Clyde by Jim Benton

I'm pretty sure I'm four to five times the expected age of a reader of this book, but, you know what: I don't care.

Jim Benton is funny, his characters are sarcastic and witty in hugely amusing ways, his stories take fun random zips and turns, and his cartooning is energetic and lively. So, yeah, he seems to have mostly done books for middle-graders, and I guess that means, as I poke through his books, I might be reading more MG graphic novels than I might have expected. Oh, horrors.

I came to Benton's long-form comics through his single-panel cartoons. As far as I've seen, he has two books of those published: Dog Butts and Love. And Stuff Like That. And Cats. and Man, I Hate Cursive. (Is this a good point to mention that I'm sure he has enough single-panel cartoons for another book? Maybe more than one?)

This one is clearly for younger readers, though - it even has a message, though Benton doesn't exactly play it straight. But it's a Benton book, full of quirky Benton characters with great dialogue and observations, arranged into a plot that mostly makes sense in its quirky way.

Clyde is a bear: a young one. He feels stifled growing up in Cubville, a nice town where everyone is nice. He knows he's really a bad guy, and wants to go somewhere where he can be as bad as he wants to be: the big, nasty town of Grizzly City.

We all know how that story will go: through a series of events, Clyde will learn not to be "a bad guy," will care about other people (maybe starting with his grandmother the turtle, who he throws into a pond just before leaving Cubville), and will become nicer and find some real friends.

He doesn't really do any of that, exactly: he does go back to Cubville, he does help people (resentfully, complaining), but doesn't seem to like other people any better or get any nicer. Which is even better, because people don't actually change like that.

Clyde changes, as much as he changes, which he would tell you is not at all, because he meets a butterfly who beats him up. But she's nice, actually: the kind of Pollyanna-ish character you'd expect in a book like this, the Jiminy Cricket figure. (Except Jiminy wouldn't tell a story starting "I was doing all the caterpillar stuff...eating other people's leaves...stealing cars...the usual.")

So they two of them rush back to Cubville to save Clyde's grandmother (the turtle, remember) from "fish jail." Benton's work is full of funny asides and details like that; there's something funny on every page, as he sort-of follows the outline of the standard plot you'd expect from the setup.

This is obviously meant to be a book for reluctant readers, especially boys, but it's also just a funny, semi-subversion of a standard kids-book trope. If you like funny, and you don't mind books for kids and their lessons (positive or negative; Benton goes both ways), this is excellent.

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.

This Year: 2005

"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.

Way back at the beginning of this series, I named it from a Mountain Goats song, and said that song wasn't part of the main sequence, but they would appear, eventually.

It's that time now. For 2005, the one song I want to remember is Up the Wolves.

I almost included several Mountain Goats songs; I kept moving songs and artists around like a puzzle, to see which ones fit best where. The other MG songs - the also-rans, the ones that didn't fit as well, however I should put it - were No Children and The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton (both from 2002!) and Autoclave and Psalms 40:2.

But I love complicated metaphors, and I love emotional honesty, and I love writers who can yoke those two things together - and Mountain Goats frontman John Darnielle is great at all of those things. Up the Wolves is one of his best, most personal metaphors, a cry to his mother about his abusive stepfather that, like the most resonant songs, is also universal.

There'll always be a few things
Maybe several things
That you're gonna find really difficult to forgive

This is a song about revenge. The whole record, The Sunset Tree, is about powerlessness and abuse, about what the speaker wants revenge for and the complicated dreams of it. Throughout the record is that thread of wanting and seeking revenge, about needing it, about the wrongs that drive that desire and the sense that trying for it is counterproductive and not wanting to give up on something so central even if it's painful - because the pain of looking for revenge is so similar to the pain of being abused.

Our mother has been absent
Ever since we founded Rome
But there's gonna be a party
When the wolf comes home

That's the metaphor: Darnielle, and his sister, as Romulus and Remus. Their mother as if she were absent physically, as she was unable or unwilling to protect them from their stepfather.

I'm gonna bribe the officials
I'm gonna kill all the judges
It's gonna take you people years
To recover from all of the damage

That's the part that always gets me. So many songs make me tear up these days - it doesn't seem to be the kind of emotion, just the strength and power of the emotion.

This is a song steeped in the powerlessness of a child: that raw anger and unhappiness, the deep knowledge that things just happen to you, and you can't control them. And that abuse from a parent is the worst possible thing, and that the child it happens to can do nothing.

But wait. And hope. And dream. Because there's gonna be a party when the wolf comes home.

Books Read: August 2023

As usual, this is primarily an index and a way for me to organize things here, which is why I often forget to do it "on time" and always bury it on a weekend. Links will appear later, once the relevant posts go live.

Bryan Talbot, Grandville Force Majeure (digital, 8/5)

Joan Didion, Political Fictions (in We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, 8/5)

Jeff Lemire and Tyler Crook, The Unbelievable Unteens (digital, 8/6)

Carla Speed McNeil, Finder: The Rescuers (in The Finder Library, Vol. 2, 8/12)

Sandrine Revel, Glenn Gould: A Life Off Tempo (digital, 8/13)

P.G. Wodehouse, The Luck of the Bodkins (8/13)

Paco Roca, The Lighthouse (digital, 8/18)

Jon Nielsen, Look (digital, 8/19)

Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet (8/19)

Sachi Ediriweera, Enlightened (8/20)

John Le Carré, Call for the Dead (8/20)

Sam Kieth, Zero Girl (digital, 8/26)

Bastien Vivés, Florent Ruppert + Jérôme Mulot, Olympia (digital, 8/27)

David B., Hasib & the Queen of Serpents (digital, 8/28)

Nick Mamatas, I Am Providence (8/28)

Charles M. Schulz, Snoopy Vs. the Red Baron (digital, 8/29)

Edgar Camacho, Onion Skin (digital, 8/30)

Peter and Maria Hoey, The Bend of Luck (8/31)

Next month I hope and expect to continue reading books.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 2, 2023

I got three books from the library this week, and these are them:

I Was Their American Dream was the first comics memoir from Malaka Gharib, published in 2019. I missed it then, but read her second book, It Won't Always Be Like This, earlier this year. So I'm going back to see the first book.

The Man in the McIntosh Suit is a historical thriller in comics form - set in 1929 California - by Rina Ayuyang. I've never read Ayuyang's work, and I don't remember how I heard about this: I might have just been searching comics in the library database, and saw this was new and from Drawn & Quarterly, who have dependably good taste.

And then there's Amulet, Book 8: Supernova by Kazu Kibuishi. I missed it when it came out in 2018 - only two years after book 7, Firelight, which is entirely reasonable for big graphic novels - but recently saw an ad for the final book in the series, Waverider, coming early next year. So I figured I might as well catch up before then, though I'm not sure how much I remember after seven years.

Quote of the Week: The Uncreated Conscience of His Political Party

But every morning, even if there's been a nighttime session and he has only slept two hours, he gets up at six and reads his paper while he drinks a strong cup of coffee. In this way Papa constructs himself, every day. I say "constructs himself" because I think that each time it's a new construction, as if everything has been reduced to ashes during the night, and he has to start from scratch. In our world, that's the way you live your grown-up life: you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult, the way it's been put together it is wobbly, ephemeral, and fragile, it cloaks despair and, when you're alone in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe.

 - Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, p.92

Inside Moebius, Part II by Jean "Moebius" Giraud

This is the middle, so there will be the usual problems with talking about middle. And the whole "Inside Moebius" project is a late-life thing - I'll be kind and not call it "the end," though it was the last major comics work of the guy who worked as Moebius and Gir and was born Jean Giraud - which means it's full of summing-up and referencing and riffs on earlier projects and ideas.

And, let's be honest: Moebius was never a rigorous creator. His strengths were playfulness, visual inventiveness, a willingness to experiment with narrative and ideas, and a flexible style that seemingly could draw every last idea he or his collaborators had and make it real on the page.

So there is a lot in Inside Moebius, Part II, and it is more than a little random and rambling and contingent and quirky. There is a narrative, but it's not about the narrative: like a lot of Moebius's personal work, it's about exploration, both of ideas and of spaces - and particularly of liminal, invented spaces, the spaces that explicate and reify Moebius's ideas, that make them real.

As in Part I (see my linked post for more about the plot, such as it is), it takes place primarily in "Desert B," which is only the first complicated French pun we'll have to grapple with here. There's an extensive set of notes in the backmatter from translator Diana Schutz, which can at least point to those puns and jokes and references and explain how she turned them into the English-language text, but no translator's note can understand a joke or pun for the reader, or trigger that aha moment of humor.

Desert B is pronounced in French the same as désherber, the word for the verb "weed" and a colloquialism for "giving up marijuana." It's also something of a reference to the standard French term for comics, bande desinée. Inside Moebius, among other things, was a project Moebius worked on to distract him while he tried (successfully, in the end) to give up smoking pot.

But, more than that, Inside Moebius is the kind of story you expect an old creator who loves complication and connections and multiverses - think of similar mash-ups Michael Moorcock has done in prose, and you'll have the idea. Moebius is overtly metafictional here, entirely concerned with the creation of art and the concerns of the creator: he is the main character, and his famous fictional characters wander around, mostly aimlessly, specifically because he has not given them a script.

This chunk of Inside Moebius - the middle two books of what was a six-book series, about two hundred and fifty pages of comics - is about things not happening, about waiting and searching and wondering and looking back on one's life and work to confront the people you used to be. This isn't subtext: the plot is Moebius (at his then-current age) wandering around and talking to younger versions of himself and to a personification of his Unconscious about those concerns, about the role and power of the reader, while the fictional characters wander around in their side-plot, often discussing the same things.

There's no core fiction here; it's metafiction all the way down. For readers who enjoy that, who know and appreciate Moebius' previous work, and who are willing to grapple with the punning and wordplay in a foreign language, there's a lot of inventive fun in Inside Moebius. But I can easily see a vast number of readers not finding it worth the bother.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

People who read a lot of books have lists - maybe on paper, maybe in their heads, maybe both. Lists of things they think they want to read someday, things they definitely want to read but probably not today, things they want to have on the shelf but realistically won't read any time soon, things they've heard of and want to look at in person, things that sounded interesting when someone else talked about them, things that don't sound like their kind of book but maybe could be so what-the-hell.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog was one of those books for me. The first book from French writer Muriel Barbery to be published in English - in a translation by Alison Anderson - it was a big success and a moderate bestseller in 2007, right around the end of the time I paid lots of attention to general fiction-publishing trends. (For somewhat obvious career-related reasons; I had a vestigial concern for some years afterward but I was finally convinced that I'd been kicked out of fiction publishing permanently and could never make my way back, so I didn't need to care about that world anymore.)

I found it randomly five years after it was published - there's a penciled note on the inside front cover of my copy that I think means it was originally owned by "M. Cummins" - in a church sale in a random town. And ten more years later, it seemed like a decent time to pull it down from the shelf and actually read it.

Barbery, I see, has written more novels since then - including, amusingly, a two-book fantasy sequence called "The Life of the Elves," which I might have to check out - but this was the one that made her an international sensation, and still seems to be her most famous book. So it was a good place to start, if this ends up being a start, and not just a single book I read.

It's set in a posh Parisian apartment building: 7, rue de Grenelle, where a bunch of rich and mostly self-absorbed people live. We see this world through two alienated female voices: Renee Michel and Paloma Josse. Renee is the concierge of the building, a middle-aged widow with no formal schooling, a vast wealth of self-taught erudition, and an inferiority complex large enough to eclipse the sun. Paloma is a twelve-year-old prodigy, the younger daughter of a deeply bourgeois family who hates everything about that family and resolves, at the beginning of the book, to burn down her family's apartment and commit suicide (two discrete actions, she makes clear) at the time of her thirteenth birthday.

Elegance is mostly a novel of voice rather than action - it takes place over the course of a few months, as we get to know these two prickly women and their thoughts. They each have low opinions of the rest of the residents of 7, rue de Grenelle, both more or less for "rich asshole" reasons. Renee in particular has a deeply internalized sense of what a concierge should be and do, and tries at all times to appear exactly as she thinks everyone is forcing her to be.

But then - after an event that is the centerpiece of Barbery's first novel Gourmet Rhapsody - a new resident moves into the building, and charms both Renee and Paloma in different ways. He is Kakuro Ozu, a Japanese businessman long resident in Paris, whose interests and expertise aligns very closely with Renee's and who sees through her pretense very quickly.

(If Elegance were meant more seriously, rather than as a light satire and generally uplifting story, I'd do more than quibble here about the deeply exoticizing atmosphere around Ozu. All French rich people are horrible, but a Japanese rich person is cultured and exciting...mostly just because he is Japanese.)

The Renee and Paloma threads are entirely separate until about the three-quarters point of the novel; each of them is unhappy, each of them is hiding her brilliance and deep thoughts from everyone, until they discover each other and see something of each other mirrored there. That leads to the ending, which is uplifting, but I found also very very French.

Barbery is a philosopher by training - she went through the elite schools she has her characters complain so much about here - and that's clear in the thoughts and concerns of her two main characters. I might think she beats on a few hobby-horses a bit too much, particularly philosophy, that elite atmosphere and the related supposedly unbridgeable class gulf in French society. But those are the central building-blocks of this seriocomic novel, and we have to allow the author her material. Elegance is a cutting, passionate, rewarding journey through the minds of two women who are at the sidelines of their worlds, told through two excellent, very distinct voices.

Ralph Azham, Vol.3: You Can't Stop a River by Lewis Trondheim

If there's one lesson from Lewis Trondheim's fantasies, it's that you don't get what you want, no matter how powerful or rich or connected you are. And even the subset of what you do get will probably change you, maybe without you even realizing it, until you turn into a person the old you would have hated.

The world is vast and cruel and relentless; people much the same. Death is inevitable and often sudden.

And, as title character Ralph Azham is coming to realize in this third omnibus of his adventures, You Can't Stop a River, you can't get away, either. Running works as well as fighting does, or possibly slightly worse.

Ralph Azham, the series, is twelve books long; each omnibus collects three of the original French albums, in an English translation by Joe Johnson. All of the books have been published in France; the fourth omnibus, The Dying Flame, is scheduled for this fall in English. I'm going to avoid details about the plot of this omnibus, since we're just past the halfway point of the series, but I will link to my longish posts on the first two books: Black Are the Stars and The Land of Blue Demons.

Ralph is powerful and smart and sneaky. He, by this point in the series, has assembled a group of other smart and powerful people around him, and they mostly trust and rely on each other. He seems to have the best interests of the land of Astolia central in his mind. He is deeply unhappy about killing people and causing mayhem, though he's, like so many other Trondheim heroes, very good at it. He's about as good and grounded and honest a protagonist as we will ever see from Trondheim.

And we can see, like Herbert in the Dungeon series, the seeds of what would turn Ralph into a Great Khan-like figure. What's more, Ralph can see it, and he doesn't like it. But how can he get away? In a world of destructive magic and superpowerful artifacts, his very existence can be a problem to would-be conquerors or reformers or religious zealots or ambitious magic-users.

By the point in the series, the initial conflict has been resolved: Ralph was originally trapped between two vastly powerful, very old magicians, the King and Vom Syrus. Now Astolia is in a state of what most people would think is peace, and the magicians - the "blueys" - have better, longer lives to look forward to.

But nothing stands still in a Trondheim fantasy world. There are always other schemers, other powers, other threats. If you have something, there's someone else who wants to kill you to get it.

It will be interesting to see how Trondheim wraps this up; his work outside of Ralph Azham is mostly made up of single volumes, where problems are resolved, for good or bad, by the end of that book. Maybe Dungeon is the exception: it's more to the opposite end, a series of unsolvable problems around that essential Trondheim fantasy dilemma, an endless story-engine that can never be depleted. Ralph Azham will need to fit somewhere in the middle: to end, solidly, with some kind of resolution greater than just the stopping point of one volume.

I'm looking forward to it: this is a rousing, thorny, exciting series with all the set-piece action and sarcastic humor you can expect from Trondheim, plus a deep concern for doing right and ruling wisely and finding stability among warring groups. Each piece so far has been excellent: I'm expecting the end will be as well.

The Agency by Katie Skelly

Katie Skelly is a fun, interesting cartoonist whose work hasn't quite connected with me. I knew that from her My Pretty Vampire, but the "fun, interesting" thing got me to come back for another run.

The Agency is a 2018 book, collecting a loose series of webcomics that came out over the three previous years. It doesn't tell a single story, but there is a through-line, and - as I'm coming to think is standard for Skelly - there's a core viewpoint and style that unifies the whole thing.

(I wonder where these stories appeared, since they're quite sexy - and my sense is that the webcomics world has usually been divided into the "no nudity! we're family-friendly" world and the "all sex! all the time!" world. This isn't all sex, but it's mostly sex: there's a lot of nudity, casual and specifically sexy, and basically all of the stories have have some sexual activity, though not as central and overwhelming as it usually is in a sex webcomic. I may here be circling the fact that this is by a woman, and so it's about things that this woman found sexy and wanted to put into a comic - therefore it's not as male-gaze-y and relentlessly focused on sticking penises into things as the typical sexcomics by a man.)

Skelly doesn't tell us what "the agency" is. But her main characters are all women, all introduced as "Agent <number>" starting with 8 and running up, sometimes jumping numbers. They have sexy adventures in which they explore things, are glamorous, and have vaguely portentous dialogues. They are in vaguely genre-fiction settings that don't entirely cohere together: a Barbarella-ish spacewoman, a model, a spy - maybe several model/spies. As I'm thinking is usual for Skelly, there's a '60s movie vibe, in the situations and the costumes and hair and the bright vibrant overlays of color.

These are sex stories, but generally positive ones. These women are getting sex they want, with themselves or other people or odder things (vibrating alien flora? octopuses!). The agents tend to disappear suddenly, as Skelly's attention shifts for the next story - they're signposts rather than people, characters who can be in the next situation for the next sexy idea. But they're mostly happy, and all self-motivated - they're doing what they want, getting mostly what they want, and enjoying themselves.

Again, there's no overall story. Each piece is basically separate, like we're watching some sexy short-film festival from 1968, far more woman-focused and sex-positive than would have been likely at the time. Their stories are vibrant and visually interesting - Skelly has a flat style, with quick lines and big eyes and ruled panel borders under those big slabs of glorious color - at times psychedelic, always distinctive.

This Year: 2004

"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.

Any list like this will have some gimmies - the ones you know from the beginning have to be included. This was one of them, maybe even the first song I thought of. 2004 was locked down from the beginning.

It could only have ever been Hooplas Involving Circus Tricks by Say Hi, the perfect droning epic of life on the road and life in general. I've loved this song from almost the moment I heard it, and I don't think I can tell you exactly why. Maybe because it has that great, unique sound; maybe the way it implies so much more than it says; maybe it just comes together, all of those pieces, in the way a great song has to.

It's loaded with references when the mime speaks about the biz
We asked him for a glass that might be clean
But he's too busy posing for fashion 'zines

Every band who lasts long enough has at least one "this is what it's like on the road" song - most of them are fairly straightforward. Say Hi - which is mostly just one guy, Eric Elbogen - is not straightforward. Hooplas instead is mostly a metaphor, or a series of interlocking metaphors, with circuses and mimes - but we know what he means.

Hooplas involving circus tricks
At addresses way out in the sticks

It's that feeling of waiting for something - in this case, for the show to start, for the point of the whole trip. The band is getting ready, people are telling each other dull stories. You can't hurry it. It will happen when it happens. But you have to get through the time before. The song has that timeless, endless feeling, anticipating and prefiguring, like a wave that never strikes land.

It's crowded, and we're bored.

And what do they find to do and think and talk about and obsess about while they wait? Well, what do young men ever think about?

The pixies in tight green little skirts say it's so much better now that it hurts

I still don't know what that means, if it's profound or just a good rhyme. Maybe it was an overheard line - I can see someone saying "it's so much better now that it hurts" randomly.

And I keep coming back to the sound of it: that electronic drone to keep the beat, the rock guitar that pops in and out for big moments, the singer's almost-whispering, understated voice. This is another song, like so many, that sounds its best as loud as you can stand, that wraps around you and envelops you for the space of four awesome minutes.

Quote of the Week: No Hurry

There is a great difference in boats, of course. For a long time I was on a boat that was so slow we used to forget what year it was we left port in. But of course this was at rare intervals. Ferry-boats used to lose valuable trips because their passengers grew old and died, waiting for us to get by. This was at still rarer intervals. I have the documents for these occurrences, but through carelessness they have been mislaid. This boat, the 'John J. Roe,' was so slow that when she finally sunk in Madrid Bend, it was five years before the owners heard of it. That was always a confusing fact to me, but it is according to the record, any way. She was dismally slow; still, we often had pretty exciting times racing with island, and rafts, and such things.

 - Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, p. 333 in Mississippi Writings

Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West

I think I read Day of the Locust some time in the '90s. I'd have to dig through my reading notebook to prove or disprove that, and I don't care that much: so take that as an unreliable narrator.

That's my primary knowledge of Nathanael West: I think I read something else by him, several decades ago. I know his name. He turned up as a background character in Stewart O'Nan's novel West of Sunset, which I read recently. And I had a Library of America book of his - Novels & Other Writings, which is the kind of title LoA gives a "OK, you're famous enough to get one book, and this is it" volume.

So I hit the shelf that book was on, and decided to read Miss Lonelyhearts: it's short, it's funny in a very dark way, so why not?

It's a novella rather than a novel, told episodically. It was published in 1933, and takes place about that time, in the depths of Depression-era New York City. Prohibition is in full swing, though the characters have no trouble getting and drinking epic quantities of alcohol. 

The main character is the male writer of an advice column for the fictional Post-Dispatch; he is only referred to as "Miss Lonelyhearts." He went to some relatively ritzy but unnamed college, got a good education. He's not worried about employment; it's not that kind of Depression-era story. Miss L and his fellow newspaper scribblers seem to believe, correctly, that they will always have work, in their current industry or advertising or something else. They're not worried about finding food or drink or keeping a roof over their heads.

The letters coming into the Miss Lonelyhearts column, though, are from people in different situations. Some potted descriptions I've read about the book online connect this to the Depression, but I didn't get that sense. The letter-writers are nearly all women, all poorly educated, all in bad situations, mostly because of men and fate and bad luck. (Mostly men, with the fate and bad luck caused by men. My reading of Miss Lonelyhearts may be solidly feminist, but I think it's all there blatantly in the text.) They're pregnant and unwed or sickly from having too many children or desperately poor with a no-good husband or raped and abandoned or a mixture of all of those things. They write in hoping for solace more than answers; they don't seem to think their situations can be changed, but, maybe, they can find a way to think about their lives to make it all less crushing.

Meanwhile, all of those letters are crushing "Miss Lonelyhearts." Look, West explains the theme, in the words of his main character, on p.94:

"Perhaps I can make you understand. Let's start from the beginning. A man is hired to give advice to the readers of a newspaper. The job is a circulation stunt and the whole staff considers it a joke. He welcomes the job, for it might lead to a gossip column, and anyway he's tired of being a leg man. He too considers the job a joke, but after several months at it, the joke begins to escape him. He sees that the majority of the letters are profoundly humble pleas for moral and spiritual advice, that they are inarticulate expressions of genuine suffering. He also discovers that his correspondents take him seriously. For the first time in his life, he is forced to examine the values by which he lives. This examination shows him that he is the victim of the joke and not its perpetrator."

From my point of view, almost a century later, I see a different problem than Miss Lonelyhearts does. He sees this as a spiritual crisis, and wants to be able to present a vision of Christian love and a welcoming afterlife, so these people will have something to look forward to when their inevitably short, horrible lives end unpleasantly.

I think that's bullshit, and that a wide social problem requires a wide social solution. Miss Lonelyhearts can't fix any of this. He could, in best Jacob Riis manner, highlight the horrible things happening to his readers and advocate - I may mean agitate - for systemic change. I doubt the Post-Dispatch would want that, of course, and it would be a very different book. But that's the answer to the problem he's faced with: not his own sad grappling with "Christ" and personal faith, but immediate change in the world to make lives better, in the way that the historical Christ actually did and advocated.

Instead, Miss Lonelyhearts drinks too much and tries to get laid - the first is much more successful than the second; even when he gets his leg over, it's not good for him. (Again, there's a lot of room for a strong feminist interpretation of this book: he's not happy in his relationships with women because he's embedded in a horrible patriarchal society and stuck in the role of  the oppressor, and on some level he knows it.)

The book is the story of how he falls apart, more or less - here a bit, there a bit, until his actions come to hit him in the end. Again, I found the god-bothering too much and focused the wrong way - it's all American Protestant "your reward will be in the next world," more Buddy Christ than anything I'd consider authentic. But that's who he is, that's the religion he was brought up with, that's the only way he can conceive the world.

And a story like that, about a character trapped by his own perceptions of the world, with no way out, is what we call a tragedy. Despite the bits that annoyed me, Miss Lonelyhearts is a good one, shot through with fine writing and crystalline moments and a darkly funny core of self-loathing from its hero.

Fortune & Glory by Brian Michael Bendis

I went through a Bendis kick, around the time a lot of the hip comics kids did, back in the mid-Aughts. I at first liked Powers, and then thought it ran at high speed away from everything that was originally good about it. I was mostly impressed by Alias. And I think I wandered away about the time he, inevitably, like every other new writer in comics, was fully subsumed into the Wednesday Crowd and started writing sharecropped superheroes all of the time.

{Spongebob Narrator Voice: Fifteen Years Later}

I just re-read Fortune & Glory, his least representative book. It was there in the app I used to find comics, since this spiffy new edition was just published in May, and I'm always up for nonfiction these days - the curse of the middle-aged man.

I see I didn't actually review Fortune the first time I read it, back in 2007, so I might as well go into some of the details here. Bendis created this - he started off as a writer-artist, which might be forgotten, since he's been just writing for a long time now - as a three-issue miniseries back in 1999. He'd done a few comics, mostly self-published, at that point - Goldfish, Jinx, Torso - all of which were dark mysteries and most of which I think were set in his native Cleveland. He was "hot" in the way it usually happens, though I doubt a self-publishing mystery series would pop now: his books were growing in popularity and getting media attention, so the bigger fish were starting to nose around.

In particular, Hollywood studios started reaching out, looking to option his books. Bendis had some loose contacts to actual Hollywood types, and was introduced to a newish producer here called David Spree, who became something of an advisor and also became "attached" to a couple of Bendis projects. Bendis also got a Hollywood agent, and started talking and taking meetings.

Fortune is the story of, basically, how those first three comics projects of his got him in the door to a whole bunch of places, got him a whole lot of meetings, and apparently led to a fair bit of money for options and writing the script for Goldfish...but did not, in the end, lead to any movies being made.

For Hollywood, though, that's a massive success: Bendis got a new line of income, got taken seriously, and even pitched pretty strongly (with fellow comics writer Marc Andreyko, the idea that became the comic Torso) and successfully. The Torso movie, in particular, seems to have almost happened, though Bendis is vague about how it fell apart - my guess is that it was a "personality conflict," probably not anywhere near him, and that the real story will only be told in memoirs thirty or so years down the line.

So this is a talking-heads book, heavy on the dialogue. I'm not sure if Bendis has been doing the Mamet-esque rat-tat-tat dialogue in his superhero books, but this is a real-world version of that, full of smiling tanned people lying to each other and Bendis's cartoony avatar - that's him on the cover - gamely making his way through the middle of a whole lot of bafflegab and bullshit and blatant lies.

Bendis was always a better writer than artist; I think he says that, in almost exactly those words, somewhere in this book. So it's not surprising in retrospect that he turned in the drawing board to focus on the word processor. This is, I think, one of the last big projects he drew, and it's fun and cartoony and full of energy - I don't think a story this personal and "here's what happened to me" would work as well drawn by someone else - so it was a suitable way to wind down that part of his career.

And the Hollywood stuff is entertaining, in the vein of a million other Hollywood stories from the past century or so: the names change, but the story is always the same.

Die Laughing by Andre Franquin

I've said this before, but I tend to read the outliers rather than the main works. I've mentioned it most often related to my penchant to read the collected nonfiction of novelists, often before I read any of their novels, but it applies in comics as well.

For example, let's take Andre Franquin. A towering figure of Eurocomics, the stalwart of Spirou for several decades, doing both the title character's stories and a series called Gaston Le Gaffe. I've seen his drawing; I'm sure I've heard of him multiple times. OK, so he's not been published terribly well or terribly often in the US - for whatever reason, Spirou hasn't travelled as well as Tintin or the Smurfs or Asterix. But, still, I have to believe that some of his most famous, representative work has been around in formats I could read over the past half-century I've been reading books.

Nope. What I saw first by Franquin was this 2018 book, which I read twenty-seven years after he died: Die Laughing. A collection of pitch-black (both in art style and material) mostly-unrelated comics from the '70s, mostly about death in all of its most horrible and appalling forms.

Sixty-six numbered cartoons - each of them originally appearing monthly, presumably as a palate-cleanser among happier, more colorful stories - all as black as pitch. Franquin draws his characters most of the time as black silhouettes against a white background; the effect is a bit like a old-fashioned puppet theatre with paper cut-outs, if you assume the theatre is of the Grand Guignol school.

These were timely cartoons in the 1970s, so the concerns - hunting and animal cruelty in general, the end of capital punishment, nuclear war, militarism in the big, and, for some reason, a lot of gags about hand grenades - are mostly of their time. They are all overstated for comedic effect; they are all exceptionally dark in tone. Main characters do survive to the end of their pages - actually fairly regularly - but it's not guaranteed, and, when they do, they often wish they hadn't.

Given how inky this book is, it's probably better in physical form than digitally, which is how I read it. On the other hand, I could pinch to blow up panels to try to figure out what the all-black figures were doing, which doesn't work with a real book. Comme ci, comme ça.

This is not a book one enjoys. The art is energetic and detailed - Franquin, I understand, was a great cartoonist, and his figures are cartoony and (ironically) full of life. But the matter is so grisly so much of the time, and all pitched as the '70s versions of these concerns, so the tone is often strident and it can seem beside the point forty years later. But it is powerful work by a major world cartoonist, in a very distinctive style.