The Great British Bump-Off: Kill Or Be Quilt by John Allison and Max Sarin

Allison and Sarin were the team behind (the bulk of) the Giant Days comics series, which ran for a number of years and was pretty successful, as I understand it. Before and since, Allison has also had an array of related webcomics - he started with Bobbins in the late '90s, transitioned that to Scarygoround for longer stories this century, ran an offshoot called Bad Machinery involving two sets of mystery-solving kids for about a decade, and has most recently done offshoots like Steeple and Solver - which are set in the same fictional world as Giant Days, though the Giant Days cast has not reappeared as often as other Allison characters have.

For some bizarre reason, John Allison is not a giant of world comics, beloved by millions, even though he has been making wonderful, smart comics with zippy dialogue, quirky plots, and fascinating characters for around thirty years now. In my darker moments, I think of that as yet another indication that we are a fallen race, and that we simply can't have nice things. More realistically, Allison can be quite British, which may have limited his appeal to the segments of the American public who have trouble breathing with their mouths closed. (Oops, there I go again with the cynicism.)

What I might grandly call the mainstream of Allison's work generally involves each new series having a few characters from the last series, doing something new with a somewhat different cast. Thus Bobbins turned into Scarygoround, with a cluster of the same people, and then a couple of those people turned up as background characters in Bad Machinery. The Bad Machinery kids are young adults now, and so they're popping up in their own series - fan-favorite Lotty Grote in the print-comics series Wicked Things and then Solver stories on the web was first.

But her mystery-solving compatriot Shauna Wickle has also gotten a spin-off: first The Great British Bump-Off, in which the mystery-loving young woman competed on a reality show whose real-world analog you may be able to figure out from the title.

And, about a year later, Allison and artist Max Sarin (with colors by Sammy Borras and letters by Jim Campbell) brought Shauna back for a sequel: The Great British Bump-Off: Kill or Be Quilt. It keeps the title of the first miniseries for continuity, but Shauna is not on that reality show, or any reality show, this time, nor does anyone actually get bumped off.

Instead, Shauna has borrowed a narrowboat for the summer, to wend her way down the canals and rivers of Jolly Olde and have some fun minor adventures. Unfortunately, her first stop is in Barton-on-Wendle, where her lack of knot-tying acumen leads to the boat getting free and gaining a very expensive scratch down one side. So she needs to get a job to pay for that repair, which drags her into the intrigues of the two quilt shops of Barton.

The proprietors of those shops hate each other, and accuse each other of trying to sabotage their shops - which is plausible, since the EV of one of them bursts into flames right after Shauna arrives and the other's shop has an extensive flood caused by a deliberately-blocked drain soon afterward. Shauna works in both shops, as an undercover spy for both proprietors against both proprietors, as she tries to figure out the villain behind the mayhem.

It all comes to a head at the big annual quilt convention in town, and Shauna does solve the mystery - and bring the quilting community of Barton-on-Wendle back into harmony, with the aid of the traditional feisty old lady quilter - in the end. It is lighter-hearted than some of Allison's stories - as I noted above, nobody gets murdered in this one, and there's no supernatural element, unlike Bad Machinery - and has a lovely ending, including return visits by many of the Bad Machinery cast.

I tend to be slightly old-school with Allison: I think no one draws his comics quite as well as he does. But Max Sarin is a very close second, with similar body language and faces. And drawing is, of course, time-consuming - an Allison who writes more than he draws can make more comics, which is a major enticement. So now I just have to figure out how to make an audience of millions fall in love with all things Allisonian, so that he will have to increase production to fill the massive demand.

If you haven't yet read John Allison's work, perhaps you can help? Buy one of his books, or, if you prefer free samples first, either this page or this one offer lists of currently-available Allison projects on his website. And then tell all your friends, so they can tell tell all their friends....

Books Read: December 2025

As always, this is mostly an index, mostly for me, and not-particularly-useful until the posts actually go live and I come back and update this. (And that will be roughly six weeks from now; I'm running about that far ahead.)

René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, Asterix and Cleopatra (12/6)

George O'Connor, Asgardians: Loki (12/7)

Mervyn Peake, Mr. Pye (12/11)

Wiley Miller, The Non Sequitur Guide to Finance (digital, 12/13)

Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell, The Joy of Snacking (digital, 12/14)

Ana Ocina, Croquette & Empanada: A Love Story (digital, 12/20)

James Thurber, The 13 Clocks (in Writings & Drawings, 12/20)

John Allison and Max Sarin, The Great British Bump-Off: Kill or Be Quilt (digital, 12/21)

Jason, Death in Trieste (digital, 12/24)

Jack Vance, Wyst: Alastor 1716 (in Alastor)

Roger Langridge and Ryan Ferrier, Criminy (digital, 12/25)

Jeff Lemire, Fishflies (digital, 12/26)

Edward Welch, ed., Captain Cuttle's Mailbag (12/26)

Sergio Aragonés, Louder Than Words, Actions Speak (digital, 12/27)

Gilbert Hernandez, Lovers and Haters (digital, 12/28)

Evelyn Waugh, Robbery Under Law (in Waugh Abroad, 12/28)

Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf & Cub, Vol.8: Chains of Death (digital, 12/29)

Kenji Tsurata, Wandering Island, Vol.2 (digital, 12/30)

Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo, Book 9: Daisho (digital, 12/31)

Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (in Later Novels & Other Writings, 12/31)

I plan to keep reading books in 2026. Not all my plans come true, but I'm pretty sure that one will.

Favorite Books of the Year: 2025

Every year, I post a list of the books I liked best the previous year, early on the New Year's morning. Some years I've read less, and kept it simple, but usually I pick a book as a favorite for each month (and some also-rans worth mentioning) and pull them all together at the end into a list.

First, though, I like including long lists of links, so here are all of the previous installments: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005.

And then, before I get into the list: I'm idiosyncratic, and I feel the need to explain those idiosyncrasies every year, so....

Rules & Explanations:

• This list is finalized on December 31 on purpose; it includes everything I read this year. I occasionally cast shade on people who do "best of the year" lists as early as Halloween; they are slackers and will get theirs eventually.
• These are favorites, not "best." I can't define "best." I can define "favorite."
• This is not separated or compartmentalized by genre; it's based on everything I read. Maybe that means I'm lazy, maybe it means I reject tired genre dichotomies: you decide.
• Each month gets some also-rans; the bolded book is the favorite.
• I try to chose new(ish) books for the favorites, so this is roughly similar to the big fancy lists; it doesn't always work. My reading is not at all focused on newly-published books, to begin with - that would be nice, and the part of me that used to work in publishing wishes I was still doing that, but I just don't read enough anymore, or in that focused a way.

But Why?

I didn't have some specific reason, originally, for making my list this way - it seemed like a reasonable way to organize a list, maybe a little idiosyncratic, certainly, but defensible. As the years have gone on, making those weird, particular choices for each month loom larger, and have become a more central part of the process. For example: if I read only books that vaguely annoyed me in a given month, how do I pick a "favorite?"

I'm ambivalent about the idea of literary standards to begin with - they've been used as a cudgel often against the kinds of books I like (not to mention all of the other problems with canon-making, starting with which groups are allowed to be part of it and how they get in) - while at the same time I do think there are aspects of a work that can be clearly done badly or well. There are standards, on some level, which I do think serious readers can identify and note. 

At the same time, lousy things can on occasion be a lot of fun, and well-executed works can be tedious, horrible bilge not worth reading. (cf. Henry James) And I didn't have any interest in celebrating the worthy but dull.

So I wanted to do a list, and I wanted it to have rules that constrained it - but not the same rules as anyone else. These rules grew up as I was doing it, mostly that first year, and have been tweaked since then but are still recognizably the same. So that's why there's twelve, and why each month is its own little competition - because listing favorites for a year is already artificial to begin with, so why not emphasize that artificiality?

January

The last few years, I've been reading a lot of older books - that's good for my reading things I actually enjoy (at least most of the time), but it's bad for this list. Maybe some year I'll break down and say some of my favorite books of a given year are decades old, but I don't think I'm there yet.

Still - I did read a bunch of older, excellent books this year. I started the year reading about a corrupt political establishment and a weird, twisty election in A.J. Liebling's classic book of reportage The Earl of Louisiana, for reasons I think I can leave unstated. Later in January, I got to Stewart O'Nan's first novel, the seasonally appropriate Snow Angels, and also continued a vague project to re-read a lot of Jack Vance, starting his "Tschai" novels with City of the Chasch. (I read the rest of the Tschai books and the three Alastor novels in 2025.)

I also noticed that George O'Connor had started what will be a four-book series of graphic novels (officially for younger readers, but don't let that scare you) and got to the first one, Odin, in January and two more (the ones already published) before the year ended.

But the favorite for the month was a new graphic novel by the unique Carol Lay, My Time Machine, which also - to loop back to Liebling - had a lot of relevance to the world we find ourselves in.

February

Starting with old things again, I continued a re-read of Raymond Chandler's novels (as I type this, I'm just a bit into The Long Goodbye, which I should finish before the year ends) with Farewell, My Lovely this month. They're favorites, but, again, it's not fair to claim anything seven decades old for this year.

Not quite as old, and just as much a favorite, was Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's Batman: Year One, which sent me, a bit later in the year, into re-reading Miller's Daredevil as well.

Even newer - only about a decade old, and new to me - was a fine and visually stunning graphic novel about Brian Epstein, Vivek J. Tiwary and Andrew C. Robinson's The Fifth Beatle. I liked it but didn't love it, and thought it had more than a bit of special pleading.

Two other things that I can't quite call my favorites, for different reasons: Axelle Lenoir's fun collection What If We Were.... is enough not-quite-new that I have to make it an also-ran, and Cathy Malkasian's Percy Gloom is both a bit too old to be a 2025 favorite and quirky in ways that sometimes set my teeth on edge (which I'm finding common with Malkasian - she's a very particular creator with definite strengths, so I want to both read her books closely and argue with them intensely).

The favorite for the month is partly a sentimental favorite - Daniel Pinkwater had a new novel this year, the middle-grade story Jules, Penny, and the Rooster. I don't want to say that any new Pinkwater book would automatically be a favorite, but it's close to that - he's such a unique writer, who I've been reading since I was a middle-grade myself, and this is yet another fine bit of Pinkwateriana for brighten the world a bit.

March

My list of possibilities this month is entirely "old," so my favorite will end up being not as new as I would like. Maybe the way to figure out which one it should be is to start from the oldest books. 

I dug back into a big omnibus of Evelyn Waugh travel books by reading Remote People, the story of his trip to see Haile Selassie crowned King of Abyssina, and read a bunch more in that book later in the year - most of it deeply entertaining, even as Waugh was full of opinions and ideas I can't quite bring myself to agree with.

I re-read David Goodis's fine noir novel Down There, which I think I read in a big bunch of Goodis twenty-five years or so ago, so it was time enough to get back to it.

I found and read two good books of memoir this month: Louise Brooks' collection of essays about her time making movies, Lulu in Hollywood, and the newspaperwoman Helene Stapinski's memoir about her childhood in Jersey City, Five-Finger Discount.

I've been reading Julian Hanshaw's graphic novels as I've found them - he's a quirky, specific creator with something new to say in each book so far, which I appreciate. This month, I made my way back to his 2018 book Cloud Hotel.

And I've been spending the year reading the fine Freddy Lombard books of Yves Chaland, who died unexpectedly and far too young around thity years ago. The one that's the most impressive is right in the middle, and that will take pride of place for this month: Freddy Lombard, Vol. 3: The Comet of Carthage.

April

A few years later than I expected, I re-read Gene Wolfe's quirky sequel to his "Book of the New Sun" series, The Urth of the New Sun, which I found just as quirky this time around.

Also a few years old, but new to me, was Daria Tessler's semi-wordless (there's no dialogue, but a lot of in-world text) graphic novel Cult of the Ibis, which is deeply quirky in its own way.

For newer things, I read two very different, interesting, good graphic novels: Michael Avon Oeming's moody medieval supernatural tale William of Newbury and Craig Thompson's massive autobiographical Ginseng Roots.

The most impressive book of the month - it's a tough read, and about horrible things at times, so I don't want to say "favorite" quite as strongly for this month - was the new collection of Kayla E.'s stories about her childhood, Precious Rubbish.

May

I listed Chandler's The High Window in my first cut for this post, but I don't want to keep mentioning re-reading old things in the same series, so let me instead call out Chester Himes and The Real Cool Killers, about a decade more current and still as cool and smart and electric as it was sixty years ago.

I read two excellent novels - very different from each other - for the first time this month; both are over a decade old. Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog is the fourth of her novels about Jackson Brodie, which have been championed by crime-fiction readers but are bigger and more encompassing that that. (For all that "crime fiction" is already a very large bucket that can include a vast number of stories.) And William Kotzwinkle's The Midnight Examiner was a fever dream of an '80s tabloid.

I read a bunch of good graphic novels this month, and am finding it difficult to pick one as a favorite. All had strengths, but all also had things I disliked. So I can't quite make Eric Drooker's Naked City or Noah Van Sciver's Beat It, Rufus or Laura Pérez's Ocultos or Grant Snider's Thinking About Thinking or even Mia Oberlӓnder's Anna as my "favorite."

I will give pride of place to All My Bicycles by Powerpaola, a book and a creator I'd never heard of before I picked them up, a distinctive and interestingly framed memoir of a specific, quirky life, a book that was fun and energetic and colorful and wonderful.

June

On the old side, I read Evelyn Waugh's Scoop again, after twenty-some years, and found it just as cynical and nasty and cutting as the first time.

For newer things, I actually read a first novel around the time of publication! There was a decade or so where I did that several times a month, but times change on us. This time around, it was Auston Habershaw with a fine contemporary fantasy, If Wishes Were Retail.

And my favorite of the month was a graphic novel: Love Languages by James Albon, a fine love story by a creator whose work I need to dig into more deeply.

July

I mentioned a Julian Hanshaw book earlier, so, under my rules, I'm not supposed to say that I also read Free Pass this year. Pretend I didn't.

For old books, I read a few - another Evelyn Waugh travel book that I shouldn't mention, for one. I also re-read Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, which I think I got a lot more out of than when I first read it, as a teenager. (But isn't that always the case?) 

The favorite was a no-brainer. Jaime Hernandez had a new collection of his Love & Rockets stories: Life Drawing. 

August

August is a complicated one. If I hadn't already picked a Carol Lay book for this year's list, I'd be happy to give the nod to her Murderburg, which is a fun, zippy collection of great stories about a small-town (island) where killing people is something of a local hobby. But I had, so I couldn't.

I've been watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 a bunch the last year or so, with my kids, and this year dug into a few books about it, because that's the kind of over-intellectualizer I am. Best of that bunch, no surprise, is the book by the cast & crew themselves, The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide from the mid-90s.

I should throw the "old" books in somewhere around here: I re-read William Goldman's classic fantasy novel The Princess Bride, which is as bright and cutting as ever. New to me, but nearly twenty years old, was the cultural history How to Be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman, which was smart and full of interesting details of everyday life for a lot of people over close to a century.

And then there were two books that could have been the favorite. One was "new," but largely reprinted old work by a great, now-dead master - so I think I'm going to take half a point off for that and list it first. Richard Sala was a massive talent who died much too soon, and his first book Night Drive was a quirky gem to begin with and made vastly better by the additional material added to the recent posthumous edition.

That leaves pride of place to Jeff Lemire's big, detailed memoir of his life in comics: 10,000 Ink Stains.

September

There were a lot of OK books in September, but not many I want to drag back out here. I got to another Cathy Malkasian book, The Heavy Bright, which I enjoyed and argued with in almost equal proportions. (I've seen reports that she's planning to stop making books, which would be sad: she's a unique, distinctive voice, and I say that even as I argue with almost every page of hers I read.)

I could also mention the fun but slight Who Killed Nessie? by Paul Cornell and Rachael Smith and the gorgeous but weirdly-ending Betty Blues by Renaud Dilles.

And the favorite for the month was another surprise: Smoking Kills by Thijs Desmet, an afterlife fantasy by a creator I've never heard of.

October

I've been reading or re-reading P.G. Wodehouse books, about one every second or third month, for several years now - he wrote about a hundred of them, so I have a lot to get through. I read several this year, all entertaining, all uniquely Wodehousian, but the only one I'll mention was this month: The Mating Season.

Also old, also a re-read, also the end of a re-read project: Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man. I was less-impressed by his middle novels, but this one is still zippy and bright.

Two random graphic novels worth mentioning: the stylish spy thriller Bang! by Matt Kindt & Wilfredo Torrres, and the major French biography George Sand: True Genius, True Woman by Séverine Vidal & Kim Consigny.

And one more, which almost became the favorite: The Interview by Manuelle Fior, an excellent SFnal story about a decade old now.

But I actually read a big non-fiction prose book, only a few years after publication, and it was full of insights and research and details about forty-some years of underground cartoonists and their followers, so that will take the slot: Brian Doherty's Dirty Pictures.

November

At this point in the year, my links start to give out, since the posts haven't gone live yet. I might go back later in '26 and add them in, but I suspect I won't remember to do that.

To start with the old: this year I finally read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, which was mostly familiar from a million adaptations but full of specifics that strong originals always have and their adaptations never quite include all of.

I also read the excellent '70s SF novel The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe by D.G. Compton, also for the first time. Vaguely related - since it's about old SF - is the oral history Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods!, edited by Richard Wolinsky from several decades of a San Francisco radio-interview program.

On the comics side, I found two excellent books by European creators from earlier this century: Naomi Nowak's Graylight and Ludovic Debeurme's Renée.

For newer comics, also worth noting were Walker Tate's debut Laser Eye Surgery and two books of an unexpected triptych of women cartoonists making memoirs about their relationships with food and eating: Jennifer Hayden's Where There's Smoke, There's Dinner and Debbie Tung's My Perfectly Imperfect Body. (I'll mention the third a section down, under December.)

The favorite was a big new book by Bill Griffith, covering the long, complex, fascinating life of his photographer grandfather: Photographic Memory.

December

In the last month of the year, I read a weird old book worth mentioning: Mister Pye, the other novel by Gormenghast author Mervyn Peake. It is light in tone and amiable and utterly its own odd supernatural thing, in a Christian vein unlike anything else I've ever read.

I mentioned Jaime Hernandez's new Love & Rockets collection above, so, out of fairness, I should also mention the similarly new collection by his brother Gilbert, Lovers and Haters. There: I have now mentioned it. I make no claims for favorites or quality.

Reading Jeff Lemire's 10,000 Ink Stains inspired me to make a list of the books of his I'd missed, and I got to his excellent, recent, mostly horror/crime Fishflies this month.

I need to mention John Allison somewhere in this list, though I seem to mostly read his stuff online these days. I did get to the collection of his recent series with Max Sarin, The Great British Bump-Off: Kill or Be Quilt, which is full of his great dialogue and sparkling plots - plus Sarin's fine cartoony drawing, too.

The third of the three memoirs by women cartoonist about cooking and eating - and the one that made me notice there were three of them, published almost on top of each other, was the smart and insightful The Joy of Snacking by New Yorker cartoonist and standup comic Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell.

And the favorite for the month, to close out the year, was another collection of laconic genre stories told sideways by the inimitable cartoonist known only as Jason, Death in Trieste.

Top 12 of 2024

• Love Languages by James Albon
• Freddy Lombard, Vol. 3: The Comet of Carthage by Yves Chaland 
• Smoking Kills by Thijs Desmet
• Dirty Pictures by Brian Doherty
• Precious Rubbish by Kayla E.
• Photographic Memory by Bill Griffith
• Life Drawing by Jaime Hernandez
• Death in Trieste by Jason
• My Time Machine by Carol Lay
• 10,000 Ink Stains by Jeff Lemire
• Jules, Penny, and the Rooster by Daniel Pinkwater
• All My Bicycles by Powerpaola

I read 207 books last year - less than 2024, more than the four years before that, less than my Book-A-Day Years but more than the ones between. I seem to have found a pattern that works for me.

I don't know if you're like me, but I need to find ways to embed reading - like so many other things that I want to make sure I do regularly - into the fabric of my life, so that it just happens. Years ago, I read for myself while commuting and for work (when I was an editor) in long stretches every weekend and many evenings. Losing the editorial job freed up my weekends, though I sometimes miss that life. Losing the commute sent me into a reading tailspin, and it took me years to figure out how to replace that time regularly.

What I mean to say is: think about the things that matter to you. If you read this far, "reading books" is probably one of them. Embed those things in your life regularly. Make time for them, structurally. Don't let the things you really want to do become contingent and secondary.

And, of course: read good books. I recommend the ones above; you'll have others based on your own tastes. 2026 is as good a time as any. Today is the best time to do anything, to start any project.

The Great British Bump-Off by John Allison and Max Sarin

John Allison's fictional world - well, mostly a fictional UK, and even there heavily mostly-Yorkshire (does that count as Midlands or the North? I'm never sure where the line is) - is big and complex, especially after thirty years of stories.

The fictional town of Tackleford was central to his webcomics from Bobbins to Scarygoround to Bad Machinery, but the last decade has seen that world expand to include a fictionalized version of Sheffield in Giant Days (with first Lissa Treiman and then Max Sarin on art), a fictional town in Cornwall in Steeple, and (less successfully to my mind, and perhaps not really in the same world) a small US town in By Night.

Allison started in that halcyon early-Internet era when you could just do a webcomic and (as I understand it) basically live on the proceeds, but that time seems to have passed: the market power of Google has driven the revenue flow of ads down massively and the subscription model for individual strips that aren't primarily about tab-a-into-slot-b never really worked. So my sense is that the Bad Machinery books were relatively successful, and Giant Days definitely a hit, but both of those stories hit their natural end. Allison has been poking around with other concepts since them - I've already mentioned Steeple, which was awesome but seems to have ended due to lack of publishing support, and By Night, which was an interesting experiment. His cast already has mixed and reshuffled across properties - one of the main characters of Giant Days had been important in Scarygoround as a teen - so several of those ideas are largely "what comes next for This Person?"

So Charlotte Grote, from Bad Machinery and a few guest turns in Giant Days, had a Wicked Things miniseries and turns up in occasional Solver stories on Allison's site. And now her compatriot in supernatural detection, Shauna Wickle, does what every young person worldwide seems to want to do these days: goes on a TV reality show.

The show is UK Bakery Tent, and the story of her time there is The Great British Bump-Off, written by Allison and drawn by Max Sarin. It was a four-issue miniseries from Dark Horse about eighteen months ago, and then collected into this one volume late in 2023.

As you can guess from the title, the show here is a version of "The Great British Bake-Off," and there is...a murder! Well, an attempted murder, at least. And The Show Must Go On, so someone has to solve the murder - and that will be Shauna, if she has anything to say about it. (With the aid of two of her fellow contestants - the nana and the quirky guy.)

There's a fairly large cast - a dozen contestants/suspects, the hosts of the show, and a couple of production people as well - and all of them except Shauna are new Allisonian creations. Even though Shauna is officially "the quirky one," I have to say they're all quirky, in amusing and entertaining ways - each, as I've implied, cast by this show to be a "type" and to fill a specific role.

(One member of the cast, who works in IT, has a complex model of all of the types with detailed predictions about how long each will last in the competition.)

Shauna runs around, trying to balance high-pressure baking competition with also high-pressure  snooping, hindered by the fact that most of the contestants don't know the truth about "the accident." But she is a John Allison heroine, with endless reserves of energy (and sass, though that seems too American a word in this context) and so of course she does solve the mystery in the end, and succeeds in not being eliminated in the first week.

The book ends with the equivalent of the credits sequence explaining everyone's fate in later life - "later life" here meaning "the rest of the competition." Like everything else Allisonian, it is quirky and specific and a lot of fun.

I don't know if we're going to get more Shauna Wickle stories - this seems awfully like a one-off, unless she turns into the kind of "influencer" whose career is going on reality shows - but it's an amusing Allison romp with great energetic Sarin art, so anyone jonesing for more Giant Days (or something not too far from it) should be very happy.

Books Read: August 2024

This is the monthly index post for the blog; if you find it useful, yay for you but it's really something I do for myself. Here's what I read this past month; I will add links eventually:

Benoist Simmat and Stéphane Douay, The Incredible Story of Cooking (digital, 8/3)

Algis Budrys, The Iron Thorn (in SF Gateway Omnibus, 8/3)

Nancy Peña, The Cat from the Kimono (digital, 8/4)

Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me (in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, 8/4)

David Prudhomme, Cruising Through the Louvre (digital, 8/10)

Julia Gfrörer, Black Is the Color (digital, 8/11)

P.G. Wodehouse, Big Money (8/11)

Charles Burns, Final Cut (digital, 8/16)

John Allison and Max Sarin, The Great British Bump-Off (digital, 8/17)

Carol Emshwiller, Carmen Dog (8/17)

Mike Mignola, Christopher Golden, and Matt Smith, Hellboy in Love (digital, 8/18)

Peter and Maria Hoey, In Perpetuity (digital, 8/24)

Jimmy Bemon and Emilie Boudet, Superman Isn't Jewish (But I Am...Kinda) (digital, 8/25)

Lisa Goldstein, Ivory Apples (bound galleys, 8/25)

Koren Shadmi, All Tomorrow's Parties: The Velvet Underground Story (digital, 8/26)

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (in The Devil's Dictionary, Tales & Memoirs, 8/26)

Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 3: The Flute of the Fallen Tiger (digital, 8/27)

Jean-Christophe Deveney and PMGL, Haruki Murakami Manga Stories, Vol. 2 (8/28)

A.J. Liebling, The Sweet Science (in The Sweet Science & Other Writings, 8/28)

Jeffrey Brown, Kids Are Still Weird (digital, 8/29)

Haruki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation (8/29)

Axelle Lenoir, Secret Passages: 1985-1986 (8/30)

Kelly Link, White Cat, Black Dog (8/30)

Tara O'Connor, Fly By Night (8/31)

More books next month - I assume.

Steeple, Vol. 3: That's the Spirit! by John Allison with Sammy Borras

The third collection of John Allison's Steeple comics is a big, capacious thing, with one long Steeple story, a short Steeple story to start off, and a crossover with...maybe Solver? or Wicked Things? [1] ...called "Author Unknown?" in the middle. It features no page numbers, but a quick count shows it to have over 150 story pages, plus covers and some sketches in the back to bring the whole package up to what I think I accurately counted off as a 176-page package.

That, then, is Steeple, Vol. 3: That's the Spirit! All written and drawn by creator Allison, with colors on "issues 4-6" by Sammy Borras (note - nothing is identified as an "issue" within the book itself; the three stories have full-page titles but no issue breaks other than that). A big wodge of excellent Allisonian comics, all of which (I think) originally appeared on his website. [2]

Before I write about those three stories, let me link back to my posts on the first two collections (one and two) and sketch the setup: Tredregeyn is a picturesque Cornwall village, home to St. Pirin's church (CoE) and an outpost of the Church of Satan. Running St. Pirin's is Rev David Penrose, a beefy exemplar of a man who spends most of his time fighting off nightly invasions from a very diverse group of aquatic monsters who are evil but seem so far to be unconnected to the Satanists. Running the Other Side is Magus Tom Pendennis, a thin, weedy bastard who seems to be not so much evil as just a selfish, unpleasant twerp. The main characters are Billie Barker, who was a trainee CoE priest but defected to the Other Side, and Maggie Warren, who ditto in reverse - they are best friends despite their officially-opposed roles.

Right! So the first story is a single "issue" long, with a cover and twenty-two story pages, and sees Billie and Maggie having imbibed too much before and after (and possibly during) a midnight Christmas Eve service at St. Pirin's and subsequently having attracted a minor supernatural creature that torments them, because that's what happens in Allison's worlds. I hope I'm not spoiling anything by saying they are not cursed for ever and ever on page twenty-six of a 176-page book, but it is a close-run thing.

Then comes "Author Unknown?" in which Shelly comes to town on a book-signing tour - she does a series of picture books for kids called "Tibkins" after the tribble-ish main character - and gets into danger. Lotty is dispatched to find and save her, and, after some misunderstandings, is aided by Billie and the Rev. in doing so. The danger is very Tredregeyn, I'll say that much.

And then the bulk of the book is the long story, which I suppose is probably titled "That's the Spirit!" It's sparked by a couple of things: Maggie and Billie love the cozy detective drama Clotted Crime, which is set in Cornwall but filmed in Devon, and Billie is learning just how different Satan is from The Chap Upstairs (the CoE provides their curates with free living quarters and a small living stipend; Satan doesn't pay at all but does charge rent), which is causing her financial trouble. One plea to Baphomet later - and some related odd events, since this is Steeple - and Clotted Crime starts filming its new series right in Tredregeyn.

This is a longer story, so the complications continue to pile up from there, including an attractive but dim actor who dates Billie, Maggie's estranged father (a former MP and high muckety-muck in a more evil, larger Satanic church), and the inevitable aquatic horrors that Tredregeyn can never seem to get beyond. It does all end reasonably well, but Allison sets a number of obvious hooks for future stories along the way.

I'll also note that Steeple seems to want to be about sex - Lottie and Shelly note, when leaving Tredregeyn, how deeply "horny" the whole place is, and the Satanic rites mentioned seem to be entirely orgies rather than sacrificing goats and seeing to destroy one's enemies and so forth. But it's also very British in its attitude towards sex, and Allison seems to have gotten more reticent at presenting his main characters even post-coitus than in the Scary Go Round days, so sometimes they seem to be protesting way too much and not actually fucking very much at all.

Perhaps one is to assume there is always some fucking going on, just off-panel, all of the time - or maybe just that everyone else is fucking all the time, but Maggie and Billie are not. (Or maybe Maggie used to, and Billie does now - that job seems to be very heavy on the facilitating-orgies work, but it is vague as to how much "facilitating" includes "participating," for maximum humorous and dramatic opportunities.)

In any case: it's zippy and funny adventure stories, Allison-style, towards the more supernatural end of his work, with more references to sex than typical. His dialogue is still like no one else's, his body language is excellent, and his plots are convoluted in the best ways. As always, I highly recommend anything by Allison, and this is his newest book.

[1] The main guest star is the incomparable Lotty Grote, star of both Solver (currently ongoing online, at least intermittently) and Wicked Things (on hiatus at best). The secondary guest star is Shelly Winters of old, who seems mostly settled into comfortable adulthood now after the usual Allisonian young-adult chaos.

[2] Note: navigation has gotten more complicated, after what I think was at least one webcrash, the migration of the vast Bad Machinery archives to GoComics and other activities involving older comics like ScaryGoRound and even the fabled Bobbins moving mostly into paid spaces. Scroll down, look for a calendar on the right, and choose from the selector below the calendar to get to the beginnings of the various stories still available there. See also this blog post from Allison for a list of stuff and where to read and/or buy it.

Books Read: December 2022

I'm actually typing this a few days ahead (Thursday afternoon), but I'm burying the post on a Sunday morning because, honestly, who cares?

Here's what I've read during the past month, mostly to be an index to this blog for Future Me:

Manix Abrera, 12 (digital, 12/3)

Lavie Tidhar, Neom (bound galleys, 12/3)

Laurent Queyssi and Mauro Marchesi, Philip K. Dick: A Comics Biography (digital, 12/4)

Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, Signal to Noise (12/9)

Rick Geary, The Fatal Bullet (12/10)

Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch (12/10)

Paul Grist, Mudman, Vol. 1 (12/11)

John Allison with Sammy Borras, Steeple, Vol. 3: That's the Spirit! (12/17)

Bean Sears, Night Air (12/18)

Jeff Prucher, editor, Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction (12/19)

Lewis Trondheim, Ralph Azham, Vol. 2: The Land of the Blue Demons (12/23)

John Barnes, Gaudeamus (12/23)

Budjette Tan and KaJo Baldisimo, Trese, Vol. 5: Midnight Tribunal (12/24)

Algis Budrys, Hard Landing (in SF Gateway Omnibus, 12/24)

Tom Gauld, Revenge of the Librarians (12/25)

Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, Christophe Gaultier, and Stephane Oiry, Dungeon: Early Years, Vol. 3: Without a Sound (12/26)

Jeff Lemire, Tate Brombol, Gabriel Hernandez Walta, and Jordie Bellaire, Barbalien: Red Planet (digital, 12/27)

Lawrence Block, The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown (12/27)

Mallie and Hubert, In Shadows, Book One (digital, 12/28)

Wilfrid Lupano and Paul Cauuet, The Old Geezers, Vol. 1 (digital, 12/29)

Benoit Feroumont, Gisele and Beatrice (digital, 12/30)

Ian Frazier, On the Rez (12/30)

Jason, Upside Dawn (digital, 12/31)

P.G. Wodehouse, If I Were You (12/31)

Twenty-four books in one month is probably the most since my last book-a-day binge in 2018; I can get a lot more reading done when I'm on vacation. Such is life!

Favorite Books of the Year: 2022

Every year, I post something like this on New Year's morning - a listing of the books I liked best the previous year. Some years I've read less, and keep it simple, but usually I pick a book as a favorite for each month (and some also-rans worth mentioning) and pull them all together at the end into a list.

I'm doing it again; I read slightly more books in 2022 than in 2021. The numbers aren't what they were back when I was an editor, or during my periodic Book-A-Day binge years, but I read 191 books in 2022, which is enough to find some themes and favorites.

First, though, I feel the need to link back to those past posts: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005.

But, before I get into the list: I'm idiosyncratic (that monthly thing, for example), and I feel the need to explain those idiosyncrasies every year, so....

Rules & Explanations:

1. This list is finalized on December 31 on purpose; it includes everything I read this year.
1. I occasionally cast shade on people who do "best of the year" lists as early as Halloween; they are slackers and will get theirs eventually.
2. These are favorites, not "best."
1. I can't define "best." I can definite "favorite."
3. This is not separated or compartmentalized by genre; it's everything I read all in one stew.
4. Each month gets some also-rans; the bolded book is the favorite.
5. I try to chose to newish books for the favorites, so this is roughly similar to other people's lists; it doesn't always work.
1. I do not only list books published in 2022, for example - that would be nice, and the part of me that used to work in publishing wants to do that, but I just don't read enough, or in that focused a way.

January

I'll start by mentioning that I've been reading Joan Didion's non-fiction over the past eighteen months or so; I read The White Album in January. Under my rules, it's not really eligible, but it's a great collection of interesting thoughts presented well, and still worth reading forty-plus years after it was written.

Everything else I have to mention is a comic of one kind or another - Guy Delisle's affecting memoir of his youth, Factory Summers, the gorgeous and thorny The Golden Age, Book One by Roxanne Moreil and Cyril Pedrosa, and R. Kikuo Johnson's deep No One Else, a book I still think needs to be read at least twice.

My favorite is the lovely, sunny, wonderful Always Never by Jordi Lafebre, a love story told in reverse.

February

The old book worth mentioning this month was Lord Emsworth and Others, a collection of Blandings Castle stories by P.G. Wodehouse. It contains "The Crime Wave at Blandings," and if you read nothing else ever by Wodehouse, you must read that story.

I was very taken by Dennis Duncan's Index, a History of the, which is exactly what it says it is, and which is exactly as good as you hope it would be.

My favorite, though, came from the field of comics: Mikael Ross's The Thud, the story of a life-changing event and the young man whose life was already much different from what most people would have hoped for.

March

I don't think I'll keep up this pattern the whole year, but I'll start by mentioning Elizabeth Bishop's The Complete Poems: 1927-1979, a great collection by a great poet. There is a newer, probably more complete Poems available, which is probably the place to go.

Also old is John le Carre's second novel, the murder mystery A Murder of Quality. It's set in a world alien to most people who might be reading this - a "Great School" of England in the early 1960s - and relentless in its searching eye on that world.

My favorite is once again a comic: The Strange Ones, a long-gestating story about punky kids in the early '90s by Jeremy Jusay.

April

OK, this time I'll start with something memorable that I'm not exactly recommending: Gilbert Hernandez's polymorphously perverse Blubber, which is like nothing else ever...and I'm not sure if that's a complement.

On the more positive side, Tardi's 1970s story The True Story of the Unknown Soldier is still strong and focused. And Pete S. Beagle's recent novel Summerlong is a mythic gem, a small novel about a small group of people and one extended, unexpected summer.

My favorite for the month was Brandon Graham's SF graphic novel Rain Like Hammers, for its depth, its complexities, for its refusal to do the obvious thing, and for its wandering, discursive story.

May

First: something indescribable. Jim Woodring's The Frank Book collected his earliest stories about Frank and his world - they are the closest to understandable, the simplest and most obvious works in Woodring's corpus, and yet they are still utterly sui generis.

Second, something ending: John Allison's The Case of the Severed Alliance, collecting the tenth and last plotline from his "Bad Machinery" webcomic. All good things must end, especially good stories - it's what makes them stories. Allison is exceptionally good at both of those things.

Last, my favorite: Daniel Pinkwater had a new novel, Crazy in Poughkeepsie. I don't know how much more I need to say, or could say.

June

A big clutch of things to mention: I'll start with Charles Stross's novella Escape from Yokai Land, a return for his series character Bob Howard and a vision of a different part of his nearly-apocalyptic Laundry world.

From the world of comics: Manuele Fior's deep SFnal story Celestia; Darryl Cunningham's well-researched and entirely committed Billionaires (hint: Cunningham is not in favor of billionaires); Rutu Modan's complex and complicated Tunnels; the fabulous and large Alone in Space, collecting a whole bunch of Tillie Walden's earlier work; and Brenna Thummler's already well-known middle-grade story of grief and next steps, Sheets.

My favorite was a quirky novella, something like a sequel and something like a religious apologetic: K.J. Parker's Inside Man, the story of one demon and his human nemesis.

July

I read two old SF novels - one a re-read, one for the first time. J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World was still deeply Ballardian, his second novel but the one that crystalized how he would write from that moment forward. And Algis Budrys's Michaelmas was even more adult and complex than I expected, a smart novel from the era when SF had to be short and so good novels crammed in depths to every word.

Paul Theroux's travel book On the Plain of Snakes was a deep and intriguing look at many facets of Mexico, from the point of view of one old gringo driving through it and trying to be as honest as open as he could be.

Walter Jon Williams launched a fantasy trilogy with Quillifer, featuring a roguish first-person narrator with a marvelous voice, reminding me that there doesn't seem to be anything that Williams can't write brilliantly.

And I read a cluster of excellent graphic novels by women: collections of short pieces by Carolyn Nowak (Girl Town) and Lilli Carre (Heads or Tails), the climate-change mid-life crisis bandee dessinee Amalia by Aude Picault, Jade Khoo's Miyazaki-inspired YAish adventure Zoc, and Lee Lai's deep and affecting story of sisters and lovers Stone Fruit.

The most memorable book is not part of that cluster, but maybe can be seen as related to it: I was trying to read outside my own life and experiences, so I came to Maia Kobabe's resonant and thorny memoir Gender Queer, in which e tries to explain eir entire relationship with gender and the world at large, and largely succeeds.

August

I was reading a lot of old books this year, wasn't I? Two memoirs came in close sequence this month: Tim O'Brien's If I Die in a Combat Zone, an early Vietnam memoir from the years just afterward, and Joseph Heller's Now and Then, a more traditional whole-life memoir published barely a year before he died.

Frances Larson's Severed was my "serious" non-fiction book for the month, a comprehensive look at severed heads throughout history - smart, interesting, and sneakily funny quite a lot of the time.

From the visual side, I enjoyed the deeply affecting story of ghosts and family history Ghost Tree by Bobby Carnow and Simon Gane. I finally saw new stories in the Trese series from Budjette Tan and KaJo Baldisimo in Trese, Vol. 4: Last Seen After Midnight, after years of waiting and hoping. And the nutty fast-paced thriller Omni-Visibilis by Lewis Trondheim and Matthieu Bonhomme was a massive hoot.

My favorite for the month was another collection of comics stories by a woman - maybe a late entry in the batch from the previous month - the chilly and thoughtful and formally brilliant Press Enter to Continue by Ana Galvan.

September

Most of what I have to mention this month is fantasy of one sort or another, so let me start with one story collection and one novel, both by formidable women writers: Prophecies, Libels and Dreams by Ysabeau S. Wilce, gathering the smaller pieces of her Califa sequence, and Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente, an early, dreamy, erotically-tinged story of other worlds and impossible desires and what we give up to get what we have to have.

Somewhat in the same vein is Dionysos: The New God, the last in George O'Connor's twelve-book retelling of Greek myths - they're ostensibly for middle-grade readers, but don't let that scare you away.

I don't think Bastien Vives's bandee dessinee The Blouse is actually fantasy, but you could make an argument in that direction, if you want. It has a stark, unblinking camera eye and an uneasy view of sex and power and visibility. Vives was also part of the team, along with Florent Ruppert and Jerome Mulot, creating the souffle of a caper story The Grand Odalisque, which is lovely and deeply enjoyable and about as serious as a random Bond movie.

My favorite for the month was back in the fantasy realm: Ralph Azham, Vol. 1: Black Are the Stars, a solo omnibus of three albums by the very prolific Lewis Trondheim. It's much like the Dungeon series co-written by Trondheim, with some twists of its own: a smart, adult series set in a big, complex world where anything can happen.

October

Old things: Roy Morris Jr's excellent '90s biography Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company and P. G. Wodehouse's wonderful '30s Blandings novel Heavy Weather.

Graphic things: the affecting and down-to-earth A Journal of My Father by Jiro Taniguchi; Max de Radiguès's two-track tale of young love and confusion, Simon & Louise; the complex memoir of a frightening illness, Parenthesis by Elodie Durand.

Josh Ritter's long-gestating second novel, The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All, was a big-hearted and open and wild as its title implies.

And my favorite was a new short novel by an old favorite: Tom Perrotta's multi-viewpoint Tracy Flick Can't Win, a book that is both a sequel to Election and a smart book about middle age and choices that stands on its own.

November

I'm very slowly reading old novels by John Le Carre, and got to his mid-Sixties The Looking Glass War this month. It's a devastating look at deluded men and the damage they cause.

Jasper Fforde's much newer The Constant Rabbit had a similarly hostile aim, but much more obviously - it's a coldly angry novel, tangling up a dozen modern issues into an unexpected fantasy framework.

Megan Kelso had a new collection of her comics with the long pieces collected in Who Will Make the Pancakes - it was welcome, reminding me of her subtleties and deceptively simple drawings.

Speaking of subtleties, my favorite book was from Bastien Vives - the puckishly-titled A Sister, which is not a memoir but was inspired by his own life, and which has the same unblinking eye I admired in The Blouse earlier in the year, but in a more focused, personal story.

December

Starting with the old, once again, let me mention Manix Abrera's wordless comics collection 12, which I was happy to see has finally been published "in English" (strange to say about a wordless book, but you know what I mean) and re-read with pleasure and joy. I also, after a decade and a half, finally read Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction edited by Jeff Prucher.

Similarly old, but which I only just discovered: Michael Wex's lively and culturally-centered tour of the Yiddish language, Born to Kvetch.

Also old, and finally coming down from the shelf for a read at the end of the year: Ian Frazier's discursive, personal, thoughtful On the Rez, the story of a friendship and a people and a time and, a bit, about Native life in the USA.

I got to the second of the Ralph Azham series by Lewis Trondheim, The Land of the Blue Demons, which was just as good as the first.

Tom Gauld's new collection of cartoons, Revenge of the Librarians, came from the bookish side of his work, and was just as smart and enjoyable as his work from the scientific side, or elsewhere.

And that leaves me with two novels to choose from for the last slot of the year. Both are sequels, of their own kinds. Both are genre books, by their own lights. Both are fun - one is lighter than the other. 

Silver goes to the unexpected The Burglar Who Met Frederic Brown, written and published this year by the indefatigable Lawrence Block, funny and quick and also an excursion into a different genre than most readers would expect.

And my final favorite is Lavie Tidhar's Neom - a SF novel set in an indefinite future but a mostly-positive one, a world full of wonders and dangers, full of minds human and otherwise, full of people living quirky and interesting lives, full of opportunities and threats and surprises.

Top 12 of 2022

And then, to pull that unwieldly long ramble into an actual list:

• Always Never by Jordi Lafebre
• Crazy in Poughkeepsie by Daniel Pinkwater
• Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
• Inside Man by K.J. Parker
• Neom by Lavie Tidhar
• Press Enter to Continue by Ana Galvan
• Rain Like Hammers by Brandon Graham
• Ralph Azham, Vol. 1: Black Are the Stars by Lewis Trondheim
• A Sister by Bastien Vives
• The Strange Ones by Jeremy Jusay
• The Thud by Mikael Ross
• Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perrotta

That's what I read that was worth celebrating and remembering; I hope you have high points of your own, and, maybe, that my list above gives you some thoughts for your 2023 reading.