Quote of the Week: A Child's First Heraclitus

I was excited to be moving, and I would be starting in an extra-good school, but what about my friends? What about Susie Q and The Raven? We'd been together since first grade. It was promised that they would all come out on my birthday, and here I was seeing them only a couple of weeks since moving, but there was already something different. The everyday stuff was gone. If I had asked them what happened yesterday, or the past week, they would have said nothing, nothing special, but they had all been part of that nothing, they knew exactly what kind of nothing it had been, and I hadn't, and I didn't. All at once I understood that the nothing was going to pile up, and while we would still like each other, we wouldn't know each other the same way.

 - Daniel Pinkwater, Jules, Penny & the Rooster, p.16

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 6: Circles by Stan Sakai

This sixth volume is slightly longer than the previous ones, collecting seven issues of the Usagi Yojimbo series (#25 - 31, November 1990 through November 1991), plus a story from the anthology Critters #38. But it's otherwise much like the previous books, down to the mixture of one-off stories (several of the issues collected) and a longer "mythology" multi-parter in which our hero returns to his home village, hoping to settle down and get out of the killing-random-people business. Of course, if he could do that, the series would end, and there are seventeen more volumes of this series, so...you can guess he learns the old Thomas Wolfe lesson.

Usagi Yojimbo: Circles was originally published in the early nineties; the current edition (no indications of what's different; it's probably not much) is from 2014. It has four stories up front - three of them full-length, and one ten-pager, "Yurei" - and the four-part "Circles" to close out the book. It also has an introduction from Jeff Smith, dated 1994, which is a bit of a time capsule itself.

In "Circles," we learn that sex actually does happen in this very tween-friendly world, although it happens, as far as we see, in a chaste embrace while both characters are still fully dressed. Still, baby steps. And I should say that I am too cynical and jaded to be a really good guide to Usagi Yojimbo: I enjoy it and appreciate creator Stan Sakai's story-telling ability while still seeing it both as a very second-hand thing (an American riff on the historical fiction of actual Japanese people about their actual history) and as something deliberately cleaned up and sanded down for that younger audience. (To be blunt, I don't see why an adult would read this rather than going to the seinen classics like Lone Wolf and Cub: it is very much a derivative version of those.)

So Usagi battles a demon (not quite a troll, but the same sort of thing) in "The Bridge," protecting the village he's just wandered into randomly. He gets caught up in a gambler's scheme in "The Duel," unwittingly, and of course kills the gambler's hand-picked fighter, which is sad for that guy's wife and child. (There's also a fair bit of cop-movie-style "I'll just do This One Last Job, honey, and then we'll have enough money to retire from This Dangerous Life forever!" which is as ironic as it always is, in the same ways.) "Yurei" sees Usagi help out a ghost after mostly forgetting what she told him, in the traditional way of causing those who caused her death to die themselves. And "My Lord's Daughter" is a very over-the-top, battle-heavy story, full of monsters, in which Usagi fights through hordes to save the title character from a gigantic, vicious Oni and its minions...and which turns out to be a bedtime story Usagi is telling a bunch of kids, showing Sakai realizes what the whole of Usagi Yojimbo is, and is willing to joke about it.

Then we hit "Circles," which is the story of Usagi going back to the village where he grew up, and hoping to settle there. He first learns that his old teacher, who lives in a remote location not far from the village, is surprisingly still alive - Usagi last saw him falling from a high cliff towards the usual rapids - which is encouraging. But the new village headman, Kenichi, is married to the girl Usagi loved, Mariko, - they had a rivalry about that, among other things - and doesn't like or trust him at all. Meanwhile, the creepy supernatural samurai Jei from the third book is back - from the dead, actually - and is leading a band of bandits to find and kill Usagi on behalf of (he claims) the gods. Jei does have supernatural powers, so, on balance, I'm willing to grant that some gods are on his side

Jei's bandits threaten and harass and raid the village. Kenichi and Usagi, as the two trained samurai, lead the villagers in fighting them off and planning a counter-attack, but Kenichi's young son Jotaro is nabbed by the bandits, raising the stakes. There's a big fight, Usagi kills Jei once again, and Jotaro is saved. But Usagi learns a deep secret, and has to leave the village because of it, never to settle there. (He could, of course, settle somewhere else, and he'll probably think of that eventually - but the point of a wandering-samurai series is for the samurai to wander, so don't expect it any time soon.)

As before, this is well-done samurai action, in a register suitable for middle-grade readers. Sakai is a fine story-telling cartoonist, adept at large groups of random animal-headed people fighting with each other with medieval weaponry, and every bit of Usagi Yojimbo I've seen has been solid adventure-story material, superbly crafted with a fine control of tone to hit both comedic and dramatic moments. I still think the originals Sakai used as models are better and more interesting, but this is both excellent and something you can hand to your tweens without worry.

Cyanide & Happiness: Twenty Years Wasted by Kris, Rob & Dave

I'm sure there have been other Cyanide & Happiness books. It would be really unlikely that a fairly popular strip would run for fifteen years without any kind of a collection being printed on dead trees. But I haven't seen or noticed a C&H collection since the one-two punch of Cyanide & Happiness and Ice Cream & Sadness back in 2010.

On the other hand, I've been reading the web mostly via RSS feeds since at least that far back, and, as we all know, feeds can die quietly and mysteriously, while the underlying content keeps going, so we think something is gone - or, more often, don't notice or think about it - when it definitely isn't. And I'm pretty sure that I had C&H in my feeds, maybe multiple times, but I can't remember seeing it recently. So I think there was yet another case of linkrot, either deliberate (they want to drive people to their website, where other items can be purchased) or random (which can never been discounted).

But I noticed this book - Cyanide & Happiness: Twenty Years Wasted, a big anniversary collection of the strip published in mid-December, just too late for Xmas shipping. It's credited to "Kris, Rob & Dave" - Wilson, DenBleyker, and McElfatrick, respectively, the "Matt" who was part of C&H back in the early days seems to have dropped out long ago and gets one vague reference in this book but no explanation - and is the traditional "annotated collection of the best stuff" that strips often bring out for a big round anniversary.

And that's great, since that kind of book works better for webcomics than a traditional reprint anthology does, anyway. Remember: the point of a webcomic is that it's always accessible, online, 24/7/265. You can always just go there and read the entire archives, without buying a book. This book has fewer strips than if they were just packed in like cordwood, and getting the three creators to annotate them and laying that all out was clearly more work, but it makes a better, more distinctive, useful package. I don't want to say all webcomic collections should be in this style, but maybe all of the gag-a-day strips should seriously consider it.

Cyanide & Happiness has one of the weirder and odder origin stories, even for a webcomic. The four guys were all teens in 2005, hanging out on a webforum but hugely physically separated in real life - McElfratrick is Irish, for one example - and one of them did a quick crude comic in this style, and it snowballed from there. (They've also created a lot of animation over the years, and at least one card game - all with the same art style and deliberately offensive humor.) It looks like they spent some years in the same place: Dallas, as a suitable random American city. But that ended, for either pandemic or getting-older and lives-getting-more-complicated reasons, and they're once again physically separated, making comics and animation randomly in basements and back rooms wherever they happen to live now.

So each C&H strip is credited to one of the guys, because that guy did that strip. And their styles are somewhat discernable - or maybe were more so in the early days. But it's all the same kind of thing, and they riff off each other, with random theme weeks - usually either specifically Depressing comics or something tasteless - thrown in willy-nilly to pull them together.

These are jokes about farts and drinks and violence and sex and dicks and so on - the subject matter was mostly formed when they were teen boys, so C&H is still largely about the things that make teen boys laugh. (There were a lot of shitposts in the early days. Maybe still a few even now.) I thought it was mostly successful back in 2010, when I saw the early strips, and this big collection still seems mostly successful now - it's crude, it's tasteless, it's dumb, but there's always been a strong current of that kind of humor in America. (Think Truly Tasteless Jokes or 101 Uses for a Dead Cat or the one about how to fit five elephants into a Volkswagen.)

If you like that style of humor, you've probably seen Cyanide & Happiness sometime in the past twenty years. (Maybe not. Maybe you are a teen boy right now, and this is all new.) This is probably the best single book to experience the strip: it's got examples from all of the eras of the strip (such as they are), lots of annotations and added jokes, photos of the C&H guys doing various things at comics conventions over the past two decades, and similar stuff. Or, you know, you could just hit the website and read the archives, as I referenced way back at the beginning of this post. That's always an option for a webcomic; don't forget it.

The Fifth Beatle by Vivek J. Tiwary and Andrew C. Robinson

This was kinda a big deal about ten years ago; you may have heard about it then. The edition I read was a tenth anniversary thingy - that's the technical term - from 2023, with additional essays and material in the back to justify a new hardcover price. (But I read it digitally, which mean pinching to blow up double-page spreads quite a lot; much of this is in Eye-Strain-O-Vision on a normal-sized consumer tablet.)

So it was a New York Times bestseller, won Eisners and Harveys and a Reuben - as I said, a big deal. The Beatles, you might have heard, were somewhat popular - more so than Jesus, one guy noted in the late '60s - and this was not just well-done, but hit at a good cultural moment.

The Fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein Story is a graphic novel, about a hundred and thirty pages (plus, in the current edition, the additional material I mentioned, mostly essays by the author on various aspects of the book's and Epstein's history), written by Vivek J. Tiwary and painted by Andrew C. Robinson, with lettering by Steve Dutro and one section with art by Kyle Baker.

It covers the rise of the Beatles in the 1960s, as seen by their manager, Epstein - he's the viewpoint character and our central protagonist. The Beatles themselves are mostly in puckish-goofball mode here, occasionally getting individual moments (just John and Paul) but clearly backgrounded: the premise is that they are a world-changing creative force, and are out there doing that, while Epstein supports and facilitates and manages that work. More important to the narrative is Moxie, a young woman who first works for Epstein in his family store NEMS and comes to be his personal assistant in his wider-ranging Beatles businesses. (From Tiwary's note at the end, I think she's completely fictional, and exists both to indicate the support he got from the family business and a semi-love relationship for Epstein - though utterly unrequited on his side - that's somewhat positive and happy.) We also see other business contacts, a few of them multiple times, but the focus is on Epstein and, mostly just offstage, the continuing creative engine that is the Beatles.

Epstein was Jewish in an era where prejudice was still pretty open in the UK. And he was gay in an era when that was actively outlawed, and being arrested could lead to ruin and jail. His Jewishness isn't particularly important to Fifth Beatle, other than making Epstein a bit more of an outsider, but Tiwary uses his homosexuality - other than one, possibly fictionalized, off-and-on relationship with an American man that turns into blackmail, entirely as a background longing or note - as a central motif, core to his outsiderness. 

Tiwary implies that Epstein sublimated his sex-drive into business, that he poured all of himself that he could into working as hard as possible to make the Beatles the world-famous band he was sure they would be. And he also implies that's what eventually killed Epstein, of what he doesn't actually say in this book was an accidental overdose of barbiturates combined with alcohol.

(I suspect those both are plausible simplifications, which work in a creative story, but that Epstein both had a much more active sex life than Tiwary shows here and that his death was basically a random accident. Thematically, though, it all works within The Fifth Beatle.)

I appreciated The Fifth Beatle - especially Robinson's magnificent pages; the new edition's cover by Christopher Brunner and Rico Renzi is, I'm sorry to say, vastly lesser than the original sweeping wraparound and the atmospheric, electric interior art - but I found Epstein mostly a one-note character. He's a sublimated homosexual, a workaholic devoted entirely to making the Beatles as huge as possible - really? All of the other acts that he quickly started representing; what about them? What was his sex life really like - purely cruising and cottaging, or anything longer and more meaningful?

The Fifth Beatle wraps things up too neatly to touch on questions like that; it's too much the story of The Man Who Died Making the Beatles Famous. That's what the audience wants, clearly - see how successful the book has been - but it's only about as true as any similar simplification for a mass audience.

A Prefect's Uncle by P.G. Wodehouse

Second novels are not necessarily disappointing. But they regularly are the same sort of thing as the first novel, executed more quickly or with less inspiration, and suffer a bit from comparison.

A Prefect's Uncle was P.G. Wodehouse's second novel, published way back in 1903 when he was in his very early twenties. It followed The Pothunters, which hit shelves the year before. I can't find any indication that it was originally serialized, as Pothunters was, but it feels like a serialization, and it looks like all of Wodehouse's early school stories were originally published in magazines such as the obviously named Public School Magazine.

Pothunters was a small thing, a book clearly assembled from parts, but it was fun and amusing, full of characters who sounded real and inhabited a real world, and it had a plot that meandered but did, more or less, circle the missing trophy alluded to in the title. I don't want to claim a lot for it, but it was a solid genre exercise - in a genre that's been dead for a hundred years now, admittedly, and never was popular on my side of the Atlantic to begin with - and it showed that this Wodehouse fellow was someone to keep an eye on, who could do good things and probably would.

Prefect's Uncle is the same sort of thing, but down a notch or two in most areas. The central plot is not really about the uncle of the central prefect; it's more a sequence of mostly cricket matches, told in very detailed language that I have to imagine would be smashing fun for someone who actually understands how cricket works. From my seat, I can say it all sounds impressive, and that Wodehouse describes the action of the matches well, with a deep facility at drama and knowledge of cricket terminology and tactics, even if it all just turns into a wall of random words to me.

Our central character is Alan "Bishop" Gethryn, head prefect of Leicester's house at the fictional Beckford public school. He's seventeen or so, near the end of his schooling, smart and upright and full of all of the traditional English public-school virtues. Bishop meets two new students in quick succession: first is his new fag (yes, yes, I know - it was a very different era and the usage of that word has shifted quite a lot) Percy Wilson, who is true and smart and good and rather boring and plays very little part in the novel. Next is Bishop's uncle, who he has to meet at the station. He thinks this is a conventional uncle: a generation older, with luck open-handed with the pocket-money and not too tedious with the advice. But it is actually a younger boy, one Reginald Farnie, who has been kicked out of three well-known public schools already, and is the kind of terror Wodehouse would get a lot of mileage out of later in his career.

As it is, though, Farnie doesn't do a whole lot here, though he does cause Bishop to miss a very important cricket match - which Bishop cannot explain to anyone, for the usual vague and unclear stiff-upper-lip reasons - and that means Bishop loses his place on the school's cricket team after they lose that very important match to a rival school. But Bishop is still captain of his house's team, so there's more planning and training and detailed descriptions of inter-house matches and a muddled rebellion by some of the "bad boys" of that house, who Bishop kicks off the team and replaces with very junior boys.

Again, there's a lot of cricket in this book. I think it's told well, and could be gripping to a reader who understands what's happening. For me, though, it was largely a sequence of baroque technical terms about kinds of bowling and where balls are being hit and how wet and/or sticky the particular ground was that day. Wodehouse also includes a certain amount of "well, this match is against that village, and they have a couple of ringers from this county team, so it's semi-important, but the next one is against Rival School, so it is of earth-shattering importance, and then there's the inter-house play, of which only these three houses are important, for reasons I will detail at great length". So I did the names-in-Russian-novels thing and mostly hummed through the cricket matches, which are roughly 40% of the novel by weight.

If you want to read a really early Wodehouse novel, to see how he did school stories, I recommend Pothunters. If you know how cricket works, you could try this one instead, but be sure you really do know how cricket works. It will test that knowledge very strongly.

Better Things: First Train Home

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

I'm solitary by nature, and often feel like I'm over things before they've really started, or out of place basically anywhere. And this is the song that often plays in my head in those situations, or has for the last fifteen years or so.

This is First Train Home by Imogen Heap, one of the clearest, loveliest musical expressions of the thought "I just want to get out of here" that I've ever heard.

I want to get on with getting on with things
I want to run in fields, paint the kitchen, and love someone
And I can't do any of that here, can I?

This is the song for everyone stuck in a group you can't stand, listening to things you're not interested in. For everyone who wishes they could just get out, go home, and do what they really want to do right now. And, you know what? You probably can.

So what? You've had one too many.
So what? I'm not that much fun to be with.
So what? You've got a silly hat on.
So what? I didn't want to come here, anyway.

So, for all of you: best wishes to get out, get on that train, and get home. 

Quote of the Week: Quite Attached to It

I felt the back of my head. My hat was still on. I took it off, not without discomfort and felt the head underneath. Good old head, I'd had it a long time. It was a little soft now, a little pulpy, and more than a little tender. But a pretty light sapping at that. The hat had helped. I could still use the head. I could use it another year anyway.

 - Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, p.812 in Stories and Early Novels

Bogart Creek, Vol.2 by Derk Evernden

Bogart Creek may be yet another thing I discovered only after it ended; it looks like creator Derek Evernden stopped posting it on Instagram and Reddit a year or so ago. On the other hand, he's published three books, the website is still there, and there's a Patreon, so maybe he just managed to paywall it and actually make some money from his cartooning.

(As you know {Bob}, cartoonists used to be able to get publications to pay for their cartoons regularly - many of them making decent livings and a few making actual fortunes. Since techbros demolished print media and advertising, replacing them with outlets that only bring profit to them, cartoonists have found that making any income from drawing funny pictures has been much more complicated and difficult - much like everything else the techbros touch.)

Bogart Creek, Vol.2 is the middle of the three books to date, published in early 2021, a little more than a year after the first book. And, like I said the first time, it's a single-panel comic in the Far Side mold, with no recurring characters or themes. It is cheerfully gory, mostly dark humor with lots of severed limbs, murderous folks (both crazed killers and gangsters, as on facing pages as I'm poking through for examples as I write this), sharks, aliens, and media references.

Now, I don't want to oversell the darkness - it's probably only about a quarter of the strips that feature a murder or other violent death, and, in many of those cases, the violent death hasn't quite happened at the moment of the strip. But there's no fluffy bunnies frolicking happily in a field - the lighter jokes are the media references and amusing wordplay and funny juxtapositions. And Evernden draws a bloody splat, or those severed limbs, a lot more often than most cartoonists - even the supposedly "dark" ones.

I like this stuff, and I think people who enjoy dark single panels will agree with me. The cover shows his visual inventiveness pretty well - that's the caliber of his non-gory gags, and the gory ones are equally well constructed but substantially darker. If that sounds appealing, there's three books of his work available, plus a fair bit floating around online for free as a teaser.

Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

Farewell, My Lovely was Raymond Chandler's second novel, coming out in 1940, just a year after The Big Sleep. It's again a story of a couple of plotlines that seem separate but intertwine, but, more interesting to me, I found the language was even more Chandler-esque than Sleep, with a good half-dozen passages that I dog-eared to use as quotes later.

Does that mean Chandler was somewhat more confident in his novel-construction skills this time out, since he'd already done it once, and spent more time polishing his prose? Or is it purely an observer affect on my part? I don't know, and I don't know if I could know. And that's a good thought to have when discussing a mystery novel, the best of which are strongly about what you can know and what you can't, about facts and history and the motivations of other people.

(I read Farewell, like Sleep, in the first of the two-volume Library of America Chandler collection, Stories and Early Novels. I think the text is basically the same in all editions, though, so that shouldn't make any substantial difference.)

The first plot in Farewell is about Moose Malloy, a giant of a man who just got out of prison after eight years away and is looking for the girl he left behind, Velma. Philip Marlowe is in the wrong place when Malloy visits the nightclub where she used to sing - now changed entirely in ownership and clientele and side of the color line - and is interviewed by the cops after Malloy's questioning techniques prove too much for the manager of that club.

Marlowe has no paid reason to want to find Malloy, but he's not a private detective because he likes to get paid, but because it's the way he thinks and how he likes to work. And the detective officially assigned to the case is old and lazy and not planning to do much; he more or less asks Marlowe to do some free legwork for him. So Marlowe sets off to see if he can find Velma himself, hoping that will lead to the big man.

Soon afterward, he's contacted by Lindsay Marriott, to assist in paying off a ransom gang. This gang - Marlowe is familiar with how it works - hijacks someone rich with something priceless, in this case a necklace of ancient Chinese jade, which would be difficult for them to fence. So they "sell" it back to the owner, through either the insurance company or another intermediary, like Marriott, for a fraction of the price. It's potentially dangerous, and it's a red flag that Marriott only called Marlowe the day of the exchange, but it's not out of the range of reason.

Things go badly at the exchange, and Marlowe is once again questioned by police in a murder case - a different set of cops, in a different Southern California jurisdiction this time. This one he really shouldn't try to investigate himself - it's in a deeply corrupt small city, for one thing - but Marlowe has never been very good at doing what he's supposed to.

Marlowe gets put through the wringer during the course of the two investigations, getting caught up in the schemes of two different con-men-cum-medical-practitioners, plus two attractive young ladies - one rich and glamorous and the owner of the stolen necklace, and the other honest and tough and the daughter of the former local police chief. 

Without detailing the plot of the back half of the novel - never a good idea to do when discussing a mystery - Marlowe, who would appear in five more novels from Chandler, makes it out to the end mostly unscathed, and does solve the murders. And they are, as they must be, related.

I always have a vague uneasiness about the "two unrelated murders turn out to be related" plot - it happens a lot in this field, and it always feels a bit too flamboyant too me, too much like the writer is showing off. (Of course, Chandler did it here at least partially because he was taking some existing separate short stories and combining them into a novel, which is the opposite of showing off.) It works here, and it usually works, and it's just my personal prejudices, so I don't know why I mention it.

As I said up top, I found the language in Farewell even more striking than in Sleep. I've seen it claimed that this was Chandler's favorite of his novels, and that may be part of the reason - he's got a lot of great lines and paragraphs and thoughts here. The plot isn't too shabby, either.

Woe: A Housecat's Story of Despair by Lucy Knisley

So I'm not really a "cat person," actually. (More so than a "dog person," I guess, but not much more. Frankly, I'm not even a people person. I guess I'm an "over there by myself" person.) But people who make comics are often cat people, and make comics about their cats, and I like reading comics, so....

Lucy Knisley's career has taken a turn into books for young readers recently - and by "recently" I think I mean the last decade. (A comics career takes a while to turn and move, since projects tend to take a long time - maybe even more so than prose writers.) I think her last book for adults - the last one I read, anyway - was Kid Gloves, a 2019 book I read in 2023. She's had a three-book YA graphic-novel series since then, plus at least a couple of picture books - I used to love picture books when my kids were the right age; I miss being part of that world now - so she's definitely been busy and productive; it's just been in regions I don't get into as often anymore. (And, to connect the dots, Kid Gloves was about her pregnancy and the birth of her son in 2016, which explains quite a lot of the kid-focus since then: memoir cartoonists tell stories about the things close to them.)

Woe: A Housecat's Story of Despair was published last year, by the kids' arm of Random House, but it's the kind of small-format humorous book about cats - in this case, one particular cat, which is a common variation - that has been a staple of the checkout counter in bookstores for at least fifty years, and I'd guess closer to a hundred. I suspect the fact that it's from RHCB is more to do with the fact that Knisley's current editor works there than that this book is particularly kid-focused.

This is the story of Linney, who was Knisley's cat. I think some parts of it originally appeared on Knisley's Patreon - it seems to be partially collecting existing comics and partly a loose project she started when she realized how old Linney was and that old cats don't last forever - and it doesn't necessarily follow in strictly linear time. Well, the end is the end, and you can guess what that end is. But, before that, it's mostly riffs and moment in the life of this loud, demanding, selfish furball who was deeply loved by Knisley and the rest of her family (husband, young son).

Knisley draws Linney as a chubby, semi-shapeless mass, with a big floofy tail and giant green staring eyes - and, most importantly, that strident, demanding voice, which Knisley puts into human words most of the time for maximum amusement. The point of view is often at Linney's level, to better put this cat in the center of the action - as she, of course, insists and demands she should be.

Knisley uses borderless panels, often with a blob of background color to define and separate them, usually just two or three to a page, keeping the activity moving and the moments running into each other, like any other life.

Woe is fun and amusing and touching, even for someone like me who could easily do without a cat entirely. (I have, for the past year or so, though that time will soon be drawing to a close.) People who actually like cats will probably enjoy this book even more.

What If We Were... by Axelle Lenoir

I have to start, as usual, with my biggest criticism, and get it out of the way. I'm sorry to slam Axelle Lenoir and her publishing team so hard, but it has to be said.

What If We Were... only has a three-period ellipsis in its title. This is wrong. When an ellipsis ends a sentence, it needs to have four periods. I am incredibly disappointed at this major, unforgivable mistake.

This book collects what I think were forty or fifty individual strips - the main story seems to be in two-page entries, but there's also interstitial material that might have been attached to the stories, added for this book, or maybe the alternate version in every other issue - that appeared in Quebec's teen-focused magazine Curium in French. From the copyright page, I think a version of this collection then appeared in book form in Quebecois French, from Front Froid, and then this edition came out in 2020, from Top Shelf, translated by Pablo Strauss and Aleshia Jensen. It is the first of two books collecting this strip; I have no idea if that's the whole run or not.

Marie and Natalie are teens, best friends who have played the title game since they were little kids. One of them has a premise - what if the two of them were Vikings, or superheroines, or world-famous scientists, or whatever - and they both riff on the idea. The strip is about their friendship, using the game as a regular (but not required) element to show how they relate to each other and what they care about. Oh, and Natalie has a crush on another girl they go to school with - first unnamed, then called "Jane Doe"...which somehow turns into her actual name over the course of the strip.

Jane does become the third major character during these strips, first having that very teenager-y  circumlocutious conversation with Marie to ask if Natalie 1) likes girls and 2) likes her. Since Natalie does and definitely does, Jane starts circling the outer orbit of the strip about a third of the way into this book, gradually getting more and more central until the two of them actually have a date.

This is very much a story about teenagers, originally for teenagers. It has that nervous, insecure-in-its-own-skin energy of the teen, the sense that all of the world is new and overwhelming and awesome but also deeply scary. Marie and Natalie are interesting, quirky, real people with foibles and distinct personalities - Jane is a bit more of a plot token, especially early on, but she does get somewhat more depth once she's in the strip more.

What If We Were... is fun and zippy - it's clearly a collection of a loose serial, and equally clearly a work for teens (especially French-speaking teen girls in Canada, which may be a bit too far away from some readers' experience), and definitely not as ambitious and impressive as Lenoir's big graphic novel Secret Passages. But Lenoir has an infectious energy in her drawing and her dialogue is always specific and grounded - this is a story about these people and what they care and think about.

Better Things: We Care a Lot

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

This year's choices will lean into my being an '80s kid quite a bit, I think - I'm free from the shackles of  the calendar that I had for This Year, and can hit all of the other bands I was listening to at the same time, back in my misspent youth. I make no apologies.

If you were around then, you know this song. You might even know it if you weren't around then. But there's a certain weird fraternity of the people who knew who Faith No More was before they switched singers and suddenly got huge in 1989.

And that later, more popular incarnation of the band is good, don't misunderstand me. But if I could save one Faith No More song, desert-island-style, there would be no question. It would always be We Care a Lot, one of the iconic songs of the 1980s.

(We care a lot) about the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines
(We care a lot) about the NY, SF and LAPD
(We care a lot) about you people
(We care a lot) about your guns
(We care a lot) about the wars you're fighting, gee that looks like fun!

It's a snotty song - as a lot of my favorites from the '80s are - and a deeply sarcastic one, a song that means pretty much exactly the opposite of what it says. It's a parody of We Are the World and all of those similar good-cause songs, a piss-take on the idea of caring in the first place.

And yet...is there some actual caring, buried in the sarcasm? You'll have to decide that for yourself - Faith No More is too busy having fun.

Quote of the Week: That's Not an Insult. THIS Is an Insult.

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume, but its outrageous Book of Rudeness is a hefty tome. Being offensive in a matey way gets people's attention, and Down Under you often make friends by being intensely rude in the right tone of voice. Australian English (one of Australia's glories and its greatest art form) is a language of familiarity.

 - Paul Theroux, The Happy Isles of Oceania, p.36

Macanudo: The Way of the Penguin by Liniers

This third collection of the Macanudo daily strip - by the Argentinian cartoonist known as Liniers - is in the same style and closely follows the first two books, Welcome to Elsewhere and Optimism Is For the Brave. So, normally, I would struggle to say something different here, when the underlying work is the same kind of thing - more penguins, elves, Olga and her boy, Henrietta and her cat, two witches, Mysterious Man in Black, and so forth.

But I read this book two weeks ago, before a major vacation (my first getaway vacation in about five years), so I would already struggle to remember or think of things to write about it. And having a built-in excuse that comes with links to two long posts about basically exactly the material in this book gives me the warm and fuzzies, this morning when a major snowstorm threatens to drop six or more inches later in the day.

All that is to say: this post about Macanudo: The Way of the Penguin will be short and vague. Jump into those links above for a lot more about Liniers, his thoughtful comic strip Macanudo, and all of the various (mostly separate) casts that appear in it.

Way of the Penguin was published in mid-December; I read it at the end of January. It's still essentially brand-new, as you read this. Macanudo is - not quite paradoxically, but something in that territory - both one of the most positive and one of the most intellectual strips out there. Linier's characters read serious books and think serious thoughts...though often in silly ways. They engage with the physical and the intellectual world without excuse or minimizing. And they're also almost always happy and energetic, no matter what they're doing or what odd landscape they're traipsing through. (Even the witches, who are most likely to encounter townspeople with torches and those Frankenstein rakes, are at worst bemused by it.)

Again: this strip was fully-formed and mature before it even appeared in the English language in the US in 2018; Liniers had been doing it in Spanish for an Argentinian audience since 2002. His art is soft and organic - it looks like watercolors, or maybe colored pencils over ink, to my eye (though, knowing the little I do about the coloring of newspaper strips, I don't know if that can actually be the case). This is often billed as an modern version of Calvin and Hobbes, since it also has a couple of imaginative children in prominent roles, but Macanudo is more centrally about major (I don't want to say "adult") ideas and thoughts. It has plenty of whimsy, but not the same kind of whimsy - there's an underlying regard for knowledge and truth and understanding here.

My Time Machine by Carol Lay

Comics take time to make, and come out at moments in time - that's the same as any media product, obviously. But comics often take longer, and the method of creation means they're harder to change, late in the creation, than a prose book would be.

Carol Lay is ambivalent about the future in My Time Machine. I don't want to say it's a lucky ambivalence - it's probably built in, from the beginning, as she thought about the story she wanted to tell - but I think she conceptualized this book starting right around the 2020 election and it was published a couple of weeks before the 2024 election, which obviously foretell very different futures.

So, as I said, the dark aspects of the future her time traveler sees in My Time Machine may seem even more likely now than they did even a few months ago.

Lay's protagonist is unnamed, a woman in her sixties, some kind of artist or creator, living in Sacramento. It's Lay herself: the book doesn't say that explicitly, but we know it. It's very much like her self-insert character in her Story Minute/Way Lay strips. The book is set in the modern day, starting in 2016 and running - aside from the time travel - through 2020.

In this world, Wells's Time Traveler was real, and his time-machine plans come into the narrator's hands, over a hundred years later. She gives them to her ex, Rob, a physics professor at Stanford, who gets obsessed and spends the next few years building a working, advanced version of the machine.

This is the story of her journey, alone in that machine, roughly following the outline of the original Traveler. She jumps to 2035 to see the near future, then in quick steps of five or ten years, then to 802,701 AD, to see if there are Morlocks and Eloi, and finally to 30,002,020 AD, to see the end.

Our narrator is most concerned with climate change; her stated purpose is to bring back proof of how the world will be devastated, which somehow she hopes to leverage to change things in her modern day. She and Rob discuss this, and neither is particularly optimistic - or has a half-plausible mechanism for actually changing things - but she wants to see the future, she assumes a warming Earth will destroy everything, and she wants to accomplish something, so this is her goal.

It doesn't quite work out that way. The 2035 she finds is a dystopian nightmare of pervasive surveillance, collapsing food-production, climate refugees, and dictatorial government. It's also almost the last time she sees human beings at all.

Jumping forward, she sees her surroundings change, burned out by the warming planet, and then somewhat recover when she hits 800k AD. But there is a hostile element in that era - which I won't spoil - and she has to flee that world, as well.

Eventually - well, the book starts at this moment, so more than eventually - she's thirty million years in the future, looking out at a once-again-dead world, dealing with a balky time machine. Will she make it back to 2020 to report on what she saw? That's the story here: you need to read it to find out.

I always like Lay's art - she's a bit less spiky than usual here, with full-color and full pages surrounding her people, so it's not quite as Lay-like as I expected. (I feel like the Story Minute years were the purest Lay drawings, all pointy jaws and spiky hands and stark black-and-white.) And I'm roughly in sympathy with her (not overt, but clear) political concerns here as well. Any time-travel story is always, paradoxically, intensely about the cultural moment when it's created, and this is no exception. This is a good one, with a clear, distinct take on the outlines of the original Wells story.

City of the Chasch by Jack Vance

I've been re-reading Jack Vance books the past year or two - first the Dying Earth series, then the Demon Princes. I am vaguely lazy in this endeavor, so I've been picking things available in convenient omnibus editions. And that meant next I found the Planet of Adventure compendium, and read the 1968 first book in that series, City of the Chasch.

This is from the same era as the first Demon Princes books, but substantially less ambitious. That assumes it makes sense to talk about ambition when all of the book were disposable mass-market paperbacks published by the same small group of houses, at basically the same length, to the same audience. The Tschai books are old-school planetary adventure - and I mean they were already old-school in 1968, when Vance wrote this one. It was a solid armature for a traditional story, which Vance tells with verve and energy but doesn't get into the depth he does in Demon Princes.

Adam Reith is a scout on the starship Explorator IV. This is probably the same universe as most of Vance's SF, but it feels fairly early in the timeline - maybe before the full Oikumene is settled - because the focus is on this ship being from Earth. Because Reith and his partner had just cast off in their space-boat to explore the planet Tschai, he was the sole survivor of the expedition when missiles from the planet destroyed the ship and sent the boat crash-landing on the planet.

He soon learns that Tschai is home to four alien races - the native Pnume and the successive invaders Chasch, Wankh, and Dirdir - who have been warring for tens of thousands of years. Each of the invaders also has a caste of humans - this is the 1960s, so Vance always calls them "men" - somewhat transformed through long-term breeding programs to be more like their alien masters. They have at least a minor capacity for space travel - the invaders obviously came from other planets, once upon a time - but the low-level war seems to have kept the planet mostly stagnant for long eras, a place where small wars or sudden devastating attacks could pop up at any moment and destroy entire cities.

The series is about how Adam Reith, the mightily-thewed Earthman, tackles each of the alien races in turn, defeats them with the power of his Terranness and wit and prowess, and gives the oppressed human peoples of Tschai a vision of how they could live free from alien shackles and be reunited with the main course of humanity.

Reith starts this book with a whole bunch of injuries from the crash-landing, and gets lucky by being discovered by a tribe of non-alien-affiliated tribesmen. He befriends the chief of the tribe, Traz, retrieves some of his survival gear from the crash, upends the social structure of this tribe, and runs away with Traz, hoping to find where the Chasch have taken his space-boat.

He learns that the Chasch are divided, like Gaul, into three: the civilized Old Chasch and Blue Chasch, who are also eternally at war with reach other, and were two separate waves of invaders back in the mists of prehistory, and the Green Chasch, nomadic bands of telepathic semi-barbarians who are purely a force of destruction.

Reith and Traz save the Dirdirman Anacho - one of the human subject to the Dirdir and resembling their masters - on the way, and then join a human caravan, where Reith discovers a beautiful woman, held captive by the Priestesses of the Female Mystery and to be taken to their templet for a presumably-horrible fate. The woman turns out to have a bewildering array of names, but we can call her Ylin-Ylan.

Reith saves Ylin-Ylan from her horrible fate - two or three times, as I recall; the Priestesses are pretty determined - and all four make it to Pera, a human settlement in a ruined old Chasch city. Nearby is the current Chasch city of Dadiche, where Reith's locator tells him the space-boat is. 

Reith tries to be sneaky and reconnoiter the space-boat; that does not go well. (He also, almost incidentally, overthrows the tyrannical human leaders of Pera, and unexpectedly is himself installed as the new leader, because he has to save Ylin-Ylan once again.) The Chasch attack Pera, but Reith, now in charge of a militia he organized, takes advantage of their contempt for humans to trick and defeat them, eventually leading an attack that murders pretty much every Chasch in Dadiche, and a large number of the Chaschmen (presumably including Chaschwomen and Chaschchildren).

And the book basically stops there: Reith has the scout-boat, but it's been gutted. He can't use it to get back to Earth; even the comms equipment is gone. The story, obviously, pick right back up in the second book - good thing for modern readers that all four were published quickly more than fifty years ago.

This is Vance in adventure-story mode; it doesn't have the languidness of his better work, or the in-universe quotes that open chapters in many of his later books. Vance is good at adventure stories, and is here, as ever, interested in quirky societies and the many ways humans can be turned into slightly different sub-groups. His writing is quick and energetic, and his language not as baroque as it gets in the books I would call his best. So it's a solid but not really typical Vance book - this series could serve as a good introduction to Vance for readers more used to straightforward adventure stories, in particular.

Please Destroy the Internet by Michael Sweater

This is a sequel, technically - but it's a collection of mostly 4-panel gag comics with some recurring characters, so the sequelness (sequality? sequelissiousness?) is somewhat muted and not a big deal at all.

Michael Sweater, from what I've seen, does punky comics about the kind of people who work McJobs, live in grungy basements, and probably drink (or use other substances) more than they think they should - the young and not-all-that-fabulous, more or less. Sometimes that person is a version of the cartoonist, named "Michael Sweater" or not.

I don't think "Please Destroy" is the strip title or anything like that. But his 2016 book was Please Destroy My Enemies and then this follow-up, two years later, is Please Destroy the Internet. Hence my point about sequels. I think Sweater is old-school enough that his comics mostly appear on paper in 'zines most of the time, but he also has an Instagram where it looks like you can sort-of read stories, panel-by-panel, in almost the right order. (It's just annoying enough to push you to buy an actual thing, which, in my opinion, is exactly what it should do.)

Internet is a 64-page book, so it's fairly small. And it's all separate strips, so there's no "story" or "overall narrative" to explain. There's a bunch of comics about a cartoonist, who we can take to be Sweater - many of them about making art, or being in art school, or realizing what art school gave him was mostly whopping debt. There's some other recurring characters, and a few captioned drawings that might be tattoo designs - Sweater does those as well.

It's mostly smart-ass humor, done well. Sweater has a gnarly, organic drawing style that's fun as well - his people tend to have gigantic toothy mouths and no noses. If you are Old and particularly grumpy or stodgy, this will not be for you, but when was this style of humor ever for the old and stodgy? Leave it for people who can appreciate and enjoy it, you humorless killjoy!

Better Things: Last Cigarette

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

This is the only band I know that's actually from my hometown. (Two asterisks immediately: they got famous - well, as famous as they got, which is not enough - only after they moved to LA. And there's another, somewhat bigger band that used the name of a place in my hometown but wasn't from there.)

Dramarama was founded in the basement of a record store in Wayne, NJ in 1982, and I'm enough of a romantic to think every band should have an origin story something like that - a specific place and time, a bunch of people who want to play music together, and, eventually, some great songs.

For me, Dramarama had three great songs. That might not sound like much, for a decade of albums and touring and work, but how many bands have even one five-star song? It started with their breakout, Anything, Anything (I'll Give You), a compelling, compulsive story of longing and need. And the third one, on their last major-label record before they broke up (the first time) was the semi-autobiographic, overwhelming Work for Food.

But, today, I want to celebrate the song in the middle. I don't remember if I heard this first - I'm pretty sure I knew Anything, Anything - but this is the song that got me to pay attention and buy the record and become a fan. That's Last Cigarette, from their 1989 record Stuck in Wonderamaland.

It's getting late you got to get the kitten fed
You got to kiss the little woman put the children in the bed
Check the sports and weather and the living and the dead
You don't have to hear the headlines you can hear what Johnny Carson said

It's straightforward, growling rock 'n roll, with energy and purpose and wit and energy to burn - a nearly perfect pop song on a subject that hasn't been ground into dirt by a million songs before it. It's a song about something mundane and ordinary in life - in this case, smoking one last cigarette, which was much more of an everyday thing for people in 1989 than it is today, I hope - and about all of the little rituals and moments like that.

And it kicks ass. I love that a band from Wayne, NJ kicked that much ass. Rock on, Dramarama. You should've been much bigger than you ever were. 

Reviewing the Mail: Week of March 15, 2025

One book showed up in the mail this week, so let me tell you about it:

One Level Down is a novella published as a trade paperback, the first adult book by Mary G. Thompson - though she's published several books for younger readers, and a sheaf of adult short fiction in magazines. It's from Tachyon, officially publishing on April 1st, but I have a final book, so you might just be able to get it early.

It's set in a simulated world, focused on Ella, who is five. She has been five for fifty-eight years, and seems to be one of the few survivors of her "family," all subject to the increasingly capricious whims of "Daddy." But a Technician comes from the world above every sixty years, and that time is approaching - so I think Ella is scheming of how to get out from under "Daddy's" thumb, or possibly blow up this fake world entirely.

(Anyone else getting a "Dr. Braun from Fallout 3" vibe here? No? Just me?)

Quote of the Week: Where We Lived That Year

My mother insists that the snow never left that winter. According to her, the first flurries struck in mid-November and we didn't see the grass again until spring. I clearly remember a flock of toddlers bulky as astronauts in their snowsuits playing on the moonscape of frozen mud beneath the jungle gym, but the strict truth is unimportant; what my mother is trying to say is that we were cold at Foxwood, which we were.

 -Stewart O'Nan, Snow Angels, p.107-108

The Major by Jean "Moebius" Giraud

Moebius was always self-indulgence. That was the name Jean Giraud used on works that were imagistic, symbolic, allusive, surreal. He had other names for other work: Gir, his full name.

Like so many things in anyone's life, it got more so as it went along. Early Moebius stories were short imagistic fantasies. Mid-period Moebius were longer but still generally story-shaped flights of fancy. Late Moebius...well, we all know what happens to an self when it keeps being indulged, over and over again, for years.

I think The Major functions mostly as a warm-up for the longer but similar Inside Moebius project (published in France in six volumes from 2001 through 2010 and in English as three omnibuses in 2018), even though it was completed later. It's also set in Desert "B" - a complicated French pun on the term for comics, bande dessineé, and on a slang term for giving up smoking pot, which Giraud was trying to do at the time - and has a lot of the imagery and ideas of the longer work.

But that's more like looking at periods in a painter's work than like tracing parallels in the books written by a novelist: both Major and Inside are deeply self-indulgent, metafictional, random, vague, and mercurial. The Major even more so, since it was created - according to some notes in this edition, not entirely in this order, either - over a period of ten years in a notebook. It's in multiple sections, which don't entirely cohere, and it also includes a bunch of non-narrative drawings at the end - somewhat like Inside did, but, in Inside, that feels like a culmination of something, whereas here it just feel like some drawings from a notebook.

Major Grubert is the main character; he's living in a hermit's box in that desert. The box is barely large enough for a human being and seemingly made of stone, so the reader may wonder how Grubert avoided dying immediately of heatstroke - but this is not a book in which logical thinking and concerns about consequences will have any purpose. That box - one of many that we see in the desert - is much larger inside, TARDIS-style, and seems to be linked to all of the other boxes through "Corridors" that Giraud doesn't explain. We don't know why Grubert is there, what he's doing, how he got there, how this story connects to any other Grubert stories. Actually, Moebius fairly explicitly says, up front, that anyone with the same little moustache is Grubert, Eternal Champion-style, which he seems to think solves those issues.

Two other men come to Grubert, in his current role as oracle, with random philosophical questions. There are two sets of these men: they may be different, or the same people under different names. The three talk in the ways that people who smoked an awful lot of pot for an awful lot of years talk, and similarly believe themselves to be profound.

Other things happen, mostly randomly. Like Inside, there's a bit of flying or falling, with people impacting at high speed into the desert sands with no ill effect. It doesn't add up to much, but the point isn't to add up: it's to have moments, and indulge those random Moebius thoughts.

So I have to say that The Major is successful, since it does what it sets out to do. That is weird and goofy and borderline pointless, but it does it, and Giraud's art is quirky and fascinating throughout as usual. If you read The Major, spend more time on the pictures than the words.

Snow Angels by Stewart O'Nan

I'm coming to believe that what Stewart O'Nan writes about is death. That's reductive, and I'd have to do a lot of fancy arguments to pull Last Night at the Lobster (it's a franchise that's dying) into the schema, and I suspect the books of his I haven't read might be less death-central. But there are more main-character murderers than you expect from a literary novelist, and he's written novels about morticians in the middle of a plague (A Prayer for the Dying) and a spree killer (The Speed Queen) and a group of ghost teenagers on Halloween (The Night Country) and an arguably-terrorist just before the formation of the state of Israel (City of Secrets).

And O'Nan's most recent book was 2022's Ocean State, whose narrator opens it by saying "When I was in eighth grade my sister helped kill another girl."

So I came to his 1994 novel Snow Angels - turned into a 2007 movie I'd missed at the time, which the edition I read features - with a certain set of expectations. (I also should note here that this was his first novel, though that wasn't noticeable in the reading: it's very similar, in themes and language and strength, to everything else I've seen of his.)

It's set in 1974 - there's a slight frame story, which only matters, or is obvious, a couple of times - in the snowy autumn of Butler, Pennsylvania, a small blue-collar city near Pittsburgh. The occasional first-person narrator is Arthur Parkinson, who was fourteen and in the school band at the time. But, like a lot of O'Nan's books (especially Ocean State, so his career is nicely symmetrical right at the moment), it mixes short first-person sections with longer third-person chapters, to tell the stories of a larger group of characters.

Most central is Annie Marchand, who used to be Arthur's babysitter. Her marriage is breaking up, as is Arthur's parents' marriage - to be schematic, that's what this novel is about: how people break up, how they bounce off each other during it, what unforgivable things they can do.

Annie's husband Glenn attempted suicide not too long ago, and has been born again since then; he hopes to get back together with his wife but is still feckless and aimless. Annie's not much better, one of those people ruled by her impulses and prone to lashing out. She works at the local country club as a waitress, alongside her best friend Barb...whose husband Brock she's just started sleeping with. Annie and Glenn have a daughter, Tara, about three years old.

Meanwhile, something similar is going on with Arthur's parents - he never knows the full details, as no one wants to know who else one's parents are fucking - but there was probably some infidelity. His father moves out in the early fall; he and his mother move into a lousy apartment complex to save money. (A minor theme in Snow Angels is the shakiness of living arrangements - people crash on friend's couches, move into what seems to be a storage unit, get stuck in those bad apartments. Unfortunate life decisions lead to worse outcomes, and things can spiral down.)

Snow Angels is a tragedy, in several ways. From the first chapter, we know that Arthur and his whole band heard gunshots, and that was Annie being murdered. There are other deaths, one even more tragic. As usual with O'Nan, even the people who do extreme things are reasonable in their own heads - we don't necessarily agree with or like them, but we understand them more than we want to.

There are a couple of first-novel things about Snow Angels in retrospect, especially the way it's somewhat distanced, set twenty years in the past through a frame story that isn't really important and disappears at the end. But it's still a strong resonant novel about people in complicated messy situations, full of precise language and crisp portraits of those people, and well worth reading.

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 5: Black Wind by Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima

In a long-running series, it can be easy to forget that some things weren't there from the beginning. Lone Wolf and Cub ran for twenty-eight volumes, but this is the one where that famous baby-cart first gets guns. (It's also armored on the bottom at a significant moment here, which might have been shown earlier - I don't remember.)

The guns get more baroque later on, as I recall, but here we see our hero, former imperial executioner Ogami Ittō, meet a master gunsmith, learn a few things about that man's craft, and get plans that he can incorporate in his own death-dealing. We see him and his son working on the cart, but not the full murderous effect of those modifications - creators Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima have to save something for later.

Black Wind is the fifth of those twenty-eight collections of the Lone Wolf and Cub series, which originally ran in a Japanese magazine in the early '70s and was translated about twenty-five years ago by Dana Lewis for this American reprinting, with the iconic covers by Frank Miller with Lynn Varley.

Like most of the books, it collects mostly independent stories - there was a long, loose plot to the whole of Lone Wolf and Cub, but that was "Ittō wanders around Japan, working as an assassin-for-hire, to gather up enough money to force an investigation of the Yagyu clan who betrayed him, destroyed his family honor, and killed his wife. Meanwhile, the Yagyu intermittently search for Ittō and try to kill him, with no luck." Most of the stories were about a specific assassination contract, or - as in the case of the title story here - the aftermath of one of those.

The five stories here do have a bit of Yagyu intrigue - "Decapitator Asaemon" is about a man manipulated into chasing Ittō because the Yagyu will be happy whichever one of them kills the other - but they're mostly separate. Well, the last story here, "The Guns of Sakai," I've already alluded to - it's somewhat important later because it shows another way Ittō has added to his formidable armament. But, more importantly, it showcases one of the core themes of the series: violent people are divided into two groups, those driven by expedience and greed, and those driven by a purer love for the work itself. The greedy ones are evil, and will die badly. Those who care deeply about doing their jobs well may come in conflict with Ittō - the gunsmith certainly does - but are seen to be noble and get good deaths. (Normal people, those who are no good at violence to begin with, get to keep their heads down and hope they make it out the other end, just like real life.)

I've written about the previous books in this series; I'm in the middle of what I think will be a re-read of the whole series over two or three years. I'm trying not to repeat myself, and trying not to do the book-report thing: in the first story, Ittō kills this guy for that guy, and it is sad because reasons. So I think this is what I want to say about this book: maybe not completely finished, but neither is the series, is it? This is a bit of middle, of a series that had a very long middle. These stories are much like the ones that came before and after them: evocative, muscular, steeped in a worldview that was outdated and alien, even in Japan fifty years ago, told precisely and  well, each long enough to be a mini-epic of its own.

Jules, Penny & the Rooster by Daniel Pinkwater

I've been a Pinkwater fan for a long time, so I need to warn you up front I probably will not be particularly even-handed today. His books are wonderful, and have been wonderful for about three generations of smart quirky kids so far - since me and my cohort in the late '70s - so my opinion is possibly not to be entirely trusted.

Jules, Penny & the Rooster is his brand-new middle-grade fantasy novel, published today in paperback and electronic formats. It is actually a bit less Pinkwaterian than some of his most recent books, which may be good for newer or younger readers - a lot of his work for the past two decades has been set in a vague shared world and/or involved what I thought were semi-autobiographic elements from his own childhood, quite some time ago. (As you might guess from the fact that I first read Pinkwater almost fifty years ago, he's somewhat older than I am, and I am not young.)

This one is more straightforward, though told in Pinkwater's usual fun zippy prose and with the random background details we Pinkwater fans love. (For example, our heroine tells us in the first chapter that her "father has an excellent job in the deluxe shoelace industry, and my mother is a house plant psychiatrist." And that's not a throwaway; we do get glimpses of her mother psychoanalyzing various neurotic plants and her dad's commute to the Shoelace Institute.) It's told in first person by Jules McShultz, a middle-schooler whose family just moved out to the new suburb Bayberry Acres for their first big new house, at the beginning of this one summer.

Jules has wanted a dog since she was tiny, and her parents told her that couldn't happen until they had a house, and now they have a house, so...there's still no dog. Jules enters a contest by writing into the local newspaper, hoping to win a purebred collie, and of course - that's the plot of the book - she does.

She names the dog Penny, her parents don't quite actually say they're keeping the dog but keep saying "we'll see" while getting a leash and food and other doggie accouterments, and Jules starts taking Penny for long walks in the undeveloped woods just past the end of Bayberry Acres.

(The book doesn't say when it's set, and, like a lot of Pinkwater, it could as easily be now as fifty or seventy years ago. The "still a lot of open wild land nearby as suburbs are being built" tends to argue for longer ago, but most young readers are not likely to pick up on that.)

The woods turn out to be enchanted, with several interesting denizens - including a friendly witch who went to high school with Jules's aunt - but a certain talisman that protects this forest from invasion by the normal world has recently been lost, and a prophesied trio of harbingers needs to retrieve the talisman and save the forest. And, yes, Jules and Penny are two of the three - the third being a rooster who they met when first entering the forest.

There are quirky Pinkwaterian characters along the way, with names like Vincent Arigato, Finnbar Hamentashen, and Rana Aullando - not to mention that Penny may be the reincarnation of a legendary wolf named Hakawakamaka - and similar odd Pinkwaterian situations. As usual with his work, there aren't villains as such, though one of the names above has done something damaging to the enchanted forest that needs to be corrected.

And, of course, there is a happy ending, as there has to be in a book like this. I wouldn't mind more stories of Jules and Penny, and Pinkwater leaves room for them to have more stories if he feels like it - but this one is definitely complete here.

Better Things: Romeo and Juliet

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

I have never seen this video before; I'm discovering it, right at this moment, as I prepare this post. And it is...one of the most 1970s things I have ever seen in my life, and I lived through the entire 1970s, as a very young and impressionable person. Wow. Maybe just listen to the song this time.

The song is Romeo and Juliet, and it's my choice from Dire Straits. That's a cliché, I'm sure, but it is one of the great love songs of my life, and I'm not going to apologize for liking something so true and pure and nearly perfect.

(If I'd made this list late in my teen years, the song that might have edged this one out is Brothers in Arms, a lovely song for listening to, late at night, probably through headphones, and thinking about whether the world will ever, or can ever be any better than it is. I'm not sure if my opinion on that is much different than it was then, sadly.)

You promised me everything. You promised me thick and thin.
Now you just say: Oh Romeo, Yeah you know I used to have a scene with him

I've always had a weak spot for cleverness, and this is a clever song. (Dire Straits was generally a pretty clever band, too - think of Industrial Disease and even Money for Nothing, though it's hard to see its cleverness after its been so overplayed for so long.)

Do I need to say that when I say "love song," I almost always mean "song of loss and broken hearts"? Maybe not. But I just did.

This is a magnificent, lovely song. And a quite interesting, very much of-its-time video, too, which I was not expecting at all this morning.

Quote of the Week: Belonging and Not

I was standing in the basement of an auction house, feeling bad for trampling muck all over their expensive carpet. I'd eventually been admitted by the doorman, who was wearing a top hat in what seemed like a ludicrous commercial pretension, but only after he'd quizzed me for a not insignificant amount of time as to the nature of my visit. I couldn't help but notice he didn't stop the lady with the expensive jewelry from going inside, nor the busy-looking chap in a cravat. I think he took issue with my cardigan.

 - Oliver Darkshire, Once Upon a Tome, p.154

The Book of Atrix Wolfe: 30th Anniversary Edition by Patricia A. McKillip

I'm not sure why this particular Patricia A. McKillip book is getting a new edition - maybe just because it's the one hitting a round-number anniversary this year, since it's from 1995. (She didn't have a standalone novel in '75 or '85 that I can see, though Od Magic from '05 also has an anniversary this year.) But nice things don't need to have a reason, do they?

This edition of The Book of Atrix Wolfe was published a few weeks ago, on February 25th. It should be widely available at this point, in both electronic and print formats. The new stuff includes a cover by Kathleen Jennings, who also contributes an introduction, partially about creating that cover (Jennings works in cut-paper, so it's more complicated than a painter would be) and partially about McKillip.

But, mostly, this is the novel, as expected: the same novel, as far as I know, as was published in 1995 and has been available since in various other editions.

This is a set in a secondary world, the kind with a few important countries without much geography - there's no map, and the characters will not be forced to march all around anywhere. As the back cover puts it, the four important realms here are "warlike Kardeth, resilient Pelucir, idyllic Chaumenard, and the mysterious Elven realm." (The word "Elven," or any variation, is never used in the book itself, but it's an otherworldly place ruled by the long-lived Queen of the Wood, so it's a reasonable simplification for marketing copy to make.)

We begin with a prologue: the King of Kardeth is besieging Pelucir in the depths of winter, to break them and get through to Chaumenard, a rich land with a school of wizards but no clear government. Doing this will kill a whole lot of the people of Kardeth, Pelucir, and Chaumenard, but, like Lord Farquaad, that is a risk this guy is willing to take. (McKillip tries to make him noble, of the unbending type, but he has absolutely no grounds for war other than "I wanna take that stuff" and the whole novel could have been avoided if someone had quietly assassinated him in a convenient moment.)

The title wizard, possibly the greatest of the Chaumenard practitioners, has been wandering in that region, and stops to see that Kardeth King. Wizards generally don't interfere in squabbles between nations, because their powers tend to do unexpected things either in ways or at scales, but Wolfe hopes he can find a way to talk Kardeth down. He doesn't, but instead does something else - something magical. It's not clear what he's trying to do, but what he ends up doing is creating a monstrous Hunter - a horned figure on horseback that leads something  not unlike the traditional Wild Hunt and whom Atrix thinks (not entirely correctly) is an aspect of himself. The Hunter rampaged, killing the King and Queen of Pelucir but also somehow forcing Kardeth to retreat. (What actually happened, like a lot of things in Atrix Wolfe, is never quite made clear.)

The rest of the book is set twenty years later, and is about the next generation - and Atrix himself, still around, still mostly a hermit running around as a wolf on a mountain or otherwise avoiding human contact - fixing that magical thing he did.

I found this to be a book that talked around a lot of stuff more than I was entirely comfortable with - there were points towards the end when the dialogue was non-specific enough that I checked, more than once, to make sure a signature from an entirely different book hadn't been included.

The twenty-years-later cast is primarily two people: Talis, the prince of Pelucir born on the night of the siege, more recently training as a mage in Chaumenard, and Saro, the daughter of the Queen of the Wood, who was caught up in that magical working, left mute, and has been working as a pot-scrubber in the Pelucir kitchens ever since. (There's a lot of good kitchen-talk in this book; I wished I had been hungrier when reading it.)

The book of the title was written by Atrix at some unspecified time - I think after the siege but long before the present day, but maybe years even before that - and is in some kind of code where it claims to be a straightforward book of simple spells, and does dependably create magical workings when used by a practitioner, but the actual spells cast are vastly different, more powerful, and dangerous than what they claim to be.

Anyway, Talis find the book, tries to read it, causes problems. He's also dragged back home by his much older brother, the current king of Pelucir. (The heir to Kardeth is in the first chapter and seems like she will be important to the narrative, but she disappears entirely from that point, as does her entire nation.) From that point, we get Talis chapters and Saro chapters, and occasionally Atrix sections, too. The Hunter rampages around - he wants to kill Atrix, for good and sufficient reasons, but Atrix, being the greatest mage of his generation, can generally escape, though sometimes only through dreams.

Again, I found a lot of this book under-explained. We don't know precisely what Atrix did, what he was trying to do, how it happened that way, or, really, anything about how magic works in this world. How the realm of the Queen of the Woods relates to the normal human world is also pretty vague. There's a lot of talking, a lot of kitchen details of meals going up and coming back down, and the same few discussions between the same few characters happening repeatedly. McKillip was a supple, interesting fantasy writer, but I don't think this was one of her most fully-realized books. I may have missed something central, but it fell pretty flat for me.