Wednesday Comics edited by Mark Chiarello

As I write this, the reruns of Richard Thompson's great Cul de Sac daily comic on GoComics have hit the summer camp sequence of 2010, introducing Andre Chang, a boy who wants to draw comics and is bigger and louder - especially in his comics - than anyone else.

Andre is lovable and amusing, because he's a child with a child's enthusiasms, and we assume he will grow out of it, at least somewhat, and temper that enthusiasm with other qualities.

A project from DC from the prior year, Wednesday Comics, belies that hope.

It was a bold, interesting experiment: to turn out standard DC comics (their usual characters, their usual stories, in-continuity as far as I can tell) in a Sunday-newspaper broadsheet format. Editor Mark Chiarello's introduction to this oversized single-volume collection - they were originally printed in newspaper-size pamphlets and distributed weekly, because everything in superhero comics must be printed in a pamphlet and distributed weekly - sidestepped the fact that Sunday comics still existed at that point, and resolutely ignored the existence of humorous newspaper strips, which most of us realize has been the majority of the form for their entire history. This was one of the first worrying points: DC has a long history of humor itself, and it wouldn't have been impossible for some alternate-world version of Wednesday Comics to have an Inferior Five strip, or even, if I'm shooting for the moon, Bob Hope. (When I first got this book, I had an alternate-world hope for a mash-up style book, from some elseworlds DC with more of a sense of humor: maybe Teen Titans in a Peanuts style, or Krypto as Marmaduke or Green Arrow and Black Canary in Blondie situations. That's not something this world's DC would ever do, of course. Pity: that would be a fun book, and different from anything else on the shelves...though, again, the Big Two never do anything deliberately different these days.)

Unfortunately, the most important thing about modern superhero comics - more than the costumes, more than the secret identities, more than the endless "who would win" arguments, more than the catchphrases and shocking reverses and Never Agains - is that you must take them seriously at all times. Superhero comics are serious and deep and important, telling stories about guys in funny costumes punching each other imbued with the power of ancient myth, and anyone who doesn't accept this basic, fundamental truth will be wished into the cornfield.

So Wednesday Comics could never have been a project full of the influence of the actually most popular Sunday comics, now or ever. You'll look in vain for anything influenced by Krazy Kat here, or Bringing Up Father, or Peanuts, or Far Side, or Calvin and Hobbes - not even a Luann or Bloom County. The model for "Sunday comics" here is a very vaguely remembered Hal Foster Prince Valiant, described as if there were an era when the Sunday color insert was entirely made up of full-page adventure stories in that mode.

These are all Andre Chang comics: as big as possible, loud and flashy most of the time, modern in the most trivial ways while mostly looking backwards to a cleaned-up dream of the Silver Age. There are fifteen full stories here (plus two single-page try-outs), each one twelve big pages long. Assuming each page is roughly the size of two normal comics pages, that's essentially a single issue of story for each one of them - call it a fill-in issue, in a different, hopefully exciting format.

Some of the artists engage with the larger page - Ben Caldwell's Wonder Woman story in particular has detailed, interesting layouts that run all over the page, though unfortunately I found that one confusing and cramped, with too many tiny boxes that didn't flow as I hoped. Some artists, on the other hand, just seem to have their normal work blown up to the larger size, as Joe Kubert's (impeccably drawn, I'll admit) Sgt. Rock story, which adds bands at the bottom and top of each page to fill it out.

I'll be frank: there's not a single story here I'd pick out as exemplary in a good way. I like Kyle Baker's work a lot; here he gives us a muddy, dull Hawkman stopping aliens from hijacking airplanes (?!) and then fighting dinosaurs with Aquaman - that perhaps shows the Andre Chang-ness of it best; it's all boys playing with whatever toys they grab out of the box, making them fight.

OK. Other possible highlights include a really awesome-looking Deadman story by Dave Bullock and Vinton Heuck, Paul Pope's mildly self-pitying and convoluted Adam Strange story, and a mostly sunny and silly Supergirl story from Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner. There are also stories where the art is fun and lively, making good use of the large canvas, to tell cliched and standard stories, such as Mike Allred on Metamorpho, Joe Quiňones on Green Lantern, José Luis Garcia-López on Metal Men, and somewhat (I don't love the art-style, but it's different and inventive and striking) Sean Galloway on Teen Titans. In pretty much all of those cases, the story is bland yardgoods - there's even a "new villain hates the heroes for histrionic unspecified 'they're the real bad guys' reasons," as required for any project like this - but the art redeems it somewhat.

No story in here will surprise you, or make you laugh, or make you think. At best, you will be reminded that you think a particular character is Wicked Kewl and want to read more stories about that character punching bad guys - which, of course, is what DC wanted out of the project in the first place. So, if that happens, this book has been successful in its aim.

The book is also physically large, obviously, and a bit unwieldy to read and store. So keep that in mind if you decide to check it out. I personally got a copy from my local library, which turned out to be a great choice: I don't need to keep the thing, and trying to manhandle it into position to read will soon be just a vague memory. Wednesday Comics is more interesting as a concept than as an object in the physical world: it is ungainly, tries too hard, trips over itself, and wears out its welcome much sooner than you expect.

Wait: maybe it is essentially Marmaduke, after all.

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy by Doug Savage

When a creator you like turns to creating works for younger readers, you have two choices: follow him along, and check out the new stuff, trying to have an open mind, or to avoid the new stuff and grump about how creators should keep doing the things you discovered them for, grumble grumble.

OR - and this is what I seem to do most of the time - you could not even notice the creator has material in a different genre for about a decade, and then stumble on it randomly when the "new thing" has a fifth book published, and wonder where the time has gone, alas, where are the green fields of our youth?

Doug Savage is a funny, inventive cartoonist. I discovered him with the Savage Chickens project, which I think was either his first big thing or his breakout. Adults don't buy books of funny drawings very consistently these days - this is sad, because in my youth, the small funny book of cartoons by the cash-register was a dependable publishing category, with big successes every year, but the Internet ruined that like it has ruined so many things - but, and here's the trick, kids still do. So a lot of funny, inventive cartoonists have found that, if they can tune their sensibility to middle-schoolers or grade-schoolers, they could have a really awesome career making fun things, visiting a very appreciative (though often massively rambunctious) audience, and enjoying a mostly supportive community of peers.

I don't know if any of that went into Savage's decision to make Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy in 2016 - many cartoonists fall into making books for younger readers because they have younger readers roaming around their houses - I'm talking about their own children, usually, not semi-feral bands of tweens - and there can be other reasons as well. But Savage made a graphic novel for middle-schoolers, got it published by Andrews McMeel, which also handled his "Savage Chickens" books, and has gone on to do four more books about these characters in the decade since then.

This first book has three mostly separate stories, all set in this same forest and focused on the main characters. They're superheroes, I guess. They fight evil, or try to, or intend to. Laser Moose is a moose who can shoot lasers out of his eyeballs for unspecified reasons, and who takes his responsibilities as a laser-shooting moose very, very seriously, probably too much so. Rabbit Boy is his sidekick, a sunny and positive rabbit with no visible superpowers but a somewhat more grounded view of reality that is desperately needed to keep Laser Moose from just cutting everything within sight in half.

In this book, they "battle" aliens who don't seem to really be invading at all. They discover a hideous Aquabear, transformed into a monstrous chimera by toxic waste, and, after some setbacks, return the monster to the human facility that created him, making him the humans' problem. And they foil a new plot by Laser Moose's arch-enemy, Cyborgupine - yes, a cyborg porcupine - who has created a fiendish minion, Mechasquirrel.

It's all fun and zippy, in an appealing kid-friendly cartooning style, mostly thin lines and flat colors. It's the kind of style that looks like an evolved version of the drawings those kids themselves are making - accessible, immediate, quickly readable. And Savage is as funny here with delusional moose and sunny bunnies as he was with wage-slave chickens. You don't need to be ten to enjoy Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy, though, if you can access your inner ten-year-old at will, that definitely helps.

Better Things: Behind the Wall of Sleep

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

I'm from New Jersey, so I had to get to the Smithereens eventually. The only question was: this song or Blood & Roses? They're both bad-love songs, both have that core-period Smithereens rhythm-section power propelling them forward at top speed, both are muscular and smart and gnarly and stark.

Maybe I just feel like being a little more positive right now: Blood & Roses is about something already broken and irreparable, but Behind the Wall of Sleep is about something that hasn't happened - maybe can't happen - but the singer hasn't really tried yet. It's a song that holds out at least a slim chance of hope.

I'll take that.

The singer is in love with a woman he doesn't really know:

Well she held a bass guitar
And she was playing in a band
And she stood just like Bill Wyman
Now I am her biggest fan

He spends the first two verses describing what's attractive about her, mostly in third person, but the song shifts to calling her "you" as well - half the time he's describing her, half the time talking to (at?) her. He hasn't connected; he's seems to be in that fabled "she doesn't know I exist" spot. But he still has hope, and the song barrels forward.

Now I know I'm one of many
who would like to be your friend
And I've got to find a way
to to let you know I'm not like them

It's not that deep, it's not that different - but it takes that core longing-song idea and does it perfectly, which is what a three-minute single needs more than anything. This is a great one.

Quote of the Week: Working Conditions

Having arrived at work, there was a whole new set of dangers to contend with. The Victorian workplace was renowned neither for its healthy environment nor for its safety record. This held true if you were working out in the fields just as much as if you were bent over a spinning machine in one of Lancashire's mills or scrubbing floors in a stately home. Open fires and unguarded machinery were common, and the air was filled with smoke, fumes and dusts of various degrees of harmfulness. Horses bolted, sending carts, carriages and machinery flying; poisons were in use everywhere; heavy and debilitating lifting was the norm; and protective hard hats were yet to be introduced into common practice.

 - Ruth Goodman, How To Be a Victorian, pp.187-88

How to Be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman

I use the tag The Past is a Foreign Country mostly to indicate books that are old themselves, but it's broader than that - it's for books that, in one way or another, are full of the thoughts and ideas of past eras - whether that's one generation ago or several hundred.

How To Be a Victorian is an example - it's a decade-old book, I think a companion piece or line-extension to a TV show the author, Ruth Goodman, presented about life on a farm in the 19th century. I don't know if Goodman is still doing that, or if her career has moved into a different phase, but it looks like she spent a decade or so making TV shows about farming using the tools of various ages in UK history - and, as I type this, I'm pretty sure my wife watched those shows and told me about them. If you want a capsule explanation of how different the two of us are, "and I read a book by the same person many years later for unrelated reasons," comes close.

The subtitle is "A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life," which explains the book pretty succinctly. Goodman organizes her material into fifteen chapters, starting with getting out of bed in the morning and ending with getting back into bed (this time to cover sex) at the end. In between, she covers clothing, grooming, work, play, school, leisure, and a lot of detail about food - obtaining and cooking and eating, how meals were presented and who ate what, when and how.

Goodman, I think, is a trained historian, and she repeatedly makes the point that the Victorian era is a long period - sixty-plus years from 1837 to 1901 - and the world was not static during that time. She also is clear about the differences between classes, urban vs. rural, and especially men vs. women - all of those groups had very different experiences of life. She also tries to cover geographical differences as much as possible: occasionally mentioning America, mostly in the context of media or advertisements, but mostly falling into the general UK dichotomies like North vs. South or London vs. everywhere else, with occasional color about specifics in places like Wales or Ireland.

I still read things with my editor brain, which often is specifically a SFF editor brain, so I kept thinking this would be a good research book for anyone writing historical fiction or alternate worlds going through their own Industrial Revolutions. There's a lot of small detail of how lives are lived - some of it seems general to the level of technology, while more is contingent of specifics of religion (most fantasy worlds, he said archly, should not have a cod-Christian church in charge) and history (the US Civil War had a surprisingly large effect on what people wore in the UK) and other real-world things. All of that could be useful to anyone writing in a similar world: specifics and details are always important, vagaries and genericism are lazy and make for dull stories.

But most of the people reading How To Be a Victorian are probably more like me: vaguely interested, with some knowledge (as much as I specialized in anything for my English degree, it was 19th century novels) and a desire to understand more about how people actually lived during those times. This is a fine book for that, full of nuanced details and excellent comparisons, good to tell you not just what "a Victorian" ate and wore, but how a poor woman differed from a rich one, or a housemaid in the 1890s from her grandmother fifty years earlier. I doubt most of us will ever need to know those details, but knowing pointless, interesting details is one of the great small pleasures of life, isn't it?

Night Drive by Richard Sala

This was Richard Sala's first book; this edition is (at least for the moment) Richard Sala's last book.

Sala died in mid-2020, alone at home, of what turned out to be a heart attack. He didn't die of COVID, but I have to believe he's one of the many, many people who would have had a much better chance of surviving that horrible year - getting better health care, being seen by more people who could notice something was wrong, etc. - if it hadn't happened. But that's the deal with the past: it's already happened, its horrors and unfairnesses already baked in. And that's a pretty solidly Richard Sala thought, frankly.

The original Night Drive was self-published by Sala in 1984, a 32-page comic in 500 signed copies. It got appreciative reviews, sold a decent number of those copies, and was useful for Sala to open doors to get illustration work - and then the long last story, "Invisible Hands," was picked up by MTV's Liquid Television, which gave Sala another paying gig to help get his career started.

This expanded edition of Night Drive came out this May, just about doubling the size of the original and turning it into a small hardcover book. It includes a foreword remembering Sala by his friend and fellow comics writer Dana Marie Andra, an interview section with answers from Sala about this book over the span of several decades, and a number of stories and illustrations from the same era - some almost made it into Night Drive, some were for the potential follow-up that was shelved when his work on Liquid Television and illustration jobs got too busy.

The art is both deeply Sala - scratchy, black-and-white, with scrawled lettering and quirky misshapen faces - and deeply 1980s, full of design-y borders and title panels. His work got somewhat easier to visually "read" later, when he moved into working most commonly in watercolors, but this is Sala at his darkest and most cryptic, all of his old horror-movie and noir influences coming out in a flood of tropes and dialogue and ideas. The pieces here are more vignettes than stories, as if Sala was trying to get down all of his inspiration and his ideas his way as fast as he could. He got clearer than this, he told more complete and satisfying stories than this - he definitely got better at his craft and I think moved closer to doing exactly what he wanted to do - but this package is full of pure unfiltered Richard Sala, early in his development and heady with the possibilities of comics.

"Invisible Hands" is still the standout here - long enough to give Sala room to maneuver, full of fiendish plots and mysterious characters, shocking reverses and new complications, quirky and entirely Sala but close enough to a normal narrative for the parallax to be deeply satisfying. But the whole package is fun, a deep dive into the beginnings of a unique artist and the style of a very distinctive, and now long-gone era.

Nancy Wears Hats by Ernie Bushmiller

I don't entirely get the way Fantagraphics has been publishing their collections of Ernie Bushmiller's great classic Nancy strip - I'll admit that - but I totally dig their vibe, and I'll read 'em once I notice new ones exist.

I think Fanta is mostly working chronologically, though without the mania for completism that their massive Peanuts project had. They've published...I don't know, five or six? maybe more? books of Bushmiller, starting (I think) with Nancy Is Happy about a decade ago. That book had war-time strips, and the books since, as far as I can tell, each collect roughly two years of dailies.

So Nancy Wears Hats, which was published earlier this summer, collects many - it doesn't seem to be all; the description says "over 300" - strips from 1949-50.

Let me digress for the potted history lesson. The strip Fritzi Ritz, one of many jumping on the flapper bandwagon (Blondie is the only thing left standing in that field), was started in 1922 by Larry Whittington. A twenty-year-old Bushmiller took it over three years later and did mostly flapperesque gags for the next decade, but then invented a niece for Fritzi in 1933. Nancy gradually took over the Fritzi Ritz strip, as Bushmiller gradually added different supporting characters and dropped the showgirl and office gags associated with Fritzi, with the strip finally changing names in 1938. Bushmiller wrote and drew Nancy until his death in 1982; it was continued by other hands since then and is still running, recently rejuvenated by the pseudonymous Olivia Jaimes. Bushmiller is beloved in comics circles for his simplicity: he drew cleanly and made precise gags that famously are easier to read than not to. His best period is generally considered to be the '50s, but it seems more to be that he took a few years first to turn Fritzi into Nancy, and then to tune Nancy to his preferred pure-gag level. I don't think there's a generally-recognized decline at the end of his run.

So: this book is full of fun Bushmiller gags, from the beginning of his best period. If you've been reading the Bushmiller reruns on GoComics - and why wouldn't you? - it might be a bit of déjà vu, since they're right in the middle of this period right now. (I guess that means everyone agrees this is peak Bushmiller.)

There are a few short "continuities" here - a week or maybe two of gags on the same theme or starting from the same premise - but Nancy was never a continuity strip. It was about the gags, and there's a flood of fun gags here: some timeless, some very 1949. I like the latter, since they're often still funny, in their own way, and I find that kind of thing fascinating - your mileage may vary.

I think Bushmiller got his drawing a bit simpler than this in the immediately subsequent years; there's some places where his drawing is more detailed - not fussy, but more lines, drawing things that later Bushmiller probably would simplify to make the gag sharper - than at his very peak. But this is a big batch of fine funny strips from a master.

Elric of Melnibonè by Roy Thomas, Michael T. Gilbert, and P. Craig Russell

When I started reading Michael Moorcock, around 1980, there were six Elric books, and Elric of Melnibonè was the first one. The series has been reassembled several times since then, and I think at least one new piece inserted earlier in the timeline than the 1972 novel - but this is still, I think, roughly, the beginning by internal chronology.

Well, the novel is. I didn't read the novel this time.

Moorcock's stories of the Eternal Champion - Elric being the most popular and best-known of his avatars - have been adapted into comics, directly and as inspiration and with new stories scripted by Moorcock himself, many times over the past fifty years. Almost as soon as there were Moorcock Elric prose stories, there were comics adaptations - the guy just called out for dramatic pages, with his bone-white skin, howling black sword, and endless woe-is-me affect.

The most sustained adaptation series started in the early 1980s, scripted by Roy Thomas and drawn by various sympathetic artists, and I think it covered all six of the novels that teen Andy would consider "real." It started at Pacific Comics, and, when that company died, moved with most of the rest of the Pacific publishing program to First, where the project expanded to do some adaptations of other Eternal Champion stories as well.

I don't know if I can get through all of the Eternal Champion material, but Titan Books, out of the UK, has been reprinting it in uniform editions for about the past decade. And I can at least take another look at those Elric adaptations, about forty years after the last time I read them.

The comics version of Elric of Melnibonè was originally a six-issue series, adapted by Thomas from Moorcock's novel, and illustrated by Michael T. Gilbert and P. Craig Russell in a detailed, Rackham/Beardsley-esque style that worked very well for the decadent-aristocrat atmosphere of Melnibonè, and adds a lot of visual interest to the book. This edition seems to keep the original coloring, which was subtle and careful and very detailed for its day but can look a bit garish now due to advances in computer coloring and printing technology. From the credits, it looks like Gilbert did the pencils, Russell did layouts and inks, and both worked on the colors.

Thomas could be an inventive comics-writer, but here the gig was to take as much Moorcock prose as possible and present it on the page, and Thomas does that well. This is still in the caption-clotted era of comics, and Thomas was one of the masters of that form. This Elric is wordy, but not in a bad way: both the rococo illustrative style and the long dialogue and captions serve to slow down the reader, to focus attention, to allow the story to flow at a slower pace.

Elric of Melnibonè is a tragedy that doesn't quite happen before the end of the book. Elric himself is the emperor of his decadent people, once world-dominating but now happy to scheme and live on their one small island in the middle of the world, while the human nations of the Young Kingdoms wax in power and threaten Melnibonè itself more and more. Their assaults used to be separated by centuries and repelled easily; now they come multiple times in one life and Melnibonèan resources are beginning to be stretched to destroy them. At some point - Elric thinks within a century - Melnibonè will lose one such battle.

Elric is an albino, physically weak, the only son of the previous emperor, his mother dying in his birth and his life only possible through a combination of sorcerous and pharmaceutical supports, which luckily his nation can provide. But his scheming cousin Yrkoon wants to depose him, and Elric can't bring himself to deal with the rival as his ancestors would. (Have him tortured to death on a whim, on some trumped-up or true charges.) And Yyrkoon's younger sister Cymoril is Elric's love - though not yet his Empress, mostly because the grand celebration of their marriage would traditionally entail the sacrificial death of more Melnibonèan aristocrats than Elric is comfortable with.

So this is the story of Yyrkoon's schemes - he tries to kill Elric during one battle with a human invading force, and fails. Then he flees to the Young Kingdoms, with Cymoril as captive, and Elric chases him, through more battles. This all is, readers who have read the written-earlier but set-later stories know, being stage-managed by the Lords of Chaos, particularly Arioch, the traditional patron deity of the Melnibonèans, to bring them back to power on this world.

For the climax, Elric and Yyrkoon end up on another plane of existence, holding two famously powerful swords - Stormbringer and Mournblade - and fighting each other, with Elric having already pledged his loyalty to Arioch to get to that point. As the narration makes clear, his doom is already set - though it will take much longer to work out. Melnibonè has not yet fallen as this story ends - but we know it will, and that Elric will be one of the few survivors.

Readers new to Elric should hit the novels first - depending on your tastes, either starting with the original Elric of Melnibonè or using one of the reprint projects that puts the stories in the order they were originally published. (The latter is reasonable, but does mean you hit Stormbringer, with Elric's death and the big climax of the series, practically at the beginning - most of the history of Moorcock writing Elric is him adding more stuff in the middle.) Adaptations should come after that, for readers who want more pictures and color and decadent atmosphere - all of which this edition provides in abundance.

Better Things: Troy

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

This is another big one - one of the handful of songs that I kept trying to fit into the original This Year series, and it just didn't go. But it was a song I loved and was awestruck by from the first time I heard it - I think a whole generation of us heard it, probably on MTV, and were struck immediately by its power and raw force.

Sinead O'Connor had a long, complicated, winding career. She made a lot of great music, and lived a tumultuous life in public probably more than was good for her. She wore her heart on her sleeve - no, even more than that, she ripped her chest open metaphorically, over and over, to show her most vulnerable side in her music.

And never more so than in her first great song, her debut single.

This week, it's Troy.

Full of devastating lines, full of deep insights. Full of pointed lines sung by one woman to one other person - I think, in the context of the song, a man, though O'Connor said later in her life Troy had other origins than the broken-love story it tells.

You wouldn't have begged me to hold you
If we hadn't been there in the first place

It's a song of regret and anger, of stalking around the ashes of something definitively burned to the ground and describing how it came to be that way.

We were so young then
We thought that everything
We could possibly do was right

Some break-up songs are about what the singer did wrong; some are about how she was wronged by the one she's singing to. Troy circles accusations and confessions, over and over - it's never clear what happened or how, but it sounds like the other person was two-timing the singer and it's just recently come out:

Oh, does she love you
What do you want to do?
Does she need you like I do?
Do you love her?
Is she good for you?
Does she hold you like I do?
Do you want me?
Should I leave?

O'Connor sings all of this like an avenging angel, going from full-force - and her voice, at its peak, had force like no one else - to barely whispered, sometimes in the space of a single line, as the orchestral background rises and falls to match. It's a big song in every way - big instruments, big emotions, big themes, aiming as high as humanly possible and hitting right where it wants to. If you've never hear it before, buckle in - you're in for a hell of a ride.

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: Winners and Losers

The fighting had been hard and continuous; that was attested by all the senses. The very taste of battle was in the air. All was now over; it remained only to succor the wounded and bury the dead - to "tidy up a bit," as the humorist of a burial squad put it. A good deal of "tidying up" was required. As far as one could see through the forests, among the splintered trees, lay wrecks of men and horses. Among them moved the stretcher-bearers, gathering and carrying away the few who showed signs of life. Most of the wounded had died of neglect while the right to minister to their wants was in dispute. It is an army regulation that the wounded must wait; the best way to care for them is to win the battle. It must be confessed that victory is a distinct advantage to many requiring attention, but many do not live to avail themselves of it.

 - Ambrose Bierce, "The Coup de Grâce," p.11 in The Devil's Dictionary, Tales & Memoirs

Quote of the Week: This Is Where I Belong

He had that feeling, which comes to all quiet men who like to sit at home and read, that this was the sort of atmosphere in which he really belonged. The brightness of it all - the dazzling lights, the music, the hubbub, in which the deep-throated gurgle of the wine-agent surprised when drinking soup blended with the shriller note of the chorus-girl calling to her mate - these things got Henry. He was thirty-six next birthday, but he felt a youngish twenty-one.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, "The Man With Two Left Feet," p.242 in The Man With Two Left Feet

Life Drawing by Jaime Hernandez

Serious comics sometimes combine the complications of literary fiction with those of their less reputable drawn counterparts. Take Jaime Hernandez, for example: he has a novelistic sweep and depth of characterization, with a large cast seen over decades in hundreds of pages of comics - told in usually two-to-ten page installments, half short stories and half chapters, published in a variety of formats under the title Love & Rockets, alongside unrelated work by his brother Gilbert, and then collected into books that mostly don't overlap.

Life Drawing is the new Jaime book this year, collecting stories from Love & Rockets. It's a book about both Maggie, his longtime heroine, and Tonta, a newer character a generation younger. It's most directly a sequel to 2021's Tonta, which gathered the initial cluster of Tonta stories, and 2020's Is This How You See Me?, which saw Maggie firmly in middle age and more settled than we ever thought she would be.

There's at least one page here - the story "99° 36°" - that I remember seeing before; I think in See Me. I'm less sure about the Tonta material, but some of it could have been reprinted in the earlier book. That's the way Hernandez works: lots of short bits, circling characters and themes and events. I know he sometimes edits or updates stories between periodical publication and book publication; that may have happened here, too.

The table of contents of Life Drawing lists thirty stories - the first one is dated 2014 and the last 2024. Tonta - a young woman at the end of her high-school years - is our main character; Maggie plays a more supporting role here, maybe because she's older and more settled. Tonta can be the young hothead making bad decisions, running around frantically in search of love or friendship, burdened with a big complicated messy family full of people who don't seem to like her.

Tonta's life here is a continuation of what we saw in Tonta: she bounces between living with two of her older half-sisters, Vivian and Violet, both of whom are horrible people in different ways. This book is less about that family drama, though it does come up a few times. Here, Tonta is growing up and hitting the point where she and her friends need to figure out their next steps - the coach she idolized, Angel, is caught in a scandal and had to quit teaching high school students; Tonta's best friend Gomez is going away to college on the east coast.

Tonta has a bit of a crush on her art teacher, who is Ray Dominguez - Maggie's long-time live-in boyfriend. She also has a random run-in with Maggie, as some random older woman in the neighborhood, along with a friend. Tonta's friends, Gomez and Judy Fair and Brown Alice, are major supporting characters - the people in Maggie's life, aside from Ray, are more secondary. We do see Hopey twice, grumbling her way through middle age, just as angry and unsatisfiable as she ever was.

Hernandez works like a literary writer, building up events and character through individual moments. So we see these characters, and many more, bouncing off each other over the course of what seems to be several months, probably the late spring into the summer in this stretch of Southern California. Tonta and Maggie meet several times on the beach; the beach is more important here than I can remember it ever being in Hernandez's work before - I'd always gotten a sense that his work took place further inland, in the sunbaked minor cities of the Inland Empire.

Hernandez doesn't always avoid the big scenes and moments - there are two weddings in this book - but it's striking that this stretch of time probably included the graduations of Tonta and many (most? all?) of her friends, which is not even mentioned. What he does is only include the moments important for the particular story he's telling here - not all of the things going on in any of his character's lives, not even the things they might consider the most important.

Life Drawing is the story of how Tonta grows up, at least a bit. How she comes to get a bit better at talking to other people, relating to other people, navigating relationships, understanding what she wants. She's a Jaime Hernandez character, so she's not going to get that good at any of those things - Maggie, thirty-some years older, has maybe hit a point where those things are pretty solid, after only forty-five years of comics with her as the main character.

This is not as flashy or dramatic as Hernandez's most famous stories - there's nothing like The Death of Speedy or The Love Bunglers. He does have Tonta to give it that young energy, that screwing-up-everything phase of their lives that all his characters have, but we think Tonta, despite all her goofiness, all her mistakes, all the things she avoids or tries not to think about, will be OK in the end.

The Man With Two Left Feet by P.G. Wodehouse

It can be odd to think of a book like this - a decade and a half into the author's career, his second collection of short stories and roughly twentieth book overall - as being part of the extreme early phase of his career. But that's what happens when you live to 93, publish a hundred books, and have a career stretching from 1902 to 1975.

The Man With Two Left Feet is an early P.G. Wodehouse book, from the era where he was transitioning from his early school stories into the frothy comedies he's best-known for. It was published in 1917, collecting a baker's dozen stories that appeared in magazines on both sides of the Atlantic in the previous years. It's cast most in light-magazine mode, with stories the reader is meant to take seriously but humorously, and there are a few elements and plot details Wodehouse would re-use later to better effect.

It does have the first Jeeves story, "Extricating Young Gussie," so early that Bertie has not yet developed a surname. Other than that, there are no recurring Wodehouse characters here - there are two linked stories told from the POV of a dog, under the title "The Mixer," but that's as close as we get. 

As with a lot of Wodehouse, the plot structure tends to be romance - young men pursuing young women with mostly pure motives in mind, or young women going about their lives and having young men pop up and romance them. There is a bit of larcenous behavior, especially in the first of the stories narrated by the dog, in the mature-Wodehouse manner and light tone. And most of the stories take place in New York: Wodehouse was successful for about a decade before this book by writing stories about exotic New York for London audiences and (less often) about exotic London for New York audiences.

So this is transitional Wodehouse, a little more conventional and pat-ending than we're used to - "At Geisenheimer's" in particular has a snapper of a mid-teens magazine ending that is just fine but doesn't feel particularly Wodehousian. I wouldn't recommend it to any reader who isn't at least forty books deep into Wodehouse; this is one of his works to save for the back half of your reading spree.

Business Cat: Hostile Takeovers by Tom Fonder

I've read chunks of the Business Cat strip, mostly on GoComics - I've been waiting, for about three years now, for it to restart from the beginning, which used to be a thing that happened regularly on GoComics for strips that ended. But we clearly live in a fallen world, so my hopes are not high. [1]

Business Cat ran from 2014-2018: it wasn't a continuity strip to begin with, but it developed a main plotline in the middle of the run and the strip stopped when creator Tom Fonder found a natural point in that plotline. It's been nearly a decade since, and it hasn't come back, so I have to assume Fonder is doing different income-generating activities these days. (And, actually, that assumes that a webcomic was income-generating in the first place, which is plausible but not proven.)

The strip was collected, I believe in its entirety, into two books. The first one was Business Cat: Money Power Treats, which I haven't seen. But the book of the back half of the strip, Business Cat: Hostile Takeovers, was available in my library app, so I checked that out recently.

The original concept for the strip was one of those weird juxtapositions: BC is both the CEO of a major global corporation and a cat! So the gags were mostly CEOs doing cat-like things: knocking coffee cups off desks, sitting on employee's laps, demanding skritches during important meetings. As you see from the cover, Fonder drew BC as a human being with a cat head, which made the whole thing quite odd - but humorously so.

Eventually, the worldbuilding got rolling - there are several Business Animals, including BC's nemesis, a pug named Howard. Each of them also runs a global megacorporation, each of them also is an animal in human form (mostly just the head to indicate animal-ness), and, as in so much popular media, they fight - as far as we see, entirely through the mechanisms of capitalism.

BC is not actually a good CEO: that's the central joke. He's easily distracted, unfocused, and doesn't seem to care about anything his company actually does. So it turns out that he replaced their "accountant" - like a lot of fiction about the business world, it has a view of a major corporation as organized like the small business above the chip shop, only in fancier offices - with a plush toy, which led to major irregularities, which led to a visit from the IRS, which led to bankruptcy, oddly described.

Howard sweeps in to "rescue" the company by taking it over, and BC is cast out of the business world, in what was a temporary rebrand of the strip as "The Adventures of Regular Cat." BC lives in an alley, is incarcerated in an animal shelter, finds a new family, and so forth - it gives Fonder a chance to make some pretty familiar cat  jokes that didn't fit into the business setting.

Eventually, of course, there is a scheme to get BC back in control of his company and cast out Howard, which of course succeeds, because BC is our hero. And the very last strip comes full circle, repeating the gag from the first strip.

Hostile Takeovers is a fun collection of a crisp, amusing strip that didn't overstay its welcome. I would recommend finding the first book first if you can, but this one has most of the "story" material from the series - and it's not like the concept or background are so complex you need the first book to understand everything.

[1] As always, saying something in public changes the world. Between the time I wrote this post and it went live, Business Cat began another round of reruns on GoComics. I'm not claiming it happened because of me...or am I?

Dante's Inferno by Paul & Gaëtan Brizzi

The last time I read a comics adaptation of Dante, it was by Seymour Chwast. This one, you might say, is from the opposite end of the picture-making spectrum, all soft pencils in a detailed, almost photorealistic style as opposed to Chwast's bold colors and carefully-designed simplicity.

And clear, obvious distinctions like that are good: living in a world with multiple graphic adaptations of Dante, you want to be able to define them against each other as clearly as possible.

Dante's Inferno, unlike the Chwast book from over a decade ago, just adapts the first and most famous of Dante's three sections of the Divine Comedy. Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi - brothers who have mostly worked in animation together for the last few decades - use some of Dante's words, but mostly present this story visually, in cinematic full-bleed pages packed with striking images and magnificent effects. They have animators' eyes for gesture and expression and, in particular, for the large arresting image - the book irises out from the usual four-to-six white-bordered panels per page to full-page or full-spread images at least once per Circle, for maximum effect.

The relative lack of text keeps the focus on the main characters - Dante himself, journeying through Hell to find his dead love Beatrice, and his guide, the classic poet Virgil. Most of the text in the book is their conversation: Dante's wonder and fear, Virgil's explanations and some of his negotiations with all of the strange doomed creatures they meet.

That's the story of Dante's poem, for anyone unfamiliar with the original. The author himself is moping about a forest near his hometown of Florence, since his great love Beatrice has recently died. Virgil appears - long-dead author of The Aeneid and Dante's poetic role model - and says he will lead Dante to her. But Virgil does not reveal that the trip will go through literal hell until they're within the gates. (Seems like a thing one's mentor would want to mention at the outset, so one could be properly prepared with strong footwear, the right mental attitude, and some appropriate traveling snacks.)

Anyway, Inferno is the journey down through the nine circles of Hell, in Dante's poetry filled with lovingly-described scenes of the torture in various inventive ways of all sorts of people, particularly those he knew and loathed. It's followed by Purgatorio and Paradiso, covering Dante's journey through the other two portions of the Christian afterlife. The other two bits are less popular, and I see no indication that the Brizzi brothers intend to continue this work to adapt them - though, of course, they might.

The Brizzis show us a lot of the creatures and people in Hell - at least one group per circle - but they've quietly simplified the presentation and removed the long Dantean descriptions of various groups of sinners, the horrible things they did in life, and how they are being tortured in inventive ways in Hell. Those who have read Inferno know quite a lot of it is made of that catalog - oh, here are the simoniacs, who are in the third of ten ditches in the eighth circle, Malebolge, and they are evil because they sold holy things, and they are punished by being left head-down in holes in the burning landscape with only their feet showing. It's all a bit like Medieval Mad Libs: the SINNER TYPE is in the REGION OF HELL because they committed VERY SPECIFIC SIN and are punished in INVENTIVE WAY.

Dante sees all of this, and is horrified and/or gratified - the latter when he sees people he knew, and is happy to see them being tortured in Hell - at all of it. Eventually, the two of them make it to the bottom of Hell, where a gigantic goat-like Lucifer breaks out of a frozen lake (the thermodynamics of Hell do not bear close scrutiny) and our heroes are able to jump onto his head to get themselves to the exit.

(Rather convenient of the King of Lies, I'd say - provides good service to visitors. Five stars.)

The Brizzis make compelling pages here, and they have a fantastic, world-famous story full of striking images to work from. Their version of Dante loses the tedious catalog of sins and torments for visual grandeur and a near-epic feel. It may disappoint some hard-core Dante fans, who want more details on exactly how the murderers are tortured, and what the virtuous pagans are up to, but, for most readers, this is either a fantastic introduction to Dante or a gorgeous reminder of his work.