Reading Into the Past: Week of 7/19/05

No new books, so let the winds of randomness waft us back to 2005. Here's what I was reading that week:

Kage Baker, Mother Aegypt (7/14)

This was a miscellaneous story collection - as I recall, it did have a Company story or three, but that wasn't the point of it - from one of my favorite writers of the Aughts, whose career was cut vastly shorter than it should have been. According to ISFDB, it (appropriately) has a baker's dozen stories in it, and according to Amazon, it's still available. Baker wrote great novels, but her short fiction, especially her novellas, are even better. (Many people, including me, have said that's the hallmark of the best speculative fiction writers: that they write great novellas.) So I recommend this, or The Best of Kage Baker, or any other story collection published during her too-short career.

Suzanne Lloyd, Harold Lloyd's Hollywood Nudes in 3-D! (7/15)

Holy crap! What a title, and what a book to forget it entirely existed! Yes, the Harold Lloyd, the silent film star. Yes, classy large nude photographs of young ladies - happy ones, as I recall, well-paid for the work - from the '40s through the '60s. And, yes, in 3-D, with glasses and all. And, to top it all off, yes, edited and assembled by his granddaughter, who has also produced a documentary on his more-famous pursuits. I don't remember it, and it was lost in the flood, which is a shame - this is something I would run over and pull out right now if I still owned it.

Bill Willingham, et. al., Fables, Vol. 5: The Mean Seasons (7/16)

In this era, I was really bad at listing the full credits on comics, even though that "et. al." mostly means "Mark Buckingham." I mean there are the James Jean covers, and I'm sure someone colored it, but the Amazon listing is just Willingham/Buckingham, so why couldn't I have done the same? Truly, our past selves contrive to disappoint us again and again.

This was fairly early in the fantasy-characters-in-the-real-world series, and followed up the prior book's major attack on Fabletown (the NYC pocket neighborhood where most of the characters lived at that point) with a couple of flashback stories to "Bigby" Wolf during WWII. I'm getting this from other people's plot synopses, mind you: those details are vaguely familiar once I see them, but I couldn't tell you unaided what happened in, say, Vol. 7.

Allen M. Steele, Coyote Frontier (7/17)

Third in an alien-world trilogy by a dependably meat-and-potatoes SF writer. Is that faint praise? I thought Steele was always readable, usually a lot of fun, and occasionally - especially in some of his better short fiction - really strong. There were dozens of writers whose work I read semi-regularly in the SFBC days that I would not give that much praise to.

I don't remember this series well, but I enjoyed it at the time. I think it had the inherent trilogy problems: the first book was the best and most original, and the latter books mostly worked up variations on the American-frontier-in-SPAAAACE! idea.

Robert Holdstock, Mythago Wood (7/19)

Not sure why I was reading this: possibly as a potential Special Collector's Issue book for SFBC (we did two magazines of all "classics" twice a year in those days, and I put "classics" in quotes because we made up the definition as best suited us at that moment, though it usually did include some decade-old stuff) or possibly just for my own entertainment and to read backward in the field. Mythago was a winner of the World Fantasy Award for Novel in 1985, and I do periodically threaten to read all of those, so that could be it.

This is a well-known, excellent novel that starts somewhat thornily and has an odd central conceit: there's this one ancient wood, somewhere in Britain, and all the mythic stuff that matters comes from there and lives there. I liked it, but it didn't send me to read more Holdstock, so perhaps I didn't like it as much as I might have.

I will note that I was tempted to start this list a day early, since on the 12th I read the utterly unlikely combo of Tom Perrotta's story collection Bad Haircut and Toni Bentley's paen to being taken anally, The Surrender. But I don't think I actually have anything to say about either of them: I was running through all of Perrotta, and don't remember that book at all. And the Bentley was a big deal that year, selling very well for the clubs, and I am not without prurient interest, particularly when said prurient interest is lying about the office in stacks of bound copies.

The latter did eventually lead to a very early post on this blog. That past self is also mildly disappointing, though the post is not quite as cringeworthy as I thought it would be.

Bad Doings & Big Ideas by Bill Willingham and various artists

The odds-and-sods collection has a long and glorious history, which I'm not going to get deeply into here. But I will say that in comics, and especially DC Comics, it's a way to squeeze another piece of product out of a current top performer, since that top performer probably did a bunch of random shorter stuff that can be slapped profitably between two covers.

(Previous examples of the form: The Sequential Art of Amanda Conner, DC Universe by Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman's Midnight Days and The DC Universe by Neil Gaiman. No, I don't know why Gaiman gets the definite article when creating the DC Universe, and Moore does not.)

In 2011, Bill Willingham was the biggest creator DC's Vertigo imprint had, smack in the middle of the hugely popular Fables series and spinning off sidebars mostly co-written with others (Jack of Fables, Fairest, Cinderella). But no corporation is ever happy with what it has: it always wants more.

And so, somewhere, in some office high above Manhattan, the idea of a Willingham odds-and-sods collection was born. It turned out he had a lot of DC odds, mostly related to the Neil Gaiman Sandman-verse, the previous heavyweight Vertigo champion. And it was the era of big bug-crushing omnibi, so DC was presumably happy to see they had enough to slaughter several beetles at once.

Bad Doings & Big Ideas came out at the end of 2011, collecting basically the Venn diagram of "by Bill Willingham," "from Vertigo," and "not Fables." It has over five hundred pages of comics from roughly the decade 1999-2009, including three graphic-novel length stories (of six, four, and four issues each), three more full-issue stories, and eight more shorter pieces. It has both a general (though short) introduction by Willingham and notes on each story, along with detailed who-did-what credits for every story and a detailed table of contents. And it was all wrapped up in a new James Bennett cover, which is good and eye-catching and yet makes me wonder if Willingham offered to make a cover himself and was let down gently. (On the other hand, I don't think Willingham has ever been a painter, and a book like this just looks classier with a fully-painted cover rather than a drawn-and-colored one. So maybe it was even his idea.)

The first big story is Proposition Player, a comics series drawn mostly by Paul Guinan (it started off as an all-Willingham joint, which lasted not quite halfway through the first issue) about a professional poker player who gets mixed up with the supernatural in a very Vertigo way. It was intended to be an ongoing series, but the market did not agree, so it got just the initial six issues to set up the premise and has sat dormant ever since. It's a decent set-up, with that core Willingham cruelty baked in around the edges, but, in retrospect, might not have given as much scope for additional stories that Fables did, just three years later.

The second and third big stories are the two "Thessaly" miniseries, about an ancient witch who showed up in Sandman and walked out of that series still alive and mostly untouched, which was rare. Shawn McManus, who also worked on Sandman, illustrated those two stories, which are a little bit too tight and plotty for their own good: Willingham throws out hooks for things he doesn't have space to reel in, but the stories themselves are solid in that neo-horror Sandman style.

And then the rest is partly comedy (a one-shot about Merv Pumpkinhead as a "spy" in the real world) partly horror (several of the shorter pieces), partly already odds-and-sods (a one-short with multiple artists called Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Dreams But Were Afraid to Ask), and then partly more-or-less just adventure stories ("The Further Adventures of Danny Nod, Heroic Library Assistant," from the miscellaneous book The Dreaming). Some of the short pieces I didn't call out specifically fit into multiple of those categories, or not clearly into any -- there's a short series of backups from House of Mystery that seem to be mostly "Willingham gets to work with artists he loves and has never collaborated with before."

It is miscellaneous; that's the point. And it's very much for the audience of people who found Willingham through the Fables door and want more kinda like that. (People who found Willingham through the Elementals door are older, crabbier, and still waiting for our collection.) Whether that's much of an audience a decade later, I can't say: I was vaguely looking for this for several years, finally found it cheap, and then it sat on the shelf for a while after that. I am happy I finally found and then read it, though: I'd missed Proposition Player at the time (pretty much everyone did) and didn't even know about most of the short stuff.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/31/19

More books than usual this time: one came from the library and a stack from a trip to the Strand in NYC. So let me talk about them in that order.

The Library

On a Sunbeam is Tillie Walden's second big book, after Spinning -- her card page also lists The End of Summer and I Love This Part, but I think those are shorter things, single-issue-sized or about there. I read Spinning, a memoir of her childhood spent as a competitive figure-skater, and was really impressed: Walden is the real deal. So I wanted to check out her follow-up, a big book telling what I think is a small-scale SF story.

The Strand


I need to confess here, as I do every time I go to the Strand these days and forget by the next time I make a plan to go. My image of this store is completely wrong. In my head, it's the unique review-copy emporium it was when I first worked in publishing, twenty-five years ago or more, with massive rows of shelves full of half-price current books in the basement and random quirky stuff everywhere else.

It is not that store now. It's a clean, bright standard indy bookstore, larger than the norm but otherwise exactly like several hundred other nice clean bookstores for book-club moms and woke twentysomethings all across the country.

That is a nice bookstore. But I don't care about that bookstore. And the Strand I loved is long gone. What it has instead is rows and rows of tables with new books at a slight discount, all merchandised exquisitely, exactly the books in exactly the current editions that you'd find in B&N or all of those other indies that are just like the Strand now.

So when I look for the books I would find at the old Strand, or even the prices I would find there, I don't have much luck. My trips there are getting shorter and shorter, and I really need to give up. The world has changed; it's not 1995 anymore and never will be again. And making a special trip to see rows of the same books I could see anywhere else is not a good use of time.

I did manage to find a few things before I left, to take my younger son out to dinner at his college (and then, oddly, bring him home for the long Labor Day weekend, even though he only got to college ten days before). Here's what I bought:

A Pound of Paper is a book-focused memoir by the writer John Baxter, who mostly does biographies of movie-makers (Fellini, Kubrick, De Nero, Lucas, etc.) but has also written the "encyclopedia of 20th century sex" Carnal Knowledge and falling-in-love-with-a-Frenchwoman memoir We'll Always Have Paris, both of which I read. (I see in my post about the latter I said that I thought I'd read this book, which is possible: the US cover looks very familiar once I google it.) Anyway, this is a "why I love books so much" book, with probably a lot about digging through bookstores in a misspent youth and suchlike. Maybe by the time I get to it I'll be even fuzzier about whether I read it before. At least I got a nice UK first, sealed in a plastic wrapper, so it's a more collectible edition if I did already read it once.

A Rage in Harlem is the first of the "Harlem Detectives" mystery novels by Chester Himes, which I periodically think I need to read. (Also known by the names of the main characters, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones.) I think I had a stack of these in the earlier (90s) Black Lizard editions, so maybe I'm starting to collect them again.

Forever and a Death is a posthumous book by Donald E. Westlake -- published in 2017, a decade after he died, but written around 1995, originally as a film treatment for a Pierce Brosnan James Bond movie and then novelized to take out other people's IP. I imagine it's not top-drawer Westlake, or it would have been published earlier, but you take what you can get when you make it to the end of a favorite writer's work.

Tetris is a graphic novel by Box Brown, telling the story of the creation of that video game, reputed to be the most popular one in world history. Brown has been doing these quirky non-fiction books for a few years, and I've only read one of them, I think (Andre the Giant). But I keep adding them to my list of books to find, so I grabbed this one (even though it wasn't really on the list) when I found it cheap.

Manfried Saves the Day is the second story of Manfried the Man, a pet in a world of giant anthropomorphic cats and their cute little men. I've seen good reviews of these, they look just oddball enough, and so here I am.

Hewligan's Haircut is the kind of book I expect to find in the Strand: weird, forgotten, random, cheap. It's a 2010 reprinting of a 1990 eight-part story from 2000 AD, written by Peter Milligan and drawn by Jamie Hewlett, about a crazy young man with a haircut that can save the world.

And last was the doorstop Bad Doing & Big Ideas, a gigantic omnibus of Bill Willingham's non-Fables work for Vertigo, with a whole bunch of different artists (Paul Guinan, Shawn McManus, Mark Buckingham, Bernie Wrightson, Kevin Nowlan, and even his own pencils for a few pages). It collects Proposition Player, the two Thessaly mini-series, and some shorter stories around Sandman and House of Mystery, and I've been vaguely looking for it since it was published in 2011 (I didn't want to pay the $50 list price, and I didn't.)

Fairest, Vol. 1: Wide Awake by Bill Willingham, Phil Jimenez, and others

So, when you're a big corporation devoted to exploiting intellectual property that you've accumulated over the past seven or eight decades, and you have a new piece of IP that's doing decently, what are you going to do?

Exploit it, obviously.

DC Comics [1] didn't own Fables, as far as I know -- I haven't seen the contracts personally, but Vertigo was famously a creator-owned shop -- so that means writer Bill Willingham and artist Mark Buckingham (or maybe just Willingham, because what's comics if not a chance to grab all ownership for yourself?) had to go along with the exploitation as well. But who doesn't like a little tasteful exploitation, especially when it puts money in your pocket?

So Fables begat Jack of Fables, which was never as good as it should have been, but it exploited a fair bit of change back to DC and its creators. And, after that ended, and with Fables still chugging along towards an eventual-but-still-comfortably-in-the-future ending, DC must have been looking for a new way to exploit it.

And what's the most obvious thing to exploit in comics?

Attractive women, obviously. If they're posing wearing not-too-much, all the better.

So, in 2012, DC launched Fairest, featuring sidebar stories about the female fables. And, five years later, I finally read the first collection, Fairest, Vol. 1: Wide Awake. This one collects the initial six-issue story written by Willingham and drawn by Phil Jimenez, plus a single-issue story written by Matthew Sturges and drawn by Shawn McManus. (And, as far as I can tell, Willingham just wrote that first arc -- after that he presumably just OK'd other people's writing and cashed the checks.)

This is basically "what happened to Sleeping Beauty after she was used as a weapon of mass destruction," with Ali Baba and a pre-Frozen Snow Queen as the other components of the main triangle, plus an annoying loquacious Bat-Mite-ish genie and the inevitable Eeeevil Scary Woman Villainess. As is usual with Fables stories, it pretends to be much tougher and nastier than it really is: things work out very well for the good characters and very badly for the bad characters. (Because that is what fiction means, as the man said.)

I understand this series has ended, too, so I don't know if I'll bother to continue. I might just dig up the end of Fables itself -- I missed the last five or six collections. This was entirely pleasant Fables product for the year 2012, but it's pretty disposable now, unless you're someone working through the Fables-verse or deep in a master's thesis on the presentation of fabulistic characters in modern graphic literature.


[1] Every so often, I need to remind people that "DC Comics" stands for "Detective Comics Comics," because that's how I roll. Put it up there with "Amazon AWS."

Incoming Books: Week of February 14

I haven't managed to get into a good groove with this unemployment thing -- I don't want to, for one thing, and am hoping and working to make it as short as possible -- which means I'm feeling uneasy and jittery for much of my days. (And that's without ever drinking coffee!) I know I'm not being as productive, on any of the things I want to, as I'd like: not reading much at all, not writing enough here, spending too much time refreshing my e-mail and researching jobs that are completely wrong for me.

But the cat-vacuuming did lead to two trips to stores that sold books last week, where I traded in a lot of old stuff and got a bunch of new(ish) stuff, much of it at wonderful prices. And, since Antick Musings does devolve into a series of annotated lists of books when I'm not careful, here's yet another one of those. My hope here is that some of this stuff will look enticing and new to at least a few of you; this is all stuff I was willing to spend the moral equivalent of money on.

First up, from my long-time local used book store (with some new stuff as well), the Montclair Book Center, were fifteen very random titles.

The inevitable stuff to feed ongoing or possible reading projects:

• George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman and the Dragon -- I'm still not sure if I will re-read these, but I now just need two or three of them.
• Ukridge by P.G. Wodehouse, in the wonderful Overlook edition, which I'm trying once again to collect (I lost fifty or so of them in the 2011 flood, and am back to around forty at this point -- but Overlook is closing in on having published all of Wodehouse's roughly hundred books by now.) This, I believe, is a collection of stories all concerning Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, who is one of Wodehouse's lesser-known great comic creations. And I'm sure there will come a time when I'll need it to lift my spirits.
• Five more Vintage Contemporaries, for that ongoing project:
• Platitudes by Trey Ellis
• Within Normal Limits by Todd Grimson
• November by Janet Hobhouse (author of Dancing in the Dark)
• Saigon, Illinois by Paul Hoover
• Something to Be Desired by Thomas McGuane (author of The Bushwhacked Piano)
• And two books by Helene Hanff, which I originally read more than a decade ago (before this blog) and was reminded of when I recently read her Underfoot in Show Business: the inevitable 84, Charing Cross Road and its lesser-known sequel The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street.

Another website-into-book, destined to be read in the smallest room, with one of the highest doses of Schadenfreude ever detected in a single volume: F My Life, edited by Maxime Valette, Guillaume Passaglia, and Didier Guedj. (Yes, F My Life was originally French -- with a title that roughly translates to "the Shit Life" -- and only came to the English language after a first initial success there. The things you learn from quirky little books.)

Temple Grandin's Thinking in Pictures, which was her second memoir/collection of essays. She's an interesting figure anyways, and I also want to understand my older son better -- he's "on the spectrum," as they say, though exactly where is a fuzzier thing.

And an interesting book from the thriller writer James W. Hall -- whom I think I read once or twice in my book-club career -- about the bestselling books of the 20th century, Hit Lit. I may end up back in the fields of mass-market publishing, soon or eventually, and that kind of thing has always fascinated me: why do so many people decide they want this, right now?

An encyclopedic book of things that Americans used to consider funny -- from anvil and falling safes to rolling-pin wielding wives and pay toilets -- under the title American Cornball, from Christopher Miller. I heard about this somewhere and knew I had to have it: I love weird encylopedias, the quirky side of history, and humor.

Sidney Harris's cartoon collection Einstein Simplified, from 1989. If you're a SF or science person, you've seen his work many times -- you may even have a Harris up on the door of your office right now.

The big book The World of Ice & Fire, by George R.R. Martin with Elio M. Garcia, Jr. and Linda Antonsson. Since I'm not commuting at the moment, if I can ever make myself sit down and read, I'd be able to sit down and read this big thing. And I'm always fond of fake nonfiction, which this more-or-less is. (I think there's some actual fiction in there, too.) [1]

As a palate cleanser, I also got a book from a Kickstarter I backed this week -- Rick Geary's The True Death of Billy the Kid. It's yet another one of his historical re-creations, which he's so good at, and this one is a larger-format book in hardcover, unlike the main sequence. (Also, since I backed it, I get a couple pieces of related ephemera, and Geary signed the book to me personally! It's amazing what can make someone happy.)

And then a bunch of comics from the packed and quirky Time Warp Comics and Games, which probably would be my regular comics shop if I still had such a thing. (My younger son semi-regularly attends a Magic The Gathering tournament there on Friday nights, and it's the closest good comics shop I know of -- oddly organized, as all comics shops are required to be, but full of interesting things all over the place.)

The first collection of Sinfest by Tatsuya Ishida. Yes, it's all online, and there's no reasonable chance the whole series will ever be collected in book form. But sometimes I just want things between two covers, OK?

Chew, Vol. 5 by John Layman and Rob Guillory -- I think I now have three of these lined up, so I might run through them quickly and write one post. (Or run through them slowly or quickly and bury them in an end-of-month roundup: could go either way.)

Scott McCloud's Zot, Book 1 -- the 1997 Kitchen Sink edition that's the only time the first ten color issues of the series were collected, and what looks like the only time they ever will be collected. (Seriously, they're not vastly different from the later black and white issues -- they're not training-wheel comics or anything.) Another book I'm very glad to have back in my hands.

A small pile of Hellboy-verse collections from Mike Mignola and his merry band:

• Sledgehammer 44, Vol. 1 -- I'm not even sure what this is, or how it fits it, but I'll give it a try
• Lobster Johnson, Vol. 3 & 4
• B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth, Vol. 8 & 9 -- I'm now missing 7, oh woe is me

A book that Alan Moore wishes we'd stop listing his name in connection with: Miracleman Book 2: The Red King Syndrome, by Moore (here laughably credited as "The Original Writer") with artists Alan Davis, Rick Veitch, Chuck Adams, and John Ridgway. It's still one of the better arguments that it's possible to take superheroes seriously.

Swallow Me Whole is one of the great graphic novels of our time, though I don't see it mentioned with Blankets or Ghost World or Bottomless Bellybutton all that often. (It did win the Eisner for Best GN for Nate Powell in 2009 though, which is something.) I had a rough galley before the flood -- I reviewed it for ComicMix when it was published -- but this is the first time I have a real finished book.

I've heard good things about Cameron Stewart's Sin Titulo, though I couldn't tell you where or when. But it's a horizontally-formatted book, collecting what was oriignally a webcomic, and with any luck I'll read it soon.

I think Dynamite only published these two collections of Tim Truman's excellent '80s comic Scout -- Vol. 1, with the first seven issues, and Vol. 2, collecting up to #16 -- which is a shame, since only one more would finish off the original series. (And another one would collect the mini-series, and two more would get all of War Shaman between covers. Heck, as long as I'm wishing, how about a world where Truman either can now do Marauder and Blue Leader, or one where he got to them around 1990ish?) Well, at least these two books exist, and I have them now.

And last was Fairest, Vol. 1, the beginning of the latest spin-off from Bill Willingham's Fables series. (This one was written by Willingham with Matthew Sturges with pencil art mostly by Phil Jimenez and inks more often than not from Andy Lanning.) I'm not really sure what angle this takes from the original, but I do want to catch up on this and Fables, though I'm clearly already missing the big finish.

(Speaking of big finishes, that was mine. Another week is beginning, and I hope to get more organized here -- but we'll have to see if that actually happens.)


[1] Interestingly, Amazon doesn't allow affiliate links to the print edition of this book -- the first time I've ever seen that message in their link-building tool. Probably the first pebble of the avalanche, though: they don't need any of us to send them traffic at this point.