Shakespeare Manga Theater by Osamu Tezuka

Osamu Tezuka was a busy, popular, energetic creator for a long time - credited with over 700 books, plus animation projects and other things - and even the most expansive translation projects have only brought disconnected chunks of that oeuvre into English. I think I have a decent idea of the Tezuka work I've liked best, and has seemed strongest to me: his adult-aimed gekiga works, mostly from the early 1970s. Although, with several hundred other things I've never had a chance to read, that's a very tentative opinion.

But I keep reinforcing it when I find works from the mainstream of Tezuka's work - like Princess Knight a decade ago, or One Hundred Tales last year. They have mostly been in madcap-verging-on-goofy mode, with often-grotesque characters emoting at top volume and rampaging around the pages, seemingly to entertain an audience of easily-distractible hellions. On the positive side, his art is always clean and crisp and his stories move swiftly, though often in arbitrary directions, the better to keep the audience on board.

Shakespeare Manga Theater is a collection of stories, or chapters of stories, with Shakespeare connections, from about twenty-five years of Tezuka's career. Other than their inspiration, there's nothing to unify them. Well, they are all in that audience-pleasing Tezuka style: all big and flashy and in-your-face, like a three-card monte dealer laying down a line of patter for an easy mark.

I'll be blunt: I find Tezuka in this mode to be a purveyor of disposable entertainment for young boys. There's some glimpses of depth, or more nuanced thought, but the morals tend to be obvious and the action tends to be frenetic. I gather his iconic work in this mode - things like Astro Boy and Black Jack - were beloved by a couple of generations of Japanese boys, and slightly less so by their compatriots in other countries, but I didn't read Tezuka at that critical age, and that work has never struck me as more than adequate as an adult.

We start off with a fairly straight adaptation of Merchant of Venice from 1959 - entirely Tezuka-ized, but the same plot, and the whole play. Then a story called "Robio and Robiette" from Astro Boy a few years later - a looser adaptation but with the essential bones of the original still entirely visible.

There are two chapters from a project called Vampires, which the editors claim to be inspired by Macbeth. I will grant them that there are three witches who a major character consults, and their dialogue is Macbeth-adjacent, but none of the rest of the plot, as much of it as we see in this excerpt, seems to have anything to do with Shakespeare. We instead have a boy lycanthrope, a dastardly villain hiding as the trusted aide of the great man he's trying to ruin, and the gorgeously fragile girl love interest who just gets to cry and be kidnapped in these pages.

The back half of the book has three stories from an '80s series called Rainbow Parakeet, in which a master of disguise takes last-minute parts in plays so he can use that access to do major thefts of the rich people attending the opening nights of those plays. Well, that's the set-up in the first story - in the second he's on vacation and the third just randomly traveling. There's also a nemesis/potential love-interest female detective who is central in the first two stories and entirely missing in the third.

In the first Rainbow Parakeet story, the play he's dropping into - the star was just arrested by the FBI on drug-smuggling charges, and the understudy was humorously injured by the director at the last dress rehearsal - is Hamlet. I think this may actually be the actual first story about Rainbow Parakeet, since he explains his deal, and we get a lot of background on the female detective, too.

The second story is supposedly an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, but much more loosely. Parakeet and the detective (Senri) land at a horse farm out somewhere in rural Japan, and investigate the mysterious disappearance of a once-famous racehorse and his apparent reappearance every night to cheer up his "wife." (This story does not accord to anything I know about horse breeding, even granted that I know very little.) Senri is also dodging a potential suitor, who turns out to be the owner of the farm. It is a much vaguer adaptation of that play; I suspect every Rainbow Parakeet story was given the title of some other famous story, and used elements of that without directly adapting it as such.

And the last story sees Parakeet in another remote rural location, this time in Polynesia. There lives a world-famous dancer, Boroguirre, and Parakeet plans to "steal" his dancing style. But he instead gets caught up in a villain's plan to actually steal the secret mixture of forty plants that Boroguirre's tribe uses to create a unique mind-expanding potion. Boroguirre is black, and has a white wife, so this is all supposedly an adaptation of Othello, and as such, Boroguirre does get unreasonably jealous out of nowhere when the plot requires him to do so.

These are all sturdy, audience-pleasing manga stories, full of action and humor. None of them have anything you would hesitate to hand to a relatively bright seven-year-old, or a particularly dull twenty-year-old. They don't make particularly interesting use of their Shakespeare references, but it is true that all of them have Shakespeare references.

Better Things: Slip Slidin' Away

"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 song meant nothing to me before I was a father. Now, I start to mist up even thinking about it. Kids, man - they change you in ways you never see coming.

This is one of the big famous songs in the list - so big and so famous that I hesitated to include it; you all know this one already. But the point of a list like this isn't to showcase weird obscure stuff I happen to like, but to honestly list a whole bunch of songs that I care about. And this one qualifies - for the past two decades, if not when I was young and free and callow.

Paul Simon wrote Slip Slidin' Away in the mid-70s, releasing it as a new song on what was mostly a "greatest hits" record. We don't know if it's autobiographical. It probably is, to some degree, because that's where true emotion always comes from: the things that happen to you.

There are four verses - three about specific, unnamed people, and one about all of us. It's full of crisp, precise language that says true things in the ways only a great song can, and the music is quiet and soothing, as if to try to temper the bone-deep sadness in those words.

If you don't listen closely, it could sound happy, with its muted doo-wop background singers and quiet late-night vibe. If you don't think too closely about what Simon is singing, it could still. But once you've really heard it - even more once you've felt something like the people in those first three verses - you can never go back.

We work our jobs
Collect our pay
Believe we're gliding down the highway
When in fact we're slip slidin' away

Reviewing the Mail: Week of June 14, 2025

This is slightly a cheat; these four books were birthday presents that I got a week ago Saturday. So not "in the mail" and not "week of June 14," either. But the point of these posts is to list new books, and these are new books, and now is the time I have to make a post, so here I go.

The first two are ones I bought myself and had wrapped so I could open them. I've said it before: one of the great things about being an adult is you can buy the presents you want for your own events and no one will stop you. (The last two came from my brother, who knows me almost as well as I do.)

I bought Alastor, another mid-90s omnibus of Jack Vance novels from Tor; I've been running through Vance over the past few years, hitting the big obvious series that already exist in omnibus editions. (This might be the last one of those; I might have to dive into Lyonesse next.) The Alastor series, as I remember, is three loosely-related novels from the 1970s - but we'll see what I find when I read them this time.

Also from myself: The Worst We Can Find is a history of the MST3K TV show and it's various successors, by TV writer Dale Sherman. I've been watching MST3K episodes with my kids - first back when they were tweens/teens, and again recently as we re-started the tradition of watching a movie together once a week. So I guess, as I do, I'm over-intellectualizing again and want to know more about things that I could just take as they came. (I should really just relax.) This book looked to be the best of the serious/historical/explanatory ones about the show - I've seen one that's pretty solidly academic, and I'm sure there are others.

Speaking of which, Twenty Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life in No Way Whatsoever is a memoir, of a kind, of the series by Frank Conniff, who was a writer and performer on the show for the first half of its original life and was also the one who did the initial choice of movies for the show. (Which means that he had to watch even more bad movies, including a whole bunch they never did on the show.) This is a slim book of, as it says, twenty-five essays about twenty-five movies.

And last is S. Petersen's Field Guide to Lovecraftian Horrors, an omnibus of the two slim Petersen books from Chaosium from the '80s - as I recall, one was Cthulhu Mythos and the other was Dreamlands. At some point in the past twenty years or so, the two were combined into this one book and republished, which is nice for me since I lost my originals in my 2011 flood. This is probably officially a resource for the the Call of Cthulhu game, but it works just fine outside that context.

Quote of the Week: A Torturer's Musings

Pain brought me to myself. Perhaps that is what pain is for; or perhaps it is only the chain  forged to bind us to the eternal present, forged in a smithy we can but guess at, by a smith we do not know.

 - Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun, p.88

Naked City by Eric Drooker

Everyone has story elements that annoy them unreasonably. For me, it's often small factual things that undermine core themes of a book - the ones that make me think, "wait, well if she can do X, then Y can't be true."

So I spent a lot of time while reading Eric Drooker's 2024 graphic novel Naked City trying to square one very minor circle in my head, and failing. You see, the main character is Isabel, a young wannabe singer-songwriter who moves to New York to chase her art. Her mother was Mexican, and was deported when she was young; her father an American who has recently died. One thread of the book is Isabel's worry that she's undocumented - the book never makes it quite clear, but she apparently doesn't have any paperwork of any kind.

Leave aside the fact that she went to school, where the usual  functionaries would have demanded and received all kinds of proof of her existence and residence and medical history and whatnot. But Drooker has Isabel take a quick European tour right in the middle of the worry about her potentially-undocumented status. And I kept asking myself: does Drooker think, or want his audience to think, that anyone can fly off to another continent, and work there for an extended period of time, without a passport? That plot element - which is totally extraneous, by the way; Drooker could have made it a West Coast thing with no change to the narrative at all - proves that she must have documentation, or it couldn't have happened.

This is not important to the book at all. It didn't need to be that way. But it's the kind of element that makes me question every strength of the book, every moody blue panel and every allusive line of dialogue, wondering if they're as randomly rickety in their own ways.

Naked City is somewhat fabulistic, which could be the answer to that question - and the one of why Isabel never even tried to look for that lost mother, or know her mother's name. Fables are focused on telling their specific story, in a particular story-teller way, and details only come up as they support that work.

So Isabel goes to New York, looking to make music and share it with people. She gets a lousy McJob (literally) and busks on the corner, but needs to also do something more remunerative. So she answers an ad to work as an artist's model, for an unnamed painter who is another of our main characters - the fable here is about making art, and he's the other side of that equation.

Normally, in a fable, there would be a strong distinction between the two - one is lazy but successful, the other driven but a failure, that kind of thing. Drooker, though, isn't constructing this explicitly as a fable with a specific moral: both of our central artists are positive, and both become notably successful in their art as the book goes on...though both have to deal with one Business Person, the gatekeeper to success, who isn't as positive and artsy as they are. (Isabel's Business Person, as is typical for the music industry, is vastly worse: predatory and demanding and actively molding her into something she doesn't want to be.)

There are two other main characters. First is Alex, a flighty dancer who "dates" Isabel for a while and dips in and out of the narrative, mostly there (I think) to be the avatar of a certain type of young hedonic artist, living for sensation and totally in the moment. Turning up later in the book is another unnamed man, older, maimed, a former window-washer and probably currently homeless - he's the unexpectedly philosophical voice of experience, stoic and accepting. He's not an artist of any kind, but he used to be a craftsman of a sort, taking pride in doing his work well, and now is almost a nihilist, insisting that life is only about the pursuit of money but (maybe paradoxically) refusing to actually do that himself.

Naked City is the kind of book where characters suddenly launch into detailed explanations of their own motivations and desires; it's about Art and Life and features people who think in those capital-letter terms at great length. Isabel mostly pours it out in her songs, which makes her the most naturalistic character - and that's good, because she's central and gets the most page-time. The Painter engages in the most obvious why-art conversations, with just about every other character; I don't know if Drooker specifically thought of him as an author stand-in, but he tends in that direction. Alex, and the band of similar folks that follow along with him for a few scenes  - because it's no fun being a hedonist alone - are more shallow, entirely about the moment and sensation above all.

It's a fairly long book, over three hundred pages, but mostly leisurely - Isabel and The Painter rise in their respective creative worlds, in their different ways, and then things change, for both of them, and they make other artistic choices. It ends better for one of them than the other: I don't know if Drooker had a moral in mind, but if he did, it doesn't entirely become clear. To be fair, Drooker's comics have typically been more imagistic, and he ends this book in his old silent mode, with a forty-page wordless sequence largely framed by snow.

I tend to think Naked City gets too specific too much for its own good - the talky bits are more specific, and less successful, than the pure-image sections. Isabel's past and parents are a distraction: Drooker wants to show she launched from a specific place, but where she launched from isn't central to this story. The Painter is more iconic, because we know less about him: he's there, he's been painting for years. We know what he wants and cares about and loves: what's important.

But this is the kind of book that will be most loved and clutched to heart by other wanna-be artists, who will see themselves in all of the arguments about art and commerce, selling out and rising up, who will passionately agree with specific speeches - I wouldn't be surprised to see some panels or lines from Naked City turned into tattoos before too long; it's that kind of book. If you're in that bucket, you should take a look at it: it is deep and capacious, and will give you language to talk about things you care about and examples to frame your thinking.

All My Bicycles by Powerpaola

There's no right or wrong way to structure a memoir. But some are more distinctive or evocative than others - some make you think "that's interesting, that's different."

Powerpaola - the working name of a peripatetic South American cartoonist whose first name is indeed Paola - decided to tell stories around the bicycles she's had in her life. Where she was at that time, what she was doing, how each specific bicycle helped her get around the places she was living and what people it connected her to. (The edition I read was translated into English by Andrea Rosenberg,)

The book is All My Bicycles, and it doesn't go in chronological order, either. Powerpaola begins with three random bikes - she gives all of them quirky names throughout, or rather tells us the things she called each of them to differentiate them - that she had between 1996 and 2013, in three different cities on two different continents. She also begins the book by telling us she doesn't know how to end it, as if this first section is the last. From there, she moves backwards and forwards, with chapters on other bikes at other times, from her first as a young teen to a bike she used in Buenos Aires just a few years ago.

Her pages are busy, full of images that fill up their panels, all in a dark wash that's more brown than black, with occasional pops of contrasting colors. There's a lot of the natural world, dark and jungly, and even the cityscapes are busy and full of darkness, crammed with manholes and dark expanses of asphalt and barred windows.

There's no single story here: it's not that kind of memoir. Powerpaola sets up a possible overall narrative, about how she always runs away, in that first section, and that is one thread of the narrative throughout. But only one - she's more interested in specifics and moments and memories than in fitting all of her history into some tight schema to make a book out of it. Bicycles is a book of memories and thoughts, all "I remember that time" and "here's what this person meant to me then." It's not "what bicycles mean" - not to her, or to the world in general - but instead "here's my life, as seen through the lens of the bicycles I rode and the places I rode them through."

The Urth of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe

I read Gene Wolfe's most successful series, The Book of the New Sun, what I think of as "recently" - though now I see it was six years ago. (The tempus, it do fugit, don't it?) I'd expected to get to this odd sequel "soon," and I guess this counts.

Book was a four-book series that told one continuous story; it was one work in multiple volumes, and has been reprinted in a single volume more than once since then. The Urth of the New Sun was a single novel, slightly longer than the constituent parts of Book, originally published about five years after the end of Book. But - and here I should point out that there's always something quirky about a Wolfe project, often multiple things - the quirky thing about Urth, or one of them, is that it too tends to fall into four distinct sections.

The narrator and hero of Book, Severian - once an apprentice torturer, now Autarch of the most extensive country on his very far-future Earth - spends Urth in a journey to save his planet, that very old-SF hero's journey. Urth starts on a vast starship - made of wood, with immense solar sails, for maximum Wolfean past-as-future frisson - then moves to the planet Yesod in another universe (or perhaps the universe is named Yesod; Wolfe is rarely interested in being clear) where Severian is tested, and then there's a voyage back on the same ship and a final section on Urth.

There's quite a lot of vaguely described time travel along the way: this unnamed ship voyages in both time and space, so the back half of the novel in particular bounces through multiple time periods of Earth/Urth - and, if you follow Wolfe, also Ushas, the new name of the planet once it is "saved."

To put what Wolfe says vaguely in fantasy-coded language into something more clearly science-fictional: it is very far in the future and the Sun is very old and dim. Other stars are visible during the day; winters get longer and colder almost year-by-year. The Sun's collapse is imminent enough to be plausible within a human timescale. Godlike beings - possibly AI, possibly a bio-engineered race - created by the human-like inhabitants of the previous universe (time-travel, remember, and a Penrosian cyclical universe model) are willing to drop a white hole into the Sun, which would rejuvenate it.

But they will only do so if the leader of Urth comes to their planet and goes through a test - at least one Autarch before Severian has taken that journey and failed. Testing leaders of planets seems to be their major industry; we see, from the air, a vast archipelago of islands, each one devoted to testing the leaders of one particular galaxy. And dropping the "white fountain" into the Sun will massively disrupt the current Urth, killing possibly a majority of the people living there. There's no hint of trying to warn them or create bulwarks against the rising seas, despite the fact that the journey of the white hole into the Sun takes at least centuries. Wolfe, as always, has a devout right-wing Catholic's disdain for mere individual human lives.

As usual in a Wolfe novel, the main character is confused and ill-informed, despite insisting repeatedly that he's super-competent and (in this particular case) that he never forgets anything. There are long conversations about the nature of reality and the SFnal underpinnings of this world, all very carefully phrased in such a way such that that none of it is clear to the reader in terms that reader already knows. That's how Wolfe works: if you're not willing to do most of the work yourself - if you don't think of a SF novel as a combination of a British crossword and an acrostic - Wolfe is not the writer for you.

In this novel in particular, most of the charms and interest are in getting additional details about characters and events from Book - but, again, all couched in Wolfean triple-reverse terms, at best allusive and often just gestures in the direction a solution might, possibly, be deduced if you think about everything in the world exactly the way Wolfe did circa 1986.

It's full of interesting moments and arresting images; for all my snark, this is actually on the accessible side of Wolfe's corpus. It would help if you had read, or even better intensely studied Book of the New Sun very soon before reading Urth, but it's not, strictly speaking, necessary. There is a novel here, with characters and events, and Wolfe, at this point in his career, would connect those events into a consistent plot that could be followed with only a normal amount of attention.

Urth is not the triumph Book was; there are multiple times when it threatens to become even more of a Christian allegory than it already is, and it's inherently a secondary, derivative work to begin with, a book explaining how something we knew would happen did happen. But it's a solid, deeply inventive book by one of the best and most distinctive SF writers of his era, and a return to his best-loved and most popular world.

Cult of the Ibis by Daria Tessler

I've only read one of Daria Tessler's works before - Salome's Last Dance, which I enjoyed a lot but had to admit I didn't entirely understand. So obviously I would next read a mostly wordless book of hers, about criminals and alchemy and set in a bizarre landscape.

The plot description of Cult of the Ibis does a great job of detailing the important points, so let me just quote it: this book "takes place in a fantasy cityscape loosely inspired by German Expressionist film. [... It] tells a story of an occultist getaway-driver who, after escaping with the loot from a bank robbery gone wrong, orders a build-your-own homunculus kit and goes on the lam."

Those sound like really random elements, but that's exactly what this book is: a collision of crime drama and hermetic mystery in a phantasmagorical city, in which our nameless, meek, yearning hero tries to transform himself, to double himself, through alchemy, perhaps because that kit costs exactly the take from the bank robbery of which he was the only survivor.

Tessler draws this in a busy, detailed, organic style, with imaginative panel layouts and film-inspired transitions. There is dialogue at important moments, but not a lot of it, and no captions. The reader has to imagine what any of these weird things might sound like. The main character, of course, never speaks. He's our Everyman, our viewpoint, our normal ordinary person - everyone and no one.

Oh, and there's a bunch of written text - alchemy explanations from magazines and advertisements - that our hero eagerly reads. We're not sure exactly what he's looking for in alchemy, what kind of transformation or power he wants, but we know he's small and weak: or sees himself that way, and so is that way. We don't know what he did before, how he became the one very different-looking member of this bank-robbery gang, any of the points on the arc of his life. All we see is this crime and the aftermath, along with his clear desire to learn the presumed secrets of the universe.

And that's what this book is about: bank robbery and the secrets of the universe. I doubt you can say that of any other book, so, really, you're now required to read this book someday, just for that. I'm sure you'll thank me for telling you about it.

Better Things: Family Tree

"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 don't think I'm ever deliberately obscure. There's stuff I like, and some of it I happened to randomly find - mostly back when I was paying more attention to popular music, or maybe when the ecosystem of popular music was more attuned to the kind of things I like. Some of the songs in this year's series are big and famous: we've already hit "I Don't Like Mondays" and the Dire Straits "Romeo and Juliet."

And some are the songs I loved the most on a record I bought because I heard a different single.

The Odds were an alternative band from western Canada in the '90s - I see from Wikipedia that they re-formed after an initial breakup at the millennium and are still around; good for them. I bought a couple of their records, and had that sense that I loved a couple of songs and didn't always connect with the rest.

But one good song is all you need - one good song is what each post in this series is all about.

So today is for Family Tree, from The Odds' 1991 first record Neopolitan.

I'll be gone before the things that I do now go wrong
Family tree is burning to heat my house a little longer

It's about someone burning down his life - it's all in metaphors, so we don't know what, exactly, he's doing. But we know he's doing it. (For my SFnal peeps: you could argue that "he" is humanity and the family is the Earth. Frankly, that could easily be the intended meaning. The more I come to think about it, the better I like that interpretation, to be honest.)

It's got a great rhythm, starting up with a rattling drum intro and transitioning into a jangly beat that continues throughout the song. The chorus - I just quoted it above - is strong, and gets bigger as the song goes on. It's yet another song that just sounds better the louder your turn it up, especially in your car with the windows open.

Books Read: May 2025

Here's what I read last month; I publish this mostly for myself. If you find it useful, too - hey, that's two of us!

Powerpaola, All My Bicycles (5/2, digital)

Eric Drooker, Naked City (digital, 5/4)

Osamu Tezuka, Shakespeare Manga Theater (digital, 5/9)

Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf & Cub, Vol. 6: Lanterns for the Dead (digital, 5/10)

Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog (5/10)

Axelle Lenoir, What If We Were...2 (digital, 5/11)

Raymond Chandler, The High Window (in Stories & Early Novels, 5/11)

Derek Evernden, Bogart Creek, Vol. 3 (digital, 5/17)

Elizabeth Pich and Jonathan Kunz, War and Peas: Hi, Earth (digital, 5/18)

Chester Himes, The Real Cool Killers (in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, 5/18)

Noah Van Sciver, Beat It, Rufus (digital, 5/19)

P.G. Wodehouse, Leave It To Psmith (5/19)

Kris, Rob, Matt & Dave, Cyanide & Happiness: Punching Zoo (digital, 5/24)

William Kotzwinkle, The Midnight Examiner (5/24)

Laura Pérez, Ocultos (digital, 5/25)

Grant Snider, Thinking About Thinking (digital, 5/26)

Martin Millar, The Good Fairies of New York (5/26)

Mia Oberlӓnder, Anna (digital, 5/31)

Jack Vance, The Pnume (in Planet of Adventure, 5/31)

Next month I will read more books: that's my promise to you the home viewer.

Quote of the Week: In the Stratosphere

In the Onondaga Coffee Room, I had observed the members of the Fort Wayne Pistons having breakfast. They twined their long legs around the table legs or doubled them back under the chairs. It occurred to me that life must be very difficult for a traveling collection of men who are from six feet six to nearly seven feet tall. They might have special long beds at home, but they could scarcely carry them with them, and they must either bend or step back several paces to look in a shaving mirror. An awareness of their altitude seemed to oppress them - I could imagine how many times they had been asked how the weather was up there - and their heads, at the ends of such long necks, looked small, like guinea hens'. I was rapidly becoming depressed myself, until I thought of what a liberation it must be for a man of that height to get into the company of others who could see eye to eye with him. Instead of feeling set apart, he probably begins to think of anyone under six feet five as subnormal,. He goes back to his home town a giant refreshed.

 - A.J. Liebling, The Sweet Science, p.192 in The Sweet Science & Other Writings

Witty Comebacks compiled by Tim Glynne-Jones

I do posts here for all the books I read, but not all of the posts are equal. Some are mostly notifications, for Future Me, for the moments when I think "what was that book of random quotes I read a few years back? Was it as slight as I remember?"

Future Me, that book was Witty Comebacks, with a subtitle of "Great responses and sassy remarks." It was published by Arcturus's Sirius imprint in 2000, with a London address but a price in US dollars printed on the book. The introduction was credited to Tim Glynne-Jones as the compiler, though online bookstores list other names as editor.

I got it as a remainder a couple of years ago, but it wasn't expensive to begin with ($12.99), though it is a small thing (roughly six inches by five and just north of two hundred pages). The pages are nicely designed, with splashes of color - each chapter is a separate color, so I think the whole thing could be a two-color job in aggregate.

And, yes, it is a book of quotes. Thirteen thematic chapters, each one twenty pages or so, with one quote and supporting text on each page. The quotes are all in the zinger mode, as the title implies - these are all responses to questions, rude or honest or whatever. You've probably heard a lot of these quotes already, which is the nature of books like this: they're one of the ways culture reminds itself of the things it already knows.

It's pretty slight, but any book like this would be slight. It's not any slighter than any similar book, and it's a nice-looking, pleasant to read collection of exactly what it says it will be. Would that every book were that true to itself.

Precious Rubbish by Kayla E.

Everyone's life is different. Some people have relatively easy lives, some don't. We can forget how wide that spectrum is: there are a lot of people on the "relatively easy" side who don't realize where they actually sit. So seeing something from the far opposite end can be bracing, or frightening, or saddening, or centering, or all of those things at once.

Kayla E. is a cartoonist who had a horrifically bad childhood. She's been turning stories of that childhood into comics under the overall title Precious Rubbish for a few years now, and the book of that name - just published this spring - collects almost two hundred pages of those strips and related material, to tell something like the full story of that childhood.

This is a mosaic rather than a narrative; there's no clear organizing principle of the book Precious Rubbish. We're thrown into the world of young Kayla as, I suppose, she was herself, growing up this way.

I was going to start with a list of young Kayla's troubles, but I worried that could come across as dismissive, or questioning, or mocking. But it is so central, that a catalog - blunt as that may be - is important, so readers understand just how much was going on, how interlocked it all was, how far to the bad side this one childhood was.

Young Kayla had at least four things that could easily be the basis of a "I had a horrible childhood" memoir.

Before any of the actual trauma, she was poor and half-Mexican in Texas, a state not notably generous or full of supports for the poor. Her parents divorced when she was three, in the early 1990s. She had one brother, a few years older. Her father claimed her mother was unfit, and got custody of the brother - but didn't try to get custody of young Kayla. So she lived with that mother, with weekends and other visits to the father. Her father remarried for a few years, and young Kayla's stepmother seems to have been mildly cruel and annoying - though, in retrospect, she's the most normal and reasonable adult in the book.

(Kayla E. doesn't name her other family members at all - they're just "brother," "mother," "father." And she has since entirely separated from all of them, quite reasonably.)

OK. So here's Number One: that mother has some kind of untreated mental illness. Maybe narcissism, maybe something else similar. She's massively selfish, obsessive, mercurial, demanding, flighty, suicidal. Young Kayla was parenting her mother from a very young age. (The mother, and maybe the father as well, was also some variety of reactionary loony Christian, but I've already said she grew up in Texas.)

Number Two: her father seemingly never related to young Kayla as a human being or as his own daughter, but just a female body - comparing her curves to adult women, complaining she was too fat in puberty, putting her on fad diets. Young Kayla was mistaken for his wife on multiple occasions, I think starting when she was shockingly young for that assumption. 

Number Three: her brother molested her regularly, on those visits to the father's house, for years, starting pre-puberty. She seems to have told both her parents, who shrugged and told her that these things happen: either it was just normal or it was her fault.

Coming through all of that, she started to steal drinks, and was a full-blown alcoholic by puberty. That's Number Four.

They're not separate things - the father's disdain and brother's creeping meant visiting their house was even worse than life with her mother, which pushed her deeper into parenting her parent, and into spiraling into alcoholism. They all interlock, all three members of her closest family deeply horrible in different ways.

Precious Rubbish is not the story of how young Kayla got out or got better. There's too much material for that. Kayla E. may get to that story at some point, but this is all still on the level of processing the pain. The strips mostly depict young Kayla: she draws herself as ugly, since they all told her she was ugly.

There are some longer strips here, multi-pagers - usually with two levels of narrative, to mirror the dissociation young Kayla was later diagnosed with - that explain in more depth what happened. But it's mostly moments, either symbolic or realistic, all in a crisp, clean-line mid-century art style reminiscent of Peanuts or Little Lulu or similar sixty-year-old Dell comics. And the reader doesn't quite connect all of those dots for a while. It's clear this was a bad childhood, but it was bad in so many different dimensions simultaneously that it takes Kayla E. a while, in this circling, mosaic fashion, to get to all of them and show what they did to her younger self.

Precious Rubbish has powerful moments, and is full of arresting pages of comics. It is inventive and fearless, taking risks with style and layout, including pages of word games and "text features" reminiscent of those old kids' comics. And it does have a core central truth, that it circles and tells from every side. But it's not quite a single coherent book; it remains a collection of "Precious Rubbish" pieces rather than transforming them into something unified. Perhaps Kayla E. didn't want to do that in the first place: this is a book about brokenness, dissociation, damage. It's only right that a book like that not be a single unbroken thing. It is powerful and steadfast, in all its multifariousness, a shattered image of a childhood no one would wish on any child.

Santos Sisters, Vol. 1 by Greg and Fake

The single-name thing seems to have leapt from Eurocomics and landed on North American shores - well, we've always had it in other fields, like music (Cher! Madonna!), but comics-makers are embracing it as well. I may be concerned that our Strategic Name Reserve is in danger of being depleted - there aren't that many regular forenames, though if we allow variants and standard nouns, we're in much better shape - but I am still not, despite all my demands, the High Lord of All English Usage, so all I can do is Canute it up here.

I don't know what arbitration mechanism is available if there's, say, a Belgian who goes by "Greg" and a North American who does the same - it seems like the kind of thing that could easily happen - but, again, I have not been granted the awesome power I keep asking for, so I guess it's not my problem.

In any case, Belgians, the name Greg has officially been claimed (by a guy from Chicago, as I understand it), so you snoozed and I suppose you lost. The name Fake has also been claimed (by a guy from Manzanillo, Mexico), but that's probably less in-demand. And they have teamed up, like Hawk and Animal of the Legion of Doom, over the past few years to make a comic called Santos Sisters.

The first collection of that comic was published a couple of months ago, under the fairly obvious title Santos Sisters, Vol. 1. From online descriptions - not the book itself - I learn that Fake is the writer and Greg is the artist. The book collects the first five issues of the series, plus a few odds and ends, though not the covers of those five issues, which seems like an odd and unusual choice. The back cover also gives, for what might be the first time: their fabulous superhero origin. (They found medallions on the beach that granted them superpowers from a goddess, Madame Sosostris.)

Santos Sisters is basically a mash-up of vaguely '90s superhero elements - more early-Image than anything else, big bulky guns and all - with Archie-style storytelling, all in a mildly mocking tone that regularly spells things incorrectly in dialogue, I think deliberately. Alana and Ambar are sisters - we can call their last name Santos, but that's probably not right - who are probably in their early 20s, since they seem to live in an apartment, but they get up to Archie-ish teen hijinks with boyfriends and dates.

Alana is the serious one, Betty-coded, with lighter skin, smaller breasts and the blue outfit. Ambar is the party girl in red, Veronica-coded and always ready for action of whatever type. They fight crime in the Southern California city of Las Brisas, the kind of place that has a vibrant downtown and a beach and is close enough to ski slopes for a day trip - a location designed for comics stories.

Their stories are short, in that Archie style. Sometimes about battling some supervillain threatening Las Brisas, but as often watching "Boozy Bees" on TV, or squabbling about dating two guys at once, or going camping in the mountains, or aiding Don Quixote (?!) who has randomly arrived in town (??!?). The word "random" is appropos much of the time, as are "quirky" and "slightly silly." Again, it's all starting from the premise "what if these Archie-style girls were Image-esque superheroines?"

Their powers are not deeply defined: they have costumes, of course, which manifest when they call on the goddess. They're probably resistant to harm, since that's pretty standard, and they do seem to glow when in costume. They definitely fly, and manifest big guns (most of the time) or big swords (once in a while, I suppose for a change of pace) with which to battle their enemies. But it's not like Alana channels the power of ice and Ambar fire, or one of them turns into an armadillo and the other an ocelot, or their necklaces generate pulsing colorful forcefields in the shape of household objects, or anything like that. They just chase bad guys, squabble among themselves, and shoot their guns to mow down the henchmen. (Major villains get fisticuffs, or talked down, or some other less-lethal activity, so they can return in later stories.)

It's a fun premise, and hasn't worn out its welcome yet. It probably will, since it's not a hugely durable or extensible premise, but a hundred and fifty pages doesn't get us there. Greg draws it all in that Archie look, and is good at both the heavy-lidded women and the dim-bulb men. Fake's stories are varied and goofy in interesting ways - there are twenty-two different stories here, and none of them are repetitive or rely on the same ideas. Again, I'm sure that will come: the premise isn't that deep. But I'd expect probably another book this size of similar stories, then maybe one big all-the-villains-team-up epic, before it hits the wall of ennui.

The Dirdir by Jack Vance

The Dirdir is the third of the four "Tschai" novels [1], telling the continuous story of an Earthman named Adam Reith who landed on that planet, the sole survivor of an exploration vessel, and his attempts to get  off it and tell his superiors back home about this big world filled with hostile aliens.

I say "hostile," but they're not actually hostile to Earth. As far as Reith and the reader knows, they don't even know Earth exists. And they're only intermittently - albeit intermittently over the past several thousand years, which shows some serious stubbornness - hostile to each other. But the three intelligent alien races that successively invaded this planet, long ago - the Chasch, the Wankh, and the Dirdir - all have enslaved or indoctrinated then selectively bred humans to serve them, so one or more of them did have contact with Earth, some time in the dim past. And the three races from off-planet presumably still exist in their original spacefaring polities, somewhere out there, too.

This is all set in the medium future, probably early in the expansion of Vance's Oikumene or Gaean Reach universe - I believe there are arguments that those are, or are not, in the same timeline, and I take no position on the matter here - in the usual mid-century SF future, full of strong men in metal phalluses proudly thrusting into the void with minimal computational power and maximum gumption. Vance, as always, has a more sophisticated and complex version of that concept, but this series is still towards the basic-adventure level, all about This One Guy, the adventures of his smart brain and mighty thews, and how he wins out for Earthmen in the end. (And it is all "men," it's that era of SF so the word "human" is used rarely if ever and women are furniture or plot tokens or background details most of the time.)

The first two books were City of the Chasch, in which Reith recuperated from the crash, gathered a couple of unlikely allies, and made his first attempt to get a spaceship; and Servants of the Wankh, in which he and those allies ventured to the other side of the world to return a "princess" in hopes her people would help with the spaceship, and then instead tried to steal a ship from another alien race.

Reith is still trying to get a spaceship, and, this time around, he figures he can more or less buy one, at the Dirdir shipyards in their city of Hei. This is, of course, back in the other hemisphere - but far south - so Reith and team have to undertake a long journey, though it doesn't take as much time in this book as the similar trip did in Wankh. Reith plans a high-risk but ironically satisfying way of amassing the funds to cover ship construction, then heads to the Dirdirman city near Hei and enlists a shady businessman to do the actual (probably illegal) construction. That does not go to plan, for mostly shady-businessman reasons, but Reith does end the novel in possession of both a half-built ship and that shady businessman to complete it.

Don't read this book as a standalone; it would probably work that way - Vance is crisp and descriptive, and the plot is not overly complex - but you would be coming in very much in the middle. All four novels are short and zippy, in that mid-century adventure-SF style, enlivened by Vance's clear-eyed descriptions and wry thoughts along the way. This is Vance in mostly restrained, straightforward mode, so the series as a whole is a decent introduction to Vance for anyone who likes SF adventure. 

[1] All four are available in the omnibus Planet of Adventure, which is how I'm reading them. I recommend it.

Better Things: In the Splinters

"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.

Nicole Atkins almost made it into last year's list - she might have been the artist I dropped last, getting down to the final 52 (since it was one song for each week of the year).

I don't know if this is my favorite song of hers: she's done so much, in so many styles, that it's gauche to pick just one.

But I love the honky-tonk piano here, and Atkins is in top vocal form on this song, and it's from what I think is still her most recent record of all-new songs. So let me give you In the Splinters.

Any other night,
But not this one!
Any other night,
I’d wish the world would end!

It's another song from a singer knocked around - maybe by love, though the song doesn't specify - talking directly to the person responsible, and saying "not this time."

Atkins has a great set of pipes, and she belts this song out with the best of them. It's not her most subtle song - she has a lot of more nuanced stuff, too - but for a potential bar-room singalong, I can think of nothing better.

This one goes out to anyone in the splinters right now - I don't know if that's an actual saying, but I think you know pretty much what it means, just hearing it once, and that's what matters - who need to get that bucking up of but not this one!

Reviewing the Mail: Week of May 31, 2025

 A few new books arrived this week - three in a box from the fine folks at Tachyon, and one from the library. As always, books from actual publishers come first, especially since I vaguely want to read all three of them:

The Adventures of Mary Darling is the new novel from Pat Murphy, which seems to be her first since The Wild Girls in 2007. I have a bound galley, but publication date was May 5th, so I think you could get your own copy immediately. It's a retelling of Peter Pan, at least to some degree, focusing on their mother (Mary), who consults with Sherlock Holmes about their disappearance but then has to chase off around the world to gather allies and clear her name and (presumably) save her children. It's not clear if there are any fantasy elements, but Murphy has been a SFF writer from the beginning, so I'd expect something.

I read Josh Rountree's first book The Legend of Charlie Fish, a particularly weird Western, and liked it a lot. So I'm happy to see he's back with The Unkillable Frank Lightning, another story in the same style. There's this married couple - he's a soldier, she's an occultist. In 1879, he was killed in the line of duty, and she resurrected him, but he came back without his soul. The novel takes place primarily twenty-five years later, when they meet again. For this one, I have a finished book, but it apparently doesn't publish until early July.

And the third book from Tachyon is If Wishes Were Retail, a novel by Auston Habershaw. It's a humorous fantasy, I think of the subset where the world already has magic on an everyday level. Alex is a teen, who wants to get out of her dead-end town - but even more than that, she needs a job, to get some income, to have any chances. So she's interviewing for a job at the dying local mall, working for Mr. Jinn and selling wishes at a kiosk. Good news is she gets the job. And I assume the less-good news is what happens next.

The library book, which I will read even more quickly, because library, is Thor, the second in George O'Connor's Asgardians series. The first one was Odin, which I saw a couple of months ago, and, before that, O'Connor did a twelve-book series about the Greek pantheon, which was quite impressive. This one, I presume, retells the legends about Thor, as the title implies.

Quote of the Week: "I'd like to say a few words. Uh, this guy's dead, the end."

"Our Father-" began Father Alerion, pulling down his Navy watch cap.

"Nondenominational," Lucien reminded him. Alerion sent up weary eyes at him.

"Dear God in heaven-"

"Nope." Lucien shook his head intransigently.

"How 'bout 'Good luck'!" shouted Father Alerion.

So "Good luck" it was, and then a long spell as the earth reclaimed Mr. Kelsey, as the soil of the American West fell upon him; and suddenly, for all of them, there was something sad about this because, for example, who was he? The eight men stood in pyramidical silence.

 - Thomas McGuane, Something to Be Desired, p.114

Just Act Normal by John McNamee

Three years ago, when I saw the first collection of John McNamee's Pie Comics - it's called Goldilocks and the Infinite Bears; it's funny; you should read it - I thought the strip might have ended, and was mildly sad that only the first of the strip's three collections were available in my library's app.

Well, sometime over those three years, a second Pie Comics collection popped up there - yclept Just Act Normal - and I just noticed and read it. In possibly even better news, McNamee has started posting to Tumblr again, with a half-dozen new cartoons this year after a six-year silence.

So the TL;DR for those of you with short attention spans: McNamee is quirky and funny, he's got a great semi-stick-figure style - a little in the Tom Gauld vein, which is high praise - and there's the promise of more stuff from him, too. This book is good; the first book is good. (I can't figure out what the third book's title is, and suspect it may be a mirage - on the other hand, the book I read, which clearly has Just Act Normal on its pages, has Book Learnin' as a header/title in the Hoopla app, so maybe that's the title of his third book?)

McNamee has the kind of art that's instantly readable and is much harder to do than it looks. (The fewer the lines, the tougher it is.) And his jokes are wry, sarcastic, modern, and true - he got his start at The Onion, which gives you a sense of the comic sensibility and tradition he mostly works in.

There are no continuing characters; it's mostly four-panel bits, different every time. You can jump in anywhere. So you might as well.

Daisy Goes to the Moon by Matthew Klickstein & Rick Geary

Daisy Ashford was real. She was born in 1881, and wrote a cluster of stories in her youth: weird, oddball things with eccentric spelling and an often-shaky grasp on how people actually lived and talked to each other, all bathed in the sunny happiness of a coddled girl of the Victorian age. After she grew up, she rediscovered those stories, and some of them were published around 1919 with the help of J.M. Barrie. There have been periodic revivals and rediscoveries since then; a movie of her most famous "novel," The Young Visiters, was made by the BBC about twenty years ago. (I know I saw it, but it must have been before the life of this blog.)

Daisy Goes to the Moon is about Daisy, but not by Daisy. Matthew Klickstein wrote a short novel in Daisy's style - which seems to me to be the opposite of the point of juvenilia, frankly - and it was published in 2009, full of 1950s imagery and ideas. And now Rick Geary, master of both whimsy and Victoriana, has turned Klickstein's story into a short graphic novel, full of authentically Daisy-esque spelling and moderately appropriate Daisy-esque situations and comments.

(Daisy herself died in 1972 at the age of 90, so she's no more going to complain about what people have done to her memory than Shakespeare is.)

This begins with Daisy about the age of nine, when she wrote her most famous works, and dressed up in the usual Victorian-girl look, down to the big bow in her hair. She's sitting under a tree, Alice-like, when a "rokit" lands nearby. It's piloted by Mr. Zogolbythm (Mr. Z), a tall, skinny man all in black who comes from the moon, to which he proceeds to whisk Daisy for an adventure.

The story continues somewhat episodically, somewhat along the lines of the usual tour-of-the-future style for utopian works. Daisy experiences the high-tech of the moon - including a "so-you-can-hear-and-read-too" device implanted in her brain to allow her to understand moon language - flees Moon Monsters and creatures from other planets, shops for shoes and goes to an automat, and so on.

Soon, though, another character pops up: Mr. Blahdel (Mr. B) an American time-traveler from the 1950s, lugging a TV that's missing an important part. B and Z have some mostly minor disagreements, which lead to further adventures when they dispute over the navigation of a spaceship. We also descend into metafiction when Daisy finds a book written by her sister Angie, which retells the first half of the story badly - the bratty Angie has followed Daisy (somehow; this isn't clear) to the Moon.

And, of course, in the end Daisy gets back home safe and sound, and declares that to the best place to be.

Geary's art is as detailed and energetic as always; quirkiness and whimsy typically brings out some of his best work, and that's the case here. I might think that was an odd project, but it's done as authentically and honestly as it could be, and this is a fun, amusing story.

Mickey Mouse: Trapped in the Shadow Dimension by Andrea "Casty" Castellan

If you read comics at all, you probably know there's a whole mythology around Donald Duck and his Uncle Scrooge - maybe even if you don't read comics, but are old enough to have seen DuckTales and the related TV shows. You need to be somewhat deeper into either Eurocomics, history, or Disney fandom to know there's a similarly-sized mythology around Mickey Mouse himself, starting with the work of the American cartoonist Floyd Gottfredson in the 1930s and expanded a lot since then mostly by the European licensors of Disney characters for their own ongoing comics.

For example, there's an Italian comics publication - started in 1932; weekly since 1960 - called Topolino, featuring Mickey. Now, I'm sure there have been plenty of reprints and re-runs over the course of the last nearly hundred years - Disney is a smart enough organization to know that the kid audience completely regenerates itself once or twice a decade - but that's still at least tens of thousands of pages of comics.

Fantagraphics has been translating and republishing that work for the past couple of decades, building on the work of earlier publishers in first publicizing and rediscovering Gottfredson and the "Good Duck artist" Carl Barks starting in the 1970s. The Fanta series, which explicitly aims to reprint great EuroDisney comics, is called "Disney Masters," and it looks like they've had twenty-three volumes so far, most of them entirely separate stories by different creators from different nations, and spanning both the Mickey and Donald universes (which are not always entirely separate, but usually are at least distinct).

I'm no expert in this. I read piles of Duck comics as a kid in the 1970s at my grandparents' house in Utica, New York, and saw a bunch of DuckTales in college, but Mickey's mostly been the corporate icon to me, not an actual character in adventure stories. But I intermittently want to check out new frontiers of the comics world, so I checked out Mickey Mouse: Trapped in the Shadow Dimension, which collects three multi-part stories from the acclaimed Italian creator Andrea "Casty" Castellan, originally published in Topolino a little over a decade ago and translated by an unnamed person for this 2022 US collection.

I don't know if modern EuroDisney comics are entirely obsessed with their history and continuity, as US superhero comics are, or if it's just that the famous, best-loved stories are the ones that bring back famous characters and do new things with them (a la Batman: Hush, to give a US equivalent). But the three stories here are all in that mode: every big character is someone I learn was created decades ago by someone else, and the joy lies in seeing them brought back out of the toybox to play again.

The title story leads off, with Dr. Einmug (the usual genius scientist, created by Gottfredson) in the background and his creation Atomo Bleep-Bleep (a humanoid enlarged atom, so the narrative says) coming back to join Mickey in investigating the mysterious masked Mr. Benevolence, who has been giving away piles of gold bars to make various problems in Mouseton better. Mickey is suspicious, of course, and it does turn out there is a fiendish plot, with missing scientists, a parallel dimension, and a world-dominating plot by Pegleg Pete to be unraveled and foiled.

In the middle is "Uncle $crooge in The Terrible, Triple-Dimensional Beagle Boy," which is one of the traditional "Gyro Gearloose invents A Thing, Scrooge tries to make a fortune on it, and then The Bad Guys take advantage" plots. This time, Gyro makes a super-duper 3D printer, along with an extensive network of pipes to feed it, and Scrooge sells it to all of Duckburg for all of their needs. The reader thinks there will be some interesting satire of capitalism, as everyone in Duckburg stops buying everything but "gyro-gel" for their printers, but that's not the way the story goes. Instead, to get this scheme approved, Scrooge has to promise to make a gigantic statue of the Mayor, and the Beagle Boys hijack the 3D printing of that statue, turn it into a giant Beagle robot, and rob Scrooge's money bin. But Scrooge and Gyro do use the same invention to beat the Beagles in the end.

Last is "Mickey Mouse and the World to Come," which oddly seems like someone saw Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (and maybe a few other things like The Iron Giant) and decided that should be a Mickey Mouse story. There are four giant robots, another old super-science character as a Mickey sidekick (Eega Beeva), the standard vaguely-European small country ruled by a king who has been duped by the villains, and a world-dominating plan from another old villain, The Rhyming Man. Minnie is a character, but mostly just gets to be kidnapped and be vaguely plucky; she doesn't save anyone, even herself. Our heroes do of course win out in the end against the king's evil nephew and the (supposedly sinister, but I found deeply silly) Rhyming Man.

These are fun adventure stories pitched at kid level. Castellan does a solid job in this style, keeping the action moving and getting in some amusing dialogue. It's fairly light and always kid-appropriate, plus, of course, Disney-sanitized, but it's entirely copacetic for a harmless collection of kid comics stories.

Something to Be Desired by Thomas McGuane

So it's clear where I'm coming from, I first need to explain how much of an expert I am in Thomas McGuane's life and career.

I am nothing of an expert in McGuane's career or life. In fact, reading this book, and having a vague sense his 1985 he-man-isms were the product of an older man at the time, I had a vague question in my head - nothing as well-formed as a theory - that the thinness and sketchiness of Something to Be Desired was due to McGuane being old or even dying during the writing of it, so it could be forgiven or even celebrated as a triumph of  his writing power.

But I checked afterward. McGuane was born in 1939. This was his fifth novel. He's written four more since then, and is still alive today. So I have to revise my theory, and say that this is just how he wanted to write this story: to have a main character who falls backwards into everything, but usually success; to have women who are cyphers at best and sex-rewards or markers for time passing most often; and to have a plot that meanders vaguely and randomly and mostly functions to allow McGuane to toss in his various post-Hemingway musings and attempted Deep Thoughts.

I've only read one McGuane novel before - The Bushwacked Piano - and so any general conclusions I might draw will be badly-informed and slapdash. But both of those novels focus on one guy, and my description of Piano's hero as a "magnificent asshole" applies almost as well to Something's Lucien Taylor as well.

Like Piano, Something begins with an Important Moment in its hero's youth, so we readers are clear that he's messed up because of his relationship with His Daddy. Again, I can't say if McGuane does this consistently throughout his career, but both of these novels are in the the hyper-masculine mid-century style, featuring men who are endlessly self-destructive in ways that never quite damage them in any serious way, endlessly attractive to only the women that readers of these books will find compelling and sexy, and endlessly lucky as the author presses his greasy thumb on the scales to make sure every last aspect of their lives works out for the best in the end, after the requisite amount of hell-raisin' and drinkin' and whorin', of course.

Something mostly takes place over about a year - it's vague in this, as it is in so many things - in Lucien's life. You see, Lucien had Two Great Loves of His Life in college: Emily, who was wild and with whom he would have been two twinned artists' spirits, and Suzanne, who was stable and solid and who he eventually married after Emily dumped him for a doctor.

That was some number of years in the past - let's say ten, since Lucien and Suzanne have a son, James, whose age is never clear in any way whatsoever. (He could be a typical five, or a dreamy ten. McGuane is only interested in the sons of his heroes as signposts to their virility and markers of his line-of-men theories.) Lucien has been working around Latin American for USIA.

But Emily has just murdered her husband, for reasons the novel never quite gets into but assures us are he-was-abusive and entirely justifiable, and, besides, it means she's available for Lucien again, which is the real point. So Lucien immediately abandons his non-working wife and young son in the foreign country his job dragged them to with one of the most obnoxiously stereotypical "I need to figure myself out" speeches in literature, and flies back to his beloved Montana to circle Emily and try to get into her pants and/or save her from the consequences of her actions.

Lucien puts up the money for Emily's bail - where a mid-level foreign-service functionary has that kind of money is never clear; Lucien in general does not seem to be leading the life he actually has in this novel, but something closer to the life of rich, famous writer Thomas McGuane, fawned on by all and serially married - and her ranch is put up as security for his money. This doesn't seem to align to how bail actually works, but, anyway, Emily runs off with another guy to avoid trial and Lucien loses his money but gets the ranch, which seems to be more valuable.

Lucien mopes around, off-handedly sleeping with all of the female barflies of the fictional town of Deadrock - one of them gets a name and almost a personality; she is, of course, crazy. He then gets a bank loan, in a scene that even McGuane doesn't seem to want anyone to believe, and converts a hot spring on the ranch into a massively successful and lucrative spa. Lucien finds running the spa, and generally being a functional, useful adult, to be unpleasant, but he does it, perhaps in McGuane's attempt to show his growth as a person.

He hectors Suzanne, first at long distance - though she seems to have returned to Montana at some point as well - and then in person, when he installs her in a cabin on the spa's land, to return to him, because he's learned his lesson now that he's rich and the crazy women ran away from him.

Suzanne, I'm sorry to say, does somewhat reconcile with Lucien, or at least seems to be heading that way late in this short novel. But, of course, we learn that Emily has killed the guy she ran away with as well - crazy bitches gonna be crazy, right? - and she comes back...for no good reason from her point of view, and really only for McGuane's narrative purposes.

At this point, there's maybe a dozen pages left in the novel: this is a short book and McGuane does not go into detail of anything ever other than Lucien's random he-man thoughts about random bullshit. It has an ending that I seriously hope McGuane didn't intend to be reminiscent of Casablanca - Lucien sticks Emily on a plane with a speech - and then he watches Suzanne drive off with James for a roadtrip the she promises she will return from. And...scene!

I think McGuane is a writer for men of his generation, and maybe somewhat for the generation afterward (mine), but only for the ones already steeped in all of the outdoorsy, he-man women-haters club mindset. His work is often described as funny, and he does have a wit and energy to his writing, but it's in the service of these horrible assholes, and I have a hard time seeing the appeal. I would very much not recommend McGuane to women readers, or to any men readers who have actually liked and understood women at any point in their lives.

Better Things: Papa Won't Leave You, Henry

"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.

As I come to type here, I'm surprised at myself: I really didn't have Nick Cave in that first-year list? That's the Procrustean splendor of list-making, I suppose - not everything can fit. Things that seem entirely central get edged out.

Better Things is a way of exploring those centers and edges, so, now, I can come back to this compelling, stark, demanding song by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: Papa Won't Leave You, Henry.

I've got eight songs by Cave as five-star in my library, so I suppose this could have been the moody clang of Red Right Hand or the more straightforward love of Straight to You or the neo-apocalyptic story of (I'll Love You) Till the End of the World. Or the different levels of moodiness of The Ship Song and The Weeping Song.

But I started to listen to Cave and his band in the early Aughts, when I was chasing after two young sons. I don't think Henry is exactly, or entirely, about a real father and a real son - it's a nightmare vision of a world gone wrong, a travelogue of Hell - but the refrain keeps coming back to that boy:

Well, the road is long
And the road is hard
And many fall by the side
But Papa won't leave you, Henry
So there ain't no need to cry

And both of those things struck me then, and have stuck with me now: the nightmare landscape, and the protective impulse of a father for his son. It's a dark vision, full of surprises and horrors, almost darker than the mind can imagine.

And the tears that we will weep today
Will all be washed away
By the tears that we will weep again tomorrow

The verses are horrors; the refrain is that unsettling reassurance to the son, and the insistence that the singer is, and will keep, walking down that road. The road is a metaphor of course. It's all a metaphor - except the bits that are absolutely true reportage from Cave's own life. That's the tension than makes it: you can tell this isn't just a list of images, a sequence of ideas, some fancy words for a song.

Quote of the Week: A Genuine Hollywood Indian

He wore a brown suit of which the coat was too small for his shoulders and his trousers were probably a little tight at the waist. His hat was at least two sizes too small and had been perspired in freely by somebody it fitted better than it fitted him. He wore it about where a house wears a wind vane. His collar had the snug fit of a horse-collar and was of about the same shade of dirty brown. A tie dangled outside his buttoned jacket, a black tie which had been tied with a pair of pliers in a knot the size of a pea. Around his bare and magnificent throat, above the dirty collar, he wore a wide piece of black ribbon, like an old woman trying to freshen up her neck.

 - Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, p.870 in Stories and Early Novels

WuMo: Something Is Wrong by Wulff & Morgenthaler

The WuMo panel runs in my paper, so I've been reading it for a while. It's weird in multiple ways, which I enjoy, but I've also had a sense that there's some story behind it that I didn't know.

I might have picked up this book to have an excuse to do a little goggling and figure out that story, as my fingers type here.

WuMo: Something Is Wrong is a 2015 collection of the strip - I say "strip," but it's always a single panel, laid out in the wide horizontal format of an American daily, with one joke and no continuing characters - with a big note on the cover to say that it collects the best strips. Even assuming that the strip has gotten better in the past decade, since we always hope things get better over time, that looked like a good place to start.

OK, let me start with my assumption: I think "Wulff" and "Morgenthaler" are real people, probably both men, and that they're not American. My guess is that they're European, something vaguely Germanic. I have no idea how a panel by a couple of Europeans would have gotten into American syndication a decade or two ago, but let's see if I can find out.

According to Wikipedia, which I always believe when it says I'm correct, I am basically correct. Mikael Wulff, a comedian, writes the strip, and Anders Morgenthaler, a cartoonist and animator, draws it. [1] They're Danish, and it started in Denmark in 2001, getting syndicated in the US in 2013. It was originally titled Wulfmorgenthaler (apparently without the internal capital, a good idea to keep them from looking like a law firm), but switched to the shorter version about a year before the American syndication deal (i.e.: mid-2012, a long time ago).

It's a gag-a-day strip, in that vague post-Far Side territory where a strip has a sensibility and a style and a tone without having continuing characters or a sitcom-style set-up. WuMo panels take place just about anywhere, featuring animals and people and fantasy creatures, all drawn a bit lumpy and rumpled. The tone is more goofy than iconoclastic - perhaps why it has found a home in American newspapers - and often drops into "the secrets of modern life" mode. It reads smoothly, but I've always thought the phrasing is subtly off: I've always thought it was translated from some other language, so I was happy to find out that was Danish.

(I also see that the panel might be somewhat different in Europe: there's a major, very popular character - also appearing on related TV shows! - called Dolph the Fascist Hippo who I don't think has ever showed up on my shores. And that's a shame: if there had been a big, brightly-colored idiot on newspaper pages every day starting in 2012, saying self-evidently stupid fascist things that people actually laughed at, it might have stolen a market niche from a different brightly-colored fascist idiot who rose to his current prominence slightly later.)

It's funny, and it's off-kilter, and its sensibility is subtly different from anything else on American comics pages today - my working assumption is that's because Wulf and Morgenthaler are not American. The drawing is funny, too: that's nice to see.

I don't think there are a lot of WuMo books in English. (On Amazon right now, I'm finding a handful of what look like pre-name-change Danish collections, and some calendars from the late Teens, and only this book.) So, if you want to try the strip, this is your best package when reading in English.

Or, as always with an ongoing strip, you can just go to the page where the strip lives - it's on GoComics; I linked it up top - and read today's strip. Then come back tomorrow, rinse and repeat.

I probably don't need to explain that to you people, do I? I hope not.

[1] Wikipedia does not actually say this explicitly. It credits the strip to both of them, and says what else they do: Wulf makes jokes, Morgenthaler draws and animates. It's possible they both write gags for the strip, or write gags together. It's also just barely possible that Wulf is involved in the art in some way. But I'm sticking to the most boring possible explanation.