Wild That We're Alive by Lauren Haldeman

Every book is from a particular person, with a distinctive point of view. The best authors realize that, and are as deeply themselves as they can be, to emphasize the things only they would say, in the ways only they would say it.

Wild That We're Alive is a collection of diary comics, from one woman, mostly about her family life. It's not anything at all like that description would make you think it is - some hybrid of Erma Bombeck and James Kochalka - because that's not who Lauren Haldeman is.

Haldeman is a poet - with several awards and a pedigree from the University of Iowa, so I don't just mean "someone who has written some poetry" - a web designer, editor, painter, and obviously a maker of comics. But what I think is the key fact is that she's the kind of person who has one child, and that child is named Magnus.

There's a kind of mom who has five or more kids, all named things like Jacob and Hannah. There's a kind of mom who has two or three kids, with names you can't predict. And there's a kind of mom who has just one, with a name like Magnus or Tinkerbell.

Magnus is a character here, appearing in a number of comics. Haldeman's husband, Ben, is mentioned but less present. But they're all about her: these are diary comics. Each one is generally a single image, captioned or with dialogue - one image for a single moment, a single thought. Haldeman works in big blocks of generally light, soothing colors, and a bold, expressive, individualistic line.

She draws people somewhat anthropomorphically - maybe dogs, maybe bipedal kangaroos? - with herself central in most of these comics. They're about what's it's like to be Lauren Haldeman in the world, sometimes the physical world but even more often her mental world. I think Haldeman is the kind of person who never stops thinking about things, even when she wants to be quieter and just present. (Ask me why I recognize that.) She doesn't always provide context: there are a number of comics about grief, but we never learn who Haldeman is grieving, how recent the loss was, or anything like that. They're all from her point of view, so things she already knows likely won't be mentioned.

Wild That We're Alive is organized as a year. After a brief introductory section about her family and animals, Haldeman mentions she thinks of years as beginning in the fall - she seems to still be embedded in the academic year, from her work with the University of Iowa and maybe other academic-related web-design work. So the book follows that flow, with full-page paintings for half-titles (and occasionally elsewhere) leading into sections of comics from that time of year.

I think this was a project, a daily comic Haldeman did. Maybe for one particular year, maybe off and on for several years. I don't see it on her website, so maybe it was mostly on social media, in the way a lot of comics-makers do these days. (If the eyeballs are on Instagram, it only makes sense to post there first.)

I'm not the first person to point out that poets and comic-writers need to have a similar level of concision, of using exactly the right word in a space where there's only room for a few words. Haldeman is a great example of that; her language is precise and thoughtful, but also conversational and playful - not "poetry" in the old academic "study-this" sense, but poetic in the allusive, connected, word-besotted sense.

At times, Haldeman feels like a higher-brow version of Grant Snider - similar concerns about internal emotional states and the purpose of life, but pitched in a mindset informed by more of the academic world and with some weltschmerz behind it. I like Snider, and I like a more rigorous thought-pattern, so both of those things are good.

To close as I started, Haldeman is particular and distinctive: that's good in and of itself, even more so because she has interesting thoughts and makes striking pictures about them.

Quit Your Job and Other Stories by James Kochalka

I haven't read much of James Kochalka's work recently, but that's OK: this book is from before most of the books of his I read anyway!

(Does that make sense? I'm not sure it even makes sense as a sentence, let alone as an argument.)

Quit Your Job and Other Stories collects four Kochalka comics stories that I think are nearly thirty years old now: the copyright page lists 1997, 1998, and 2002 dates. This book is from 2015, which is still longer-ago than it seems.

There are four stories, alternating long and short, and they're all linked, somewhat, sort of. The first, title story is the most separate - the Kochalka-insert character (apparently called Magic Boy, but never named that in the book) is seen as a young man, living a normal life one day in a snowy town, talking to his talking cat and skipping work when he misses the bus. He also finds a magic ring in the snow along the way, though all it seems to be able to do is blow things up when he gestures at them - not one of your traditional "magic ring" properties, and less useful than wishes or invisibility or being able to rule the world if you renounce love. The title, in context, is descriptive rather than imperative - I'd always taken it the other way.

"Primal Brown" is the shortest story, and a connector - Magic Boy, or maybe Kochalka-the-cartoonist, is at his drawing board, and draws or dreams this story, which I suspect is a Peanuts reference. A round-headed naked kid with a single curlicue hair comes out of the water in a jungle, somewhere, and then the cartoonist wakes up.

The last two stories have the Primal Brown character in them, as well as the old-man version of Kochalka's Magic Boy character - again, not called that, but drawn like Magic Boy in other stories so let's assume it's him. The other long story is "Paradise Sucks," which has multiple threads that mostly come together: Brown and some similar people in a jungle, the wizard-looking God who made them (and his insect buddies/helpers) pretending to be nice to the jungle people but mostly teasing them, and old Magic Boy living on dumpster roasted nuts and making abstract expressionist art that urbanized round-headed guys love before suddenly finding himself in the same jungle as God and the primal people.

Last is "The Devil Makes a Man," in which one of the insects - explicitly the devil here, I suppose - makes a robot friend from Brown's rib, but Brown kills it because it's against God's will. (Which...I dunno, I didn't see anything in this story or earlier that explicitly says that, but maybe....?)

The title story is the most straightforward; the others function more on dream or imagistic logic, with scenes that flow into each other and go odd places along the way - they imply or sketch their meanings and purposes more than say anything outright.

This is quirkier, earlier, rawer Kochalka than most of what I've seen - a creator still making comics pages from the thrill of it, and seeing where each ink line takes him rather than planning out a careful journey up front.

Books Read: September 2025

I do this every month, and it's boring this time as always before. This is what I read; once the posts go live, I'll add links. I don't know if this is actually as useful as an index to the blog as I say it is, but it's a thing I do consistently, and I'm old and set in my ways enough to be very fond of consistency.

Cathy Malkasian, The Heavy Bright (digital, 9/1)

James Thurber, The Seal in the Bedroom (in Writings and Drawings, 9/1)

James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times (in Writings and Drawings, 9/1)

Thijs Desmet, Smoking Kills (digital, 9/6)

Tony Millionaire, Drinky Crow Drinks Again (digital, 9/7)

John Updike, Bech: A Book (in The Complete Henry Bech, 9/7)

John Lustig, Last Kiss: Casual Fridays (digital, 9/13)

Roger Langridge and Andy Hirsh, The Baker Street Peculiars (digital, 9/14)

Evelyn Waughh, Waugh in Abyssinia (in Waugh Abroad, 9/14)

Paul Cornell and Rachael Smith, Who Killed Nessie? (digital, 9/20)

Renaud Dilles, Betty Blues (9/21)

Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister (in Later Novels & Other Writings, 9/21)

Daredevil by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson, Vol. 2 (digital, 9/26)

James Kochalka, Quit Your Job and Other Stories (9/27)

Patrick Wirbeleit and Uwe Heidschötter, Box (9/28)

Next month I will probably read more books.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of October 4, 2025

This is the second of three weekly posts listing a big box of comics-format stuff I got from Midtown Comics about two weeks ago now. I'm breaking them into five-book chunks to keep me from typing for too long on a sunny Saturday morning and just because I can. This time, I have the middle of the alphabet, authorially:

I have two things written by Matt Kindt; I've mostly read the stuff he draws, too, but I gather that, like a lot of people in comics, he does other kinds of projects to make money and keep a career going. (Throwing no shade there: my own career wandered away from a "creative" field into  a deeply dull, B2B end of marketing that pays nicely but no one cares about.) First up is Apache Delivery Service, where the art is from Tyler Jenkins and the colors by Hilary Jenkins. This is some kind of thriller or horror story, set in the jungles of Vietnam (the war as well as the country, as I understand it), with two men (soldiers?) searching for a lost treasure.

The other Matt Kindt-written thing is Bang!, where the art comes from Wifredo Torres, and the colors are from Nayoung Kim and Bill Crabtree in various permutations. This is some kind of spy thriller thing, though I think each issue might start from a different starting place, and some of the storylines might be fictional within its overall world. Anyway: looks twisty and complex, and the quotes are mostly in the "this is awesome!" mode without giving details, so I suspect Big Reveals and Shocking Twists starting pretty early.

I had James Kochalka's Quit Your Job and Other Stories on my list of books to get for a long time - so long that I don't remember why, exactly. This is the 2015 edition - possibly expanded, or at least with a new introduction - of a book Kochalka originally published in 1997. My guess is that this was "adult" Kochalka - or maybe I mean a Kochalka book from before he started doing so much specifically for young readers, not that it's necessarily anti-kid - and I wanted to dive into that end of his work. I guess I'll see.

I thought Be That Way was a graphic novel, but it isn't, exactly: this 2023 Hope Larson book mixes comics pages, longer prose sections (in what look like a lettering font), spot illustrations, and some design-y pages to tell the story of one teen girl's life in the early '90s through her diary. So it's denser than I expected: good for depth, possibly not as good if I wanted to just read it quickly.

And last for this batch is Graylight from Naomi Nowak. I read one of Nowak's books back in the Aughts, and reviewed it for ComicMix then. This book is from the same era, so I decided to check it out. From a quick google, it looks like Nowak is mostly making paintings and jewelry these days, rather than comics, but I count "making art the way you want" as a win, no matter the form. Maybe she'll come back to comics, or some other narrative form, eventually. The description of this book is very vague, so I have almost no idea what it's about - which is also a good thing on occasion.

Mechaboys by James Kochalka

I've said this before - multiple times - but a reading life goes through various odd turns and stages. Creators that you think of as being current favorites can have multiple books that you expect to get to "later," are for different audiences, or that you just never see.

And suddenly you realize it's been a decade since you read a James Kochalka graphic novel.

When my kids were younger, I read a bunch of his books for kids - with and to them, or passed on to them after - but that petered out when they were in their mid-teens; Kochalka's books for younger readers tended (at least then; we've just established I'm thoroughly outdated on his current career) to the younger end. And I read his American Elf diary comics, until those ended. (In fact, the last Kochalka book I covered here was the collection of the earliest American Elf strips.)

So when I saw a Kochalka book in my library app - one for teens, mostly, rather than little kids - I decided a decade was already too long to go without Kochalka.

Mechaboys is tonally closer to Superf*ckers than to the kid books, though even his work for little kids gets a bit snotty and rude - Kochalka, I think, is an old-school punk, and his characters are brash and pushy and in-your-face no matter what the story. It's the story of two high school seniors, Zachery (who wants to be called Zeus) and Jamie (who wants to be called James). They just built a mech suit in their garage - Zachery is living with Jamie and his widowed mom for not-entirely-specified problems-with-his-family reasons - out of what seems to mostly be an old lawnmower.

Because this is a Kochalka comic, the mech suit basically works - it makes the wearer bigger and stronger and tougher, though it does need to be started with a pullstring, because former lawnmower.

Our heroes are bullied in school - well, some jock-types pick on them for being weird and different, but it's fairly low-key for bullying in a graphic novel for teens. The jocks are jerks rather than assholes, basically: just about as thoughtless and impulsive and destructive as our heroes, only in different ways. Still, it's a huge pain for the guys, and they want to get even or win out or whatever - all those outsider "we'll show them" ideas.

The mech suit has multiple outings: crashing into a car, visiting a keg party at Booger's Hollow, and eventually disrupting the prom. But things don't go quite the ways either Zachery - the more alienated and angry and violent of the two - or Jamie - who thinks a girl in their class might like him, and wants to figure that out - expect. There are fights, including a huge mostly joyful free-for-all at the prom at the end. 

This is a quick, fun story that takes unexpected twists all the time, in Kochalka's mature cartooning style, all rubber-hose characters with rounded organic black lines. It reminded me how much fun Kochalka's work is, and how I really shouldn't have gone without it for so long.

Books Read: March 2025

Here's what I read this past month. I list it here mostly as a way to keep track of it for myself; if it helps one other person in the world I suppose that's a bonus. I add links as the posts go live; I'm currently running five to six weeks ahead, so you'll have a bit of a wait.

James Kochalka, Mechaboys (3/1, digital)

Helene Stapinski, Five-Finger Discount (3/1)

J.L. Westover, Mr. Lovenstein Presents: Feelings (3/2, digital)

Jack Vance, Servants of the Wankh (3/2, in Planet of Adventure)

Yves Chaland, Freddy Lombard, Vol. 3: The Comet of Carthage (3/8, digital)

Jaime Hernandez, Queen of the Ring: Wrestling Drawings: 1980-2020 (3/9, digital)

Evelyn Waugh, Remote People (3/9, in Waugh Abroad)

Andrea "Casty" Castellan, Mickey Mouse: Trapped in the Shadow Dimension (3/15, digital)

Mike Mignola, Bowling with Corpses and Other Strange Tales from Lands Unknown (3/16, digital)

Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood (3/16)

Julian Hanshaw, Cloud Hotel (3/22, digital)

Megan Nicole Dong, Sharky Malarky: A Sketchshark Collection (3/23, digital)

David Goodis, Down There (3/23, in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s)

Brian Michael Bendis and Bill Walko, Fortune & Glory: The Musical (3/28, digital)

P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves (3/28)

Sophie Goldstein and Jenn Jordan, An Embarrassment of Witches (3/29, digital)

Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier, Space Circus (3/30, digital)

Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse (3/30, in Complete Novels)

Carl Hiaasen, Paradise Screwed (3/31)

In April, I'm pretty sure I will read some more books.

As a Cartoonist by Noah Van Sciver

I used to personalize far too much when I read, to reflexively attribute ideas or thoughts in a book to the author. To blame the author, some times, for how I reacted to the book, or just hold them responsible for how I, or anyone, responded to a book. [1]

I got better; I got older and (I hope) smarter.

One quirk of that growing-older change is that, as I seemingly have less and less time to read, I'm willing to give writers more and more chances, to assume it's a book that's not working for me rather than the author. And I try to be more generous to creators, to assume positive intent, to get away from that young-huffy pose of outrage that's so energizing to so many of us read-everything types for so long.

So I keep coming back to creators that don't quite work for me, especially if I see things I like in them. I just read a Katie Skelly book a couple of weeks ago, for example, liking it better than I did her past stuff. And I'm here again with another Noah Van Sciver book despite thinking Fante Bukowski wasn't really my kind of thing and finding Saint Cole technically strong but something of a slog to read. [2]

That's what brought me to As a Cartoonist, Van Sciver's short book of mostly autobiographical comics from last year. It's a thematically connected collection of comics, collecting work from what seems to be all phases of his career, from his first comic Blammo to a bunch of newer work. It's not a single narrative, but it is organized, mostly, by chronology: the main spine of the book is Van Sciver's professional life over the past decade. Van Sciver provides a list of original publications in the backmatter - have I mentioned recently that creators who make original publication clear are the very best people in the world? they are - and a number are listed as "never published," which could mean they were new or could mean they just didn't make it into anything else.

My guess is that Van Sciver was thinking about a book like this for a while - the autobio cartoonist is a clear type, and he seems to be in an indy-cartoonist world that includes a lot of autobio guys. And, as seen from some of the work here, he does have a confessional streak, or an urge to tell stories from his life, to tell his stories and express things that happened to him. But he's not relentlessly confessional, like James Kochalka or even John Porcellino - the strips with Van Sciver as a character are focused and directed, all about his career and work. They're not the kind of general "here's what I was doing and thinking" daily-comics: it's all about his aspirations and fears and life as someone trying to make these kinds of stories, in a world that mostly doesn't value that.

His life As a Cartoonist, you might say. He did.

Mixed in with the focused autobio material are some jokier pieces from Blammo about "Notable and Tasteful 19th Century Cartoonist," a now-forgotten and unnamed hack from a century ago, and some quirkier related pieces, like a page Van Sciver sold as a print, of him dancing under the title "How it feels to be a cartoonist."

It's not the kind of book that is a single thing; it coalescences and explores rather than explains, showing us some aspects of what's been like to be Van Sciver over the past decade, some hints of his personal life and history. (His childhood is fascinating - he came from a big family that seems to have been on the edge of poverty for a long time; his mother separated from his father and their Mormon faith when he was young; it looks like they moved around a bunch, too - but I think he's only told bits and pieces of that story, here and elsewhere.)

The title is arch and implies a certain distance, but Van Sciver is more of a warts-and-all cartoonist: he's grappling here with what it means to be a professional in this field, how to handle various situations, how it feels to be "a cartoonist," for good or bad, in mid-career, after the shiny newness has worn off and he's just trying to do something else and keep his life and career going. He portrays himself as well-meaning but not always successful, self-doubting and conflicted, prone to be taken the wrong way and somewhat odd because of his unusual upbringing. He's a specific, detailed person telling stories about interesting, particular things in his life - and making those stories just as long as they need to be.

It's a strong collection, with more of a focus and connection than you might expect from the sources. Even the "earlier, funnier stuff" - as Van Sciver has fans repeatedly tell him they like best, in an echo of Woody Allen - works really well in context, both as comic relief and as parallax: a hundred years on, all cartoonists will be half-forgotten.

[1] My theory is that I did this because I started out in SF, the field that never saw a metaphor it didn't turn into concrete. And I grew up at just the right time to be indoctrinated by a long string of Heinlein author stand-ins and form the assumption that was normal.

[2] One of the bits in this book also explained to title of Saint Cole to me, making me feel like a dunce. Van Sciver does mention most readers missed it, but it was a smart touch and it totally flew over my head.

Read in July and August

I'm getting lazier and lazier with my review writing, and with my book reading. I don't expect anyone cares -- I'm only mildly annoyed myself -- but it's true, and should be noted.

But here's what I read over most of the summer of 2015: not nearly as much as I'd like, but I was having too much fun playing Fallout 3 instead.

Note: I've realized it's now mid-October, and I still haven't posted this. So I'm going to type something for each book and put this up. Please don't take my lack of time/energy and haphazard comments as indicative of the quality of any of these books -- most of them are really good, in various ways for various people.

Ted McKeever, Eddy Current, Vol. 3 (7/1)

McKeever's 12-issue mini-series from 1987-88 was reprinted about a decade ago by Atomeka, and I only found it about a year ago. In the late '80s, I thought McKeever was exciting and interesting -- he made comics that could be sold next to superhero stuff in the monoculture direct market but were idiosyncratic and quirky and specific -- but I lost track of him somewhere along the way. I have no idea if McKeever is still out there making quirky comics, but I hope whatever he's doing, it's quirky and fun and paying him better than comics usually does.

I'm not sure if I ever read this whole series at the time -- the ending wasn't completely familiar -- but it's weird and fun and bizarre. The best comparison I could make for McKeever is Bob Burden, but McKeever is more studied and deliberate than Burden: Burden is weird because that's the way his brain works, but McKeever uses weirdness to tell specific stories and explore particular things.

I see that it's back in print as a single omnibus, so that's what I linked above.

Mimi Pond, Over Easy (7/7)

I wrote a bit about this a few weeks back, when I had no new books for a "Reviewing the Mail" Monday post. Other than that: it's great to see Pond back in comics after far too long. (Note: this only applies if she hasn't been doing comics the whole time and I just missed them, but I think that's true.) And my copy got seriously damaged in my bag during a midsummer rainstorm, which is annoying -- because this is one I think I'll want to keep for a long time.

H.P. Lovecraft and I.N.J. Culbard, The Shadow Out of Time (7/8)

Another Lovecraft story adapted into comics by Culbard, who previous did the same with At the Mountains of Madness (and there's one more Lovecraft-Culbard joint coming up in my already-read stack, too). I would not expect Lovecraft's talky, long-word-filled, deeply metatextual stories to work well as comics -- let alone the problems of drawing the monsters he describes without having them look silly -- but Culbard has now done it very well repeatedly. So there's me wrong, and quite happy to be wrong. Culbard's books are highly recommended for any Lovecraftian.

Jason, The Last Musketeer (7/13)

I'd read this once before -- it was my very first Jason book, in fact -- back when I was an Eisner judge in 2009. But that was as part of a whirlwind of reading over four days, since Eisner judging is the closest thing the literary world has to four-a-day football training camps. So I wanted to go back to it, and I wanted to have a copy of my own. It's still very Jasonian: distanced and quiet in its action set-pieces, as if filed by an alien race from very far away. And it's a great example of how Jason mashes up different pieces of pop culture across centuries, in this case Dumas with Flash Gordon-style SF, to make something distinctive and quirkily entertaining.

Frederick Exley, A Fan's Notes (7/13)

Matt Wagner, Grendel vs. The Shadow (7/14)

Wagner's art is as crisp and strongly driven by storytelling as ever, and his writing is equally strong and supple. And if I wish that he had the opportunity to tell new stories, and not just keep rehashing Hunter Rose fighting various other people from the multiverse...well, that's really beside the point, isn't it? This is another one of those stories, and it's pretty good for what it is. If you like both Hunter Rose and the classic, '30s-era Shadow, you will enjoy this.

Jessie Hartland, Steve Jobs: Insanely Great (7/15)

Hartland previously turned the life of Julia Child into a book, Bon Appetit. (And I'm not comfortable calling either that previous book or this new one "graphic novels," since they're nonfiction. But I do admit that we don't have a good term for the nonfiction work of book-length comics.) She has an energetic, loose style that suits Jobs' energy, even if it seems somewhat off for his micromanaging, ever-tiny-bit-in-his-place management style. Possibly due to the limitations of the graphic format, this is primarily a celebration of Jobs; the fact that he seems to have been a complete asshole (albeit a massively successful one) who caused his own avoidable death through his arrogance and bullheadedness is left out almost entirely.

I've been a Mac fan for twenty-plus years, so I have the usual complicated options about Jobs. This book doesn't get into any of the reasons behind that, and stay mostly a book of cheerleading. Since the audience for a biography is primarily the fans of a person, that is most likely a very smart move on Hartland's part.

Svetlana Chmakova, Awkward (7/16)

Chmakova -- whom I know from her neat unfinished series Nightschool, but is probably best known for her first series Dramacon, which I haven't read -- dives into Raina Telgemeier territory with this story of middle-school life and friendship and work and social life. This particular middle school is very club-centric, which still feels like a manga trope to me than indicative of the real lives of American tweens -- but, then, I'm not an expert on every school system in this country, so I could be wrong.

Anyway, this is sweet and fun, running down the border between drama and comedy as it tells the story of two kids who first just want to keep quiet and get through school without attracting bad attention, but find friendship with each other and purpose in doing the things they love to do. If you're looking for lessons, this only has good ones, and if you're looking for a good story, it has that, too.

Mallory Ortberg, Texts From Jane Eyre (7/16)

James Burks, Gabby and Gator (7/17)

 I don't know who Burks is -- I keep mixing him up with the Connections guy, but that's James Burke -- other than the fact that he made this cute suitable-for-grade-schoolers graphic novel about a quirky young girl and the neurotic alligator she befriends. Burks has a nice cartoony style with the right level of energy for this project, and an underlying sweetness that kids of the right age will appreciate. I wouldn't directly recommend this as a story for older readers -- particularly teens, who would find it "babyish" -- but it does well what it wants to do and is a great story for the right audience.

Pascal Girard, Petty Theft (7/20)

Girard is the Quebecois cartoonist of the deeply affecting memoir Nicolas, the fictional and thoughtful Bigfoot, and the farcical semi-memoir Reunion (and possibly other things still trapped in the French language and unknown to me). This one is along the lines of Reunion, focusing on a sad-sack version of the author whose life is going badly: his long-time girlfriend threw him out, his work is blocked, and he just injured himself while jogging.

So he becomes mildly obsessed with a cute girl he sees reading, and then shoplifting his book in a store. She turns out to be a serial book thief, but Pascal is still deeply attracted to her -- which forms the basis of the book's conflict and comedy. This is mostly light and fun, and Girard draws it in a suitably light style, with vignette-like unbordered panels floating on the page in a loose six-panel grid and his expressive art and tight dialogue equally contributing to the humor. Even if Girard never makes anything else as powerful as Nicolas, he's still found a solid vein to mine here.

Mary Norris, Between You and Me (7/25)

Gilbert Hernandez, Grip: The Strange World of Men (7/27)

Gilbert is the weird Hernandez brother, prone to head off into metafiction and semi-allegorical works -- through, from the interviews I've read, I believe those works arise mostly visually and from genre tropes, and so he doesn't actually construct allegories specifically, but just throws interesting story ideas down and sees when his drawing hand takes him. Grip is one of his more surreal and odd stories, originally serialized as a five-issue series in 2001-2002 and only collected this year.

It's the kind of book that starts with an amnesiac hero and only gets quirkier from there -- I'd only recommend this to readers who already have some experience with Hernandez, preferably through Love & Rockets, and want to explore the outer reaches of his work. And, since I read this a couple months ago and am not entirely certain I understood it even then, I'll leave my critique at this: Hernandez draws great weird stuff, and this story gives him a lot of opportunity to do so.

Fuka Mizutani, Love at Fourteen, Vol. 1 (7/28)

Fuka Mizutani, Love at Fourteen, Vol. 2 (7/30)

Two middle-schoolers in Japan -- I think they're the equivalent of what would be high school freshmen in the USA, since the years of school don't line up quite the same way -- have a very mild, age-appropriate love that they hide from the rest of their still-childish classmates. So there's a lot of hand-holding and starting into each other's eyes, a certain amount of blushing and struggling for words, and plenty of doing everyday and season activities together, either semi-secretly (when near school friends) or more gleefully (when free and alone together).

There's also a creepier parallel love affair between a male classmate and a female teacher. The classmate is presented as a creep who loves the main girl, and is trying to manipulate our main characters with his knowledge of their love. And the teacher seems sunny and nice and friendly -- except that she's deeply inappropriate with the sour boy, teasing him and dancing up to what would be sexual harassment in the US.

George R.R. Martin, Elio M. Garcia, Jr., and Linda Antonsson, The World of Ice & Fire (7/31)

I wrote about this a bit one week when no new books came in for "Reviewing the Mail," and that covers most, if not all, of what I could say about this. I'm a sucker for fake non-fiction -- books that are supposed to be "real" within a fictional world -- and this is a decent example of that form, telling the reader only the things that the learned of Westeros know at this particular point in the series.

It did make me wish Martin would finish up this series and write some swashbuckling action in the odder corners of this world, because he has a lot of odd, interesting corners. This world would make an excellent backdrop for a sword & sorcery series, but I doubt Martin will ever get that far -- but hope springs eternal.

I'll reiterate that this book is good on maps of Westeros, though they're scattered throughout the book and not indexed anywhere. But it has no maps of anywhere else in the world aside from one map of the entire known world. This may be to leave unvisited areas mysterious, but books like this really demand maps, even if they are vague and medievaloid.

Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, Jason Latour, and Laurence Campbell, Sledgehammer 44, Vol. 1 (8/3)

This is one of the slightest and most sidebar of the Hellboy universe stories -- though I expect that it ties into five other stories in sneaky little ways that I don't remember at the moment. (Because I don't live in that world.) It's about a US super-soldier robot, powered by vril, in WW II, and the much more ordinary soldier who finds his soul inside that robot.

Someday, someone will make a perfect reading-order list of the entire Hellboy universe, and I'll be able to read this connected with the other stories that it casts the most light on. But, as it was, it was just a story of a different tank character punching Nazis and their sorcerers, when Hellboy has more style doing so. (And there's a faint sense of piss-take, as if this is poking Atomic Robo for being a Hellboy ripoff by ripping that back off in turn.)

Chris Duffy, ed., Fable Comics (8/4)

A murderer's row of comics artists -- James Kochalka, Eleanor Davis, Roger Langridge, R.O. Blechman, George O'Connor, Jaime Hernandez, Mark Newgarden, Sophie Goldstein, Tom Gauld, Graham Annable, and at least a dozen more -- present tales mostly from Aesop in four-color form, for the edification of young and old.

These are all message stories by their very nature, but there's a great variety of messages -- and art styles, and sources of the fables, and everything else. This is another book primarily for the younger set, though it's good for maybe up to middle school, since it's better for a reader who will think about the messages and how the stories present their didactic points, and start poking at the assumptions.

Sue Grafton, W Is For Wasted (8/7)

Paul Pope, JT Petty, and David Rubin, The Fall of the House of West (8/17)

This is the second part of a prequel to Pope's solo graphic novel Battling Boy -- it follows The Rise of Aurora West -- and it unfortunately doesn't exactly have an ending of its own. (The real ending of this book is contained early in Battling Boy, and Pope and his collaborators don't retell that moment here, maybe to keep this from being completely downbeat.)

This is less successful than Rise was, since its an incomplete tragedy -- if you've read Battling Boy, you know what will happen, but it doesn't happen hear, which leaves the story in the air. But, until that lack of an ending, it's a high-energy adventure with flawed heroes (including Aurora herself, a great kick-butt teen girl character) and deeply hissable villains. Rubin also does a good job of drawing something like Pope -- making this look like it's set in the same world -- without slavishly imitating Pope's very obvious artistic idiosyncrasies.

Judd Winick, Hilo Book 1: The Boy Who Crashed to Earth(8/18)

Winick has been making comics (writing and drawing) in a wide variety of modes for a couple of decades now, so it's really not fair to him that I keep thinking of him as a guy who was on a reality show once. (Sadly, them's the breaks: people in the public sphere can't control how other people remember them.)

This launches a graphic novel series for grade-schoolers that reads to me as deeply influenced by Scott McCloud's classic Zot! -- though that series is old and obscure enough that there's no reason to believe Winick has even heard of it. We've got a sunny blond-haired kid from another world with mysterious secrets, over-the-top villains battling him, and the wide-eyed normal Earth kids dragged along for the ride. Also, underwear jokes. Adults aren't likely to read this for their own pleasure, but it's not for them -- leave it to the kids, who will love it.

Dan Wells, The Devil's Only Friend (8/21)

Maira Kalman and Daniel Handler, Girls Standing on Lawns (8/24)

The Museum of Modern Art has a lot of stuff in it -- more than just the works displayed on its walls, even. Like most big museums, it has extensive archives of art works -- and things that most of us wouldn't think of as "artworks" -- that rarely make it up onto those walls and are mostly only seen by curators. MoMA in particular has about twenty-five thousand photographs: some percentage were "made as art," but most weren't. Those other photos, the snapshots of ordinary things by ordinary people, are called vernacular photography.

And this is the first in a planned series of books turning those vernacular photos into art. Or maybe presenting them as art. Or both. Daniel Handler has written some words about the photos, or the people in the photos, or the ideas behind the photos. And Maira Kalman has made paintings based on the photos. And a bunch of the photos themselves are here too.

All of those photos are, as the title says, of girls standing on lawns. Young women, in the first three or four decades of the last century, standing outside in their nice or everyday clothes, squinting or smiling or glaring, posing or just standing there, as someone unseen clicks the shutter and saves that image forever.

This is a quick read, if you run right through it. But it's not a book to read that way; it's art to look at and think about. To wonder who those "girls" are, how they got to those lawns, and what happened afterward. Handler's words and Kalman's paintings help those thoughts, but the photos are the main thing: real people in their real lives, a hundred years ago.


And those were the books I read in July and August, which I'm posing around noon on October 10th. (Yes, I know.) No promises for the next installment, but this is something I want to do, so let's see if I can find time to do it somewhat earlier.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/1

Hello again! Here are some books, yadda yadda yadda. You know the drill by now.

The Last Man, Vol. 3: The Chase is the third in the graphic novel series -- I should say BD series, since it's originally French, and I like to be sophisticated and condescending like that -- by Balak, Michael Sanlaville, and Bastien Vives, about a world dominated by a fighting championship and the odd partnership that is (of course) dominating the current running of that championship. It's from First Second, available right now, and I hope to read and review all three Real Soon Now.


(But I already have a stack of twenty-plus books I've already read, and the reviews are coming much slower than Real Soon recently.)

Next up is a YA novel from Colleen Houck: Reawakened, in which a New York teenager discovers an ancient Egyptian mummy in the Met is actually a Prince who needs her help battling the evil god Seth. It doesn't say so, but I would not be surprised at all to find out that this is the first of a series. Reawakened is coming from Random House's Young Readers imprint as a hardcover on August 11.

Tom Doyle is back with the sequel to the military contemporary fantasy American Craftsmen, The Left-Hand Way. This series seems to marry the usual urban fantasy "evil things and the secret organization of magicians that battle them are absolutely everywhere, even though no one ever notices" stuff with a large helping of Clancy-esque saluting and honor and duty and long descriptions of weaponry and uniforms. If you like both of those things, this could easily be your literary Reese's Cup. This one is a Tor hardcover, hitting stores August 11.

Fable Comics is a large-format collection of new short comics, edited by Chris Duffy, all adaptations or riffs on classic Aesop stories. There are twenty-eight stories in all -- including several from George O'Connor -- from such diverse creators as James Kochalka, Roger Langridge, Graham Annable, R.O. Blechman, Mark Newgarden, R. Sikoryak, Elanor Davis, Jaime Hernandez and Graham Chaffee. It's published for kids, but I bet plenty of adults will enjoy it. It's a hardcover from First Second, coming in October.

Cixin Liu is a massive SF bestseller in his native China, and his first novel translated into English, The Three-Body Problem, is a current Hugo nominee. (Which is a complicated story, in this most unusual of Hugo years.) The sequel to Three-Body is The Dark Forest, and it's coming from Tor in a translation by Joel Martinsen as a hardcover on August 11. This is the middle book of a trilogy, so the secret plot of the aliens from the first book has been uncovered, and humans are mobilizing to defeat them, but I don't expect a strong resolution in this book.

And last for this week is the new "Darger and Surplus" novel from Michael Swanwick, Chasing the Phoenix. The main characters are two con-men traipsing across a quirkily diverse post-apocalypse world -- one human, one not precisely so -- in search of opportunities and vast wealth, hampered only by their own very large flaws. Darger and Surplus previously appeared in the novel Dancing Bear, in which they hit Russia (it hit back), and they've also been central to a series of great novellas. This time out, they've made their way to China, with the slight problem that one of them is currently dead. Swanwick has been writing great novels for thirty years now, and the Darger & Surplus stories are the closest we have to a modern Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser, so I'm looking forward to this one with glee. It's a Tor hardcover, coming on August 11.