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."

Elric: The Dreaming City by Roy Thomas and P. Craig Russell

Most of the Roy Thomas-scripted adaptations of Michael Moorcock's Elric novels came out as individual comics issues - five or eight or so for each novel - and were eventually collected into book form. But The Dreaming City was instead a single graphic novel from Marvel in 1982 - maybe because this is the original 1962 novella "Dreaming City" rather than the alternate-title-for-the-first-novel Dreaming City, which has confused several generations at this point.

To be clearer: the novella "Dreaming City," when I first read the Elric books, was collected in The Weird of the White Wolf, at that time the third "novel" (actually a fix-up, like many of them) in the series, and now I think fourth. There have been remixed editions of the series since, so it also sits in different books with "Elric" in their titles.

I suppose the important thing to note about this adaptation is that it is the third in the recent Titan unified-covers reprinting of all things Moorcockian and Eternally Championing, Elric sub-series - third by internal chronology - but that it was first in the sense that Thomas wrote it first, P. Craig Russell drew it first, and it came out into the world four years before the adaptation of the first novel in the series, Elric of Melniboné.

(Also see my posts for the first two books in this Titan series: Elric of Melniboné and The Sailor on the Seas of Fate. Though both the original Moorcock stories and the vicissitudes of publishing adaptation series makes the timeline and details too convoluted to easily follow.)

I should also note that the next volume in this Titan series reprints the Thomas-scripted adaptation of The Weird of the White Wolf, which I expect - I haven't read it since about 1986 - also includes an adaptation of "The Dreaming City," in the context of that fix-up. So I have that to look forward to.

"Dreaming City" was one of the very earliest Elric stories, and, as many have noted repeatedly since then, Moorcock started out with the most dramatic, central story of his doomed albino hero, and has spent six decades since filling in smaller, lesser stories around them. What that means is: if you only read one Elric adaptation, it should be this one: it's early enough to be unfussy, it has some of Russell's most energetic artwork, and it's early-80s full-of-captions style captures the feel of Moorcock's prose well.

So this is shorter than the other Elric adaptations, tells a story of tighter scope - originally a novella, not a fix-up of short-fiction like the "novels" - and is one of the major events of this doomy, gloomy albino's life.

In Dreaming City, for good and sufficient reasons which are not provided here, Elric leads a large force of Sea Lords - pirates, basically - from the Young Kingdoms to plunder his homeland, sack its capital city Imrryr, slaughter basically all of his people, and depose his evil cousin Yyrkoon. He does succeed in those things, though he also intended to save his cousin and lover Cymoril, who does not survive this story.

He also does not succeed in getting more than a tiny fraction of his human forces back from Imrryr alive, in keeping with Elric's usual results to his actions: pretty much everybody but him dies, usually in horrible ways that make him sad. But that's the deal with Elric, and this was one of the first stories to codify that. Thomas and Russell turn Moorcock's often-purple prose into equally grand and exciting pages here; I'll repeat that, if you're interested in either Elric in general or the comics adaptations thereof, this is a great place to start.

Tongues, Book 1 by Anders Nilsen

I don't know why Anders Nilsen is coy with some of the names in this retelling of Greek mythology in the modern day. One of his main characters is clearly Prometheus - even if there were any doubt or possible nuance, he's visited by his brother Epimetheus. Explicitly brother, explicitly named Epimetheus. There's also Gyges Hekantonchieres, here female, but clearly the hundred-handed monster of the Titans' generation from mythology and the daughter of "the Voice," which I take to be Gaia. [1]

But the Zeus figure is called The Omega, and Nilsen's explanatory text explicitly says he is "considered by some to be the return of the Roman god Jupiter" - even though, in the book, we see him millennia ago, so calling it a "return" is a bit of a red herring.

Perhaps Nilsen is trying to be pan-mythological, at least in a small way - another character is Athena-Seshat, yoking somewhat similar figures from Greek and Egyptian myth into one character. That's the only reference to non-Greek myth I noticed, though. For more of the vague names, the Omega's top lieutenants are Might (probably Typhon) and his "partner" Violence (thus maybe Echidna), who are here to be threatening, violent, powerful, and loyal, but not to actually do much.

Prometheus is called The Prisoner, which of course he is. He's chained to a mountain cliff, somewhere dusty and desert. His immediate surroundings, though, have bloomed and flowered, because spilling the blood of an immortal - The Prisoner calls himself and his family "gods," even though, in Greek myth, the generation of the Titans were distinctly a different thing from the subsequent generation, the actual gods - does have effects, over the long years.

But there are three strands to the story here. All are caught up in this ancient war of the gods and Titans (I perhaps shouldn't use that word; Nilsen never does). All are in this dusty desert landscape, which is never named explicitly but seems to be more Iraq - or perhaps I should say Mesopotamia - than the Greek mountains. And I expect they will all come together in the end.

I have to expect, because that ending is not in this book. Even at three-hundred-plus pages, Tongues, Book 1 does not come to a conclusion. It stops at a imagistic moment that could serve as an ending, if it had to, but the three plots are still separate, and the fate of humanity still in the balance.

The Prisoner is one strand. We see him chained to that cliff, in the modern day and in the distant past. He talks to the eagle who comes every day to eat his liver - mostly the current eagle, since all mortals die, and "the eagle" is a millennia-long sequence of mother and daughter eagles, generation after generation. This lineage of eagles talks, because they have been eating The Prisoner's liver for those long ages, and Nilsen shows us some of the process by which the earliest eagles learned to speak.

Tongues is about language, at its core, or at least the Prisoner's strand is. The ability of language to chain and control and define the world, maybe - the way it confers power. What the Prisoner gave humanity, in this telling, is explicitly language, not fire.

Another strand of the story is the orphan girl Astrid, found like Moses floating down a stream as a baby, raised by a middle-class family in what I think is Kenya. Nilsen heavily hints that she is the reincarnation of the first real human, who The Prisoner pulled from the mud, saving her from suffocation, millennia ago. That first human went to live in a village of hominids who looked just like her, but didn't have her facility with language - until she joined them, when her example sparked the same transformation in the children, and cascaded from there down through the ages to make our modern world.

Astrid is guided by a talking chicken that calls herself Hermaea - I think she is meant to be a female version of Hermes rather than a gastropod - as part of a vast conspiracy among the "gods" to kill The Omega. The Prisoner has predicted that death, which may have been the inciting reason for his imprisonment. And Astrid is very clearly the possible manifestation of that prophecy, though only possible: nothing is predetermined in Nilsen's telling, but some outcomes can be seen and planned for.

So Astrid - a girl, maybe ten years old - is being groomed to murder a god. A god who is also the head of an insurgent group, or possibly even quasi-ruling force, in this unsettled region. His armed forces are called the Rings; they seem to be mostly humans, though led by at least a few gods. (Again, Nilsen calls them gods, but, aside from Athena-Seshat and The Omega, they seem to be from the prior generation.  We do see a background character who may be Hephaestus.)

The third strand is the least connected, and seems to be taking place slightly before the Astrid sections. An American young man with a teddy bear strapped to his backpack is wandering through this region. We don't know his real name; he gets called "Teddy Roosevelt" by two mercenaries or military contractors who pick him up. He may be a pawn on The Omega's side, part of a plan to foil the assassination attempt, or maybe something more complicated.

"Teddy" did something horrible - we think mostly accidentally, or thoughtlessly - back at home, and is traveling to atone for it, or to obliterate his memory, or hoping for a random death somewhere foreign. Teddy probably couldn't tell us which, either. He is picked up by those two violent men, on the roadside in this dangerous desert - dangerous inherently, from the heat and the lack of food, and dangerous because of the Rings and the (unnamed, unseen, implied) other forces the Rings are fighting.

There's one last major element: The Cube. Astrid has it, Teddy dreams of it. It's brightly colored, filled with something amorphous and unreal, an eruption of the numinous and godlike into everyday life. It has something to do with The Omega - embodies or contains some of his power, maybe, or possibly is the one thing that can kill him. The Omega knows it is out there, and is seeking it - as are his minions. 

Nilsen bounces among those three main storylines - The Prisoner, Astrid, Teddy - and some secondary points of view, including The Omega (appearing as a Swan to a woman in the mythological past, talking to The Prisoner, working with his minions, being mysterious and knowledgeable). Again, this is Book 1 - it doesn't end, exactly.

But it is full of fascinating images and thoughts, driven by the conversations among the large cast and their various dangerous situations. Nilsen's pages, as in his previous major book, Big Questions, are laid out like no one else's, with odd-sized panels crawling across backgrounds or expanses of white, sometimes cramming together as if compacted, sometimes soaring separately across the page like eagles. Those panels are, I think, never square - his central shape is that hexagon on the cover, and his panels are hexagonal as much as anything else. They're not regular, but their sides have two or three line segments, possibly rotating or morphing under the weight of the story.

There is also a lot of philosophizing in Tongues; a reader has to be willing to take long stretches of a chained Prisoner debating the purpose and worth of humanity with his various visitors, plus more pointed, immediate conversations involving Astrid (and various gods) or Teddy (and various violence-minded men). There is a lot to think through here: Tongues is a deep and rich work, both in its story and the telling, even if it's still unfinished.

If you're in the mood for a philosophical, mythological mediation on whether the human race is salvageable or not - or is inherently twisted, so that the world is clearly better off without us - you will want to take a look at Tongues.

[1] This gender-swap somewhat sets up a battle-of-the-sexes element that stays undertone throughout this book. This is Book 1, so it may rise higher in the narrative before the end.

Black Hammer: The End by Jeff Lemire & Malachi Ward

So a few years ago there was a Black Hammer story-segment [1] called The Last Days of Black Hammer, which sounded like it could have been an ending. But that was a flashback; it told us things we already knew in greater detail, like so many superhero comics. It was not an ending.

Series creator and writer Jeff Lemire might be getting more blunt; the new Black Hammer book for 2024 was explicitly The End.

And, this time, it actually was. (Well, I don't want to oversell it. This is Vol. 8 of the main Black Hammer sequence; there's already a Vol. 9 out, so I mean "end" in a story sense rather than an actually stopping sense.)

I have been reading the Black Hammer stories, with somewhat of a gimlet eye, since mid-'21. I should mention that I haven't been particularly a fan of superhero stories for at least twenty years; they are artificial in silly (and seemingly absolutely required) ways that I find more and more annoying as the years go on. I keep coming back to this one, I think, because it's discrete, because I respect Lemire and enjoy most of his work, and because just whaling on something in writing is one of the little-discussed great pleasures of criticism.

OK, so let me set this up. In 1996, this superhero universe had its required crossover: worlds lived, worlds died, nothing was ever the same again. One superhero team from Spiral City, which apparently didn't have a team name because we've never learned it, was mostly exiled to a pocket universe afterward, while their leader and big gun, the titular Black Hammer [2] died defeating the Big Bad, Anti-God. [3] The main cast moped on a farm in that pocket universe for a while, and then - in a story I only vaguely remember, and am mostly going on faith that it was actually told in the pages of these comics - were freed from the tiny pocket universe to the exact same location, but on our Earth, a world outside of the superhero multiverse, which was Better Somehow. (This is explicitly a no-superpowers world - our world, remember? - but superheroes can pop in and out and their powers work just fine on this planet like anywhere else, so it's somewhat of a distinction without a difference.)

In between stories about the Moping Crew on the Farm, there were a lot of flashback and side stories about other superheroes back in Spiral City, including the Moping Crew themselves, mostly set before the big fight with Anti-God. Finally, in the Reborn series, Black Hammer's daughter Lucy - who had taken up as Black Hammer II for about twenty years after his death, but got older and settled down with a family even later than that - faced Shocking Revelations and The Return of the Villain She Thought Was Gone Forever.

The End is what happens next. My dismissive description is: Jeff Lemire said, "What if Crisis, but me?" It is very, very much in the Crisis mode. Anti-God is working his way down the string of infinite universes - hey, if they're infinite, shouldn't that take infinite time? wait, don't answer that - while he sends the Evil Black Hammer (older, with white in his evil-coded facial hair, like the old-man evil Hulk and a thousand others) ahead of him to whack all of the other Black Hammers in all of those universes first.

Because only a Good Guy with a Really Big Hammer can defeat a stone-faced kaiju-sized villain intent on eating your universe, of course!

So we get panels of worlds like beads on a string, getting crunched or eaten or whatever one after another. We see two versions of Earth with each other upside-down in the sky (like, really close!) and the requisite evil Hellamentals run around killing people and causing destruction, because if you're capable and willing to eat an entire universe, you need minions to smash things on one particular planet first, for Reasons.

And we see, in what is surely the point of the whole thing, alternate versions of all of our heroes, assembled from other universes, including the inevitable Parliament of Weird - every superhero multiverse must have a Parliament of That Guy; it's required - who are gathered by characters we vaguely remember from some of the many, many random Black Hammer spin-offs, who squabble with each other in the best Marvel Manner, and who fight Anti-God in various ways, which are all ineffectual (leading to many of them getting killed on the page - multiverses are great for disposable versions of characters the reader is expected to care about) until the One Last Crazy Idea That Just Might Work.

Anyway, before the Crisis kicked off, Lucy fled with her family to what DC Comics would prefer I don't call Earth-Prime, to live with the Moping Crew on their farm. She is pursued by the Evil Black Hammer, and she and her family eventually fight the guy. They lose and the entire multiverse is destroyed, the end!

Sorry, just a little joke there. Of course they beat the old man who is an alternate-world version of their father and grandfather to death. That's much better.

Then they pop back into the main multiverse to take part in the really, really final fight, because the page count is dwindling. And Anti-God, we think, is defeated for ever and ever.

But, then, we also thought that way back at the beginning of Black Hammer, and we were wrong then.

As always, I do not take this seriously in the slightest. It's Superhero Grand Opera, and the fat lady is screeching for all her might in a really silly costume downstage center, trying to make us all really invested, but I just don't feel it. No shade on Lemire, who keeps everyone talking like human beings and does his best to make it as grounded as possible (spoiler: not very much) along the way. Or on artist Malachi Ward, who draws a bewildering array of versions of characters in a solid adventure-comics style - not as flashy as some of the previous Black Hammer artists, but dependable and clear. (This could easily have been a mess with a flashier artist, frankly.)

I cannot recommend any of the Black Hammer books for anyone with an attitude towards superhero comics anything like mine. Or, well, maybe I can, because I do enjoy making fun of them, and maybe you will, too. But I expect you need to have a very different opinion on the value of yet another Crisis knockoff to enjoy this on a non-camp level.

[1] They're all in Big 2 all-epic mode, so none of the main-sequence miniseries have been actual stories, since there was one beginning (at the beginning) and no end previously - all middle, all the time.

[2] How literal are superhero comics? Black Hammer is a Black guy who hits things with a comically oversized hammer. That literal.

[3] Anti-God has no personality or traits other than wanting to destroy all of the universes (for no stated reason). Visually, he's basically Darkseid in a Spirit Halloween "Galactic Planet Eater Guy" costume.

Usasgi Yojimbo, Book 9: Daisho by Stan Sakai

As I've warned before, my posts about series tend to get shorter and more perfunctory as I have less and less to say. I may end up rambling below, but I doubt I'll have anything particularly profound this time.

I'm still reading my way through Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo series, a mildly fantasy-tinged adventure series set in a dramatically heightened version of Edo-period Japan, pitched at a level appropriate for middle-grade readers...oh, and all of the characters are anthropomorphic animals, because Sakai started this series in the '80s for the Critters anthology. Anthropomorphic characters also suit his art style quite well, though there are all the usual questions of how multi-animal worlds work - are all these races interfertile? If a rabbit and a fox have children, are they hybrids, or are the boys rabbits and the girls foxes, or what? Do the races code specific positions in society, or geographic origins, or something like that?

In this series, they're mostly just animals because Sakai wanted them to be animals. Individual characters are kinds of animals that make sense for them specifically; I haven't made a study to see how families connect. Usagi himself clearly gets the hots for babes who are not themselves rabbits, for one data-point.

The ninth collection of that series is Daisho, collecting some stories from issues 7 and 8 of the 2nd series that weren't in vol. 8 (Shades of Death) and the full issues 9-14; it reaches almost to the end of the Mirage series (Usagi started with Fantagraphics, had a short run with Mirage, and then settled in at Dark Horse for twenty years and 160-ish issues); the current edition came out in 2010 but seems to be an only very slightly updated version of the original book 9 from about 1995.

The stories here mostly flow into a continuous narrative, though those two lead-off stories are both closing off loose plot threads from earlier volumes. Most of the book sees Usagi caught up in helping out a town taken over by slavers, and then chasing their leader after "General Fujii" steals Usagi's swords. After that, we get a flashback to another great lost love of Usagi's life - we're only up to Lost Love #2 at this point, but we're also only twenty-some issues in, with a hundred and sixty to go, so Usagi could have a hot anthropomorphic babe in every town by the end of the series if I'm counting correctly.

This particular Lost Love is the We Could Never Be Together type - she's the daughter of a major lord, he's the bodyguard delivering her to the arranged marriage, and they're on the run from the forces trying to murder her before that can happen. You've read that story before, but Sakai does a solid version of it here.

That's generally my take on Usagi, this volume and this previous ones - Sakai is professional and solid, telling stories well in a clean style, with solid dialogue and engaging plotting. There's nothing groundbreaking or surprising here, and it is all pitched so you could hand it to a ten-year-old. Is that enough? Every reader has to decide that - so far, I'm enjoying the stories, while finding them inherently limited.

Fishflies by Jeff Lemire

It still surprises me when I lose track of a "favorite" creator's work - in my head, I'm still the guy who spent sixteen years diligently tracking every last thing being published in my areas of concern, so that feels impossible to me. But I haven't tracked like that for two decades now, and I don't even see the trade publications I used to use as initial sources. Even if I wanted to, both PREVIEWS and Publishers Weekly are gone or vastly diminished from what they were when I relied on them.

But when I recently read 10,000 Ink Stains, Jeff Lemire's recent memoir of his career in comics, some of those old habits came back - I took notes. (I keep a small google doc with mostly series I want to keep reading in the library app - keeping them more-or-less in the same order, so I rotate through and remember to keep going with the ones I want to continue with. On the other side, I just removed my entry for Asterix as I was updating it based on reading this book.) So I now have a list of things I missed by Jeff Lemire.

Some of them are his Big Two superhero work - those have question marks after them, and I'm not sure if or when I'll get to them. But I also missed some of his more "indy" work, which I've consistently (well, mostly, with a big asterisk for Ascender/Descender, where the worldbuilding triggered a strong reaction) enjoyed - so I have a list of those books, and plan to get to them in '26.

First, though, he had a major series recently that I missed - seven issues of sixty-ish pages each, collected as a single book this past March. Written and drawn by Lemire, with one flashback section drawn by Sean Kuruneru. That was Fishflies, another story of rural Ontario and the hardscrabble lives of the damaged people who live there, like a lot of his solo work going back all the way to Essex County.

Fishflies is the story of two people - that's them on the cover. She's Francis "Franny" Fox, an elementary-schooler in Belle River, a small town in Southern Ontario, near the water. He's Lee Simard, a minor criminal, probably in his late twenties, who held up the Belle River Mini-Mart one night, shot a kid coming there to buy popsicles, and then...something happened to him.

It's the height of summer, the few weeks around a full moon when the local mayflies - called fishflies here, because they come from the water and smell like fish - swarm over everything. Some of you may have similar insect infestations where you live: I've seen cicadas here in New Jersey and "love bugs" down in Florida. This is a big, annoying, unpleasant one - the fishflies gather in huge masses for a few days, and then die. They don't bite or sting; they're purely a nuisance - the worst thing is their vast number and the unpleasant crunch underfoot.

There's a supernatural element to this book, which isn't explained until much later. 

Lee flees the botched robbery and his shooting of the kid, Paul Dupuis. He seems to be shot himself, in exactly the same place as the kid. He's also tormented by the fishflies, which seem to be biting him. He runs through the fields, and ends up on the farm where Franny lives with her sour, abusive father. She takes him in, making him a place to stay in an unused silo. She knows he "did something bad," but insists God can forgive him if he changes.

And he does change - but not the way she means. See that thing on the cover? That's Bug, which Simard transforms into by the next day. He can't talk, but is strong and can jump really far. Franny still wants him to be her friend. She still wants to protect him, and vice versa.

Meanwhile, the local head of police Danny Laraque is looking for Simard. We also follow Dupuis's mother Helen, first watching over her comatose son in the hospital. And there's an old couple, brother and sister, who have seen "bugs" like Simard emerge before - and devoted their lives to killing those bugs.

Franny and Bug flee - and the police realize that she's missing and think Simard has kidnapped her. Things escalate. We learn the secret of the supernatural element: why Simard became a bug, and how it's happened before. All of those characters circle the story, and circles always lead back to where they began.

Fishflies is somewhat horror-tinged and somewhat crime-story-plotted, but it's still very much in the mainstream of Lemire's solo work: damaged people, in poor circumstances, in small Ontario towns, in stories that are, to quote myself, "literary explorations of death and regret and loss." His scratchy art is perfect for those kind of stories, those hardscrabble people, and it works really well for a giant anthropomorphic bug, too. Lemire gives this story the page-space it needs to breathe, including sidebars about fishflies from secondary characters in this town at the end of most of the original issues. It's creepy and sad and dark, but does give a glimmer of hope for some people, especially Franny - who needs it most.

Mr. Pye by Mervyn Peake

I probably am missing some vital portion of background to do a really good job of explicating this book. I was born two or three generations too late, on the wrong side of the Atlantic, for one thing. And, which I think is probably more important, I'm not Anglican.

(I come from an Episcopalian family, which is as close as Americans get, but we wandered off any vestige of High Churchiness very early in my life, and "as close as Americans get" is not actually that close.)

Mr. Pye is one of the other books by Mervyn Peake, famous in SFF circles for the massive, quirky, half-broken Gormenghast trilogy. (It's not really a trilogy. It's two big books that are basically what Peake wanted them to be, one short book written more-or-less while he was dying, and ideas for more that died with him, though his daughter Maeve Gilmore did expand a few of his notes into a fourth book.)

Unlike the Gormenghast books, Mr. Pye is set in our world. It is fantasy, of a type, but it doesn't look like fantasy for about the first half of the book. I'm afraid that any discussion of the book will "spoil" the fantasy element, so, if you are a purist about such things, stop reading now.

Mr. Pye was published in 1953. Looking at the list of Peake's works, I think it's his only other novel. So we can assume this story was important to him in some way. But it is quirky - even more so than the Gormenghast books, I think, though in a more traditional way.

Harold Pye is a small, round, middle-aged Englishman of unspecified background. As the novel opens, he's taking the boat from Guernsey to Sark, one of the smallest and most distant Channel Islands. He intends to settle in Sark and transform it: he is going to make its people good. Like so many reformers before and after him, he has an unassailable belief that he knows exactly what "good" is, and that he can mold an entire society into that shape.

More importantly, he's a compelling speaker. Even more importantly, Peake is firmly on his side, so when he talks vaguely about "the Great Pal" (his pet name for the Christian God, whom he claims to have long conversations with, though those conversations are not narrated in this book), none of his listeners scoff or laugh or raise any of the thousands of potential objections, many of which a reader will quickly call to mind and may even mutter under his breath while reading.

Instead, he first quickly enlists his landlady, Miss Dredger, who starts calling him "chief" as he calls her "sailor" and the two of them do call-and-response hymns and sea shanties to each other to show how matey they have become. Then, most of the people of the islands - Peake always divides them into natives and residents and visitors, and makes a big deal about the differences at the beginning of the novel in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with anything that happens in the novel - also come under his spell fairly quickly, all caught up in the thrill of the Great Pal.

The local prostitute, Tintagieu - this is the only name she gets; I'm not sure if it's a personal name or a surname or perhaps obscure identifier - for a while looks like she will be the center, or maybe the only resistance to Pye's domination, since she is willful and self-contained and not susceptible to his vague, bland statements. She might also not exactly be a prostitute: it's not clear if she regularly takes payment, but she does sleep with roughly the entire willing male population of the island on a regular basis and has no other obvious support.

Perhaps I should note here that Mr. Pye is not a tightly plotted book. It wanders about, as if it is ambling around the fields and cliffs of Sark on a sightseeing trip, and spends most of its time with Mr. Pye himself saying vague things about his faith and the concerns of his best buddy, the Great Pal. 

Anyway, Tintagieu and the local painter, Thorpe (bad as a painter, stammering, not otherwise characterized) - they're seen as something like a couple in this book, despite Tintagieu's profession (or pastime?) - talk about Pye and his influence, and look like she will do something to counter it, for much of the first half of the book, but nothing comes of it.

Instead, the fantasy element emerges. This is your second chance to stop reading to avoid being spoiled; at this point you only have yourself to blame if you continue.

Mr. Pye starts to grow wings. White-feathered, clearly angelic wings, from his shoulder-blades. At about this time, he also notes that the Great Pal is not talking to him - whether this is "any more" or if he was mistaken or lying before is left as decision for the reader; I know which way I fall.

The wings are weird, and a proper Englishman - even one aiming to convert the entire population of a small island to his quirky version of Christianity, in preparation for possibly doing the same to larger and larger regions of the world - must never do anything weird. If any other English people saw the wings, they would at best shun him, maybe give him the whole Wicker Man treatment, or, even worse: point and laugh and scoff. So, obviously, Pye must start doing evil acts to balance his clear moral purity, which will make the wings shrink and disappear.

Since the author says so, this does work, and Pye kicks over children's sand-castles and secretly lets out all of the contents of the water-cisterns on the island and, oh yes, sneaks out at night to worship Satan in the form of a local goat. These actions might seem to some readers - this one, for example - to be of such radically different levels of "evil" that they don't make any sense as a list, but Pye does them all, and tracks, along with the aid of the redoubtable Dredger, the size of his wings after each evil action.

But, woe! The wings do disappear, but then he gets an itching sensation in his brow, and devil's horns appear there. So he must, at the climax of the book, balance good (telling people about the Great Pal) and evil (hanging out with that goat) to keep both manifestations in check. They see-saw back and forth, and this exhausts Pye, physically and morally and mentally.

Eventually, the locals - I think mostly natives, if that matters - see the horns, make the obvious conclusion, and assemble with pitchforks and Frankenstein rakes to find and capture the now-fleeing Pye. They also call in the constables from Guernsey, because that's what English people do: they might be a mob and a rabble, but by God! they're a mob and rabble that will hand over a miscreant to the proper authorities!

Tintagieu hides Pye in the local jail - the last place they'd look! - until night, when he tries to flee in a way that would never, ever work. And, on the last page of the book, the horse-drawn cart he's fleeing in wrecks, killing the horse and throwing the once again be-winged Pye into the air.

He flies away, of course. And the novel ends.

I think Peake meant this as some kind of commentary about living in the modern world, living up to your own principles, that kind of thing. I think Pye is meant to be heroic, in his way. I also do not believe a single thing Pye says for one second. I find his Great Pal talk silly and infantile, and the concepts of good and evil in this book so cartoonish as to be practically useless. You might have had to have been English and living in 1953, preferably on Sark, to get it.

It's a pleasant, goofy read, though, even if you can't take it seriously. And if you're looking for weird Christian fantasy, I don't know how much else you have after you've read Lewis and Williams. 

Loki by George O'Connor

The surviving corpus of Norse mythology is very thin - the two Eddas, Prose and Poetic, from an era after most of the Norse peoples stopped believing these gods were real and started thinking of them more as stories or metaphors. So retellings often have notes to say "this background character is named, and it looks like he was a major god of something-or-other, but this is the only surviving reference to him" or "from the way it's told, this seems to be one of a long cycle of similar stories, but it's the only one we have." 

But the stories we do have are compelling, full of interesting characters, complex mythology, and great stories - or maybe, in some cases, fragments or pieces of stories. So modern storytellers keep trying to put those two Eddas into modern language, to frame what we do know in ways that attract and thrill present-day audiences.

George O'Connor is in the middle of a four-book series, which I think will retell most, if not roughly all, of the existing Norse stories in comics form, under the overall title Asgardians. Like his previous twelve-book series about the Greek gods, Olympians, so far the books have been titled after, and focused on, specific gods: first Odin and then Thor.

The third book is this one, Loki. The fourth, teased at the end here, will of course be Ragnarok. (If you do a four-book series retelling Norse mythology, you're pretty much required to make the fourth one Ragnarok. Same with a two- or three- book series; you might be able to avoid that title if you do just one.)

Since I've written about all fourteen of O'Connor's previous mythological books, I don't know if I have a lot to add here. This is just as good - compelling, well-told, strongly organized, drawn in an style influenced by classic adventure comics and colored in moody tones by SJ Miller.

In Loki, we do see again O'Connor's skill at weaving what were separate myths - how this happened, how Loki tricked that guy, and so on - into a fuller, linked story. It's still clearly a bunch of tales, but O'Connor organizes them, and narrates them, and foreshadows later events, to make this, like his other books, not just a collection of pieces, but a single integrated tale.

And, not to give it away, but he notes in his extensive backmatter that the story here is Loki's "heel turn" - how he went from an annoying but usually helpful (in the end, mostly, while having fun along the way) trickster god who was loosely allied with the Aesir to the guy who sparked that previously mentioned - and, in so much Norse mythology, foreshadowed repeatedly - apocalypse that will destroy most of the Nine Worlds and its peoples.

The stories here see him shifting in that direction - we start with the creation of Asgard's walls, by a mysterious stranger, and how Loki got the Aesir out of their agreement with that stranger when it looked like the stranger actually could live up to his outrageous promise and claim his even more outrageous prize. Then we see the story of Idunn's golden apples, which shows Loki's random, cruel, chaos-for-chaos's-sake style. In between, though, there are scenes of Baldr, and of his mother Frigg - who, O'Connor repeatedly notes "knows the fates of all, but makes no prophesies" - extracting promises from nearly all of the animals and plants and objects in the world not to harm him.

If we know anything of Norse mythology, we know the one item she will not get a promise from. And we know what will happen. That's the last story page of this book.

There are other Loki tales in the middle as well, particularly those about his children. We see a slimy worm, thoughtlessly thrown into a river that leads to the sea by Thor. We see a small wolf that grows very large, and how he is chained. We see a little girl, dead on one side and alive on the other side, and learn where she goes and what name she takes.

Before those, we see an eight-legged horse, and O'Connor does not tell us that horse's parentage - one of the few obvious nods in this book to its young-readers audience - but he hints as obviously and clearly as he can, so only the very most cossetted and innocent and dim young readers will fail to realize just how Loki saved Asgard from having to pay for its walls.

Most of O'Connor's mythological books stand alone; this one less so. It's partially "here's some stories about Loki, the great trickster," but also partially "here's how Loki helped to bring about The End of All Things, which we will see in the next and final book." But if you're reading a four-book retelling of Norse myth, you're expecting Ragnarok - it's not going to be a surprise.

And Ragnarok will be coming. The George O'Connor book, I mean, not the actual end of all the nine worlds. With luck, it will hit next fall. I'm looking forward to it, and wondering what myth sequence (The Kalevala? The Irish "cycles"? The Mahabharata? Something Egyptian?) he might be thinking about next.

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Time Trout by Doug Savage

First up: I know I missed one. In between the original Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy and this book, there was Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Disco Fever, which is unavailable from any library near me, digitally or physically. (In fact, none of the nearby libraries seem to have any of the Laser Moose books in dead-tree form, which shocks and annoys me.) I may have to read it in a bookstore at some point, assuming I remember.

But I'm pretty sure there weren't any shocking revelations or major change in Disco Fever: this is a middle-grade graphic novel series about a moose who shoots lasers out of his eyes and his best friend the slightly more reasonable rabbit, and that's going to be the whole point. Oh, and they fight crime. Well, maybe not crime as such, since they're out in the woods - but they help nice people and foil miscreants, so basically the same thing.

OK, so maybe Laser Moose gets a little wild with his eye-lasers, and cuts off the deer Frank's leg once in a while. These kinds of things will happen when you're defending the forest. And, anyway, Doc the raccoon can sew Frank's leg back on. Again.

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Time Trout is just what the title implies: another adventure of Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy, in which they meet and help out a time-traveling fish. A time-traveler from the polluted far future came back to their bucolic wilderness and dropped his time gizmo, which the fish immediately ate. (Because "I thought it might be a grasshopper. I tend to eat anything in the river, just in case it's a tasty grasshopper. You don't want to find out that it was a grasshopper later, when it's already gone," which makes just as much sense as anyone's motivation in this series.) 

This makes the fish travel semi-randomly in time: a big purple vortex appears repeatedly to pull him off when he thinks about past events and then again to return him to the present day. Our heroes - plus the evil Aquabear from the first book - get caught up in the shenanigans, with the usual time-travel complications, including changing the past and seeing how current-day things actually got that way. Oh, and dinosaurs. Time-travel stories are required to have dinosaurs.

In the end, Moose and Rabbit put (nearly) everyone back in their proper times, get the time gizmo back to the traveler, and watch the fish follow the traveler off to the future in search of adventure.

It is aimed at middle-graders, which may be a detriment for some readers. I love the goofy tone, and the plot's zippiness, and creator Doug Savage's clean cartoony lines, all of which make it a lot of fun and solidly land it in that genre. Graphic novels for pre-teens can often be substantially less serious than those for older readers, and I appreciate that a lot. Savage is particularly good at that kind of thing.

Elric: The Sailor on the Seas of Fate by Roy Thomas, Michael T. Gilbert & George Freeman

To those confused by the attribution in my post title - this is the 1985 comics adaptation, not the 1976 Michael Moorcock novel. (Sidebar to the sidebar - the novel is divided into three novella-length sections, which are largely separate, but, as far as I can see, they were not published first as novellas as I expected, though two of the three seem to have been published later as novellas.)

See my post on Elric of Melniboné for more details on the adaptation series; I hope to read through at least all of the Elric books in comics form, and maybe then move on to other Eternal Champions stories, since Titan seems to have collected all of them in uniform trade dress these days. (And I am a major fan of big publishing projects and uniform trade dress, so I want to encourage that.)

By 1985 Roy Thomas had settled into the long haul in adapting Elric stories - he'd keep doing it through all of the extant novels at the time - and had landed at a publisher, First, that was somewhat more stable than Pacific had been. Elric: The Sailor on the Seas of Fate was a seven-issue comics series, adapting a novel generally running about 160-190 pages into 198 pages of comics. So this, like the rest of the Roy Thomas series, is a comprehensive adaptation, aiming to capture every word of dialogue and story beat of the original in a visual form.

Sailor, the novel, was the first of many continuity inserts by Moorcock: the initial run of stories in the mid-60s (collected slightly later as Elric of Melniboné and Stormbringer) gave Elric's origin and fate, so every other story since has been filling the middle with more and more detail. This particular story starts in sturdy adventure-tale fashion: Elric has been fleeing some other adventure, and finds himself alone, tired, and hungry on the shore of a desolate sea.

A mysterious ship appears, claiming to have come to pick him up for some equally-mysterious purpose. It turns out to be one of the periodic gatherings of multiple Eternal Champion avatars - by never-defined forces that are probably related to the Lords of the Balance that Moorcock would introduce years later - to defeat a major threat to the entire multiverse. So Elric meets, for the first time for him - others are at slightly different points in their personal histories - Corum, Hawkmoon, and Erekosë - along with a dozen-plus other sword-swinging types, most of whom will die during this section to show how dangerous this threat is. The whole group of twenty is delivered, by this universe-sailing ship and its blind captain, to an island where two creatures from outside this universe are gathering power to do the usual apocalyptic thing if not stopped. The four ECs have to merge into a giant four-headed figure with a really, really big sword to kill the creatures, and they do so. Then they all seem to mostly forget about it, for vague mystical reasons.

Elric goes on to have two more adventures, with Count Smiorgan Baldhead, a new sidekick he picks up along the way. First, they land in another world where a Melnibonéan exile is chasing the reincarnation of the great love he tortured to death (Melnibonéans are horrible people, pretty consistently), while the third side of their love triangle, the guy who did not torture her to death, is chasing them. Elric helps the pursuer catch up, and justice is done and love reunited, more or less, though the reincarnated girl doesn't seem to have much of a choice in any of this and is handed off to the guy who is, I suppose, at least less horrible. 

Elric and Smiorgan try to head back to their own world, and end up rescued by a ship searching for the ancient original home of the Melnibonéans, deep in the usual fantasy jungle somewhere. They come along for the ride, where Stormbringer kills more allies than those allies would have liked, a giant statue of Elric's patron god Arioch comes to life, and Elric kicks off the Law/Chaos fight on his world that will eventually kill him. But he and Smiorgan do manage to find a ship, with which they can get back to civilized lands and be available for another continuity-insert novel.

Moorcock never claimed his heroic-adventure stories were great literature - he did write other books with more nuance and depth; he knew the difference - but they are flashy and exciting and full of portentous dialogue and Big Fantasy Ideas that seem to be more profound than they really are. They can be electric when you're young and tormented, and can still be fun and zippy even once you're not. As long as a reader is clear on the tone and style of the stories - High Weltschmertz and Deeply Meaningful - it's all good.

Michael T. Gilbert uses an ornate, detailed style here, ably supported by George Freeman's inks and colors - this book looks detailed and full of depth, as it should. It's a tale over-full of self-conscious woe, but that's the deal with Elric: if you're not in the mood for woe, you should stay away from him to begin with.

Something More Than Night by Kim Newman

There's more than a little discussion of the differences between mystery and horror in Kim Newman's 2021 novel Something More Than Night. Which is appropriate, because the book itself somewhat tries to split the difference - though, in the end, it falls solidly into horror, with the actions of the protagonists not being dispositive, with big set-piece scenes that run on for shock and effect, with pure monsters and their makers, with mad science and shocking transformations and deep lore and unpleasant truths about the way the world really is.

It also may be part of a longer sequence of Newman's works - there's a secondary antagonist, or maybe I mean a higher-level antagonist, named Ariadne, who appears on stage briefly only once but who is said to be something like the source of all evil in the world and who was part of a (mentioned but not narrated) major transformative event for our two main characters in their youth.

Frankly, for quite a while, Something More Than Night reads like maybe the fourth or fifth book in a series, with references to previous adventures and that origin story involving Ariadne. It's not, as far as I can tell - it seems to stand alone - but if Ariadne turns up in other Newman works, that could explain some of the odd aspects of the book.

This is a high-concept secret-history book, somewhat in the Tim Powers mode: famous people battling supernatural dangers in ways that illuminate their work in the real world. The famous people this time are author Raymond Chandler and actor Boris Karloff, who were English schoolboys at the same time in the same town, though they went to different schools. (Karloff was Billy Pratt in those days - Hollywood changes so many names along the way.) The third main character is their friend and mentor Joh Devlin, a DA investigator-turned-PI.

The three, in Newman's fictional world, spent much of the Thirties investigating creepy cases, in between their better-known work, and stopping at least a few fiends in human form. There's no specifics of supernatural elements mentioned about those previous cases, but there's no reason to believe they weren't supernatural, either. The mysterious, ages-old femme fatale Ariadne - who was invoked at some kind of ritual when Ray and Billy were schoolboys, at which they were among, and possibly the only, survivors - is behind some or most or all of these events, though we don't learn who she is or what she does or even what kind of a creature (vampire? goddess? human with mesmeric powers? something different or older?) she is.

We hope, in the early pages of this novel, that Something will be the story of their final confrontation with Ariadne, and to end with revelations to explain all of that. It is not, and does not. Hence my thinking that Ariadne is something like Brust's Devera: a motif or linking element more than an element of this novel.

Something also has an odd structure: it flashes back and forth multiple times, with a lot of sections of wildly different lengths, and jumps from mostly following Chandler's first-person narration to a couple of long chapters in third-person from Devlin's point of view. It's set in the late Thirties, it says, but the two main time periods seem to both be after The Big Sleep was published, and that was February of 1939.

Anyway, after the novel itself does some obfuscation with the timeline and sets up things that it doesn't entirely plan to explain, we settle into the main plot: Devlin pulls in Chandler and "Karloff" to investigate Ward Home Junior, a movie mogul and scion of a oil family - Newman is loading both barrels to show this guy is stereotypically California rich - who was just in some kind of a bizarre accident at his palatial home in the sprawling Home compound.

It turns out that Home's pet doctor Vaudois and the doctor's oversized, creepy assistant Norman Quin have developed a mad-science device for transferring "special abilities" - in this case, mostly side-show-freak things like quick healing or super flexibility - from one person to another. And the major test of that device left Home on fire, so that he's now recuperating at the Lamia Munro Clinic, also part of the Home compound.

First Devlin investigates the basement laboratory of Home's house - which is as full of horrors as might be expected, and where he learns that only one other subject survived the experiment, a woman now calling herself Laurel Ives, whose "special abilities" aren't exactly detailed but seem to include some manner of extended life or limited vulnerability.

(She also does not seem to have lost this ability from the experiment, though we see later in the book that abilities are taken away during the transference procedure with another character. I'm not sure if that's a plot hole, meant to be a clue as to "Ives's" true nature, or something else.)

Soon afterward, Chandler and Karloff go to the Munro Clinic, where they rapidly get in over their heads: Home is not only not in a coma, he's healthier than ever before, close to a foot taller, and possessed of near-superpowers. It all leads up to a big scene in a courtyard in the rain, where Karloff gets some special abilities himself, but our heroes do, eventually, get away, after yet more horror-movie scenes.

As I said, this is a horror story, so our main characters don't gather their forces and battle the monsters to save the world - that would be fantasy. They also don't find out exactly how it works, figure out how to counter it, and do so - that would be a thriller. And they don't gather evidence and present it to some authority who can shut down Home - that would be a mystery.

What they do is lie low and hope not to get killed, with a few more sections with varying timeframes finally coming back to the cliffhanger established way back at the beginning of the book. There is a more-or-less happy ending, but in the dying-fall mode: the characters don't initiate it, or have much to do with it, but they do realize that things have worked out in their favor, and are able to brush their hands together, say "well, that's that, then" and end the novel cleanly.

It's not the most satisfying ending one could have hoped for. Ariadne is resolutely not explained, let alone defeated. Home won't be a problem going forward, we think, but there's no reason the process his minions developed can't be used again, by just about anyone. Think of it as a sequel hook, if that makes it better, I suppose.

On the positive side, Newman does a good mock-Chandler throughout - it's not the same voice Chandler used to write his novels, but it feels authentic and has quite a bit of fine writing of its own. Newman's characters, though sometimes types - especially his villains - are interesting and well-drawn, and the central relationship between Chandler and Karloff is well-depicted and plausible. Something More Than Night, I found, is over-complicated in the telling and full of things that don't seem to begin or end in this book, but, all in all, it's a pleasant historical horror novel that does what it sets out to do: tell an untold, unexpected story of the friendship of Raymond Chandler and Boris Karloff.

Bang! by Matt Kindt and Wilfredo Torres

Stop me if you've heard this one before: James Bond, John McClane, Modesty Blaise-as-Miss Marple, and a gender-swapped Michael Knight are recruited by Philip K. Dick to save the world from a secretive nihilistic terrorist organization...and learn a shocking secret!

OK, it's not literally those characters, for what I have to assume are largely not-getting-sued reasons. But we start off, in the first issue of five collected here, with suave British superspy Thomas Cord of MI-X, who has been many different men over the past seven decades or so as he battles the evil global organization Goldmaze, and is currently a stylish Black man who doesn't look unlike a young Idris Elba. He's sent to investigate mysterious writer Philip Verge, who has written a long series of books - it's not clear if these were actually published in ways most people noticed; that detail seems to waffle back and forth - about Cord, which predicted in minute detail everything about his missions, including his death.

(Don't worry, the death already happened - that was a previous Thomas Cord. We see it happen on the page.)

This is Bang!, a stylish mildly reality-bending action thriller by writer Matt Kindt and artist Wilfredo Torres. It was a five-issue series in 2020, and collected in a single volume the same year. There's material in the book that teases additional stories to come, but, as far as I can tell, they didn't come.

But anyway, issue two follows John Shaw, who keeps getting caught up in Goldmaze terrorist incidents in his bare feet (and, to be skiffier, has a continuing supply of a mysterious set of "inhalers" with designer drugs keyed to his DNA that give him specific superhuman abilities - superhuman in the Captain America sense rather than the Superman sense). At the end of his adventure, he's recruited...by Thomas Cord, who hands him the novel telling the story he just lived through.

Next up is Dr. Michele Queen, a brilliant paraplegic cyberneticist with a skintight exosuit that allows her to not just walk but do the usual spy-style karate fighting, and is mentally linked with the intelligent car BOI. She also fights Goldmaze.

Last is Page Turnier, who was a hot-cha spy babe in the '60s - and teamed up with Thomas Cord then - but is now an old Vietnamese lady who is the smartest person in the world and solves drawing-room mysteries. It doesn't seem that Goldmaze would be doing a lot of murders in drawing rooms, but she's recruited, too.

Once they're all brought together, in the last issue, Verge gives them their orders and sends them out: to save the world! (Or is he secretly behind Goldmaze the whole, time, and this is all a trap for the only people who could stop him?)

Verge is Phildickianly-coded, and had a similar Exegesis-like experience that showed him what the world really was, but he's not quite as wild-hair and particular as the real-world Dick - he's here to be mysterious, to be a writer, and to be ambiguously tied to both the good and bad guys for maximum shocks and thrills.

And there are a lot of shocks and thrills. Torres has a fine action-storytelling style for this story, slick and modern, with inventive page layouts, excellent faces, and well-choreographed action. Kindt keeps it all moving swiftly and keeps it basically plausible, for all that I might seem dismissive above. Again, I think the plan was to have a second Bang! series - maybe more than that; the concept is based on reversals so I don't expect it would ever be an ongoing but it could run through three or four iterations before exhausting the idea - but that hasn't happened and, after five years, is getting less likely by the day. But this is a complete story, for all that it ends on a hook for a sequel - you can absolutely read it as a completed thing, and be happy with that.

Quit Your Job and Other Stories by James Kochalka

I haven't read much of James Kochalka's work recently, but that's OK: this book is from before most of the books of his I read anyway!

(Does that make sense? I'm not sure it even makes sense as a sentence, let alone as an argument.)

Quit Your Job and Other Stories collects four Kochalka comics stories that I think are nearly thirty years old now: the copyright page lists 1997, 1998, and 2002 dates. This book is from 2015, which is still longer-ago than it seems.

There are four stories, alternating long and short, and they're all linked, somewhat, sort of. The first, title story is the most separate - the Kochalka-insert character (apparently called Magic Boy, but never named that in the book) is seen as a young man, living a normal life one day in a snowy town, talking to his talking cat and skipping work when he misses the bus. He also finds a magic ring in the snow along the way, though all it seems to be able to do is blow things up when he gestures at them - not one of your traditional "magic ring" properties, and less useful than wishes or invisibility or being able to rule the world if you renounce love. The title, in context, is descriptive rather than imperative - I'd always taken it the other way.

"Primal Brown" is the shortest story, and a connector - Magic Boy, or maybe Kochalka-the-cartoonist, is at his drawing board, and draws or dreams this story, which I suspect is a Peanuts reference. A round-headed naked kid with a single curlicue hair comes out of the water in a jungle, somewhere, and then the cartoonist wakes up.

The last two stories have the Primal Brown character in them, as well as the old-man version of Kochalka's Magic Boy character - again, not called that, but drawn like Magic Boy in other stories so let's assume it's him. The other long story is "Paradise Sucks," which has multiple threads that mostly come together: Brown and some similar people in a jungle, the wizard-looking God who made them (and his insect buddies/helpers) pretending to be nice to the jungle people but mostly teasing them, and old Magic Boy living on dumpster roasted nuts and making abstract expressionist art that urbanized round-headed guys love before suddenly finding himself in the same jungle as God and the primal people.

Last is "The Devil Makes a Man," in which one of the insects - explicitly the devil here, I suppose - makes a robot friend from Brown's rib, but Brown kills it because it's against God's will. (Which...I dunno, I didn't see anything in this story or earlier that explicitly says that, but maybe....?)

The title story is the most straightforward; the others function more on dream or imagistic logic, with scenes that flow into each other and go odd places along the way - they imply or sketch their meanings and purposes more than say anything outright.

This is quirkier, earlier, rawer Kochalka than most of what I've seen - a creator still making comics pages from the thrill of it, and seeing where each ink line takes him rather than planning out a careful journey up front.

Who Killed Nessie? by Paul Cornell & Rachael Smith

Lyndsay Grockle works at a small boutique hotel, the Lakeside, in northern Wisconsin [1]. She's the newest member of staff, described as an intern - I don't think hotels usually work like that, but OK. There's an odd convention that shows up every year, and, this time, she's going to run the whole hotel solo for the weekend while that happens. (Again: even a five-room B&B will have three or four people working over a weekend, and this hotel seems to be big enough to hold about a hundred guests. But that's the story, and it's set up immediately: in fiction, you take the premise as given, though it may sometimes be a lot to swallow.)

As Lyndsay quickly learns when the guests start to check in on Friday, this is the annual convention of the mysterious creatures of the world: mythologicals, cryptids, lake monsters, and so on. Mummies, selkies, fairies, bigfeet, stink apes, Jersey devils, firebirds, Baba Yaga - only one of each (except the fairies, who are more-or-less the hosts and may have an extensive larger society we don't see), because each of them is a singular thing. Notably missing is the Hodag, who probably could have walked to the event, but it doesn't seem like this is supposed to be everyone: just the ones who are more clubby and decided to come this year.

OK, so that's weird. And they seem to just want her to be quiet and stay away from their function spaces: they don't need food from the hotel, or anything else. (No one preps these rooms for the panels? Or cleans up afterwards? The hotel staff doesn't turn on lights and check the grounds and all of those other things? I suppose I'm still having trouble buying the "only one person" part of the premise.)

So Lyndsay is a little grumpy and out-of-sorts, particularly since this makes her remember her ex-boyfriend, a  massive conspiracy theorist who does not come across well in a few flashback pages, and wonder if he was right. (I don't think so: he's a flat-earther, among other stupid ideas. He could have been more nuanced, but that's not the way he's presented.) But then one of the attendees wakes her up in the middle of the night with the news that the title has already spoiled: the Loch Ness Monster is dead.

Murdered.

And only Lyndsay, the outsider, can investigate and find out Who Killed Nessie?

She's pulled into this investigation by the Beast of Bodmin Moor - Bob for short - who woke her up, gave her the scoop, explained how this group works, and started introducing her to the rest. Bob - like many of these creatures, Bob's appearance is variable, partially because of personal choice and partially because of human expectations, which means Bob uses pronouns at what seems to be random whim - also speaks in a somewhat old-fashioned Cornish dialect that comes across to Lyndsay (and the reader) as if he's trying to talk like a pirate.

Lyndsay talks to a whole lot of the attendees, learning about their disputes and personal clashes and polymorphous perversity: they're all shape-changers, and see above about variable appearance and pronouns. She gets a few solid suspects, travels to the underworld with the aid of a very puppyish Cerberus, and, eventually, declares that she knows who the killer is and will reveal that in the traditional "I suppose you're wondering why I called you all here" speech.

I'm not quite sure if Nessie is meant for young readers or not - some aspects seem to aim that way, but the whole polymorphous perversity thing - even if it's kept vague and off-page, creators Paul Cornell and Rachael Smith make it very clear one major reason for this convention is for various creatures to get freaky with each other in ways a lot of school systems and library boards would be deeply uncomfortable with if they learned about it.

Well, that's for librarians and teachers to worry about. For the rest of us readers, it's an amusing story with a lot of colorful, quirky characters, and only a few hiccups in the worldbuilding (that I've already wasted enough time on). Cornell has written a lot of comics and TV; he shows an ease at maneuvering what could have been a large, unwieldy cast so that it's clearly a big group but the narrative focuses on just a few important people. And Smith's line is light and flowing, with a lot of energy and life to it. keeping the whole story towards the cozy side of murder.

Who Killed Nessie? is a solid play-fair fantasy mystery in comics form: it aims to do several complicated things simultaneously and does them all pretty well.

[1] The first page says the Lakeside is fifty miles north of Turoga, which doesn't seem to exist. That hotel also seems to be on Lake Champlain, which is not particularly close to Wisconsin. I suspect this book's British creators have as detailed a knowledge of American geography as I do of that of the Midlands.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 8: Shades of Death by Stan Sakai

This one was a professional transition - it collects the first six issues (plus stories from issues seven and eight) of the second series of Usagi Yojimbo, from Mirage - but, within the story, there's no indication of that. Creator Stan Sakai didn't reboot the series, drop into long explanatory flashback stories for the relaunch, or even make much of an apparent effort to attract any new readers. Well, it was 1993, when "long-running" was a selling point for a comic, unlike today.

As it was, the Mirage series only lasted sixteen issues, and they didn't manage to publish any collections - this eighth book, and all of the subsequent book-format Usagi materials (I think; there's been a lot of them and I might be missing some odd item) came out from Dark Horse, which started the third Usagi series in 1996 and published 165 issues over the next twenty years.

That's the background of Usagi Yojimbo Book 8: Shades of Death, which was originally published in 1997. The current edition, which I read digitally, is from 2010; it doesn't say what was different but my guess is that it was mostly trade dress - there's no sign that Sakai changed any of the stories fifteen years later.

Shades includes seven stories, all of which stand alone and don't directly connect to each other. (When your main character is a wandering adventurer who's solo most of the time, you can just make stories as you feel like it, and they line up just fine.) Two of them, "Shades of Green" and "Shi," are long three-parters, sixty-some pages each. Two more - the wordless "The Lizards' Tale" and the flashback "Battlefield" - are about the length of a single issue, in the low twenty-page range. The last three, "Jizo," "Usagi's Garden," and "Autumn," are eight-pagers that presumably were backup stories.

Three of those stories feature Usagi as a young rabbit - a kit, I suppose - learning Important Life Lessons from his sensei, Katsuichi. Usagi has never been officially a book for young readers, but it's always been young-reader-adjacent, with any sex kept implied and the violence stylized enough to pass, and these three pieces show that side of the series strongly: as always, Usagi Yojimbo was a comic told in a register suitable for tweens.

The jump to Mirage also meant another crossover with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; Usagi had met one of them (Leo, maybe?) a few times before, but now all four of the TMNT are summoned to this cod-Edo-Japan world by the traditional old guy (who, unsubtly, Sakai draws to look just like their leader, Splinter) to battle side-by-side with Usagi and defeat the evil ninja, in the first story of the book, "Shades of Green."

There are other evil ninja in other stories, too: that's how cod-Edo-Japan stories work: noble samurai battle fiendish ninja, and of course prevail in the end. This isn't "the end" - Sakai had another four thousand-plus story pages still to come (and I'm not sure that he isn't still adding more on, even now) - but you know what I mean.

Usagi stories are dependable and fairly predictable, but, luckily, the American comics audience for the past eighty years has craved monthly doses of exactly the same thing, only with slightly different covers so they know to buy it again. So Usagi has been successful commercially, and it's pretty successful artistically - as long as you like this sort of thing and are comfortable with the moral lessons inherent in any stories about violence experts.

In the Midst of Life by Ambrose Bierce

I'm not the only one to remark that Ambrose Bierce really was the writer some people think Mark Twain was: a San Francisco resident, a cynic, a misanthrope, beset by family tragedy, mostly a journalist, uncompromising to the end. He spent most of his career as a critic - of literature but even more often of the world at large - and columnist, for Hearst newspapers during most of his career and at the time when working for Hearst meant working for Mr. Hearst.

In the Midst of Life, initially published as Tales of Soldiers and Civilians in 1891, was his first book under his own name - in the 19th century fashion, he'd had a few books of his criticism and satire come out in London in the 1870s, while living there, under the name "Dod Grile." I read it in the Library of America Bierce omnibus The Devil's Dictionary, Tales & Memoirs, which uses texts from the 1909 Collected Works. (Bierce selected, edited, and corrected all the texts for that twelve-volume set, so that's a good choice.) This version of Midst has twenty-six stories; a few that had been in the 1891 edition, or added in subsequent editions, were moved to the Can Such Things Be? collection for the 1909 text.

There used to be a good Doubleday edition, edited by Ernest Jerome Hopkins, that collected all of Bierce's stories - I used it when I wrote my thesis on Bierce back in my college days - but I can't find that, or any similar thing now. There's a lot of shovelware editions of his writing, mostly digital, since Bierce is solidly out of copyright. At this point, I recommend the LoA edition for Bierce, unless you have access to a library with the 1909 Collected Works. Though I also recall those books being a fussy size and format; not terribly pleasant to read decades later.

As the initial title hints, Midst is made up of two sections: first fifteen stories of the Civil War, and then eleven more various stories set in civilian life at various points in the previous forty or fifty years. But, more fundamentally, the stories are all about death. The war stories obviously so: war is always largely about death, and the US Civil War was one of the first mechanized, industrial-scale "modern" wars. The civilian stories tend to be psychological, about people in unusual situations, from which they do not necessarily emerge.

Bierce was both a decorated veteran of the Civil War - he worked as a topographical engineer, sketching and detailing landscapes that would very soon be the locations for battles, racing just ahead of or in between armies on the move - and a dark, cynical writer with a mania for concision and precise language. The war stories are generally stronger here; I found the civilian stories often rely on specific superstitions that are no longer current, making more of an effort for the reader to get into the right frame of mind, while the war stories are about their time and place in ways that make them universal.

The stories are all dark - Bierce's most famous story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," is second here, and many readers may know that one. The war stories have a similar tone and style: precise, unadorned, factual, like a dispatch from the actual war, in which horrible things happen inevitably because huge groups of trained and well-equipped men are working very diligently to kill large numbers of each other. Or, more accurately, because men, as Bierce saw them, are stubborn things animated by counterproductive ideals that drive them to do horrible actions against their own best interests.

I won't talk about details: the endings of these stories are not exactly surprises, especially after the first one or two, but they're generally snappy, tight summations or reversals, and listing them would be dull and mostly pointless. 

Bierce was one of the great short-story writers of the late 19th century, and the first person to both fight seriously in a modern war and write well about it afterward; his stories, especially his war tales, are very much still worth reading now. But you might need to be in the right mood for them; they are dark and uncompromising.

Sergio Aragones' Groo: The Hogs of Horder

I sometimes look at a Groo book and think "that will be a quick read, and an easy one to write about." And then I'm wrong on both counts. It happened with the three-book Friends and Foes series in 22-23, and it just happened again now.

Groo looks quick and breezy, but it's a wordy comic, and creator Sergio Aragones, for all his speed and facility, draws a lot of detail. So the pages are engaging and light and fun, but they demand more attention than you expect. And then I remember, after finishing reading, that Groo (the character) is aggressively stupid, but Groo (the comic) nearly always has a point of view or moral or life lesson it's trying to impart, and untangling that takes effort.

The Hogs of Horder was the new Groo series in 2009-2010; its four issues started in October of '09 and the book came out in August of '10. So it is absolutely the "the Groo take on the Global Financial Crisis" book, just to warn you.

Aragones (here, as usual, assisted by Mark Evanier on something vague related to scripting, Stan Sakai on letters, and Tom Luth with Michelle Madsen on colors) is not a subtle or nuanced creator. And, in Groo stories, there can be villains, but most of the problems in the world will be caused by Groo himself. So Hogs of Horder both wants to blame some general long-term economic shifts (moving production overseas to a lower-cost country, for one main example) for the woe in this world and also wants to make Groo personally responsible for the shift, because he's an idiot who sinks ships and destroys stuff.

This means that we have a lot of panels with lots of mercantile folks - in Groo's medieval-ish world, carriage-makers and home-builders and flask-makers and so on - gloating about getting loans from bankers to spend on making their stuff, but more importantly "high salaries for ourselves" (even though, if they are the owners, what they actually get is a return on their invested capital, and if they are not the owners, how come we never see the owners?) after Groo breaks things.

This runs round and round for a while, as Groo goes from the cheap foreign country to the US-analogue, breaking things and causing all of the business owners/leaders to go to the banks for loans to rebuild everything they're doing and/or to set up new operations in that cheaper nation. It is all pitched in that speaking-to-children tone Groo often uses, and is about that level of sophistication; even readers who think capitalists are typically rapacious and destructive will find this version really overly simplified and silly.

But "silly" is the point of Groo. He breaks everything, and it is funny, and then he walks away to break something else somewhere else. Oh, and there are jokes about mendicants and cheese dip along the way. If you want a Groo story, this is one. I haven't yet figured out a good reason to recommend any one Groo story above any other one, so just pick the Groo thing closest to your hand at the time, if you want to read one. That's basically what I did. Maybe I'll take a longer break before doing so again, this time.