The Undertaker, Vol. 3: The Ogre of Camp Sutter by Xavier Dorison & Ralph Meyer

So this is possibly confusing: the previous Undertaker book I read was "Volume 1," but it included the first two French albums. Right now, there are six of those albums, and I decided to read the rest of them one by one in digital editions from Europe Comics rather than the new American-published omnibuses. (There seems to be a second omnibus out now, and I bet a third one is in progress if not already released.)

This may not be the best plan, since I now think each actual story takes two album - which is probably why the American publisher is doing 2-in-1s. But it means I read shorter things, even if they're not quite complete, and that appeals to me. Besides, Undertaker is a deeply genre exercise that I'm mostly enjoying if not respecting, so smaller doses helps keep my level of potential snark reasonable.

All that leads me to The Undertaker, Vol. 3: The Ogre of Camp Sutter. If you're looking for a physical book in the US, you'll want Vol. 2, which includes Ogre as well as the French Vol. 4, The Shadow of Hippocrates. The whole series is written by Xavier Dorison and drawn by Ralph Meyer. (Yes, that doesn't sound like a French name to me, either. But it is.)

The series is set soon after the US Civil War, in that American West renowned in the comics and movies of Europeans for two or three generations now - not quite the same as the US version of the Western, and just as far away from the reality. The main character is, yes, a traveling undertaker [1] named Jonas Crow with a mysterious past that, of course, involves dark doings in the last days of the War. In particular, he's wanted for murder under the name of Strickland.

His "partners" in the undertaking business, after the events of the first book, are what the intro calls "a former English governess named Rose Prairie and Lin, a Chinese immigrant." Yes, an English person named "Rose Prairie," and supposedly being a governess, though the family in the first book had no detectable children for her to govern. Lin is a grumpy middle-aged Chinese woman, who declares she just wants to raise enough money to get back home to her son in Shanghai. (I suspect she will continue to say this, no matter what happens, for as long as the series runs.)

So: definitely artificial in that genre way. We open this book with the crew broke, largely because Crow's business should be with rich people, but he's a crass jerk who systematically offends those people with his every sentence. Rose tries to teach him, but he's also the kind of jerk who doesn't think he needs to learn. He is our hero, and we are supposed to like him. (Rose and Lin are also unpleasant, in their own ways, I should say: it's a crew of grumpy, spiky, unlikeable people, who are only slightly better than the monstrous antagonists of the series.)

Anyway, they get a lead on a job, to embalm and bury the rich wife of a Union officer (Colonel Charley Warwick) from the war - but, of course, the Colonel is a drunken mess and recognizes Crow, which leads to trouble.

So much trouble that the Colonel - an old, one-armed guy who mostly cleans up OK the next day - heads off with our undertaking crew, looking for a patent-medicine salesman and doctor (who I am sorry to say is named Jeronimus Quint) who is known by the moniker of the title for darkly-hinted activities during the war. The Colonel's son is one of many he has sent after Quint and not returned, so it's time for One Last Mission to get Quint and bring him to justice.

For those filling out their Genre Bingo cards, Quint is both a Talking Killer and a Creepy Doctor - he gets several opportunities to ramble on nastily to various members of the cast while the rest are occupied elsewhere, and also apparently did the usual hideous 19th century experiments with grafting limbs to living subjects, somewhat a la Frankenstein. He is a monster, of the plausible, smooth, seemingly-benevolent sort.

Our heroes do find him, capture him, and run off, but things get complicated from there, because Quint is deeply creepy and inventive and resourceful, and he very much doesn't want to be hauled off to justice. We get a bunch of speeches about how the rest of mankind are sheep and he's doing important work with his creepy experiments and so on - you know the drill from previous Creepy Doctor types.

As I noted up top, the plots of the Undertaker series seem to take two books each. So this is the beginning of this plot, but not the end. Quint has not been brought to justice as the book ends, and our heroes are in various troubles on the last page. I'm sure all will come out on the side of justice, but it hasn't happened yet,

Meyer still has a fine storytelling style, full of detail and energy - his pages are busy but easy to track, with great period detail and good panel flow. I'm not as fond of Dorison's work, which strikes me as much more clichéd - but that's the kind of book this is, so I might be asking too much of him. I think he knows the job, and gives his original European audience just what they want in their creepy Western adventure stories.

[1] This seems like a dumb idea, particularly in an era where bodies need to be buried quickly. But, as I say a lot, I try not to question premises, so I will take it as read. He's a guy with a black coach, and he wanders about California and similar regions looking for grieving families with rich enough recently-dead relatives to pay for his relatively fancy services at exactly the moment he can get to their town.

All My Friends by Hope Larson

It's not always safe to say that a series is definitively over - writers, like life, find a way to come back - but when a third book came out five years ago and the creator has moved on to other projects, it's clear that what we have is a trilogy and we can treat it as such.

All My Friends is a 2021 graphic novel by Hope Larson, aimed at tweens. (The copy I read has a library sticker to that effect right on the spine, in a classy sans-serif display font.) It follows 2018's All Summer Long and 2020's All Together Now. The first book was the story of one summer in the life of thirteen-year-old Los Angeles girl [1] Bina, as she started to get more serious about writing and playing music when her next-door best friend Austin went off to soccer camp. The second one continued both those plots, as Bina formed a band with two other girls and also had a single (unsuccessful) date with Austin.

Friends cover roughly the first half of the next year: Bina is now fourteen, which is not specifically remarked on. But this is a book about doing more, reaching out more, expanding and trying to continue - even when some people around you want to curtail that. She's got a different band - there was serious Band Drama in Together, but that's smoothed over now, and her former bandmates are friendly with Bina - which is getting serious.

The band is Fancy Pink, and it's another three-piece: Bina on lead guitar, vocals, and songwriting, with bassist Lora and drummer Kesi. (Fiction tends to like small, tight bands, so as to avoid having too many characters to keep track of.) They have their first show early in the book, opening for a band of slightly older kids named Anne Surly. (From the evidence here, the LA band scene is entirely the realm of people not yet old enough to drive.)

This leads to music-career drama: first their best song is licensed for a TV show theme. (Larson elides the details here in a sneaky way - Fancy Pink must have recorded this song professionally in some studio, but later in the book they say they have no experience in how to record music.) Their parents are uneasy, but allow this.

They don't allow, though, when a label gets in touch and wants Fancy Pink to record an EP for them. The girls are Too Young, say the parents, and the music industry is Too Much.

The three bandmates hate this decision and will accept it only as much as they absolutely have to. Which means they obviously can't sign with that label without parental approval, but they can make plans to raise the money and record an EP on their own. They don't run any of this plan past their parents, who they assume would nix it. (And I agree with that: if I were one of these girls, I'd have been making arch comments about "the bad nursing home" to my parents by this point.)

Fancy Pink practices, writes songs, gets better. Bina has a date or two with Cooper, the fifteen-year-old frontman of Anne Surly. She doesn't like-like him - he has too many phony cruel friends - but they stay friends afterward. She also comes to think about Austin, who circles on the outer edges of this book, more and more.

It all comes together at a semi-secret benefit concert in a basement one Saturday afternoon, where Bina plays a brand-new song she wrote about Austin. (Tween drama! In all its forms.)

All My Friends is a fun book that closes out the trilogy well: it's very much a book for tweens, all longing to hold hands and be famous, so it might feel small and juvenile to some older readers. But if you can engage with it on its level, it has the energy and enthusiasm of youth, which is no bad thing.

[1] Thirteen is already fairly old for me to feel comfortable calling a young woman "girl," but it's also a bit young to call her "young woman." Life is complicated. (And I read too many 20th century books by men - or books by 20th century men - that use "girl" to mean "potentially available hottie" to be comfortable with any use of the word, frankly.)

This Beautiful, Ridiculous City by Kay Sohini

Comics can be almost anything. They can be fictional or non-fiction. They can be wordless or almost illustrated prose. They can be immediate or thoughtful, punk or academic, seat-of-the-pants or carefully constructed.

We tend to think of them in specific genres, with a pick-and-mix of those options and a dozen more - superheroes are all dialogue and action, with flashy layouts, for example, while young-adult books are brighter, with more softly rounded art, a personal connection and a heaping helping of earnestness. But any particular book can be its own subgenre, and further out on any particular axis than we're used to.

Kay Sohini is an academic - I think that's important. She's also an artist and a teacher of artists, and (obviously) a maker of comics. Central to this story is the fact that she's from India: born and grew up in the Calcutta suburbs, a native Bengali speaker who went to expensive, demanding English-language schools. Her first book was This Beautiful, Ridiculous City, a memoir of how and why she came to move to New York City; it was published last year.

On all of the axes I called out in the first paragraph, Sohini is far to the latter side. Her book is personal, factual, told entirely without dialogue, in a continuous narrative presented often as large paragraphs on her pages, told a decade or so after the fact, through the lens of a lot of personal and professional experience since. And her art is, I think, digital: colorful and illustrative and carefully-constructed, never quite aiming at photo-realism but often quite close, a camera eye that maybe is meant to show us how Sohini sees the world.

I don't know if Sohini did this deliberately, but it's the kind of thing I'd expect from an academic, from a person trained for years to analyze and interpret. City is somewhat organized in that classic way: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The thesis is the image of New York and how that contrasted with Sohini's life growing up - her first chapter is about the first, and the second delves (in the most academic part of the book) into the question of how New York, and "the West" in general, was seen in her country growing up - and gets somewhat into the knotty question of colonization and the mindset of a post-colonial society.

The antithesis is a bad relationship Sohini had in her twenties. She never gives us a name or a face - her art style, and the all-narrative, no-dialogue script is very distancing, I assume deliberately - but she lived with a man who turned out to be controlling and violent, and who she learned years later was carrying on multiple other major relationships at the same time. Somehow, during this time - and Sohini does not want to make it clear to the reader how long this period was, or what years it covered - she still kept up her academic work, or came back to it.

And that gave her an escape: she applied to graduate school (several of them) in New York and nearby. She ended up with a full ride to SUNY Stony Brook, and went there. As far as the book says, this was at least a decade ago, probably the early Teens, and she doesn't mention ever going back to India after that.

Her life in New York is the synthesis. Sohini bluntly points out she is a very controlled, interior, introverted person - the kind that thrives in big, bustling, energetic, anonymous cities, where interactions are many but straightforward, where it's easy to be part of a vast sea of people, alone and specific and particular like everyone else.

This is not a confessional book in any way. She does name her husband and devotes a little page-space to things about him - but doesn't say how they met, anything about their wedding or cute relationship moments or respective backgrounds, or anything else personal like that. We also don't see him - this is a book about Sohini exclusively, about, possibly, the education and creation of an artist. It's how she got to this point: how she became the person who wanted to, and could, create This Beautiful, Ridiculous City.

There's something inherently chilly about City - appropriate for a book about New York, where everyone is happy to be helpful and direct while dodging deeper connections. I don't think Sohini has completely synthesized all of her theses and antitheses here, but they're her life: expecting that would be ridiculous. I wouldn't be surprised if she revisits some or all of these themes in another decade or so - especially if she ends up living somewhere else at some point. That's one of the intriguing points of any memoir - it can only ever show one side, one view of a life, and there can always be other sides or new experiences or reconsiderations.

Seven Places Without You by Juan Berrio

Just reading two books by a creator doesn't make you an expert: let me say that up front. I read Juan Berrio's lovely wordless Kiosco earlier this year, and was happy to see his name again when browsing through my library's app. (Either the app itself or the publishers putting work into it are not the best at metadata, so one book has the author "Juan Berrio" and the other "Berrio Juan," so they are not linked in any clear way.)

Seven Places Without You was a 2018 graphic novel, originally published in Spanish because Berrio is Spanish (living in Madrid) and translated by Fiona Marshall for a 2019 English-language Europe Comics edition. [1] 

The main character is Elena. She's young, living in a city - probably Madrid. Over the course of the book, we come to think that she's still a student. She's been living with Jorge, in his family's home, for some time, and it was good - at first. But Jorge is spending less and less time at home, ignoring Elena more and more. She doesn't know why, and he's been evasive when she tries to ask.

It has seven chapters, each set in a different place - hence the title. It starts in Jorge's family house, right at the moment when Elena decides she has to leave, and calls friends to see if she can stay there for a while. Those friends - Maria and Nacho - turn up in several chapters, as does Mario, another friend who has been pining for some time for Elena and awkwardly says so midway through the book. The second chapter is set in Maria and Nacho's apartment, before and during a party, and later chapters are set during a family dinner at Elena's parents' house, at Mario's apartment, in a park, at an evening out in a bar, and, finally, in Elena's new solo apartment.

It's mostly quiet and observational. Berrio focuses on Elena but we see her from outside. We know her thoughts - like anyone in the world - only from what she tells other people, and we're pretty sure she's not saying everything she feels. Berrio has a soft earth-toned palette, with squared-off panels not bordered by lines.

And, given the title, we assume, as the book goes on and there's no word from Jorge, that he will not be a character in the book. My just raising the question is possibly a spoiler, so I'll leave it at that. Seven Places Without You is a book about the Jorge-shaped hole in Elena's life, how she realized that it was already there and the ways that she began to fill that space in the early days after the break.

It's just as lovely, if a lot more melancholy, than Kiosco was. Berrio is incisive and thoughtful; his people are real and understandable and likable - even Jorge running away, even Mario clinging too close - and we see all of them through the lens of how they interact with Elena.

[1] I've praised Europe Comics multiple times before: they're digital-only and don't really promote much, since they're primarily a marketing effort from continental-European publishers towards English-language publishers, but they do - or did - a large volume of excellent books far outside the usual standard North American comics genres.

Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol. 3: Resurrection by Lewis Trondheim & Manu Larcenet

On this side of the Atlantic, they all hit at once: in 2018, Europe Comics published (digitally) translations of the three Cosmonauts of the Future books, all turned into English by Mercedes Claire Gilliom.

But, in their original life, the first two both came out in 2000 and this third and final book - Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol. 3: Resurrection - was four years later. So that original audience might have expected, or at least have a reasonable suspicion, that the characters were a few years older this time.

A reader who pays really close attention and has the details of the first two books at his fingertips could have figured that out from the early pages of the book, too - our heroes, Gildas and Martina, are taller, and there's a reference to something "eight months ago" on the first page, an event that didn't happen in the previous books. They also think it's 2033, which would place it more precisely in time if I remembered what year they thought it was in the previous books.

(They are not quite correct, for reasons which become clear as the book goes on.)

They're not on the planet Mawis anymore; they're traveling around in a spaceship, along with two aliens (one in a human suit, their former teacher for killing stinky aliens). They don't say why, but we assume they're looking for the rest of humanity: Gildas and Martina are clones of space explorers who died in a crash on Mawis, and, now that they're growing up, it makes sense that they'd want to find their own people.

They do find a human-crewed space station, which confusingly (for them) seems to be a museum of their lives, exactly like the Mawis-created replica of their childhood that they grew up in. And that's somewhat how this book goes: it's simulacra and clones all the way down.

Gildas and Martina don't learn this for a while - they are very confused, and running about at high speed, often chased by clones of themselves using dangerous weaponry - but they have found human civilization, and it is not at peace. There's a faction run by their daughter Celta and a faction run by Gildas's sister Gaelle, and both use clones of the two of them - the obviously perfect human beings - as soldiers. Both sides are heavily armed; each is dedicated to the extermination of the other; neither is particularly amenable to persuasion or anything more peaceful than a ray-gun.

Do Gildas and Martina manage to bring peace to human civilization, leaning somewhat heavily on the fact that they are "the originals"? (I don't see why their clone-ness is terribly different from the hordes of clone soldiers, but it works, so I won't sweat it.) Yes, they do.

The story is a bit more confused than the first two books, and ramps up the slapstick running-and-fighting material from the second book as well. It does feel a bit like writer Lewis Trondheim and artist Manu Larcenet were escalating with each book, and hit their limit quickly with this third one. It is still fun, zippy adventure, but a reader can definitely see why they would think they'd exhausted the premise by this point.

The Kingdom, Vol.1: Anne by Benoit Feroumont

I was sure this book was different, but I didn't know how much or in what ways. It looked like it might be for younger readers, which was hugely different from the first book I read by its creator, Benoit Feroumont: Gisèle & Bèatrice.

After a bit of research - mostly trying to navigate a computer-translated version of Feroumont's detailed Wikipedia page - I believe that The Kingdom series is more typical of Feroumont's work than Gisèle & Bèatrice was, but there's a certain sharp wit and love for antic mischief that I suspect is common in his work. After reading this one, I don't think The Kingdom series is specifically for young readers, but it's all-ages in a European sense: full of things certain American readers (you know the kind) would be shocked to give to their little darlings, but pitched to be understandable to an audience roughly ten and up and reasonable for that audience for most normal human beings.

The full title is The Kingdom, Vol. 1: Anne; it was originally published in 2009, has colors by Feroumont's wife Christelle Coopman, and was translated by Mercedes Claire Gilliom for this 2017 Europe Comics edition. (There are ten books in the series; the six that existed before 2015 were translated in the years of Europe Comics' flourishing and the rest seem to be sitting in limbo for now.)

It's one of those lightly fantasy stories set in a pocket kingdom - small enough to be just the unnamed capital city and as much countryside as needed for stories, small enough that the King can be a local figure, and specifically with no neighbors that impinge on the story. This one, I think, sets up a lot of the characters and situations for later in the series. In particular, this one is about the title character, Anne, the friendly, happy, ultra-competent maid who has been taking care of the King - this isn't the kind of book with a deep sense of the organizational structure of a big house - who loses her job and has to move on.

You see, she's been frightened by owls hooting in the night, and so has been sleeping in the King's bed to avoid them. (He's the usual good-natured-but-ineffectual doddering old guy, along Lord Emsworth lines, so there's no thought or possibility of hanky-panky.) But a flock of little yellow (talking) birds have just arrived in town: this is annoying and disruptive, but not seen as particularly weird or unnatural. They're gossip-mongers - I might say "shit-stirrers," to be more precise - who delight in telling people things that will annoy, anger, or frustrate them, and particularly things that will cause them to fight with each other.

Anyway, the birds told the mean Queen about Anne and the King, so she fired Anne. The King gives Anne an old house down in the city, which she is to turn into a tavern. On the way there, she has some slapstick adventures, attempting to attack the birds and running into the large blacksmith's apprentice François, who immediately falls madly in love with her. (This, I gather, will be a major plot engine for later in the series.)

Anne does find her new home, which is a dump. But the birds more-or-less befriend her - they're still jerks - and help to clean it up. And she does turn it into a tavern. The climax of the story is the opening night of that tavern, when the King's children - two goofy sons and a more sensible daughter - come in disguise to patronize that tavern, plus a large contingent of the palace guards, sent by the Queen to give the impression that the tavern is raucous and unpleasant, so it will fail.

Does the character whose name is in the title of a the first book in a comic adventure series succeed despite all odds? Of course she does.

Feroumont tells this story in a broad way, full of jokes and big body language - it's a funny book that makes very little attempt to be subtle. And it's mostly tween-friendly, assuming your tweens aren't shocked by the "sleeping"-with-the-King plot-starter.

Leonardo the Genius (Vol. 1) by Bob De Groot & Turk

The credit on the book just says "De Groot and Turk," but other official descriptions include De Groot's first name. I'd have to go to a secondary source to learn that Turk is actually an artist named Philippe Liégeois. Similarly, this material looks to be forty or fifty years old, but the book itself gives a 2002 publication date in French and a 2016 date for this translation by Montana Kane.

The same secondary source notes that the Léonard comics - the terminal "o" pops up in Dutch and English translations, and possibly elsewhere, but the original French and Belgian editions don't have it - began in 1974. I think this book collects '70s stories in a package - possibly the start of an entire repackaged series - from the early days of this century.

This is one of those works of humor that seem to be very popular in their home culture - there have been fifty-seven volumes in French, continuing to the present day - but have not travelled as well. At least, it's barely traveled into English, which is the only bit I can really evaluate.

The premise is simple: there's this genius, living in a small town in a vaguely Renaissance world (but with some Renaissance-versions of modern things when the jokes require them), who invents crazy things. He looks a lot like Leonardo Da Vinci. This is the first book of his adventures: Leonardo the Genius.

It starts out with single-pagers, and even the longer stories only last four or five pages. I see that this series originated in magazines, and might still appear in magazines today, which explains that.

The jokes are silly and broad, which makes me wonder why it hasn't traveled into English more successfully. There is something vaguely European about it: like Asterix, there's an underlying sense that you have to have at least a little bit of cultural/historical grounding to get the jokes, and maybe general American audiences react badly to that.

Over the course of this book, Leonard hires an assistant - just called "Disciple" here, though I gather he gets a name in some later stories. This allows even more slapstick, and for the inevitable "guy wrapped up in bandages in a hospital bed" results of some less-successful experiments.

As I said, it's all just a bit old-fashioned - big squared panels with tightly ruled lines, squared-off dialogue balloons, that mid-century style of humor, a big-nose cartooning style from Turk - but that's just a sign of the era it came from. A few of the jokes are unfortunate now - there's one in which Leonardo invents the first airplane, and then a swarthy guy tries to hijack it to Cuba, ha ha ha - but most of it is durable all-ages humor that still basically works.

I find this kind of series fascinating, because it's so obviously A Big Deal in the land of its birth, probably hyped every year when a new volume comes out and the big birthday/Christmas wish for thousands of kids, and yet it's totally unknown in my country. The world is big and full of things, some of which are vaguely familiar even if you've never seen them before - I guess I find that weirdly comforting. The book itself...ehhh, it was OK. I think it's a lot more resonant if you grew up with it.

Glorious Summers, Vol. 3: Little Miss Esterel by Zidrou & Jordi Lafebre

This is not my nostalgia. But, reading this book, I was reminded that the whole series is about the nostalgia of people around my age and their parents, remembering the era when the parents were young and energetic and the children were young and free.

Glorious Summers is a six-book series, written by Belgian Zidrou and drawn by Spaniard Jordi Lafebre. They were published in French quickly in the teens, and the first five translated into English - this third volume by Laura Vergnaud - for publication in 2018 by Europe Comics. They're digital-only; Europe is not quite a full-line publisher, and acts mostly as a proof-of-concept and an engine for licensing material to American/British publishers who would then bring out their own editions. Each one is set in a particular year, and tells the story of one summer vacation of the Faldérault family.

So Southbound! began with a frame story in what seemed to be roughly the present day, with an aged Pierre Faldérault and his wife Maddie, before flashing back to 1973, when they had four young and rambunctious children. The Calanque dove right into 1969, without a frame story, when the Faldérault family had slightly younger children and only three of them.

This third book is Little Miss Esterel - that's the model of car they drove in those first two books, and this is her story, in a way. The frame story isn't dated, but it's probably the mid-Nineties: the youngest child "Peaches" (Paulette) is still at home, in her early twenties (wearing a Nirvana T-shirt), and the other three are out, with their own lives. But the bulk of this book, like the others, is about one summer - in this case 1962, the year the Faldérault family got that Esterel and went on a two-week long vacation (minus four days; as always Pierre overruns the beginning of the holidays finishing up his comics-making work).

The family is obviously even smaller in 1962 than it was in 1969: Peaches and her older brother Louis aren't even born yet. Julie is a toddler and Nicole is a baby, still breast-feeding. But the traveling crew - in that brand-new Esterel - will include Maddie's parents as well.

She's an only child - we learn some details of why late in the book - and her parents seem old in 1962, while the Faldéraults are in their energetic mid-twenties. Maddie's father Henry - lovingly called "Fat Pop-Pop" by Julie - had a heart attack the year before, and around the same time sold his hat store and retired. He's a genial, happy man. His wife Yvette is tighter-wound and massively more controlled - we think she's been managing her husband's health (and maybe his store, and her family, and whatever else) for a long time, back to the War which still looms in their history.

Pierre thinks it will be fun to have Henry and Yvette along; that they'll drive down to the coast and camp out and Julie will love having "Fat Pop-Pop" to play with. The last of those things is true, at least.

Yvette is an inveterate organizer, with a Michelin guide in her hands, and she takes over entirely - they only make it as far as Saint-Etienne (which is reasonably far South, but not "The South" and certainly not on the Mediterranean), and settle into a hotel there. Yvette leads them around to see all the cathedrals and churches, in strict Michelin-star order.

Worse, the hotel has a Belgian-style restaurant, so they end up eating as if they were at home instead of French cuisine - but not even that, since Yvette browbeats the staff into taking frites off the menu for their entire visit, to protect Henry's heart. (And what is more Belgian than frites?)

Julie has a fine time, of course - she's a toddler. And Nicole is a baby. Yvette is having the vacation she wants, mostly - as much as she can be happy about anything. Henry is thrilled to still be alive and spending time with his family. Pierre and Maddie push back in some ways - they commandeer a wheelbarrow to act as a stroller for the girls - but the tension between Maddie and her mother simmers, until it breaks out into a full-fledged argument in the (slow, stuck-in-traffic) drive back home.

But Maddie learns things about her mother she didn't know, and Yvette learns to unbend a bit. We see the whole Faldérault family making a stop at a frites stand just over the border, the beginning of a tradition that was called out in the previous books. And the core family does have a quick camp-out, in their own backyard, back at home - we are convinced they will find ways to be happy and to do the things that strengthen their family, no matter what.

That's the nostalgia, or the story-telling aspect of it - the haze of memory that turns it all to something good in retrospect. Even a vacation you didn't love at the time becomes a good story years later.

As always with this series, the story is true and realistic, with interesting characters we care about - even Yvette, in the end. And Lafebre's art is magnificent in a clean, crisp story-telling style, with great faces in particular. Glorious Summers is a marvelous example of what comics can be: this series tells stories almost entirely outside any of the mainstreams of North American (or British, or even Japanese) comics - domestic, evocative of specific moments in the past, family-centered, lovely, small, perfectly formed. 

Into the Bewilderness by Gus Gordon

There are some signals that a book is actually for kids. Sometimes they're obvious: the shelf it sits on in a store or library, a big sticker on the spine, quotes from "little Jimmy, age 10."

Sometimes, though, you find a book in a library app, and think it could be a fable or something else quirky like that. And then you realize it's one of those stories about two people who live together Ernie-and-Bert-style, and that snaps a lot of other vague or goofy things into perspective. "This is a book for ten-year-olds," you realize, "I might enjoy it but it's not for me."

I hit that point about halfway through Gus Gordon's Into the Bewilderness, which sent me to his bio at the back of the book. He is known for writing and illustrated books for "small people," as he puts it. I think Harper Alley, the publisher here, might also be at least in part an outfit aimed at small people, though the copyright page doesn't have the age guidance I usually look for as my dead giveaway.

Anyway, this is nice and pleasant and a bit cozy, largely because it's a book for younger readers. Keep that in mind, and it's quite enjoyable.

Luis and Pablo live together in a cabin out in the middle of nowhere. We know this from the beginning of the book: it starts with a map that includes their "Bewilderness" as well as other places including "The Really Pointy Mountains" and "Grumpy Toad Valley" and "Weird rock place."

Luis is a bear who wears a sweater and a tuque; Pablo is a mole who wears overalls and glasses. Luis is the Ernie-coded one: he carries a guitar, makes up songs, and has silly ideas. Pablo is Bert-coded: always reading books, more knowledgeable, deeply grumpy.

Luis yearns for culture: shows, arts, musicals. There are none such in the middle of nowhere. Pablo notes that his people never leave this area, since his great-great-great grandfather ran off and...he leaves this story vague for a long time.

But Luis wins two tickets to a musical in the Big City, and - after some mostly-friendly banter, Pablo eventually decides to go with him. They go wait at the bus stop, finally get a bus, and take the long, circuitous (we've seen the map) ride to the Big City.

It is, indeed, Big - very different in every way from what they're used to. In interesting ways, surprising ways, fascinating ways. They go to find the theater where the musical is playing, and things don't go like they or the reader expects.

Of course, the end of the story sees them back in their cabin in the Bewilderness; books for small people must always renormalize. And we get the inevitable pitch for friendship: books for small people sometimes are about family, but most of the time - especially with a set-up like this - they lean heavily into the "friends are the best darn thing in the world" framing.

Gordon has a nice cartoony style - his self-portrait looks a bit Quentin Blake-y - and he does the vaguely-smartass dialogue and narration on a kid-appropriate level. This is a renormalizing book about the importance of friendship for ten-year-olds, but it's quite entertaining on that level.

The Incal, Vol. 5: The Fifth Essence - The Dreaming Galaxy by Alejandro Jodorowski & Mœbius

The Incal series is both a continuous narrative - individual volumes stop rather than ending; the primary conflict just keeps building over the whole series - and explicitly set up as a series of three sets of diptych titles. It begins with The Black Incal and runs into The Luminous Incal, most obviously. Then came What Lies Beneath and What Is Above.

But this fifth book has the more-complicated title The Fifth Essence, Part One: The Dreaming Galaxy. It will all end with the second Fifth Essence book, with a similarly parallel title, Planet DiFool, but it indicates, possibly, that writer Alejandro Jodorowski's metaphysical musings are starting to overwhelm the skiffy adventure here.

(Or that they did so some time back, and the titles are just catching up now.)

The Incal books started as medium-future, vaguely space-operatic adventure: the main character is a somewhat sleazy, low-level private investigator, John DiFool, who gets dragged into events of cosmic significance when he finds the title McGuffin, one of two sentient items of untold and fundamental power. By this point, the antagonists of the first couple of books have all become allies, the two Incals have merged with a minor character, and the team has been battling the real enemy, the Great Darkness, for a book or two. In this book, they mop up the last bits of conventional conflict, the Techno-Centreur - who I gather is a person rather than a group; it was less clear in the previous book - and the remnant bits of government of this human-dominated galaxy that they hadn't already co-opted.

But The Great Darkness is the usual overwhelmingly powerful outside-context force of destruction, manifesting as spiky black goo that envelops and transforms/destroys everything it can, and that is prone to the sort of loud histrionic bwha-ha-ha speeches that we always expect from our cosmic villains.

The plot of this book starts off with that mopping up - DiFool and his allies must attack the War Star, the final stronghold of the Techno-Centreur and his forces, so they can consolidate control of the human worlds and tackle the Great Darkness. There's a lot of impressive pages from artist Mœbius - I still insist the biggest fans of this series saw this before it was translated from French (this edition is translated by Justin Kelly and Sasha Watson) and are mostly reacting to the magnificent visual storytelling and not the dull repetitive Jodorowski dialogue.

There's some fighting with the Great Darkness as well, mostly by the personification of the Incal, which - for a reason Jodorowski doesn't make entirely clear - means the Great Darkness was pushed away now but is now able to completely conquer the entire universe twenty-one days later. (It seemed entirely capable of conquering right now if not stopped; I don't quite get the distinction here, or what the twenty-one-day delay means.)

Anyway, the only way to save all life everywhere is for every last human being - I don't think Jodorowki means "sapient being," because the alien Bergs don't seem to be included - to go into a special sleep called the Theta Dream. If any single human doesn't, every last person will die.

(I am constitutionally opposed to mystical skiffy stories that center on "give up all of your individuality to The Great Mind and everything will be Special and Wonderful," but there's no hive-mind yet, so I'm withholding judgment for now.)

Anyway, at the very end of this book, that's mostly happened in the human galaxy, surprisingly. But, there are also multiple billion humans over in the Berg galaxy, after DiFool fucked their queen a few books back - I swear I am not joking, though either they're all babies or the timeline is weirder than I thought - so he has to zoom off over there to convince all of his offspring to fall asleep to save all life everywhere.

Meanwhile, DiFool has to be dragged kicking and screaming through every last plot point: he doesn't want to do any of this. He's somewhat annoying, but also the only character with any individual personality left and the only real source of human conflict in the series, so it's not too bad. And we know that he'll give in every time: he's a weak-willed loser being led by his impressive nose through the whole thing, a convenient hook for plot and action.

As always, these books are visually sumptuous and impressive. The dialogue cluttering up those pages is somewhat sillier and repetitive, but space opera is not known for deep characterization and Algonquin Round Table-esque conversations anyway. You come to The Incal for magnificent Mœbius pages, and suffer through the goofy Jodorowski plot to get them.

Ew, It's Beautiful by Joshua Barkman

Did you know there are at least two comics about animals that talk? (Random animals, out in the world, and not talking to humans, but to each other.) I say "at least" because if there's two, there's probably more than that.

The one I was vaguely aware of is called (unsurprisingly) They Can Talk, and has been running for more than ten years. But I ran across a book in my library app from a different comic, False Knees, and decided in my whimsical way to read that one.

For a reductive comparison, Talk has a lot of domestic animals (dogs, cats, and so on) who live around people, and occasionally goes wider. Knees is mostly about birds - lots of different kinds of birds, depicted as far as I can tell exceptionally accurately - with occasional cats. So choose your talking-animal strip appropriately.

Ew, It's Beautiful is the second False Knees collection; it was published in July of 2025. The cartoonist is Joshua Barkman, who lives in Southern Ontario and who I suspect sees a lot of the same birds that I do here a few hundred miles south in Northern New Jersey.

What I mean by that is that I can't necessarily identify all of these birds - I do see jays and crows and cardinals and pigeons and a whole lot of those small nut-eating birds of various kinds - but I do recognize most of them, thinking "I've seen dudes like that at the birdbath out the back window." Barkman gives them body language and speech - obviously - but he mostly keeps them birds; they're all recognizable, and, more subtly, the things they care about and the topics of the comics are very bird-centric.

Ew, It's Beautiful is funny, but not Borscht Belt funny - not funny like so many daily-style strips. The strips are deeply about how these birds (and others, poking through while writing this I saw a strip about a beaver and one with an ant) actually live and behave, slightly exaggerated for humor but not all that far. I don't think I laughed out loud, but I appreciated all of the strips: they're thoughtful and interesting and smart in subtle ways.

The art is ink and gouache, for a soft organic look and bright natural colors. It might not need saying, but Barkman is very good at depicting specific birds; it's kind of his thing here.

Barkman has arranged this book in four sections according to the seasons, starting with Winter; there's about 130 comics here, so roughly one for every three days of a whole year. And you can go through it with these loud, demanding, millet-loving little fellas, if you like. They're not overly fond of humans, but I think you'll come to like them.

Brain Drain, Part 2 by Pierre-Henry Gomont

Stories don't have to be true to be good stories - frankly, it's more often the opposite. So it's no surprise that French bande dessinée creator Pierre-Henry Gomont took a lot of liberties when telling the posthumous adventures of Albert Einstein's brain.

As I pointed out when I wrote about the first half of the graphic version, Brain Drain Part 1, the real story was boring: a pathologist removed Einstein's brain and eyes after death - and against the physicist's wishes - and gave out brain segments to his colleagues what seemed like willy-nilly for the next twenty years until the public finally learned about it. No important research resulted.

Gomont seems to want to follow the general outlines of that story in this second volume, Brain Drain Part 2, without actually saying the dénouement takes place in 1978, as it did in the real world, or tying himself to that sad "no important research." It makes this second book expansive in odd ways, as readers who know the timeline start wondering if decades are passing between pages. In his fictional version, there's also a major scientific finding - somewhat parallel to the real-world research of Marian Diamond in the 1980s - by his fictional neurologist Marianne Ruby.

But let me start at the beginning. Pathologist "Stolz" is on the run with "Professor Albert," who appears as an older man with the top of his head missing and an empty cranium (he wears hats a lot, so people don't notice that), and with the brain of Einstein in a jar. The independent existence of the Professor - zombie? ghost? avatar? - is the central motif of the series and its defining fantasy element; Gomont never explains it: it just is. It is presumably 1955, the year Einstein died. The FBI is chasing them, for never-fully-defined hugger-mugger reasons - the Professor does not want them to get their hands on him, nor does Stolz.

Stolz is said to be married with children; they appeared only briefly in the first book and he has fully abandoned them in this one. He apparently never contacts them again after running away with the Professor. The narrative also blithely says that a doctor can always find work, given his skills - presumably to explain how Stolz has funds for this life. But a doctor can find work as a doctor because he is officially licensed, under his name, on large, maintained lists that detail his training and expertise. This seems implausible for a man officially on the run from the FBI.

Anyway, after hiding out for some indeterminate time, Stolz tries to broker a deal with the head of the Institute where the Professor worked, a man called only Otto. Gomont doesn't give all the details - and the Professor assumes the unqualified Stolz will be in charge of the overall project - but it seems that there could be a research project, blessed by the Professor's family and the Institute, under Stolz as a figurehead and with Ruby as the primary expert.

The Professor and Stolz do enlist Ruby, but the FBI is not a part of (or amenable to) this deal, and capture the Professor and his brain for presumably-unpleasant researches of their own. (This is the MK-Ultra era, though that was the CIA.) Stolz somehow rams the FBI agent's car to retrieve the two remnants of Einstein, and the three (or four, counting the brain separately) flee (in what must be another car but isn't explained), more deeply Most Wanted than before.

Up to this point, the Brain Drain story seems to be taking place basically in 1955 - possibly a few months have passed, but no substantial amount of time. From here, though, the calendar becomes much more flexible.

Ruby demands to begin the research, so Stolz looks up an old professor, Dr. Seward, who now runs an odd, out-of-the-way asylum in Kansas. There are a lot of brains there for Ruby's comparative anatomy studies, and Seward does his own LSD-based researches on the Professor, escalating to cloning the brain (!!!) multiple times and doing surgery on the original that leaves the Professor unable to speak. Stolz is sidelined this whole time, but finally breaks free with the Professor after Ruby finishes her research and heads out of the plot almost for good.

Some years seem to have passed, during which Stolz has not worked as a doctor. But he goes back to hiding out with the now-silent Professor for what may be another decade or so. And he eventually sends part of one of the cloned brains to Ruby, which allows her to expand her research and finally make solid, groundbreaking findings, which she releases in the standard scientific manner.

…which tells the public that Einstein's brain was preserved, and causes a media frenzy. This leads to the actual ending, which I think is meant to be in roughly 1978, as in real life. Stolz finally does what he should have done, back at the beginning, and Gomont's narration nods towards the outlines of real history.

That narration, by the way, is assured and supple and smart: Gomont is very much telling this story, and makes it clear several times he's diverging from history to do so. His art is equally enticing, with realistically lumpy people, sometimes impressionistic vistas, and detailed mid-century objects to ground it all.

I don't think Gomont's themes entirely line up with what actually happened in the real world, and I find his timeline a bit odd. He also seems to want this to be, in the end, the story of the posthumous friendship of Stolz and the Professor, which is entirely fictional - and, for the bulk of those years, the Professor was incapable of speech after the events of this book. It is a very odd and quirky thing. But I do appreciate that about it, and I think it's almost exactly what Gomont wanted it to be. And that's a great thing to be.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 11: Seasons by Stan Sakai

It can be easy to discount craft and consistency and clear storytelling, particularly at scale. Stan Sakai has been telling Usagi Yojimbo stories for forty years now; I've been reading them for two years, and I've only gotten through about the first decade.

(I may have been inspired to start reading this series by realizing that, after being vaguely aware of it the whole time, that the entire forty-some book series was available through my library's app. Actually, I'm not 100% sure that absolutely everything is available, but I'm now eleven books in and dozens stretch ahead of me, so it's darn close if nothing else.)

I have quibbled about some things about these Edo-period anthropomorphic-animal stories, mostly related to the fact that this is explicitly an all-ages series - and, in practice, that means that there's nothing in it that would be upsetting to a ten-year-old. It's a valid choice, and I think aligns closely with the way Sakai wants to tell stories anyway, but a vast amount of life is inherently upsetting to a ten-year-old, which means all of that is off-limits. Sex in more than the most vaguely implied sense, of course, but also a lot of the consequences of the violence that is central to a samurai epic. Usagi Yojimbo is a clean, somewhat sanitized view of a historical world, with a main character who is always true and honest and brave and on the side of right, where violence consistently solves problems and only occasionally leads to tragic ends, and where new humans appear somewhat mysteriously and relations between the sexes are either on the dynastic-connection level or a vague adolescent longing.

All that is still true of Usagi Yojimbo, Book 11: Seasons, which collects seven issues (including one originally in color; here presented in black-and-white just like the rest) and a few previously scattered stories, all from the mid-90s. It's eleven stories in total; this book was published in this format in 1999 and is still available digitally, though finding a dead-tree edition might be more difficult. (There's a newer reprint series, with fatter - but possibly smaller-format; that seems to be the way these things go - and fewer volumes, which may be easier to find.)

By this point, Sakai had a large recurring cast; two of the semi-loves of Usagi turn back up in this book, plus the inevitable roguish ronin Gen. (I didn't remember the exact detail of the two women, which were somewhat important, but the stories themselves inclue the reader enough.) Geography, though, is not a focus - Usagi does explicitly return to places in this volume that he'd been before, but those places don't get named or placed anywhere specific in Japan.

The stories are mostly miscellaneous; there's no central plot and it doesn't advance any larger overall motion of the story. (I don't think there is a central uberplot to Usagi to begin with; he has enemies and a tragic backstory but the Lone Wolf and Cub parallels don't go any further than that.) Each story is a well-told moment: a couple are vaguely sad, but mostly see Usagi setting something-or-other right or helping out someone in danger.

Sakai is a fine storyteller, with a clean line and exceptionally expressive faces. His pages are impeccably designed and his fight scenes vivid, easy to follow, and as visceral as they can be while staying ten-year-old-friendly. This is a fine series for what it is, and a lot of people would enjoy what it is.

The Once and Future Riot by Joe Sacco

I'm not really sure how Joe Sacco works. I suspect he has more than one project going at a time, particularly since his projects often take years to turn into books. But I don't know if he works on everything on and off, all the time, or if he goes through bursts on separate things, or some other organizational principle I'm not even thinking of.

For example, his new book last year was The Once and Future Riot. It's about a specific set of events in India's Uttar Pradesh state during August and September of 2013 - or, more precisely, the record of Sacco's investigations into those events a few months later. About midway between those investigations and this book's publication, Sacco had an entirely separate book, Paying the Land, about Indigenous people in Canada. I have no idea if Riot stalled on Sacco, so he researched, wrote and drew Land in the middle, or if Land was chugging along in the background during his trip to India.

It doesn't really matter, but I do wonder. Book-length comics take a while to make, which somewhat fights against the impulse for journalism to be quick and timely. And Riot is a book about a riot that comes a decade later. I haven't kept close track of Indian politics and Hindu/Muslim tensions, but I have to assume there have been other riots and (I hope, vastly more, and more productive) less violent movements since then: Modi is still in power, but there was an apparently-successful major youth protest over the past few weeks as I write this.

Which is to say: I don't think things have gotten better in Uttar Pradesh since 2013. They may well have gotten worse. Sacco's book isn't about long-term trends, though he does try to provide background: it's about this event, and primarily about his and his journalistic colleagues' efforts to untangle the statements from various officials and victims and local leaders to find the truth. (Spoiler: the local leaders, in Sacco's estimate, were mostly bullshitting at best, and Sacco all but accuses several of them of being leaders of violence in their villages.)

The spine of the book is Sacco's time in Uttar Pradesh: he's a character on most of his pages (as in his other books), but a viewpoint and an interrogator rather than a main character. Sacco and his colleagues - a translator/fellow journalist, mostly - are trying to dig into what happened on those days in September. Much of the book, like Sacco's other work, is made up of interviews, of refugees and community leaders and other witnesses, about what happened.

It's a complex situation: Muslims are a minority in Uttar Pradesh, but a fairly large one, and had traditionally been the swing voters that defined winning administrations. Muslims are also not uniform: there are two very different groups, one of very poor farm-workers, living alongside the Hindu Jats in villages, and another group of better-off homeowners and butchers and other more skilled trades, who tended to live in their own towns. The latter were the focus of the political power, obviously, and the former were the ones hit hardest by the riot.

But who started the riot? That's not clear, and there possibly was no one single "start" anyway. Tensions had been rising - fomented primarily by a group of Hindu nationalist politicians, in Sacco's telling, and using a crude but effective "they're seducing our young women to fuel plans to replace us" lie campaign.

Also, and under everything: India (or maybe Uttar Pradesh specifically) seems to be a deeply corrupt society on many levels. The police will respond to immediate large-scale problems - such as the riot of the title - but getting them to investigate day-to-day crimes requires either the payment of bribes or use of political influence from above the local police-station level. Sacco implies that the higher-level police leaders may not be personally corrupt in the way the local station leaders and cops are, but some of them are political creatures, tied to specific parties and with an interest in certain narratives and thus in investigating crimes to make them fit those narratives.

And, of course, if the local people - both Muslims and the Jat subsect of Hindus who are dominant in this region - don't think the government and police and other officials are honest and will investigate to find actual facts, they will be looking for other outlets for their anger and fear and hatred.

When two distinct groups live side-by-side, they don't necessarily conflict. But when political leaders see gain in that conflict, or have an aim to eliminate the other group, they absolutely will.

Riot is a book about an overdetermined outburst of violence. Sacco points out, several times, that this was not a huge violent upheaval. It ended in a day or so. Only a few score people died; only a few hundred were turned into refugees. On a global scale, that's small. (India may have seen worse since then; they certainly saw vastly worse, along the same ethnic/religious lines, during partition, and occasionally later.)

But it's a riot that came about because of longer-term trends, that was fed by leaders who do seem to be looking forward to larger bloodshed or expulsions (Jat mobs are said to have chanted "Pakistan or the grave" at Muslims during the riot), and that have not been solved or cured or made right. Those are riots that can recur, that can get bigger, that can expand. And, again, Sacco talked to a few people in the course of this book that seem to be hoping and working for that end. Hence the "future" of the title. It hasn't happened on that scale yet. It might still be avoided.

This is not a story about only India, of course. It's applicable to groups that are not Jat or Muslim. Supremacists who make up lies about a minority to foment anger and try to get them thrown out of the country are common in many places. The future riot could be much closer to home - wherever your home is.

The Werewolf at Dusk and Other Stories by David Small

My first thoughts are trivial, distracting: how long do werewolves live, anyway?

I mean what we might call the Metric Standard Werewolf, beloved from folklore, and not any modern author's bespoke version, for greatest applicability.

Because The Werewolf at Dusk and Other Stories is a collection of three stories largely about being old, and I have a nagging sense that werewolves don't get old.

Of course, in traditional werewolf stories, they don't get old because they are abominations before God who must be destroyed as soon as they are discovered - but I thought they would live a long time if they could. Or am I conflating them with other Universal Monsters? Vampires are clearly immortal, and mummies generally are, too. Reanimated corpses are already dead - I guess this covers both zombies and Frankensteinian creations - and so presumably don't continue to age in their second life.

This time-wasting activity has not brought me a comprehensive answer, sadly. Mister Google is happy to tell me the details of specific fictional universes - his new shiny AI buddy will synopsize a bunch of them for me - and give vague pointers for continuing research. But the answer seems to be...yes, maybe, no, it depends?

Werewolves can be very old if the story needs that: in some traditions, it's even common. Old and decrepit, not as often - but it's a big folkloric world, and it's rare we can say "that's just not allowed."

I did say my initial thoughts were distracting.

Werewolf at Dusk has three illustrated stories by David Small, author of the graphic memoir Stitches most relevantly, and also a long-time illustrator, mostly of books for younger readers. (He has a Caldecott and several other awards; he's kind of a big deal in that world.) The three stories were created for this book, and they're similar to a comics format but not quite the same: Small's text is set in type on the pages, more like narrative than captions, and his art sits borderlessly on the pages, often just one image per page. But there are comics-style panel transitions between pages, and on pages with multiple images - large parts of this book do read like comics. But it also looks a lot like an illustrated story, of the kind most commonly seen for young readers.

The three stories are: "The Werewolf at Dusk," from a flash fiction written and performed by Lincoln Michel; "A Walk in the Old City," somewhat modified from a dream Small had; and "The Tiger in Vogue," from a 1948 story in French by Jean Ferry and presumably translated by Small here.

The first story is about, as you might have guessed, an old man who is a werewolf - a tired, weak one, with mangy fur and aching joints, after a long life of spending the full moons attacking and killing people. Now, sadly, he can barely tackle "an injured squirrel."

The second story has been transmuted a bit, but still retains that dreamlike feeling: an old man, a psychiatrist who suspects he's starting to go senile, is prone to wandering strange districts of his home city, and has gotten lost. He meets another old man, who at first seems helpless, and encounters some very symbolic elements that make him analyze the dream while still inside it - but he has misunderstood some essential aspects of the situation.

The third story features another old man, but the situation - from a surrealist story set in early 1920s Berlin - is more important than the man himself. He attends a music hall, hoping to avoid one particular act he has come to hate and fear - but that act inevitably plays, every time. A tiger, somehow mesmerized and standing upright in a human-style tailored suit, is led by a redheaded woman through a burlesque of the audience experience in that very theater, sitting in a prominent box, using opera glasses, and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, a "little man with tired skin and pale eyes" in the next box - who Small unsubtly draws as Hitler, in case any reader his missed the metaphor - is the real controller of the tiger, sweating and mentally straining to keep him in control. Every night, the act finishes as planned, and the tiger is gotten offstage before he reverts to his animalistic nature and is shoved back into a cage by stagehands. He never actually eats the baby he inevitably is given to hold and coo over.

Again, the Ferry story was published in 1948, with the benefit of hindsight. Small's version has another near-century of hindsight. I don't think the metaphor entirely makes sense, but that's surrealism for you: it is ominous and creepy and feels significant.

The three stories have somewhat different concerns, but all circle old age in one way or another; they work pretty well as a themed collection. I suspect this book might have been bought by a lot of youth librarians going on Small's reputation - and the reps at the publisher, Liveright, might not have tried too hard to dissuade them - but that actual young readers might not have strongly loved this book about age and infirmity and regrets and the impending horrors of WWII.

Then again, I could be wrong. Perhaps the children yearn for stories of old werewolves and ominous tigers. Stranger things have happened.

The Hidden Dominion of Geordie James by Mike Dawson

Like many cartoonists who like to eat and live indoors, Mike Dawson has made books for younger readers. It's a big audience that buys a lot of books - both personally and by proxy through schools and libraries - and that is really happy to have a creator come and do an event at their school, especially when the creator can stand on stage and make drawings on a pad of paper.

For those of us who are adults, we can sometimes miss those books, or notice them but think "maybe that one's not for me." So I've read a bunch of Dawson's comics, but not his middle-grade Fifth Quarter series, for example - and those two books look to be his major output (and probably major income source) of the first half of this decade.

But Dawson had a new middle-grade GN this year, and maybe it looked more appealing to me as a no-longer-tween, or maybe I thought it was time I actually paid attention to Dawson's middle-grade work, or maybe something else.

The book is The Hidden Dominion of Geordie James; it came out in January of 2026.

Geordie James is the viewpoint character, a sixth-grader who spends most of his time in a MMORPG called Dominion, a fictionalized Minecraft or Roblox. He's not good at talking to other kids his age and mostly wants to be left alone to do Dominion and hang out with his dog Crackerjack. He has an older sister - slightly annoying as older siblings always are, but not a major character - and a Scottish architect father who clearly means well but is not very plugged in to what his son is going through. There's no sign of a mother in the current day; she does show up in flashbacks. (Yes, that will be important. No, I won't spoil it.)

Geordie is failing science. His teacher Mr. Fritts gathers him and four other students failing the class - abrasive jock A.C., probably enby Taylor, possibly ADHD Alex, and potential-Geordie-friend Samesh - and tells them they have one chance to turn their grades around. They have to do a group project together for the science fair - the whole class will participate, but these five have to work together - on the topic "our place in the world."

All five of the kids hate this idea for obvious reasons - who likes group projects? - but it's their only chance, so they start meeting...and mostly devolve into playing Dominion together. This at least makes them friendlier to each other, but does not get much work done.

Meanwhile, on the news is a story about a piglet escaping (from what the book carefully does not call a slaughterhouse) and running through nearby towns. Geordie becomes obsessed with the piglet: researches animal husbandry, decides his whole family should go vegetarian, makes his new passion the focus of his work on the group project, and even blows up at A.C. over it.

Things go on from there: Geordie's father tries to ground him from Dominion and schedules "playdates" with Samesh, neither of which goes quite according to plan. The project moves forward in fits and starts. Geordie starts spending a lot of his afternoons and evenings out in a wooded area nearby - something of a waste ground, used as a dump for Christmas trees and other random detritus - where he makes a fort out of what he finds there. Oddly, the Wifi signal is very strong there, and he advances quickly in Dominion there and even shows Samesh the fort he built.

But then there's a plan to redevelop that wooded area - into a park for kids, among other things, so most people think it sounds great - and Geordie's fort is destroyed. He lashes out, smashes a lot of the group project's work to date, and runs off into an ominous and dramatically-timed storm.

This is a book for middle-graders, so nothing Geordie does is irrecoverable or final. We learn what happened to his mother, and the group does manage to finish its project and pass the class. No one ever finds the piglet, but Geordie is sure it's still out there, somewhere.

Dawson gets in little character moments for the other kids and for Geordie's dad - none of them take over the story, but we get glimpses of what their stories might be, if this were a different book. There's a part of me that wants to characterize those as loose threads that Dawson could have tied off more cleverly at the end, but that's too dismissive: this is a book about one character, but he's not the only person in his world. Hidden Dominion is Geordie's story, but it knows others have their own stories.

It's a colorful, cartoony book with a lot of visual appeal: Dawson contrasts the real world with the more saturated world of Dominion and light blue-toned flashbacks to keep the reader visually oriented in space and time. And Geordie is an intriguingly flawed character: he's angry for reasons we don't know at first, not good at expressing his emotions, and just plain twelve years old, which is never easy. It is all pitched in a tone and style appropriate for other sixth-graders, which an older reader needs to align to, but it tells a strong story well and Geordie is an interestingly flawed kid hero with elements that many of us may find familiar from our own youths.

Emanon, Vol. 1 by Shinji Kajio & Kenji Tsuruta

One of the core tensions in science fiction is between the pull of a neat idea and the need to actually do something with that idea. It was most stark in the early days, when many SF writers were fumbling fans who could iterate on each other's thoughts but not necessarily turn them into actual compelling stories. But you do still see fans and writers talk about "sensawunda" or arguing that just having a cool new take on some standard trope is good enough.

I think the Emanon series, originally prose stories by Japanese writer Shinji Kajio, might suffer a bit from that syndrome. I've just read the manga adaptation of the first of those stories, "Memories of Emanon," by illustrator Kenji Tsuruta; there are at least three more volumes, so I gather more implications or complications are worked out later.

I'm going to give some spoilers - first general ones that the back-cover copy mentions, and that you'd be hard-pressed to avoid in any case, but later I'm most interested in one particular implication. I thought of it before it came up in the book; I think most SF readers will get there fairly quickly. But I'll warn the more spoiler-averse of you before I mention it.

Emanon, Vol.1: Memories of Emanon is a 2008 manga volume based on the original 1983 story of the same name by Kajio - I've seen references to that story both as a "novel" and as a "short story," so I suspect it's a shortish novella that might have been published standalone at least once - which was translated by Dana Lewis for 2019 English-language publication.

The main character is a young man (explicitly a SF fan, reading a bunch of classic mostly-American SF novels on this trip), traveling on a long-distance ferry in Japan on February 24, 1967. He meets a young woman, somewhat rescuing her from an overbearing drunk, and they start talking - they end up spending most of the day-long journey together. He doesn't get a name in the story; she tells him to call her "Emanon," which means "No Name."

And then she tells him her big secret: she's the once-in-a-generation repository of a vaguely Jungian collective memory. She remembers, absolutely perfectly, the lives of all of her ancestors - it seems to be only direct female-line ancestors, but explicitly back to single-celled creatures that don't have memory to begin with.

The rest of the book is vague philosophizing about that, combined with our unnamed dude yearning for this hot "hippie chick" who is several billions of years older than him. The plot, such as it is, is these two characters talking on this boat over the course of eighteen hours or so.

More spoilers might come in from here, since I'll be talking about how this "immortality" works. Feel free to drop out if you're allergic.

Emanon basically has the memories of being young millions of times, and none of being old [1]: the accumulated memories "transfer" to each woman's firstborn (always female) child. Anyone who has looked at historical records will find such an unbroken strand incredibly unlikely, to put it mildly. (Perhaps there used to be more people like Emanon, but the female lines were all severed? That might come up in later stories.)

Also, what memories do the "former" Emanons have? Do they remember that they used to be able to remember? Surely they don't become amnesiacs at the moment they give birth. Do they never talk about this overwhelming, unique thing with their own daughters and mothers? 

(I suspect Kajio is more interested in what his main character thinks of the hot girl with memories of eternity, not what it's like to be that girl.)

All in all, Emanon comes across as that very hoary SF thing, the "check out this cool idea" story. It's a moody, ruminative piece, focused tightly on this one male gaze at the title character.

I don't blame her for ghosting him when the boat approaches port.

Personally, I find the idea oddly flawed in multiple ways: I don't believe in this one singular unbroken line, I expect there would be a much stronger mother-daughter connection Kajio completely ignores, and the "I remember being a paramecium" stuff is utter bunk. But it does have an interesting idea, and engages it with seriously, which makes it solidly SFnal and worth thinking through. I would not agree with reviewers that call it unique or particularly deep - it's that standard SF thing, a sophomore bull-session put onto the page - but it has an idea and explores that idea with at least some pretense of rigor.

[1] If I were being cruel, I'd point out this is clearly what attracted Tsuruta to the material: a woman he can draw, in any era or place, as exactly his thin freckle-faced model, because she is always young and slim and hot, or else she's not Emanon anymore. He can even draw her half-naked in some ancillary material, even if that doesn't fit into the story at all. Good thing I'm not cruel.

Proof That the Devil Loves You by Gilbert Hernandez

So Gilbert Hernandez makes his regular comics stories - I almost said "normal," but that's not the right word here - with continuing characters set in a real world. They get pretty rococo; Hernandez is fond of overcomplication and of turning his theme-amplifier knob up to eleven and then trying to twist it up even further. But scenes have the same people in them, and those people have regular relationships that the stories explain and depict.

He also makes stories that are meant to be fictions within his already-fictional world - I think they've all been "movies" so far, but I don't want to be dogmatic. (Hernandez is deeply inventive, both stylistically and formally.) These focus on his character Fritz, who was a basically normal-proportioned woman who worked as a psychologist in her earliest appearances, but at some point turned into a worldwide icon as a bad actress with breasts larger than her head. [1]

I'll take Fritz's unlikely career as read, and the vastly more unlikely worldwide army of Fritz imitators likewise: in Hernandez's worlds, manias just seem to spread, and people don't act rationally except on rare occasions.

But, anyway: there are the core Gilbert Love & Rockets stories, set in a secondary world. Then there are the "movie books," which are comics versions of movies that exist in that secondary world. Hernandez has done a number of these: Chance in Hell, The Troublemakers, Love from the Shadows, Maria M. They tend to be pulpy - they're bad movies; this is on purpose - but they do lean into some of Hernandez's strengths.

That finally brings us to Proof That the Devil Loves You, which is the most recent "Fritz Movie Book," published in 2023. It collects five stories, or story-pieces, that appeared in his serial comics over the pervious decade, somewhat reorganized and expanded...but not into a single narrative.

The descriptive copy hints at this, but doesn't quite say it: Proof is a collection of scenes that don't seem to be from the same movie. In fact, two of the six somewhat separate stories  here might not be from a movie at all. I suspect that Hernandez didn't so much turn these five previous-published pieces into a single graphic novel as he cleaned them up slightly and set them alongside each other, and then walked away.

The six stories - the first has the book's title; the others are untitled - are, roughly:

• In a Palomar-esque small town, a female sheriff is one of a large number of monomaniacs, which leads to tragedy. Meanwhile, the Fritz character is a wacky oddball who may be mentally ill and who seems to die off-panel for possibly thematically important reasons. This actually has a beginning and an end, and is arch and affected but all of that seems to be on purpose; think of it as a misfire from a Wes Anderson type, maybe.
• Three weird creatures drive into Vegas, with a lot of money because of something possibly-criminal that they vaguely celebrate. Strange things happen to them, and two seem to die or disappear, while the third is left to keep gambling, we assume eternally. The other two drive away, in what may be a parallel universe.
• Fritz is an "astronette" who needs to uncap some thing on an alien world. It is difficult, and she has a radio argument with her controllers during it, but she does it. A beam of light streaks off, and missiles try to destroy her escaping ship, but she survives.
• A passel of Fritzes, each in costume for a specific story and called by the name of that story, are in a tall building. The central Fritz is from a movie called Chest Fever; we also see non-Fritz actresses from that movie. The Fritzes talk about their careers in metaphoric ways, change their clothing, travel to different floors, come and go randomly. It is all very philosophical, and ends with our central Fritz transforming, or something. It is also super-obviously Symbolic and Important.
• A Prince Valiant-looking dude with glowing flying boots meets a furry demon-woman (played by Fritz) who, along with her imp sidekicks, tries to kill him in a typically icky Hernandez way. It doesn't take, and two other Prince Valiant types appear to scold her. Everyone swears every other word in a very "modern" way, which is probably important.
• Fritz and some guy - he seems to be connected to her career, an agent or manager or studio guy, and might have a name but it's not mentioned here - wander around, talking about various things, mostly in philosophical mode but using mostly-grounded and specific language (unlike the Fritzes-in-metaphoric-Hollywood-as-a-building before). This is probably "real" within the world of Love & Rockets. It's less artificial than a lot of the similar conversations in Lovers and Haters, and looks like it could actually lead somewhere - so, of course, it closes out the book.

As often with Hernandez, his pages are interesting and his artistic choices bold - sometimes bold in the "that is great" sense; sometimes in the "why on earth would he expect that to work?" sense - and I do believe that he thinks these pieces come together to form an overall narrative. But I think that narrative exists about 65% in Hernandez's own head, with only the remnant actually making it onto these pages.

And, in common with a lot of late Hernandez, this is not the place to start. You don't need to go all the way back to Palomar, but you should start earlier in the Fritz stories, maybe Three Sisters. He's in what we might call a remix period currently, taking many of his core concerns and themes and bouncing them around in different permutations - it can be arresting, but you need to have a grounding in the more conventional stories to get much of anything out of it.

[1] Hernandez's work now features many characters with breasts larger than their heads, and some men with biceps larger than their heads, for reasons I hope that are essentially artistic but that I suspect are not.