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.

The Pass by Katriona Chapman

Mea culpa: I put off reading this book for several months because I thought it would be heavy, wordy, "serious." It is not. Creator Katriona Chapman tells her story swiftly, lovingly, on full-bleed pages of softly painted color, and both shows rather than tells and has a positive story to present.

The reader does need to figure some details of that story out. Though, if you're paying close attention, the very first page, right before the title, gives it all away.

The Pass is about Claudia, a young chef in London. Her father ran a famous restaurant for years, so she grew up in the business - and she has a lot of expectations and demands related to that. (Mostly from her parents, who I think mean well but are sure they know best in every situation and are endlessly willing to give their advice increasingly forcefully until Claudia does what they say.)

She's a few years out of culinary school, and opened a restaurant, Alley, with her best friend from school, Lisa. We don't know the exact business arrangement, but it seems like they started out as partners but somehow - Lisa has a young child and a partner with medical issues; Claudia is focused entirely on the restaurant and her parents provided the seed money - Claudia is "chef" and Lisa is very much in a support role. The third major player is Ben, the bartender - he does a lot of the host's role in the dining room (calming unhappy customers, in particular) and is as inventive in his drinks as Claudia is with the food.

Alley seems to be fine dining but not fussy: the kind of restaurant that's been popular, especially in big cities, over the past decade or two. Claudia goes to the fish market early in the morning, obsesses about presentation, makes new dishes regularly: that kind of thing. It seems to be consistently busy, and making money - popular at least in the neighborhood, with a growing larger reputation.

And the big Pro Chef of the Year competition is coming up; a major food writer who visits Alley encourages Claudia to enter, and we think she's probably hearing the same thing from others as well.

Meanwhile, there are other stresses  - the bookkeeper for the restaurant, Lisa's brother Jack, is not particularly communicative; all three principals have complicated relationships with their families; and just the day-to-day of running a restaurant is grinding and demanding.

The Pass covers close to a year in the life of Alley, starting with the day before Christmas. We follow all of the main characters as they live their separate lives and come together at Alley, but Claudia is at the center of it. Chapman never directly tells us any of her thoughts. Instead we see her live through all of this, navigate it as best she can, until we start to wonder, along with her, if this is really what she wants. In the end, The Pass is about a decision Claudia makes - a decision hinted at by the title.

There's a lot of depth here, a lot of carefully-observed life, and a fairly large cast all seen honestly. Even Claudia's parents, in their domineering know-it-all-ness, are doing what they are sure is right, and trying to be helpful. And it's all presented lovingly on comics pages that tell this story unfussily, as much through gesture and things left unsaid as in its major scenes.

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Spidermania by Doug Savage

First of all: I checked multiple times, because I keep expecting that title to have an exclamation point. But it does not, and that slightly disappoints me.

That might be the only criticism I have of this book, so I'm putting it up front.

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Spidermania is the fifth and most recent book in this middle-grade graphic-novel series, written and drawn by Doug Savage, who more adult readers might know from his online comic Savage Chickens.

Laser Moose is, yes, a moose who shoots lasers from his eyes (when he wants to) and Rabbit Boy is his best friend, a happy and slightly more reality-based fellow without any superpowers. They've previously appeared in the books Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy, Disco Fever, Time Trout, and As the Deer Flies.

They have adventures, generally of the kind involving animal supervillains - well, animals with strange and unusual powers, but not necessarily bwah-ha-ha evil except for the villainous Cyborgupine - in their forest home. They have a supporting cast with a few named characters - Frank the deer, Doc the raccoon, Gus the wolf - and many more squirrels and eagles and other folks who fill out the crowd scenes. The tone is just a couple of clicks towards goofy: the danger is treated as actual danger, but these are the kind of books where we know everything will turn out right in the end. And our heroes have a somewhat different perspective on everything, being North American forest animals, than their readers do.

(There has been some light ecological content, especially in the end-of-book educational exercises Savage includes - mostly along the lines of "the McGuffin here is a weirdly polluting thing from those humans, who are always causing trouble.")

So this time out we start with Cyborgupine being chased by an ominous spider, and then crashing a party at Doc's house, to celebrate Frank getting the casts off his legs this time. (A running joke is that Laser Moose keeps cutting off Frank's legs or otherwise injuring him, and Doc has to keep stitching him up.) Laser Moose is a bit sad, because he doesn't like parties: he'd prefer to be a "lone wolf," which concept Rabbit Boy has been quizzing him about.

Cyborgupine arrives, with an important piece of paper and saying the usual vague and portentous things, before his eyes turn purple, he starts spitting spider webs, and will only say "We are spider." In best zombie-movie fashion, he starts biting party-goers, who in turn also get purple eyes and declare themselves to be spider.

Our heroes flee, grabbing the paper, and head to Cyborgupine's VW microbus HQ. There, they learn that one of Cy's "father's" (a human scientist who had a lot of weird experiments, one of which produced Cyborgupine and several of which caused the plots of the previous books) notebooks details a plan to create a hive-mind among various animals. That's what happened: there's one spider who was mind-enhanced, and now can control anyone she bites, or who they bite.

The paper is a map to the spider's lair, and so they head there, hoping to figure out a way to stop the ever-increasing spider hordes. They do, in the end, without killing the spider or squishing the eggs she thinks she's protecting. And everyone, of course, goes back to normal.

At the end, there's a short piece with Savage-as-himself talking about his fear of spiders, and how, during the creation of this book, he went through a desensitization process to lessen that fear, culminating in an encounter with a giant tarantula.

Again: these are silly, irreverent adventure stories with zippy dialogue and crisp cartooning for an audience of pre-teens. I find that kind of book a lot of fun when done well, and Savage does them very well. Calibrate your expectations accordingly.

The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson

I saw the movie made from this book long before I actually read it. And I've read several other books by journalist Jon Ronson before getting to this one, finding him usually breezy and amusing but not always bringing as much depth as I might want. (See Them in particular, and also somewhat The Psychopath Test.)

So I wanted to see if the book The Men Who Stare at Goats was much like the movie, or like Ronson's other books. It was published in late 2004, and it's very much an Iraq-War-era book, a look at a particular wild-hair strain of thinking within the US military-industrial complex, which strain had become somewhat more relevant and visible at that point because the US MIC was flush with cash and taken off its leash and urged to Do Anything that would help in its not-particularly-well-defined mission to Make The World Safe For Americans Again.

The premise of Stare at Goats is: there's a group of US soldiers who have tried to use various psychic or paranormal powers, vaguely centered on Fort Bragg and led in the early Reagan years by a guy named General Stubblebine. Ronson talked to Stubblebine, and then to others that he found, to see what those psychic powers might be, if they were real, and what weird things this bunch of soldiers got up to.

Like Ronson's other books, it's very much a "I talked to This Guy, and this is what he said" book. I think Ronson is of the "don't question a good story" school of journalism, rather than the "if your mother says she loves you, check it out" school. That means there is a lot of material here where Ronson is presenting it somewhat skeptically, or at least wanting the reader to believe that he's not accepting it whole-heartedly, while still presenting the crazy idea, because it's zippy and fun and that's the material he has for this book. What I'm saying is: Stare at Goats would either be a lot shorter (leaving out everything dubious) or a lot longer (explaining why it's dubious) if Ronson had spent any substantial time in fact-checking.

Instead, this is full of those stories that are too good to question, which readers should believe exactly as much as they believe in similar stories. Ron's narrative does intersect with proven, journalistic history multiple times - a CIA agent's mysterious death in 1953, some verified details of interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib, the Heaven's Gate death-cult, and other places - so those are clear facts.

But it also has several retired military leaders who solemnly tell Ronson that they personally witnessed someone stare a goat to death - well, OK, maybe it was a hamster, but still! - that by thinking really hard it's possible to walk through walls, and other patently stupid ideas. Many of those are Vietnam-era guys, and Ronson does note that war as a source of trauma for individuals and the larger US armed forces, so maybe that's his excuse for how delusional so many of them are.

Stare at Goats is a meandering, discursive book. Ronson picks up successive threads, gets told fantastic things by people with axes to grind, does not make any serious efforts to prove those things actually happened, follows up some minor leads until the trail inevitably quickly grows cold, and then moves on to another old military hand with a somewhat different nutty story. There's a vague through-line with Colonel Jim Shannon and his '70s-era manifesto about the First Earth Battalion, a catalog of a whole lot of those nutty ideas that others later developed (or didn't), but Ronson also drops back late in the book to hit MK-ULTRA, the CIA program in the '50s and '60s that dosed scientists with LSD and did other, equally useful and deeply scientific things.

And the lens for every section is whatever guy Ronson talked to: this is the collective story of a bunch of self-aggrandizing folks, many of whom were at the time (just post-911, early Iraq War, when the military contracts were flowing like the oil would be at Rumaila once the fires were put out) trying to get lucrative government contracts to do whatever they claimed they could do and who used Ronson as a way to publicize their amazing powers.

It's a vague, incomplete, and confusingly organized catalog of various "unconventional warfare" ideas that various aspects of the US military and related agencies had in the fifty or so years up to 2004, without any attempt to put any of it into serious historical context, get comments from any then-current government people, or fact-check it. On the other hand, it is funny throughout, it features some absolutely fascinating oddball characters, and there are more than a few actual facts within it for careful readers. And anyone inclined to think large militaries are full of idiots who make bad decisions for venial and self-serving reasons will find much to love.

(The movie turned some this material into a fictionalized, and, as I recall, somewhat more straightforward narrative, in which at least a few of the unconventional warfare tricks actually worked and there was something of a thriller plot in Iraq.)

Murder Book by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell

Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell has one of those modern gig-style careers where she does multiple things (I presume to get something vaguely like the life the previous generation had with A Job that they kept for decades). She does burlesque and stand-up comedy, illustrates books for other people, cartoons for The New Yorker and elsewhere, makes documentaries - and has done two book-length comics memoirs about specific aspects of her life and family.

I read the second one, The Joy of Snacking, soon after publication a few months back. It's a dense, fun, amusing and deep look at a woman who has certain very specific issues with food and made that into both a great story and a thoughtful exploration of the world she lives in.

So I figured I had to go back to her first book. Murder Book was published in 2021, and it's just as dense, thoughtful, personal, funny and insightful as Snacking. Both could be reduced to clichés about modern women - Snacking is the "nothing for me; I'll just pick" book, and Murder is the "why are so many women obsessed with true crime podcasts?" one.

Campbell's remit is wider than podcasts, though: she's low-key obsessed with true crime in general, books and movies and streaming TV (and the wider world of ripped-from-the-headlines but not-quite-true crime, like Law & Order) as well as podcasts, and she has several friends and family members (one sister and their mother in particular) just as obsessed as she is. She's honest about the genre: the template true crime story is about the mysterious death of an attractive (young, white, more often than not blonde) woman, and how, usually, Some Man is found to be responsible and brought to justice. 

Murder Book is organized roughly into chapters - she has full-page white-text-on-black headers to introduce sections, but they're not titled like chapters, and the narrative flows conversationally throughout - with an introduction and then sections on the various different types of true crime and true-crime-adjacent media (movies, books, TV like 48 Hours, TV like Law & Order, streaming shows, podcasts, and so on), plus a few more about her family's history with true crime (she traces the obsession back to her mother's mother's mother, which is pretty impressive and/or worrying).

Along the way, she retells some of her "favorite" murder stories - the Zodiac killer and Ted Bundy have long sections, among others - mostly through the lens of how she heard the story and engaged with it. Campbell grew up in northern California in the '90s, and compares that with her mother's life, in San Francisco and nearby, during the serial-killer-soaked '70s: both of them felt like death and murder were everywhere around them, though it was probably more true for her mother than the more media-influenced Campbell.

Like Snacking, this is conversational and funny, with long back-and-forth dialogue and extensive narrative captions: Campbell is telling this story, and it's in her voice throughout. Her art is cartoony, with dot eyes and mostly simple figures. Her pages have panels jammed up right against each other without gutters, and tiers that don't always line up, to keep that headlong, energetic, "I'm going-to-tell-you-everything-I-can-think-of" style.

Campbell does get into the "why do women love true crime so much" question, dipping back into it a couple of times during the book, and tends to come down on the worry/fascination side. True crime is about the deaths of women, so women look at it, think "that could be me," and want to know more. Campbell, as a stand-up comedian, joked that she loved true crime so much she wanted to be a murder victim - but she mostly thinks it's the other way, that women consume so much true crime to learn all of the tricks and keep themselves alive.

It's a big book, and a dense one. It might have more about murder than many people want at once - but, clearly, there is a huge audience for murder, so I don't think that's a major problem.

And Campbell has a lot of fun with it. It's weird to say a book so much about murder is breezy, fun, and amusing, but Murder Book definitely is. It's a passionate observer's guide to true-crime media, combined with her personal history, and still recent enough that it's fairly up-to-date. I'm not personally obsessed with true crime - I'm a man; I think men worry more on the other side of that equation - but Murder Book is a fascinating deep dive into the mostly women who are obsessed with true crime stories, what they find in it, and what it means to them.

Platform Decay by Martha Wells

I'm not going to list all of them, or explain which are novellas (the first few, mostly) and which are novels (short novels, mostly the last few), but this is the new book in Martha Wells' excellent Murderbot series, and note that you've probably heard of them, if you've been paying any attention to SF in the past decade.

Instead, for Platform Decay, what I want to talk about is voice. Murderbot - who doesn't use that name at all in this book, by the way - is a bioengineered sapient construct officially called a SecUnit, basically a productized corporate-security mook, one of what may be thousands or millions of similar units across this medium-future galaxy. This unit, though, hacked its governor module, for good and sufficient reasons we learned in previous books, and is now a fully autonomous and self-directed individual...that calls itself Murderbot in its own head, also for good and sufficient reasons.

Murderbot narrates all of the books in the series, in a direct, colloquial, stream-of-consciousness style that is immediately compelling and must be tough for Wells to pull off so seamlessly and gracefully. Everything we know about this universe comes to us through the lens of what you could semi-reasonably call a slacker killer robot - a person who is not human, who doesn't like humans all that much, no longer has to obey them, and wants to be left alone to watch media most of the time.

(I don't know if I've made the direct connection before, but Murderbot's voice reminds me a bit of John Sladek's Tik-Tok in its tone and repressed anger at humanity - and obviously comes as the latest in a very long line of killer robots in SF.)

Like a lot of voice-driven books, Platform Decay is tightly constructed in ways that I don't know if most readers notice. Murderbot books tend to begin in medias res, run through one specific complex situation, and end immediately when the danger is past - and that's what happens here, as well. There have been glimpses of Murderbot in less-fraught moments, during the course of the series, but that's the standard: what is it like to be in Murderbot's head during what I might as well call a mission.

For example, about halfway through this particular escapade, Murderbot encountered, well, pirates, who were looking to rob or do worse things to the unwary humans they captured, but were not at all prepared to face an annoyed Murderbot. On pp.130-131:

I really wanted to kill them but they were so whiney and screamy, it was hard to get started. I don't like helpless humans in my media, but in reality, it's... Provoking them hadn't worked so I tried to be encouraging. "Maybe if you all run at me at once you could kill me."

Target 4 looked tempted, but the others all shook their heads rapidly, 3 sobbed louder, and 5 whimpered.

Great.

Being good at violence - and, more subtly, in control of dangerous situations where violence is likely - is one of Murderbot's core competencies. Or, I should say, the competencies Murderbot wants to emphasize and think about and focus on, the parts of its skill-set that it's most comfortable with. (There's a reason it named itself Murderbot.)

More complexly, since we experience all the events in these books via Murderbot's POV, the telling of those events features a lot of cascading and intersecting thoughts - and, often, notes from semi-separate processes, since Murderbot is not a normal organic human, but a created and hacked and self-modified mind - which Wells often uses parentheses to set off and encapsulate. This is funny and insightful and piercing - and, I'm sure, fiendishly difficult to get to work this quickly and precisely (p.157):

I needed a plan, too. Option (1) I could tell Farai that Leonide's family were all dead.

It was safer, it was sensible. My job was keeping my clients safe.

(Emotion check: Then why does it feel so awful.)

Option (2) I could tell Farai they were all dead and alter my memory structure so I believed it was true.

Risk assessment just hit the roof.

I'm not sure I like having risk assessment be more accurate. It keeps scaring the shit out of me. I knew doing something basically terrible and then lying to myself about it by altering my memory archive would change me, not in a good way... Yeah, when you put it like that, it seems really obvious.

Reading Platform Decay, I was struck by just how much work Wells was doing in few words, in this short book. Every line is precise, even descriptions are filtered through what Murderbot sees (dangers, human fripperies it thinks are pointless) and what they could imply (where hostiles could be hiding, where it can send its own drones to scout things out) and how it feels about everything.

Because Murderbot is close to an open nerve, even eight books into the series. It's not comfortable being a mind that has emotions - in this book, it's built in that "emotion check" I quoted above, to flag those thoughts. Murderbot doesn't like the emotion check, that's clear: but it needs it; it needs to be able to understand its own emotions, to live with them, to regulate them.

Like any of us.

Murderbot has only had emotions and self-will for a few years at this point - it thinks sometimes unkind thoughts about "human juveniles" in this book, but it's basically a juvenile itself, still working towards emotional regulation and integration. I don't know if this series will last long enough for Murderbot to get there - and, in a way, I hope not - but that's the arc. That's what we're seeing, over the course of the series: a new mind exploring the world and its own feelings, trying to do right when what it really wants to do is sit in a corner and binge Sanctuary Moon for twenty hours.

And what actually happens in this book? It opens with Murderbot, along with its compatriot Three, another self-hacked SecUnit, sneaking onto a torus - a gigantic human-built station that completely encircles a world and contains many separate, individually-controlled sections within it. Several of what Murderbot calls "its humans" are held hostage there, by Supervisor Leonide of the unpleasant Barish-Estranza corporation, and Murderbot is going to find them, extract them from their situation, get them across the torus to a port, and leave there with Three's help.

That's what happens, more or less, though there's a lot of complications along the way. But that's the joy of reading it.

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.

Foundling Fathers by Meg Elison

They say that one of the best compliments you can give to a book is the wish that it was longer.

Well, I think Foundling Fathers is a great prologue to the book I was waiting to read, but it just sketches out what I'd expected to be the meat of the story. So what's here is pretty darn good, but I was surprised that author Meg Elison framed it up the way she did.

We open with four young men, living on a remote island in what they think is 1750: Ben Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. Franklin is the oldest, maybe twenty, and Adams the youngest, around four years younger. They think they are brothers, that their father was a towering, important figure, now sadly dead - though none of them remember him at all, and he was not around even in Franklin's earliest memories. They are being tutored to be leaders and masters of the world, told that they will inherit vast, separate fortunes.

They are all smart and driven: smart enough to see holes in the story they have been told and willful enough to push hard against boundaries. (Tom has just impregnated a "servant" for the second time as the novel opens.) So when Ben finds an iPhone in the privy, it both answers some questions they already had and raises vast numbers of new questions.

The reader already knows, from the back cover if nowhere else, that it is the current day, and the boys are being fed a diet of lies. They are clones of their famous namesakes - how the genetic material for such clones was obtained, or how their upbringing would make them exactly the same as those progenitors is not explained in this short novel - created by a organization of rich libertarian nutbars, the Antediluvian Society, who expect to reveal these four young men to the world, have them clearly be better and smarter and more moral people than modern politicians, something something collect the underpants, and then use these four men to take over the government of the US and rule it the way they want to.

(We can all see half a dozen fatal flaws in that plan, but that's the point: they are delusional right-wing billionaires, so of course their plans are stupid, poorly defined, and overly ambitious. They are the kind of people who think having a lot of money solves every problem, because it has solved every problem they've had so far.)

The boys' handlers - their "mother" (she did bear them, and has been raising them, but has no biological connection to them) and their tutor and the doctor who visits occasionally - start to think something is going wrong as the boys ask some odd questions later that day. They start to worry that the secret has slipped out. There's some squabbling among them: they are not all equally on board with all Antediluvian Society plans, and it doesn't go the way any of them expect, anyway.

This remote island is just a few miles off the Virginia coast. (That the boys saw airplanes a few times in earlier years is a plot point, though I'm not sure how they can have avoided seeing them all the time that close to such a crowded bit of airspace.) As we might expect from a scheme created by libertarian assholes with government connections, the "servants" are all some degree of criminals or political prisoners or the kind of people the Society would call "illegals," renditioned to the island and allowed to work there as long as they stay on good behavior. The servants revolt right about the moment the boys are about to have their own revolt, there is a confused firefight in the night, and the four boys get to the mainland and learn the truth.

At which point we get a few quick scenes of what each one of them does in the immediate aftermath, and the novel ends.

I obviously saw how few pages were left, so maybe I hoped there would be a sequel hook. But it feels like the fun part of this premise would be these four young men interacting with the modern world, each in his own way, each one failing to live up to Antediluvian Society expectations in entirely different ways. (Elison also has a couple of scenes at the end with the Society to show that these four boys were not their only plan, and the other plans are possibly even nuttier - and equally something I would have loved to see spin out at greater length.)

Elison, though, seems to both want to have her four protagonists be smart and capable - somewhat accepting the Society premise that they are "special" - while still insisting that they're absolutely normal, average people and that the myth of the Godlike White Men Founders of the 18th century is stupid and counterproductive. She also has the Society let them go with essentially no repercussions; the boys seem to actually get their promised fortunes. I find it hard to believe the kind of assholish billionaires she depicts would do anything of the sort: they are vindictive and deluded and enamored of their own special brilliance, so I'd expect anything from cruel, targeted legal actions through attempts to recapture the young men for intensive "re-education" all the way up to assassination teams.

What's here is good, but there's a lot less here than I expected. This is basically the story of the day these boys discovered everything they were told about the world was wrong, with nothing before that day and only a quick sketch of what happens afterward. Perhaps if it makes a big splash, Elison will be forced by the allure of lucre to expand on the ending: that's where I end up.

Drew Friedman's Chosen People

Can reading a book be an experiment? I thought of this one that way, but that may just be me being precious about something minor.

I've read previous books of Drew Friedman's art digitally, on my old tablet - a ten-year-old jobbie, 9.7 inches I think - and noted that the art was smaller than the real-world book size, so I didn't recommend that. (See my post on Heroes of the Comics in particular; the other relevant Friedman books are All the Presidents, Schtick Figures, and Maverix and Lunatix.)

But I had a birthday recently, and got myself a newer, fancier, bigger tablet. (I'm still getting used to holding it, since it seems to be approximately the size of a coffee table - they say it's 13 inches but it feels larger than that.) And I'm seeing how digital comics look on this new screen: so far, better and clearer, not just larger.

And so I read the 2017 collection of portraits Drew Friedman's Chosen People, and, I have to say, it looks just fine on a big tablet. This slab of metal and glass is close to the size of the real-world book, so the experience is close to the same. If you have a big-ass tablet, as I do now, even large-format books of art and comics look pretty good there.

And I'm glad I had that consumer note to give you because, otherwise, what's there to say about this book? It collects at least a decade of mostly editorial illustrations by Friedman, and is entirely miscellaneous. Friedman has put out some books that were specific projects, with pictures of people with some connection to each other, like Presidents and the Old Jewish Comedians books and the ones of comics-makers, but he also has done books that collect the other stuff he does that pays the bills, like this and Schtick Figures.

There is a section of potted bios in the back to explain who the people are. You might think that would not be difficult, since each page has the person's name, but Friedman often draws very obscure people, either because they intersect with his hobbies and loves (Forrest J. Ackerman, Max Asnas, Richard Deacon, Friedman's own father, grandfather, and brother) or for reasons that cannot be discerned from the book (e.g., Franklin Longbone and Carl P. Sodiwater, both of whom I vaguely suspect of being fictional).

The main section of the book has 117 full-page pictures. The front matter adds an additional picture of Shemp (there are two more later), plus Al Lewis, Friedman's wife Kathy, introducer Merrill Markoe, and Alex Gard, something of an inspiration for the whole project. In the back is a self-portrait with Friedman's bio and a nine-panel grid of a group of people in front of the American flag, which is not explained in any way. (The front cover is Muddy Waters and the back cover is Chris Ware, but both of those also appear inside.) So it tops out at 140 pictures of people, most of whom are "famous" in some way or other.

By the way, "chosen" here means "chosen to have Drew Friedman do their pictures." The person choosing may be Friedman himself much of the time, but also includes editors of various mostly New-York based publications, especially the New York Observer. The potted bios list (consistently? always?) where the illustrations first appeared, with notes on about half of them.

Friedman has a detailed, immersive style - his people look real and grounded. He's never gone out of his way to draw pretty people, and he tends to make them less pretty than they might like - he's an artist of jowls and dewlaps and ragged hairlines, laugh lines and creases and extra chins, scowls and smirks and incredulous glances. This is a fine book of a whole bunch of those drawings, some in color and some in his distinctive black-and-white stippled style, including some people you will recognize and some - no matter who you are - that will be a mystery to you.

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.

Daredevil: Born Again by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli

I'm sure I've re-read this story since 1986. You can't prove it from this blog, though. And my copy of  the trade paperback is the original 1987 edition, with minimal credits and supplemental material, from the era when the Big Two were still figuring out the whole reprint-floppies-in-a-permanent-format thing. (I'm not sure how I can have a copy of that edition, since mine would have died in my 2011 flood, but I do and I'm looking at it now.)

This storyline obviously followed Frank Miller's original run on Daredevil by several years: he'd worked, mostly with Klaus Janson inking his pencils and taking over writing midway through the run, on that series from 1979 through 1983, in material that's now collected in three good-sized volumes.

Daredevil: Born Again collects issues 227-233 of the series, a discrete seven-issue storyline written by Miller and drawn by David Mazzucchelli. Like a lot of now-famous mid-80s Big Two stories ("The Anatomy Lesson" is another major example), it's a strong, specific story whose bones have been scattered and re-used by a thousand other hands since then to the point that they've become a cliché.

This is the ur-"villain systematically destroys the hero" story - the next most influential version, I think, is "Kraven's Last Hunt," about Spider-Man, from a few years later. But there are dozens of others by this point: everyone who has had an ongoing series over the last three decades has probably been broken down by now.

They all get better, of course. Daredevil gets better in this one. IP can't be left to wither on the vine.

The specifics here: Karen Page, a former girlfriend of Daredevil, went off to Hollywood to make her fortune a few years earlier. It didn't work out; she quickly got addicted, descended into vaguely-described porn, and found herself somewhere in Mexico with a bad habit and no resources. Well, she had one thing worth selling: the real identity of Daredevil (the New York lawyer Matt Murdock).

She sells that; the letter with her note makes its way to New York and Daredevil's biggest enemy Kingpin; and Kingpin decides to use it to, as villains always say, destroy everything the hero loves or cares about.

Murdock's utilities are shut off, the IRS audits him and freezes his accounts, and a corrupt cop brings evidence that will lead to his disbarment. Murdock already had paranoid tendencies, and he quickly spirals out of control, which overjoys the Kingpin.

But Kingpin also then blows up Murdock's brownstone home, which even a paranoid, spiraling Murdock realizes was done by someone. And, since he's a character in an adventure comic, he knows, correctly, who that was.

Things go on from there - I might sound dismissive, but the story is compelling and told well, with precise, emotionally taut scenes and magnificent character work from both Miller (here still underplaying emotion, unlike later in his career) and Mazzucchelli. There is a lot of violence, since this is a superhero comic, but most of it is shocking and a lot of it is fatal, which was not standard for this era. There's even a comic-relief gangster who talks in malapropisms to keep it all from being unrelievedly grim, and a great supporting-character role for Captain America in the big climax.

Miller constructs a new reality for his main characters out of the broken pieces he reduced them to, which is one of the things that became most cliched about this kind of story. That's not on Miller - it was an ongoing series; he had to leave something for the next writer to work with - but it has become a central aspect of superhero comics since, the big storyline in which everything changes and launches an exciting new direction in the saga of <insert name here>.

I think you can read this with only the vaguest sense of who Daredevil and his supporting characters are. He's a guy in a red costume; he's in New York; his civilian identity is a lawyer. The big fat crimelord hates him. And you get that all from the story itself.

This is still probably the best first Daredevil story for any reader, as well as the best full-stop Daredevil story. I don't think that's faint praise, but it does need to be contextualized: this is a genre exercise, from an era when that genre was opening itself to new influences and story-telling techniques, and one of the early attempts to "write to the arc" that was entirely successful. It is a darn good story about guys who dress up in long underwear, run around rooftops, and beat each other up - but it's still a long-underwear story at its heart.

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.

Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson

This is a noir novel; I read it in the Library of America omnibus Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s. I don't know Edward Anderson otherwise, but I assume this novel is thought of as his best book: at least by the editor who put together this omnibus in 1997. (A chap named Robert Polito is credited with that.)

Thieves Like Us is set in the depths of the Depression, in the South (Texas and Oklahoma) - but more often talks about towns and counties than states. States are too big for these small-timers; they don't get that far and only think that big on rare occasions.

As the novel opens, three men have just escaped from prison: T.W. (T-Dub) Masefield, Elmo (Chicamaw) Mobley and Bowie Bowers. Bowie is the youngest, our narrator - he was in on a murder rap that would be accessory at best these days, as part of a botched robbery he fell into working as a carnie. T-Dub and Chicamaw are substantially older, and seasoned bank robbers. Three men is a decent gang for bank robbery - there's a discussion early how four would be better, but who wants to cut in a whole additional man? - so T-Dub and Chicamaw bring Bowie into the work.

It's a short novel, and all told through Bowie's voice, but Anderson gets a lot of specific details in: how they case banks, how they get away (buying cars with cash and burning the car that did the robbery, for one), how they hide out and how long, how they rely on a loose network of mostly relatives, particularly when the police attention is fiercest. He also quotes newspaper accounts of their crimes, as Bowie finds those papers, and gets some solid irony in how misleading, biased, and often just wrong those newspaper articles are.

The plot is loose and episodic; the novel covers a long span of months with three major heists along the way. The heists are not emphasized. Anderson tends to describe them quietly, nearly past-tense - they go well. Maybe because heists that don't go well in the late '30s meant that the heisters all get shot dead or immediately arrested.

So the book is more about Bowie becoming part of this world, and learning how to live with more money in his pocket than he ever expected. Chicamaw and T-Dub are both gamblers and womanizers, both with long-established ways to waste the money they steal nearly as quickly as they steal it. But Bowie is newer, and greener, and more innocent: he thinks he can save it up - at least between jobs - and go away somewhere to enjoy it. The three separate after jobs, to minimize the potential police heat or just to enjoy their money, and then catch back up at a pre-planned time, with T-Dub and Chicamaw having run through everything they stole.

During one of those pauses, Bowie connects with a girl, Keechie - actually Chicamaw's niece, though that's not emphasized, nor does Bowie try to hide the relationship - and the two of them think and talk about making a life together. At the same time, the police of two states are looking for Bowie - for what the papers call a vast number of bank robberies beyond the three they actually did. And newspapers get many things wrong, but, somehow, they found out about Keechie and Bowie, and that's a hot story, too.

Again, this is a noir novel. It's loosely inspired by Bonnie and Clyde. It's not going to end happily for Bowie and Keechie. It doesn't. Anderson has a lot of depth and insight in this short book; it's smart and cynical about people and newspapers and society. The title comes from a repeated refrain, especially early in the book - banks and police and others are just as corrupt, just as money-hungry, just as bad as the bank robbers: they're "thieves just like us."

That's the mindset and the world Bowie and Keechie are caught up in here; it's both roughly true and not at all helpful. In a noir novel, not only are the odds stacked against you, but those odds always come in - like real gambling, not like a happier kind of novel, because a million-to-one shot in real life never comes in.

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?)

Christine Falls by Benjamin Black

I've mentioned various ways of differentiating literary and commercial novels here before. They're mostly tongue-in-cheek, but I think there's always an element of truth in those quick dichotomies.

Today, the way I want to look at it is: commercial novels need to have a plot. Literary novels only need to have a theme.

Christine Falls is a novel, ostensibly in the mystery/crime/thriller genre, published as by "Benjamin Black," though all the publicity materials, then and since, also made it clear that Black was a pseudonym for the literary novelist John Banville. Banville's photo is in even in the paperback edition (US Picador, 7th printing but first edition) I read. Falls came out in 2006, and was the first of nine novels with the same main character, all as by Black.

I've read a number of Banville's novels, most recently Snow, which is oddly related to the Black series. Otherwise, my readings of his literary novels was mostly some time ago, in the '90s and Aughts, when I was reading at a quicker pace and spending more time analyzing stories professionally. I've also read the Black novel The Black-Eyed Blonde, about a decade ago - that was an authorized sequel to Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep which I thought was substantially more successful than other attempts at continuing Chandler.

So I came to Christine Falls intending to enjoy it. And Banville/Black, as always, is a lovely writer of sentences and paragraphs and scenes and moments.

But Falls, like the much later Snow, is largely a message book. That message is: "the Magdalene Laundries were bad, m'kay?" This was not a shocking proposition in 2006, a decade after the initial scandal and four years after a major movie about them.

On top of that, the main character of this book, and the whole Black series, is Quirke. No first name, no middle name, no other name. Just, apparently, Quirke Q. Quirke, the quirkiest quirk who ever quirked a quirk. There are a few moments when Banville/Black nearly stumbles or fails to paper over the fact that his hero has no first name in a world where all of the other characters - most of whom are part of Quirke's family and have known him for decades - do have first names and use them all the time.

So our hero is quirky, got it? Black/Banville wants to be very very sure that you understand that.

And the way that he is quirky is that he's a very large gentleman who drinks a lot - I'm not sure if Banville thinks of it as a lot, as fish don't always recognize water - who has worked as a pathologist in a big Dublin hospital for about twenty years, who was an orphan himself, and who had a wife that died, long ago. So He Is Sad, and has been living a very small, circumscribed life for a long time - doing his work, drinking at all hours, and living in a small set of rooms full of the same old crap he's had forever.

Oh, and it is The Fifties. No more specifics than that, but it is definitely The Fifties.

But then, one day, Quirke gets interested in the case of Christine Falls - not a portentous name at all, o no! -  a corpse in his department that he notices one night during a party for a nurse who is heading to a hospital in Boston. (Boston in the US.) His pseudo-brother/brother-in-law Malachy Griffin - Griffin's father the Judge raised Quirke after rescuing him from the orphanage, and the two married Boston heiress sisters Sarah (Mal) and Delia (Quirke) - was doing something suspicious with the paperwork for Falls, and the drunken Quirke was interested.

Quirke sort-of, more-or-less, intermittently, tries to figure out what happened to Falls. He fairly quickly learns that she died in childbirth, despite Mal changing the paperwork to say it was a heart problem, and learns that there's a big Catholic conspiracy, mostly bankrolled by his father-in-law, that moves what seems to be a vast sea of unwanted newborns out to deserving families, both in Ireland and among the Irish in America. There doesn't seem to be any particular reason for this to be illegal, but it's being run by gangsters, and Quirke is repeatedly threatened and eventually badly beaten.

This all happens very slowly. The reader, if that reader has any knowledge of the wider world, has already figured out nearly all of the plot, and has correctly identified the two possible candidates for the father of Fall's baby. But Banville/Black is writing in a literary manner, so we get a long section with the adoptive parents of that baby, over near Boston - the mother is mostly the viewpoint character, and is quiet and loving and more than a little boring, while her husband at first seems just a bit loutish but turns out much worse than that.

Anyway, Quirke (James Quirke? Seamus Quirke? Aloysius St. James Roberto Quirke?) learns a bit more about the baby, including that she was carried off to Boston by the very nurse whose going-away party was the occasion for Quirke's discovery of Falls in the first place. (In a literary novel, everything must be connected. There are no coincidences.)

Eventually, after about three hundred pages of thoughtful introspection from various POV characters, Quirke is in Boston, chaperoning his niece Phoebe - who in the minor B-plot was mooning after a totally unsuitable young man, Conor Carrington, who is shock! horror! Protestant - to visit her grandfather, who is near death. 

There are a lot of mystery-novel-esque elements to close out the book, including a death that could be called murder if you want and a rape that is deeply thematically important. (2006 seems awfully late for a Significant Rape in a novel, but Banville is of the older generation.) The old man funding the whole scheme - Quirke's father-in-law, Phoebe's grandfather, who has a Big Sleep-esque hothouse and wheelchair, speaking of thematic elements - does die, as we all know he would. Quirke learns some things, including one shocking truth that is almost immediately retconned into something he always knew - so I suppose he drank it out of his mind for twenty years? Maybe you can do that if you're Irish enough - but does not solve any crimes or act like a detective in a detective novel at all.

In fact, he's very much a literary-novel protagonist. He's in the middle of a family situation that's more complicated than he realizes, he pulls at threads that lead to things he wasn't ready to learn about the people closest to him, and the most important changes in the book are internal to Mr. Quirke Q. Quirke, Lord of Quirkiness.

Again, Banville/Black tells this story in exquisite prose and has a fine hand for characterization - though Quirke himself is a bit more of a black box than he should be, to make those end revelations work. But it feels like a novella's-worth of matter stretched out to novel length for no good reason, to tell us all that something we already know about was Really Bad.

Um, yeah, OK, I guess. What else have you got?

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.