Fun Time Omnibus, Vol. One by Mike Dawson

DIY as an ethos pops up across a lot of creative areas. Even moviemakers embrace it, some of them, some of the time - the most complicated, resource-intensive, multi-creator kind of art out there, trying to do great work with two people and a borrowed camera. But the most fertile areas are the ones where one person can do all of the work alone. So music, obviously - the one-person band coming out of a bedroom and a computer is practically a cliché these days - and, even more than anything else, comics.

Comics DIY benefits from multiple threads of history - the undergrounds, minicomics, the wider 'zine scene - going back five or six decades. It doesn't really matter what any one creator's impulses or influences were, though it can be fun to trace them. There's a network of printers who are used to working with lone creators; a schedule of events they could show up at, table, and maybe even sell some units; and an audience that believes "I published it myself" is a badge of honor and not an admission of defeat. All that is to be celebrated; lots of art forms aren't as welcoming, for structural or cultural reasons. (Try to stage your own ballet!)

I'm waffling up front here because I have a cool DIY project today that's probably unavailable to readers right now, and is an anthology to begin with - so it's a collection of all sorts of different things.

Mike Dawson has been making comics professionally for two decades or so, breaking out with Freddie & Me in 2008. He's also a New Jersey guy like me - with a big asterisk, since he was born and spent his first decade in the UK - so I've vaguely kept track of his career for the usual local-guy reasons. Over the past few years, he's published three issues of a 'zine called Fun Time, which he collected into a single book, along with some other material, earlier this year.

The book is Fun Time Omnibus Vol. One, and I don't have a link because it was a Kickstarter and doesn't seem to be otherwise available right now. I bet if you run into Dawson at a comics show, and he's tabling there, he'll have some copies to sell, but that has a couple of big assumptions built into it.

At least some of the stories here have been slightly reconfigured from larger pages - Dawson has published in the New York Times, both in the Metropolitan section and the Book Review, which have much larger pages than this digest-size book - and his new intro here points out that he does often rewrite or redraw his work somewhat to adjust it for later publication, but tends to think of it as locked down once it hits a book page.

This officially collects the three issues of Fun Time, but not in an obvious way - Dawson doesn't include their covers, or run the strips in a clear "this is issue #2" way. He's reconfiguring work that appeared other places - the issues may have done the same thing; I'm not super-clear on how many permutations some of this work went through; and that doesn't actually matter - and presenting it as one anthology of Dawson work, mostly ruminative, mostly non-fictional, often personal in that autobio-comics way.

It's something of a sequel to Rules for Dating My Daughter, that is: more essay-ish comics, about his life and what's going on in the world, anchored in both his normal Jersey-guy life with kids that are I think roughly tweens now and the fact that he mostly made these comics in 2020-21, amid the ongoing fascist hellscape and the very particular global health crisis of that time that the big fans of the hellscape have tried to entirely memory-hole since then.

I think I agree with Dawson politically, at least in broad outlines, which helps for work like this. And he's a thoughtful essayist who has been making comics like this for more than a decade - Freddie, though more personal and backwards-focused, wasn't a million miles away from the same style of work, either.

I hesitate to recommend a book that's a potential reader would have trouble finding, but Dawson is an interesting comics essayist who I expect will keep doing work like this. (Alongside his main gig, which these days are young-reader GNs - I don't want to say every middle-aged comics-maker turns to making kids books when they have kids, but it happens a lot, and even to those who don't have kids.) Check his stuff out when you get a chance: he's thoughtful and has a fun, expressive line - the way he draws noses I particularly amusing.

All of This and Nothing: Little Bird Courage

"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.

Continuing the swing back and forth - as I noted last week, often from '80s songs reasonably well-known in their day to Aughts songs that are somewhat...less popular. This time out I have a song from 2009 by a band called Old Canes.

This is Little Bird Courage - I don't know much about it, or the band. But I liked it then, I still like it, in all of its rattly, clangy glory.

As far as I can tell, Old Canes was a sidebar band - the main guy, Christopher Crisci, had a main band, Appleseed Cast, which I don't think I've ever heard - and Old Canes only had two records in the Aughts. Their website is defunct, so I assume the band is as well.

This is another song with obscure lyrics - a metaphor for something, or more than one something. The title implies a lot of it: the song is about how the world is dark and dangerous, but there is hope.

And when I'm thirsty
You are the fountain
In the face of danger
I am unafraid

The tone is almost religious, but there's no specific dogma - Crisci may have meant it to be in some  particular tradition, but it doesn't come across that way to me. So it comes across as inspiring, no matter what you believe or don't believe - we can all rely on a little bird to give us courage.

Quote of the Week: He Is Not Wrong

'Listen to me, Wolf.' He was standing close, now, his hand on my shoulder reaching for my neck, almost choking me. 'You do not say no to me. No one does. I am America, and America does not take no for an answer. Refuse us, and we will bomb the shit out of your country, kill your women and rape your dogs and burn your houses and piss on the embers. Do you understand me? I said, do you understand me!'

 -Lavie Tidhar, A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), pp.194-195

Incredible! by Zabus & Hippolyte

Before I dive into the details of this book, I just want to take a moment to note how far above its weight Belgium punches in the comics world. It's comparable in size and population to the state I live in (New Jersey), similarly sandwiched between bigger, noisier powers (France and Germany for Belgium, New York and Philadelphia for New Jersey) and divided culturally in a similar way. Although, I should note that the gulf between Flemings and Walloons is substantially more fraught than the debate about whether to call one's breakfast meat "pork roll" or "Taylor ham."

And yet, it's not the French comics ecosystem that dominates Europe - it's the Franco-Belgian comics world. With Belgium second in the name, sure, but close to equal with a country that has twenty times its physical size and five times its population. I don't know why - maybe Belgium has Chinese-style academies for fomenting their children's comics-making power, to funnel them into the 9th art? But it's a whole thing, has been for two or three generations now, and this book is deeply Belgian in an unapologetic way that might be notable from some other small country. But, with Belgium and comics, it's just to be expected - Belgium is the land of comics.

Incredible! is a 2020 bande dessinée, originally published by Dargaud in Europe, with this Europe Comics English-language edition coming out the same year in this Joseph Laredo translation. It's written by Zabus and drawn by Hippolyte, two more of those single-named creators so common in Europe (and somewhat baffling to me) - both of whom, as far as I can tell, are new to me. But, again, it's a big Franco-Belgian world of comics, most of which never gets translated into English to begin with, and I've never tried to be comprehensive anyway.

I don't think this is for children, exactly, though it's the kind of book that's fine for most ages. But it is about a child: Jean-Loup, an eleven-year-old Belgian boy. Even if the book didn't tell us explicitly that he was Belgian, the fact that his confidant and basically only friend is a figurine of the then-Belgian king (the story is set in 1983, for possibly semi-autobiographical reasons) would be a major clue.

Jean-Loup is a stutterer, quiet and withdrawn at school, not wanting to call attention to himself. He has a lot of rituals and rules for himself, which we see on his way home from school - we think he may have OCD, or something similar. He lives with his father, who is distant and busy - we don't see the father on the page. Jean-Loup spends his time researching things intensively, writing down facts on little cards, and organizing those cards - so he has a large collection of knowledge, or semi-random things, that he built himself and knows pretty deeply.

His mother is dead. He talks to a funerary urn of her ashes. And he's got some externalized guilt and fear related to his family - we don't know exactly why, but he's an imaginative kid who sees (at least in this book, in comics form to make it visual) visions of his relatives and that Belgian king, nagging and demanding and exhorting and criticizing him all of the time.

So Jean-Loup is a smart, interesting kid with a lot of stuff to deal with, much of it deeply personal - things he doesn't tell anyone else.

And his class at school is having a series of oral presentations. Jean-Loup has prepared his, on a topic carefully constructed to be very boring (so he doesn't draw attention) and very thorough (so he gets a good grade). But things go wrong on the morning of his presentation, and he leaves his notes behind - so he ends up talking off the cuff about his latest research project, the thing he's currently passionate about: the burial customs of people around the world. He's riveting, energetic, engaging his audience and full of facts that he has right at the tip of his fingers.

His teacher gives him a high grade - and also asks him to be their school's representative in a regional presentation contest. He'd have to do a new presentation: slightly more formal, somewhat longer, on a new topic. Jean-Loup immediately agrees - and never regrets or goes back on that decision.

But it's not easy. His father can't take him to the regional competition - in another city a few weeks later - so his deeply unreliable uncle Johnny Gala has to do it. And, even before that, Jean-Loup wants to ask the advice of the Belgian king on his topic - I think this is one part "Belgium is a small enough country that this isn't a completely insane idea" and one part "Jean-Loup is really caught up in his fantasies and thinks this is a completely reasonable idea," so Johnny Gala has to drive him there.

Johnny's car is unreliable, and breaks down on both trips - but Jean-Loup does meet with the king, briefly, and he he does make it to the competition on time, in the end.

Other things happen, too - there's some family history that we learn along the way, and some changes for Jean-Loup - but that's all part of the journey.

There is a happy ending, slightly bigger than I expected, with Jean-Loup triumphant and happy and (we think) somewhat better positioned in life and somewhat less mentally unsteady.

Zabus tells this story in a slightly more ornate, detailed style than the reader might expect - giving more detail, going down more side-alleys, adding more grace-notes - which works, given Jean-Loup's mania for research and his cabinets crammed full of little cards of facts. Hippolyte draws it in a cartoony style, his figures often lightly outlined and his colors giving at least a pop of sunniness - often from Jean-Loup's blonde hair - on every page. His panels are regular and square, but with loose, rough edges, and his watercolors keep that softness, like a haze of memory taking us back to 1983.

Incredible! is a sweet, positive book suitable for eleven-year-olds like Jean-Loup and anyone who has been eleven, in 1983 or since then. I do suspect some aspects of it are semi-autobiographical, but I have no idea how many or how much.

A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar

You know the old story of the Taoist master who dreamed he was a butterfly? This novel is something like that. It is a dream, or maybe two dreams - one character dreaming the other, or making up his story, and the other in turn dreaming the first.

Shomer is always described in this novel as "in another time and place." His story is shorter, takes up less of the novel. He's a former writer of shund, pulp fiction in Yiddish. His time and place we know: Auschwitz, somewhere near the end of WWII. He's a prisoner there - is prisoner the right word? Victim, perhaps? In his mind, to try to avoid the horrors all around him, he tells a story - a detective story, an alternate-history story, a shocking pulp story.

The bulk of A Man Lies Dreaming, Lavie Tidhar's 2014 novel, is the story Shomer is telling himself - his revenge story, his distraction story, his lifeline.

It is 1939 London, November. The 1933 German elections swung the other way: the Communists took control, purged the National Socialists, aligned with the USSR. German refugees flooded London, and a nativist reaction to them has risen since then. Fascism, led by Oswald Mosley, is poised to take over the government in England, with an election coming by the end of the month. Mosely is expected to be the next Prime Minister.

Our main character is a private detective, one of those refugees, who was held in those post-election German camps but somehow escaped, an Austrian man in his middle years. He calls himself Wolf. He is who you suspect he might be. It isn't a secret, but the novel doesn't say the name - except once, very late.

Names have power, of course, as every SFF reader knows.

Wolf stumbles through a plot that's something like a parody of The Big Sleep and something of an excuse for Shomer to torment him and run through all of the sordid and scurrilous wartime rumors about "Wolf's" proclivities and sexuality.

(Tidhar does note, blandly, in his endnotes that the "one ball" rumor has no factual support. Wolf does seem to have the usual two throughout the book.)

Wolf's story is told mostly from his diary - though it's unlikely he would have time to write in such detail given the events depicted, and his zeal in capturing exact back-and-forth dialogue is both admirable and unbelievable - with some scenes narrated in third person, almost always after a diary section. The Shomer thread is also in third person, and is always introduced with that "in another time and place" line.

Wolf is hired by a rich woman - Jewish, which he loathes, of course - to find her sister, who was smuggled into England from Germany, but disappeared along the way. The organization that handles such smuggling is made up largely of Wolf's old compatriots, and parts of it operate mostly as advertised - delivering people where they expected to be, alive and poorer - and parts of it engage in the usual horrors of human trafficking. Wolf investigates that organization, talks to old friends, learns some things.

He's later also hired by Mosely, whom he thinks of with contempt but has eclipsed him comprehensively at this point. There's a Jewish terrorist organization that keeps trying to assassinate Mosely; they're getting closer. Mosely wants Wolf to find and stop them.

Wolf gets beat up, even more than most Chandleresque private detectives do. He rages and spews hate at random moments. He is sexually humiliated in ways that he secretly loves, in scenes that could limit the audience of this novel even more so than its Holocaust focus already does. He doesn't do much detecting, or show particular signs of being good at it. In the Chandler model, though, he does find that missing sister, though he never actually speaks to her or tells the older sister (or their father, who of course warns him off the case, through violence, about midway through the novel) where he found her.

Wolf takes on a fake identity, a very ironic one, and his story goes in an unusual direction at the end. The mystery-novel plot isn't wrapped up in any way; there are cops who he's embroiled with - there is also a serial killer of prostitutes, a young man obsessed with Wolf and killing them in ways to frame his idol, and so some of Wolf's beatings come at police hands - but they don't solve anything, either.

It ends like a literary novel: not like SF, not like a mystery, not even like noir. Wolf is...not transformed, I don't think, but perhaps I should say transported. And Shomer - well, we can say that Shomer is at peace, and we can argue about what happened to find him that peace.

This is definitely an audacious novel, with a sharp premise that generally works. Wolf sits uneasily in the Chandleresque tradition, though - he cannot be any kind of a knight or good man - which makes me think it would have been better-served with Mickey Spillane as a model. And a good part of the novel's appeal is to see Wolf humiliated, beaten, demolished - which, again, sits uneasily with his role as the hero of a detective novel. Perhaps the best thing I can say about A Man Lies Dreaming is that it shouldn't work, that it's too full of contradictions and elements that undercut it. And yet it does.

Dogtangle by Max Huffman

Comics do at least half of their storytelling through images - but sometimes I wonder if some creators think their images can communicate deep, complex concepts that are clear and crisp in their own minds, even when they don't embody those ideas in words.

Max Huffman's graphic novel Dogtangle brings up those thoughts: it's obviously full of ideas, and Huffman is clearly coming from a specific viewpoint and stance, but his words only sketch lightly around the edges of his premises, leaving his energetic, deeply particular art to carry a lot of the weight of his story here.

That art is deeply caricatured, verging into pure design at times; his characters, to my eye, disappearing into his tinted pages as just more elements to shock or delight the viewer. It's a deeply cartoony, distinctive style - I think I see graffiti influences, especially in his display type, and maybe equally in his defiant love for stark pages and imagery that doesn't quite come into focus unless you already know what you're looking at.

Dogtangle has plenty of dialogue, and a few captions to define what we're look at, but not nearly enough words to explain all of the complexities of Huffman's weird, satirical world. Concepts are thrown onto the page once for the reader to catch, and I suppose Huffman assumes that reader will assemble the elements in their own minds to match the model he has in his own. But I found Dogtangle, as it went along, more to dissolve in my mind to a sequence of striking images - vignettes, scenes, or moments - that sit like beads next to each other but don't connect or combine to form a coherent whole.

I'm sure there is a story here, in Huffman's mind. I'm just not sure it made it onto the page in a format that's intelligible to most readers.

Here's what I can tell you. Vernon Smilth is a local gadfly in Business Park, making long speeches during boring civic meetings in the converted Taco Bell, trying to slow down the relentless redevelopment of the town. He's a failure at this, and there's no sign that he does anything for an actual living: this is all he does that we see.

At one meeting, he meets Caressa Vignette, head and face of the pharmaceutical company named for her. We later on get the usual corporate hugger-mugger, in vague terms, so she doesn't outright own the company, but her actual title and role and what Vignette really does is never clear - they make stuff, she's in charge, that's as far as Huffman wants to explain.

Smilth and Vignette fall in love, eat soup, get married - in the course of about two pages. They both want to do something big, something impressive. And Smilth has an idea: to create a Hypermutt. (The word is always presented in display type, like a splash page, in that Huffman graffiti-esque style, so it's deeply difficult to read.)

Like many things in Dogtangle, exactly how this works is vague and doesn't make much sense. But the Hypermutt is basically a specialized Katamari: once created, it is a big ball of dog that absorbs any other dogs that touch it. This supposedly is the next big product for Vignette, which is supposed to be satirical, but I have a hard time even seeing the space where the joke is supposed to be: this is not a consumer product at all; it can't be sold to multiple people; and it seems to have nothing to do with the actual business of a pharmaceutical company.

Anyway, they make this thing, which is not as central to the book as you might imagine.

Almost immediately, Smilth and the hypermutt disappear - Vignette gets a ransom note for one or both of them, but we don't see anyone nab either of them. Smilth is threatened and beaten by one of the Business Park zoning nabobs, apparently because his useless complaints at meetings were slightly less useless than Huffman made them appear. He has angered Powerful Forces, and He Will Pay.

What does that have to do with the Hypermutt? Did this Florida-based zoning overlord also grab the dog for some unspecified reason? Well...maybe? It's never clear.

Back in Business Park, Vignette goes into business-crisis mode, running the gauntlet of shouted questions from reporters and hiring Ermine Slalom, a high-powered something-or-other (lawyer?) who will help her keep control of the company...but that plot gets derailed quickly by new characters Simon (Slalom's little four-eyed nephew, who she's caring for) and Smilth's formidable mother, who arrives at the same time and is kept in the dark about her son's disappearance.

From that point, a lot more stuff happens - some of it in what seems to be a completely different alternate universe where all of these characters are living in medieval Europe, for no obvious reason. Oh, and it flashes forward what I think is a few years, to Simone Slalom - who I thought at first was Simon's mother, but maybe she's an older sister? - where the Hypermutt now dominates the sky and has ruined the world.

Because what happens when dogs get stuck together in an ever-growing ball is that they fly into the sky and form a layer of cloud...obviously. (Duh!)

Anyway, this is SF and it is satirical, so of course there is an apocalypse, and this one is the Hypermutt apocalypse. At this point, the reader starts to wonder if the build-things-everywhere, knock-down-the-old-city, make-all-the-money folks are actually supposed to be our heroes. They did try to stop the apocalypse and their motivations were clear and reasonable, if venial.

Back to plot: Simone once pet-sat the Hypermutt, and was "the best sitter ever," so now she has to retrieve Smilth from inside the flying cloud of dog. That sentence makes slightly more sense in context, though not very much. She does, he is freed, the Hypermutt collapses or dies or something, and the world...is maybe slightly less apocalyptic in the end? Huffman ends the book with a deeply enigmatic stretch of mostly-wordless pages that I assume mean something to him but left me flipping back and forth to figure out if he actually explained anything or told us where he left any of these characters.

(As far as I can tell: no.)

So Dogtangle is a deeply weird book, a massively particular book, and one that I suspect you might need to be Max Huffman to understand. Well, maybe Huffman could explain it to you in person, too - that's possible. But, if you're just reading it, do not expect it all to come together or make conventional narrative sense. It will look awesome, full of bizarre pages, and you may find yourself asking questions like "All of the pages are tinted, and the colors shift repeatedly throughout the book, from blue to yellow and so on, to end with orange. Does that mean anything?"

I suspect, in Huffman's head, there's a lot of meaning here. But it is not particularly clear on the page.

Just Friends by Ana Oncina

I'm trying to figure out if this sweet teen semi-romance about two girls at summer camp was actually published in an Asian country, to explain why it reads right-to-left. The author's site is less help than it could be, since she's Spanish and so is the site. (Weird how that works!) But that site seems to say that this book was only published in Spain and the USA, but also that it won the Japanese International Manga Award, and that at least the title of the book was also in Japanese on the Spanish-language edition.

How much of that is actually-for-Japanese-people and how much is looking-like-manga-for-a-Western-audience I can't say. But it was created in Spanish, it was translated into English by Nanette Cooper-McGuiness for this 2023 TOKYOPOP American edition, and creator Ana Oncina created the pages, as far as I can tell, with that right-to-left flow from the beginning.

Oncina is best known in Europe for her Croquette & Empanada series, which is also romance-adjacent but more heteronormative. (Not that croquettes are necessarily male-coded, but the one in her books is.) That series has run to several books in Europe - including, notably, one about a trip to Japan - but only the first one has been translated for American publication.

Just Friends tells its story in two timelines: in the framing story, it's around twenty years later, and Erika and Emi are meeting for the first time in a while. The bulk of the story is told in flashback, with Erika the central character, first being forced by her mother to go to this week-long sleep-away camp - against her wishes - and then her time there, meeting and being befriended by the more outgoing Emi immediately on the bus out.

The details are general or universal enough that it doesn't read as "foreign" to an American audience - maybe that same element helped it in Japan as well, assuming it did make it to Japan. Teens go to camps all over the world, to do outdoor activities under the guidance of counselors, to make friends and spend time with people they "like," to do some light making out when they get the chance, to drink furtively in tents or around campfires deep in the night, to talk deeply and seriously with people they might never see again, or might only see "next year."

Erika is quiet, introverted, an artist. Her mother thinks this week would be a good time for Erika to become better friends with Celia, who is in her class. Erika denies they're friends - this is true, but we learn more complicated details of their relationship later in the book. Erika thinks she's going to spend the whole week quietly by herself, and is resigned to that.

But Emi - another first-timer - gloms onto Erika on that bus, and they partner up, in the way of camp, for the rest of the week. Their relationship deepens over those days, though mostly driven by Emi. They both hang out with boys that they talk about "liking," but they have a stronger connection to each other, which comes out as the week goes on.

Meanwhile, in the frame story, we learn how Emi has bounced back into Erika's life every few years since then, for a quick fling, only to disappear for years again. This doesn't entirely connect to what we see of her at camp, but it does provide a larger structure to their relationship and gives Oncina some momentum in the frame-story to close out her book solidly.

Just Friends read like a genre exercise to me, like Oncina was doing her version of a yuri story - down to some details of phrasing that felt more like translated-from-Japanese than translated-from-Spanish. (Though those could be from Cooper-McGuiness, the translator, enforcing a TOKYOPOP house style.) It's a nice, resonant genre exercise, but still sits comfortably within the boundaries of a standard genre and doesn't try to push those boundaries or do anything particularly new or exciting with it.

All of This and Nothing: Under the Milky Way

"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.

As I look forward over my list of Famous and Obscure, I'm mostly seeing Famous songs that are old and Obscure ones that are newer. And I wonder if what I'm really cataloging is that I paid attention to popular music when I was young, and got stuck into quirkier side-streams in the last couple of decades. Or maybe that there used to be a big general culture, more or less, and now there's just algorithms and narrowcasting.

Well, with nearly half the year behind me, I'm not going to change it up now. So stick a pin in that as an interesting potential point, and keep it in the back of your mind as I pick another "Famous" song that was a single back in 1988. (And maybe argue with me, in your head or in comments, that it really doesn't count as famous almost forty years later.)

For this week, the song is Under the Milky Way by The Church.

It's an atmospheric song, on the quiet side - as the title implies, it takes place at night, probably a dark night. The singer is talking to someone - maybe himself, but probably not - in this dark, quiet place, and wondering what it's all about.

Wish I knew what you were looking for
Might have known what you would find

I think this is a song inspired by a particular moment - "Sometimes when this place gets kind of empty," "Lower the curtain down on Memphis," and so on - probably after a concert, when singer Steve Kilbey was looking out over an empty, quiet space with a quiet dark sky above him. Or, at least, that's the story the song tells.

Songs don't necessarily tell the truth. They tell a story that the songwriter wants to put out into the world, and stories have their own shape. And that's the story this one tells: here we are, in a hushed, dark place. The singer (Kilbey) is talking to "you," about what seems like something broken or lost, and he's about to move on.

I got no time for private consultation
Under the Milky Way tonight

Books Read: April 2026

I am finding it increasingly difficult to believe my calendar. April 2026 just ended? Surely that's a science-fictional year, yes? Whatever month or year it actually is - the empire never ended - here's what I read over the past thirty-one days. I will add links later, once my posts actually go live.

Kenji Tsurata, Captain Momo's Secret Base, Vol. 1 (digital, 4/3)

Mike Mignola and Dave Stewart, Uri Tupka and the Gods (digital, 4/4)

Loïc Clément and Anne Montelk, Days of Sugar and Spice (digital, 4/5)

Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo Book 10: The Brink of Life and Death (digital, 4/11)

Mark Twain, Roughing It (in Library of American omnibus with The Innocents Abroad, 4/11)

Pierre-Henry Gomont, Brain Drain, Part 1 (digital, 4/12)

Raymond Chandler, Playback (in Later Novels & Other Writings, 4/15

Philippe Riche, The Alliance of the Curious, #2: Neandertalensis (digital, 4/17)

Ben Sears, Young Shadow and the Watchdogs (digtial, 4/18)

Jordan Crane, Goes Like This (digital, 4/19)

Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre (4/19)

Alexandro Jodorowsky & Mœbius, The Incal, Vol. 4: What Is Above (digital, 4/25)

Hope Larson, Be That Way (4/25)

Lauren Haldeman, Wild That We're Here (digital, 4/26)

I will read more books in May (May?!). Pretty sure of that, at least.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/2/2026

I think these two books actually arrived last Saturday (April 25), but I didn't get time to write about them until now. (Now being the next Saturday. It's all very Spaceballs.)

Anyway, two books came in from Tachyon, both of which were recently published. Here's what I can tell you about them:

A new collection of stories by Samantha Mills: Rabbit Test and Other Stories. I think this is actually her first collection, and it has thirteen stories: one of them original to this collection, the rest reprinted from the usual wide range of outlets from about the past decade. The title story won the Nebula, Locus and Sturgeon awards, and Mills has also won a Compton Crook award. This one hit stores on April 21.

And a debut novel told in a very modern epistolary way (emails, chats, and more exotic postings): Justin Feinstein's Your Behavior Will Be Monitored. This one came out on April 7th, and is a satirical novel about AI, in which a copywriter is training a new bot under pressure, as his company barrels towards an ever-accelerating product release. (There seems to be a bit of John Sladek in the set-up, which I am absolutely here for.)

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: Shipboard Love

It was the fourth morning of the voyage. Of course, when this story is done in the movies they won't be satisfied with a bald statement like that; they will have a Spoken Title or a Cut-Back Sub-Caption or whatever they call the thing in the low dens where motion-picture scenario-lizards do their dark work, which will run:

AND SO, CALM AND GOLDEN, THE DAYS WENT BY, EACH FRAUGHT WITH HOPE AND YOUTH AND SWEETNESS, LINKING TWO YOUNG HEARTS IN SILKEN FETTERS FORGED BY THE LAUGHING LOVE-GOD

and the males in the audience will shift their chewing gun to the other cheek and take a firmer grip of their companions' hands and the man at the piano will play 'Everybody wants a key to my cellar,' or something equally appropriate, very soulfully and slowly, with a wistful eye on the half-smoked cigarette which he has parked on the lowest octave and intends finishing as soon as the picture is over. But I prefer the plain frank statement that it was the fourth day of the voyage. That is my story and I mean to stick to it.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, The Girl on the Boat (from 1922), p.60

Quote of the Week: National Legends

In the United States, we have the tradition of the Lone Man. .... Usually our heroes and antiheroes follow their destinies alone. I think that's what caught my eye about the Bebo inscription - "I STAN ALONE" - and what appeals to me about the character of Gouverneur Morris. He was a lonesome person, suddenly going off by himself, or staying in Paris as the only remaining diplomat when chaos ruled. This sort of protagonist fills our national dreams. I like solitude myself, and I was eligible for social security before it occurred to me that a bunch of loners wandering around and doing as they pleased might not make for much of a society.

 - Ian Frazier, Paradise Bronx, p.437

The Girl on the Boat by P.G. Wodehouse

I'm still reading Wodehouse books I've never read before - he wrote around a hundred, mostly novels and story collections, so I have probably a couple of dozen to go - which means I'm getting into things that are called "minor" or "obscure" or other critical terms that mean "you might want to read this if you really like this guy, but be warned."

But Wodehouse was a popular, humorous novelist to begin with. His failure modes are nothing like those of more literary novelists, where "minor" tends to mean a book is half-baked, confusing, or just wrong-headed. "Minor" in the humorous novel implies things like "not in a major series" or "didn't make a splash when it was originally published" or just "about as good as a dozen other books by the same guy, with nothing really particular to make it stand out." Or, as is the case here, "is Of Its Time in ways that look quaint several generations later."

The Girl on the Boat is a hundred-year-old short, funny novel by a writer who was already a master of his craft by this point: it was published in 1922, when Wodehouse was about forty and had been making a living at writing for half his life. The problem, for some readers, will be that it's set in a world that no longer exists. Astute readers will realize the title implies that: no one meets on an ocean liner anymore, though that, and the inevitable shipboard romance, was a cliché of the time. I tend to think that's a minor problem with humor in general, and usually entirely beside the point with Wodehouse: nearly all of his book were at least somewhat anachronistic when he wrote them, on purpose. As long as we can understand how this world works, it can still be funny: we don't need to live in that world ourselves, or, frankly, for that world to have ever existed.

The plot of On the Boat wanders a bit, starting in New York with a British Theosophist writer, Mrs. Hignett, arriving for a lecture tour but immediately abandoning her to focus on her nephew Sam Marlowe, who will be our romantic hero. Sam ends up on the boat of the title, rooming with his cousin Eustace (son of the domineering Theosophist) and falling in love with Wilhelmina "Billie" Bennet, who...

Wait, this is Wodehouse, so it gets complicated quickly.

Billie has been urged since practically birth to marry Bream Mortimer, a young man with a face like a parrot, because their respective fathers (rich American businessmen) are good friends. Bream and Billie and their respective fathers are on the transatlantic boat to spend the summer in England, where they hope to rent Windles, the Hignett ancestral manse.

Billie has been engaged to Bream, but not terribly seriously, and is not currently. She does not love him, doesn't consider him up to her Tennyson-inspired standards of dashing, daring knightly manhood, and won't marry him. She was also briefly engaged to Eustace in New York over the previous weeks, even though he is a weak neurasthenic type who is even further away from her ideal.

Anyway, Sam makes a big impression on Billie by making what she thinks is a grand romantic gesture towards her, but was actually more of a standard Wodehouse misunderstanding, as the ship pushes off from the docks in New York. They spend much of the journey together, canoodling as much as anyone canoodles in a Wodehouse novel, and are briefly engaged, though Billie breaks it off at the end of the voyage for her usual you're-not-Sir-Galahad reasons related to a very Wodehousian amateur-theatrical event Sam comes off very badly at.

Meanwhile, Billie's best friend, the big-game hunter Jane Hubbard, has also been looking for love. She's the kind of strong domineering woman who will grow into a formidable Aunt in Wodehouse, so she's looking for a fairly weak man she can take care of - and so she falls hard for Eustace, and he for her. Because of that, Eustace agrees to rent Windles to the Mortimer/Bennet party, but only if he can stay there as well to be close to Jane.

Does Sam find a way to get down to Windles himself and press his suit with Billie? Of course he does. Are there confusions and misunderstandings along the way? Yes, indeed. Are there impostors galore infesting Windles?

Actually, no. I regret to inform any reader hoping for impostors that all of the main characters already know each other well, so such subterfuges would not be possible. But Sam does hide in a suit of armor during a late-night search of the stately home, a scene that also includes Jane running around shooting at things with her elephant gun, if that helps soften the blow.

And, yes, of course the book ends with Sam and Billie motoring away to get married, as it must. Getting there is the fun: this is prime-period Wodehouse, with a lot of fun turns of phrase and some of his more amusing hey-I'm-writing-a-story-here sidebar commentary.

Even if you're a Wodehouse fan, you probably haven't heard of this novel. It's not famous, not in any of his major series. But it's a wonderful book from his interwar peak, with only minor flaws and not too much reliance on his standard material. (e.g.: the lack of impostors)

Tomorrow the Birds by Osamu Tezuka

Osamu Tezuka made a lot of comics. According to Wikipedia, over 700 works, comprising more than 150,000 pages. I doubt even half of that has been translated into English. So the view any North American reader has of his work - unless that reader both is fluent in Japanese and has access to a library-worth of Tezuka - is going to be limited, tentative, and gatekept by other people.

I come back to Tezuka periodically, though I think I found the period and style I find most compelling first: Tezuka was inspired by the adult-oriented gekiga movement in the mid-60s, and changed up his style and concerns for at least one strand of his work going forward for the next twenty years. (Tezuka died of cancer, at only 60, in 1989.) Vertical published a lot of that Tezuka material, around fifteen years ago, including The Book of Human Insects, Ayako, Ode to Kirihito, Buddha, Dororo, Black Jack, MW, and Apollo's Song.

There's probably more in that style - to say it again, Tezuka was ridiculously prolific - but I haven't seen anything newly-published along those lines in years. So I've poked into other Tezuka styles and series - the well-regarded early adventure Princess Knight, for example, and more recently the anthology Shakespeare Manga Theater and the odd One Hundred Tales. But the seriousness and darkness of those core gekiga works hasn't come out in anything else I've seen.

But I keep looking. So this time I grabbed Tomorrow the Birds, from the time-frame that also saw those gekiga books. It was serialized in S-F Magazine between 1971 and 1975, collected in Japanese not long afterward, and translated into English for this 2024 edition by Iyasu Adair Nagata.

It's somewhat more serious than the '50s-era Tezuka books I've seen - it comes close to the doomy gekiga, especially early in the book - but still has some goofiness in it. And Tezuka seems to have leaned heavily into the serialized nature of this story to tell very different kinds of stories - to the point that the back half of the book feels a bit like "well, here's a Western set in this world, and now here's a fable, and then let's try a ghost story."

Tomorrow is basically a future history, spanning what seems to be at least a thousand years, told in nineteen mostly short chapters. In the near future, magpies (maybe corvids in general) have gotten smarter, learned to harness fire, and start attacking humanity. Very quickly, over the course of the first four or five stories, Japan surrenders to the birds and helps them destroy other human nations - I expect this was a political dig - and human civilization ends. The birds turn into anthropomorphic birdmen in a mechanism Tezuka wisely does not explain - though, as you can see from the cover, he does note that their heads get substantially larger to house more complex brains.

There's also a minor thread of an alien civilization monitoring Earth, and how they have interfered to create the rise of the birds. This is another bit of Tazuka's SFnal satire, and also gives him his ending - I saw it coming, but it's well done.

Each of the nineteen stories in Tomorrow is separate. The first few, during the war between humans and birds, take place in a short period of time - maybe one generation at most - but the rest of the book stretches down long centuries, as birdman civilization grows, changes, and is expressed differently in different places on earth. As I said, we get a very traditional Western - with a human in the Noble Savage role - and several other clearly genre exercises, as if Tezuka was working down a checklist of kinds of stories to tell in this milieu.

The stories are mostly in the downbeat, tragic, or SFnal if-this-goes-on mode: things go badly for the main-character humans in all of the stories, and often not much better for main-character birds. This becomes a bit obvious once the reader notices it - and any reader will definitely notice how the first few stories are all "birds attack humans, humans lose" - but each story is strongly told, and all of this material does have a similar tone and sweep and seriousness to his core gekiga works.

It is a goofy premise, but Tezuka sells it well, and gets through the "birds destroy human civilization by setting things on fire" bits quickly enough that most readers won't argue too much. We take it as allegorical, accept the WWII echoes and the core Japanese-ness of the idea, and see where the story takes us. Tomorrow the Birds is not quite as darkly uncompromising as something like MW or Ode to Kirihito, but it's from the same strain of Tezuka's work and has many of the same concerns and ideas.

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: As the Deer Flies by Doug Savage

This is the fourth in this middle-grade graphic-novel series; it follows the original Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy, a book I haven't been able to find, and Time Trout. And, yes, the series is about a moose who shoots lasers from his eyes and his friend/sidekick, a slightly more reasonable and grounded rabbit without notable fantastic powers.

Well, so far. We've also got cyborg porcupines, time-traveling fish, and a racoon doctor in this series, so it's not impossible that Rabbit Boy will develop his latent mutant powers at some point.

As the Deer Flies continues in the same goofy-but-reasonable tone that creator Doug Savage has established in the earlier books. Strange things happen in the Laser Moose books, but Savage presents it all with a matter-of-fact tone; he's got a crisper, more understated kind of humor than, for example, someone like Dav Pilkey. [1]

This time out, LM and RB are out in the woods, going to visit the Old Oak, which apparently RB has never seen before. It is old and huge and impressive, and it will figure in the amazing action sequence at the end of the book. But, more immediately, when they head over to a nearby marsh to find some water lilies for lunch, they see their friend Frank the deer leap off a cliff.

Frank is seriously injured hitting rocks on the way down, but LM manages to laser-cut a bunch of branches so Frank survives the big bump at the bottom. LM and RB take an unconscious Frank to see Doc (the aforementioned racoon), where they insist Frank's injuries are not their fault this time.

Frank has a lot of broken bones, which Doc can handle. But he's also screeching instead of talking, and acting like a bird, so the three assume he bumped his head in the fall. The doc is going to try to do something about Frank's brain, while LM and RB go off to investigate the site of the fall - LM is sure that some villain pushed Frank off the cliff. (Because why would he just jump?)

There's no sign of a struggle at the top of the cliff, though - just clear prints showing Frank leaping off. 

Luckily, some new characters show up to explain: Gus the wolf and a talking eagle. It turns out that Gus is a tinkerer, and wanted to be able to talk to birds. (Birds and animals both are sapient in this world, but their languages are mutually unintelligible.)  So Gus tried to make a machine to translate from animal to bird, and got it almost working.

Stuck, he went to the other tinkering expert in the forest: Cyborgupine. (Who, yes, is an evil villain.) Cyborgupine was really helpful for a while, and the two got the machine working...as an upgraded mind-transfer device, which Cyborgupine used, in his sudden but inevitable betrayal, to swap the brains of Frank and an eagle.

Hence Frank shrieking like a bird and thinking he can fly. Hence an eagle who can talk and saying he's Frank.

LM and RB of course decide they need to confront Cyborgupine, get the mind-transfer device, and put the eagle and Frank back in their correct bodies. It does not go quite that smoothly, with one more mind-transfer and an extended chase sequence near the end of the book, with a lot of laser eye-beams lancing about and cutting things indiscriminately. In the end, of course, good prevails and everyone is put back into their correct bodies.

As usual, Savage ends the book with a short additional educational section - this time about tree rings.

These books are aimed at middle-schoolers. If you can't get past that, I suppose that's unfortunate. Savage has an accessible cartoony style and a dryer wit than usually seen in books for tweens, plus the expected wacky hijinks the form requires. Frankly, I don't see how anyone can miss a series called Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy once they know it exists, but it takes all kinds to make a world, I suppose.

[1] Example: when Rabbit Boy asks Laser Moose if he meditates, the Moose says "Meditate? I don't meditate. I just come here to sit quietly and focus my mind until I feel a peaceful sense of inner calm."