Much Obliged, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

This is the fourteenth of the fifteen books primarily about Bertie Wooster and his man Jeeves. Others may argue with that number, since it includes several short-story collections that are mostly Jeeves but include other stories, and also includes the novel Ring for Jeeves, which does not feature Bertie. But it's about that many, and this is near the end but not the actual end. It was originally published in 1971, near the end of author P.G. Wodehouse's long life and career, and was known as Jeeves and the Tie That Binds Us in the US for its initial life.

The UK title was Much Obliged, Jeeves, under which title I first read it in the early '90s and under which title it appears these days.

It's shorter and slighter than the best of Wodehouse's work - he was ninety the year it was published, and so possibly slowing down just a bit - but just as funny and sprightly as he ever was, with a fine example of Bertie Wooster narration. (Though Bertie is possibly overusing the narrative tic of using a letter to stand in for a word here - a little of that can go a long way.)

Like all of the Bertie-and-Jeeves books, it's explicitly set in sequence, and starts off with references to the plot of 1963's Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, the prior book in the series. None of the plots are terribly dense or difficult to understand, but the recurring motifs and plot devices can be slightly confusing, I suppose. (Not many impostors in the Bertie stories - those are mostly at Blandings Castle. Bertie's troubles often start with aunts, though. He also ends up stealing, or being accused of stealing, various expensive objects a lot, and of course has a whole herd of young women who think he wants to marry them and will "allow" him to do so if not stopped. Also, everyone else in the book thinks Bertie is mentally feeble, which is not exactly correct but also not entirely untrue.)

This time out, the Aunt is Dahlia, the nice if loud one, who drags Bertie down to her historic pile outside Market Snodsbury to help out Bertie's old university chum Ginger Winship, who is standing for Parliament there. Ginger is affianced to the formidable Florence Craye, and is being supported in his political battle by the odious Roderick Spode (now Lord Sidcup), who is also joined by his fiancée, Madeleine Basset, who famously believes the stars are God's daisy-chain.

Both Florence and Madeleine are former fiancées of Bertie's, and both could potentially re-establish that connection if their current beaus disappoint.

Meanwhile, the club for butlers and gentlemen's personal gentlemen, the Junior Ganymede, has a book in which members are required to write down everything "interesting" or relevant about their current employers, which means there's a very long section about Bertie's various escapades. Even worse, there's a section about Ginger, and his former man, Bingley, has absconded with that book and is offering it for sale to various persons around Market Snodsbury.

There's also an unpleasant American businessman in a Panama hat, who wants to sell a valuable silver thingy to Aunt Dahlia's husband. Dahlia also wants him to bestow a large quantity of money on Tuppy Glossop, another chum of Bertie's, whose father developed a fabulously successful product for the American and who is looking to marry Dahlia's daughter Angela. (Angela and Tuppy do not appear on-page at all in this novel; there are complications here that are mostly formal.)

Wodehouse runs through his usual type of scenes to get to the requisite happy ending - as I said up top, a bit quicker and less impressively than some earlier novels, but still breezily and deeply amusingly.

Don't start reading Bertie-and-Jeeves with this book. You don't actually need to read them through in order - the details rhyme more than they build - but start with Joy in the Morning or The Code of the Woosters or The Mating Season or one of the short-story collections, and then move on as you feel inclined. Wodehouse is one of the greatest comic writers of the 20th century, if not all time, and his worlds are sunny and enticing, particularly when the real one is neither of those things.

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 10: Hostage Child by Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima

Lone Wolf and Cub is a twenty-eight volume series, collecting a serialized story that originally appeared in installments in the early '70s in the aptly titled Weekly Manga Action. Now, each installment is long: fifty pages, sometimes longer. But they often tend to be separate, each one an adventure or encounter of the main character, former imperial executioner Ogami Ittō.

But, sometimes, the stories in a particular collection - I think the English-language editions of this series actually are in tankōbon format, unlike most manga, which is closer to bunkoban or the US-specific "Tokyopop trim" - are more closely related, and form something like a story arc.

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 10: Hostage Child is one of those. It starts with a massive battle, in "The Yagyū Letter," which is, if I recall correctly, the first big battle between Ittō and the forces of the evil ninja Yagyū clan. Since there's still several thousand pages of story to go, neither Ittō nor Yagyū Retsudō, his nemesis, are completely victorious, though they do get to cross swords in between Ittō killing just about everyone else in the scene. (Samurai stories, like cowboy stories, usually have a character who is vastly better at dealing out death than is plausible - it's just a trope of the genre, and we have to accept it.)

In the aftermath of "The Yagyū Letter," Ittō is separated from his son Daigorō, and the narrative hints that he might be dead. (Of course he isn't; that's the whole point of this series.) But we get two stories of Daigorō's adventures without his father, and then two more showing what they do separately as Ittō  follows the tracks of his son's path. Daigorō is saved by a former samurai, whose death - and that of his mentally disabled son - allows Daigorō to flee. In the second all-Daigorō story, various peasants are amazed and astonished at his shishōgan eyes and calm demeanor, while a temple priestess (I think) loudly insists they should send the kid away because he's bad luck.

She is correct, but that's kind of the point of every Lone Wolf and Cub story: crossing the paths of either Ogami is likely to shorten your life, often down to the next few minutes. 

The last story here sees a starving and nearly-dead Daigorō picked up and nursed back to health by a bandit as a "straw boy" - he and his two henchmen can travel more easily if they're not obviously a band of thugs, and a little boy helps sell that story. Since this means Daigorō is "working" - he's a look-out for the gang, among other things - the kid then allows himself to be fed and regains his strength. The authorities are close on the bandit's tail, though, and everyone but Daigorō dies in the end.

Daigorō has not reunited with his father Ittō yet; I assume that will happen in the next volume. And Yagyū Retsudō and his remaining forces are still nearby - I think; it can be difficult to follow the geography in this series - ready to attack once again. So danger still lurks, as always, but Ittō and his fancy sword will be slicing torsos for another eighteen volumes to come.

Planeta by Ana Oncina

I'll admit I don't always understand what makes a book "manga" in the American market. Translated from Japanese - sure, that's obvious. Korean and Chinese comics get more complicated, since those generally read left to right, but getting fussy about "manhwa" or "manhua" smells a bit too much of the lamp.

But if a book is by a Spanish creator, why are the pages organized in an English-language edition to flow right-to-left when each page reads left-to-right (like the Spanish read, like English-language also reads, like most European languages), and why is it called a manga?

At that point, I start to think it's purely a marketing slogan, detached from the actual content of the book. Doesn't mean anything negative, but it has stopped imparting any useful information to the reader other than "the publisher thinks you will like this if you've liked other stuff they did." 

That brings me to Ana Oncina's [1] 2025 "manga" Planeta, a science-fiction story by the creator behind the cozy Empanada & Croquette series and the 2023 teen-lesbian romance Just Friends. It was published in a romance line, Love Love, though I would not characterize it as a romance. On the other hand, it is largely about the relationship between the two main characters, and they do meet and form a relationship over the course of the book.

Well, in one reality, they do...

Planeta takes place in two realities. Valentina is a young woman living in a small cabin in the woods with her dog Soup, near a small town she visits regularly for supplies and human contact. She makes pottery, and sells it both online and at local craft fairs. It's heading into winter. The time is "now," as far as we can tell.

VAL3 is a young woman in a medium-future universe where humans have fled a devastated earth. Everyone lives in couples, each with a small module inside a transparent bubble, on the inhospitable planet Nebulon, or "Planeta." The couples are matched to each other from birth, and grow up together under the care of robots. Their society is like Asimov's Spacers, but even more so: they never meet anyone else outside of VR. VR is their main way of experiencing everything; Oncina doesn't show any of them working but does imply money still exists.

VAL3 is matched with AN3. The two are in love, as they must be. They have been very happy together. We don't know how aging works in this world, or how old they really are, but let's assume they are fairly young, as they look to be.

Valentina is dreaming of being VAL3, and vice versa - or the same mind is switching between the two realities every time she goes to sleep.

And then Valentina sees another young woman in that small town, who looks exactly like AN3. Her name is Anna; she's staying at a B&B in town for an extended time. The two fall in love - as we see in the other reality, they're perfectly matched for each other, right?

VAL3 isn't happy anymore. The life as Valentina, in a living world, is more compelling than her entirely-VR life in the sterile module. Oncina doesn't directly compare the relationships in the two worlds, but I had to wonder if the newness and surprise of Valentina's new relationship with Anna was also a factor, compared to the inevitability and day-to-day-ness of VAL3 and AN3.

VAL3 withdraws, spends all of her time in bed, trying to get back to the other world. She neglects her partner AN3, her friends, everything about her life. She consults with an AI therapist, which doesn't help. She just keeps being told this is her life; it's wonderful and as good as human could ever wish for; she must be grateful and live this life or else.

That escalates; the implied "or else" is the way the book ends.

There's a version of this story where Valentina/VAL3 is inspired by her double life; where she takes ideas from one back to the other; where being with the same woman in two worlds means they're meant for each other and that brings them closer together. This is not that story. This is the story where a cold SF world is inherently off-putting, wrong, inorganic, sterile, stifling - and the reader is supposed to see and sympathize with that, and not with poor neglected AN3.

I found the ending of Planeta strong but a bit unearned, and quite a puzzler for a book published as a romance. It also collapses the essential question of which world is real, when an ending that kept that ambiguous could be more interesting.

But Oncina tells the story she meant to tell well, with crisp art, cleanly differentiating the two worlds through color - but still making them parallel as well. (The book ends with schematics of the cabin and the module - our heroine's homes in both worlds - which emphasizes how similar they are.) I might wish she had made different choices, but it was never my choice.

[1] Translated by Diego Jourdan Pereira, which I didn't find room to fit in anywhere else.

Quite Ugly One Morning by Christopher Brookmyre

Christopher Brookmyre was the Next Big Thing in thrillers for a while during my career in publishing, so I kept seeing his books, thinking they looked like fun, and having to go back to reading things for my program instead. I think, over the last few decades, he became just a standard Big Thing in much of the English-speaking world, though sadly not a Thing at all in the USA.

Looking him up now, I'm seeing his major series - which started with this book, his first novel - with radically different cover treatments on current editions, and many of them showing up for sale in their UK editions here. That's a sign the US market has not been kind to Brookmyre, for whatever reasons.

And that's disappointing, because on the evidence of Quite Ugly One Morning, his 1996 debut, Brookmyre is something like a Scottish version of Carl Hiaasen, with funny, fast-plotted thriller novels with a political undertone, smart-ass characters who get themselves into more trouble than they expect, and amusingly baroque levels of violence.

It might be the "Scottish" bit that caused the trouble - parts of Quite Ugly get into nearly Trainspotting-levels of Scots dialect and spelling. I found nearly everything clear from context, but a few random words were puzzlers - and there's a Black LA police detective, in one flashback scene, who does not talk like an American at all. It's the kind of thing that can bounce American readers out of a book, I suppose.

The series hero here is Jack Parlabane, an investigative journalist with a talent for getting himself into trouble, not least because he's good at burglary, which we are told he only uses (these days) in the line of duty. He got into hot water in London for exposing the wrong people and fled to LA, where the same things happened - and more seriously, since the wrong people in LA hire killers, and one tried to murder Parlabane.

So now he's newly in Edinburgh, having just landed a day or two before and about to look for newspaper work there. (This is 1996; newspapers were still booming.) But there was a horrific murder in the flat one floor below his last night, which he did not hear because of the usual all-too-Scottish over-indulgence in alcohol. So he wanders into the crime scene, in his underwear, hungover but endlessly inquisitive.

He's briefly a suspect, but, more importantly, it triggers Parlabane's need to get to the bottom of things. So he starts investigating on his own.

At the same time - this is a thriller, not a mystery - we get scenes from the POV of both the murderer (mostly a Standard Thriller Thug with Scottish Characteristics) and his boss, a deeply Tory and horribly self-satisfied wanker who is head of a NHS Trust and looking to use that to personally enrich himself. There is, of course, a nasty scheme behind the murder of Dr. Jeremy Ponsonby, and Parlabane connects with Ponsonby's ex-wife, the anesthetist Dr. Sarah Slaughter, as they both have separate clues that can join up to help solve the crime.

Among other major characters, there's a few cops, including a youngish lesbian woman who is willing to listen to Parlabane's theories and is not immediately dismissive of them. And this is a short novel, so it rattles very quickly through a lot of scenes - often very colorful, in language or violence or setting or all three - on the way to a big ending with Slaughter, Parlabane, the murderer, and the wanker.

It is a fun romp, the more so if you are inclined to align with Brookmyre's regular, quite pointed, but often sidebar attacks on Toryism - our villain is very much like the guy in this meme:

I'm going to be looking for more Brookmyre books myself - I've got thirty years to catch up on - so take that as a recommendation if you like.

Mickey Mouse Versus the Mouseton Society of Evil by Nicolas Pothier & Johan Pilet

I am no expert on Euro Disney comics. Fantagraphics has been reprinting what they say are the best of that large universe - and I have no reason to doubt them; publishing programs always try to get the best of whatever - for a decade or more, and I've dipped into that sequence here and there.

So I know enough to say that the Disney Euro universe is not unlike a kid-friendly version of a Big Two superhero universe, especially if you keep the dream/hoax/imaginary story stream in mind as well. They're generally about some permutation of the characters Disney fans call The Fab Five: Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy, Pluto. (Poor Daisy! Only room for one girl in that sausage-fest.) The villains are also always the same, just as you can be sure a year of Batman comics will have the Joker turning up at least once.

But they can be set "now" - in Duckburg (like Donald's Happiest Adventures) or Mouseton (like Trapped in the Shadow Dimension), or trotting the globe - or in some strange world (like Mickey Mouse and the Amazing Lost Ocean). Or in what seems to be the Marvel 2099 equivalent - a future world of 2128 and the fabulous city of New Mouseton!

That's the setting for Mickey Mouse Versus the Mouseton Society of Evil - the SoE doesn't have "New" in their name to modify Mouseton, possibly because they are the first SoE formed in any Mouseton, possibly due to translation glitches, possibly because no one thought it was important. (The original French name of the fiendish team seems to be "L'Alliance Malefique," which I like much better, but I'm just the kind of person who would.)

Anyway, this book is by Belgian creators Nicolas Pothier (writing) and Johan Pilet (art), and it features The Revenant Blot (future version of The Phantom Blot) getting himself sent to the fabulous space-jail of @lc@trz to break out a bunch of other villains, similarly future-versions of the Beagle Boys and so on. They form the title society, and have a wicked plan to...wreak havoc with giant robot crabs, and then use one member's mind-influencing power to take over the feed in everyone's "Egophone," influence the public to love them all, and then, eventually, run for office and seize political power!

(It seems that giant robot crabs might not be entirely necessary for a plot like that - it sounds like the kind of thing that could be done entirely within the law, which would leave Space Ranger Mickey no reason to come beat them up - but if they did things the smart, sensible way I suppose they wouldn't be villains, would they?)

But that is their plan, and they insist that it requires a giant robot crab, and, like all fiendish plans hatched by secret societies of multiple villains, it works pretty well for a while. But Mickey gathers his friends - you know them; I mentioned them in Paragraph One - and, despite a few setbacks and a long unexpected space journey, they are victorious in the end.

Either Pothier or his translator (David Gerstein) has some fun language Easter Eggs, particularly in the overwrought villain dialogue. The bank robbed in the early pages of the book is also named Zeerust, a deep cut I particularly appreciated. This is a book explicitly OK for kids, but has that old Looney Tunes or Jay Ward-style mix of high and low-culture jokes to keep the parents from being bored, too.

Pilet has an energetic, distinctive art style - he gives Mickey a beetle brow to make him look more serious - and gives his coloring the vague sense of being made up of Ben-Day dots. It all gestures in the direction of classic mid-century Disney comics while not specifically copying any of them.

This is a book made to be accessible for kids, part of a giant hegemonic global entertainment corporation looking to maximize the return on its long-running IP. Within that context, it's a fun adventure story.

Blacksad, Vol. 2: Arctic Nation by Juan Díaz Canales & Juanjo Guarnido

I don't want to say that creators can't write about whatever they want to write about. That's not my point at all. But if they want to have a particular theme in a particular work, they really should take some time to think about whether that theme actually makes sense.

The Blacksad books are noirish detective stories in comics form, set in a version of the US 1950s as seen by two Spaniards from about fifty years later - Juan Díaz Canales writes and Juanjo Guarnido draws. This world is anthropomorphic, of the no-specific-principle subtype: everyone is a humanoid animal, but it's not like the Red Deer are British and the Whitetail Deer are American, or anything like that. There are lots of different kinds of animals, mostly furry but including some birds, and all the different types seem to be vigorously interfertile, without creating chimeras along the way. The only distinction I think I can see is that men are more likely to be predators (wolves, foxes, bears, tigers) - but some men are large grazing animals (horses, pigs, bulls), too. Women are smaller, frailer things - deer and other ruminants, mostly, I think, plus the usual sexy mostly-human types with fur and animal snouts.

Racial politics maps uneasily at best onto that structure. Animals with darker fur are not necessarily from any particular place in the world, and I'm not even 100% sure if children are even consistently the same "race" as their parents, since there's obviously so many different races and they all interbreed.

That all said, Blacksad, Vol. 2: Arctic Nation is the "racism is bad, m'kay?" book in the series, set in a decaying suburb [1] where a white supremacist organization - explicitly about color of fur, not about national origin or bloodline or anything more substantial, since their big leader is a white tiger - has taken power. This organization, the Arctic Nation of the title, is corrupt and evil and what I guess passes for racist in this world, though the corruption and evil are mostly in the style of every small town in every noir story since 1930 and not particularly distinctive or notable.

Series hero Jon Blacksad - the black panther on the cover, who does have a patch of white on his face, further muddying the metaphor - is hired by a schoolteacher (?!) in one of the few schools still operating (?!) in this town to find a missing child, Kaylie. Kaylie's mother doesn't want the police - corrupt and evil, run by the Arctic Nation - involved, and is scared of something she won't explain, in that usual noir way.

So Blacksad pokes around, with the aid of a weasel (I think) newspaper reporter, and bumps against the usual racists. (There's also a Black Power equivalent, a street gang of jet-black animals, to reinforce the schema - but that just made me think that most of these animals, like most animals, aren't either pure-white or pure-black, so the metaphor gets more and more strained every time Canales leans on it.)

And, frankly, the white tiger that runs the whole thing has tiger stripes on his face, so he's not pure white, either. Nothing in the story calls this out; it's not, as far as I can tell, meant to be some big "racists are hypocrites" reveal - he just is a tiger, and white enough for Arctic Nation, and we shrug and move on. Let me point back to my second paragraph and tap the sign.

There is a shocking revelation, and several shocking deaths, and of course a scene in which the Arctic Nation gather in their KKK-ish robes, because Blacksad didn't get to where it is by being subtle. Blacksad walks out in the end, shaking his head at human evil and racism and so on.

The dialogue is a bit overwrought and not quite colloquial - I'm not sure if that's from Canales' original or inherent in this translation by Anthya Flores and Patricia Rivera. It's mostly overwrought in a noir direction, so I think it's all on purpose: Blacksad is a cartoon version of a '50s detective story, so the tone and style are all a bit cartoonish, too. It is stylish, and it absolutely means well, but Arctic Nation trips over its own (metaphorical) feet more than I'm comfortable with.

[1] This is what the text says. It doesn't make much sense, particularly given the timeframe. It's too early for major white flight, which is not what's described, anyway. It's clearly not a "those people are moving into our neighborhood," either - everyone seems to have been there already, and changing economic circumstances is creating a crabs-in-a-bucket situation. Not to descend into personalities, but I suspect Canales misunderstands, inadvertently or deliberately, a lot of things about the US in the 1950s.

Laughing Gas by P.G. Wodehouse

I don't like to make sweeping statements about writers with around a hundred published books, since there's likely to be some oddball piece I've forgotten. But I'm pretty sure that Laughing Gas is P.G. Wodehouse's only fantasy novel. (The Swoop!, which I haven't read, is arguably science fiction, but that's different, he said as a former editor who specialized in that difference.)

It's from 1936, which I (and most others) consider Wodehouse's high period - it came in the middle of Heavy Weather, Thank You, Jeeves, Right Ho, Jeeves, The Luck of the Bodkins, Summer Moonshine, The Code of the Woosters, and Uncle Fred in the Springtime - a murderer's row of humor if ever I saw one. Not all of those books are his absolute tip-top - Summer Moonshine is a minor book; you might be thinking of the Blandings book Summer Lightning; I was - but it's a pretty impressive run for six years ('33-'39).

Laughing Gas is also arguably minor: it's not part of any of Wodehouse's series, the fantasy element is a bit odd and doesn't entirely emphasize his strengths, and it has one of Wodehouse's intellectually duller protagonists without a Jeeves figure to relieve him. On the positive side, there's lots of great Hollywood material, including a wonderfully beastly child star - Wodehouse didn't have major child characters in his work very often, but they tended to be great when he did.

That slightly dim hero is Reggie Havershot, third Earl of that name, the usual late-twenties rich and unencumbered Wooster-esque figure. He's in Hollywood because "the family" (the usual Formidable Aunt) wants him to stop a cousin, "Eggy" Egremont, from marrying an unsuitable American woman.

That woman is Ann Bannister, a former reporter who was briefly engaged to Reggie two years before (of course). She's now minder to the child star Joey Cooley, though she's maneuvering to become the new personal publicist for big star April June.

Reggie met April on the train to Hollywood, and she got her hooks into him then. Since he is dim, he thinks she's wonderful and they have the love that is true. Everyone else thinks she's leading him on for the title, and that she's mean and self-obsessed, but Reggie, like a good Wodehouse hero, will not have the name of the woman he loves bandied about.

But then Reggie goes into a dental surgery at the same time as that child star, Joey Cooley, and the two of them swap bodies "in a sort of fourth dimension." Reggie wakes up as Joey, though he has some trouble remembering that consistently - he thinks of himself as his former, large, strapping self, so the fact that he is now a weedy pre-teen with golden locks is a continual surprise to him.

Meanwhile, Joey is having a grand time in Reggie's body - he'd been keeping a list of people he wants to "pop in the snoot," from directors to scenario writers to April, and now that he is large and beefy, he's going to take full advantage of all the snoot-popping he can do.

Over the course of about two days, in which Reggie-in-Joey's body is stuck with the schedule of a child star living in the home of the head of his studio and under the baleful eye of that studio head's nasty sister, Reggie keeps trying to continue his old life - did I mention he's a bit dim? he's the kind of person who is no good at adjusting his plans to current circumstances - and is moping over what he assumes is the loss of April forever.

It turns out Joey was an absolute terror, and a lot of the things the kid did pre-swap come back to bedevil Reggie over the course of those days. Also, he's thrown together with Ann quite a bit, and comes to curse ever having let her go, particularly when he finally sees what a nasty person April is.

There are complications and chases and various other colorful characters along the way, and, of course, Reggie and Joey do end up colliding in the fourth dimension once again, so they can return to their respective correct bodies and their appropriate happy endings. They each somewhat ruin the life of the other, but in ways that they're both happy with, in the end.

Again, I think this is a bit on the minor side - the fantasy mechanism is fun, but Reggie is a bit too dim to take best advantage of it, and we don't see April being as horrible as we're told she is. But it is a fun Wodehouse book from his best period, with a lot of amusing material.

The Court Charade by Flore Vesco and Kerascöet

Let me tell you about the dangers of good intentions. Over the last few years, I've made an effort to include diacritical marks in people's names on this blog - because that's the right way to spell their names, obviously. It's slightly annoying and often involves a bunch of cut-and-pasting, but doing things right is its own reward.

It does mean, though, that the standard Blogger search function no longer works for those names: Kerascoet is not Kerascöet, so a search for one does not bring up the other. (Not to mention the trouble in getting special characters into the search box to begin with.)

I'm still going to spell names correctly, going forward. But it does mean that as I look back to figure out what I've written about a creator before - and you the home viewer might do the same - that I can easily miss things.

That's the lesson, of course. When writing about people from other cultures, the small details can make you miss things.

The Court Charade, though it inspired those thoughts, is not weighty or particularly serious. It's a romantic, adventurous story about a young woman in a world that might be historical or lightly fantasy - the usual story-book "once upon a time" kingdom. It was written by Flore Vesco, whose work I'm otherwise unfamiliar with, and drawn by the wife-and-husband team Kerascöet, here working in soft colors and often small panels, all unbordered but sitting cleanly in grids on their lovely pages. It's less visually pyrotechnic than previous Kerascöet books like Satania or even the similarly fairy-tale Beauty; this is a deliberately smaller, lighter, more personal story.

Our heroine is Countess Seraphine Marie-Geneviéve Alexandrina de Notre-Dame Chancies du Jousselinier Senestre lez Castiche de l'Auberivière sié l'Ostel de la Colline. But call her Serine. She's the oldest child of an elderly and kindly but impoverished nobleman and his imposing wife, spending her time taking care of five rambunctious (much) younger brothers. She loves stories and has the usual fairy-tale heroine characteristics: smart, determined, positive, beautiful without noticing it, essentially happy, resilient, egalitarian, and possessed of massive spirit and a core determination to do right and help people.

So of course she is thrown into a situation that is the opposite of most of those things. When her father dies, her mother wants to find her a suitable, sensible marriage - subtext: to some minor nobleman, probably much older, probably nice enough but not anyone Serine would pick. She instead says she will head off to the capital, become a lady-in-waiting to the queen and make her fortune. Her mother warns her that the queen is mercurial and demanding: the mother is stern and doesn't appreciate her daughter but is correct in almost everything she says in the book.

Serine, in the one dress she owns, makes her way to the capital and does become a lady-in waiting to the queen. She manages to keep that position, due to her good heart and helpful nature, despite the backbiting from the other ladies and some more active resistance from the king's advisor, who we and Serine believe has secret schemes.

She does make friends, as well: notably the maid Claire and the torturer's apprentice Leon. As required by the form, the noble characters are almost all snooty status-obsessed creeps, while members of the working class are capable, friendly, and collegial. The one exception is the kindly, sickly king, who can be whimsical as any rich character but essentially means to do right.

After various adventures and reverses, Serine is attacked and left for dead. But she returns in disguise as the king's new fool, to foil the plot she has discovered between the advisor and queen to kill the king and take over the kingdom. She does stop a few assassination attempts, and manages to nudge the king towards more compassionate governance in at least a few things, but the king, I will repeat, is old and sickly.

There is a crisis, and all looks black - as, again, is required by the form. But there is a mysterious missing heir, and Serine's work as herself and the fool has given her a large pool of goodwill to draw on, so there is the required absolutely happy ending. Serine gets everything she hoped for and more. 

Vesco's dialogue is mostly naturalistic, though her narration - which is mostly in the early scenes - leans into rhymes and a more obvious storybook-y tone. I suspect that was the tone of her novel that this bande dessinée was based on: De Cape et de Mots, also the original French title of this book. As I mentioned above, Kerascöet's work is lively and fun as always, on a mostly amusing, light-fairy-tale level, with lots of energy in gesture and layout.

The Court Charade will not surprise any but the youngest readers, but fairy tales are meant to be familiar: that's not a criticism. This is a good one, well translated into English by the mysterious L. Benson for this new Abrams edition, and it has entirely positive lessons to tell the young readers that will mostly find it. (Though, being French, there's also bits of incidental nudity and a few mildly racy moment that some particularly American parents may be shocked to see. I recommend their children hide those pages from their susceptible parents: they'll know who they are.)

The Undertaker, Vol. 1: The Gold Eater & Dance of the Vultures by Xavier Dorison & Ralph Meyer

I try to treat books on the level I find them; it's only fair. This one is the first of a decent-length series of Western comics by two French creators. It collects the first two, very closely linked books in the series, both originally published in 2015 and translated by Tom Imber for this 2026 English-language edition from Abrams.

I don't know that the Western in French comics tends to be a high-octane, big-picture genre exercise. But I suspect it does: that a French comic set in the old American West is going to be a big adventure story that is plausible on the surface but doesn't worry too much about deep thoughts as it caroms forward down its action-filled path. This one certainly does.

The Undertaker series is written by Xavier Dorison and drawn by Ralph Meyer, with colors by Caroline Delabie and Meyers. It is big and bold and full of characters saying dramatic things, moving smoothly from one big set-piece scene to another. I don't think you should come to this book, or probably the series in general, for gritty realism, though it does aim to be gritty and has the big action-movie style of psuedo-realism.

This first American volume collects two French bande desinée - hence the full title The Undertaker, 1: The Gold Eater & Dance of the Vultures. It's the origin story, to some degree - the main character still has some mysterious bits of his past - somewhat spoiled by the book's descriptive copy, so I think they come up quickly in later volumes - that I think sets up the rest of the series.

The book doesn't say when it's set; it's sometime in the late 19th century. A man going under the name of Jonas Crow is working as an itinerant undertaker in the usual rugged wilderness, with a black coach pulled by two horses and a vulture pal named Jed he picks up on the first pages here. He arrives in the town of Anoki City, the usual corrupt town run by one rich guy, because the rich guy, Joe Cusco, has hired Crow to bury him.

Cusco's plan is to commit suicide by poisoning - he's dying anyway - and have Crow bury him in the shaft of his first mine, the original source of his fortune. So far, so normal.

But he also converted his fortune into gold nuggets and ate all of those nuggets just before the poison; the point is to be buried with all his wealth, so no one else gets it. There's an additional several levels of manipulation by Cusco with his haughty English governess Rose (?) - that's how she's described by the flap copy; she looks to be more of a housekeeper/head of staff - and with the Chinese woman Miss Lin, to make sure his body gets to the proper place when it's supposed to, but that mostly comes out later in the book, in the inevitably revelation-filled plot.

Meanwhile, the miners of the town have been kept poor by Cusco for years or decades. They hope his death will mean some money for them, though I don't see why they would ever have that expectation. But they do expect to get some of the rich guy's money when he dies, in that something's-gonna-break sense of people pushed too far for too long. And then they learn what he actually did with the gold, and they figure on cutting him open first to grab it for themselves. For various reasons, Crow and Rose and Lin can't accept this, so they go careening out into the wilderness in the undertaker's coach, closely followed by a heavily-armed band.

There's also a local sheriff, who is more-or-less honest and not 100% on board with looting a corpse - but deeply suspicious of Crow, who he thinks is some legendary outlaw or other. And some Federal soldiers who wander into the action about mid-way through, to facilitate a chaotic multi-sided battle and ratchet up the tension and danger. But the core of the book is that chase: the undertaker and his companions ahead with a gold-filled corpse; a town full of angry men behind them.

The Undertaker is the title character of the series, so we know he wins. There's a lot of stuff along the way, though - portentous dialogue, big shootouts, daring escapes, thrilling chases, shocking reversals, amazing revelations.

I think Dorison intended to have a deep theme about greed and honesty and doing what's right despite everything, and you can line up the story to that if you want. But it comes across much cartoonier than that, to me at least, so I'll just nod in that direction.

Meyer has a detailed art style with a strong story-telling panel flow - he varies the number of panels per page, but generally gets a lot of panels onto his big pages. There's a lot of story here to get through, with dialogue to spare, and Meyer makes it all work on the page.

I don't think The Undertaker is essentially as serious as I think it wants to be taken, but it is fun and it moves quickly and it crams in a hell of a lot of Western action of the kind the kids love today. (The kids love Westerns, right?)

Gérard: Five Years with Depardieu by Mathieu Sapin

There's a point in the middle of this book where creator Mathieu Sapin claims that Gérard Depardieu is one of the two most famous living French people in the world. He says this in conversation with then-President François Hollande, who he is flattering by saying Hollande is the other most famous French person. When Sapin mentions this to other people later, they mostly agree - well, not about Hollande. He's no Depardieu.

As an American, I also agree: if you think "French actor," Depardieu is the first person who comes to mind for at least a plurality of us. For some more gender-neutral definition of "actor," I would also accept Bridgette Bardot, who is sadly not eligible under the "living" portion. Younger, hipper people might argue for Timothée Chalamet, who I don't think is "French" in the same sense, since he grew up in New York. But Depardieu is definitely world-famous, though maybe becoming less so in recent years as he's gotten older, has been in fewer really globally popular movies, and has had more scandals accumulate (tax exile, sexual assault rumors, a certain chumminess with Putin).

So: Mathieu Sapin is a French bande desinée creator - and possibly a filmmaker, too; we see him work on some projects during this book - who shares a studio with Christophe Blain. (That has nothing to with this book, but Sapin mentions it and shows Blain, so I'll include it as well.) He got pulled into a documentary involving Depardieu taking a trip to Azerbaijan - deliberately replicating a trip by Alexandre Dumas, who was accompanied by a painter - in 2012, and, since he found himself in Depardieu's circle, he thought he might try to stay there if he could and get a book out of it.

Gerard: Five Years with Depardieu is that book; it covers Sapin's experiences with Depardieu starting with that 2012 trip to Azerbaijan and continuing through Depardieu's tax exile a few years later, multiple other projects and opportunities for Depardieu to be big and dominate conversations and talk a lot, before ending with a 2016 trip to Moscow.

The point of this book is "what is Depardieu really like?" and Sapin delivers - he keeps himself involved, as a viewpoint and way into this world, but the focus is on who Depardieu is and what he does. Depardieu is famously active, volcanic, and mercurial, so he gives Sapin a lot of material - he also has the long-time actor's ability to just talk at great length about anything continuously.

Sapin draws himself as physically small and balding - that little guy in the sidecar on the cover - to contrast with the physically imposing Depardieu. He's originally hired to basically lob questions to Depardieu for that documentary, and let the actor run on at length - the one who initiates conversation, and, as much as possible, aims Depardieu at specific topics, but not an equal partner. The rest of the book finds him in roughly the same role: a chronicler, a scribbler in the corner, the guy with a dictaphone to capture the interesting or outrageous things that Depardieu rolls out endlessly, all the time.

You have to have at least some sympathy or interest in Depardieu, of course: why else would you read a book like this? I won't say that Sapin gets any deep insights into Depardieu's essential character or history, and he's not really trying to. This is a book about what's it's like to be in the middle of the whirlwind of activity that is Gérard Depardieu; what happens around him and how he talks and acts on a day-to-day basis. Sapin is not intervewing Depardieu; he's accompanying him.

It's a very wordy book: Depardieu talks a lot, and Sapin needs a lot of captions to explain who everyone is and what's going on, as he drops in and out of Depardieu's life and projects repeatedly over these five years. Sapin has a lightly cartoony style: most of his people are fairly realistic, though he makes himself tiny with a big head. But his background and scenes are mostly realistic, though sometimes lightly sketched, particularly on the pages where he has a lot of captions and dialogue to make room for.

There will be a point where Gérard Depardieu is not longer the most famous Frenchman in the world, and this book will be an interesting relic at that point. But I don't think we're there yet.

The Holy Places & A Tourist in Africa by Evelyn Waugh

I'm pretty sure the point of the Waugh Abroad omnibus, assembled and introduced by Nicholas Shakespeare in 2003, was to gather Evelyn Waugh's pre-War travel books into a single volume, rescuing them from the mostly-obscurity they'd fallen into. Waugh had suppressed them, more or less, for the last decade or so of his life, issuing instead a "good parts" collection of the less-politically-tendentious bits under the title When the Going Was Good.

Those books were Labels, Remote People, Ninety-Two Days, Waugh in Abyssinia and - in a different tone and style and not really a travel book in the same sense - Robbery Under Law. I got the Waugh Abroad omnibus soon after it was published, read Labels in 2006, and then finally got back to the rest of those books starting last year.

But that was not the end of the omnibus.

Waugh had two other short books, which came out after WW II, which were suitable for inclusion in a book called Waugh Abroad. And so they were. And now I've read them, too.

The TL;DR is that Waugh got stuffier and grumpier and stodgier and more boring as he got older, and he was not unstuffy and grumpy and stodgy to begin with. His fiction has a lot to recommend it, even towards the end of his life, but his late nonfiction is really for scholars and massive fans and exceptionally right-wing Anglo-Catholics at this point.

With that said, the last two books in that omnibus are The Holy Places and A Tourist in Africa.

The Holy Places is barely a book at all; it comprises one very short introduction and two magazine pieces. I know the bookbinders can do magnificent things, but this is barely twenty-five pages in the omnibus, so I wonder how this appeared on its own in the world.

One essay is about Saint Helena, who was the wife of one Roman Emperor and mother of another in the 4th century. More important to Waugh - so important that he barely mentions it - is that she's credited with discovering the True Cross. Waugh is a true believer, so the fact that it's pretty clear that the jumble of wood she was lumbered with is no such thing - assuming that there was originally a thing that it could be, and I might not even go that far myself - cannot impinge on his thinking. Since she is a saint, she must be a wonderful perfect person, and that's basically what his essay says. It is nice that he had such a durable religico-philosophical underpinning to his thinking, Andy said brightly, searching for something positive to end with.

The other essay is about a trip to Jerusalem in 1952. It is also suffused with the piety of a convert, and some circumlocutiously-worded stuff that I think is grumping about the existence of Israel, because clearly only Christians should be in charge of that land and the world in general. (Preferably Catholics, of course, but Anglicans are mostly all right and those Orthodox chappies have much to recommend them. Waugh is less fond of more radical Protestants.) Muslims are mostly treated as good enough fellows, for lesser races - I suppose because this was before most of the major wars and oil shocks, so they had no power. The essay is decent on architecture and some aspects of history, and it's nice that Waugh had such a resolute faith, I suppose. He's not actively dismissive of Judaism and Islam, I'll add, in an attempt to be somewhat positive.

A Tourist in Africa is somewhat longer - actual book-length, though not a long one - but sketchier and smaller and less well-formed than his pre-war travel books. He admits he hates being in England in the cold weather - and almost admits to hating being with his family at Christmas - and so fled in the winter of 1958-9 for a trip down the East coast of Africa, somewhat visiting places he'd been before the war and at intervals since.

The book is based on a diary he kept at the time, and still maintains a diary format. I suspect that, instead of turning diary notes into a fuller narration and spending some serious time thinking through what he wanted to say, this time Waugh just expanded his notes in situ, threw in some of his usual hobbyhorses, and called it a day. I don't want to say a book about traveling several thousand miles over the course of two months is lazy, but there are definitely aspects of it that show an impulse to take the easiest path.

It is substantially less interesting and detailed than his pre-war travel books. It's still Waugh prose, so there are good lines and specific thoughts throughout - the reader may not agree with those thoughts, and I expect most won't, but they're worth engaging with in one's own head to be clear on why they're wrong.

In that typical old-boy-network way, Waugh avoids giving names to most of the people he meets - it's the commissioner or agent of this particular town, or "R" - though they mostly seem to have been friendly and solicitous and happy to give this visiting dignitary dinners and house-room and the use of their cars and drivers to roam about and see the sights. And, as usual, it will be the rare modern human being who can agree with any of Waugh's political ideas - I'd be very suspicious of anyone in 2026 who could, actually.

I do recommend the Waugh Abroad omnibus - or, at least, the first four books collected in it, which are actually about travel and see Waugh giving insights about places and people he met that are long-gone now. The later bits of that omnibus, though, are for a much more select and massively smaller audience.

Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol.2: The Return by Lewis Trondheim & Manu Larcenet

It was a long time ago, but I think it happened quickly.

Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol.2: The Return - my library app has a slight disagreement with itself as to the subtitle, so you may also see The Comeback some places - was published in French by Dargaud in 2000, the same year as the first volume. This version took a lot longer: it was translated by Mercedes Claire Gillion and lettered by Sylvain Dumas for a 2018 e-book-only Europe Comics edition, which is, I think, still the only way this book is available in the English language.

Like the first book, it was written by the prolific Lewis Trondheim and drawn by the energetic Manu Larcenet. It follows directly from the first book; you could click my link above to get a precis of the story if you want or need that. Or, if you prefer to remain ignorant of the plot details of the first book, stop reading now.

Elementary-schoolers Martina and Gildas learned in the first Cosmonauts that their seemingly-paranoid worries were correct: everyone around them was an alien and/or robot (mostly robots made to look like humans by aliens). They were, they were told, clones of the "survivors" of the crash of a human spaceship on this alien world, and were being raised in a close simulacrum of their original lives on Earth by the kindly aliens of the planet Mawis.

Now, they know the truth...but they're still kids, and need to grow up. So all of the robots around them admit to being robots, but school goes on - with some changes, such as the "Exterminating Stinky Aliens" class taught by Professor Vatter.

But, like so many stories told to children, they learn early in this book that what they were told is true...but not complete.

There are nasty aliens: the Meskimek. A Meskimek ship is approaching, and will destroy all life on Mawis. The Mawissians, unfortunately, venerate life so much that they are physically incapable of fighting back.

So the only people on the planet capable of violence are the cloned members of the human crew: Gildas and Martina. Who are maybe eight or nine years old.

But are they the only survivors of that crash? Are there more secrets of their past yet to be discovered?

Well, of course. It would be a short book if the stinky aliens just swept in and killed everybody.

This one is more action-oriented than the first book, as there's a hostile Mekimek fleet chasing our heroes' spaceship nearly continuously for the back three-quarters of the story. This is popular fiction, so of course they survive, learn the truth, and save their friends - and, since it's arguably a book for kids, they also learn some lessons along the way. (Although I should note that European comics "for kids" have a substantially higher amount of violence - very cartoony violence, all zap-rays and explosions, admittedly - than some readers may be comfortable handing to their little Taylors and Liams.)

Larcenet has a very distinctive style here, with lots of often-small panels to get all the action in and people with weird but very readable faces. This is zany but has an undercurrent of real emotion, as I've come to expect from Trondheim. This is a fun, goofy soft-SF comics series, and I'm happy to note that there's still one more to go.

Glorious Summers, Vol.2: The Calanque by Zidrou and Jordi Lafebre

As Spring in my area has been chilly and damp, and I had an official company-wide Mental Health day, I indulged myself with a nostalgic book about a long, wonderful summer vacation - warm and relaxing and seemingly endless. (All of of those aspects were a nice contrast.)

Glorious Summers is a six-book series by writer Zidrou (Belgian) and artist Jordi Lafebre (Spanish), originally published fairly quickly in French during the teens. The first five books were translated into English - this one by Lara Vergnaud - soon afterward, but they're all from Europe Comics, which is more of a proof-of-concept than a major publisher, so you can only find them digitally.

Each one, I think, is about one year - one long summer vacation in the life of the Belgian Faldérault family. The first book was set in 1973, and had a light frame story in the modern day. This second one, The Calanque, is set in 1969 and wastes no time in other frames.

I have two thoughts before I dive into how wonderful and lovely this book is - and it is wonderful and lovely, the best kind of nostalgia.

First is informative: a calanque is what you call a fjord in French, or maybe what looks something like a fjord when it's on France's Mediterranean coast. It's a narrow, steep-walled inlet of the sea - you've probably seen them, looking untouched and beautiful, in a dozen comics and movies and other visual media, without knowing it had a French name. (I did.)

Second is more ruminative, or predictive. Each book is about one year, and they might cluster in this time-frame. Pierre and Maddie Faldérault were young in 1973, and they're four years younger here - with three children under the age of about seven and a fourth on the way. I think that's the premise of the series: this era in their lives. But I'm hoping for something to break the mold, later on. Maybe a book set in 1962 or 3, with Maddie pregnant with their first child or the two of them trying to get away with a new baby. Maybe a book set in 1982, with the older girls coming back from university or école, maybe jetting in to join the rest. I'd like to see nostalgia for other phases of life: the thing about kids is that they're always changing, and when you look back, you realize every year is a completely different era. I don't know if the series went that way, but I can hope.

In this book, BD artist Pierre is working full-out to finish his latest assignment so his family can go on vacation - just as we saw in the first book, running over their supposed departure date by three days. He's delivering the first installment of a new series he created, Four, about a four-armed sheriff in the American West. (Westerns were popular in Eurocomics, then and to some degree even now.)

He does finish; they do set off. And, in what I think is characteristic of this family, they don't have a specific destination in mind. They're going to camp anyway, so they don't need hotel reservations, and they're going to be gone for a month or two, so they're in no hurry. [1] The point is to go south - toward the Mediterranean, into the sunshine, down into France - for this family, to go to the land of summer.

The first night, they find a place to camp after dark - and it turns out to be the front yard of an older French couple. Luckily, they're happy to see a boisterous Belgian family camping on their lawn, and give the Faldéraults both a place to stay for a day (feeding them very well) and a tip on a place to spend the rest of the summer: a cabin in a calanque, on the sunny southern coast.

The rest of the book is set in that calanque, as they snorkel and fish and sunbathe and loaf and sing random songs and reenact the moon landing they just saw on TV. The brother of "Old Man Rufus" - half of the friendly French couple - lives nearby and also befriends the family, taking them to the local town in his boat for supplies.

Zidrou shows a real knack in this series for the small rhythms of life, of the running jokes a family creates and the quirks individual kids have at particular times in their lives. The Faldéraults are specific and quirky - maybe a bit weird, which the French always attribute to their being Belgian. They enjoy life, and are getting the most out of this vacation: memories to hold onto for the next long year and cold winter.

And Lafebre's art continues to be a delight, with expressive animation-inspired character design and poses on cleanly laid-out pages mostly drenched in that French sunlight. Glorious Summers is a series that makes you wish you grew up somewhere in driving distance of France in summer, and had two months a year to enjoy it.

[1] I don't know if the camping thing is a generational marker. In a US context, it might be - my own grandparents, both schoolteachers, headed off into the woods every summer for much of the summer for decades (the late '40s through at least the early '80s), though they stayed much closer to their home (Albany, NY) than the adventurous Faldéraults. My sense is that my mother and her sisters were not as fond of this as their parents, so it was not repeated with my generation. I think that kind of roughing-it camping is much rarer, at least in US culture, in the 21st century than it was in the mid-20th.

French Leave by P.G. Wodehouse

As I continue my saunter through the odder ends of P.G. Wodehouse's oeuvre - I've already read the famous novels at least once - I'm testing my assumption that the early obscure books (pre-war) are generally better than the late obscure books (post-war).

Wodehouse was born in 1881. His first novel was published in 1902 and his last in 1874, just before his death at age 93. There were nearly a hundred different books in between, so there are a lot of datapoints and a lot of potential arguments to be made about that assumption of mine. The best thing is that, to make those arguments well, you need to read Wodehouse books, which are always fun, even if one wants to argue this particular one under the microscope is slightly lesser than some other Wodehouse novel.

French Leave is a short 1956 novel, somewhat out of character for Wodehouse in its setting. The main characters are three sisters from Long Island - two fairly standard romantic-comedy protagonists and one slightly older budding Forbidding Aunt - and the action takes place mostly in two French resorts, Roville and St. Rocque.

Kate, Josephine, and Teresa Trent run a farm, mostly of bees, and are not too unhappy there. But, when a play their late father wrote is sold to television, they each get a windfall about about two thousand dollars. And the two younger sisters, Jo and Terry, want to go to France to waste that money and, just maybe, find some millionaires to marry. Kate disapproves, but will go with them as a chaperone and to disapprove at close range.

Since their money is slim, to make it go farther they will alternately pose as each other's maid. First, in St. Rocque, Jo is "Miss Trent" and Terry is her maid "Fellowes." Jo has some dates with a man she thinks is suitable - but it turns out he's already married, so she flies back to America, alone, to marry the lawyer she was dating there.

Terry and Kate move on to Roville, setting up in the big fancy hotel there. Terry falls in love with Jefferson, Comte d'Escrignon - the half-American son of a penniless Marquis who writes for a living and is called "Jeff." French Leave is most Wodehousian in the way in which nearly every major character has an official name and then the name that people actually call them, most notably in Jeff's father, alternately Nicolas Jules St. Xavier Auguste, Marquis de Maufringneuse et Valerie-Moberanne and "Old Nick."

There are some ex-wives - of the Marquis in particular - and a parallel young couple of fairly dim but rich heirs to sparkling-water fortunes, who Jeff and Terry get somewhat entangled with. There's also an officious and somewhat corrupt local police Commissaire, who is aimed at Terry by that formidable ex-wife.

Of course, there are misunderstandings, primary among them about who is actually rich and who is not. (Terry is definitely not, though she's posing as an American heiress. Jeff has good prospects from his writing, but his father is penniless and their titles are very impressive but come with not a single sou.)

As any good Wodehouse book must, it ends with the young people getting married in the right permutations and the forces of repression and unhappiness (the Commissaire and the ex-wife primary among them) foiled.

Along the way, it's a bit more cumbersome than Wodehouse's better books - the whole deal with Jo feels extraneous to the central plot, which means the real complications don't start up until about 75% of the way into the book. But there's good material, especially about a publisher, Russell Clutterbuck, who is both a neighbor of the Trent sisters on Long Island and Jeff's great hope for fame and fortune. In the end, it's a slightly lumpy, not entirely well-shaped novel in the Wodehouse manner, quintessentially a book one can call minor but still enjoy reading.

The Incal, Vol.4: What Is Above by Alexandro Jodorowsky and Mœbius

The influential and stylish French six-book space opera bande dessinée series named after its McGuffin, the Incal, moves into its second half with this book. By this point, series hero John DiFool still has some distinctive characterization - mostly of his negative traits, but we'll take what we can get - while most of the people around him have been smoothed out and perfected by the ongoing fate-of-the-universe plot. As always, it's written by moviemaker and international goofball Alexandro Jodorowsky and drawn by French master cartoonist Mœbius; the whole series originally appeared in Metal Hurlant in the '80s, with the current edition having gone back to the French original to strip out some emendations made by Marvel in their earlier English-language reprinting. This volume was translated by Justin Kelly and Sasha Watson, who do the best they can do with Jodorowsky's bombastic, silly dialogue.

To catch up on the background quickly: in the previous three books (The Black Incal, The Luminous Incal, and What Lies Beneath) John found that Incal, a sentient, glowing super-powerful thingy destined to bring balance to the galaxy in much the same way that Anakin Skywalker would in his own universe a couple of decades later. In typical mystical-space-opera fashion, everything was a duality: there were dark and light Incals, which needed to merge; two women who are sisters and guardians of the two Incals; a Great Darkness threatening the human empire that is opposed to the combined Incals; and so forth. John did the hero's-journey thing, turning enemies into allies, going on a dangerous journey to the heart of his world, where the Incals merged and turned into a super-cool spaceship - this is an '80s space opera - and one of the minor characters was subsumed into the Incal gestalt.

John and his allies are in that spaceship as The Incal, Vol.4: What Is Above begins. The evil Techno organization - I'm not sure what the overall name is; the Technopope is dead and their headquarters habitat of Technogea is run by the Techno-Centreur and the Cyclic Council, so they're the Techno-somebodies - has taken over human space and is proceeding with their evil plans to seed the universe with Shadow Eggs, semi-living manifestations of the evil Great Darkness. Those shadow eggs will eat all of the stars and then...I'm not really sure. Probably kill everyone; it's that kind of ha-ha-ha evil plot. It's not clear why the Technodudes want to do that; I suspect it's mostly that Jodorowsky assumes techno-anything is evil, and is attributing to them everything he doesn't like in life.

The Incal-starship has powerful weapons, but they can only break shadow eggs into pieces, which then re-form. They need a more organic solution to defeat Techno-ness and Darkness.

So they fly off to the prison planet Aquaend, where the minor character Raimo of Kamar and his crew have already been exiled, discovering a hidden undersea city Vitavil H2O where the locals live in harmony with the native gigantic medusas. (Medusa in the French-language sense of a jellyfish rather than a lady with a stunning gaze.) Those medusa somehow have the power to envelop and destroy shadow eggs, because gigantic sea-dwelling semi-sentients clearly have the power of space-travel, and so the giant wave of Techno shadow eggs is met by and destroyed by a wave of human-guided space-traveling medusas.

Vitavil H2O is also the current home of the human empire's semi-deposed Emperoress, thought dead. But no, he/she fled and is ready to re-take control of the human worlds once the little matter of the Technofellas is resolved.

That gets us about halfway through the book, so it's time to switch gears. The alien Berg race - from the next galaxy over, and invading human space intermittently over the past three books - is about to have its Five Thousand Year Games, in which a few hundred members of some alien race are gathered to fight to the death in the inevitable sandy arena. The single winner of the Five Thousand Year Games gets the honor of impregnating the Berg's Protoqueen - who may be immortal; this isn't clear - and then being disintegrated. After 24,000 such games, legend says, the Bergs will "enter the golden age of eternal prosperity."

This is, of course, the twenty-four-thousandth Games. The competitors this time are all humans. And John must compete - and win! - the game to fulfil the Incal's plans, fucking the giant bowl of goop that is the Protoqueen. (She first extrudes a body that closely resembles John's love Animah, to make the fucking somewhat more palatable.)

In the end, John does not avoid his inevitable post-coital disintegration, but he gets better with the help of his friends. Technogea is attacked and conquered by the forces of righteousness and Incal-hood. Our heroes seem to be entirely triumphant, with two books left to fill, but - shock! horror! - they learn that the Emperoress has been infected by the Great Darkness through a "psycho virus" and is now the new focus of its aims. This is our ending cliffhanger.

Mœbius's art is lovely and muscular; I still have the lurking suspicion that the people who really love this series first saw it before it was translated and don't read French. Jodorowsky's writing is full of super-science and mysticism in almost equal proportions, any distinctive characterization has mostly retreated by this point so his characters can explain the convoluted plot to the reader. I may seem dismisive, but it is definitely fun on a space opera level, full of bizarre ideas, weird technology, and shocking reversals. And there's still two books to go, as it gets bigger and crazier in the usual space-opera way.

The Alliance of the Curious, #2: Neandertalensis by Philippe Riche

I can't tell if Philippe Riche made any comics after this one. He did the two Bad Break books about 2003, this two-book series in 2006, and nothing since. But he also seems to be the same Philippe Riche who works in animation, and that Riche is credited with directing a movie released this year - so he might have just gotten busy with other things.

(This might be a quirk of mine, but I always want to find that creators I know - not even that I like, just anyone whose work I'm even aware of - continued their careers and did interesting or great or exciting things. I worked in publishing for more than a decade, and saw how many creative careers fizzle out after a couple of projects or a short decade. I hate that; I hate living in a world where that's the norm. So I'm always hoping for the opposite, for everyone.)

Be that as it may, this is the back half of the story. The Alliance of the Curious, #2: Neandertalensis continues and completes the story started in the first book, Sapiens, still focusing on the three main characters from Bad Break. Their roles shifted a bit from Bad Break to Alliance - Ernst-Lazare no longer seems to be immortal, or quite as unknowable; Rebecca X is not mentioned as working in porn; and Simon, well, Simon, in this book, seems to have become much dumber and less focused.

We do get a bit more explanation of the backstory, though that mostly fills out the outlines of what we  knew or guessed from the first book. The three heroes have that jeweled Neanderthal skull, and are still looking for an old man, a possibly mentally-ill tramp named Griffon De Martel.

Griffon is both the heir apparent to the (vacant, of course) throne of France, from the medieval Carolingian dynasty, and the last living Neanderthal, the final product of a millennia-long secret society living among modern humans and interbreeding - presumably, exclusively among themselves.

Because of the first aspect of his lineage, he will disinherit Louis, the dissolute Bourbon pretender, due to some complicated hugger-mugger involving something called the Order of Saint Louis. And, because of that, three young blonde women called the Cocaine Sisters - Louis's lovers or friends or enablers or all three - are on a rampage to find and kill Griffon, with high-powered automatic weapons.

Because of the second aspect, as we eventually learn near the end of this book, Griffon is trying to get back to the secret crypt of his people - which is, of course, beneath Paris - where he will reunite that jeweled skull with its body. They both belong to the legendary first leader of his people, forty thousand or so years ago, who made them go underground in human society when the mammoths got hunted to extinction. (I swear I am not making any of this up.) And, legendarily, if the skull is placed on its body by the last Neanderthal, all of the dead Neanderthals will rise and take back the world that is rightfully theirs.

Simon and Rebecca and Ernst-Lazare are mostly bystanders or witnesses to this plot; they're trying to figure out if the skull is valuable, and, if so, to whom. They get shot at by the three women, try to find Griffon to talk to him about this whole bizarre situation, and come out of it all basically the same way they did in Bad Break. They do manage to keep their clothes on this time, which I suppose is an improvement.

It is all very Dan Brown, in that are-you-willing-to-believe-this? style. Riche has nice atmospheric storytelling art here; his people are angular, like a world full of high-fashion models, and his colors are moody. He has a lot of dialogue, to explain this oddball story, and it it all basically makes sense and is believable in the reading, which is all one can expect for a conspiracy-theory book like this one.

I don't think we got, or probably will get, any more comics from Riche, since he's spent the last twenty years in the animation mines. But who knows? Doing animation means he's probably still drawing regularly, so maybe he'll come back - with another tale of these three or something else. I'd like to think so. These books are just weird and specific enough that I feel like the world should have more of them.

Brain Drain, Part 1 by Pierre-Henry Gomont

This much is true: when Albert Einstein died in 1955, his brain was removed by the pathologist, divided into 240 sections, and, over the next couple of decades, somewhat divvied out to researchers. This only became widely known in 1978. There is, inevitably, a Wikipedia article about it.

Pierre-Henry Gomont's bande dessinée series Brain Drain tells a fictional version of that story. The first half of the story - published as Brain Drain, Part 1 by Dargaud in 2020 and apparently translated into English the same year by Edward Gauvin - sees Gomont getting a little cutesy with those facts. He changes the names slightly - the dead luminary is only called "Professor Albert" and the pathologist, actually Dr. Thomas Stolz Harvey, is here called "Stolz." And the ghost - or something - of Einstein is a major character. Gomont also diverges from the true history - more so than just having Einstein "alive" and commenting on the action - by making Stolz a horndog for a cute blonde neurologist and introducing rather more drama and running-about than I think the real Dr. Harvey saw.

Well, let me just point to that cover, which seems slightly (and oddly) a Fabulous Freak Brothers homage - that sets the tone for the whole exercise. Gomont has a aggressive line with a lot of mid-century influence in it, matching cleanly-drawn but lumpy people with slashing but precise backgrounds and objects. He also has an equally aggressive narrative tone: this is a story, and he's going to tell it to us, in a clear, detached, omniscient voice.

So "Professor Albert" dies, and "Stolz" performs the autopsy and announces the results to the assembled media. So far, so normal - but Stolz also, on what Gomont presents as a whim or a mania - or a way to get into the pants of that blonde neurologist - removes the brain and hides it, just before the body goes to be cremated.

(The real Dr. Harvey also removed Einstein's eyeballs and gave them to the dead professor's ophthalmologist. Stolz in this book does nothing similar. The historical Dr. Harvey also seems to have been substantially less secretive, making the whole thing more of a conspiracy among doctors, or just a "we doctors know best how to handle these things; we don't need to consider the patient's wishes" attitude.)

After the cremation, an older man shows up at Stolz's house, with the top of his head missing. It is, of course "Professor Albert." He seems to be physical and real in every way - he takes up space, drives cars, is seen by other people, and so on. He's also something like Stolz's Jiminy Cricket, and something like a canary in a coal mine about the state of the removed brain (which, in this book, is sitting in a glass jar, in some kind of liquid - formaldehyde, maybe? purified water? some manner of alcohol? - inside a box, in Stolz's basement).

Anyway, It Is Wacky. Stolz tries to connect with the executor of Professor Albert's estate - it seems to be widely known, or suspected, that Professor Albert's brain is still floating around - but has no luck there. Then large men in suits, who claim to be some kind of government investigators, come nosing around, and Stolz has to flee with the brain and Professor Albert.

This book is only part 1, so it ends with them on the run. Presumably, the second half will wrap up the story, though I don't see how it can reconnect with the actual historical record at this point. (The actual historical record is mostly "Dr, Harvey gave out pieces of the brain to his colleagues, and nothing much happened for twenty years," which is pretty boring in a BD.)

I would not read this hoping it will tell you the real history; it will not. But it is an energetic, goofy story told with a clear voice in a distinctive tone, with wonderful art, and I think Gomont has a point that he's driving the story to. So if the story of the removed brain of a famous historical figure doesn't squick you out, you might want to take a look.

Days of Sugar and Spice by Loïc Clément and Anne Montel

We tend to think of certain genres as being intrinsically tied to a medium - sometimes, right up until the point where it's obvious they do translate into other media. Think superheroes: they were clearly something that only worked right on the comics page - until special effects and other moviemaking skills leveled up enough to equal it.

Specifically, I thought of a certain kind of romance - Young Woman with a Modern Urban Job in The Big City goes back to Quaint Childhood Village, meets A Nice Guy with A Quirky Job there, possibly has An Inconvenient Inheritance that forces her to Confront Her Past and Think What She Wants Out of Life, possibly has a Sassy Friend to Provide Commentary and Drive Her to a Realization - was inherently cinematic.

Well, by "cinematic" I mean filmed and two hours long. But probably an original on The Hallmark Channel.

I'm here to tell you today that writer Loïc Clément and artist Anne Montel successfully ported that genre into bande dessinée form with Days of Sugar and Spice, originally published in France by Dargaud in 2016 and in the Montana Kane translation I read by Europe Comics in 2019.

The woman is Rose Lemon; she's about thirty - as required by the form - and works as a freelance graphic designer in Paris, that job also right down the broad middle of the genre. She has a particularly annoying client who keeps making stupid changes, as required. Her contact at the client is also the requisite Big City Man Who Is Her Current FWB But Doesn't Appreciate Her - his name is Edouard, and we never see him on the page. Rose lives with her best friend Mei, the sassy truth-teller.

Her mother is dead; something vaguely tragic and not entirely specified a few years in the past.

But her father, whom she was estranged from since her parents separated twenty years ago, has just now died. And he's left his boulangerie, Brav Eo, to her.

So she has to take the train, down through scenic Brittany, to the small town of Klervi. There, local lawyer Joseph Doré tells her the town is slowly dying: their big industry (an oil refinery) closed up a couple of decades ago, and, since then, the local Largaux vineyard has been buying up properties as locals retire, die, or leave. Largaux has a growing staff of low-paid workers - probably migrants, though this point isn't stressed - that it low-key exploits. But the important point is that they control more and more of the quaint old town, and, once they get enough of it, are going to replace this real (if dying) town with "an American-style attraction." (Think some weird fusion of Disneyland and a studio tour, featuring a fakey version of the winery.)

Shock! Horror!

Doré tells Rose all of this; he clearly wants her to keep the boulangerie running. She just wants to sell it - to Largaux if necessary - and get back to her real life.

But she misses the last train out that day - trains are deeply inconvenient, and regularly missed, in romantic stories like this one - and has to spend the night at Brav Eo. On the way through those enchanting streets, she runs into her childhood friend Gael Fougiére, now the much-beloved schoolteacher of Klervi. And she learns her half-forgotten great-aunt Marronde is still living next door to Brav Eo and had been working in the boulangerie, but had a stroke a few years back and now cannot speak.

She misses the train in the morning, too, and ends up wandering about town with Gael. She's clearly attracted to him - the form requires it - and she ends up apologizing to him and Marronde about her bad attitude, and staying in Klervi longer than expected.

Long enough to find an old diary of her father's, full of "his baking experiments," which she takes back to Paris to read, and soon starts baking those recipes she finds in it.

Does she go back to Klervi, to start a situationship with Gael and re-open the boulangerie? Is that re-opening at first very unsuccessful, until she connects more closely with the local community? Does her sassy friend come for an extended visit, bringing heaping helpings of sass? Does Rose flee back to Paris after a Fateful Discovery, but eventually come back for the Happy Ending?

I hope I don't need to answer any of those questions.

Clément keeps the tone light, with a Greek Chorus of local cats that comment on the action several times during the book. He also organizes it all into chapters, each named after one kind of pastry - some more informed critic could tell you if there's some kind of progression or sequence of those names; I can just note that they're all yummy things I'd be happy to eat from a quaint pastry shop in Brittany. Montel draws it with an equally light line, illustrative and often vignetted rather than having panel borders; that and her soft colors (pencils?) gives the whole thing a warm, personal, almost sketchbook feel.

Days of Sugar and Spice will not surprise you, but who comes to a Hallmark Romance for surprise? It tells its genre story skillfully and has a good, crabby, particular heroine in Rose: she's the kind of person the reader wants to see happy in the end, which is the whole point of the exercise.