The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing

I've been reading random noir novels in various Library of America omnibuses over the past couple of years: this one is smack in the middle of the Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s book. It's by Kenneth Fearing, who was a poet before turning to writing crime novels, and this is his most famous book.

The Big Clock is from 1946, and is modernist enough that it feels - well, not exactly contemporary, but like it takes place in a world close enough to our own that we can still feel the texture of it and understand how it works. Fearing tells it in chapters from multiple points of view, but the main character, and viewpoint for about two-thirds of the book, is George Stroud.

Stroud is head editor of Crimeways, one of a group of sophisticated, strong-selling magazines from Janoth Publications in New York on various aspects of modern life. The whole group has a consistent style and method; they're not necessarily the very biggest magazines - they have notable competitors mentioned in the book - but they sell a lot of copies, pay exceptionally well, and pride themselves on having the best talent. (Think Time-Life of about the same era and you'll be close.)

Stroud is happily married, but...he's the main character of a mid-century noir novel, almost as smart as he thinks he is, and drinks about as much as any similar character. He falls into a brief affair with Pauline, the girlfriend of Earl Janoth, head of the whole operation - very brief, one overnight and then a weekend in Albany a few days later. On that Sunday afternoon, he drops her off at her apartment, watching her walk up to the building from across the street - and be met by Janoth, who came back from a trip to Washington, D.C. earlier than expected.

Janoth fights with Pauline up in her apartment, gets angry, and kills her semi-accidentally. He gets out of the building quietly and goes to see his second-in-command/fixer Steve Hagen. Janoth knows he saw someone drop off Pauline, but isn't sure who it was. That man could unroll his otherwise-solid alibi. Steve hints that he will have the man killed, if only they can find him.

So they set the entire apparatus of Janoth Publications to work to find this mysterious man, with a thin cover story about the man being the central figure in some bribery scheme. And the whole project is given to one of Janoth's most trusted and seasoned editors to run: Stroud.

Stroud knows the threads that could lead to him - a painting he bought with Pauline that morning, his physical description, a low-life bar the two visited, that trip to Albany - and does all he can to seem to be pursuing the investigation zealously while putting subtly wrong people on particular aspects of it and letting the results point as much away from him as possible. After all, no one expects that the clues will lead to him in the first place - he's potentially safe unless there's something really obvious.

But Janoth Publications is good at this, and they find multiple people who could identify the mysterious man - including the eccentric fine artist Louise Patterson, who painted and (coincidentally) competed with Stroud to buy the very painting he'd bought the morning of the murder. Stroud's long interest in her work - he has a Patterson on the wall of his office, and several at home - could potentially blow up the whole thing. And his wife Georgette is already worried that he's become distant, as he did once before during an affair.

This is a noir, so someone has to die. The last line of the novel explains who and how - I won't explain further. (It's a short book; just reading it would be quick enough.)

Fearing tells this, as I said above, in a modernist way, with multiple first-person viewpoints, though Stroud is the dominant voice. Each of them have their own quirks and foibles; they're distinct people, though we only spend a lot of time in Stroud's head. The only other repeat narrator is Janoth himself.

Fearing is also witty and interesting on the workings of Janoth Publications itself, including how big media operations will mold public conversation in specific ways - not the usual thing a reader would expect in a noir novel, particularly a short zippy one like this, but it's authoritative and interesting. 

Even further afield, there's a sub-plot about a scheme called Funded Individuals - in which some group of young people would be given support and roughly a million dollars to get started in life, something like a vague early sketch of a venture capital fund but much more general, official, and personal - which I don't think would work at all like Fearing's characters assume it would, but is interestingly quirky and turns up more in the book than I expected. It's the kind of book that feels like it has everything relevant that ran through the author's head while writing it: full of quirky sidebars and precise moments and arch opinions.

Ew, It's Beautiful by Joshua Barkman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brain Drain, Part 2 by Pierre-Henry Gomont

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen

I think I read this back in the day, but my memory is fuzzy. I used to be in pretty regular touch with Colin Smythe, Terry Pratchett's indefatigable agent, in my job as Senior Editor of the SFBC, and Colin would pitch the odder Discworld books to us - after, I'm sure, the more traditional trade outlets for such books had already turned him down. (I could kid Colin, but he was a good agent for Pratchett, relentlessly positive but also, I think, with an underlying understanding of the vast difference in Pratchett's market profile in the US and UK.[1])

I know I read the first Science of Discworld book, and liked it. I thought I bought it for the club, but I'm not seeing a SFBC edition on ISFDB, or any edition in the US earlier than the trade-paperback series starting in 2014, so perhaps my memory is faulty. I also read the second one, and thought it was not quite as strong, and I think got to this one around UK publication in 2005 (thanks to Colin) and had a similar reaction.

There was a fourth book; I'm pretty sure I've never seen that one.

All of the Science of Discworld books are hybrid things. There's a fairly slim Discworld fictional story by Pratchett - about the creation by the wizards of Unseen University of what they call "Roundworld" (our universe) and their subsequent investigations and adventures there. In alternating chapters, scientists and science writers [2] Ian Stewart (math) and Jack Cohen (biology) explain the real science behind the goofy stuff the wizards get up to. I expect the three plotted out the whole thing together and then edited each other for consistency; it's a bit of an odd combination but it generally works on both a comic-fiction and a pop-science level.

So the first book saw the Roundworld created. The second one had the wizards needing to save it from an infestation of Discworld elves, mostly related to Shakespeare for sufficiently-good reasons.

And this third book, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch, came out in 2005 in the UK but not until a decade later in the US. It's the one about evolution, so I'm afraid Stewart and Cohen need to talk about the kind of anti-evolutionists they characterize as Christian fundamentalists from the Southern USA. (Not inappropriately, of course, and entirely honestly. But it might have been yet one more thing to give US publishers pause.)

Once again, outside forces - it's not revealed until late in the book, so I won't say who, but it's another Pratchett villain - are interfering with the Roundworld's timeline, causing humanity to go extinct before it can lead a space exodus to colonize the larger Roundworld universe as of course humanity is destined to do. (Science of Discworld is more old-fashioned than some readers might expect.) This time, it's all connected to Charles Darwin, who is being channeled to instead write The Theology of Species rather than The Origin and to stay a good Anglican curate and not be so strident about the whole evolution thing.

The pop-science chapters are an odd mix of evolutionary biology (not quite as much as you might expect) and QED-derived alternate-world physics theorizing circa the early 2000s (because the changes to Darwin's timeline creates many different options, in none of which he wrote Origin). There's some other, even further afield science topics as well, but those are the two central ones: the ways species change and diverge over time, and the ways timelines might conceivably do the same. (They are connected, at least conceptually, but they come across as mostly-separate discussions.)

The short Pratchett chapters feature wizards - mostly Mustrum Ridcully, Ponder Stibbons, and of course Rincewind - having somewhat amusing experiences either watching Roundworld or traveling to it to interfere with its timeline, and talking about the science implications. Then the longer Steward/Cohen chapters go into more depth, non-fictionally, about those implications. It's all amusing, mostly light, and easy to follow: it's a fine pop-science book, if possibly slightly outdated now, twenty years later.

There's enough Discworld that you could read nothing else for quite a long time if you wanted to, and I suppose this series means that those who do - I'm fairly sure there are some anorak-wearing chaps named Kevin who come close, at least - get some actual science knowledge included into their humanistic humorous fiction. I found this one less focused than I'd hoped, but all of the pieces are solid, and they form an essentially coherent whole, so I'm mostly quibbling.

[1] This is complicated and changed over time. But, very generally, in the '80s and '90s, Pratchett was not just the biggest fantasy author in the UK, he was one of the top five or so authors of any kind in the UK, and a measurable fraction of all books sold had his name on them. That profile declined only slightly post-Rowling; I think he still sold basically as well, but others sold at similar or nearly-similar levels, too. Because of that, he could write or commission the kind of oddball line-extension books that were just not commercially feasible for almost anyone else: a cookbook, a long series of annual desk diaries, multiple actual printed-on-heavy-stock maps, an encyclopedic compendium in several editions.

In the US, by contrast, Pratchett sold like a decent upper-mid-level fantasy writer (comparing it to personal income, in the US Pratchett was like the well-respected name partner of a major law firm and in the UK he was Bill Gates) and was beloved in the SFF community. It was absolutely a solid level of success that most writers would be thrilled with, but Pratchett (and, more centrally, I think, Colin) saw the UK sales and thought "why can't we replicate that in the much larger and more lucrative USA?"

There's also the question of how well he was published in the US. I don't want to cast aspersions, but he was with Roc/New American Library at first, who perhaps didn't have the market muscle (or the desire to use it for Pratchett) to replicate the UK success. In the early '90s, he moved to Harper, which went through a confusing period - Pratchett was very prolific at that point, and Roc had gotten behind - where the books were not published in the same order in the US and there were some interesting cover designs in attempts to widen the audience. So, at the point where he was at his absolute peak of market power in the UK - say the late '90s - he was rising in the US after Harper got good at publishing his books but was still very much a genre author rather than a general-audience one. That has stayed true in the US since then.

And, frankly, Pratchett is deeply British in a lot of ways. There's no reason to believe he would be a general-audience author anywhere that doesn't have a solid British cultural identity.

[2] And science-fiction novelists; I read and bought their Wheelers - not for nepotistic reasons related to the title, I think - for the SFBC.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 11: Seasons by Stan Sakai

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Once and Future Riot by Joe Sacco

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Werewolf at Dusk and Other Stories by David Small

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

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

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

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

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

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

I did say my initial thoughts were distracting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hidden Dominion of Geordie James by Mike Dawson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Witch King by Martha Wells

It's weird to say this, but I think this is the first time I've read a Martha Wells fantasy novel when I wasn't being paid by the Doubleday Book & Music Clubs (or successor organizations) to do so. I was the first reader there for her debut novel The Element of Fire, and I think I acquired all of her '90s novels for the club (Element, City of Bones, Wheel of the Infinite and The Death of the Necromancer - all excellent, by the way, and well-worth digging back into; I'd recommend Necromancer if you only have time for one). But my plans to do an omnibus of the "Fall of Ile-Rien" trilogy floundered, and then I got laid off...and I haven't been reading at the same pace for the past twenty years.

(Was there also some burnout after several subsequent years of applying to SFnal editorial jobs and not getting anywhere? Could be.)

More happily, Wells has been in the middle of a fabulously successful and award-winning SF series for the past decade - the Murderbot books; you may have heard of them - which I have been reading.

So Witch King was her first fantasy novel in six years when it came out in 2023, and I'm only slightly late in getting to it. (It's the first of what is either a trilogy or duology - the second book, Queen Demon, came out last fall, but I'm not sure if that's the end.) 

It's a complex novel set in a big, complicated world: there's a useful map in the front matter that covers what I think is the entire "Rising World," but does not include a continent further to the south from which the world-conquerors in the backstory emerged. There are at least four types of magic, with some similarities but big differences. It's a world mostly of humans - mortals, Wells's characters tend to call them - but several of those magic-using groups are immortal or very long-lived or can change bodies or some other permutation.

So the opening sets the tone: our third-person viewpoint character, Kaiisteron, Prince of the Fourth House of the underearth, wakes up. He's dead, his former body in a tomb on a small island, just emerging from being submerged in water. Some enemy is going to try to turn him into a familiar, to control his power and possibly destroy his memory. That will not go well for the enemy.

I won't explain all the details of the magic systems - such as the Immortal Blessed, with their sometimes technology-powered devices and their not-always clear hierarchy of Immortal Marshalls and Lesser Blessed; the Hierarchs, those invaders from the south whose expositors derive power from death and burn cities to get power to burn more cities - but I do need to get into demons and witches. (Those are in the titles, after all.)

Demons come from a parallel world - most people think it's under the ground; that doesn't seem to be exactly true - and are a different, serpentine, sapient race. There was some kind of war, centuries ago, between the demons and the humans of the nomadic Saredi people. A peace was brokered in which one Saredi woman, called Grandmother these days, went to the demon world, presumably to marry some demon leader: she has an extensive multi-generational set of offspring now. Since then, demons are a valued part of Saredi society, their souls moving into the bodies of Saredi who died young and unexpectedly (presumably mostly from sickness, not physical trauma). Demons can move their souls from body to body at least that much, bouncing back and forth from the underearth to the mortal world.

Witches are the offspring of demons and mortals - they have somewhat different magical powers than demons do, but the two groups are generally allied to each other. They do not have any direct connection to the underearth mentioned in this novel. Witches seem to have spread across several regions of this world, and are not limited to Saredi lands. Demons, though, do seem to be entirely limited to the Saredi, so it's a bit of a open question where all the witches came from and how they spread so much relatively quickly.

Kai is a demon. He was one of the leaders of the successful resistance to the Hierarchs, after they had conquered most of this northern continent, sixty or eighty years ago. Those leaders formed first an alliance of forces to fight back, then a more durable political coalition (the Rising World of the series title) that formed a continent-wide political structure called an Empire but relying on periodic approval from the individual nations. Kai is the demon who discovered that demons can jump from one mortal body to another, killing the host and taking over. And he developed what seems to be an idiosyncratic, individual magic system based on the Hierarchs' but fueled by his own pain rather than that of others.

Witch King has two plotlines: close to two-thirds of the book is set "now," starting with Kai's awakening in that tomb, defeating the expositor who tried to enslave him, and freeing his long-time friend and ally Ziede Daiyahah, who was also captured in that tomb. The other plotline is set in "The Past," with a few short chapters of Kai's life with the Saredi and then the story of the beginning of that resistance, in a Hierarch regional capital. In large part, the past plotline explains the relationships among the main characters - Kai; Ziede; Ziede's wife Tahren Stargard; Bashasa, who I think became the first Emperor; and a few others.

The past plotline is simpler and starker, once it gets to that Hierarch city: Bashasa leads a group of plotters in what he expects will be a doomed attempt to kill a few Hierarchs and, at best, inspire others to similarly fight back and spark a successful rebellion. The early stages go more successfully than expected, largely because of Kai, and the plotters unexpectedly survive and flee to build that larger rebellion themselves.

(We know the rebellion succeeded from the beginning of the book, or else none of these people would be alive in the "now" timeline.)

In the present day, first Kai and Ziede need to survive and get out of the tomb, then figure out what has happened. A political conference to "renew" the Empire is underway, and they are pretty sure they were shoved out of the way to interfere with that - but in which direction, and exactly what the plotters intend to do next, is unclear. Also, they quickly learn that Tahren is also missing, and finding her becomes their main aim.

This is the first of a series, so the wider issue is not resolved at the end. But the core this-book problem in both timelines - surviving the initial revolt and getting away in the past, finding Tahren in the present - are resolved, to give a satisfying ending. And the joys, as usual with Wells, is the deep characterization and insight into behavior, coupled with magnificent action sequences and a compelling narrative voice - this book is less snarky than the Murderbot books, but Wells is always crisp, focused, and precise in her writing.

Emanon, Vol. 1 by Shinji Kajio & Kenji Tsuruta

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Proof That the Devil Loves You by Gilbert Hernandez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perfect Example by John Porcellino

When you self-publish a comic on any kind of regular basis, you tend to pour all of your creative work into that one outlet. (I don't think there's anything similar in other art forms - non-comics 'zines, maybe, but that feels like a variation of the same idea. Very few media have both the low barrier for entry and the potential/audience to run for an extended period of time that comics do.)

John Porcellino has been making comics and publishing them as King-Cat Comics since 1989; he's done other projects occasionally - the only entirely separate book-length one I know of is Thoreau at Walden - but most of his work gets funneled into that one outlet, for all the obvious reasons.

There are books that generally reprint King-Cat: I've seen two of them in the life of this blog, Map of My Heart and From Lone Mountain. But Porcellino or his editors at Drawn & Quarterly have also pulled out selections that are more graphic-novel-shaped from the long King-Cat archives, including The Hospital Suite and Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man (which I'm pretty sure I read, probably as my first Porcellino, but I can't find any record of it).

Perfect Example is another book like that: it collects the four-part story of the title, plus two other shorter pieces, and a one-pager to open it all up. All this material is from the mid-90s, but it all looks back a decade, to the summer right after Porcellino graduated high school in 1986, in the Chicago suburb Hoffman Estates. D&Q published this package in 2021.

Descriptions of this book can lean into the "aimless teen" cliché - that's not completely untrue, but not everyone has an aim automatically. (Maybe most of us don't.) It is day-to-day, matter-of-fact, about what John and his friends were getting up to that summer - driving around, going to parties, starting relationships, meeting new people, going to concerts (or trying to), all that kind of thing. The exact details aren't as important as the feelings and the motion.

If you've read Porcellino's work before, you know he's had some mental health issues - anxiety, depression, that whole sad ball of wax. This is, to be all comics about it, something like his origin story - or, at least, a time when that was starting and young Porcellino realized it at the time.

Like all of Porcellino's work, Perfect Example is full of clean, single-weight lines in hand-drawn boxes, with a very minicomics, personal look. His writing is focused and minimalist as well: he's not trying to tell a story, but to capture what he was doing, and what it felt like, moment by moment.

Porcellino is a cartoonist of moments: that's how I'd put it. Good ones, bad ones, points of connection and of disconnection - how this one young man was living in the world, what he cared about, and how his own brain was undermining him along the way. This book is a collection of those moments, all from that one summer, organized and arranged to show what Porcellino was like then. I don't know of any other cartoonist who can do this kind of tone and style: simple, unadorned, precise, thoughtful, ruminative, open.

The Moving Target by Ross Macdonald

I have a shelf dedicated to reading projects, in my to-be-read bookcases. It's mostly sat quietly for the last few years, with three half-assembled "projects" slowly disappearing behind other things piling up in front of them. I thought I had to assemble all of the books first; my model was Starktober and similar things, where I read a whole bunch of books quickly - generally one a day - and wrote about them just as quickly.

But I don't read like that now, so those "projects" have sat gathering dust.

On the other hand, I have been reading through authors intermittently, mostly nudged by the presence of Library of America books on my main shelves. Over the last couple of years, I got through all of Dashiell Hammett's novels, and then Raymond Chandler's, that way.

One of the "projects" was to read all of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novels. And I just realized I could do that the same way I was reading other authors: one at a time rather than in a big burst. So I think I will.

The Moving Target was the first of that series, and the first novel to appear under the author's pen name. ("Macdonald" was really Kenneth Millar, but his wife, Margaret Millar, was also a crime novelist, with a growing career at the same time, so her husband cycled through "John Macdonald" and "John Ross Macdonald" before settling on the version of his name he kept for the rest of his career. It was always a fairly open pseudonym; I suppose mostly to keep their books just a few feet separate on the shelves.) "Macdonald" had published four standalone mystery/crime novels before this; he wasn't brand-new, and he'd gotten good notices.

So Moving Target comes mostly formed. It's very much in the Chandler mode: Macdonald's series hero Lew Archer is similarly tough and cynical at this point, and Macdonald has flights of language not unlike Chandler's in the course of the novel. It's also, most obviously, a book about a private detective in Los Angeles and its surroundings in the late 1940s - Chandler would have been the glaringly obvious touchstone even if Macdonald had tried to run farther away from him.

As I recall, Archer became more of a viewpoint, especially as the series went on - he was a window into the lives of the people he met, and did less commentary than Chandler. I'll have to see if I still think that, this time through the novels. It's not really the case here: Archer gets knocked out multiple times, kissed by dames, and gives a few major speeches, all of which is solidly in the Chandler mode.

The joke about Macdonald is that all of the Archer books are about family problems, which stem from some event that happened twenty years ago in Canada. (Macdonald was born and lived most of his life in California, but his family was Canadian and he spent his youth in Ontario.) This first one is about families, but all of the cliché elements aren't there yet - there's no Canadian content here.

Archer is hired by a rich woman to find her husband. Ralph Sampson is a Texas oil millionaire, living on his rents and making occasional random deals, drinking too much and flying around impulsively to Las Vegas and elsewhere. Ralph disappeared the day before, after a flight back from Vegas. Archer was brought in by the family lawyer, Bert Graves, who he worked for when Graves was a DA and Archer an investigator in that office.

Graves is involved in a love triangle with Sampson's twenty-year-old daughter Miranda: he's pursuing her in a slightly embarrassing middle-aged way, while she's making eyes at her father's hunky pilot, Alan Taggert. Mrs. Sampson is openly derisive of her husband, insisting - though she's an invalid whose legs don't work after a fall from a horse - that she's going to outlive him. And Sampson, as Archer discovers, has some very odd business connections, including the gangster owner of the Wild Piano club, a thug named Dwight Troy, and a self-declared guru, Claude, who Sampson gave a mountain hunting lodge as a "temple."

Archer chases Sampson's trail for a couple of days, as it becomes clearer that the millionaire was kidnapped and eventually a ransom note appears. He meets a number of women connected to the case, faded movie star Fay Estabrook and ex-con pianist Betty Fraley, and some violent men connected to them.

Most of this takes place near the Sampson mansion in Santa Teresa - Macdonald's invention, a fictional town loosely based on Santa Monica that later mystery writers would also use - and in the mountains and rural roads nearby. That's one of the most clearly 1949 parts of the novel: how empty so much of Southern California was at that moment, with the post-war building boom still building up steam. (The other thing is another post-war sense, that something big had just happened and was over, leaving a lot of men still keyed up, still used to handling dangerous, important work and now trying to settle back into smaller, quieter lives.)

Archer solves the crime - well, crimes, since there's more than just the kidnapping to deal with in the end. A mystery novel needs at least one murder, doesn't it?

This is an atmospheric and smart mystery novel, very much in the Chandler manner and style but already showing clear signs of distinguishing Macdonald from Chandler. Archer is less romantic than Chandler's hero, Marlowe, maybe more of a post-war man in that. And, as I recall, the series only gets better from here.

Muybridge by Guy Delisle

Guy Delisle's new book last year - his first graphic novel since 2021's Factory Summers - was something of a change of pace.

Delisle, to this point, had mostly had two strands of his career - the short books of funny strips like the four "Bad Dad" collections and some early work, and longer, more integrated books that told single, essentially serious stories. Up to this point, all of those longer books had some connection to his life, and most of them were autobiographical to some degree: Hostage was the outlier, about a Médecins Sans Frontières worker (like Delisle's wife), living in a foreign and in some ways dangerous country (not unlike Delisle's travel books), and retelling the story that man had told Delisle.

Muybridge has a vastly smaller connection to Delisle personally; near the very end, he mentions that he, and thousands of other animation students over the past century, bought and studied Eadwaerd Muybrudge's two books of photographic motion studies; that those books are standard references for that entire industry and have never been out of print. Delisle does appear in this book: on that one page.

Otherwise, Muybridge is what it looks to be: a biographical sketch in comics form of the photographer who, more than anyone else, froze time in his pictures. Delisle ranges more widely than Muybridge himself at times, but his focus is on the man himself and his career, with some material on his personal life. (It was scandalous, but not terribly happy: he married a much younger woman, who had an affair and then a child - parentage never entirely clear, decades before genetic testing - while Muybridge was traveling to photograph various things. Muybridge tracked down the seducer, shot him dead, and was found not guilty by a jury. His wife tried to divorce him multiple times after that, was rebuffed by the state of California each time, and died soon afterward of typhoid fever. Her child was stuck in an orphanage, and last saw Muybridge at the age of nine.)

Delisle also shows other photographic pioneers of the era - the late 19th century - and some painters who worked in related areas, as well as a lot of material on Muybridge's relationship with railroad tycoon and later Senator Leland Sanford.

The book is organized chronologically, with sections set off with the years they begin, but it falls into roughly three sections. First is the early, pre-photography life of Muybridge, which is the shortest and gets him from his youth in England to San Francisco (and back, and back again). Then there's the long years of trying to show exactly how a horse gallops, which was a matter of much scientific, gambling, and artistic debate in those days. Muybridge's work, bankrolled and supported by Sanford, proved how a horse's gait really looks when frozen.

And then the last third of so of Muybridge is everything after that - a stretch at the University of Pennsylvania doing stop-motion photography of all kinds of animals and people (scandalously, many of them naked!), other advances in photography and how it affected painting, and finally, how it all led to the motion-picture industry at the turn of the century.

Muybridge was central to most of that, but not the only central figure, so he's at the core of the book but not always the focus for specific scenes. Delisle named his book after his main character, but his story is wider than his hero.

This is more distanced and less personal than Delisle's previous books, and I might have felt it slightly lesser because of that. In all of Delisle's books before this, the creator was intensely present - even is Hostage, he was telling the story, and had a "that could have been me" frisson throughout. Muybridge is a fine graphic biography of an interesting, important figure, but it feels more like a book that any one of a dozen cartoonists could have done, more or less.

(Compare it to Bill Griffith's Photographic Memory, another book about a 19th century photographer that came out at nearly the same time - Griffith was writing about a family member, and intensely present in his book; Delisle was writing about a world-famous figure, and keeps it all on that level.)

Muybridge is excellent at what it does; Delisle even turns his pages into facsimiles of Muybridge's motion studies a few times, with more panels than usual showing small changes in motion of a figure. His art is inventive; he makes the grumpy, self-centered Muybridge a sympathetic figure; and he covers a lot of strands of a complex story well. I just felt that his previous books were more specific.

(Throwing this in at the end, since it didn't fit elsewhere: Delisle works in France and creates his books in French. Muybridge was translated by Helge Dascher and Rob Aspinall for this English-language edition.) 

How I Make Comics by Kim Deitch

Kim Deitch's work has been largely of a piece for the last thirty or so years, going back to A Shroud for Waldo. Deitch himself is a character in his work, often the main character in the modern-day sections, investigating or just discovering mysterious stories about old entertainment, obscure Hollywood movie-makers or vaudeville or carnivals or similar things from the early 20th century. But the meat of the story is in that past world, with supernatural entities and midgets and mysterious technology and reincarnations of the same people over time.

For a while, the stories centered on his trickster character Waldo, something like an evil Felix the Cat, but I think Deitch has been deliberately playing down Waldo over the past decade or so, to tell different kinds of stories using other elements of the same mix.

How I Make Comics is his most recent book, from earlier this year; it follows in that tradition while being a little lighter and more accessible. Despite the title, it's not a how-to. It might be a series of examples, though: it's explicitly a linked collection of shorter pieces, like beads on a string, which connect loosely to each other to tell a series of stories about Deitch in the present day and the same sort of past events - some of them possibly true, or partially true, but it's never clear - that he's turning into his stories. As always, we see the Deitch-created versions while he tells us that he's presenting the true history, but, this time, his wife Pam is a more major character, and she acts as his first reader and sounding board (both, we understand, in life and in the fictional versions in this book), commenting on the stories in the middle of them and between them.

Of course, Pam here is a fictional version of the real Pam, as the Deitch here is a fictional version of the real Kim Deitch. He does draw their real apartment, with all of its knickknacks and oddities, and details their conversations - but never forget that it's all a story being told, and that this is the same thing Deitch has been doing for decades. He slides from modern domesticity into stories about reincarnated rats and flying cars seamlessly, with the reader left wondering which bits are "real" and which are invented.

So the first story dives right into a 1952 taping of Howdy Doody in which an eight-year-old Deitch was bullied by a six-year-old Donald Trump. If I had to untangle truth from fiction, I'd bet Deitch was in the audience for Howdy Doody that year, and maybe Trump was, too, but that the rest is modern fabulation. 

The rest of the book is similar, with probably-true bits about cartoonist Harold Grey being inspired by news reports of a woman's passionate courtroom speech in a case about a midget couple involved in a fatal bombing and definitely-fictional bits about that couple's (normal-sized) son becoming a superhero with a flying car and his father-reincarnated-as-a-rat sidekick. The stories aren't quite complete: there are a lot of anecdotes and beginnings here, but no real endings.

How I Make Comics has a dozen sections: a few of them are clearly interstitial material - titled "Interlude" and "Appendix" and "Preview" - but most are stories, or partial stories, with that mixture of probably-true and obviously-fiction. They circle or cluster around the same concerns as Deitch's prior work, but don't really build or combine. They stay mostly separate pieces, as Deitch pitches them to Pam and she finds faults in most of them. The last section, the one called "Preview," might be the topic of Deitch's next book, a collection of stories from storytellers in a park he frequents.

So this could be a bit disappointing to some Deitch fans, especially the ones that want the wilder mythology of Waldo and the time-hopping, integrated plots of his bigger books. On the other hand, it has lovely art on its big pages, quirk to spare, as it tells the kinds of stories that only Deitch can. And for a guy in his early 80s, that's impressive - I'll take whatever odd stories Deitch feels like telling now.

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.