Roaming by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki

The publisher says this is an adult book, but it's about young people (nineteen; at my age nineteen is very young) figuring out what they want out of life and how to live in the world, so it's at least thematically appropriate for not-quite-adult readers. I'm tagging it thus; complain in comments if you think high schoolers should be shielded from the view of first-year college students traveling to New York, drinking and smoking pot, swearing and causing trouble, staying in hostels and getting busy. (And then I'll point and laugh at you, because you are just wrong.)

Roaming is the third major graphic novel by cousins Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki, after 2008's Skim and 2014's This One Summer. (So we can expect their next book together about 2035, assuming three points can be extrapolated infinitely.) I don't know how they work together. Jillian is a cartoonist who does other projects all on her own, both writing and drawing. Mariko has written other comics, but I don't think she draws. So my assumption is the art is all Jillian, but not that the writing is all Mariko. And we all know what they say about assumptions.

It's set in 2009. Two friends who grew up together in some random Toronto suburb, Zoe and Dani, are meeting up at Newark Airport on spring break, to spend a week together in NYC, after going away to different Canadian colleges for the past year. Zoe is aiming for a STEM-ish degree; Dani is studying art - again, they're second-semester freshmen, so all of this is new and somewhat tentative.

When they meet in Newark, Dani has brought along a new friend: Fiona, another art student, assured and opinionated and a former New Yorker herself. We think this will be the story of how Fiona's presence affects Zoe and Dani's old comfortable friendship, and that's true...but not in the way we first expect, seeing quiet Zoe react warily to brash Fiona.

It's organized into five sections, corresponding to the five days. We open with Zoe alone in that airport, and we close on a subway, all three women heading to one last new experience on the day they'll fly out. And much-too-old me ended the book thinking they're heading in the wrong direction, even if they do have most of the day, to be sure to get to the airport on time. But that's old-person thinking; they're trying to cram as much experience into a few days as possible - to be somewhere they've dreamed about for years. So I can worry about them, but I can't fault them.

The plot is deceptively simple: they wander around the city, doing things - apparently from a list Zoe and Dani worked out ahead of time. Fiona, who was not part of the planning and is vastly less go-along and vastly more opinionated about everything NYC, pushes them in very different directions - not always the ones you'd expect. And Zoe connects with Fiona. And Dani and Zoe talk, eventually, about who they used to be as friends and who they are now after a year away at different universities.

My fingers wanted to type "universes" there. It's almost equally true. They're doing different things, living different lives, and we get only snippets of those new lives here - but enough to know they're as tumultuous and often uncomfortable as most lives. They have idealized visions of each other - their dreams from high school, mostly - and Roaming is, in part, how they learn that they each are not the people they dreamed about being - maybe not yet, or maybe not ever.

What it's mostly about is circling back to someone who was really important in your life, thinking you can pick right back up where you left off, and you both have changed. You may still be friends, you may still be really close friends, but you're not sixteen anymore: you've both already changed, and you will both keep changing.

And the dialogue is great; true, in that broken, rambling, random way that people really talk. Half-thoughts, cut-off sentences, pasts alluded to rather than detailed. The Tamakis don't tell us everything about Dani and Zoe, but they tell us what we need to know, and they show us how Dani and Zoe used to be with each other, and how they are now.

This is a lovely book about an important time of life, and an important kind of transition. We all have old friends, and we are all changing, all the time. Even if we're no longer nineteen, Roaming has a lot to say to us.

Thorn by Jeff Smith

It's always complicated looking at the early stuff. Especially when "the early stuff" hasn't been publicly available for a few decades, and was very much a trial run for the later stuff, which used a lot of the same elements and ideas in a more coherent, consistent way.

That's why it took until 2024 for Thorn: The Complete Proto-Bone College Strips 1982-1986 to be published; Jeff Smith knew that as well as anyone, and Bone, even now, is his major work, the core of his resume, and probably still his largest source of income. Add that to any creator's standard disinterest at looking back at juvenilia, and this is work that could easily have stayed moldering in a vault indefinitely, only to roll out in some posthumous Complete Works or similar exercise.

But, for whatever reason, Smith decided to look back, to clean up, and to publish a comprehensive collection of his earliest major work: it shipped to his Kickstarter backers recently and is scheduled to hit regular retail channels this summer.

It's a big book: over three hundred pages, on good paper, in a wider-than-tall format suitable for printing strip comics two-up on each page, in a large, clean presentation. And the material is equally comprehensive, with all of the strips Smith did in college - the full run of Thorn from his college paper The Sundial, a short try-out called Mickey & Rudy that ran very briefly during a Thorn hiatus, and a book-formatted one-pager from another campus publication - surrounded by notes, introductions, and other material to put it into context and explain how it all came to be.

So, physically and technically, this is impressive. It's the best possible presentation for this material, treating it all seriously and presenting it all well and clearly. The material itself if a bit more of a mixed bag, which is what we all assumed.

Thorn was a daily strip - five days a week, during the four quarters of the Ohio State academic calendar - and it has the rhythms of a daily. It wanders, it digresses, it has one-off silliness and gags. Dailies, especially by college students, tend to be "about" everything in their creator's worlds, almost equally, and that's the case here. The first two years of Thorn feature a shorter, substantially different version of the main plot from Bone, alongside other material and including topical elements that dropped out of the later comic-book version.

Most obviously, Thorn was a Reagan-era strip. There's a Reagan caricature that shows up late in the run, and other digs earlier on. Smith has a whole quirky subplot about Thorn's religious mania, which loosely ties into a storyline about a con-man evangelist - it was the 1980s, and shady evangelists were big in both pop-culture and the real world. There's also plenty of Cold War material, including a major antagonist - a Russian-accented pig who denies he's a pig - that dropped out between this version and Bone.

It's not all successful, or artfully done, but it's all authentic. Smith was young, working on deadlines, and getting his stuff down on paper to tell stories. Some of the threads don't go much of anywhere, or are phrased weirdly - the Thorn religious material, and her subsequent feminism, have particularly stilted phrasing a lot of the time, either because that's how those topics were discussed in Ohio in the '80s or because that's how Smith could phrase them for a general newspaper.

The art runs through the same variations, too: some of it is as crisp and clear as early Bone, and some is a lot sketchier, or with half-formed ideas left in the drawing or half-erased. Thorn herself in particular isn't as pretty as I think Smith wanted her to be: her face is usually an only-slightly-younger version of Grand'ma Ben's. Or maybe what I mean is that she's treated as an adult here, and turns into an ingenue for Bone. She clearly does seem to be somewhat surer of herself, and possibly older, here than in Bone.

All of that is reading Thorn with one eye on the future. It's more difficult to think of it as a thing complete in itself, to imagine how we would look at it if Smith had never reworked this material into Bone, if he'd, for example, done something like RASL or Tuki first in the comics field. That's also partially because a few years of a daily, even one with a clearly defined central story (at least for those first two years) like Thorn, isn't generally one thing: it's a conglomeration of dozens or hundreds of things, one per day, for as long as the strip runs. Dailies generally stop rather than end - even this one, with that clear plotline, kept going almost as long again after the big climax.

Thorn is a fun '80s-era college strip, and a fascinating signpost on the way to Bone. Smith was a solid artist even this far back, and does at least workmanlike art all of the time, and quite nice art fairly regularly. It's a quirky, interesting precursor to a major work, and it's great to see it get published in this definitive edition.

The Armadillo Prophecy by Zerocalcare

OK: let me start again, from the beginning.

I read one Zerocalcare book a few months back: Forget My Name, which I thought was his breakthrough or biggest book (or maybe just that in the English language), but found some elements of it hard to parse. It seemed like some of what tripped me up was just the way he tells stories, so I thought I might as well go back to his first book and see what I found there.

This is that book: The Armadillo Prophecy was published in 2011 in the author's native Italy, with this 2023 English-language edition translated by Carla Roncalli di Montorio. One minor point: the first section of this book - about a dozen pages - seems to have been added nine years later (so about 2020) as a later prologue, to connect to the author's later work and revisit some of the themes.

Like Forget, it's structured as a constellation of short sections, circling a cluster of central concerns and ideas without directly telling a single coherent story or turning into a single narrative. Also like Forget, it's entirely from within Zero's mind - there are other characters, but he explicitly calls out that he's drawing them in quirky ways (I'll come back to that) which is also a sneaky way of making clear that he's also writing about them entirely as he sees or understands them.

What I mean is: I don't think Zerocalcare's books are about a wider world. They're all about what it feels like to be Zerocalcare, what is going on in his head, how he feels and thinks about things. Other people exist - he's not some kind of solipsist - but we'll never get their viewpoints, and their concerns will never be on the same scale as Zero's.

In fact, the second most important character - here, and, I think, in his work in general - is that armadillo on the cover, the external manifestation of his internal voice. The movie based on this book describes the armadillo as being Zero's "fears and insecurities," but I think it's wider than that - the armadillo is the eternally questioning internal voice, the kind that can turn into something like a separate persona for people who live mostly in their own heads.

I haven't yet said what Armadillo is "about." There was an event that sparked all of the thoughts here - something from the outside world that sent Zero into this internal cascade. And a more conventional book would be "about" that event, that person, somewhat equally about the two of them.

That's not how Armadillo works; I don't think it's how Zero works in general. To be blunt, Armadillo is a book about someone else's death, entirely about what changes that made in Zero's thinking.

Camille was a teenage friend, part of a group of four that hung out all the time. Zero had a huge crush on her, of course - a book like this can't start from anywhere else. And of course he never told her, or did anything about it. And of course she moved away, and he only saw her rarely after that. And of course she died very young, and tragically - the word "anorexia" is mentioned once, and no other details are ever given.

We don't learn about Camille here. We know the young Zero desperately wanted her, in the ways sixteen-year-olds desperately want things. We see that she was pretty, and always there. We probably remember similar crushes from our own youth, and understand. But Camille is just an image - again, other people aren't important here. She isn't even on most of the pages - not even referenced in a majority of the sections, if I wanted to start counting pages. She's not a person, because Zero never actually had a real relationship with her. If I wanted to be cruel, I'd say Zero never tried to know her as a person: he thought that required dating her, and he couldn't work up the courage to do that, so instead he left her as a mysterious, unknowable Other.

So Camille's death is the moment that sparked this book, but the book is more about Zero being neurotic and, maybe, beginning to realize that and (even more of a maybe) thinking that he might want to be slightly less neurotic and more straightforward in his life.

Autobio comics are often about neurotic young men wrapped up in their own heads. Zero has an energetic line and a quick way with patter-y writing that emphasizes that rush-of-thinking aspect of neurosis - Armadillo is fun to read and deeply entertaining. We know this kind of guy, and Zero presents himself well in that tricky balance: clearly not functioning well in society, but not a complete goofball, either.

That energetic line and visual inventiveness also comes out with a lot of secondary characters - one oft-repeated schtick here is the "in order to preserve his privacy, I'll present Character X as <insert random thing>". Zero's parents are each seen just a couple of times, and treated this way - in forms that I gather continue throughout his work, since they're drawn the same way in Forget, and informed some of the structure of Forget. Here it's mostly a joke, but an important joke - it keeps the circumscribed, Zero-focused nature of the whole project central, since he isn't going to accurately depict other people. Again: not the ways they look and not the ways they think.

I  gather from Forget that Zero has become somewhat more outward-focused than he started, which is good - this is awfully insular, awfully wrapped up in the head of one mid-twenties Italian guy, and there's only so much material that can be wrung from one guy's neuroses. (On the other hand, he's already done something like half a dozen GNs, a movie and two animated TV series, so maybe this particular well of neurosis is a cash-cow.)

I like the energy here, I like the self-awareness, I like the strength and vigor of the drawing. I'd like a little more reflection, more of a sense that the rest of the world actually does exist, and that other people have separate, different concerns. But it's a young creator's first project, so all of that is to be expected, and Forget shows that, in a really weird, quirky way, he did start concerning himself with at least his family's history, though he weirdly fictionalized that in ways I'm still not sure how to take.

Portions for Foxes: Eleanor Friedberger

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

Here's another song where I have to admit I don't know the background. It's a 2013 song by a singer-songwriter who has had more than a few records, I think a busy career, and is probably still out there, doing something interesting.

A song is a moment, and you can love a moment even if you don't know the whole story.

This is Stare at the Sun by Eleanor Friedberger, a mostly happy song with some depths and darknesses hiding within it. Because the sun is wonderful and warming and brings life to us all, but, as the title implies, you don't want to look directly at it, do you?

‘Cause when I’m with you everything’s treasure
I forget what it’s like to be gone
I’m far from the town in the suburbs of your pleasure
I've been in exile so long

The person she's singing to is the sun, by the way. That's the metaphor. Or maybe the relationship is the sun: you don't want to dwell on it too much, or that will ruin it.

The two of them are separating, maybe - could be for the day, or a tour, or something longer. The singer seems to be worried, somewhere deep inside, that it's not just a "see you at dinner" kind of separation.

If that was goodbye then you must be high
And maybe I'm losing the thread

It's an energetic song with a mostly happy sound and some lurking questions beneath: I love that kind of thing, those songs with depths and ambiguities. This is an excellent one; I hope you like it too.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of April 27, 2024

One book this week: I was ordering some other things from that hegemonic Internet retailer, happened to check my wishlist, and realized the finale of this series was actually published. So now I have it on hand:

Ralph Azham: The Dying Flame is the fourth book of the series - at least as published in English. In the original French, this is a series of twelve album-length bande desinées published in the decade after 2010. The American publisher, Super Genius - which I think is the adult, or maybe Eurocomics, arm of the Papercutz kids-book juggernaut - combined those into three-book omnibuses. The first three are Black Are the Stars, The Land of the Blue Demons, and You Can't Stop a River.

See my posts on the earlier books for more details, but, briefly, this is a secondary-world fantasy series, with a lot of the same tone, concerns, and style as the Dungeon books Trondheim writes with Joann Sfar. Ralph himself was the "Chosen One" - which turned out to be both not really a good thing, and not as singular as it sounded. As usual with Trondheim, it's gotten a lot more complicated over the course of the nine books before this volume - but a real ending is promised here, and I'm interested to see how he wraps it up.

Quote of the Week: Don't Worry, It Works the Other Way, Too!

Scud has a feeling that Maisie is watching him out of the corner of her eye. He waves to her, but she acts like she doesn't see him. In his chagrin, it occurs to him that he's facing an entire lifetime of not understanding women.

 - Rudy Rucker, Million Mile Road Trip, p.395

Million Mile Road Trip by Rudy Rucker

Every writer is unique, of course. But some are quirkier than others, with idiosyncrasies closer to the surface. They're the obviously unique ones.

Even in that company, Rudy Rucker stands out: the creator and pretty much sole acolyte of Transrealist writing, a mode of science fiction in which the point is to "write like yourself, only more so" and incorporate as many elements from your real life into fiction as possible. His work is weirdly specific in at least two distinctive ways. First, a loose-limbed Northern California sense of freedom and possibility, equally influenced by surfing and slackerdom. Second, a deep fascination with math, topology, and computer science - Rucker's college-professor day-job for decades - which means that some of his novels have actual drawings in them to illustrate ideas and the structures of fictional worlds.

On top of that, Rucker delights in the goofy and the weird - one early novel was The Sex Sphere, which is about, well, "a giant ass in Hilbert space." That's the slacker/surfer vibe again, I suppose, but I need to emphasize it, because Rucker is consistently weirder and wilder than you imagine, no matter who "you" are.

His novels are usually fun and amusing - not exactly light, since they often feature potential apocalypses, but definitely askew from normal life and fiction, and not to be taken purely with a straight face (or an unaltered brain). And I see that I've never written about his novels here, despite having read a lot of his stuff and acquiring several projects back in my SFBC days. (I did cover his autobiography, Nested Scrolls, here about a decade ago.)

So today I'm trying to get my arms around Million Mile Road Trip, Rucker's most recent novel, published in 2019. It is deeply Ruckerian, both mathy and slackery, and the central plot is about fighting off an invasion of evil flying saucers from a parallel world - so it's full of elements and ideas that resonate and follow from his earlier books.

Zoe Snapp and Villy Van Antwerpen are graduating high-school seniors in Los Perros, California - sort of going out, tentatively thinking about their futures, a bit overwhelmed by all the possibilities of life. And then two skinny aliens, Yampa and Pinchley, show up, declare that these two are needed to save the world, and offer to modify Villy's giant old station wagon to make a massive road trip across a parallel world. And why not? Villy's kid brother Scud tags along at the last minute, and the five are off.

They travel through a dimensional bridge - an "unny tunnel," in Rucker's typically goofy language - to Mappyworld, a parallel universe where various round planets from our universe are mapped onto flat valleys in a potentially infinite landscape of hexagonal mountains. (Yes, some older readers may notice an unexpected Jack Chalker echo at this detail.) So every few thousand miles, there's a massive mountain range separating another "world," with another batch of weird aliens living there.

There's a lot of incidents, and, as the title implies, their destination world is about two hundred valleys away, making it, yes, a million-mile road trip. (And that's just in one direction!) Along the way, they learn that flying saucers are living beings, and are divided into the good dark-eyed saucers (Scud makes out with one of them) and the evil red-eyed saucers (who try to kill them, and are led by the gigantic evil Groon, bent on conquest of our Earth, of course).

Our heroes learn details of Mappyworld, meet various bizarre creatures, and gather strange powers and devices, such as the pearls that power saucers and their own transforming musical instruments. (Rucker also has the Boomer tropism for rock 'n roll, or at least music, as a liberating mechanism in the world.) There is a big battle in various 4D environments and the grounds of Los Perros High at the climax. And the world, of course, is saved.

Rucker's language is always goofier than I expect - unny tunnels and surfer slang - and this is one of his less-structured, "and then this happened" stories. It's characteristically Ruckerian, but maybe not one of his very best novels, or perhaps I mean not the best choice for a new reader. On the other hand, it's pure Rucker, contemporary in a way that a lot of his books aren't anymore, and full of interesting moments.

I dunno, man. You'll have to decide for yourself, y'know? Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

Darwin Carmichael Is Going to Hell by Sophie Goldstein and Jenn Jordan

It's weird how a serialized story turns into something different in collected form. Obviously, it was structured to be read in snippets, day by day, over time. Getting a big clump of it all at once - as much as, in this case, all of it - turns all of those pauses vastly smaller, everything that had to stand for a day or a week or a month into a bare second as the reader turns the page.

I suppose there are examples where it damages the work, where there's a lot of Shocking Reveals and Unfulfilled Cliffhangers and other things that just become tedious when all read together. But the things that come to my mind are all cases where the continuity makes the story work better, where it's easier to keep characters and relationships and world-building in your mind as you go, since it hasn't been (in this case) four and a half years since the beginning.

Not to bury the lede with that meandering: Darwin Carmichael Is Going to Hell was a webcomic, appearing from the beginning of 2009 through mid-2013. It turned into this book in 2014. It was written and drawn by Sophie Goldstein and Jenn Jordan. (I gather Goldstein is the cartoonist, so she did most of the art and maybe more scripting, but there's a style of repeating strip drawn by Jordan, the medieval historian, so it's pretty clear they both did some level of All The Things creating this story.)

It's a contemporary fantasy, of the "everything is true" sub-variety - Darwin is our main character, a mid-twenties guy in a NYC that's also home to a bewildering array of mythological and fantastic creatures. For examples: his landlord is a minotaur, his pet/friend Skittles is a manticore, and three stoner angels have been crashing on his couch for far too long.

Darwin, some years ago (during his late teenage years) in a sequence of events we eventually see, acquired an overwhelming karmic debt, one that he's unlikely to ever be able to overcome in his life. He's, as the title says, doomed to hell, and all of the creatures that can see karmic auras - which is a lot of them, including more "normal people" than you might expect - can see and be at least mildly taken aback by his metaphysical cloud of absolute gloom.

That's the set-up: Darwin Carmichael is mostly a thing of short continuities for the first half, exploring its world and fleshing out Darwin's connections to other people (most importantly Ella, his best friend, whose karma is as good as his is bad, and for pretty much an equally not-her-responsibility reason). There are a couple of large-ish adventures, where Darwin falls in love briefly with a Snow Queen and Ella is transformed into a cat, plus a mythology-related trip to see the Dalai Lama - but, overall, it feels more like an ongoing series than something with a clear through-line.

But Goldstein and Jordan switched gears in the last six months or so of the strip, with a big apocalypse storyline that incorporated nearly every character still alive and active in a literal battle to the death between good and evil. (And let me note here that Darwin, because of that karmic debt, is firmly placed by said supernatural forces on the evil side of the battle.)

It ends well, which most webcomics don't. I mean, most webcomics peter out or just stop suddenly - Darwin both has a real ending and does it well, which is doubly impressive. Even a decade later, this is a great example of telling a story using the rhythms of serialization but making it something that works well as a single story in the end.

And Goldstein's art is great here: fat rounded lines, great faces, crisp colors, cartoony in all the best ways. (Jordan's style is fun and works for the bits she does, too.)

The website is still mostly live, though the comics are down at the moment ("moment" here meaning "since 2022"), and it's old enough that it'll throw a scary "not secure" error in most modern browsers. The book is semi-available from random third-party sellers. Or you can be like me and hope to come across a copy of the book in the wild: it did work in my case, though it took nine years.

A Matter of Life by Jeffrey Brown

Jeffrey Brown is a prolific, interesting cartoonist (and teacher of cartooning), yet another creator that sits in my head in the category "I need to keep up with their work" until I realize the last book of his I read was in 2015.

I have reasons, or excuses, for that. The most reasonable one is that Brown has been mostly making comics for middle-graders for the past decade-plus - a couple of Star Wars series, Incredible Change-Bots, and their follow-ups - and that I did read a few of those but lost track of them eventually. A lot of cartoonists are mostly making books for middle-schoolers these days: middle-schoolers not only buy books, but actually love them, and there's a whole ecosystem of school visits and book fairs and whatnot to provide income and marketing opportunities and fan contact for those creators.

I found A Matter of Life randomly recently, and read it quickly. It was published in 2013 and - if I'm reading Brown's Wikipedia bibliography correctly - was his most recent book actually aimed at an adult audience. So I might not be as far behind as I thought I was.

This is a memoir comic, like a lot of Brown's work for adults, in the style of Clumsy and the rest of his Aughts work. I've read that he does these stories in sketchbooks - I'm not sure if he just works them out there, and then re-draws them "officially," or if the sketchbook pages are the final work. But Brown's stories in this mode do come off as less polished - or maybe I mean "processed" - than the usual modern memoir comic, a collection of short chapters about moments or ideas rather than a long single story with a point of view and an overarching message.

Brown's autobio work is more about exploration than presentation - this book's subtitle is "An Autobiographical Meditation on Fatherhood and Faith," which covers the ground solidly - he isn't presenting a GN that says "here's this story of my life." Brown instead has a cluster of thoughts and moments, little stories and bigger ones, that circle around something important and interesting. In this case, it's thoughts about the relationships of fathers and sons, primarily Brown to his own minister father and to his then-young son.

The faith piece is less explicit - to tell a story about what you believe, you really need to explain those beliefs, by speaking directly to the reader or something similar. But Brown doesn't work that way, so other than a short intro, this instead is a collection of moments - some when he was younger, and believed in a traditional flavor of Christianity as much as he did believe (however much that was; Brown, again, keeps it vague) and some when he was older and no longer believed. Brown unfortunately does fall back on the usual "It doesn't mean I don't believe in something bigger than myself" vague statement that means exactly nothing - I mean, so do I, because Mt. Everest is bigger than I am and I believe in it, but it's not helpful in defining any specific belief in the supernatural underpinnings of the universe. There's no one in the world who only thinks things smaller than them exist.

Brown's style, I think, works best on interpersonal, daily-life questions. His initial fame came from books about his love life, and what works best in this book are the father-son interactions, in both directions. To really get at what his father believed, and how his relationship with his father shifted after he stopped believing, Brown would have needed to work in a different, more explicit style - to define things rather than just show them.

So this is more about fatherhood than faith, and more about realizing that in-betweenness - that you are both a father and a son - and having new appreciation for both roles. That's plenty for one book, actually, and Brown, as always in this style, tells his story in an organic and grounded way, full of specific moments and thoughts.

Haruki Murakami Manga Stories by Jean-Christophe Deveney and PMGL

Some titles are more obvious than others. This book could have been called anything, but it would have been Haruki Murakami Manga Stories even if it was named something different. So some editor or functionary at Tuttle decided to be obvious, I suppose.

This book is the first in a series adapting the short stories of Haruki Murakami into manga format, exactly as the title implies. A second volume is already out; I'm not sure how many more are planned. This one has four stories, and his ISFDB entry lists thirty-two short stories in total, so there could be as many as eight volumes - more, I suppose, if he continues to write more stories, or the books do longer adaptations.

But I do want to quibble slightly at "manga." It's a project of Tuttle, an American publisher headquartered in rustic Rutland, Vermont. These stories are scripted by Jean-Christophe Deveney, who is French, and drawn by an entity calling itself PMGL, about which I can find very little online. (The back-cover bio implies it is a male human being, but offers no hints to location or the names of other works.) Manga Stories is created in full-color, and reads (at least in this digital edition) from left to right, both on individual pages and between pages. All of that is clearly comics, but I would not say it's manga. I might even argue for bande desinée.

But maybe we're in a world where all of the words for comics are mixing together, and making distinctions among them is no longer useful. That might be annoying, since I like words that mean distinctive, specific things, but it's common and not unexpected.

Anyway, there are four stories here. They are each quite separate, and all solidly Murakamian in their style, tone and concerns: literary stories told quirkily, that start from odd places and don't necessarily resolve in traditional ways.

"Super-Frog Saves Tokyo," originally appeared in after the quake, a book of six thematically-linked stories from 2003, all sparked by the 1995 Kobe earthquake. A middle-aged salaryman is surprised by, yes, a gigantic talking frog, who insists that the two of them must battle an even more gigantic supernatural Worm beneath Tokyo, which will spark a cataclysmic earthquake if not defeated. The story sets up a weird but recognizable hero's journey, and then entirely avoids telling that story.

"Where I'm Likely to Find It," was a 2005 story, published in English translation in The New Yorker almost immediately, and then collected in the English-language collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman the next year. This is a quirky-detective story: the specific quirky detective here chases missing persons, refuses to take any payment, and is looking for something larger, more central, more amorphous. (This is a Murakami story, so it's not exactly a spoiler to say he doesn't find it; Murakami stories are largely about not finding things.) The detective is hired by a woman to find her husband, who disappeared mysteriously between floors of a Tokyo high-rise, returning from calming his mother (who lives a few flights down) to an expected pancake breakfast. The detective spends days roaming the stairs of that high-rise, talking to various odd characters and contemplating the infinite, until, as so often in Murakami, the story resolves itself in a different way off the page.

Birthday Girl seems to have been only published in translation, as a small paperback first in German in 2017 and then in the UK in 2019. A woman tells the story of her twentieth birthday, ten or twenty years later, to a man who is probably the Murakami stand-in for this story. But it's all her story: she worked at a fancy restaurant, on the ground floor of a big building. And, one day, the manager was sick, and unable to take the usual dinner to the restaurant owner, a recluse who lived high up in that building. So this woman took the meal, met the owner, and was granted a wish...and doesn't tell us what the wish was.

And last is "The Seventh Man," a 1996 story (English translation 1998, in Granta), also most prominently from Blind Willow. At some kind of dinner party of middle-aged men, one man tells a story from his childhood, when he was about ten and friendly with a younger boy. That day a massive typhoon came, the two boys went out to explore while the extremely slow-moving eye sat over their coastal town, and then were caught when the storm moved. This man spent much of the rest of his life recovering from what he saw then.

Deveney effectively turns Murakami's prose into comics: these stories have the same feel and frisson as the originals. PMGL, whatever that is when it's at home, draws in a slightly grotesque style, full of details and lines and changes in color (except for "Find It," which is all grey-tones) - I thought that was also very appropriate for Murakami, and worked well. Adaptation is a tricky thing; adapting very distinctive creators even more so. Manga Stories is more purely and centrally Murakamian than I expected - it's a big success at what it set out to do.

Portions for Foxes: Orenda Fink

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

Doing a little research for this post, I found out there's a whole history I wasn't aware of - previous band and parallel bands and reunions and all that jazz. It's not a surprise - people have careers and lives, which started before you paid attention and continued after you get distracted by something else - but the details are always more specific and interesting than you expect.

I knew Orenda Fink from one solo record in the mid-Aughts. I'm a big fan of this one song in particular, and still listen to it. But her career is much bigger than that, with several other band names I probably should take the time to investigate, one of these days.

But today, I'm here to talk about High Ground, a swirling, tense song driven by what I think is a mandolin - the second-creepiest mandolin song I know, after Okkervil River's Westfall - and powered by Fink's bright, clear, quiet voice.

Cause when the water rises
They start to look for high ground
Just like me when you come around

I'm pretty sure this is yet another bad-relationship song. The singer is trying to stay away from the man she's singing to - but she also seems to be singing to a storm, something natural and overwhelming. Or maybe she just sees that man like a tsunami or flood or nor'easter: destructive and violent, destroying all before it.

Hey, big man, big wind, don’t blow
Don’t come search for me
I beg of you both

There is a "both." So I like to think there's both a storm coming and this man, at the same time, and the singer is pleading with both of them to stay away. The song is in that moment before the storm hits, before the man finds her, when there's still room for words, for pleading. Still time to look for high ground to weather the storm.

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: We've All Known Drivers Like That

Professor McFwain stepped on the accelerator, and the Hindustan-eight sort of threw itself forward - the car has a desperate way of moving, as though it was hurling itself off a cliff.

Professor McFwain evidently enjoyed driving, even though the car shuddered as though it was terrified, lurched, hesitated, and then lurched forward again. I wasn't sure if it was the Hindustan-eight or the way Professor McFwain drove - maybe a little of each.

 - Daniel Pinkwater, Yobgorgle: Mystery Monster of Lake Ontario, p. 214 in 4 Fantastic Novels

Quote of the Week: The Job Hasn't Changed

Should you rest upon a bench, and your tired eyes close, depend upon it the policeman would rouse you and gruffly order you to 'move on.' You may rest on the bench, and benches are few and far between; but if rest means sleep, on you must go, dragging your tired body through the endless streets. Should you, in desperate slyness, seek some forlorn alley or dark passageway and lie down, the omnipresent policeman will rout you out just the same. It is his business to rout you out. It is a law of the powers that be that you shall be routed out.

 - Jack London, The People of the Abyss (p.47 in Library of America Novels & Social Writings)

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 1: The Assassin's Road by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima

I read this whole series once, when everyone else did, starting in 2000 when this translation was originally published in the US. (I should note here that this volume - I think the whole series - was translated by Dana Lewis.)

But that's more than twenty years ago now, and I thought something like, "You know, maybe a twenty-eight volume series of three-hundred-page books about a guy chopping off heads, accompanied by his never-aging toddler son, set three hundred and fifty years ago in Japan, would be a fun reading project for 2024." So here I am, at the beginning of one of the acknowledged masterpieces of Japanese comics, and of world comics in general.

I probably won't have a lot to say. This series is remarkably resistant to commentary: it is what it is, and it is intensely itself. I gather it is the pinnacle of a whole style or genre of comics, one which was already mostly of historical interest in Japan when the US translation appeared - this is work from the early 1970s, back at the other end of my life, fifty years ago.

So what can I say about Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 1: The Assassin's Road? It was not the first collaboration between Kazuo Koike (writer) and Goseki Kojima (artist), but it was their longest, most fruitful project together. That's how canonical works work: they set the tone and the standard, and everything else is compared to them, generally as criticism.

This book contains nine stories, mostly around thirty pages long. It begins with our main characters already in their wandering life; we don't get the explanation until deep into this volume. But we do learn, eventually, that Ogami Ittō was once the shogun's executioner, one of the three main powers of the state, and that the head of the Yagyu ninja clan - the shogun's secret police, basically, another one of those three powers - betrayed him, framed him for treason, and set him up for death. Of course, Ittō instead fought his way free, with his infant son, and now wanders Japan as an assassin for hire.

As I recall, most of the stories are random jobs, like any series about a protagonist who wanders to do things. The central conflict comes back, again and again, and is concluded in the last volume - but that's about eight thousand pages in the future at this point. That's certainly the pattern here: one or two backstory tales, mostly wandering.

All of it is deeply atmospheric, both visually - in that slow-paced way that was such a shock to American audiences when we first saw it - and thematically, as Koike sets his story completely within the mindset of the people of the time. There is no winking, no modern viewpoint, no frame story: this is Ittō's world entirely, and all of the moral choices and societal attitudes are his, all from his point of view.

And he is declaredly on the road to hell, of his own will, to find his vengeance and die.

American comics readers now live in a world with many more options; we've all seen a lot of manga by now. Lone Wolf and Cub may not be as different as it was in 2000, not as stark a contrast - but I think it is still so much its own thing, so well-defined and fully-realized, that is is still as powerful and compelling. 

Yobgorgle: Mystery Monster of Lake Ontario by Daniel Pinkwater

I've written about Daniel Pinkwater a lot here: see Borgel for my most recent attempt, or just plumb the archives for more. The short version: he's been writing quirky, smart books, ostensibly for an audience of Young Adult or Middle Grade readers, for about fifty years at this point. If you grew up during that period, I hope you found Pinkwater books at the time: if you're reading my blog now, you're probably exactly the right kind of reader for his work.

If you didn't grow up reading Pinkwater, well, are you really sure you're done growing up? There's still time.

I just re-read Pinkwater's 1979 novel Yobgorgle: Mystery Monster of Lake Ontario, for the first time in probably twenty years. It's currently available in the omnibus 4 Fantastic Novels, alongside three other, well, fantastic books by Pinkwater.

This is the one in which young Eugene Winkleman is living with his Uncle Mel for the summer while his parents take an all-expenses-paid vacation to Europe that they won:

The second prize was a home videotape machine. I would have liked it better if they had won that, because I could have started a collection of science-fiction movies. But they won the trip, and off they went[.]

But then Uncle Mel has to go to Rochester, New York for work - he works on horrible-sounding vending machines that dispense things that are almost entirely unlike food - and brings Eugene with him for those two weeks.

Eugene is just a kid, so at first he doesn't have much to do in downtown Rochester while Mel is doing his training. He goes to the library and reads a bit, trying to avoid the oppressive summer heat. He's worried that he's going to be pretty bored, and not find any other kids to hang out with.

He doesn't find any other kids, but he's not bored.

Eugene sees a documentary and then reads a book, both about Professor Ambrose McFwain, head of a local scientific institute that searches for strange monsters - such as the monster of the title, supposedly resident in the local Great Lake. Eugene, somewhat bored, reaches out to the professor, and is hired as a research assistant for the next two weeks - which McFwain promises will be an exciting time in monster-hunting.

As usual, the Pinkwaterian plot gets more complicated and silly from there, bringing in the eccentric billionaire Colonel Ken Krenwinkle, who sells used cars one day a year and hunts rare and interesting cars whenever he can. Eventually, they're all out on Lake Ontario, at night, looking for the mysterious monster.

They find something, of course. It's not what they expect. It's not what you the reader expects, either. I won't say more than that. There is a big silly ending, as there must be, and it all works out pretty well for everyone involved. 

As always, with Pinkwater, the point is to explore a big, weird world, full of quirky people and ideas - a world that is both weirder and stranger than ours but paradoxically more understandable and friendlier. A world where lakes will obviously have monsters in them, where billionaires do oddball things, and where multiple overlapping businesses can operate out of the basement of a factory making suits for fat men. If you ever wished you lived in a world like that, you are a born Pinkwater reader.