Nothing Serious by P.G. Wodehouse

I am on a multi-year, vaguely serious plan to read "all" of P.G. Wodehouse, in the lovely little Overlook hardcovers. He wrote around a hundred books, so it'll take a while, but I've got fifty-two down now (counting this one) and eight more sitting on the shelf to be read. So I do need to track down some of the more obscure and rare books - which might mean shelling out more money than I feel like spending at the moment - but it's all doable.

(I had a somewhat different shelf of Overlook Wodehouse before my flood in 2011 - probably forty or so; no idea how distributed between read and unread - but I'm taking the current shelf as the master record, so I'll be done when I have all of them and have read them, whether that's for the first time or not.)

Some of those books spark interesting posts on this blog, since Wodehouse was a deeply entertaining and fun writer for around seventy years.

But some of them are collections of short stories, largely about golf, originally published in 1950, and my options are to give potted plot synopses of each story (boring for both of us) or a general airy overview (quick and easy for me; possibly dull and vague for you). I hope you realize which way I'm going, and will forgive me if it is dull and vague.

Nothing Serious collects ten stories originally published, if I can trust the dates on the copyright page, between 1939 and 1948. Some may also have been original to the book. It leads off with two stories of the Drones Club, follows that with five about golf narrated by the Oldest Member, and then ends with three odd stories, including one very odd one featuring Lord Emsworth selling encyclopedias in a Long Island suburb.

Wodehouse in short form tends to be concentrated: there's not as much room for complication, so it's mostly the pure young-love-thwarted plots, with one major obstacle thwarting that love which is then cleared by the end of the story. There's occasionally other plots - Emsworth sells encyclopedias, as I mentioned above, to help a young woman who is already married (and pregnant) build a nest egg - but assuming each story is going to be about this guy and the lady he loves is a solid strategy.

And these are good stories, with some fine Wodehouse prose, from the prime period of his career. There is rather a lot of golf in it; short Wodehouse seems to be about golf more often than most readers expect. (Did he write short stories for a golfing magazine? I've never dug into the question.) It's not part of any of his major series, and not famous: if you read Nothing Serious, you're, like me, deep into the Wodehouse Cult and looking for more to keep going. Luckily, as I noted, he did write about a hundred books, so you can keep going for quite a while.

John Cuneo's Good Intentions

John Cuneo is an illustrator: he's done a bunch of New Yorker covers, worked for Esquire, and so on. But, like any artist, there's work that he wants to do that doesn't fit into what clients want him to draw.

So he's had a series of books collecting his other work, over the past twenty years: nEuROTIC, Not Waving But Drawing, Coping Skills. And, just last year, most recently, John Cuneo's Good Intentions.

His style is familiar, and the older book titles vaguely so, but I can't prove I ever read any of them, or point to a specific time I saw a Cuneo illustration. (That's the curse of illustrators: they're hired to provide distinctive and visually interesting work entirely to support something else. Cuneo has done a bunch of celebrity caricatures, as seen on his site, which I expect originally accompanied various profiles.)

So this was probably the first time I saw a bunch of Cuneo work - and definitely so a bunch of work I knew was by Cuneo. Good Intentions collects eighty or so color drawings, in three themed chapters: In the Wild, In the Studio, and In the Home. More than half of the drawings are captioned, but they're not quite cartoons - the captions are wry, descriptive, allusive, narrative.

And, of course, most of the drawings are about sex, one way or another. (That's what "personal work" means for artists, isn't it?)

They're not sexy, though: Cuneo draws mostly lumpy, middle-aged people, with a few more pounds and wrinkles than they'd like, and his loose line and watercolors can give their skin a mottled look, too. His women tend to be slightly more attractive than his men: their faces are grotesque only occasionally, while men are caricatures around half the time. But there's a lot of flesh in this book: tits and ass and dick, often engaged in activities with other people. Again, it's not particularly attractive tits and ass and dick, so don't go here if that's what you're looking for. (You're on the internet: attractive tits and ass and dick are always only a click away, photographic, hand-drawn, or AI-generated.)

So this is an odd book. It's not quite funny - it's not trying to tell jokes. It's amusing, and quirky, and definitely making commentary about modern life and types of people and things like that. It's not unlike a book of cartoons; it's just not aiming for a laugh reaction. And it is quite polymorphously perverse, which could be a bonus or a detriment, depending on the reader.

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.

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.

Physics for Cats by Tom Gauld

Tom Gauld is one of our funniest cartoonists, and also comes off as one of our most erudite. He cartoons regularly both for The Guardian, about books and the literary world (most recently collected in Revenge of the Librarians) and for New Scientist, about, well, science and scientists.

The previous book of New Scientist cartoons was Department of Mind-Blowing Theories, about five years ago. Last fall saw a new one appear: that's Physics for Cats.

Like all of the books reprinting Gauld's series comics, it's in a smallish format, with each cartoon presented in color on one page. His work tends to be about the size of two daily comics stacked on top of each other - sometimes laid out as a single panel, sometimes in a sequence, sometimes in a more complex pattern - which means that page-size presents the work well. And the resulting package could sit nicely in a cardboard display next to the cash-wrap, for those who actually still shop in physical bookstores. (I did, and got this book in one, but it wasn't displayed that way. My frame of reference may still be, anachronistically, a mall chain bookstore from the mid-80s.)

Gauld's art is cartoony in a minimalist way - his people sometimes have faces (well, at least eyes) but, in the middle distance, they tend to turn into silhouettes. That also makes his style well-suited for icons and warning labels, of which we see quite a few in this book (Frost Giants, Haunted Tornado, Sentient Nano-Smog).

The cartoons here are all on scientific themes - particles and theories, labs and colleagues, grants and grant-seeking, academic conferences and meetings, and so on. They will be funnier the more you know about science in general, but they're not deeply hermetic: they're all for a general-science audience, not for any particular sub-specialty like forensic avian biology.

I've written about Gauld's work a number of times before, and am running out of adjectives and ways to praise his cartoons. Look: he makes funny work for smart people, OK? If you consider yourself a smart person, and haven't checked out Gauld yet, you really should.

Robots, Demons & Dayjobs by David Kantrowitz

I regularly read books of funny comics by creators I'm not familiar with. This is usually great - new funny stuff! new perspectives! potentially new favorites! - and there are lots of books out there by lots of funny people.

But then I come to write about them here, and I worry that I'm saying exactly the same thing each time: this is a newish book of funny stuff, by somebody I hadn't heard of previously, and it is funny, and you might want to check it out.

For example: Robots, Demons, and Dayjobs. It's a 2025 collection of comics by David Kantrowitz, who has worked for Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and other places - these nine things seem to be all personal work, and there's no sign they were published anywhere else first before this book. (Though they easily could have been.)

So it is a newish book of funny stuff, by someone I hadn't heard of previously, and it is funny, and you might want to check it out.

(See what I mean?)

Most of the pieces here are short stories in comics form - the Table of Contents entry "Twelve Single Panel Cartoons" being an obvious exception.

The first and last pieces are in a pseudo-storybook layout, with big blocks of typeset text, and tell stories about a character based on Kantrowitz - one about finding a big trash can full of trophies, and one about accidentally wearing a red shirt to Target (and the horrors that ensued).

But most of the book is in more normal comics-format, with various odd creatures - a skull-headed restaurateur, a log-limbed ball-bodied dude named Wizard Dinks, two hard-working monsters, a succession of overly polite robots - getting through their days however they can.

Kantrowitz has mostly worked in kids' media, I think: he has the sort of sensibility, art style, and concerns that you see in creators who have toiled on big corporate stuff for younger readers and are now doing more personal work. His art is expressive and mostly pretty crisp, though he varies his style quite a bit in these stories. The subject matter is not aimed at kids, but it's also not "adult" (in the sex & drugs sense), either - there's a feeling that he may be talking to adults more here than he's used to, but it's all accessible work, with a mostly broadly comic sensibility.

I will note that this book is not available in the usual hegemonic retailer that I typically provide links for. I linked above to the Hoopla library app, where I read it. (Your local library might include Hoopla access: if so, I greatly recommend it.) It's also available directly from the author. I didn't see an ISBN, so it may not be more widely available, but Kantrowitz is LA-based, so, if you're in that part of the world, you might see him at a show somewhere, selling these. Take a look.

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 1974, 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 Girl on the Boat by P.G. Wodehouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writings & Drawings by James Thurber

This is the fourth of four posts on the big '90s Writings & Drawings omnibus of James Thurber's work, assembled about thirty years ago by Garrison Keillor and containing mostly excerpts from the books Thurber published during his life. Because the book is a thousand pages long, I took it in chunks: first The Seal in the Bedroom and My Life and Hard Times (plus some other material), then The Last Flower (plus other material), and then The 13 Clocks (yes, plus some other material).

This home-stretch of Writings & Drawings covers almost three hundred pages and the 1950s, the last decade of Thurber's life. It has some new pieces from the mostly-reprint collections The Thurber Album and Thurber Country, the introduction from Thurber's Dogs, five pieces from Further Fables for Our Time, one from Alarms and Diversions, six chapters from his New Yorker memoir The Years with Ross, and a small collection of uncollected work from earlier in his career.

It's more Thurber, mostly, from the era when he had become a household name - the titles of his collections show that clearly - and when his eyesight had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer draw. Like a lot of successful writers late in their careers, there's a lot of looking back in these pieces - essays about his great-aunt and his mother; one titled "The First Time I Saw Paris," in the mode that a few dozen other American writers essayed in the first half of the 20th century; the whole book about Harold Ross, creator and first editor of The New Yorker - which are pleasant but not core Thurber, to my mind.

Otherwise, it is much of the same kind of thing. The Further Fables are in the same tone and manner as the first batch of fables a decade and a half earlier. There are a handful of Thurberesque amusements, including "File and Forget," one of those sequence-of-letters pieces in which the main character can't get out of an increasingly-unpleasant situation; "Do You Want to Make Something Out of It?," about a word-game played at parties with friends; and the literary-criticism-adjacent "A Final Note on Chanda Bell."

The uncollected pieces are all fairly short, but strong - there's a reworking of the Clement-Clark Moore "A Night Before Christmas" into pseudo-Hemingway, and a kidnappee-charms-the-kidnappers story, and a couple of bits of Thurberesque "I'm no good at everyday life" pieces, with one about broadcasting and one actually titled "I Break Everything I Touch."

Looking at the book as a whole, it is still an excellent, well-rounded introduction to Thurber, even after thirty years. My sense is that it contains maybe half of his total published work, maybe slightly less. But my sense is also that there are a lot of Thurber This and Thurber That books from the second half of his career that overlap quite a bit, and no Grand Unified Thurber to seek out with everything. So my recommendation is still roughly the same. If you think you want to read all of Thurber, or want something not quite as daunting, grab, say, The Thurber Carnival or maybe My Life and Hard Times. But if you want a big book with all the Thurber most people will ever need, this is the one.

Your Caption Has Been Selected by Lawrence Wood

This book is less official than I thought - not that that's a bad thing, but I should note it.

Lawrence Wood is the reigning champion of the New Yorker's weekly Cartoon Caption Contest - he's won eight times and been a finalist fifteen times, far above anyone else. Bob Mankoff is the founding editor of that contest, though he left the New Yorker a few years back. Wood, supported and introduced by Mankoff, wrote Your Caption Has Been Selected to explain what the contest is, how it works, and, most importantly, how entrants can maximize their chances of winning.

(The long and informative subtitle, as required by any nonfiction book, is "More Than Anyone Could Possibly Want to Know About The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest.")

Your Caption was published by St. Martin's Press in 2024, and is not officially endorsed or otherwise directly connected with The New Yorker, as a disclaimer on the copyright page states. But...it does reprint more than a hundred New Yorker "drawings," with and without captions, so old-publishing-hand me suspects there was some kind of underlying agreement, possibly brokered by Mankoff.

Obviously, the audience for Your Caption is made up almost entirely of people who are already well aware of the Cartoon Caption Contest, and probably enter it regularly. (I used to enter back in the early days, but fell off the wagon some years ago and have never quite remembered to start up again.) So the "what is it" portion of the book is short and somewhat perfunctory - and it's not that hard to explain, anyway. 

Here's my potted version: The New Yorker posts a "drawing" without a caption on Week One, and during that week collects reader-contributed captions for it, which are also up- and down-voted by readers and sorted by a semi-automated system. In Week Two, an august board of New Yorker worthies selects three finalists, which are presented for a final reader vote in Week Three. Week Four sees the winning caption published.

Wood uses about a hundred examples, including the first few annual versions of the Contest going back to 1999, to discuss, in concrete terms, what makes a good cartoon caption and what should be avoided. His lessons are generally pretty good ones: be short, address the elements of the cartoon (who is speaking, any incongruities, all the major oddities), avoid the obvious jokes that everyone else will think of, and put it into the best words for the idea possible. He has some more detailed rules, too, which are also good - don't take my thumbnail here as covering it all.

This is a fun book about cartoons, which delves more deeply into how and why single-panel cartoons are funny - and the ways in which they can attempt to be funny and fail - than a "normal" collection of cartoons. If you're the kind of person interested in theories of humor, this is a good choice. Or if you just want to see your name in The New Yorker and win a contest - it could be useful there, too.

Pigs Have Wings by P.G. Wodehouse

As the back-cover copy leads off by sublimely noting, it is pig-stealing time in Shropshire.

This is not the longest or the most complex of P.G. Wodehouse's novels set in and around Blandings Castle, and there's only one impostor, who is revealed fairly quickly. But it is the Blandings novel that sees two massive pigs stolen by the major competitors of that Fat Pigs competition at the Shropshire Agricultural Show, in either 1952 (the year the book was published) or the eternal, unspecified, Wodehouse year, where it is one part 1890s, one part 1920s, one minor part the decade it was written, and about five parts pure whimsy and invention.

Pigs Have Wings has some of Wodehouse's most inventive, fun writing - he several times pauses to talk about the details of writing the book, apologizing for not mentioning a particular character for a long time and noting at one point:

Stress was laid earlier in this narrative on the fact that the conscientious historian, when recording any given series of events, is not at liberty to wander off down byways, however attractive, but is compelled to keep plodding steadily along the dusty high road of his story, and this must now be emphasized again to explain why the chronicler does not at this point diverge from his tale to give a word for word transcript of Lord Emsworth's speech.

Every mature Wodehouse book is frivolous; the best of them turn that frivolousness into something  magnificent. This is one of those - it's also the book that features the line about the "unmistakable sound of a butler falling off a bicycle." [1] The plot is fun, but the language is even better.

You see, the Empress of Blandings has won that Fat Pig contest two years running. Lord Emsworth's great rival, Sir Gregory Parsloe, has imported a possibly even-fatter pig - in a shocking breach of ancient custom, though not actually against the rules - from Kent and named it the Queen of Matchingham. The contest is coming up swiftly, and the two pigs, each in her sty at the two stately houses a few miles apart, are snuffling up their recommended fifty-seven thousand and eight hundred calories a day, in a race to see who can get the fattest.

But everyone assumes Parsloe will cheat. And the current keeper of the Empress, a slightly wobbly pig-girl named Monica Simmons, is his niece, installed by the domineering Lady Constance, Lord Emsworth's sister, who is more interested in keeping good relations with the neighbors than with winning Fat Pig contests.

Of course, there's also a few young-love plots - as well as a not-quite-so-young-anymore love plot - to complicate things. And one impostor, in the person of one of those not-quite-so-young love interests, a former barmaid and current owner of a detective agency, hired to keep her presumably-beady eye on the Empress.

Eventually, both the Empress and the Queen are stolen, by forces from the other camp. And a pig is hidden in the kitchen of a villa, where a keen-eared pig-keeper - and a slightly less keen-eared local policeman - may hear its distinctive grunting.

This is a good first Wodehouse novel - it shows what he does well, isn't too long or too convoluted, and the series element is minor. (There's a fat pig, a dithering lord, and a couple of other bits of standard business - that's it.) The fact that it's a glittering, lovely delight makes it only that much better.

[1] As opposed to the unmistakable sound of a barmaid falling down stairs, which is from the Drones story "Tried in the Furnace."

The 13 Clocks by James Thurber

This is the third of what looks to be four posts on the big James Thurber Writings & Drawings volume from the Library of America. My reading rules and plans are a bit quirky: I keep track of books read, which (since every metric turns into a target, as marketers like me well know) means that I tend to prioritize both short books and discrete books. So when I wanted to read Writings & Drawings again, for the first time since the late '90s, the fact that it's mostly made up of excerpts from Thurber's various collections was annoying to me and threatened to mess up my carefully-organized system.

But! Thurber wrote a few short books, which were incorporated in toto into Writings & Drawings by the compiler, Garrison Keillor, and so I'm able to name the separate posts - and, more importantly, write down actual books finished in my reading notebook - after those books. So the first post was named after The Seal in the Bedroom and My Life and Hard Times, while the second was named after The Last Flower.

And this one, which will cover almost three hundred pages of miscellaneous Thurber, including excerpts from Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated, My World - And Welcome To It, Men, Women and Dogs, The Thurber Carnival, and The Beast in Me and Other Animals, is named after the short 1950 fable The 13 Clocks, which is at the end of that sequence of stuff.

This clump of Thurber covers the Forties, and it's largely similar to the selections I mentioned in my first two posts: autobiographical snippets pitched in the humorous mode, officially fictional sketches that are often very similar in tone and matter to the aforementioned, Thurber's quirky simple drawings, light satire of various things.

The first big group of pieces are from the 1940 collection Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated, which is made up of two kinds of pieces, exactly what the title promises. First we get twenty-eight fractured fables, of the kind that others have done since but none done better. Among them is the famous "The Unicorn in the Garden," and a handful of others that might seem vaguely familiar, either from actually reading them or just because others have "borrowed" Thurber's ideas since. Then there are four famous poems, in the heroic mode - three of them are "Excelsior," "Lochinvar," and "Barbara Frietchie" - made somewhat bathetic by Thurber's drawings.

My World - and Welcome To It has a clump of the usual Thurber pieces, including "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." There's also "You Could Look It Up," a baseball story in light dialect that's reasonably famous and somewhat outside of Thurber's usual narrow bounds. Like earlier collections, some - like "Mitty" - are pitched as fictional and others, like "The Macbeth Murder Mystery," are framed as stories from Thurber's life, but both styles have very similar tones and styles and plots.

Next up is Men, Women and Dogs, which opens with a big group of captioned cartoons and also includes my tag-defining "The War Between Men and Women" and one other piece. The Thurber Carnival (which I think was partially reprint anyway, way back in 1945) with two pieces and The Beast in Me and Other Animals with four come next. Of these, "The Princess and the Tin Box" is interesting as either a late addition to the Fables cluster or a precursor to 13 Clocks, and "A New Natural History" is another one of the distinctive Thurber pieces that combines writings and drawings - in this case, using a lot of jargon or technical words and drawing the odd creatures Thurber thought appropriate for those names.

Then comes The 13 Clocks, which I expect was originally aimed at younger readers. Thurber's old New Yorker buddy E.B. White had published Stuart Little in 1945, which I think was a success from the beginning, which may have inspired him. (Or, as I see from some digging, it could be that 13 Clocks was the fourth of Thurber's eventual five books for younger readers, all in the fairy-tale mode, the first of which was previous to Stuart. So that's a nice theory that doesn't fit the facts.) Clocks is another fractured fable, told at greater length and with more detail. Somewhere unspecified and medieval, there is an evil Duke, in whose castle dwells the beautiful Princess Saralinda. As is typical, princes appear regularly to ask for her hand; the Duke either just kills them (slicing them from zatch to guggle) if they break his many and quirky rules, or sets them to impossible tasks so they never return.

But one prince - Zorn of Zorna, disguised as a wandering minstrel named Xingu - arrives, and is aided by a magical person called the Golux, son of a witch and a wizard, and not a mere device, in a tag that's repeated several times without ever becoming entirely clear to this reader for all its punchy specificity. With the Golux's aid, Zorn wins the hand of the princess, restarts the titular clocks - stopped at ten minutes to five years before by the evil of the Duke - and generally sets things right in the world. As a fable, it's substantially less fractured than the short ones, for obvious reasons.

This is another good clump of Thurber work, including several of his most famous pieces, including "Mitty," the "War Between Men and Women" and 13 Clocks. I'm still recommending the overall Writings & Drawings as a great single-volume Thurber; if you want more, though, you will have to go to the individual books and dig through for the pieces Keillor left out of this one. So the question for a reader is: do you want one big thousand-page clump of Thurber, or do you think you'll want to read it all? If the latter, probably start with Thurber Carnival or something similar, and then chase after all of the other books individually.

Spring Fever by P.G. Wodehouse

I am still zipping through P.G. Wodehouse books, hitting another one every two months or so. He wrote about a hundred of the things, so I still have some runway, but my unread-Wodehouse shelf is dwindling, and it may be time to fill it back up soon.

This time, I have a just-post-war comedy (well, they're nearly all comedies, once you get out of the first decade of his long career) unrelated to any of his major series, about a peer who looks like a butler and wants to marry his cook, get out of his stately pile, and settle down running a pub. That's Spring Fever, from 1948.

It also felt like another Wodehouse book that could have been adapted from a stage play, but I find from Wikipedia - which I have no reason to disbelieve - that it was actually the other way around; Spring Fever was adapted into a play, which was not produced, which was then adapted into another novel, The Old Reliable, which I've actually read recently.

Holding up the juvenile romance end of the plot are two young American friends. First is Stanwood Cobbold, a beefy ex-college football player not overly endowed with brains, sent by his tycoon father to London to extricate him from his entanglement with the mercurial movie star Eileen Stoker, whom he wants to marry. His smarter friend is Mycroft "Mike" Cardinal, junior Hollywood agent who is himself deeply head-over-heels with Lady Theresa "Terry" Cobbold, third and nicest daughter of the Earl Lord Shortlands, called "Shorty" by Terry.

Shorty is the aforementioned peer who wants to marry his cook. He owns the stately pile Beevor, in Kent, and hates it. Mrs. Punter, that cook, wants to marry a man with two hundred pounds to invest in a London pub, so she can get out of service and into business for herself. She has some standards for who that man will be, but is willing to be somewhat flexible in her ends. Shorty, sadly, doesn't have two hundred pounds, which torments him. Worse, his rival in love is his own butler, the wily and scheming Mervyn Spink, whose success at betting threatens to give him the financial leg up in their competition.

Mostly in charge at Bevor is Shorty's domineering eldest daughter Lady Adela Topping, married to the rich American Desborough, whose money keeps the castle as solvent as it's possible for an English castle in 1948 to be. The middle daughter is Lady Claire; she doesn't do much in the book but is heading towards marriage with a well-off but deeply tedious playwright currently staying at Beevor.

Also important is Stanwood's man Augustus Robb, a reformed burglar and current teetotaler. 

The last major piece of the plot is a fantastically valuable stamp, discovered in an old album in Beevor and squabbled over by Shorty and Spink. As part of their machinations, the two young men arrive at Beevor as impostors: first Mike, pretending to be Stanwood (who wanted to stay in London to be with Eileen, filming a picture there), and then Stanwood, pretending to be someone who can vouch for Spink's claim to the stamp.

There's a fair bit of plotting among various factions to get the stamp and further their schemes, some running about, the usual severed-hearts stuff, a failed safebreaking and related drunk scene, and other usual Wodehouse bits. In the end, both young couples ride off into the sunset (or, rather, the registry office) to get married as quickly as possible. Shorty finds happiness in a slightly different way, which is not usual for Wodehouse - generally, if he sets up potential marriages at the beginning of the book, he ticks off every single one of them at the end.

It's all slightly quicker and tighter than it could possibly have been - one reason why I thought it might have been a play - with opportunities for additional comedy material (such as the stuffy playwright) left almost entirely as suggestions. In my mind, Spring Fever is a three-hundred-page novel that would have been better off about four hundred pages, with possibly the addition of a policeman, bringing Eileen onto stage at least once, and some actual thefts of the stamp for spice.

But the book Wodehouse actually wrote is just fine and quite entertaining in his best manner, so that's a pure quibble.

Hi, It's Me Again by Asher Perlman

I bemoan the sorry state of single-panel cartoons a lot here - because I like them, and because they used to be a massive tide rolling across popular culture, so there were many more of the things I liked, albeit mostly before I was born - so it's nice to be able to balance that out now and then.

Asher Perlman's first book of cartoons, covering a decade or so of toil and strife, was published last fall: Well, This Is Me. It was a best-seller, says the publisher, and I believe them. The reason I believe them is because they backed it up: they published what looks very much like a sequel to the first book just about exactly a year later, which is the time-honored model for a publisher that has found a good thing and wants it to continue as long as they possibly can.

The 2025 Asher Perlman collection is Hi, It's Me Again, featuring the same character (and a variation on the joke) from the cover of the first book. Again, "hey, this is a sequel!" is a reaction you aim for when the first thing did well, so I am happy for Perlman and for comics-in-book-form in general.

Like the first book, it has three new short page-formatted comic sections to organize it (Introduction, Interlude, Epilogue), all with the "real" Perlman taking to another character about his work, in the usual half self-deprecating, half self-aggrandizing manner appropriate for comedy.

In between are two big sections, transparently called Part One and Part Two, each with eighty or ninety single-panel cartoons. The whole book is just about two hundred pages long, so it has almost that many pages of Perlman art and gags.

The only remaining major regular outlet for single-panel cartoons is The New Yorker, and Perlman does appear regularly there. According to the copyright page, nine of the cartoons here first appeared in that magazine - it's possible that some of the others appeared elsewhere, but likely the vast majority of them are new to this book. (At least as far as the general public goes; my guess is that they were part of Perlman's weekly "batches" over the past who-knows-how-long, though potentially reworked or finished for this book.)

As always, it's difficult to say anything specific about a pile of nearly two hundred individual cartoons. Perlman has a fine modern cartoon style, with confident lines mostly of a single weight and various tones overlaid for texture and depth, and his ideas and punch lines are funny. (At least, I think so, and I'm the one reading the book.) A lot of people liked the first book; if you were one of them, this second book is more of the same stuff you already liked.

If you weren't one of them, well, a lot of people liked the first book, so the odds you'll like this one are solid - give it a try, won't you? Help keep single-panel cartoons alive; it's your civic duty.

And to Think We Started as a Book Club... by Tom Toro

This is a book of single-panel cartoons by Tom Toro, who is good and funny, and (TL; DR) if you like such things you might as well check it out. I'll go into slightly more depth below, but - as I've said here many times - there's not a lot that's coherent and reasonable to say about single-panel cartoons. (Incoherent ramblings, though - I could whip you up a lot of that, but I'll try not to.)

And to Think We Started as a Book Club... is the first collection of Toro's cartoons; he's been appearing in The New Yorker for about fifteen years, and (I hope) found some other markets to sell his cartoons to, as well. (There still are other markets for cartoons, right? We're not down to just one now that Playboy is dead?)

In the usual way of modern cartoon collections, it's divided into a bunch of very vague sections, all titled "The Book of" something and with a new Toro drawing to lead off the grouping. Those include Life, Love, Family, Work, Beasts, Tech, and Weird, which are of course the universally-known seven aspects of life.

Otherwise, it's just under two hundred pages long, with a Toro cartoon on each page - so about a hundred and ninety of them in all. His work has a softness to it; I think he works in washes or pencils of some kind, so it's all shades of grey. His linework is solid but unobtrusive - mostly medium-weight, but often essentially buried underneath the tones. His people are just a bit cartoony - again, soft and somewhat rumpled, with big open faces and dot eyes.

I find his jokes are less "New Yorker-y" than some of his contemporaries - there are pirates and Midwesterners as well as the urbanites starting at their screens and surprisingly articulate children. With its Seven Canonical Sections, Book Club covers a wide range of joke topics - though they're all single panels with captions, so the rhythm and style is consistent.

Again: I think this is funny, and I think Toro is one of the top talents working in this form today. So I do recommend it, if you like this kind of thing.

The Last Flower by James Thurber

This is the second of what will be four or five posts on the Library of America James Thurber Writings and Drawings volume. I'm reading it in chunks, since I'm not the man that can go straight through a thousand-page book these days, and most of those chunks are excerpts from the various books Thurber published, because LoA didn't want to put out a multi-volume complete Thurber for whatever reason (I'm guessing budget or space on the list or a sense of his importance; mostly likely a combination of all three).

The first post was titled after The Seal in the Bedroom and My Life and Hard Times. This one is slightly sillier, since I'm going to write about two hundred-odd pages of Thurber under the name of a short fabulistic drawn book from the eve of WWII. The Last Flower is available as a separate book, if you want it that way.

See that first post for more details on Thurber and the LoA book, if you care.

The clump I got to this time is from the late Thirties: extensive selections from the two collections The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze and Let Your Mind Alone!, and then Last Flower itself.

Middle-Aged Man is a mixture of fiction and non-fiction - or, rather, has a bunch of stories about mostly married couples, some of which are explicitly framed as reminiscences of Thurber, and some of which have characters described in the third person and given other names. They're all in the same tone and style, all in that Thurber voice, and they work well together as a collection. (I have no idea how much else was in the original book, or how similar it was; compiler Garrison Keillor edited out some unknown amount of material from all of these books to fit it into a single LoA volume.) There are a few autobiographical pieces that are not about men and women, too, I should mention. Particularly the famous "If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox," which many readers may have found in some anthology somewhere or other.

Let Your Mind Alone! is a somewhat more themed collection - the full title includes and Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces. Let Your Mind Alone! itself is a series of ten linked essays about a bunch of then-well-known pop-psychology books; Thurber returns to the same four or five writers repeatedly over the course of the series. All the books seem to be in the "how to be happy" mode, aimed at a relatively affluent, urban, educated audience - I'm pretty sure this series of essays was in The New Yorker originally; it's exactly that sort of audience - and Thurber takes a very dim view of all of their recommendations and ideas. It's amusing, but not particularly relevant, ninety years later - we've had at least a dozen different pop-psych phases since then, and this one is quite musty and unfamiliar, although the general outlines don't change all that much.

Also from Let Your Mind Alone! comes eight miscellaneous pieces - pretty much along the same lines as the ones in Middle-Aged Man, and equally amusing. These tend to skew more towards autobiography, though it also included one of Thurber's best-known man/woman stories, "The Breaking Up of the Winships."

And then The Last Flower was published in November of 1939, and apparently made very quickly just before that time: it could be seen as a very early graphic novel, telling its story with one big image to each page with a caption underneath. (The alternative interpretation is that it's a picture-book format, like so many books for children, only this one is for an adult audience.) It starts in the aftermath of "World War XII," which led to the collapse of civilization. Most of humanity is full of anomie and despair, for the usual fabulist unspecified period of time, but one young woman and one young man nurture the last flower in the world, which leads to the rebirth of civilization...and, then, inevitably, to the next world war, which reduces the world to only one man, one woman, and one flower.

I see that Last Flower is generally considered guardedly optimistic, even with its cyclical destruction. But I instead see escalation in it: WW XII destroys civilization but leaves a large number of people alive to go on; WW XIII kills all but two people. Clearly, to my pessimistic mind, the next cycle will finish the job entirely.

Thurber is a somewhat limited writer: he had a distinctive style and set of concerns (Last Flower is mostly outside of those, though, I should say) which he turned into a stream of amusing and thoughtful pieces for about thirty years. For most of us, a thousand pages of Thurber would be too much all at once, but two hundred pages or so - like I did this time - is a fine dose, and I recommend it.

The Mating Season by P.G. Wodehouse

You can think of The Mating Season as the finale of one of the greatest comedy trilogies of all time - it closely followed the wonderful Jeeves & Wooster novels The Code of the Woosters and Joy in the Morning, and the next time Jeeves appeared, it would be in the Wooster-less Ring for Jeeves.

It isn't, in any appreciable way, the end of a trilogy, mind you. But you can definitely think of it like that.

I just did, for example: quad erat demonstrandum.

And I have to immediately apologize, because reading a good Bertie Wooster novel puts the old grey matter into Bertie Wooster mode, and I start faffing off in all directions for no good reason.

The Mating Season was the new novel about Jeeves and Wooster in 1949, fifth of what would eventually be twelve novels (plus a passel of short stories, with four major collections and a scattering of others in miscellaneous books). That puts it towards the end of prime-period Wodehouse: he started writing at the turn of the century, got good at humor within a decade and magnificent sometime in the '20s, had a great run in the '30s and '40s that slowed in the '50s, and finished up with somewhat shorter, less complex books before he died, knighted and in his mid-nineties, in 1975. There are roughly a hundred Wodehouse books, just counting titles he published in his lifetime; if you include repackagings and similar things, the total is even higher.

But this is one of the best ones, even with the caveat that all of the Jeeves stories are good - oh, Aunts Aren't Gentlemen (the last novel finished by Wodehouse in his life, published in 1974) isn't where I'd recommend starting, but it's just fine about mid-way through. Mating Season, similarly, I'd put a few books in - it builds on the earlier novels, and works better if you know some of the characters already.

Wodehouse worked with a number of common situations and plot devices, something like a formal banquet at a big country-house, so that the broad outlines would be similar but the details and recomplications are specific to the particular book. So this one has Madeleine Basset in it - she's always one of my favorites; so soppy - but mostly at a distance, and only showing up for one major scene. 

Someone has probably developed a schema for all of those Wodehouseian elements, but I haven't seen it. Mating Season is the one where Bertie Wooster, our narrator and hero, is visiting Deverill Hall pretending to be the noted orange-juice drinker and newt fancier Gussie Fink-Nottle, who is also present, pretending to be him. 

(The copy I read this time was missing roughly a signature - probably a binding error, since there's no gap in the pages - and it came right at the point where this switcheroo was explained. I vaguely remembered it from the last time I read Mating Season, and hummed over the rest.)

Along the way, there are four pairs of hearts who are sundered at least once during the narrative and need to be reunited, not least because one of them (the aforementioned soppy Miss Bassett) will attach herself to Bertie if he's not careful. And the reuniting, as always, falls to Bertie, with support from Jeeves.

Anyway, this is a Jeeves and Wooster novel: it's set mostly in a country house, there are impostors, and Bertie sums up the sundered and reunited hearts at the end to put a bow on up the proceedings. Jeeves is absent much of the time, meaning his counsel is not available at important moments and things can go wrong in amusing ways for a while. I still think Joy in the Morning is the absolute best Jeeves novel, but this one has a lot of great material - Wodehouse's writing is particularly amusing and sprightly here, with a lot of good lines in that goofy, slightly confused Bertie voice.

Life of Vice by Robin Enrico

I'm pretty sure this is a sidebar. Not that that's a bad thing, just a thing to note.

As far as I can tell Robin Enrico's main series was Jam in the Band, about an all-female rock band - that was collected in 2017. Somewhere in the middle of that big series, he also did a three-issue sidebar story about a secondary character, Becky Vice.

And that was collected in 2018 as Life of Vice, which I just read.

Enrico has a cartoony style, full of confident fat black lines - lots of straight lines, lots of big gestures, characters mostly looking fairly flat and facing forward - talking to the reader even when they're in dialogue with each other. He also does a dialogue thing I haven't seen before: one character's question will be in a normal balloon, but the reply will be lettered large across the background, almost like a sound effect - looks like it's usually something said louder and more enthusiastically than normal, but it also sometimes seems to be internal dialogue, like a thought bubble.

The plot is fairly minimal: reporter Shelby Ambrose (the one with glasses on the cover) tags along with rock star Becky Vice on a trip to Las Vegas, where Vice is hosting the American Pornography Awards. Ambrose is writing for Rocking Roll magazine, whose title Enrico draws so stylized I first thought it was called R.King R.11, and thought it was some weirdo indy downtown thing, and wondered how they had the budget to send a reporter on a major trip like this.

They drive through the desert, stay in a hotel room together, attend the awards ceremony, and go to a big wrestling event the next night where Vice's ex is competing for the title. But, mostly, they talk - about Vice's life, about her various professional activities (music, early sex work, a sidebar career as a sex-advice columnist), about both of their sex lives, and so on. 

The story was originally a three-issue series, and each issue is one day - with a two-page intro for the day before, to set it all up. It's one semi-crazy weekend in Vegas, and the two characters do drink a lot, but otherwise don't do any of the traditional crazy Vegas stuff (no illegal substances, no hookups regrettable or otherwise, no gambling, no run-ins with mobsters, etc.)

So Life of Vice came across to me as cozier and more intimate than I expected from a "reporter spends a crazy weekend at the Porn Awards with a wild child rock star" - it's mostly about dialogue, how these two characters relate to each other. Or, maybe more so, how Ambrose is getting stories out of Vice to write this article - though Ambrose comes across as young, maybe a bit naïve, and mostly along for the ride, just letting Vice talk about whatever she wants and getting it all down on paper.

Last Kiss: Casual Fridays by John Lustig

I felt lazy yesterday, and wanted a book I could read quickly and then write something quickly here. I may have been too lazy, if that's possible. (I have my doubts.)

So I read John Lustig's Last Kiss: Casual Fridays. It's a short, digital-only collection of that strip from 2013 - much like Sex Day, which I read a couple of months ago. In fact, go see that earlier post for all the details of what Last Kiss is and how it works, if you're interested. The short version is: Lustig takes panels from mostly '50s romance comics, cleans them up and has them recolored in a modern style (I think by someone else), then adds snarky new captions. So it's a single-panel comic but entirely out of repurposed artwork, a quirky hybrid of Roy Lichtenstein and Wondermark.

As you can guess from the title of the other book and the cover of this one, the jokes are often directly sexual, but Lustig leans into other clichés as well - there's a big cluster of "women hate cooking" jokes in this book, for example. Since these are all single panels, the jokes need to be quick and tight - not a lot of room for nuance or wordplay.

I got this book - and the previous one before it - from my library app, which is how I'd recommend reading them; they may also be available from the subscription end of Kindle or other similar outlets. There is a retail price, if you're thinking about "owning" it, but, as a 68-page book, it's a higher per-page cost than I'd be comfortable with.

Smoking Kills by Thijs Desmet

Comedy duos have to be contrasts - the wacky one and the one that tries to keep it together, for example. The optimist and the pessimist. It doesn't have to be a gag man and a straight man, but that's pretty common.

Thijs Desmet's collection of linked comics stories Smoking Kills is about two characters in some kind of afterlife. Ghost is depressive, grumpy, dismissive - spending his time smoking and drinking. Skeleton is lighter, happier, questioning everything and looking for a way out or something new to do. This isn't a straight comedy, but they fall into those patterns - these are stories about two characters, so it's how they bounce off each other, annoy each other, contrast with each other.

Skeleton seems new to this environment - they meet when he walks up to Ghost on a train platform, sits down, and starts talking. Ghost tells him that both of them are dead: Skeleton either actually doesn't believe it or really strongly pretends not to. That sets the pattern for most of their interactions: Skeleton is active, interested, inquisitive, looking to know why and to do things, to find a way out of this world or more people or just explanations.

Ghost wants to be left alone to drink and smoke.

They wander through this mostly empty world, doing what they can where they are in their own ways. The landscape is lightly urban or near-suburban, with playgrounds and woods and standalone houses - Skeleton and Ghost live together in a small house later in the book - all empty of real people, because, as Ghost says, they're dead and in the afterlife.

It's not quite that simple, though. When Ghost smashes a bunch of bottles in a grocery store, there's a commotion nearby, and they run away. They interact with a group of children telling stories around a midnight fire towards the end of the book. So Desmet is presenting this in a somewhat traditional way: they are haunting the real world, on the same streets and buildings as living people, but are separated, in a different version of that world, most of the time.

It's not laugh-out-loud funny; it's not aiming to be. It is amusing and light, most of the time, though Desmet's usually straightforward, jammed-together panels (with only thin black ruled lines separating them) occasionally iris out to larger visions, especially in a tour de force section where Ghost talks about how the universe works. It raises more questions than it answers - I don't know if that means Desmet is planning more stories with these characters (this book was originally published in Dutch in 2018; this English edition, translated by the author and Ria Schulpen, came out last year), but I hope so. Or that Desmet does something else that gets translated into English: this is interesting and distinctive and specific, and I want to see more comics like that.