Quote of the Week: Unexpected Surprises in One's Domicile

It is not easy to state offhand what is the last thing a young man starting out in life would wish to find on the premises of the furnished villa ready for immediate occupancy which he had just begun to occupy. Bugs? Perhaps. Cockroaches? Possibly. Maybe defective drains. One cannot say. But a large black pig in the kitchen would unquestionably come quite high up on the list of undesirable objects, and Jerry, as he gazed at Queen of Matchingham, was conscious of that disagreeable sensation which comes to those who, pausing to tie a shoelace while crossing a railway line, find themselves struck in the small of the back by the Cornish express.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Pigs Have Wings, p.204

The Alliance of the Curious, #1: Sapiens by Philippe Riche

French creator Philippe Riche had a two-part series called Bad Break - as far as I can tell, it came out in France close to twenty years ago, and was translated into English in the mid-Teens, as part of Humanoids' expansion. Riche also did a sequel series around the same time, which was also brought into English by Humanoids.

I can't find any newer related books, but Humanoids - which I think was Riche's publisher in France, too - has been having some troubles lately, particularly the US outpost, so he might have pivoted to different projects with more stable partners. (Or maybe not - creative careers are odd and contingent, so he could be doing something different but vaguely related, like art-directing or making animation, right now.)

I did read the two Bad Break books last year - see my posts on the first and second one - and now I'm jumping into the sequel series, called The Alliance of the Curious. Riche seems to have carefully made this second go-round so he could expand on it easily with more stories - so, to my cynical mind, it's only to be expected that he wouldn't have the chance to do so.

This first Alliance of the Curious book is titled Sapiens. It picks up some time after Bad Break, or perhaps slightly changes the premise to facilitate more stories. Simon and Rebecca, two of the three main characters of Bad Break, are now in a relationship, and Simon is still working in vaguely the same junk industry: he now cleans out storage units and sells what he finds there, or acts as a middle-man between, on the one hand, people who have a bunch of random old junk and, on the other, potential buyers. It doesn't seem to be a lucrative career, but there's no sign that Rebecca is working, so I guess it pays for their lifestyle, such as it is. (Rebecca was a porn actress in the first series - in a vague way, since we only saw a few advertisements - so maybe she retired or maybe she's still working at the same thing or maybe she's shifted to acting/modeling work with more of her clothes on.) The third member of the original trio, Ernst-Lazare, is still doing the same thing: high-end dealer in cultural artifacts, mostly those that are or incorporate human remains. 

Meanwhile, we also see a secret society called the Order of Saint Louis, including three wild young blonde women known as the Cocaine Sisters, a man named Louis who is the previously-presumptive heir to a mysterious "throne," and a grumpy middle-aged functionary, Grégoire De Tours. An old woman has died, and she is of a "purer lineage" than Louis, so her son will inherit whatever this is.

That son, Griffon De Martel, is a white-haired man with some kind of mental problem, and we watch him stumble through his life as well - losing his apartment when his mother died, having all of his stuff sold to a junk dealer, falling into a group of homeless people.

Simon gets Griffon's stuff, most of which is worthless crap. But there is a jeweled skull, which he passes to Ernst-Lazare for help identifying and finding a market for. Meanwhile, the Cocaine Sisters start searching for Griffon - why them isn't as clear, but they obviously want to kill Griffon so their boy-toy Louis inherits whatever there is to inherit.

All this is set during a massive summer heat wave in Paris, mostly for atmosphere though it also allows Riche to put his cast in fewer clothes (or none, as we saw in Bad Break).

The secret of the De Martels comes out by the end of this book, and I won't give that away, but this is a Dan Brown-esque secret society thing, with hidden people with unexpected and frankly unrealistic connections to ancient history. In this book, there's mostly a bunch of running around, some shooting, and a whole lot of Griffon being confused and muddle-headed.

This one is all set-up; I expect the second book will have more action, explain the deal of the Order, and maybe even see our heroes make a little money from their findings. Although they didn't make a penny in Bad Break, so that could be a standard feature of Riche's work.

His art is still Euro-stylish, though his women all tend to look the same. Translators Natacha Ruck and Ken Grobe put it all into idiomatic, clear English - it's a silly thriller plot, but that's the genre, not a complaint.  I tend to think this is slightly less engaging than Bad Break was - too much running about, with the Griffon scenes entirely separate from everything else - but it's in the same style, and I have hopes the back half will land the plane well.

Pigs Have Wings by P.G. Wodehouse

As the back-cover copy leads off by sublimely noting, it is pig-stealing time in Shropshire.

This is not the longest or the most complex of P.G. Wodehouse's novels set in and around Blandings Castle, and there's only one impostor, who is revealed fairly quickly. But it is the Blandings novel that sees two massive pigs stolen by the major competitors of that Fat Pigs competition at the Shropshire Agricultural Show, in either 1952 (the year the book was published) or the eternal, unspecified, Wodehouse year, where it is one part 1890s, one part 1920s, one minor part the decade it was written, and about five parts pure whimsy and invention.

Pigs Have Wings has some of Wodehouse's most inventive, fun writing - he several times pauses to talk about the details of writing the book, apologizing for not mentioning a particular character for a long time and noting at one point:

Stress was laid earlier in this narrative on the fact that the conscientious historian, when recording any given series of events, is not at liberty to wander off down byways, however attractive, but is compelled to keep plodding steadily along the dusty high road of his story, and this must now be emphasized again to explain why the chronicler does not at this point diverge from his tale to give a word for word transcript of Lord Emsworth's speech.

Every mature Wodehouse book is frivolous; the best of them turn that frivolousness into something  magnificent. This is one of those - it's also the book that features the line about the "unmistakable sound of a butler falling off a bicycle." [1] The plot is fun, but the language is even better.

You see, the Empress of Blandings has won that Fat Pig contest two years running. Lord Emsworth's great rival, Sir Gregory Parsloe, has imported a possibly even-fatter pig - in a shocking breach of ancient custom, though not actually against the rules - from Kent and named it the Queen of Matchingham. The contest is coming up swiftly, and the two pigs, each in her sty at the two stately houses a few miles apart, are snuffling up their recommended fifty-seven thousand and eight hundred calories a day, in a race to see who can get the fattest.

But everyone assumes Parsloe will cheat. And the current keeper of the Empress, a slightly wobbly pig-girl named Monica Simmons, is his niece, installed by the domineering Lady Constance, Lord Emsworth's sister, who is more interested in keeping good relations with the neighbors than with winning Fat Pig contests.

Of course, there's also a few young-love plots - as well as a not-quite-so-young-anymore love plot - to complicate things. And one impostor, in the person of one of those not-quite-so-young love interests, a former barmaid and current owner of a detective agency, hired to keep her presumably-beady eye on the Empress.

Eventually, both the Empress and the Queen are stolen, by forces from the other camp. And a pig is hidden in the kitchen of a villa, where a keen-eared pig-keeper - and a slightly less keen-eared local policeman - may hear its distinctive grunting.

This is a good first Wodehouse novel - it shows what he does well, isn't too long or too convoluted, and the series element is minor. (There's a fat pig, a dithering lord, and a couple of other bits of standard business - that's it.) The fact that it's a glittering, lovely delight makes it only that much better.

[1] As opposed to the unmistakable sound of a barmaid falling down stairs, which is from the Drones story "Tried in the Furnace."

Nocturnos by Laura Pérez

I like to read comics - or graphic works, however you label them - that work largely visually, that imply more than they say, that aren't looking to tell a single, straightforward genre story. Those kinds of books are rich and fascinating when done well, and I find them more impressive than any hugger-mugger plot.

Laura Pérez is a Spanish creator - most famous on my side of the Atlantic for creating the title sequence for the TV show Only Murders in the Building - whose comics are very much in that vein: moody, thoughtful, allusive, full of fleeting moments and emotional states among characters that we don't get to know very well at all. Because how well do we know anyone? (Even ourselves?)

Two of her books were previously published in English translation for the US market - Totem and Ocultos. This past fall, her 2019 book Nocturnos was also published in English, translated by award-winning translator Andrea Rosenberg.

Pérez's books are difficult to write about, difficult to classify. They're meditations or explorations more than storytelling exercises, books that wander through a visual space and a set of ideas rather than laying out a linear story for the reader to follow. Nocturnos is a book about night - mostly about dreams, but also all of the other things that go on under the cloak of darkness, creatures and feelings and connections.

Pérez works here largely with emotional states, with feelings - her night is not a place of danger, specifically, though she does start with showing a prehistoric woman (or a modern woman acting like one) and references to fears of what might be in the dark. Nocturnos follows a sequence of people - I think we see some of the same people repeatedly, at different ages in their lives, but we also see a lot of people, once or twice in passing, as the night rumbles on past them - and shows us their dreams, as well as what they see and what they do in the depths of the night.

It's mostly quiet; it's mostly low-key. These are realistic dreams - the kind where you just know things, and you can't describe exactly what happened or what it meant, but know it meant something important. There's a fine sequence a little more than halfway through where one character describes a dream in those terms, over Pérez's evocative art, and we don't really understand what he means, as the man he talks to also doesn't understand. And the things Pérez's characters get up to during this night - because I think this book is meant to depict a night, a particular time in a particular place - are mostly everyday as well. They read, they look out windows, they ride public transit, they sit in bars talking to the bartender, they drive trucks, they arrive at a vacation cabin. They live their lives, quiet moments in their lives, as the night envelops them.

Pérez's art here has a surprising brightness for a book about night; she has an almost glowing blue-green sky, flecked with stars, visible a lot of the time, and her people have faces that almost look illuminated. Black does envelop her pages much of the time, though, as if the night is surrounding each of these moments, making each of them distinct and separate, like beads on a string.

I can't tell you what Nocturnos means; it doesn't "mean" one thing. It's a sequence of ideas and thoughts about what night is, what night means, what goes on in our brains when the world gets dark and quiet and still. I found it fascinating and deep; I hope you will do the same.

Bridge Planet Nine by Jared Throne

I came into this book with almost no expectations, and was happily surprised - it's a taut, smartly-paced crime thriller in a lived-in SF universe. I'll try not to spoil what turns into a twisty plot with a lot of revelations, but keep that in mind.

Bridge Planet Nine is Jared Throne's second full-length graphic novel, and I think the first to be published by an established company - Top Shelf put it out in October. It's the kind of book that takes unabashedly genre materials, uses them well, and mixes them to make its own story.

It's the medium future. Humanity has expanded to some unknown number of other planets, and seems to be living under a mildly dystopian corporatocracy - well, about as dystopian and corporate-ruled as today, frankly. One of those corporations, Partna, has a string of "Bridge Planets" - uninhabited worlds used as refueling stations for automated transport ships. It sounds like the point is either to extract all of the mineral wealth from those planets or to degrade them enough that Partna can take full ownership for some other activity later - or maybe both.

Four people are planning a heist on one of those planets. Garrett was a VP at Partna before a scandal - which he claims he had nothing to do with - took him down, tossed him in prison, and ruined his life. He has the knowledge and the desire to hurt Partna. The other three are specialists: Hudson is a long-time criminal with a lot of expertise; Wes is the one who'll get them through digital security, with his reprogrammed drone Etta; and Pearl, Wes's sister, is the pilot. They have contacts so they can "borrow" a ship to get there and back - not in a lot of comfort, but good enough.

Garrett knows of a high-value ship, with extra security, coming into Bridge Planet Nine soon. The ship, and the planet, are completely automated - no staff at all. So the four heisters just have to get there, quietly take what they want, and get back out - a big payout for all four of them, minimal risk.

Of course it's not that simple.

Before we meet the heisters, there's what I might call a cold open. A group of people, on a planet somewhere, execute or sacrifice one member of their group by chaining him outside at night and removing the mask they all wear. Something in the environment kills him, unpleasantly, almost immediately. We don't know exactly where they are. But we can guess.

Garrett and crew do get to Bridge Planet Nine without trouble, and park their ship away from the transfer station they plan to hit. They take a ground truck over, marvel at the ruined buildings from when this was an inhabited planet, and get to work on the security at the transfer station. They know their jobs, are smart and organized, and have planned carefully. (This is roughly a third of the way into the book.)

Things go badly in unexpected ways, as they always will in a heist thriller. The mission shifts, there are revelations of what Partna did and is doing on Bridge Planet Nine, and, of course, there is sudden violence and death. There are other characters, too, of course. You need to have a larger cast than just four people to have enough deaths to make a thriller.

The borrowed ship does lift off from the planet at the end of the story; I'll say that much. It does return to Earth, with a crew and a pilot. The people on that ship are not unrewarded by their efforts on Bridge Planet Nine. It's a good ending, a satisfying ending - one that fits for both a heist thriller and a gritty anti-corporate SF story.

Throne draws this in an indy-friendly style, with sharp spotted blacks, crisply distinct faces, and a good eye for design - both of his pages and for elements in his world. Suitably for both the heist and grungy-SF genres, most of the background elements look worn, lived-in, half-broken - he draws a universe that's already seen a lot of activity, where the street has been making its own uses for things for a long time now. Bridge Planet Nine is impressive: it tells its cross-genre story well, with distinctive characters, a strong sense of place, and serious tension throughout.

All of This and Nothing: Such Great Heights

"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 we're back to Famous, with a song everyone heard two decades ago in the movie The Garden State. (Yes, I saw it: I've lived in New Jersey since 1977, so I was legally obligated.)

It's a cover, though I'm not sure if I ever heard the original, by The Postal Service. Sometimes covers take over for the original - Hendrix did that with All Along the Watchtower.

And Sam Beam, aka Iron & Wine, did it with Such Great Heights.

I don't think I've written about quiet songs much on these Mondays - oh, sure, I talk about songs starting quietly, but I usually go on to talk about the loud parts. This one is all quiet, like a still pond, all focused on one man's voice and guitar.

It's a love song, a mostly happy love song.

Mostly. No true love song can be entirely happy, just like no person is ever entirely happy.

But everything looks perfect from far away

That's the core line of the song for me - this is a good relationship, a happy one, a fulfilling one. But it's not perfect, because nothing is perfect...but it, and the whole world, can look perfect from the right viewpoint.

This is also explicitly a "missing you" song - that's another thing that looks perfect from far away. I don't think that's meant as irony; I believe this is a heartfelt song, both as written and as performed by Beam. But any good song has tensions like that in it - ideas that could undercut themselves, phrases that could be taken different ways.

I'll leave it there: this is a quiet, meditative song, and I don't want to over-egg it. It's something to listen to, quietly, and think about how it reflects, or doesn't, your own life.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of February 21, 2026

I got three books from the library this week - along with the movie Caddyshack, for the weekly watch-with-my-kids Wednesday [1] - and all of them were larger than I expected. This complicates my life, for a silly and quirky reason you certainly don't care about.

You see, over the last few years, my reading time shifted. I used to read mostly while commuting, but now I work from home. And I also wanted to be more active once I was working from home - to get up regularly and spend time walking around. (I now aim to get 25k steps a day, and hit it except for very rare calamities.) So the question was: how do I both spend time reading and spend time walking? [2]

Yes, I do now read books while pacing in the house. Yes, my family thinks I am very weird. Yes, I have bumped into doors and walls more than once. But it does seem to work for me, though I would hesitate to recommend it to anyone else.

It does mean that larger or heavier books can be an issue, because I'm holding them up and walking about with them. Again, this is not a problem that I think anyone else in the world has ever had, and I don't expect anyone to commiserate with me - I'm just mentioning it.

Because E Is For Edward is particularly large, and I spent much of yesterday (Saturday, February 20th; I'm writing this the "today" of publication) walking about with it, and expect to finish it off today. I did whack it into doorframes at least twice. Anyway, this is a coffee-table book - the kind that normal sane people read on their laps in a comfy chair, or perhaps flip through as it sits on a table - about Edward Gorey, by Gregory Hischak, the current director of the museum made out of Gorey's Cape Cod house. It's full of Gorey art, and divided into a number of thematic chapters - designed to be a celebration of all his work on the event of the hundredth anniversary of his birth (last year).

Then there's Tongues, a large graphic novel by Anders Nilsen, whose similarly-large Big Questions I loved a decade ago. I did have access to a digital review copy of this almost a year ago, but it was watermarked in an annoying way, so I just didn't want to read that version. So, instead, I got the book itself, and will be maneuvering that through space in the near future and trying not to whack it into things in its turn. I have no idea what the story of Tongues is about and am deliberately not checking.

Last is the most recent book by Ian Frazier, Paradise Bronx. Frazier is a longtime New Yorker writer, adept at both serious reportage (like On the Rez and Family) and humor (like Cranial Fracking and the great Coyote V. Acme). This is Frazier in serious mode, and, as the title implies, it's a history of Da Bronx. It's also over five hundred pages, which is more than I thought I needed to know about NYC's most blue-collar borough, but I trust Frazier and will read, I expect, all of it.

[1] This time around, it was clearly from a different era. Even more so, I was struck by how it's really just a random collection of scenes - usually pretty funny, at least for audiences in 1980 - thrown together based on the same vague premise and with occasional attempts at an ongoing plotline.

[2] I also now have a sit-stand desk for work and a walking pad I pull out some of the time, so I do quite a bit of editing of work whitepapers and similar activities while trudging forward at that desk.

Quote of the Week: Other Lives

The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out, but this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss's daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even have got rich - small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader's Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I'll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.

 - Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, p.625 in Later Novels & Other Writings

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

This is the big one; if you read only one Raymond Chandler novel, it should be The Long Goodbye. It's almost twice the length of his earlier books and not structured like a traditional mystery - a loose, looping, allusive novel that can make the case, all by itself, that private-eye stories can be fine literature.

I don't know if the world needed to be told that in 1953. On the other hand, I don't know if "the world" has entirely learned it since then - the world is full of blindered people of all kinds. Some refuse to believe mysteries can be as good as any other novels; some read only private-eye novels.

I'm not going to describe the plot in any great detail - it's deliberately slow, and recursive, and is best experienced by reading it. I did flag a whole lot of quotes, and I might drop a couple of them in below, with some linking material, to give you a sense of the book.

But I can tell you it starts with Terry Lennox - a drunk, a man badly damaged by his WWII service, the once and future kept husband of a widely-ranging heiress, a man with his own notions of propriety and honor. Series hero and narrator Philip Marlowe rescues him one day - more or less from his wife - and comes to be his friend, in the way of men who don't get close to each other or ask each other many questions.

One night Lennox calls Marlowe and needs a big favor, no questions asked - to be driven to the airport in Tijuana. This is a mystery novel; Marlowe assumes and we the reader assumes that means someone is dead - and we're both right. It won't be the last death.

Somewhat later, Marlowe is hired - sort-of - to find the alcoholic writer Roger Wade, who has disappeared on what both his wife and his New York editor are afraid is yet another bender. The Wades live in the same rich town and mix in the same circles as Lennox's wife; Lennox's sister-in-law is prominent there.

Maybe this is a good point to throw in a quote - here's Marlowe talking to the novelist's wife, on p.502 of the Later Novels & Other Writings omnibus:

"Look, Mrs. Wade," I said finally. "My opinion means nothing. It happens every day. The most unlikely people commit the most unlikely crimes. Nice old ladies poison whole families. Clean-cut kids commit multiple holdups and shootings. Bank managers with spotless records going back twenty years are found out to be long-term embezzlers. And successful and popular and supposedly happy novelists get drunk and put their wives in the hospital. We know damn little about what makes even our best friends tick."

That's the core point of any mystery novel - the why of a specific shocking violent act. And the best mystery writers, Chandler at their fore, make it clear that we can say some things about any particular act, especially in retrospect, but that people are strange and contingent and unexpected. Long Goodbye is a novel about people, the things they do and the ways they bounce off each other - often violently.

This is also the book where Chandler has the "main story" cool down repeatedly, almost as if his plot is dying out, as Marlowe goes on to other cases, other parts of his life, before looping back to that cluster of Lennox and Wade and the rest:

So passed a day in the life of a P.I. Not exactly a typical day but not totally untypical either. What makes a man stay with it nobody knows. You don't get rich, you don't often have much fun. Sometimes you get beaten up or shot at or tossed into the jailhouse. Once in a long while you get dead. Every other month you decide to give it up and find some sensible occupation while you can still walk without shaking your head. Then the door buzzer rings and you open the inner door to the waiting room and there stands a new face with a new problem, a new load of grief, and a small piece of money.

"Come in, Mr. Thingummy. What can I do for you?"

There must be a reason.

(p.549)

As I said, this is a long novel - especially for a mystery, especially for 1953. Marlowe isn't really investigating any of the deaths, and, for a long time, he's half-heartedly trying to get away from the bits of this puzzle he's entangled with. But this is what he does: he worries loose bits of string until he gets to the knot and untangles it.

In the end, we do learn what happened - to Lennox and Wade and all of the others, to the cops and crooks and millionaires and their daughters. This is a magnificent American novel, on the short list that everyone should read at least once. I'll leave it at that.

Usasgi Yojimbo, Book 9: Daisho by Stan Sakai

As I've warned before, my posts about series tend to get shorter and more perfunctory as I have less and less to say. I may end up rambling below, but I doubt I'll have anything particularly profound this time.

I'm still reading my way through Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo series, a mildly fantasy-tinged adventure series set in a dramatically heightened version of Edo-period Japan, pitched at a level appropriate for middle-grade readers...oh, and all of the characters are anthropomorphic animals, because Sakai started this series in the '80s for the Critters anthology. Anthropomorphic characters also suit his art style quite well, though there are all the usual questions of how multi-animal worlds work - are all these races interfertile? If a rabbit and a fox have children, are they hybrids, or are the boys rabbits and the girls foxes, or what? Do the races code specific positions in society, or geographic origins, or something like that?

In this series, they're mostly just animals because Sakai wanted them to be animals. Individual characters are kinds of animals that make sense for them specifically; I haven't made a study to see how families connect. Usagi himself clearly gets the hots for babes who are not themselves rabbits, for one data-point.

The ninth collection of that series is Daisho, collecting some stories from issues 7 and 8 of the 2nd series that weren't in vol. 8 (Shades of Death) and the full issues 9-14; it reaches almost to the end of the Mirage series (Usagi started with Fantagraphics, had a short run with Mirage, and then settled in at Dark Horse for twenty years and 160-ish issues); the current edition came out in 2010 but seems to be an only very slightly updated version of the original book 9 from about 1995.

The stories here mostly flow into a continuous narrative, though those two lead-off stories are both closing off loose plot threads from earlier volumes. Most of the book sees Usagi caught up in helping out a town taken over by slavers, and then chasing their leader after "General Fujii" steals Usagi's swords. After that, we get a flashback to another great lost love of Usagi's life - we're only up to Lost Love #2 at this point, but we're also only twenty-some issues in, with a hundred and sixty to go, so Usagi could have a hot anthropomorphic babe in every town by the end of the series if I'm counting correctly.

This particular Lost Love is the We Could Never Be Together type - she's the daughter of a major lord, he's the bodyguard delivering her to the arranged marriage, and they're on the run from the forces trying to murder her before that can happen. You've read that story before, but Sakai does a solid version of it here.

That's generally my take on Usagi, this volume and this previous ones - Sakai is professional and solid, telling stories well in a clean style, with solid dialogue and engaging plotting. There's nothing groundbreaking or surprising here, and it is all pitched so you could hand it to a ten-year-old. Is that enough? Every reader has to decide that - so far, I'm enjoying the stories, while finding them inherently limited.

Wandering Island, Vol.2 by Kenji Tsurata

Everything I said about the first volume of Wandering Island is still true for the second: it's a laconic, quiet story with a lot of Miyazaki influence, driven by images, with a thin plot and only one real character, the floatplane pilot Mikura Amelia. (Who, as you can see from the cover, spends a lot of her time in borderline fan-service-y poses either in that tiny bikini or, for a sequence here, entirely naked.)

Well, one thing is different, I suppose. I said I thought this would be a two-book series, that the plot was thin enough that I didn't see how it could run more than another couple of hundred pages. I was mistaken; a visually-driven series can keep going, I'm coming to see, as long as the creator has more images to put on the page.

Wandering Island, Vol. 2 is not the end. It needs at least one more volume, maybe more. According to an afterword by editor Carl Gustav Horn, the fifteen chapters here appeared in the Japanese  monthly Afternoon magazine between October 2012 and December 2017, with the Japanese tankōbon also copyright 2017, so probably appearing the same month as the last chapter it collected. This English translation, by Dana Lewis, arrived in January 2019.

On the other hand, I can't find any indication that creator Kenji Tsurata has published any further chapters of Wandering Island in the past eight years, so this may be entirely abandoned. Caveat lector.

The first volume ended with Mikura flying off to find the mysterious, moving Electric Island - she'd tracked its movements, and was sure she could catch it on this go-round through the North Pacific. The first chapter here is mostly "where is that wandering island?" but she does get there, landing right next to it despite the locals firing cannon at her.

She has a package to deliver, after all. She needs to give it to "Miss Amelia."

Most of this book is Mikura wandering, mostly silently, around the semi-ruined town that takes up most or all of the island, trying to map it so that she can figure it out. It's made up of buildings jammed together, with narrow, winding streets rising and falling up and down the hills - very Mediterranean, very Miyazaki. She sees some locals: mostly semi-hostile old men (the ones who fired that cannon, we think), one old lady is who slightly more helpful, one kid near the end.

We don't learn any of their names. None of them get more than a few words of dialogue. None of them explain anything, talk about this island, or advance the plot at all. They mostly all just tell Mikura to get the hell out of there, that she's not wanted.

Oh, and "Miss Amelia" is dead. The place she lived is entirely a ruin; she may have died a century ago.

At the very end, as Mikura is running out of the food saved in her plane, and wondering what she can possibly do next, that kid just happens to mention that there's "a store" on the island, of course in what seems to be the highest point. Mikura goes there, sees the shopkeeper...and this volume ends.

We don't see the shopkeeper clearly - we see his body, but not his face. He seems to be familiar to Mikura. I'm going to guess that it's her dead father, since it's that kind of story, and because there are so few characters that's an plausible guess. If there are ever any further chapters, maybe I can find out if I'm right.

This is a lovely book, with great images. I can recommend it on that level. Anyone coming to it hoping for answers to the questions raised in the first volume, though, will be deeply disappointed, and need to be ready to continue waiting - perhaps forever - for those answers. Anyone deeply interested in plot will also want to stay far away.

Lone Wolf & Cub, Vol.8: Chains of Death by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima

About a year and a half ago, I decided to re-read the Lone Wolf and Cub series, a masterpiece and towering achievement of gekiga manga, created by writer Kazuo Koike and artist Goseki Kojima in the 1970s. I figured I could get through the the twenty-eight volumes at least one a month, so it would take a couple of years.

Well, I'm now up to volume 8, so I think it will take a bit longer than that. And, as I keep saying for each book in turn, I doubt I'll have much to say: each book is very much like the one before; their strengths are their strengths; these are amazing works but what has to be said about them has been said, many times, over the past fifty years.

So I just read Chains of Death. It contains six stories. As throughout the series, they're all sequentially numbered - these are 39 through 44.

My sense is that this series went through phases or clusters - some groupings were more concerned with the central plot, some with one-off stories. They also take place in different parts of Japan, not that I'll be any good at explicating that. This book has a group of stories that take place during winter: snow and cold is important in several of them. It's also closer to the main plot; we see Yagyū Retsudō scheming in several stories, and get a flashback of his son's duel against our series hero, Ogami Ittō, for the position of the Shōgun's executioner.

The pleasures of this series, as always, is that odd mixture of the quiet moments of beauty - Kojima is masterful at depicting natural and everyday life - and the sudden interruptions of that life by extreme violence, which is what the audience, then as now, is here for. Otherwise, see what I - and many other commentators - have said about Lone Wolf and Cub earlier; it is what it is.

All of This and Nothing: Strugglin'

"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, we're back to Obscure, with the 2014 song Strugglin' from I Am the Albatross's self-titled record. They're obscure enough that they barely show up in a google search for their quirky, specific name, which saddens me - but the world is big and full of stuff, and most of it is hidden in one way or another.

I'm pretty sure this band is defunct - that their website is gone, that their Bandcamp page lists three releases ending a decade ago, and the aforementioned google search lead me to think that. But art can live forever, and I still listen to this song. (And I can't be the only one.)

There's a lot of people out there in the world tonight
A lot of people out there in the world tonight (x2)
That ain't gonna make it 'til the morning light...

This is another song that starts relatively quietly, and then goes on to burn the barn down. The lyrics are evocative, allusive, metaphoric. Something bad is happening - the singer's "baby" is "struggling," which is as specific as it gets - but the words are almost apocalyptic, all-encompassing.

When things can't get any worse, well that's when they do
Searching for a crack where the light shines through...

It has a shuffly, loud, borderline-lofi sound, and it blasts at top speed for almost five minutes - five great minutes. This is a song that shouldn't be forgotten, so I'll do my tiny bit to remind people it's out there.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of February 14, 2026

One book came in the mail this week: let me tell you about it.

Rick Geary has been doing Kickstarters for books for about the last decade - I think it started out as his weirder, quirkier projects, but there have also been a few historical-murder stories that looked a lot like the books he did for bigger publishers. So it might just be the way he initially self-publishes his work these days, which is just fine - I'm on the mailing list, so I get 'em.

The most recent book was A Billy the Kid Alphabet, which heads back a bit towards the quirky side. Geary did a more "normal" Billy the Kid book a few years ago with The True Death of Billy the Kid, which is a better bet for anyone who wants the story told in order with the facts lined up nicely. Alphabet, on the other hand, is in the style of a abecadary, with a big double-page entry (one full-page illustration, one page of text) for each letter of the alphabet, from Alias to Zero.

Billy the Kid is still a source of fascination for many - including Geary, I assume - which is why this book exists and has an audience. For, me, I'm mostly here for Geary telling me about historical murderers and showcasing his magnificently detailed pen-and-ink drawings.

Quote of the Week: The Law Is The Law, and We Can't Change It

Men, in their attitude to law, may, nowadays, be divided into those who believe that if an act is legal, it is irrelevant whether it is just and expedient, and those who believe that if it is just and expedient, it is irrelevant whether it is legal.

 - Evelyn Waugh, Robbery Under Law, p.777 in Waugh Abroad

(Source of title quote.)

Robbery Under Law by Evelyn Waugh

I've been reading a bunch of Evelyn Waugh's travel books over about the past year, in a big omnibus called Waugh Abroad. I've generally enjoyed them: Waugh was a right-wing nutbar, just this side of fascist and absolutely loony in the ways only an upper-class Englishman converted to Catholicism in adult life could be, but he was also a fine writer with a great eye and a world-class grump. So seeing him go to various Third World - I think the term didn't exist yet, but that's what it was - hells in the '30s and complain about them is a lot of fun.

The next book collected in Waugh Abroad was Robbery Under Law, subtitled "The Mexican Object-Lesson." Waugh did travel to Mexico for a few months in 1938 and wrote this book immediately thereafter, it is true. But this, sadly, is not a travel book. It's a tedious, tendentious screed that is probably only of interest as an example of what the kind of right-wing people who thought fascists were really good at building roads and keeping the lesser races down but still were going too far in the whole government-controlling-the-economy-thing considered important in 1938.

Mexico, at the time, had been through a century or more of turmoil since independence, and had had a sequence of corrupt and/or incompetent leaders, who each in turn stole what they could and either fled or the country, or, more often, were murdered by their successors. In 1938, they were officially Marxist and had suppressed the Catholic Church, two aspects of their society that Waugh, of course, hated with every fiber of his being. So, being a professional writer, he therefore spent over two hundred tightly-set pages writing against those things at great and deeply boring length. Let me be clear: it seems like Mexico was a horrible place, run by thieves and charlatans for their own benefit, and had been (with slightly different fools and charlatans, each in their turn) for decades at that point. But the things Waugh was most annoyed about are the nationalization of the oil business and the breaking up of the large estates of the rural aristocracy. And one is hard-pressed, a hundred years later, to care about either of those things if one has anything like a modern political sensibility - even a very right-wing modern political sensibility.

I was hoping for stories of Waugh traveling through another corrupt, odd country and telling the reader about it. There is a quick list of sketched moments in one chapter here: all of the rest is argumentation. And, again, unless you're the kind of interwar Anglo-Catholic Waugh was - not necessarily deeply racist, but satisfied with the hierarchies of the world, since he's near the top of them, and sure that democracy is good for the right kind of peoples, the ones with mostly pale skins - you are not going to agree with a lot of what he says.

In fact, when he tries to cover the expected objections to his position, he inadvertently implies that things were pretty horrible. Oh, sure, he says, some bishops probably abused their power, especially far from the capital - how could it be otherwise? - and, of course, the upper ranks of the priesthood was mostly made up of aristocratic younger sons, who are used to living in riches and splendor, so you can't be surprised that they continued to amass great wealth and spend it on themselves, even once they were  in religious orders. This goes on in several directions, throughout the book, and the astute reader gets a good sense of what Waugh would be happy with: the stable, organized world in which people like him are firmly on top and the Indians - he says, magnanimously, that they're not necessarily mentally inferior to "the white races," that Mexicans as a "race" have interbred between the Spanish and the "Indians" quite a lot (and he doesn't even more than very slightly hint that might be the source of their ongoing political problems), and some of those not-purely-Spanish chappies have even become quite good priests! - know their place down at the bottom of the heap.

It's too bad, because clearly Mexico was a horrible place in 1938. Waugh, though, is not the one who can describe those horrors in a way that anyone to the left of Roderick Spode will agree with. I would only recommend reading this if you've already gotten through all of the good Waugh, and probably some of the other all-too-Catholic pieces as well. Or, of course, if you are a fanatically right-wing Anglo-Catholic with fascist tendencies: it'll be right up your street.

Lovers and Haters by Gilbert Hernandez

Look, Gilbert Hernandez is one of the giants of world comics, right? So anything I say here on a minor blog is probably pointless. He's also one of the most wild-hair creators I've ever seen, prone to run off in really bizarre directions - witness Blubber, witness the long series of "The Fritz B-Move Collection," witness Birdland and Garden of the Flesh and...just about everything he's done for the past two or three decades, frankly.

It can also take a while for a new Love & Rockets collection to percolate: first the stories appear in individual issues - which have changed format a lot over the years, and are now I guess roughly annual magazine-sized things - and then those stories are usually edited a bit for book publication, to include most of the material in L&R but tweak some pages and add more. So any one book is a record of a longer time than it might seem. This book, for example, was published in 2025, but the first piece in it is dated 2014.

So a lot of what I said about Gilbert's work when I wrote about the first six issues of the current L&R series back in 2018 (!) is still relevant here: this is some of the same material. Actually, I think this is the weakest of what I remember from that material, the stuff that was most tedious and repetitive.

Which finally brings me to Lovers and Haters, the 31st volume in The Complete Love and Rockets. (Note: that doesn't mean the "library editions;" there have been I think fifteen of those so far, each roughly twice the size of a "Complete" book. It also doesn't mean the really big hardcovers, like Palomar and Locas, which have even more material but don't reprint the smaller books directly. The counts of both series also also includes the work of Gilbert's brother Jaime; their material appears side-by-side in L&R but the two have never worked together. Oh, and there's also a few stories here and there over the past forty years by a third brother, Mario, who has worked occasionally with Gilbert, just to be more confusing.)

When I wrote about that current L&R series back in 2018, I said, optimistically, that "Gilbert wrote his way out of the swamp of Too Many Fritzes." But this book collects the plotline I thought of as Too Many Fritzes, and mostly includes material later than 2018, so I was not entirely correct at that time. (And I live in hope that the things I saw then that I considered stronger, and showing a movement towards more lightness and openness in his work, will be collected themselves, eventually.)

Fritz is the half-sister of Luba, who was Gilbert's big central character for the '80s and '90s. Originally, she was a psychologist, but that may have been completely retconned away by now. In these stories, she's in her late forties - just turning fifty near the end - and has been a bad actress her entire adult life. I say "bad," but I may mean "limited" - there's a sense that she appeared in almost entirely bad movies and may not have been worse than mediocre herself.

These stories, mostly a series called "Talent," circle around Fritz, her controlling but borderline incompetent boyfriend/manager, several skeevy porn producers, and a bewildering array of younger women who adopted versions of Fritz's name to cash in on her fame, mostly by working as strippers, in porn, and in fetish movies that might not be distinguishable from porn. There's a largish cast that mostly stands around saying the same things to each other, or announcing plot and background details, as they sarcastically cut each other down. You see, they mostly hate each other, even though a lot of them work on the same movies and have sex with each other regularly - in fact, working on the same movies often is having sex with each other.

This is weird and artificial and odd on a storytelling level - before I even get into the mostly-underlying plot idea of the mad scientists who invented some kind of human growth serum that gave all of the women breasts of various massiveness (the smallest are about the size of their heads) and some men similarly freakish muscles. Oh, and there's a guy with two dicks - that seems to have been natural, though.

Just the frenzy about Fritz is already silly, as if there was a massive global industry of Linnea Quigley imitators. With all of the other material piled on top of it, Lovers and Haters is incredibly difficult to take seriously. I'm not going to try to do that: it is deeply not-serious.

There's also a lot of moments or elements that seem out of place. Or maybe I mean that the timeline is really confused, and it's unclear when all of these events are happening. Fritz is married to a woman, Pipo, in a couple of stories late in this book, which doesn't seem to match at all with her relationship with her boyfriend/manager, and Gilbert's narrative voice doesn't comment at all.

I think this is mostly for Beto completists, who want to see what's going on with his main storyline. (Spoiler: very, very little; it's chasing its own tail through sex cults and breast-inflation fetishes.) In a few years, there will be another L&R collection by Gilbert, and I don't see any way that it can be worse than this. But I have been surprised before.

Louder Than Words, Actions Speak by Sergio Aragonés

Sergio Aragonés is one of the modern masters of comics; I freely admit that. He draws quickly, really well, and in a distinctive, inherently amusing cartoony style that's more flexible and subtle than it looks. It's hard to talk about his writing, since he usually works with Mark Evanier on anything that has actual words in it and so it's difficult to tell what's pure Aragonés and what Evanier adds to the mix.

I keep picking up his books, now and then: his drawing is just funny, and his pages filled with details. A lot of the time, it's been Groo comics, which I've been reading off and on since the late '80s when my kid brother was a big fan and I read anything in comics format that came anywhere near my eyes. And, let me be polite, Groo is a collection of a few running jokes - maybe a dozen at most, with some variations - assembled in slightly different configurations monthly for decades and then slightly less often more recently. And none of those jokes are what anyone might mistake for high-brow.

So, this time, I thought: let's try some pure Aragonés. Louder Than Words, Actions Speak is a big book - well over three hundred pages - of wordless single-page comics, nearly all of them in a multi-panel format. The jokes are somewhat older than I expected: this book came out in 2024, but it collects the 6-issue Louder Than Words series from 1997 and the six-issue Actions Speak series from 2001. So there are only a couple of cellphones here, and they're the kind with a stubby antenna at the top left and a scribble to show where the keypad is.

That's OK, because Aragonés is mostly using old joke setups anyway. There are lots of kids on skateboards, people at the beach, circuses and wrestling matches, angels and animals, priests and doctors, museums and aliens and cheerleaders, muggers and ghosts and Mexican bandits. The biggest group of cartoons are about dating, with jokes about condoms and family members hiding while the couple is making out and similarly durable funnies. I would be hard-pressed to find any surprising joke in the three hundred or so here, and it would be harder to find one that could be considered entirely original - but that's not what Aragonés is doing here.

Wordless jokes have to be at least somewhat familiar: they need to be understandable without words. So we get Tarzan or King Kong; we know exactly who they are. These are all, in the Year of Our Lord 2025, dad jokes - durable, dependable, slightly shop-worn; the kind you recognize quickly and can practically tell yourself. (Well, you could tell them yourself if you could draw like Aragonés, which, if so: that's impressive.)

So the material is very familiar. It's quite possible to do wordless jokes that are not quite this obvious, but Aragonés, I think, is from the Mexican equivalent of the Borscht Belt, where standard jokes grow on trees and the children grow up telling each other "take my wife, please!" at every turn. It's not a problem, exactly - it is what it is; he is the creator he is - but a reader has to accept it, and, preferably, be ready for it.

This book is definitely funny. But, no matter how old you are - I'm in my mid-fifties - it will feel slightly older than you are, and you need to be willing to go with that.

Captain Cuttle's Mailbag edited by Edward Welch

Miscellaneous books are difficult to write about; old ones even more so. I'm going to try to explain what this book is, but I may be like a blind man describing an elephant - it's weird and quirky and very much of its time while also being a surprisingly early example of what looks a lot like a random listserv.

Captain Cuttle's Mailbag is a collection of entries, organized into thematic chapters, from the first series (1849-1855) of the weekly London magazine Notes and Queries. It was compiled for publication in 2017 by Edward Welch, whose short bio describes him mostly as a writer and editor living in Philadelphia. He also gave it the descriptive subtitle - as required for nearly every nonfiction book - "History, Folklore & Victorian Pedantry from the pages of 'Notes & Queries.'"

Notes & Queries was a reader-contributed periodical, described at launch as "a medium of inter-communication for literary men, antiquaries, genealogists, etc." Welch doesn't give us much of a sense of how it was laid out or organized, but the way it seemed to work was: some guy would send either an interesting note on some random thing he had noticed or researched, or a query about something similarly obscure. That note would be published, and sometimes other guys, from elsewhere in the UK, would chime in on the same subject, to amplify what the first guy said, give a wider context, or run off in their own direction - and those would be published in later weeks, leading to what could be a slow-motion conversation.

N&Q seems to have been made up of a bewildering myriad of small items every week - again, not a million miles away from some early-90s email listserv. Welch organized this book into four large sections - Anecdotes of History, Relics of Folklore, Language and Literature, and Scientific Investigation - each of which is broken into maybe half-a-dozen chapters on more specific topics. Contributors don't really recur in this book, so it's one long string of variously pedantic and stuffed-shirt Victorian men (some clearly more cranks than others) writing in their best "serious" style to one another to impress each other with their erudition and/or request information for deeply specific and often pointless-sounding researches.

It's generally amusing and fun: the short pieces make it a good book to dip into at random times, and the organization means you can read four or five bits on epitaphs, or rural superstitions, or all the birds named in Shakespeare when you feel in the mood. The mindset is deeply Victorian, as you would expect: there's an occasional comment on something being "suitable for reading in the family," meaning that there's nothing that could possibly be offensive to the most nervous five-year-old girl imaginable. One might also detect certain attitudes towards the rural peasantry, foreigners, and women that the reader (one hopes) does not share.

It's a neat book that gets a reader deeply into the mindset of a previous era, and provides that useful parallax view: that people back then were still people, with a lot of the same concerns, issues, and problems as we do today, but that they also had substantially different backgrounds, standard ideas, prejudices, and mindsets. So they're the same as us...except in the ways they're massively different.

All of This and Nothing: Satin in a Coffin

"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.

Some songs are meant to be taken literally; I'm usually not fans of those. I love metaphors, quirky language, strange flights.

You said, "Do you believe what you're saying?"
Yeah, right now, but not that often

My favorite Modest Mouse song, by a long stretch, is the rattling, thumping, banjo-fueled Satin in a Coffin, a song about being dead, or pretending to be dead, and all that might mean.

Are you dead or are you sleeping?
God, I sure hope you are dead

It can be about anything killing you, or anything you worry might be killing you - relationships, substances, work, just living in the world. It is about any, or all, of those things, if you want it to be in the moment.

Well, everybody's talking about their short lists
Everybody's talking about death!

And that banjo, along with singer Isaac Brock's increasingly loud and tormented yells as the song goes on, are just perfect. This is a short song, but it goes exactly where it needs to.

Books Read: January 2026

During the first, and very cold, month of 2026, I stayed inside a lot and read books. (Spoiler Alert! I do that in all seasons anyway.) Here's what I read; links to my posts will be added later:

Jared Throne, Bridge Planet Nine (digital, 1/1)

Laura Pérez, Nocturnos (digital, 1/3)

P.G. Wodehouse, Pigs Have Wings (1/3)

Philippe Riche, The Alliance of the Curious: #1 Sapiens (digital, 1/4)

Matt Foy and Christopher J. Olson, Mystery Science Theater: A Cultural History (1/4)

Alexandro Jodorowsky and Mœbius, The Incal, Vol. 3: What Lies Beneath (digital, 1/10)

Pornsak Pinchetshote, Jesse Lonergan and Jeff Powell, Man's Best (digital, 1/11)

Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (in Counterfeit Unrealities, 1/11)

Jeff Lemire and Malachi Ward, Black Hammer, Vol. 8: The End (digital, 1/16)

Lawrence Wood, Your Caption Has Been Selected (1/17)

Dave Barry, Class Clown (1/17)

Navied Mahdavian, This Country (1/18)

Matt Wagner and Brennan Wagner, Grendel: Devil's Odyssey (digital, 1/19)

Yasuhiko Nishizawa, The Man Who Died Seven Times (1/19)

Jean Zeid and Emilie Rouge, The Age of Video Games (digital, 1/24)

Caroline Cash, Girl in the World (digital, 1/25)

Peter Bagge, The Complete Neat Stuff (digital, 1/31)

James Thurber, Writings & Drawings (1/31)

I'm writing this right after having added the book I finished on February 1 into my reading notebook, so I can state definitively this time that I continued to read after this point. I expect I will list them here in time, too.

Quote of the Week: Vocations

In a subdued voice Jantiff stated that he had not yet discovered a specialty which he felt would interest him across the entire span of his existence. Lile Ravensroke replied that to his almost certain knowledge no divine fiat had ever ordained that toil must be joyful or interesting. Aloud Jantiff acknowledged the rightness of his father's views, but privately clung to the hope that somehow he might turn his frivolity to profit.

 - Jack Vance, Wyst: Alastor 1716, p.305 in Alastor

Fishflies by Jeff Lemire

It still surprises me when I lose track of a "favorite" creator's work - in my head, I'm still the guy who spent sixteen years diligently tracking every last thing being published in my areas of concern, so that feels impossible to me. But I haven't tracked like that for two decades now, and I don't even see the trade publications I used to use as initial sources. Even if I wanted to, both PREVIEWS and Publishers Weekly are gone or vastly diminished from what they were when I relied on them.

But when I recently read 10,000 Ink Stains, Jeff Lemire's recent memoir of his career in comics, some of those old habits came back - I took notes. (I keep a small google doc with mostly series I want to keep reading in the library app - keeping them more-or-less in the same order, so I rotate through and remember to keep going with the ones I want to continue with. On the other side, I just removed my entry for Asterix as I was updating it based on reading this book.) So I now have a list of things I missed by Jeff Lemire.

Some of them are his Big Two superhero work - those have question marks after them, and I'm not sure if or when I'll get to them. But I also missed some of his more "indy" work, which I've consistently (well, mostly, with a big asterisk for Ascender/Descender, where the worldbuilding triggered a strong reaction) enjoyed - so I have a list of those books, and plan to get to them in '26.

First, though, he had a major series recently that I missed - seven issues of sixty-ish pages each, collected as a single book this past March. Written and drawn by Lemire, with one flashback section drawn by Sean Kuruneru. That was Fishflies, another story of rural Ontario and the hardscrabble lives of the damaged people who live there, like a lot of his solo work going back all the way to Essex County.

Fishflies is the story of two people - that's them on the cover. She's Francis "Franny" Fox, an elementary-schooler in Belle River, a small town in Southern Ontario, near the water. He's Lee Simard, a minor criminal, probably in his late twenties, who held up the Belle River Mini-Mart one night, shot a kid coming there to buy popsicles, and then...something happened to him.

It's the height of summer, the few weeks around a full moon when the local mayflies - called fishflies here, because they come from the water and smell like fish - swarm over everything. Some of you may have similar insect infestations where you live: I've seen cicadas here in New Jersey and "love bugs" down in Florida. This is a big, annoying, unpleasant one - the fishflies gather in huge masses for a few days, and then die. They don't bite or sting; they're purely a nuisance - the worst thing is their vast number and the unpleasant crunch underfoot.

There's a supernatural element to this book, which isn't explained until much later. 

Lee flees the botched robbery and his shooting of the kid, Paul Dupuis. He seems to be shot himself, in exactly the same place as the kid. He's also tormented by the fishflies, which seem to be biting him. He runs through the fields, and ends up on the farm where Franny lives with her sour, abusive father. She takes him in, making him a place to stay in an unused silo. She knows he "did something bad," but insists God can forgive him if he changes.

And he does change - but not the way she means. See that thing on the cover? That's Bug, which Simard transforms into by the next day. He can't talk, but is strong and can jump really far. Franny still wants him to be her friend. She still wants to protect him, and vice versa.

Meanwhile, the local head of police Danny Laraque is looking for Simard. We also follow Dupuis's mother Helen, first watching over her comatose son in the hospital. And there's an old couple, brother and sister, who have seen "bugs" like Simard emerge before - and devoted their lives to killing those bugs.

Franny and Bug flee - and the police realize that she's missing and think Simard has kidnapped her. Things escalate. We learn the secret of the supernatural element: why Simard became a bug, and how it's happened before. All of those characters circle the story, and circles always lead back to where they began.

Fishflies is somewhat horror-tinged and somewhat crime-story-plotted, but it's still very much in the mainstream of Lemire's solo work: damaged people, in poor circumstances, in small Ontario towns, in stories that are, to quote myself, "literary explorations of death and regret and loss." His scratchy art is perfect for those kind of stories, those hardscrabble people, and it works really well for a giant anthropomorphic bug, too. Lemire gives this story the page-space it needs to breathe, including sidebars about fishflies from secondary characters in this town at the end of most of the original issues. It's creepy and sad and dark, but does give a glimmer of hope for some people, especially Franny - who needs it most.

Criminy by Roger Langridge and Ryan Ferrier

Roger Langridge has an almost uniquely quirky comics career, and I sometimes forget that. He has some projects where he does everything, writing and drawing. (I think he even does the coloring and lettering, at least sometimes - this book right in front of me now doesn't credit anyone else with those tasks.) Sometimes, though, he just writes - as in The Baker Street Peculiars, which I saw recently.

And sometimes he just does the art, as in today's book, Criminy, which was written by Ryan Ferrier. This is from 2018, as I'm still poking around the odder corners of my library book-reading app and finding unexpected things by creators that I follow, more or less. Ferrier also writes this in what I think of as a very Langridge kind of way, so it reads  not all that differently from all-Langridge works.

Criminy was originally a four-issue comics series, and then collected in this more durable form immediately afterward. It's a classic-animation-inspired - Langridge mentions the Fleischer studio several times in the sketchbook section at the end - in both look and story, as the Criminy family goes through various travails, as narrated in rhyme.

Daggum Criminy and his family - wife Ditto, older son Nadda and the baby twins Bitt & Bobb - live on the bucolic Isle of Burnswick, and are very happy there...until the pirates led by Baron Bugaboo attack and capture all of the locals. The Criminys sneak away, and set sail on a raft at the end of the first issue.

Each subsequent issue sees them finding another place, where there's more trouble. First they're sucked up into a gigantic "floaty-boat" run by a robot-squid-whatever Kapitan, where they join a vast horde of other folks similarly captured and waiting decades to be freed, until the Criminys inadvertently spark a squabble and wreck the ship. Then they're swallowed by a living island and forced to work ceaselessly in its bowels for the benefit of the leisured aristocrats who live on top - until everything goes wrong there as well, though this time there's a happier outcome.

The Criminy family's third destination is Slinkle Reef, a supposed paradise run by skeletons in zoot suits, an eternal carnival full of free food, entertainment, games, and frivolity. There is, of course, a dark side, and the Criminys find it and use it to overthrow the Slinkles and free a gigantic new friend.

With the aid of that friend, they can return to Burnswick, save their neighbors, kick out the pirates, and live forever afterward in peace and harmony, protected, we think, from any subsequent pirates or similar miscreants.

This is an all-ages book, which means the dangers are all cartoony - reasonably threatening on that level, and full of excitement, but characters can get eaten without a drop of blood (and, maybe, even get out later some of the time). There's a lot of talk of family, as the Criminys stick together - well, most of the time, since Nadda gets a moment or two of rebellion in, as required - through thick and thin to win out in the end. Langridge makes it all look like a cartoon from the '30s, and Ferrier's often-rhyming captions and similar dialogue (not rhyming, but just a bit off from colloquial, to sound a bit more serious or formal or just quirky) also work well for the story. This is a fun book - not just for the kids, but probably more for them than for older people.

Wyst: Alastor 1716 by Jack Vance

This is the third Alastor novel, from 1978. Like the first two - Trullion and Marune - it's set in the titular globular cluster, nearby but not part of the Gaean Reach of much of Vance's other SF novels. The three are entirely separate stories; the only real connecting link is the presence of the overlord of the Alastor Cluster, the Connatic, who has a somewhat larger presence in this novel than the first two.

Wyst: Alastor 1716 opens in the Connatic's palace on Lusz, where he is preparing to receive the four Whispers of Arrabus, elected leaders of the main polity of the world Wyst. Arrabus is entirely urbanized, several massive cities with billions of inhabitants - the rest of Wyst is thinly populated and doesn't seem to have much in the way of government above a village level.

A century ago, Arrabus had a revolution: the previous aristocratic rule was overthrown by a philosophy called Egalism, which seeks to make all people aggressively equal. Now, everyone lives in roughly identical apartments in giant blocks, works only a dozen hours a week at "drudge," eats the same heavily-processed food, and spends most of their time in recreation and affairs. By most accounts, Arrabins are happy, though smug about their system and punctilious about what they will or won't do - and, of course, they break some of the rules of Egalism routinely for themselves while insisting on them for others. As usual, Vance is interested in both what societies say about themselves and how they actually run on the ground - and the interesting, specific ways those two things diverge.

The Whispers are the four co-heads of what government Arrabus has, standing atop a loose system of elected block-level leaders in turn nominating sub-sets of themselves for groups covering larger and larger areas, all the way up the chain to the Whispers, each of whom represents one of Arrabus's four cities. They are coming to Lusz to invite the Connatic to attend the upcoming festival for the Centenary of Egalism, and also, the Connatic thinks, to ask for aid to adjust their system somewhat: they are overwhelmed by immigrants seeking an easy life, and their machinery has not been maintained as it should have been, which is going to come to a head quite soon if not corrected. Arrabins, of course, consider work and expertise and specialization "elitism," and that all is beneath them - so they do work grudgingly but not well, and don't want to be good at any of it.

As the Connatic turns his attention to Wyst - unspoken but implied is that most planets get very little of his time, since there are three thousand worlds of humans ostensibly under his rule - and discovers a series of increasingly-alarmed messages from his representative on Wyst, Cursor Bonamico, and Bonamico's staff. Apparently, an offworlder named Jantiff Ravesroke has gotten into some kind of trouble, which may have wider implications, and the Connatic's direct attention is desperately needed.

The book then shifts to Jantiff, who will be our main character. We get a brief sketch of his young life: he grew up in a family of skilled upper-middle-class workers in the city of Frayness on Zeck, Alastor 503, but wanted to become an artist. He won a contest for his art, which gave him the opportunity to travel to another world in the Cluster, and he chose Wyst for its famously magnificent light - and, maybe, also a bit because of its inhabitants' fabled freedoms and leisure.

He arrives in Arrabus, is assigned an apartment in the city of Uncibal, and quickly learns that Egalism is not as wonderful as he was led to believe when most of his goods are stolen while he's out of the apartment. (On the ground level, Egalism comes to mean that if anyone else has something you want but don't have, grabbing it for yourself is entirely moral.)

The rest of the novel is a slow burn from there: Jantiff lives among the locals, learning from them and influencing them in turn, and Vance quietly lays out some moments that start to explain some of the unexpected things that happened when the Connatic met with the Whispers in the first chapter and, also, those increasingly frantic messages from the Connatic's representatives on Wyst. Eventually, things get dangerous, and Jantiff goes on the run.

This is a 1978 space opera novel, so it does all end well for Jantiff. There was a major criminal conspiracy going on, which he sparked, in an odd way, and he's instrumental in both bringing it to the Conantic's attention and helping the Connatic to break that conspiracy. Wyst is slightly longer than the first two Alastor books, which gives Vance room to show Jantiff's day-to-day life in Uncibal, giving an interesting picture of the Egalistic life in both its positive and negative aspects.

Those two sides of Vance's writing - the adventure-plot and the anthropological - come together well in Wyst; a lot of his novels lean towards the former and the novellas to the latter, so it's a treat to see them so well integrated into a single whole here.

Death in Trieste by Jason

If I say this book is more like Good Night, Hem than like Upside Dawn, does that help anyone place it? How about if I say that's not just because Athos makes a few appearances here?

(Athos is turning into the glue of Jason's later career, the character who turns up everywhere and has met everyone. See The Last Musketeer for his initial appearance, if you're confused. Not that will necessarily make you less confused, but it's a good place to start.)

Death in Trieste is a book with three long stories. They are not formally connected, though David Bowie - in one of his most glam '70s incarnations - is a character in two of them. They are somewhat typical Jason stories: laconic, allusive, but also deeply genre stories, told through gesture and implication, with blank-faced characters we're often supposed to recognize - usually as "the vampire" or "the secret agent" or Rasputin, but in one story here as "Annie Lennox circa 1985" and other pop-music figures. (Jason's drawing style makes the latter somewhat more difficult: they're all anthropomorphic animals with big blank eyes and fairly standard faces for their "type - I'm not sure who most of the musical characters in the story "Sweet Dreams" are meant to be.)

"The Magritte Affair" leads off. It's set in contemporary Paris, where a group of criminals place specially-made Magritte knockoffs in the homes of random people, which turns them into Surrealists, complete with black suits and bowler hats. (This oddly reminded me of the Monty Python sketch where an alien blancmange turns tennis players into Scotsmen.) The usual wisecracking detective duo - a man and a woman - track down the ringleader of the gang and foil the plot, just before Surrealism completely takes over the world.

The title story is in the middle, and it's a very Jasonian mix of genre tropes and characters - a bewildering mix of characters across Europe in the '20s (including a time-traveling David Bowie, Marlene Dietrich, Nosferatu, and the oracular skull of Rasputin) are involved in several intersecting plots mostly involving Dadaism, the theater, and a rampaging vampire. Athos shows up here, wandering through some of the later scenes, and influences events but has no dialogue.

Last is "Sweet Dreams," in which several New Wave bands are actually superheroes led by Avalon, a Dr. X-ish wheelchair-bound presumably-psychic. They battle mummies, living suits of armor, and other menaces, but are helpless against a giant meteor that has been diverted by unknown forces and will strike Earth with devastating force right after the end of the story. (A space mission by "Starman" - the same Bowie as in the previous story - was unsuccessful in shifting the meteor.)

Jason has done some other kinds of books over the past decade - the travelogue On the Camino, for example - but this book is firmly in the mainstream of his work. I find the joys and strengths of that work really clear in the reading, but difficult to nail down when writing about it. No one else is like Jason; he mixes high and low culture fluidly, telling what should be junky stories with the chill of high culture and a detachment that makes them fascinating and distinct. You might have to deeply enjoy both high and low culture to really appreciate Jason: for me, that's no handicap, but it might be for some readers.