E Is for Edward by Gregory Hischak

I don't read coffee-table books much. Very few people do, of course - there might be critics who do round-ups for something like the NY Times Book Review once or twice a year, but most of us read through a coffee-table book every few years at best. Assuming we read it, and not just plop it down in its natural home, to be poked through at odd moments when our phones are less compelling than usual.

(Thinking about it, the coffee-table book is yet another example of the wide array of boredom-reducing technology that was outcompeted by phones.)

But I did read this one - all the way through, beginning to end, like a "normal" book. So I suppose I might as well say something about it.

E Is for Edward is a celebration of the work of the illustrator, writer, and artist Edward Gorey. The subtitle is "A Centennial Celebration of the Mischievous Mind of Edward Gorey," and it was indeed published last year, the hundred anniversary of Gorey's 1925 birth. The author is Gregory Hischak, curator of The Edward Gorey House - the museum created from Gorey's home and full of his stuff - which means he's probably the best current person to give an overview of Gorey's work.

It is not a biography - there have been several of those. It doesn't reprint entire works by Gorey - the Amphigorey series already does that. It's also not primarily a process book, though there are some sketches and unpublished work. (That's good, because most Gorey fans will want to see the stuff they recognize.)

Instead, Hischak organizes Gorey's wide body of work into eight loosely-themed chapters, from "Hapless Children" to "He Wrote It All Down Zealously," to cover as many of the hundred-plus books Gorey published in his lifetime and the other projects (credits for PBS Mystery!, costumes and set design for a famous 1970s staging of Dracula and a few other theatrical projects, a mostly-just-mentioned vast flow of commercial illustration work that he did for decades) as possible. It's a well-designed book, with lots of Gorey artwork throughout, and Hischak is a knowledgeable guide through it all.

We do get sketches of bits of Gorey's life, mostly out of order, although the first chapter does the whole childhood thing. There's one exceptionally circumlocutious section almost smack-dab in the middle about the word "queer" and whether or not it applies to Gorey, which I take to mean that Gorey was probably gay but either led a mostly celibate life as an adult or that his affairs were so scandalous and so well-hidden that they can't be discussed in public even fifty years later.

(I prefer to believe the latter, but the former is more likely.)

Anyway, the book is mostly "here's a cluster of stuff by Gorey with loosely related themes," one cluster after another. Among those loose clusters are things like ballet, murder, nonsense verse, and clothing. It's informative and interesting, and does - as a coffee-table book must - include lots of Gorey's art, presented well.

My only complaint is that the book drops into reverse-type - white on a deep green - far too often. Designers used to know that knock-out type is inherently more difficult to read, and saved it for special occasions, but, like everything else, the standards of the past are no longer enforced, and children now disobey their parents.

Other than that, it's a handsome, comprehensive look at the work of an American original. And it's large and heavy enough to kill a small child if dropped on them from a height, which would probably amuse Gorey.

All of This and Nothing: In the Branches/The Coal Mine Fall

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

This week we flip back to Obscure, with a band that I've tried to fit into this Monday series almost every year. (The band is all men, I think, so they really didn't fit with Portions for Foxes.) I finally managed to do it.

The Builders and the Butchers have a sound that I want to call unique - it's folk-based, but more in the rock vein, though nothing like the concept of "folk rock." They sound like what would have happened if rock had developed in the Appalachians, out of murder ballads, rather than the Mississippi delta.

Maybe. Something like that, anyway.

They have a lot of great songs, and they have a new record coming out this year that I haven't heard yet as I type this.

And, maybe because picking one song was tough, what I chose was a medley of two songs from their live record Where the Roots All Grow. So my favorite Builders and Butchers song is In The Branches/The Coal Mine Fall.

B&B songs are deeply atmospheric, sometimes telling semi-clear stories but more often full of apocalyptic, specific, haunting imagery, to imply and tease and suggest:

They left the angels singing
In branches of a burning tree
'Said it was all a game.
And your daddy got bent and twisted
In the bed that he made.
You'll end up the same.

Or, in one of the lines that comes to my mind most often:

A true love will leave you on your knees in the rain
A true love will leave you in the rain

This medley has the energy of a great live recording, two great songs full of atmosphere and menace to run through, and sees the band at one of their peaks. I recommend all of their stuff, for anyone who likes dark Americana music, but this is, I think, a magnificent entry point.

Quote of the Week: Handing-Over

"And then when you've collared him just hand him over to me," Ricky instructed. Jackson wasn't against entrapment - it took up the bulk of his business - nor was he against clearing the streets of one more pervert, but he wasn't at all sure about the handing-over bit. He wasn't a vigilante, he really wasn't, although his idea of right and wrong didn't always conform to the accepted legal standard. Which was a nice way of saying that he had broken the law. One more than one occasion. For the right reasons.

 - Kate Atkinson, Big Sky, p163

Red Ultramarine by Manuele Fior

What do you get when you tell the story of Daedalus and Icarus, and combine it with a parallel story about a modern architect named Fausto? Does it matter if the architect stays resolutely a secondary character, and makes no deals with any infernal agencies? How about if the whole thing is told in slashing, imagistic hues of black and red? Or if the architect's girlfriend Silvia is the main character?

Those are some of the elements in Manuele Fior's graphic novel Red Ultramarine, which I think is his earliest work to be translated into English. The Italian original came out in 2006 - and is the earliest book listed on his website - and this translation, by Jamie Richards, is from 2019.

I don't think I entirely understood what Fior was trying to do here. Why does King Minos seem to be the same person as the esteemed doctor that Silvia consults about her boyfriend's obsession? How does that doctor's assistant, Marta, connect the two worlds - Silvia and Fausto in the modern day, Icarus and the rest in ancient Greece? And why is Marta young and gorgeous - and, notably, naked - in Greece, but older and more settled with the modern doctor?

The story, such as it is, bounces back and forth between the two timelines. Icarus works with his father near the labyrinth, both are eventually thrown into it and have to escape, and do so in the traditional way with the traditional tragic end. Meanwhile, Silvia consults the doctor - who hectors her and rants about Faust for no obvious reason - about her boyfriend's obsession with perfection and labyrinths, is given a cream by Marta that promises to make the large birthmark on her face "go away," and uses that cream, which turns her entire body the color of the birthmark and sends her back to the time of Icarus. Silvia consults the doctor - who is somehow also in ancient Greece and has the same face as Minos, but is dressed differently, so maybe they're not the same person? - and demands that he send her back to her world, and he responds in much the same confusing wordy flood as before, which makes her hysterical.

All of the dialogue in Red Ultramarine talks around things: nothing is stated clearly. No options are laid out cleanly. The connections are symbolic, imagistic, implied. And all of the talk about Faust doesn't lead anywhere cleanly - it comes across as a red herring.

Speaking of colors, the title is also a bit perplexing. The book is steeped in red - several of the characters, especially in Greece, have dark red skin tones, and red is an element on every page. Ultramarine, though, is entirely absent from the book - that slash of blue on the cover is the only blue in the entire book. The art inside uses black to complement red - black as the base, the core element, red as the embellishment, most of the time.

The art is gorgeous and striking, almost abstract at times in its stark outlines and elegant simplicity. It's not simple in a cartoony sense, but simple like design, like a mid-century poster. It's visually stunning throughout, a succession of compelling pages, even as the words confuse and obfuscate.

In the end, I took this as an early work by a creator still figuring out what he wanted to say and how to say it. Possibly also a creator more comfortable with pictures than with the words that partner them - able to make the art say what he wanted but not quite as adept yet with the words.

Big Sky by Kate Atkinson

The fifth Jackson Brodie novel, Big Sky, came out in 2019, after a nearly decade-long gap since the previous book, Started Early, Took My Dog. It's structurally like the previous books: Brodie is an important viewpoint, but only one of several, and the story circles around both a group of characters, many of whose thoughts we see, and some unpleasant and illegal activity both in the present day and the past, which all comes out in the end. They're all crime novels, but I still don't think they're really mysteries - there are police, detecting things, and sometimes Brodie doing detection as well, but the detection is not the focus and the feel is much more like a literary novel.

Well, Kate Atkinson did begin as a literary novelist, winning the Whitbread for her first book Behind the Scenes at the Museum, so that's not surprising.

This time, we're on the east coast, back in Yorkshire, in a cluster of towns and hamlets and villages of which the one familiar to me is Whitby - from Dracula. Brodie is living in a rented house nearby, doing minor private-detective work, mostly watching or entrapping unfaithful husbands, and trading custody of his teenage son Nathan with his former partner, Julia, who is working as an actress on the Collier TV show nearby. 

One of the other viewpoint characters returns from a previous book - Reggie Chase, a teenager in When Will There Be Good News?, is now a Detective Constable working on a cold case this time. (There's always the underlying question in a series of how swiftly time passes - I think, for the Brodie books, it passes normally, and everyone gets as many years older as the calendar indicates.)

The crime this time is sex trafficking, which causes some tonal shifts in Big Sky, and also means Atkinson is more reticent about showing the bad things underlying the plot than previously - not always to the book's benefit. We do see a few of the women trafficked, but none of them from inside their own heads, and Atkinson's politeness in skipping over all of the actual criminal activity means they stay ciphers, or plot tokens. This is clearly a post-Jimmy Savile novel; there's a (fictional) trafficking ring that was discovered and shut down a decade or two previously. The two heads of the ring were caught: one suicided and the other is now dying in prison. But there were rumors of a "third man," who was never identified - Reggie and her partner are running down leads related to that now, after a victim from those days gave a new interview and named some new names.

The other viewpoint characters are are peripherally related to the ring that is still running - the second wife of one figure, her teenage stepson, a local businessman who might be brought into the scheme by the current three conspirators, and some secondary characters.

I find that the Brodie novels, and maybe Atkinson in general, are a bit of a hill to climb starting out - Atkinson has to run through her large, disparate cast, to identify everyone, place them in the world, and explain their backstories and how they're related to each other. That takes the first fifty or seventy pages of the book: it's all compelling writing, but it can feel a bit like homework. Once the narrative gets past that point, though, her strengths shine out more clearly, as she can make connections and cut back-and-forth between strands and (several times this book) carefully give the reader the impression something particular (and generally shocking) has happened, while leaving herself room to show that impression was mistaken.

Big Sky is a bit messier, and I think not quite as successful, as the previous books: Atkinson can't show us sex trafficking the way she could murder and abduction, so it's all abstracted and on the level of tut-tutting rather than visceral. But the characters are sharply drawn, their thoughts full of insights and pointed moments, and the writing is as supple and engaging as ever. Not quite as good as the previous books is still very good.

Was That Normal? by Alex Potts

Philip is about forty. He has one of those jobs you can do from anywhere, on a laptop, so he does it from his apartment, alone. He lives in a British city, probably mid-sized - not very specific, not very special. His apartment is garden-level, which means he looks out his window, while typing on that laptop, below the street. He doesn't have any long-term friends, or any connections with colleagues that we see - the closest person in his life is his landlady/roommate, an older woman who intermittently tries to engage Philip and be friendly with him.

Philip isn't all that good at being engaged and friendly. He's wrapped up too much in his own head, the kind of person who obsessively thinks about what's he's doing, what he should be doing, and if there's anything that he wants to be doing. (There usually isn't..) He goes out to the pub now and then, because he thinks he should or because he thinks he'll have a good time this time, but he inevitably ends up drinking too much to be social and pays for it later.

Was That Normal? is a graphic novel, by British creator Alex Potts. It covers a few months in Philip's life - how he starts from that point of being stuck, how he's searching for connection, what happens to him, and where he ends up. There are no major epiphanies, no huge revelations, no amazing transformations - like all of us, Philip is deeply embedded in his own life, and all changes will be gradual and incremental.

But he does want more, want something different. He does try, in his fumbling, uneasy way, to open up to experience, to look for things that would make his life brighter. He gets dragged out to a concert, and is struck by the singer, Gina. He sees her around town, and strikes up a friendship.

He obviously wants more, but things are messy - Gina has a volatile not-quite-ex and doesn't seem terribly interested in anything more serious than friendship with Alex. But she is friendly, and it looks like it's been a long time since Philip had a friend.

He's uncomfortable with a lot of the day-to-day of life, the kind of person who over-thinks everything and then has trouble just doing even the little bits of social interaction that more thoughtless people never waste a moment on. That might not change - or not entirely. He's going to stay Philip. But he might be able to be a Philip a little more comfortable in his own skin, a Philip who tries more things, a Philip who spends more time with people and gets better at it. I do say "might" - Potts, again, is not going for epiphanies or transformations here; this is a realistic, grounded story about a real person in a real world, and nothing is guaranteed. 

Potts draws Was That Normal? with a slightly rumpled, indy-esque line - immediate and grounded, with his people not quite as pretty as a reader might expect. His panel borders are hand-drawn, just a bit uneven. The colors feel just a tone or two off from purely realistic - slightly more of a picture than the thing itself, usually in earthy tones, with lots of yellows/tans, browns and dull reds for backgrounds.

Was That Normal? could be a little hard to take, particularly for readers with a lot of Philip in their own makeup - but it's well-observed and thoughtfully true, and does provide some hope for this Philip...and, by extension, for all of the rest of us.

Daredevil by Frank Miller & Klaus Janson, Vol. 3

Credits are always a tricky thing for assembly-line comics. Projects tend to have a particular, clear breakdown of responsibilities - this guy writes, that other guy draws, a third guy inks - but those comics tended to be monthly, and monthly deadlines lead to messiness. (Ask the guy who spent sixteen years in a business that had a minimum of seventeen "months" a year.)

And creators want to work with each other - sometimes the same crew for a while, sometimes a one-off with that idol of theirs or the new guy doing interesting stuff.

When it comes to gather all of that messiness into a book, sometimes the publishers err on the side of simplicity. The first time the "Frank Miller Daredevil" was collected, it was under roughly that title, even though Klaus Janson drew the vast majority of those stories. For the second go-round, Marvel decided they needed to add Janson to the title, which makes a lot of sense.

But it meant that there was a first book with stories mostly written by or with other people, one of them inked by Frank Springer, and most of them drawn by Miller and inked by Janson. And then a second book that really was all Miller/Janson, the core of the run.

And this third, concluding volume gets messy again, with Daredevil by Frank Miller & Klaus Janson, Vol.3 collecting not just the climax of their run together - Daredevil issues 186-191 - but several odder and quirkier things, several of which Janson had nothing to do with. So it's yes Frank Miller, as before, and some embarrassed shuffling of feet about how much Janson there is.

There are three quirkier things, so I'll take them first, in the order they appear in the book and in increasing order of importance and strength.

Miller and Janson did an issue of What If...? in 1981, with co-writer Mike W. Barr, asking the comical question "What if Matt Murdock became an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.?" It would be a very standard late-'70s, early-'80s Marvel comic, much like the stories in the first Miller/Janson volume, is what. Talky, obvious, full of cramped panels and way too much narration from that boring bald giant on the moon. This is included, I assume, for completionists.

Miller returned to Daredevil for a one-off issue, #219, in mid-'85 (about a year before the Born Again sequence with David Mazzucchelli), apparently in large part to work with John Buscema. The credits are a bit vague - the splash page credits everything to Miller (with an asterisk), Buscema, and inker Gerry Talaoc - but I assume Miller wrote this story and did layouts that Buscema finished. This is a hardboiled "crooked town" story in twenty-ish pages, with Matt Murdock (out of costume) wandering into this Jersey hellhole and incidentally (and almost accidentally) cleaning it up on his way back out. This story has many of the weaknesses of both Marvel comics of the era and Miller in particular, but it's a solid piece that works on its own level.

And the last eighty pages or so of this book incorporate the 1986 graphic novel Daredevil: Love & War, written by Miller and drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz, in what ended up being a try-out for their Elektra: Assassin project almost immediately afterward. This is very much a one-off, but it's glorious and energetic, with Sienkiewicz at the height of his '80s inventiveness and Miller's multiple-narrators captions working quite well. Daredevil himself doesn't actually do a lot in this story, actually - he is necessary to the plot, I'll admit, but he also sets off for a whole lot of derring-do that fizzles entertainingly.

I've left the meat of the book for last: issues 186-191 is the big ninja storyline, the single most important vector for their takeover of American culture (particularly comics culture) later in the '80s. But we can't blame Miller and Janson for that. The stories are muscular and taut, with Miller dialing down his wordiness and telling this story visually a lot more than was standard for Marvel at the time. It includes all the greatest hits of the Miller Daredevil: Matt's mentor Stick and the small band of good-guy ninjas he leads, his dead-but-gets-better global-assassin ex-girlfriend Elektra, the super-evil ninjas of The Hand and their world-domination plots, the Kingpin, and a cameo by currently-paralyzed assassin Bullseye.

Those issues, though, in the best Marvel Manner, actually starts with some hugger-mugger about Matt's current girlfriend, Heather Glenn, and the family company she supposedly runs that has gotten involved with...gasp! horror!...some kind of munitions work. As usual with Big Two comics of this era, both the legal and the business details are ludicrous and unbelievable to anyone who is not twelve, and all of the characters talk about it in mind-numbing detail that only proves how little any of the creative team involved understood law or business. But, eventually, the Heather subplot ends and we get to the ninjas, who are thankfully much quieter.

My takeaway from this, and the whole mass of Miller/Janson Daredevil stories, is that everything is part of its time and place. The best of this material is as good as any adventure stories in comics form anyone has made over the past century. But a lot of it is dull, cliched and obvious, rolling out wallpaper-like standard plots, themes, and concepts that are third-hand at best and threadbare if you look too closely. The three Daredevil books have nearly a thousand pages of comics: three to four hundred of that is pretty darn good. The rest you need to slog through to get to the high points.

All of This and Nothing: Wicked Game

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

We swing back to "famous" this week, with a song you'll recognize, at least if you're of my generation: Chris Isaak's Wicked Game.

I'm embedding the full-length version below; the video - which I saw on MTV at the time; yes, I am old - is for the single edit, which I don't like as much. But that's out there as well, for anyone looking for classy black-and-white people canoodling without too many clothes on.

One thing that surprised me, looking at the lyrics now: I always thought it was "this world is only gonna break your heart," but it seems to be "girl," which seems smaller and less important. Sure, any particular person could break your heart, but I prefer the version of the song in my head.

And we can all do that, if we want. No one's going to stop you from having your own version of a song in your head. (Or rotating a cow, if you want something visual that's not too abysmal.)

I usually prefer my bad-love songs to be "I am full of woe" rather than "look what you did to me," but this is of the latter type, and Isaak's mournful tone and quiet confidence sells it. This is a quintessentially sad song, something to put on late at night while you're having too much of whatever intoxicant you prefer, and just wallow.

The lyrics could easily come off as "this is all your fault, you evil witch you" in lesser hands; it's a tribute to Isaak that they don't - this is all about his pain and what-might-have-been.

What a wicked game you played to make me feel this way
What a wicked thing to do to let me dream of you
What a wicked thing to say you never felt this way
What a wicked thing to do to make me dream of you

Books Read: March 2026

Is it really April of 2026? Neither of those things seems plausible. (I also had an AI tool at work confidently tell me it was 2025 several times this past week, which may be adding to my confusion. Maybe 2025 will never end.)

Anyway, assuming a month did just end, and that it was actually March of 2026, here's what I read:

Anders Nilsen, Tongues, Book 1 (3/1)

Peter Kuper, Insectopolis (3/6)

Roy Thomas and P. Craig Russell, Elric: The Dreaming City (digital, 3/7)

Jordi Lafebre, I Am Their Silence (digital, 3/8)

Ian Frazier, Paradise Bronx (3/10)

Doug Savage, Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: As the Deer Flies (digital, 3/14)

Osamu Tezuka, Tomorrow the Birds (digital, 3/15)

P.G. Wodehouse, The Girl on the Boat (3/15)

Ana Oncina, Just Friends (digital, 3/20)

Max Huffman, Dogtangle (digital, 3/21)

Lavie Tidhar, A Man Lies Dreaming (3/21)

Zabus and Hippolyte, Incredible! (digital, 3/22)

Mike Dawson, Fun Time Omnibus, Vol. One (3/28)

Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 9: Echo of the Assassin (digital, 3/29)

Michael Swanwick, The Universe Box (ARC, 3/31)

In April, if this is April, which I'm not sure I'm convinced of, I will read more books.

Quote of the Week: I Tell You This In Confidence

This was a determined-looking young woman in a blue dress and a large hat of a bold and flowery species. Archie happening to attract her attention, she gave him a glance out of a pair of fine brown eyes, then, as if she did not think much of him, turned to her companion and resumed their conversation - which being of an essentially private and intimate nature, she conducted, after the manner of her kind, in a ringing soprano which penetrated into every corner of the lobby. Archie, waiting while the brigand reluctantly made change for a dollar bill, was privileged to hear every word.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Indiscretions of Archie, p. 141

Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Donald's Happiest Adventures by Lewis Trondheim and Nicolas Keramidas

About a decade ago, writer Lewis Trondheim and artist Nicolas Keramidas made a bande dessinée for Éditions Glénat, the French arm of the global Disney octopus, about Mickey Mouse. It was called Mickey's Craziest Adventures and pretended to be rediscovered pages from an obscure (probably American) 1960s comic, telling a long, convoluted and all-adventure story on its big pages. It didn't entirely make sense, but that was the point: it was supposedly roughly half of the pages of a decade-long story that was all cliffhangers and hairsbreadth escapes to begin with.

A few years later, they did it again, though in a slightly less breathless register: Donald's Happiest Adventures similarly pretends to be a serial from an incredibly obscure '60s comic. But, this time, they happily state that they found the whole thing, and can present the full story of how Donald was tasked by his Uncle Scrooge with finding the secret of happiness. Happiest was published by Glénat in 2018, and an American edition followed in 2023, translated by David Gerstein.

The structure is the same as the Mickey story: Trondheim and Keramidas pretend that each page stood alone as a monthly installment of the story, so the story leaps forward regularly, with each page being a moment or a thought or a particular place. Trondheim's Donald has the standard irascibility, though he doesn't break into full-fledged tantrums here as he sometimes does in stories by other hands. He's also more philosophical than Donald often is, a lot like other bird-coded characters in other Trondheim stories, like Ralph Azham or Herbert from Dungeon or Trondheim's self-portrait in Little Nothings.

But if you're going to have a story about Donald Duck searching for the meaning of happiness, you need to have a version of Donald who is capable of finding happiness and of talking about it coherently - not always a guarantee in every version of Donald.

Like the Mickey story, this one ranges widely - Donald is summoned by Scrooge to go retrieve a fabulously valuable artifact from an obscure corner of the world, but unwisely questions Scrooge's motivations and finds himself instead sent to find the secret of happiness. In particular, the secret of making Scrooge happy, which is even more difficult than doing so for Donald. (Donald has moments of happiness throughout the book, as a careful reader will notice - but he's not happy all the time, which is what he thinks he's looking for.)

Donald meets and talks with a vast array of other characters - the fabulously lucky Gladstone Gander, the down-to-earth Grandma Duck, the genius Ludwig von Drake, and so on - as he asks each of them in turn what happiness is. Along the way, he gets into adventures that span the globe, including a stint in a nasty totalitarian country where, luckily, the shackles are all made of cardboard. He also runs across Mickey several times, helping capture Pegleg Pete each time and getting a reward from the police forces who pop up, always right after the hard work is done.

It's a fairly talky story, because it's about finding happiness, and Donald needs to talk to nearly every character about it. (He doesn't have any conversations with Pete, which is a possible miss, since Pete has always seemed quite content with his lot in life, despite having all of his schemes fail miserably.)

As he must, Donald does eventually make it back home to Duckburg, and has an answer for Scrooge that makes the old miser happy, at least for that moment. It's not the secret of happiness, but that of course is Trondheim's point: there's no such thing. Along the way, Happiest is thoughtful and adventurous in equal proportions, a good story for people who are willing to do a little thinking during their Donald Duck adventures.

As in the Mickey book, Keramidas draws it in a style that I can't quite call off-model but doesn't quite look right. (Though I mean that as a compliment: purely on-model is boring.) His characters are energetic in that cartoony way and his pages crisply laid out to accommodate all of Trondheim's long speeches - and to look as if each one could have been a full entry of this serial. 

Some reviews of this book have missed the fact that the '60s origin is...how do I put this delicately?...not actually true. But you, my dear readers, are smarter and more perspicacious than that, so I'm sure the metafiction here will be no trouble for you. If you're looking for a combination of philosophy and Disney adventure - and why not? it's a fun mix - Donald's Happiest Adventures will provide a lot of enjoyment.

A Billy the Kid Alphabet by Rick Geary

This was a Kickstartered project; you might not be able to get it. On the other hand, Rick Geary has been making books for decades - and comics for even longer than that - so I have to think that he'll have a way for people to buy his stuff. You don't get a career of that length and depth by making it hard for people to pay for your work. My guess is that it will show up on the Books page of his website eventually.

Geary has been doing Kickstarters for books - at this point, I think his output is about one Kickstarted book a year, and he's had probably a dozen or more going back at least a decade - for a while, and I've been backing them to get the books, since I'm a long-standing Geary fan.

The project for 2025, which got to me early in the new year, was A Billy the Kid Alphabet, an abecedary about the man known to history as William Bonney.

And you might be asking "wait, didn't Geary already do a book about Billy the Kid?" That's right: in 2015, he did a more traditional narrative version of Bonney's story, The True Death of Billy the Kid. That earlier book is longer, organized in a more familiar way, has more details, and in general is a better place to start. (Geary also did a book about the related Lincoln County War around the same time.)

But Geary is a fun, quirky creator, and I do enjoy his quirky projects. This is definitely one of them.

Alphabet more-or-less tells Bonney's story, though not in order. Geary has a reasonable word or phrase for each letter, from Alias (covering the names used by Bonney) to Zero (debunking the "he survived his death" rumors), but the stricture of the alphabet means that, for example, the Lincoln County War is referred to a few times before we get to Regulators (the group Bonney was part of during that war) and Tunstall (the landowner Bonney worked for, whose death sparked the war).

So Geary does get to the high points of Bonney's life - that war, his capture, trial, and escape, how he was killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett - but not quite in the order that they happened in life. This might confuse some readers, assuming Alphabet has readers who aren't familiar with the basic facts already.

Each letter has a left-hand page, with the letter big and the explanatory text for the chosen word, and then a right-hand page, with a Geary pen-and-ink illustration of the thing he's writing about. As always, Geary's art is detailed and particular - he's always been good at 19th century faces, clothing, and surroundings, and Alphabet shows his strengths well.

Again, this is a book that would be difficult to find at this point, though it will probably be available from the author in the near future. If you are a Geary or Bonney fanatic who didn't know about it, I wish you luck in finding it.

Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer

I might have been in the wrong mood for this book, or maybe didn't read it the right way. But I found Jeff VanderMeer's Acceptance to be too full of too many things, trying to be three novels at the same time and not landing with me as any of them.

(Plenty of other people have praised this, and the trilogy it concludes, since VanderMeer published it in 2014, and I've generally liked VanderMeer's work - so it's more than likely the issue is with me.)

VanderMeer famously put out this entire trilogy in less than a year, but it took me more than a decade to get to it: first Annihilation, then Authority, and finally the conclusion. They're near-future, or maybe alternate-present, horror-tinged science fiction. Something transformed a stretch of coast - VanderMeer never says in the text precisely where it is, but it was inspired by the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge in the Florida panhandle - about thirty years before. Area X is full of strangeness, and wiped clean of nearly all signs of humanity. A government agency, "Central," established a division, the Southern Reach, to investigate Area X; it has sent expeditions through the one portal into this transformed landscape regularly over the decades, with minimal scientific results and various horrific ends to many of the people involved.

Annihilation was the story of the "twelfth" expedition - like many things about Area X and the Southern Reach, the initial story is not precisely true - told by "the biologist" through her journals. Authority was the story of a new Director of the Southern Reach, sent by Central after a failed career doing other spy things elsewhere in the world, who was generally just called Control. He spent a lot of time talking to a version of the biologist from the first book, created by Area X and called Ghost Bird for opaque reasons, and some time countering various bureaucratic maneuverings and schemes from longer-serving members of the Southern Reach, with their own agendas.

Acceptance is a direct sequel to Authority - Control and Ghost Bird went through a portal to Area X at the end of that book, and one narrative strand here follows them. It's also a prequel to the whole series, with a major thread about Saul Evans - the only major character regularly referred to by his actual name in the novel - the keeper of the lighthouse that eventually became a focal point of Area X and the only major human-made piece of infrastructure remaining there.

VanderMeer rotates viewpoints - from The Lighthouse Keeper to Ghost Bird to Control to The Director (another major character from the earlier novels, who I've neglected to mention, who also has two names) - and switches timeframes, covering the period just before the creation of Area X with Saul, various times during the Director's tenure running Southern Reach, and the journeys of Control and Ghost Bird back in Area X.

I found each of these threads to be separate from each other, part of the same overall story of Area X but not as resonant with each other as I think I was supposed to. In particular, Saul's story was just sad and pointless: he was manipulated by other people, and maybe the mysterious cosmic or alien forces behind the transformation, so he lost everything and was utterly destroyed in a horrible, unpleasant, creepy way. So, yes: he was mostly happy, and had a man he loved, but then something used him to transform the world, kill millions of people, and bring about Creepy Armageddon. I didn't find that cathartic, or inevitable - just tedious and unpleasant and utterly regrettable.

This was the kind of book where I liked the sentences and paragraphs, appreciated the character insights and wanted to know how it all worked out - but didn't care, in the end. This is a world that has had a Weird Apocalypse, and we still, after three novels, don't know how or why. There's only so much wandering around and talking about different pieces of the elephant I can stand without an actual elephant being revealed. And, I suppose, I've discovered that's two novels worth: I can take two, but three is Right Out.

You may react differently, but, if you've read the first two Southern Reach books and are hoping for a big reveal at the end...well, you may want to recalibrate your expectations.

Kiosco by Juan Berrio

I didn't know this was wordless going into it. Wordless books pose a challenge to the critic, for all the usual dancing-about-architecture reasons, but this is sweet and lovely and expressive, so let's see what words I can dig up that Juan Berrio didn't need.

Kiosco is a horizontally-formatted graphic novel, generally one big wide panel to a page, originally published in Spain by DIBBUKS in 2014 and published in this edition for the US market by Europe Comics in 2017. It doesn't credit a translator; it didn't need one. Someone wrote the descriptive copy in English, but then I bet someone wrote descriptive copy for this in Spanish, French, and German earlier, and we don't credit those people, either. (No offense: I've written descriptive copy for books, back in my misspent youth. It's a skill, and a necessary function, and I didn't get credited, either.)

The main character is a young man. We see painting apparatus in his apartment, and him working at it, so we think he's an artist. But the way he makes his living, we think, is by running a little coffee-and-pastry stand in a local park, in whatever city this is he lives in. A kiosk, we might say in English. I gather "Kiosco" is the Spanish equivalent.

This is the story of one day. He gets up, gets ready, pokes at a painting briefly, and then sets off on his bicycle to work with a tray of croissants. He opens the shop, the sun rises, and he's ready to greet the day.

But though the park is full of people passing through, no one is spending money at the kiosk. Berrio shows time passing, with some wonderfully expressive pages in soft earth tones - I'm not sure if it's watercolor or colored pencils. He goes back and forth between the hubbub of the passing crowd - different every time, a fascinating array of different faces and body language and gesture, all going somewhere else to do something else - and our main character, standing and fidgeting and cleaning the stand and tables yet again to keep himself busy.

There are a few scenes of someone almost shopping at the stand, but no one actually does. It even rains, to make this a comprehensively bad day.

Eventually, though, he does have a customer. I won't spoil it. It's lovely and bright and happy, and that ends his day in the kiosk and, soon afterward, the book.

I don't know if Berrio typically works wordlessly; I found this book randomly and the only other Berrio book I see available in North America is similarly wordless, for kids. (But he has a long list of previous works on his Spanish site, and wordless comics famously travel the most easily.) This is a sweet little book in a lovely cartoony style, and I'd love to see more of Berrio's work make it over to my side of the Atlantic.

All of This and Nothing: Life Design

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

I know this song because I stayed at a hotel. The Hard Rock Hotel in Universal Orlando used to - and might still, for all I know - give away a mixtape to guests, called Sounds of Your Stay. I think it was a roughly annual thing. It was entirely digital even then; it might just be a non-downloadable stream these days.

My family stayed at the Hard Rock, on a big theme-park vacation, back around 2010. I liked some of the music on the collection, and I guess I'm still listening to this song even now.

This is Life Design by the Parlotones. (And I see, right this moment, that the mixtape got the title slightly wrong, and I've been thinking of this song as Life's Design for a decade. But I do also have the record it came from, Stardust Galaxies, which does not have the possessive.)

This is a bombastic song, sung in a register to emphasize that. I do like rock 'n' roll with pretensions, at least some of the time, so that doesn't bother me - it may get to some listeners. But it is big, with vague words that imply a lot more than they actually say, and a theme that, as far as it can be made entirely clear - the point is to be not-quite-clear to be even bigger and more impressive - is about All Of Life.

Again: I like it. It swings for the fences, and I think gets the ball solidly out into the parking lot. I hope you agree.

This is our story, this is our life design