Daredevil: Born Again by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli

I'm sure I've re-read this story since 1986. You can't prove it from this blog, though. And my copy of  the trade paperback is the original 1987 edition, with minimal credits and supplemental material, from the era when the Big Two were still figuring out the whole reprint-floppies-in-a-permanent-format thing. (I'm not sure how I can have a copy of that edition, since mine would have died in my 2011 flood, but I do and I'm looking at it now.)

This storyline obviously followed Frank Miller's original run on Daredevil by several years: he'd worked, mostly with Klaus Janson inking his pencils and taking over writing midway through the run, on that series from 1979 through 1983, in material that's now collected in three good-sized volumes.

Daredevil: Born Again collects issues 227-233 of the series, a discrete seven-issue storyline written by Miller and drawn by David Mazzucchelli. Like a lot of now-famous mid-80s Big Two stories ("The Anatomy Lesson" is another major example), it's a strong, specific story whose bones have been scattered and re-used by a thousand other hands since then to the point that they've become a cliché.

This is the ur-"villain systematically destroys the hero" story - the next most influential version, I think, is "Kraven's Last Hunt," about Spider-Man, from a few years later. But there are dozens of others by this point: everyone who has had an ongoing series over the last three decades has probably been broken down by now.

They all get better, of course. Daredevil gets better in this one. IP can't be left to wither on the vine.

The specifics here: Karen Page, a former girlfriend of Daredevil, went off to Hollywood to make her fortune a few years earlier. It didn't work out; she quickly got addicted, descended into vaguely-described porn, and found herself somewhere in Mexico with a bad habit and no resources. Well, she had one thing worth selling: the real identity of Daredevil (the New York lawyer Matt Murdock).

She sells that; the letter with her note makes its way to New York and Daredevil's biggest enemy Kingpin; and Kingpin decides to use it to, as villains always say, destroy everything the hero loves or cares about.

Murdock's utilities are shut off, the IRS audits him and freezes his accounts, and a corrupt cop brings evidence that will lead to his disbarment. Murdock already had paranoid tendencies, and he quickly spirals out of control, which overjoys the Kingpin.

But Kingpin also then blows up Murdock's brownstone home, which even a paranoid, spiraling Murdock realizes was done by someone. And, since he's a character in an adventure comic, he knows, correctly, who that was.

Things go on from there - I might sound dismissive, but the story is compelling and told well, with precise, emotionally taut scenes and magnificent character work from both Miller (here still underplaying emotion, unlike later in his career) and Mazzucchelli. There is a lot of violence, since this is a superhero comic, but most of it is shocking and a lot of it is fatal, which was not standard for this era. There's even a comic-relief gangster who talks in malapropisms to keep it all from being unrelievedly grim, and a great supporting-character role for Captain America in the big climax.

Miller constructs a new reality for his main characters out of the broken pieces he reduced them to, which is one of the things that became most cliched about this kind of story. That's not on Miller - it was an ongoing series; he had to leave something for the next writer to work with - but it has become a central aspect of superhero comics since, the big storyline in which everything changes and launches an exciting new direction in the saga of <insert name here>.

I think you can read this with only the vaguest sense of who Daredevil and his supporting characters are. He's a guy in a red costume; he's in New York; his civilian identity is a lawyer. The big fat crimelord hates him. And you get that all from the story itself.

This is still probably the best first Daredevil story for any reader, as well as the best full-stop Daredevil story. I don't think that's faint praise, but it does need to be contextualized: this is a genre exercise, from an era when that genre was opening itself to new influences and story-telling techniques, and one of the early attempts to "write to the arc" that was entirely successful. It is a darn good story about guys who dress up in long underwear, run around rooftops, and beat each other up - but it's still a long-underwear story at its heart.

Physics for Cats by Tom Gauld

Tom Gauld is one of our funniest cartoonists, and also comes off as one of our most erudite. He cartoons regularly both for The Guardian, about books and the literary world (most recently collected in Revenge of the Librarians) and for New Scientist, about, well, science and scientists.

The previous book of New Scientist cartoons was Department of Mind-Blowing Theories, about five years ago. Last fall saw a new one appear: that's Physics for Cats.

Like all of the books reprinting Gauld's series comics, it's in a smallish format, with each cartoon presented in color on one page. His work tends to be about the size of two daily comics stacked on top of each other - sometimes laid out as a single panel, sometimes in a sequence, sometimes in a more complex pattern - which means that page-size presents the work well. And the resulting package could sit nicely in a cardboard display next to the cash-wrap, for those who actually still shop in physical bookstores. (I did, and got this book in one, but it wasn't displayed that way. My frame of reference may still be, anachronistically, a mall chain bookstore from the mid-80s.)

Gauld's art is cartoony in a minimalist way - his people sometimes have faces (well, at least eyes) but, in the middle distance, they tend to turn into silhouettes. That also makes his style well-suited for icons and warning labels, of which we see quite a few in this book (Frost Giants, Haunted Tornado, Sentient Nano-Smog).

The cartoons here are all on scientific themes - particles and theories, labs and colleagues, grants and grant-seeking, academic conferences and meetings, and so on. They will be funnier the more you know about science in general, but they're not deeply hermetic: they're all for a general-science audience, not for any particular sub-specialty like forensic avian biology.

I've written about Gauld's work a number of times before, and am running out of adjectives and ways to praise his cartoons. Look: he makes funny work for smart people, OK? If you consider yourself a smart person, and haven't checked out Gauld yet, you really should.

Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson

This is a noir novel; I read it in the Library of America omnibus Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s. I don't know Edward Anderson otherwise, but I assume this novel is thought of as his best book: at least by the editor who put together this omnibus in 1997. (A chap named Robert Polito is credited with that.)

Thieves Like Us is set in the depths of the Depression, in the South (Texas and Oklahoma) - but more often talks about towns and counties than states. States are too big for these small-timers; they don't get that far and only think that big on rare occasions.

As the novel opens, three men have just escaped from prison: T.W. (T-Dub) Masefield, Elmo (Chicamaw) Mobley and Bowie Bowers. Bowie is the youngest, our narrator - he was in on a murder rap that would be accessory at best these days, as part of a botched robbery he fell into working as a carnie. T-Dub and Chicamaw are substantially older, and seasoned bank robbers. Three men is a decent gang for bank robbery - there's a discussion early how four would be better, but who wants to cut in a whole additional man? - so T-Dub and Chicamaw bring Bowie into the work.

It's a short novel, and all told through Bowie's voice, but Anderson gets a lot of specific details in: how they case banks, how they get away (buying cars with cash and burning the car that did the robbery, for one), how they hide out and how long, how they rely on a loose network of mostly relatives, particularly when the police attention is fiercest. He also quotes newspaper accounts of their crimes, as Bowie finds those papers, and gets some solid irony in how misleading, biased, and often just wrong those newspaper articles are.

The plot is loose and episodic; the novel covers a long span of months with three major heists along the way. The heists are not emphasized. Anderson tends to describe them quietly, nearly past-tense - they go well. Maybe because heists that don't go well in the late '30s meant that the heisters all get shot dead or immediately arrested.

So the book is more about Bowie becoming part of this world, and learning how to live with more money in his pocket than he ever expected. Chicamaw and T-Dub are both gamblers and womanizers, both with long-established ways to waste the money they steal nearly as quickly as they steal it. But Bowie is newer, and greener, and more innocent: he thinks he can save it up - at least between jobs - and go away somewhere to enjoy it. The three separate after jobs, to minimize the potential police heat or just to enjoy their money, and then catch back up at a pre-planned time, with T-Dub and Chicamaw having run through everything they stole.

During one of those pauses, Bowie connects with a girl, Keechie - actually Chicamaw's niece, though that's not emphasized, nor does Bowie try to hide the relationship - and the two of them think and talk about making a life together. At the same time, the police of two states are looking for Bowie - for what the papers call a vast number of bank robberies beyond the three they actually did. And newspapers get many things wrong, but, somehow, they found out about Keechie and Bowie, and that's a hot story, too.

Again, this is a noir novel. It's loosely inspired by Bonnie and Clyde. It's not going to end happily for Bowie and Keechie. It doesn't. Anderson has a lot of depth and insight in this short book; it's smart and cynical about people and newspapers and society. The title comes from a repeated refrain, especially early in the book - banks and police and others are just as corrupt, just as money-hungry, just as bad as the bank robbers: they're "thieves just like us."

That's the mindset and the world Bowie and Keechie are caught up in here; it's both roughly true and not at all helpful. In a noir novel, not only are the odds stacked against you, but those odds always come in - like real gambling, not like a happier kind of novel, because a million-to-one shot in real life never comes in.

The Court Charade by Flore Vesco and Kerascöet

Let me tell you about the dangers of good intentions. Over the last few years, I've made an effort to include diacritical marks in people's names on this blog - because that's the right way to spell their names, obviously. It's slightly annoying and often involves a bunch of cut-and-pasting, but doing things right is its own reward.

It does mean, though, that the standard Blogger search function no longer works for those names: Kerascoet is not Kerascöet, so a search for one does not bring up the other. (Not to mention the trouble in getting special characters into the search box to begin with.)

I'm still going to spell names correctly, going forward. But it does mean that as I look back to figure out what I've written about a creator before - and you the home viewer might do the same - that I can easily miss things.

That's the lesson, of course. When writing about people from other cultures, the small details can make you miss things.

The Court Charade, though it inspired those thoughts, is not weighty or particularly serious. It's a romantic, adventurous story about a young woman in a world that might be historical or lightly fantasy - the usual story-book "once upon a time" kingdom. It was written by Flore Vesco, whose work I'm otherwise unfamiliar with, and drawn by the wife-and-husband team Kerascöet, here working in soft colors and often small panels, all unbordered but sitting cleanly in grids on their lovely pages. It's less visually pyrotechnic than previous Kerascöet books like Satania or even the similarly fairy-tale Beauty; this is a deliberately smaller, lighter, more personal story.

Our heroine is Countess Seraphine Marie-Geneviéve Alexandrina de Notre-Dame Chancies du Jousselinier Senestre lez Castiche de l'Auberivière sié l'Ostel de la Colline. But call her Serine. She's the oldest child of an elderly and kindly but impoverished nobleman and his imposing wife, spending her time taking care of five rambunctious (much) younger brothers. She loves stories and has the usual fairy-tale heroine characteristics: smart, determined, positive, beautiful without noticing it, essentially happy, resilient, egalitarian, and possessed of massive spirit and a core determination to do right and help people.

So of course she is thrown into a situation that is the opposite of most of those things. When her father dies, her mother wants to find her a suitable, sensible marriage - subtext: to some minor nobleman, probably much older, probably nice enough but not anyone Serine would pick. She instead says she will head off to the capital, become a lady-in-waiting to the queen and make her fortune. Her mother warns her that the queen is mercurial and demanding: the mother is stern and doesn't appreciate her daughter but is correct in almost everything she says in the book.

Serine, in the one dress she owns, makes her way to the capital and does become a lady-in waiting to the queen. She manages to keep that position, due to her good heart and helpful nature, despite the backbiting from the other ladies and some more active resistance from the king's advisor, who we and Serine believe has secret schemes.

She does make friends, as well: notably the maid Claire and the torturer's apprentice Leon. As required by the form, the noble characters are almost all snooty status-obsessed creeps, while members of the working class are capable, friendly, and collegial. The one exception is the kindly, sickly king, who can be whimsical as any rich character but essentially means to do right.

After various adventures and reverses, Serine is attacked and left for dead. But she returns in disguise as the king's new fool, to foil the plot she has discovered between the advisor and queen to kill the king and take over the kingdom. She does stop a few assassination attempts, and manages to nudge the king towards more compassionate governance in at least a few things, but the king, I will repeat, is old and sickly.

There is a crisis, and all looks black - as, again, is required by the form. But there is a mysterious missing heir, and Serine's work as herself and the fool has given her a large pool of goodwill to draw on, so there is the required absolutely happy ending. Serine gets everything she hoped for and more. 

Vesco's dialogue is mostly naturalistic, though her narration - which is mostly in the early scenes - leans into rhymes and a more obvious storybook-y tone. I suspect that was the tone of her novel that this bande dessinée was based on: De Cape et de Mots, also the original French title of this book. As I mentioned above, Kerascöet's work is lively and fun as always, on a mostly amusing, light-fairy-tale level, with lots of energy in gesture and layout.

The Court Charade will not surprise any but the youngest readers, but fairy tales are meant to be familiar: that's not a criticism. This is a good one, well translated into English by the mysterious L. Benson for this new Abrams edition, and it has entirely positive lessons to tell the young readers that will mostly find it. (Though, being French, there's also bits of incidental nudity and a few mildly racy moment that some particularly American parents may be shocked to see. I recommend their children hide those pages from their susceptible parents: they'll know who they are.)

All of This and Nothing: Rock Lobster

"All of This and Nothing" 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, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

For many of these Famous songs, I'm not introducing them so much as saying "hey, remember this one? Yeah, I like it, too!"

And never more than this week, with one of the iconic songs of the late 20th century, the song that I will insist is the best thing the B-52s ever did: Rock Lobster.

It is intensely itself, and is the epitome of a song that has a vibe and a sound but very little in the way of a coherent story. This is not a song that will tell you what it's about.

Well, it's a beach party, obviously. As big and overwhelming a party as you can imagine. But what any of the details mean - well, you can work that out yourself. The B-52s are too busy cooking.

We were at the beach
Everybody had matching towels
Somebody went under a dock
And there they saw a rock
It wasn't a rock
It was a rock lobster

You either get it or you don't. But all you need to do is listen. Well, maybe dance, if you feel so inclined. I think the B-52s would want that.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of July 11, 2026

I ordered a batch of book-shaped comics recently - I'd gotten a coupon from the shop that I suppose is my "regular" these years, and hey, a deal is a deal - and they arrived early in the week I was off. That was great timing, since I can now read them during those days off.

(And I say "can now," since I'm writing this on Wednesday, but by the time the post goes live on Sunday, I probably will have already read all of them. Such is the miracle of scheduled posts.)

Anyway, these did come in the mail, but I paid for them:

John Porcellino's coming-of-age memoir Perfect Example. I've read a couple of collections of Porcellino's King-Cat Comics, which are lovely minimalist slice-of-life stories, but somehow I'd missed this one when it was published a few years ago.

The most recent "movie book" from Gilbert Hernandez, Proof That the Devil Loves You. It's part of a long, weirdly metafictional side-series of mostly short GNs that are meant to be movies - bad ones, most of the time - that one of his main characters in his regular stories starred in in her fictional world. Like a lot of things with Hernandez, it's weirdly overcomplicated for reasons that I suspect are deeply important to him but don't necessarily come through to the reader. But that weirdness, even if I don't quite get it, is fascinating.

A newish graphic novel from Guy Delisle, Muybridge. I guess this follows Hostage in seeing Delisle making stories about non-fictional things that aren't part of his own life. Previously, his work mostly fell into two buckets: the short books about "Bad Parenting" and the longer memoirs about various things in his life, first the foreign cities he lived in and then Factory Summers a few years ago. This one looks like a biography-in-comics-form of the pioneering 19th century photographer Eadwaerd Muybridge.

I probably got John Cuneo's Good Intentions out of pure prurient interest. Cuneo is an illustrator - maybe also a cartoonist, if you want to argue that captioned drawings automatically put him into that category - whose material tends to the fleshy and uncomfortable. His people are lumpy and middle-aged, their circumstances boring but odd, and this book collects a hundred or so illustrations (some captioned, some not) that I think were all sketchbook work rather than meant for a particular publication.

And last - because I already read it yesterday - is the most recent book by Kim Deitch, How I Make Comics. I'm about to write a full post about it next, so I'll leave it at that here.

Quote of the Week: A Pathologist's Realization

He had thought that he was going to die and was surprised at home little he feared the prospect. It had all been so shabby and shoddy, so ordinary; and that, he now realized, would be the manner of his real death, when it came. In the dissecting room the bodies used to seem to him the remains of sacrificial victims, spent and inert after the frightful, bloody ceremony of their souls' leaving. But he would never again view a cadaver in that lurid light. Suddenly for him death had lost its terrifying glamour and become just another bit of the mundane business of life, although its last.

 - Benjamin Black, Christine Falls, p.208

The Undertaker, Vol. 1: The Gold Eater & Dance of the Vultures by Xavier Dorison & Ralph Meyer

I try to treat books on the level I find them; it's only fair. This one is the first of a decent-length series of Western comics by two French creators. It collects the first two, very closely linked books in the series, both originally published in 2015 and translated by Tom Imber for this 2026 English-language edition from Abrams.

I don't know that the Western in French comics tends to be a high-octane, big-picture genre exercise. But I suspect it does: that a French comic set in the old American West is going to be a big adventure story that is plausible on the surface but doesn't worry too much about deep thoughts as it caroms forward down its action-filled path. This one certainly does.

The Undertaker series is written by Xavier Dorison and drawn by Ralph Meyer, with colors by Caroline Delabie and Meyers. It is big and bold and full of characters saying dramatic things, moving smoothly from one big set-piece scene to another. I don't think you should come to this book, or probably the series in general, for gritty realism, though it does aim to be gritty and has the big action-movie style of psuedo-realism.

This first American volume collects two French bande desinée - hence the full title The Undertaker, 1: The Gold Eater & Dance of the Vultures. It's the origin story, to some degree - the main character still has some mysterious bits of his past - somewhat spoiled by the book's descriptive copy, so I think they come up quickly in later volumes - that I think sets up the rest of the series.

The book doesn't say when it's set; it's sometime in the late 19th century. A man going under the name of Jonas Crow is working as an itinerant undertaker in the usual rugged wilderness, with a black coach pulled by two horses and a vulture pal named Jed he picks up on the first pages here. He arrives in the town of Anoki City, the usual corrupt town run by one rich guy, because the rich guy, Joe Cusco, has hired Crow to bury him.

Cusco's plan is to commit suicide by poisoning - he's dying anyway - and have Crow bury him in the shaft of his first mine, the original source of his fortune. So far, so normal.

But he also converted his fortune into gold nuggets and ate all of those nuggets just before the poison; the point is to be buried with all his wealth, so no one else gets it. There's an additional several levels of manipulation by Cusco with his haughty English governess Rose (?) - that's how she's described by the flap copy; she looks to be more of a housekeeper/head of staff - and with the Chinese woman Miss Lin, to make sure his body gets to the proper place when it's supposed to, but that mostly comes out later in the book, in the inevitably revelation-filled plot.

Meanwhile, the miners of the town have been kept poor by Cusco for years or decades. They hope his death will mean some money for them, though I don't see why they would ever have that expectation. But they do expect to get some of the rich guy's money when he dies, in that something's-gonna-break sense of people pushed too far for too long. And then they learn what he actually did with the gold, and they figure on cutting him open first to grab it for themselves. For various reasons, Crow and Rose and Lin can't accept this, so they go careening out into the wilderness in the undertaker's coach, closely followed by a heavily-armed band.

There's also a local sheriff, who is more-or-less honest and not 100% on board with looting a corpse - but deeply suspicious of Crow, who he thinks is some legendary outlaw or other. And some Federal soldiers who wander into the action about mid-way through, to facilitate a chaotic multi-sided battle and ratchet up the tension and danger. But the core of the book is that chase: the undertaker and his companions ahead with a gold-filled corpse; a town full of angry men behind them.

The Undertaker is the title character of the series, so we know he wins. There's a lot of stuff along the way, though - portentous dialogue, big shootouts, daring escapes, thrilling chases, shocking reversals, amazing revelations.

I think Dorison intended to have a deep theme about greed and honesty and doing what's right despite everything, and you can line up the story to that if you want. But it comes across much cartoonier than that, to me at least, so I'll just nod in that direction.

Meyer has a detailed art style with a strong story-telling panel flow - he varies the number of panels per page, but generally gets a lot of panels onto his big pages. There's a lot of story here to get through, with dialogue to spare, and Meyer makes it all work on the page.

I don't think The Undertaker is essentially as serious as I think it wants to be taken, but it is fun and it moves quickly and it crams in a hell of a lot of Western action of the kind the kids love today. (The kids love Westerns, right?)

Christine Falls by Benjamin Black

I've mentioned various ways of differentiating literary and commercial novels here before. They're mostly tongue-in-cheek, but I think there's always an element of truth in those quick dichotomies.

Today, the way I want to look at it is: commercial novels need to have a plot. Literary novels only need to have a theme.

Christine Falls is a novel, ostensibly in the mystery/crime/thriller genre, published as by "Benjamin Black," though all the publicity materials, then and since, also made it clear that Black was a pseudonym for the literary novelist John Banville. Banville's photo is in even in the paperback edition (US Picador, 7th printing but first edition) I read. Falls came out in 2006, and was the first of nine novels with the same main character, all as by Black.

I've read a number of Banville's novels, most recently Snow, which is oddly related to the Black series. Otherwise, my readings of his literary novels was mostly some time ago, in the '90s and Aughts, when I was reading at a quicker pace and spending more time analyzing stories professionally. I've also read the Black novel The Black-Eyed Blonde, about a decade ago - that was an authorized sequel to Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep which I thought was substantially more successful than other attempts at continuing Chandler.

So I came to Christine Falls intending to enjoy it. And Banville/Black, as always, is a lovely writer of sentences and paragraphs and scenes and moments.

But Falls, like the much later Snow, is largely a message book. That message is: "the Magdalene Laundries were bad, m'kay?" This was not a shocking proposition in 2006, a decade after the initial scandal and four years after a major movie about them.

On top of that, the main character of this book, and the whole Black series, is Quirke. No first name, no middle name, no other name. Just, apparently, Quirke Q. Quirke, the quirkiest quirk who ever quirked a quirk. There are a few moments when Banville/Black nearly stumbles or fails to paper over the fact that his hero has no first name in a world where all of the other characters - most of whom are part of Quirke's family and have known him for decades - do have first names and use them all the time.

So our hero is quirky, got it? Black/Banville wants to be very very sure that you understand that.

And the way that he is quirky is that he's a very large gentleman who drinks a lot - I'm not sure if Banville thinks of it as a lot, as fish don't always recognize water - who has worked as a pathologist in a big Dublin hospital for about twenty years, who was an orphan himself, and who had a wife that died, long ago. So He Is Sad, and has been living a very small, circumscribed life for a long time - doing his work, drinking at all hours, and living in a small set of rooms full of the same old crap he's had forever.

Oh, and it is The Fifties. No more specifics than that, but it is definitely The Fifties.

But then, one day, Quirke gets interested in the case of Christine Falls - not a portentous name at all, o no! -  a corpse in his department that he notices one night during a party for a nurse who is heading to a hospital in Boston. (Boston in the US.) His pseudo-brother/brother-in-law Malachy Griffin - Griffin's father the Judge raised Quirke after rescuing him from the orphanage, and the two married Boston heiress sisters Sarah (Mal) and Delia (Quirke) - was doing something suspicious with the paperwork for Falls, and the drunken Quirke was interested.

Quirke sort-of, more-or-less, intermittently, tries to figure out what happened to Falls. He fairly quickly learns that she died in childbirth, despite Mal changing the paperwork to say it was a heart problem, and learns that there's a big Catholic conspiracy, mostly bankrolled by his father-in-law, that moves what seems to be a vast sea of unwanted newborns out to deserving families, both in Ireland and among the Irish in America. There doesn't seem to be any particular reason for this to be illegal, but it's being run by gangsters, and Quirke is repeatedly threatened and eventually badly beaten.

This all happens very slowly. The reader, if that reader has any knowledge of the wider world, has already figured out nearly all of the plot, and has correctly identified the two possible candidates for the father of Fall's baby. But Banville/Black is writing in a literary manner, so we get a long section with the adoptive parents of that baby, over near Boston - the mother is mostly the viewpoint character, and is quiet and loving and more than a little boring, while her husband at first seems just a bit loutish but turns out much worse than that.

Anyway, Quirke (James Quirke? Seamus Quirke? Aloysius St. James Roberto Quirke?) learns a bit more about the baby, including that she was carried off to Boston by the very nurse whose going-away party was the occasion for Quirke's discovery of Falls in the first place. (In a literary novel, everything must be connected. There are no coincidences.)

Eventually, after about three hundred pages of thoughtful introspection from various POV characters, Quirke is in Boston, chaperoning his niece Phoebe - who in the minor B-plot was mooning after a totally unsuitable young man, Conor Carrington, who is shock! horror! Protestant - to visit her grandfather, who is near death. 

There are a lot of mystery-novel-esque elements to close out the book, including a death that could be called murder if you want and a rape that is deeply thematically important. (2006 seems awfully late for a Significant Rape in a novel, but Banville is of the older generation.) The old man funding the whole scheme - Quirke's father-in-law, Phoebe's grandfather, who has a Big Sleep-esque hothouse and wheelchair, speaking of thematic elements - does die, as we all know he would. Quirke learns some things, including one shocking truth that is almost immediately retconned into something he always knew - so I suppose he drank it out of his mind for twenty years? Maybe you can do that if you're Irish enough - but does not solve any crimes or act like a detective in a detective novel at all.

In fact, he's very much a literary-novel protagonist. He's in the middle of a family situation that's more complicated than he realizes, he pulls at threads that lead to things he wasn't ready to learn about the people closest to him, and the most important changes in the book are internal to Mr. Quirke Q. Quirke, Lord of Quirkiness.

Again, Banville/Black tells this story in exquisite prose and has a fine hand for characterization - though Quirke himself is a bit more of a black box than he should be, to make those end revelations work. But it feels like a novella's-worth of matter stretched out to novel length for no good reason, to tell us all that something we already know about was Really Bad.

Um, yeah, OK, I guess. What else have you got?

Robots, Demons & Dayjobs by David Kantrowitz

I regularly read books of funny comics by creators I'm not familiar with. This is usually great - new funny stuff! new perspectives! potentially new favorites! - and there are lots of books out there by lots of funny people.

But then I come to write about them here, and I worry that I'm saying exactly the same thing each time: this is a newish book of funny stuff, by somebody I hadn't heard of previously, and it is funny, and you might want to check it out.

For example: Robots, Demons, and Dayjobs. It's a 2025 collection of comics by David Kantrowitz, who has worked for Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and other places - these nine things seem to be all personal work, and there's no sign they were published anywhere else first before this book. (Though they easily could have been.)

So it is a newish book of funny stuff, by someone I hadn't heard of previously, and it is funny, and you might want to check it out.

(See what I mean?)

Most of the pieces here are short stories in comics form - the Table of Contents entry "Twelve Single Panel Cartoons" being an obvious exception.

The first and last pieces are in a pseudo-storybook layout, with big blocks of typeset text, and tell stories about a character based on Kantrowitz - one about finding a big trash can full of trophies, and one about accidentally wearing a red shirt to Target (and the horrors that ensued).

But most of the book is in more normal comics-format, with various odd creatures - a skull-headed restaurateur, a log-limbed ball-bodied dude named Wizard Dinks, two hard-working monsters, a succession of overly polite robots - getting through their days however they can.

Kantrowitz has mostly worked in kids' media, I think: he has the sort of sensibility, art style, and concerns that you see in creators who have toiled on big corporate stuff for younger readers and are now doing more personal work. His art is expressive and mostly pretty crisp, though he varies his style quite a bit in these stories. The subject matter is not aimed at kids, but it's also not "adult" (in the sex & drugs sense), either - there's a feeling that he may be talking to adults more here than he's used to, but it's all accessible work, with a mostly broadly comic sensibility.

I will note that this book is not available in the usual hegemonic retailer that I typically provide links for. I linked above to the Hoopla library app, where I read it. (Your local library might include Hoopla access: if so, I greatly recommend it.) It's also available directly from the author. I didn't see an ISBN, so it may not be more widely available, but Kantrowitz is LA-based, so, if you're in that part of the world, you might see him at a show somewhere, selling these. Take a look.

Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum & Jon Buller

The "and" in the author line above is doing more heavy lifting than usual: Joshua Slocum and Jon Buller didn't work together in any sense on this book. They never even met.

Well, they couldn't: Slocum disappeared in 1909, and Buller, I'm pretty sure, wasn't even born then. (I can't find biographical details online, but he's a modern illustrator and cartoonist whose career seems to stretch back to about the turn of the century - this century - so he's likely in his forties.)

The original Sailing Alone Around the World was a non-fiction book by Slocum, loosely based on letters he wrote during, yes, a three-year period when he sailed 46,000 miles alone in his sloop Spray from Massachusetts to Massachusetts, the hard way. It was published in 1899, and is one of the standard classics of the adventure-travel genre, on that short shelf with books like The Worst Journey in the World and The Long Walk.

Buller has published a long list of books for children, along with his wife Susan Schade - she writes and he draws mostly early readers and middle-grade books. The two of them did a comics project a few years back, the intriguingly-titled Nudism Comes to Connecticut. But this one seems to be all Buller, working from Slocum's original book.

His version of Sailing Alone Around the World translates Slocum's book into comics form, with mostly big square panels with cleanly-ruled borders and large sections of Slocum's text as captions. His art has a lot of cross-hatching, and his people are slightly cartoony in a vaguely Edward Koren style - both of which both reflect his story-book experience and work well for a story set over a hundred years ago.

Joshua Slocum was a seasoned seaman in the early 1890s, in his mid-forties with years of experience as a master of sailing ships around the world. He'd run off to sea (the time it finally took; he'd tried before) at the age of sixteen in 1860, and had been working since then. But, with the rise of steam ships, his skills were less and less valuable, and it looks like he had a period of unemployment.

So he decided to refurbish a small sloop, the Spray, and plan for that round-the world trip. Buller starts by adapting the work Slocum did to refurbish and rebuild Spray, which took two years - that gets us through the first twenty pages of the book, and then Slocum sets off on his trip.

His initial plan is to go east, and he gets to Gibraltar without too much incident. But there a friendly British ship tells him the southern coast of the Mediterranean is still full of pirates, making Slocum's intended path to the Suez Canal much too dangerous.

So Slocum instead went the other way, recrossing the Atlantic at its narrowest point back over to Brazil and going down the coast of South America and through the Straits of Magellan, where bad weather delayed and diverted him for more than a month.

But he did make it through, and got across the broad Pacific to Australia. He spent some time there, meandering up the east coast and across the north, before setting on across the Indian Ocean, stopping in South Africa and then finally heading back home across the Atlantic a third time.

Along the way, he saw a few pirates - mostly at a distance, mostly in small boats, and mostly "natives" - put in at Juan Fernandez to honor the memory of Alexander Selkirk (the original of Robinson Crusoe) and ran into a lot of seamen he knew from his earlier career or that knew him by reputation. He also ran aground at least once, and had to do extensive repairs in harbor (various ones, all along his journey) multiple times - par for the course for a wooden sailing ship on a long, rough trip.  For a book about sailing alone, there's a fair bit of convivial dinners and 19th century pleasantries, including dialogue that I assume is straight out of Slocum's book.

Sailing Alone is the kind of book that in the reading feels like it was much easier than the work was in reality, so the reader starts to think "I could do this! That would be grand!" in his best 19th century diction. But it was an impressive accomplishment, and Slocum got a fair bit of fame from doing it. His book was a bestseller, making him enough money to buy a farm on Martha's Vineyard, where, of course, he ended up not spending much time, since he preferred to be at sea. It was on the Spray that Slocum disappeared, about a decade later - the assumption is that he died in a rough sea, but, like Ambrose Bierce, his body was never found, so readers can make up any pleasing stories they want.

All of This and Nothing: Get It On

"All of This and Nothing" 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, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

This week's song is not from the 1960s. It might sound that way, but it's actually a 2008 song by an Australian band, The Chevelles.

This is Get It On.

It was the lead single from a record designed to launch them in the US, Barbarella Girl God - they leaned into the '60s thing, I think, at least somewhat - and that record has a bunch of other good songs, too. She's Not Around, C'mon Everybody, and Every Moment I particularly like.

I don't think the launch "took" the way everybody hoped, which is why I'm classifying this as one of my Obscure songs this year. But a good song is a good song, and ones you haven't heard before are wonderful, so, if this one is new to you, you're welcome.

It sounds to me like yet another "rock band on the road" song, with verses loosely about specific US West Coast cities - no details, just the "here's what's next" of a band on the road in a blur of shows and highways:

Well, I'm seein' things in the highway lights
Twenty-four cities
I don't see the sights
Too far from home
Forgot my own life

And those kind of songs are fun. For those of us who don't go on tour with a rock band - which is the vast majority of us - they encapsulate the great parts of that life (excitement, cool music, novelty, moving on quickly) and avoid the less-pleasant bits (living in a van with 2-5 people you used to like, long hours on the road, eating whatever's available on those highways, etc.).

This is a good one; it gives the feel of that road rolling on, with something new around every corner. The feeling that you might as well Get It On.

Quote of the Hour: What Doesn't Change

I like to think about things that have always been the same, from remote human history up to and including now. People's heads have always been about as hard as they are today and have hurt about the same amount when they bumped together. Horses have always shaken flies off themselves, whether waiting to pull Pharoah's chariots or standing at a kiddie ride at a county fair. Meat cooking on a fire has smelled delicious in exactly the same way forever.

 - Ian Frazier, Paradise Bronx, p.24

Quote of the Hour: Can He Handle It?

As the bus sailed away with Harry safely on the top deck, she held Candy up so she could wave goodbye to him. He wasn't stupid, he was never going to stop asking questions. Perhaps she should tell him the truth about everything. Truth was such a novel ideal to Crystal that she found herself still staring after the bus had disappeared up the road.

 - Kate Atkinson, Big Sky, p.315

Quote of the Hour: Explaining the Unexplainable

I have never wanted to write about my drawings, and I still don't want to, but it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to do it now, when everybody is busy with something else, and get it over quietly.

 - James Thurber, "The Lady on the Bookcase," p.657-58 in Writings & Drawings

Quote of the Hour: Stout Denial

He eyed her apprehensively, like some rat of the underworld cornered by G-men. Painful experience had taught him that visits from Connie meant trouble, and he braced himself, as always, to meet with stout denial whatever charge she might be about to hurl at him. He was a great believer in stout denial and was very good at it.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Pigs Have Wings, pp.10-11

Quote of the Hour: American Cuisine

Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out of the sides, preferably a little wilted.

 - Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, p.693 in Later Novels & Other Writings

Quote of the Hour: If They Call It Tourist Season, How Come We Can't...

It is a long abandoned belief that tourism, like competitive athletics, makes for international friendship. The three most hated peoples in the world - Germans, Americans and British - are the keenest sight-seers. There are very few English villagers who have seen an Egyptian; very few Egyptian villagers who had not seen an Englishman; the result is that the English generally are well disposed toward Egypt, while the Egyptians detest us. Sympathy for foreigners varies directly with their remoteness.

 - Evelyn Waugh, Robbery Under Law, p.722 in Waugh Abroad

Quote of the Hour: Decisiveness

It is one of the great advantages of being a tycoon that your life trains you to take decisions at the drop of the hat. Where lesser men scratch their heads and twiddle their fingers, the tycoon acts.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Spring Fever, p.15

Quote of the Hour: The Unsleeping Eye

I seem to remember I went to a cinema that night. Or it might have been a casino. The cinemas blur in my mind, and so do the casinos. The only safe thing to say is that I didn't go to my solitary, expensively riverside home. I wasn't sleeping anymore. If you didn't sleep in it, what else is a home for?

 - D.G. Compton, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, p.47

Quote of the Hour: Fans are Slans

Of course, there was a kind of fandom, and I knew them, but they were all real weird freaks, and they were unpalatable to me because they did not read the great literature. There wasn't anybody that read both. You could either be in with a group of freaks who read Heinlein and Padgett and van Vogt and nothing else, or you could be in with the people who read Dos Passos, Melville, and Proust. But you could never get the two together. And I chose the company of those who were reading the great literature because I liked them better as people. The early fans, they were trolls and wackos. Being stuck with then would have been like the first part of Dante's Divine Comedy, I mean, up to your ass in shit. They really were terribly ignorant, weird people.

 - Philip K. Dick, Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods! edited by Richard Wolinsky, p.140

Quote of the Hour: Understanding Pigeons

People who do not understand pigeons - and pigeons can be understood only when you understand that there is nothing to understand about them - should not go around describing pigeons or the effect of pigeons. Pigeons come closer to a zero of impingement than any other birds. Hens embarrass me the way my old Aunt Hattie used to when I was twelve and she still insisted I wasn't big enough to bathe myself; owls disturb me; if I am with an eagle I always pretend that I am not with an eagle; and so on down to swallows at twilight who scare the hell out of me. But pigeons have absolutely no effect on me. They have absolutely no effect on anybody. The couldn't even startle a child. This is why they are selected from among all birds to be let loose, with colored ribbons attached to them, at band concerts, library dedications, and christenings of new dirigibles. If any body let loose a lot of owls on such an occasion there would be rioting and cat-calls and whistling and fainting spells and throwing of chairs and the Lord only knows what else.

 - James Thurber, "There's an Owl in My Room," pp.216-217 in Writings and Drawings

Quote of the Hour: Theory of Lies

"It's a funny thing - I suppose you've noticed it - the people who lie the most are nearly always the clumsiest at it, and they're easier to fool with lies than most people, too. You'd think they'd be on the look-out for lies, but they seem to be the very ones that will believe almost anything at all."

 - Gilbert Wynant in Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man, p.861 in Complete Novels 

Quote of the Hour: Five Aunts

On the cue 'five aunts" I had given at the knees a trifle, for the thought of being confronted with such a solid gaggle of aunts, even if those of another, was an unnerving one. Reminding myself that in this life it is not aunts that matter but the courage which one brings to them, I pulled myself together.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, The Mating Season, p.10

Quote of the Hour: Los Angeles Dining, 1949

I ate dinner at a place near Thousand Oaks. Bad but quick. Feed 'em and throw 'em out. Lots of business. We can't bother with you sitting over your second cup of coffee, mister. You're using money space. See those people over there behind the rope? They want to eat. Anyway they think they have to. God knows why they want to eat here. They could do better home out of a can. They're just restless. Like you. They have to get the car out and go somewhere. Sucker-bait for the racketeers that have taken over the restaurants. Here we go again. You're not human tonight, Marlowe.

 - Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister, p.268 in Later Novels & Other Writings

Quote of the Hour: Exclusive News!

The real work of the propaganda department was done through unofficial channels. To the horde of competing journalists the government communiqués were of negligible importance. They were transmitted instantly in full by Reuter's [sic] and the other agencies and gave no material for the special news which the editors were demanding. This had to be procured by other means; it had to be jealously guarded from rivals. It could not be investigated for fear of attracting their attention. An exclusive lie was more valuable than a truth which was shared with others.

 - Evelyn Waugh, Waugh in Abyssinia, pp.652 in Waugh Abroad

Quote of the Hour: REMF, a Few Wars Earlier

An army in line-of-battle awaiting attack, or prepared to deliver it, presents strange contrasts. At the front are precision, formality, fixity, and silence. Toward the rear these characteristics are less and less conspicuous, and finally, in point of space, are lost altogether in confusion, motion and noise. The homogeneous becomes heterogeneous. Definition is lacking; repose is replaced by an apparently purposeless activity; harmony vanishes in hubbub, form in disorder. Commotion everywhere and ceaseless unrest. The men who do not fight are never ready.

 - Ambrose Bierce, "One Officer, One Man," p.101 in The Devil's Dictionary, Tales & Memoirs

Quote of the Hour: Policeman's Progress

His last beat had been in the heart of tempestuous Whitechapel, where his arms had ached from the incessant hauling of wiry inebriates to the station, and his shins had revolted at the kicks showered upon them by haughty spirits impatient of restraint. Also, one Saturday night, three friends of a gentleman whom he was trying to induce not to murder his wife had so wrought upon him that, when he came out of hospital, his already homely appearance was further marred by a nose which resembled the gnarled root of a tree.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, "The Romance of an Ugly Policeman," p.202 in The Man With Two Left Feet

Reviewing the Mail: Week of July 4, 2026

I was ordering a movie from the library this week - Knives Out, which I just saw six years after everyone else - and I got a book as well. This is it.

Seek You is a 2021 graphic novel by Kristen Radtke, author of Imagine Wanting Only This. I have been thinking of it as new, but I guess I've been thinking that for longer than I thought. The subtitle is "A Journey through American Loneliness," which I suppose explains what it covers as well as any longer explanation I could give here.

I'm expecting to read it quickly - that's the deal with library books - so I'll see what I think of it then.

Quote of the Hour: Just a Place

The Rossmore Arms was a gloomy pile of dark red brick built around a huge forecourt. It had a plush-lined lobby containing silence, tubbed plants, a bored canary in a cage as big as a dog house, a smell of old carpet dust and the cloying fragrance of gardenias long ago.

The Graysons were on the fifth floor in front, in the north wing. They were sitting together in a room which seemed to be deliberately twenty years out of date. It had fat overstuffed furniture and brass doorknobs, shaped like eggs, a huge wall mirror in a gilt frame, a marble-topped table in the window and dark red plush side drapes by the windows. It smelled of tobacco smoke and behind that the air was telling me they had had lamb chops and broccoli for dinner.

 - Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake, p.118 in Later Novels & Other Writings

Quote of the Hour: The Joys of Enthusiasms One Will Never Pursue

I thought how delightful it would be to make a study of the trade in marble and rare stones, tracing the course round the Mediterranean cities of the porphyry galley from the hottest quarries in the world on the Red Sea coast; a trade so active that practically no porphyry has been quarried since and all the pedestals and urns of Napoleonic bric-a-brac were made, so I am told, of stone cut in the time of Caligula. But this is the kind of thing one thinks about only when one is traveling; all the time that I am abroad I make resolutions to study one thing or another when I get back - Portuguese, map-making, photography; nothing ever comes of it. Perhaps it is a good thing to preserve one's ignorance for old age.

 - Evelyn Waugh, Ninety-Two Days, pp.383-4 in Waugh Abroad

Quote of the Hour: How it Works

Corker looked at him sadly. "You know, you've got a lot to learn about journalism. Look at it this way. News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead. We're paid to supply news. If someone else has sent a story before us, our story isn't news. Of course there's color. Color is just a lot of bull's-eyes about nothing. It's easy to write and easy to read but it costs too much in cabling so we have to go slow on that. See?"

 - Evelyn Waugh, Scoop, p.80

Quote of the Hour: And Then What Happened, Fella?

...[I] went over to my hotel, thinking about that neat white bed. But it was nearly eight o'clock, and my stomach needed attention. I went into the hotel dining room and had that fixed up.

Then a leather chair tempted me into stopping in the lobby while I burnt a cigar. That led to conversation with a traveling railroad auditor from Denver, who knew a man I knew in St. Louis. Then there was a lot of shooting in the street.

We went to the door and decided that the shooting was in the vicinity of City Hall. I shook the auditor and moved up that way.

I had done two-thirds of the distance when an automobile came down the street toward me, moving fast, leaking gun-fire from the rear.

 - Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest, p.97 in Complete Novels

Quote of the Hour: Your New Office

There was a desk you could've landed Sea Kings on (but the legs were grooved with scratches) and the sort of chair that emperors used to sit on; a huge leather-covered sofa out in the western prairies; the wall opposite the door was one huge window, with a view of all the kingdoms of  the earth; against the north wall, enough raw computing power to send a manned probe to Andromeda. If you lived in a room like this, sooner or later you'd be overwhelmed by the urge to be discovered sitting in your chair stroking a big fluffy Persian cat and drawling, "We meet at last, Mr Bond."

 - Tom Holt, Barking, p.70

Quote of the Hour: One in Every Family

Aunt Dot was a clever, impetuous driver, taking the sharpest bends with the greatest intrepidity. A brilliant and unorthodox improviser, she usually managed to work her way out of the jams she not infrequently got us into.

 - Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond, p.22

Quote of the Hour: What a Star Needs

As a loner, I count as my two most precious rights those that allow me to choose the periods of my aloneness and allow me to choose the people with whom I will spend the periods of my not-aloneness. To a film star, on the other hand, to be let alone for an instant is terrifying. It is the first signpost on the road to oblivion. Obviously an actor cannot choose the people with whom he will work, or when or how he will work with them. He goes to work at a time specified by the studio. He spends his working day under the control not only of his director but also of the scriptwriter, the cameraman, the wardrobe department, and the publicity office. Since publicity is the lifeblood of stardom, without which a star will die, it is equally obvious that he must keep it flowing through his private life, which feeds the envy and curiosity that bring many people into theatres.

 - Louise Brooks, "Humphrey and Bogey," p.59 in Lulu in Hollywood

Quote of the Hour: What They Call A Good Eater

Archie was not a man with a wide visiting-list among people with families, and it was long since he had seen a growing boy in action at the table that he had forgotten what sixteen is capable of doing with a knife and fork, when it really squares its elbows, takes a deep breath, and gets going. The spectacle which he witnessed was consequently at first a little unnerving. The long boy's idea of trifling with a meal appeared to be to swallow it whole and reach out for more.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Indiscretions of Archie, p. 216

Quote of the Hour: New Minds

I collect too many quotes for this weekly "feature," and then run an hourly version twice a year, on a Sunday near a major holiday. It's that time again.

The talking, riffing, endless making of words and stitching of ideas, that was how you knew a young intelligence, full of ideas and connections but innocent of the dynamic interchange of conversation, testing and exploring those ideas, forging then on the anvil of other minds. Newly emergent intelligences talked like they had been storing words up since the dawn of recorded thought. Which in a way they had.

 - Alex Irvine, Anthropocene Rag, pp.77-78

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: In Which Evelyn Waugh Is Less Racist Than Expected

Even now [1959] you will find people of some goodwill and some intelligence who speak of Europeans as having 'pacified' Africa. Tribal wars and slavery were endemic before they came; no doubt they will break out again when they leave. Meantime, under European rule in the first forty years of this century there have been three long wars in Africa on a far larger scale than anything perpetrated by marauding spearmen, waged by white men against white, and a generation which has seen the Nazi regime in the heart of Europe had best stand silent when civilized and uncivilized nations are contrasted.

 - Evelyn Waugh, A Tourist in Africa, p.1052 in Waugh Abroad

Quote of the Week: The Joys of Homeownership

Marrying Bea, who had drifted into his life in the wake of her stormy sister, Bech had ignorantly climbed aboard an ark of suburban living whose engines now throbbed around him like those of a sinking merchant ship in Conrad. There was no ignoring noise in these environs. In New York, there were walls, precincts, zones and codes of avoidance; here in Ossining every disturbance had a personal application: the ringing phone was never in someone else's apartment, and the child crying downstairs was always one's own.

 -"Bech Wed," p.236 in The Complete Henry Bech

Gérard: Five Years with Depardieu by Mathieu Sapin

There's a point in the middle of this book where creator Mathieu Sapin claims that Gérard Depardieu is one of the two most famous living French people in the world. He says this in conversation with then-President François Hollande, who he is flattering by saying Hollande is the other most famous French person. When Sapin mentions this to other people later, they mostly agree - well, not about Hollande. He's no Depardieu.

As an American, I also agree: if you think "French actor," Depardieu is the first person who comes to mind for at least a plurality of us. For some more gender-neutral definition of "actor," I would also accept Bridgette Bardot, who is sadly not eligible under the "living" portion. Younger, hipper people might argue for Timothée Chalamet, who I don't think is "French" in the same sense, since he grew up in New York. But Depardieu is definitely world-famous, though maybe becoming less so in recent years as he's gotten older, has been in fewer really globally popular movies, and has had more scandals accumulate (tax exile, sexual assault rumors, a certain chumminess with Putin).

So: Mathieu Sapin is a French bande desinée creator - and possibly a filmmaker, too; we see him work on some projects during this book - who shares a studio with Christophe Blain. (That has nothing to with this book, but Sapin mentions it and shows Blain, so I'll include it as well.) He got pulled into a documentary involving Depardieu taking a trip to Azerbaijan - deliberately replicating a trip by Alexandre Dumas, who was accompanied by a painter - in 2012, and, since he found himself in Depardieu's circle, he thought he might try to stay there if he could and get a book out of it.

Gerard: Five Years with Depardieu is that book; it covers Sapin's experiences with Depardieu starting with that 2012 trip to Azerbaijan and continuing through Depardieu's tax exile a few years later, multiple other projects and opportunities for Depardieu to be big and dominate conversations and talk a lot, before ending with a 2016 trip to Moscow.

The point of this book is "what is Depardieu really like?" and Sapin delivers - he keeps himself involved, as a viewpoint and way into this world, but the focus is on who Depardieu is and what he does. Depardieu is famously active, volcanic, and mercurial, so he gives Sapin a lot of material - he also has the long-time actor's ability to just talk at great length about anything continuously.

Sapin draws himself as physically small and balding - that little guy in the sidecar on the cover - to contrast with the physically imposing Depardieu. He's originally hired to basically lob questions to Depardieu for that documentary, and let the actor run on at length - the one who initiates conversation, and, as much as possible, aims Depardieu at specific topics, but not an equal partner. The rest of the book finds him in roughly the same role: a chronicler, a scribbler in the corner, the guy with a dictaphone to capture the interesting or outrageous things that Depardieu rolls out endlessly, all the time.

You have to have at least some sympathy or interest in Depardieu, of course: why else would you read a book like this? I won't say that Sapin gets any deep insights into Depardieu's essential character or history, and he's not really trying to. This is a book about what's it's like to be in the middle of the whirlwind of activity that is Gérard Depardieu; what happens around him and how he talks and acts on a day-to-day basis. Sapin is not intervewing Depardieu; he's accompanying him.

It's a very wordy book: Depardieu talks a lot, and Sapin needs a lot of captions to explain who everyone is and what's going on, as he drops in and out of Depardieu's life and projects repeatedly over these five years. Sapin has a lightly cartoony style: most of his people are fairly realistic, though he makes himself tiny with a big head. But his background and scenes are mostly realistic, though sometimes lightly sketched, particularly on the pages where he has a lot of captions and dialogue to make room for.

There will be a point where Gérard Depardieu is not longer the most famous Frenchman in the world, and this book will be an interesting relic at that point. But I don't think we're there yet.

The Holy Places & A Tourist in Africa by Evelyn Waugh

I'm pretty sure the point of the Waugh Abroad omnibus, assembled and introduced by Nicholas Shakespeare in 2003, was to gather Evelyn Waugh's pre-War travel books into a single volume, rescuing them from the mostly-obscurity they'd fallen into. Waugh had suppressed them, more or less, for the last decade or so of his life, issuing instead a "good parts" collection of the less-politically-tendentious bits under the title When the Going Was Good.

Those books were Labels, Remote People, Ninety-Two Days, Waugh in Abyssinia and - in a different tone and style and not really a travel book in the same sense - Robbery Under Law. I got the Waugh Abroad omnibus soon after it was published, read Labels in 2006, and then finally got back to the rest of those books starting last year.

But that was not the end of the omnibus.

Waugh had two other short books, which came out after WW II, which were suitable for inclusion in a book called Waugh Abroad. And so they were. And now I've read them, too.

The TL;DR is that Waugh got stuffier and grumpier and stodgier and more boring as he got older, and he was not unstuffy and grumpy and stodgy to begin with. His fiction has a lot to recommend it, even towards the end of his life, but his late nonfiction is really for scholars and massive fans and exceptionally right-wing Anglo-Catholics at this point.

With that said, the last two books in that omnibus are The Holy Places and A Tourist in Africa.

The Holy Places is barely a book at all; it comprises one very short introduction and two magazine pieces. I know the bookbinders can do magnificent things, but this is barely twenty-five pages in the omnibus, so I wonder how this appeared on its own in the world.

One essay is about Saint Helena, who was the wife of one Roman Emperor and mother of another in the 4th century. More important to Waugh - so important that he barely mentions it - is that she's credited with discovering the True Cross. Waugh is a true believer, so the fact that it's pretty clear that the jumble of wood she was lumbered with is no such thing - assuming that there was originally a thing that it could be, and I might not even go that far myself - cannot impinge on his thinking. Since she is a saint, she must be a wonderful perfect person, and that's basically what his essay says. It is nice that he had such a durable religico-philosophical underpinning to his thinking, Andy said brightly, searching for something positive to end with.

The other essay is about a trip to Jerusalem in 1952. It is also suffused with the piety of a convert, and some circumlocutiously-worded stuff that I think is grumping about the existence of Israel, because clearly only Christians should be in charge of that land and the world in general. (Preferably Catholics, of course, but Anglicans are mostly all right and those Orthodox chappies have much to recommend them. Waugh is less fond of more radical Protestants.) Muslims are mostly treated as good enough fellows, for lesser races - I suppose because this was before most of the major wars and oil shocks, so they had no power. The essay is decent on architecture and some aspects of history, and it's nice that Waugh had such a resolute faith, I suppose. He's not actively dismissive of Judaism and Islam, I'll add, in an attempt to be somewhat positive.

A Tourist in Africa is somewhat longer - actual book-length, though not a long one - but sketchier and smaller and less well-formed than his pre-war travel books. He admits he hates being in England in the cold weather - and almost admits to hating being with his family at Christmas - and so fled in the winter of 1958-9 for a trip down the East coast of Africa, somewhat visiting places he'd been before the war and at intervals since.

The book is based on a diary he kept at the time, and still maintains a diary format. I suspect that, instead of turning diary notes into a fuller narration and spending some serious time thinking through what he wanted to say, this time Waugh just expanded his notes in situ, threw in some of his usual hobbyhorses, and called it a day. I don't want to say a book about traveling several thousand miles over the course of two months is lazy, but there are definitely aspects of it that show an impulse to take the easiest path.

It is substantially less interesting and detailed than his pre-war travel books. It's still Waugh prose, so there are good lines and specific thoughts throughout - the reader may not agree with those thoughts, and I expect most won't, but they're worth engaging with in one's own head to be clear on why they're wrong.

In that typical old-boy-network way, Waugh avoids giving names to most of the people he meets - it's the commissioner or agent of this particular town, or "R" - though they mostly seem to have been friendly and solicitous and happy to give this visiting dignitary dinners and house-room and the use of their cars and drivers to roam about and see the sights. And, as usual, it will be the rare modern human being who can agree with any of Waugh's political ideas - I'd be very suspicious of anyone in 2026 who could, actually.

I do recommend the Waugh Abroad omnibus - or, at least, the first four books collected in it, which are actually about travel and see Waugh giving insights about places and people he met that are long-gone now. The later bits of that omnibus, though, are for a much more select and massively smaller audience.

Books Read: June 2026

I'm back-dating this post, because I already have two quote posts "today" (Saturday, the Glorious Fourth, when I'm typing this) and a massive number of hourly quote posts for tomorrow, the twice-yearly day I burn off my excess book quotes.

You don't care about that. But I might wonder, looking back sometime in the future, so, Hi Future Me! that's why you did this.

Here's what I read this past month. I'll add links once the posts go live; that's running five to six weeks ahead, pretty consistently, these days.

Flore Vesco & Kerascӧet, The Court Charade (digital, 6/1)

Edward Anderson, Thieves Like Us (in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s, 6/1)

Tom Gauld, Physics for Cats (6/6)

Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli, Daredevil: Born Again (6/7)

P.G. Wodehouse, Laughing Gas (6/7)

Juan Díaz Canales & Juanjo Guarnido, Blacksad, Vol.2: Arctic Nation (digital, 6/13)

Drew Friedman's Chosen People (digital, 6/14)

Meg Elison, Foundling Fathers (6/14)

Roy Thomas, Michael T. Gilbert, P. Craig Russell, & George Freeman, Elric: The Weird of the White Wolf (digital, 6/19)

Nicolas Pothier & Johan Pilet, Mickey Mouse Vs. The Mouseton Society of Evil (digital, 6/20)

Martha Wells, Platform Decay (6/20)

Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell, Murder Book (digital, 6/21)

Jon Ronson, The Men Who Stare at Goats (6/26)

Doug Savage, Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Spidermania (digital, 6/27)

Katriona Chapman, The Pass (digital, 6/28)

Christopher Brookmyre, Quite Ugly One Morning (6/28)

Next month, I do expect to read more books.

The Shadower by Peter & Maria Hoey

I've written about the Hoeys' comics before: they're a brother-and-sister team, who both also work as illustrators. They share writing and drawing duties on chilly, precisely-constructed stories. But I don't think I've mentioned that their pages are horizontal, unlike most comics.

A Hoeys page spreads across, not up and down, like a landscape rather than a portrait. Landscape is often important in their work: they've done multiple short comics showing the same scene - usually from a high, slightly tilted vantage point, to see multiple streets and cutaway buildings between them - with actions ramifying through the panels over the course of six or eight pages. And their crisp, digital art makes their places both precise and generic; we see streets and apartment interiors in detail, but those details are multiplied.

Add this to the fact that their worlds are typically vaguely historical, with big blocky cars and people in suits and no modern technology, and a Hoeys story is a window into a specific, distinct world - one clearly not our own.

In Perpetuity was set in an afterlife: a Greek-style, mostly unhappy one. The Bend of Luck showed us a world where luck was a physical commodity. Animal Stories could have been our world, almost, with six loosely-linked stories are centered on animals.

And their new book this year is The Shadower. It's set in the unnamed capital city of an unnamed country, in an unnamed year. The cars are big and boxy. The women wear skirts and the men suit jackets. Phones attach to the wall. Ibsen's 1879 play A Doll's House is "a hundred years old" - is that meant to be a vague placeholder for "really old," or more specific?

I doubt it's specific. The Hoeys are specific, but only about the invented details of their world.

A civil war has recently ended, uneasily. There's some kind of power-sharing system, and the city is divided into sector by green lines, guarded by soldiers who check passports and visas. Most people seem to stay in their districts; moving between them is difficult. (We think this must be a poor city, a poor country - commerce is not going to thrive in a system like this. But maybe this is what the little people endure, and the ruling class lives differently.)

Nadia is studying acting at the Academy of Dramatic Arts, which is both a prestigious national treasure and part of "a small college in her district."  Her father was a theater director and her mother a stage actress; a bombing during the war, in her childhood, killed her father. Her mother has been living quietly, not acting, since then. Nadia is apparently good at acting, a devotee of her father's method - which he codified in his influential book The Methodology of Disappearing. It's a very deep acting style, of subsuming the actor into the role completely.

And she's tapped by one of her father's old comrades, Nikola, to do something for the Popular Resistance Committee - the group her father was a leader in, the group that rules this sector of the city.

She is to impersonate a café waitress, Miriam, in another sector. O'Brien, a leader of that sector's ruling group, the Revolutionary Provisional Council, uses that café as an office, meeting with important people all day long. Nadia is to place a listening device at O'Brien's table and retrieve it at the end of the day, for seven days.

She doesn't have a choice, of course.

So she "agrees." She studies Miriam, uses wigs and fake glasses and a fake facial mole to impersonate the other woman. She spends a week in a replica of the café, practicing. And then she is inserted into the other woman's life, and goes to work in that café.

It goes as expected for the first few days: nerve-wracking but she's prepared. Then, things start shifting, both for her personally and otherwise. Her father's teachings will be more important than she expected. This impersonation will not end the way Nikola promised.

The Hoeys - the book also credits the story to C.P. Freund and Peter Hoey, which I think means roughly what the same credit would in a movie: not the script but the original plot - tell this story in their usual chilly manner, distanced, mostly quiet, with an emotionless third-persona omniscient narration.

They give it the inexorability of a tragedy: we think most of the lives in this broken, separated city are tragic, one way or another.

Bech Is Back by John Updike

I like having omnibuses on the shelf, especially ones that collect books that can easily be read separately. I can pull them down when I get back to that shelf, read the next clump of whatever, and move on.

I used to be the kind of reader who would plow through one of those big omnibuses, beginning to end, over a few days, but that was when I read professionally. I'm pretty sure I could still do that if the professional side of my brain was still connected to capital-L Literature. (Though my bank account might not survive that; there's a reason I'm doing boring content marketing these days.)

So I got back to Henry Bech, John Updike's sad-sack writer character, recently. Bech first appeared in 1970's Bech: A Book, which I read last fall. The second batch of Bech stories were collected in 1982's Bech Is Back - a few scattered pieces from the mid-70s in the New Yorker and Playboy, then what seems to have been a concerted effort by Updike to add enough text to fill it out to book-length soon before that eventual publication.

Both of those are in the omnibus The Complete Henry Bech, along with one later collection and the last (otherwise uncollected?) story.

Bech is a Jewish writer, in the vein of Bellow or Roth, who published some big and/or well-received books in the '50s but had fallen into silence by the time of the mid-'60s and the first stories in A Book. I think Updike meant Bech to be satirical, which is how I can believe that a guy who wrote three novels twenty years before - novels which are taught but not hugely read - can continue to live on them and do nothing else productive.

(And that's the question in the back of my head throughout the Bech stories - how does this guy spend his days? We mostly see him in special moments, away from his usual life and milieu, but how does he fill up the endless days in his small New York apartment, for years and decades? He can't have that many affairs. We don't think he's a theater aficionado, or involved in any volunteer work, or sitting in front of a TV screen twelve hours a day. Does Updike mean us to believe he just sits and reads, all day every day, for twenty-some years?)

Anyway, we know this is literary fiction for a few reasons. First, Updike's prose is lovely and supple, which is a requirement. Second, Bech is a writer and the stories are deeply in his head - literary fiction is about people like their authors, grappling with the Big Serious Questions that writers alone have to face. And third - and possibly most importantly - the stories are also largely about where Bech wants to put his dick. Literary fiction, canonically, is about writer characters having affairs.

Sadly, Bech was not married - had never been married - by the end of A Book, so he was not able, technically, to have affairs. (He did make up for it in dalliances, though.) Updike does remedy that in this second book.

But first some travel. The first book saw Bech on a tour behind the Iron Curtain - it was the '60s - while this book sees him move more widely about the world. There's a story that bounces among three mostly-American trips, another that does something similar with trips to two African countries and South Korea, the what-it-says-on-the-tin "Australia and Canada," and two trips with the new wife he picks up along the way, to "The Holy Land" and to Scotland in "Macbech."

Again, the Bech stories, up to that point, are mostly about him going to some strange (often foreign) place, feeling a bit out of sorts, and trying to get into the pants of some attractive woman he meets there. (Generally at least ten years younger than him, of course - this is both literary fiction and the '70s.)

But then we get a novelette-length - the longest piece in the book and the longest Bech story to date - piece called "Bech Wed," in which our hero settles down in a big house in Ossining with his new wife (the stand-in mistress younger sister of the primary mistress from the prior book). There, she gets him to actually sit down and write every day - a crazy idea he has apparently never had before - and, lo and behold, he actually produces his fifteen-years-delayed fourth novel. It is a massive success, despite being not very good, which leads to Bech fucking his wife's older sister (his former mistress, remember) and blowing up his marriage.

It's literary fiction: characters can be successful or happy, but never both. And frequently neither. Besides, fucking the wrong people is what literary fiction is about.

The last story is a bit of a coda, with a newly-single-again Bech going to someone else's book-launch party, now that he's living in Manhattan again. He of course ends it going home with a lady mud wrestler, because those are the attractive women available at the event, and a literary-novel hero must Always Be Macking.

There are books I can enjoy reading even though I don't take them seriously: space opera, plot-coupon epic fantasy...and this-writer-is-totally-not-me literary fiction. Some readers might find take offense at that odd company for Updike; they can suck it. The Bech books are frivolous and untethered to anything in real life, but they can be enjoyable on that level.