Laughing Gas by P.G. Wodehouse

I don't like to make sweeping statements about writers with around a hundred published books, since there's likely to be some oddball piece I've forgotten. But I'm pretty sure that Laughing Gas is P.G. Wodehouse's only fantasy novel. (The Swoop!, which I haven't read, is arguably science fiction, but that's different, he said as a former editor who specialized in that difference.)

It's from 1936, which I (and most others) consider Wodehouse's high period - it came in the middle of Heavy Weather, Thank You, Jeeves, Right Ho, Jeeves, The Luck of the Bodkins, Summer Moonshine, The Code of the Woosters, and Uncle Fred in the Springtime - a murderer's row of humor if ever I saw one. Not all of those books are his absolute tip-top - Summer Moonshine is a minor book; you might be thinking of the Blandings book Summer Lightning; I was - but it's a pretty impressive run for six years ('33-'39).

Laughing Gas is also arguably minor: it's not part of any of Wodehouse's series, the fantasy element is a bit odd and doesn't entirely emphasize his strengths, and it has one of Wodehouse's intellectually duller protagonists without a Jeeves figure to relieve him. On the positive side, there's lots of great Hollywood material, including a wonderfully beastly child star - Wodehouse didn't have major child characters in his work very often, but they tended to be great when he did.

That slightly dim hero is Reggie Havershot, third Earl of that name, the usual late-twenties rich and unencumbered Wooster-esque figure. He's in Hollywood because "the family" (the usual Formidable Aunt) wants him to stop a cousin, "Eggy" Egremont, from marrying an unsuitable American woman.

That woman is Ann Bannister, a former reporter who was briefly engaged to Reggie two years before (of course). She's now minder to the child star Joey Cooley, though she's maneuvering to become the new personal publicist for big star April June.

Reggie met April on the train to Hollywood, and she got her hooks into him then. Since he is dim, he thinks she's wonderful and they have the love that is true. Everyone else thinks she's leading him on for the title, and that she's mean and self-obsessed, but Reggie, like a good Wodehouse hero, will not have the name of the woman he loves bandied about.

But then Reggie goes into a dental surgery at the same time as that child star, Joey Cooley, and the two of them swap bodies "in a sort of fourth dimension." Reggie wakes up as Joey, though he has some trouble remembering that consistently - he thinks of himself as his former, large, strapping self, so the fact that he is now a weedy pre-teen with golden locks is a continual surprise to him.

Meanwhile, Joey is having a grand time in Reggie's body - he'd been keeping a list of people he wants to "pop in the snoot," from directors to scenario writers to April, and now that he is large and beefy, he's going to take full advantage of all the snoot-popping he can do.

Over the course of about two days, in which Reggie-in-Joey's body is stuck with the schedule of a child star living in the home of the head of his studio and under the baleful eye of that studio head's nasty sister, Reggie keeps trying to continue his old life - did I mention he's a bit dim? he's the kind of person who is no good at adjusting his plans to current circumstances - and is moping over what he assumes is the loss of April forever.

It turns out Joey was an absolute terror, and a lot of the things the kid did pre-swap come back to bedevil Reggie over the course of those days. Also, he's thrown together with Ann quite a bit, and comes to curse ever having let her go, particularly when he finally sees what a nasty person April is.

There are complications and chases and various other colorful characters along the way, and, of course, Reggie and Joey do end up colliding in the fourth dimension once again, so they can return to their respective correct bodies and their appropriate happy endings. They each somewhat ruin the life of the other, but in ways that they're both happy with, in the end.

Again, I think this is a bit on the minor side - the fantasy mechanism is fun, but Reggie is a bit too dim to take best advantage of it, and we don't see April being as horrible as we're told she is. But it is a fun Wodehouse book from his best period, with a lot of amusing material.

All of This and Nothing: Cage in a Cave

"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.

I have a weakness for concept records. I think I developed that growing up in the 1970s - it was hard to avoid concept albums then, and we all came down with at least a mild case.

This week's song comes from a concept record - Rasputina's 2007 Oh Perilous World! I couldn't give you a decent coherent description of the overall story - the Wikipedia article includes a lot of things I don't really remember or didn't focus on. But the record is at least partially about Fletcher Christian, the famous mutineer from the Bounty.

And the song that's all about him is Cage in a Cave.

Fletcher Christian, he found him a cave
and he'd go there to be alone

Rasputina is a band that uses odd instrumentation - the lead is usually an electric cello - and singer Melora Creager sings in what I think is a slightly affected style, too: it's all distanced, strange, specific, different. She also writes the song, and is not afraid of wordplay and long words that take over their lines.

To fits of melancholy
he was increasingly prone

So this is a song I like largely for vibes reasons. It's about a dude hiding out, because the things he tried to do haven't worked out the way he hoped. So he's off in a cave, where he can be alone.

But, most of all, it sounds cool: it's a magnificent, enjoyable "everybody go away and leave me alone" song.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of July 18, 2026

This is slightly cheating: I'm writing this the morning of Friday, July 10, and the three books below all arrived earlier this week. But I already have a post about new books going up this Sunday, so this one gets bumped back a week. No one cares about the exact timing anyway.

I was on vacation this week - still am, as of the moment I'm typing this - and wanted some things to read. (Because three big bookcases full of stuff clearly wasn't enough, as often is true.) I ordered some things from that retailer we all wish we didn't use as much as we do, and three of the four books I bought came quickly. (One more is still in transit from somewhere more distant; I imagine I'll post about that when it finally arrives.)

Anyway, this is what arrived Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week - in three separate packages on three separate days for maximum environmental impact, I guess.

For a reading project: The Moving Target, the first of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novels. I've already read this, and written a post about it, so what else can I say here? Hmmm. I have a suspicion that this book was printed print-on-demand, if that's interesting. It's the Vintage Crime/Black Lizard edition from 1998, but the copyright page doesn't have a listing of what printing it is. Also, the covers curl somewhat more than usual while reading, the text is ever-so-slightly fuzzy, and there's a bunch of blank pages at the end. All of that, in my mind, adds up to POD - but there's no bar code at the end of the book block, so I can't be sure. If it is POD, it's very close to a "real" offset-printed book, which is nice.

Because I like to try to read longer books when I have a few days free to dive into them: Witch King, the beginning of a fantasy trilogy from Martha Wells. (I almost said "new" trilogy, but this is from 2023, is already in paperback, and I think the sequel is out or nearly out.) I'm not quite a quarter of the way into this one, and looking at my days of vacation left, I might not manage to finish it off before Monday's return to work. So far, it's a meaty, complex book with two timelines, but, given its trilogy-starter status, I'm trying not to expect an actual ending here. If I do get one, that can be a pleasant surprise.

And, more or less as an alternate choice if I decided I didn't want to read Witch King next, I also got Jack Vance's 1982 novel Suldrun's Garden. I've been working my way through Vance novel-series over the past couple of years, and I think I've gotten to all of the classic Vance that has been collected into omnibuses. So now this fantasy trilogy is probably next, and then I'll have to figure out where to go from there. I did read this, I think, but it was a long, long time ago - probably in the mid to late '80s, having gotten them from the SFBC a decade or so before I went to work there.

Quote of the Week: Natural Mechanisms

The lawyer talked. There are more millionaires in this country than in any other, he said, and at the same time more robbers and killers. Therein lay significance. Extremes in riches make extremes in crime. As long as a Social System permitted the acquisition of extreme riches, there would be equalizing crime and the Government and all law-enforcement organizations might as well fold their hands and accept it.

 - Edward Anderson, Thieves Like Us, pp.339-340 in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s

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.