Quote of the Week, Supplemental: Bay City Blues

I sat down on the bunk again. It was made of flat steel slats with a thin hard mattress over them., Two dark gray blankets were folded on it quite neatly. It was a very nice jail. It was on the twelfth floor in the new city hall., It was a very nice city hall. Bay City was a very nice place. People lived there and thought so. If I lived there, I would probably think so. I would see the nice blue bay and the cliffs and the yacht harbor and the quiet streets of houses, old houses brooding under old trees and new houses with sharp green lawns and wire fences and staked saplings set into the parkway in front of them. I knew a girl who lived on Twenty-fifth Street. It was a nice street. She was a nice girl. She liked Bay City.

 - Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake, p.133 in Later Novels & Other Writings

Quote of the Week: The Real Deal

Much of this chronicle - perhaps, it may seem, too much - has dealt with the difficulties of getting from place to place. But that seems to me unavoidable for it is the preoccupation of two-thirds of the traveler's waking hours, and the matter of all his nightmares. It is by crawling on the face of it that one learns a country; by the problems of transport that its geography becomes a reality and its inhabitants real people. Were one to be levitated on a magic carpet and whisked overnight from place to place, one would see all that was remarkable but it would be a very superficial acquaintance, and, in the same way, if one leaves the reader out of one's confidence, disavowing all the uncertainties of the route, the negotiations, projects and frustrations, making of oneself one of those rare exemplary dragonmans who disguise every trace of effort and present themselves before their employers with a plan completely tabulated, hampers packed, conveyances assembled, servants in attendance, one may show them some pretty spectacles and relate some instructive anecdotes, but one will not have given them what was originally offered when one was engaged - a share in the experience of travel, for these checks and hesitations constitute the genuine flavor.

 - Evelyn Waugh, Ninety-Two Days, pp.525-6 in Waugh Abroad

The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler

This is the middle one, though no one knew that at the time. The Lady in the Lake was published in 1943, the end of the first burst of Raymond Chandler's novels and the fourth of an eventual seven about private detective Philip Marlowe. After publishing those four books in five years, it would be six more before The Little Sister appeared in 1949, and four and five more years between his his last two books.

This is also the end of the war-time Chandler - again, only in retrospect. But Lady is a war-time book, with references to rationing and limited supplies and a heavily-guarded dam that is crucial at the very end of the novel.

Marlowe is hired by a businessman, Derace Kinglsey, to find his wife: she ran away, he thinks with the man (Chris Lavery) she's been having an affair with, leaving their mountain cabin on Little Fawn Lake about a month ago and telegraphing from El Paso, apparently on the way to a Mexican divorce. Kingsley would be fine with a divorce, but his wife is a bit wild and has her own money to be wild with - he wants to make sure she's not getting into anything serious while she's still married to him.

So Marlowe heads up into the mountains - one of the stories that Chandler "cannibalized" into Lady in the Lake was "No Crime in the Mountains," a title I always remember fondly - to investigate the disappearance of Crystal Kingsley. He discovers that another woman disappeared the same night: Muriel Chess, wife of the caretaker Bill. More dramatically, he and Bill discover Muriel's body in the lake - she's clearly been in there since the night she "disappeared," and the note she left for Bill might have been a suicide note.

The local police, led by the local sheriff-like constable, Jim Patton, think that note might be older than Chess says it is, and Chess is the obvious first suspect in the death of his wife. Marlowe isn't sure how this death relates to his actual case, but he still hasn't found Crystal Kingsley. He spends the rest of the novel between Los Angeles, where Kingsley lives; Bay City, where Lavery lives; and Little Fawn Lake. 

Bay City is corrupt - we saw that in Farewell, My Lovely and it's still true now - and Marlowe gets into some trouble with a detective there named Degarmo, who is also caught up somehow with a pill-pusher doctor, Almore, who coincidentally (or maybe not) lives right across the street from Lavery in a neighborhood devoid of other houses. There's also another woman, missing for a longer time - Mildred Haviland, Almore's former nurse. And another dead woman, also a longer time ago - Almore's wife, who conveniently committed suicide by car exhaust after a wild night that led Almore to bring her home and put her to sleep with a sedative.

All of that is connected, in the end. Crystal Kingsley is not as central in her own missing-persons case as she seemed to be. And there will be more bodies before it's done, as always.

I tend to clump Chandler's novels: Big Sleep and Long Goodbye are the best, with Goodbye clearly on top. The four in between them, including Lady, are all very strong, and only one small step down. I try to be polite and not mention Playback. On this re-read, I didn't see anything to shake that hierarchy: Lady is still a fine detective story, with an interestingly twisty plot, and doesn't rely too heavily on Marlowe being sapped on the head and left in danger. And Chandler's prose is as evocative and thoughtful and resonant here as his best.

(Note: I read this in the Library of America Later Novels & Other Writings. I don't think there are any textual discrepancies in editions of Chandler, but I'll always recommend LoA for American writers, particularly if you think you'll want to read more than one book.)

H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu by Gou Tanabe

Gou Tanabe is a manga-ka whose work has largely been adaptations of literary works - with a particular line in adapting H.P. Lovecraft stories. He's put out a fairly long shelf of work, but I can only speak to his two-volume version of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, which I read a few years ago.

Tanabe - in this edition, supported by Zack Davisson (translation), Steve Dutro (lettering and touchup) and Carl Gustav Horn (editor) - is, from what I've seen, a very faithful adaptor of the stories he chooses. He picks up large chunks of the original author's prose and runs those as large captions, floating over his pages, occasionally for several pages at a time. He also replicates the structure of those stories, at least in the Lovecraft works I've seen, which is particularly notable since Lovecraft tended to use a multi-section, fake-document style in his major works, and Tanabe closely follows that.

H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu - the Tanabe adaptation, I mean; the original short story is from 1928 - was published in Japan in book form in 2019, and this English translation followed in the fall of 2024. And it does adapt the underlying story very, very closely, turning a thirty-some page story into about two hundred and fifty pages of comics. The only thing I could think to complain about is that the main character, Francis, looks a lot more like Elric - very pale, thin face, stringy collar-length hair - than I think Lovecraft would have been comfortable with.

Tanabe's backgrounds and objects are hyper-detailed, especially the horrific visions - he's an artist who clearly delights in the monstrous and hideous, crafting his images of Cthulhu, cyclopean ruins, and the like with great care and to strong effect. His people are slightly less detailed, though still well into the realistic side of manga art styles - and he gives his people distinct faces here, something American readers don't always find the case with manga.

Do I need to describe the Lovecraft story? It's, like a lot of Lovecraft, one of the world's creepiest document reviews, as Francis gathers and annotates several statements by other people - all of whom, spoiler alert! - are dead because of the horrific things they witnessed, which slowly reveal to the reader the by-now well-known Lovecraft view of the universe: humans are small and unimportant; beings of far greater power and scope used to rule, and will come back "when the stars are right;" understanding humanity's very small and temporary place in the universe almost inevitably leads to a mental breakdown if not immediate death.

This story was one of the earliest crystallizations of that idea, the story where all of Lovecraft's ideas melded into the final form that he would work out in a series of stories over the next nearly twenty years. And Tanabe's adaptation of it does justice to Lovecraft's "unspeakable, unnamable" language - Tanabe is excellent at drawing gigantic, shadowed, horrific, bizarre creatures that both seem real on the page and yet are impossible. This is a fine adaptation of a major horror story; I'd recommend having a familiarity with the original story first, but anyone interested in a Lovecraft adaptation will have that arlready.

Doctor Strange: What Is It That Disturbs You, Stephen? by P. Craig Russell and others

There are several different ways to collect periodical comics into book form. The most obvious, and to my mind the best, is to take a story, or at least a string of issues that mostly tells one story, and maybe add some additional material to explain any random references or dangling plot threads. Things like The Great Darkness Saga or Born Again or Days of Future Past - they can work well even if collecting the story wasn't the original plan; and obviously series designed to be discrete, like Secret Wars or Batman: Year One, work even better.

Next best is the big chunk of continuity - the Masterpieces or Archive model. Take a year or two of periodical comics, starting somewhere relatively coherent, and just reprint it, in the order original readers would have seen it, with any intros and outros necessary to give it a little shape.

But since corporate comics often worked on an assembly-line model, with creators treated as interchangeable widgets, neither of those models works well if you want to focus on the work of a single human being - because those companies, historically, didn't value the contributions of any single human being.

That's when you get the "here's some stuff by this guy" - and it is, 99% of the time, a guy. Sometimes the guy is a writer, and so it's a collection of mostly standalone stories - for example, DC Universe by Alan Moore or Midnight Days. But when the creator in question is mostly an artist, the book can get very random and miscellaneous.

Doctor Strange: What Is It That Disturbs You, Stephen? collects what I think is all of the work that P. Craig Russell did on that character, from 1973 through 1997, including things he penciled but didn't ink, things he inked but didn't pencil, and even a couple of versions of a mostly-Russell story. It would have been a rag-bag in the best of situations, but this 2016 book has no table of contents and only a jumbled page with credits for all of this material, perhaps in an an attempt to hide just how massively miscellaneous the book is.

It credits six pencilers, five inkers, eight colorists, five letterers (plus an "& Co."), two assistant editors, five full editors, and a whopping thirteen writers - from Gardner Fox to Marc Andreyko. Most of the book is from the caption-crazy era of Marvel comics, with a bunch of random '70s stories and then a shorter stretch of slightly more ambitious and less cringeworthy pieces from Marvel Fanfare in the '80s.

It opens with the title story, which appeared as a one-shot in 1997 and was itself an expansion or re-imagining of the first Dr. Strange annual from 1973 (which itself is next in the book). Both of those started from an idea Russell had - the 1973 version was molded by writer Marv Wolfman into a very conventional Marvel tale of the time and the 1997 version was allowed to be more consistently Russell-eqsue by Marc Andreyko.

In both stories, someone close to Strange - Wong in 1997, Clea in 1973 - is spirited away by mysterious mystical forces, and Strange goes to first a temple (where he's attacked by a librarian) and then to the usual floating-paths otherworld so common in Dr. Strange stories. In that otherworld, he's attacked by a sorceress, Electra or Lectra, who rules that realm and who eventually cajoles him into coming with her to save the person she's kidnapped. They travel in a ship crewed by the dead for a while, see a vast golden city rise up out of the depths, and land in that city. Electra/Lectra's sister - her name is more variable in the two versions - is supposed to be equal in rulership of this realm, but Electra/Lectra claims she's totally evil and had to be contained.

The truth, as even a very dull child will notice, is exactly the opposite: Electra/Lectra is door-shakingly insane, and has trapped her poor innocent sister (and the sister's gorgeous lover, who Electra/Lectra covets) magically. There is a confrontation, with lots of mystical hand gestures and bands of light zipping around the panels for a while, until the madwoman shatters the mirror that maintains this realm and dooms herself, her sister, and her sister's lover to oblivion.

Only Strange survives, cast back out into his normal world, presumably sadder but wiser. The person he came to save, Wong or Clea, is also carefully preserved to appear in future stories.

The plot is more than a little operatic, and Russell draws the 1997 version in much the same style and energy he brings to his opera adaptations. That title story is obviously the high point of the book and reprinting it is the overall purpose - it's a shame it comes first and the rest is such a letdown.

The 1973 annual sets the tone for much of the subsequent material: it's clotted with captions and bombastic dialogue in the tedious Marvel Manner, as readers are spoon-fed every possible bit of information they could possibly want to know.

Everything else here is just random Dr. Strange comics that Russell happened to touch - penciling a few stories, inking a few others. None of it looks like Russell to any serious degree, though really serious students of art could spend a long time staring at individual panels looking for his work. Oh, wait, there are also three random short horror stories from other series - standalone "chillers" without continuing characters - that were Russell's first work for Marvel. And then some backmatter with other covers and similar bits of Dr. Strange-related art. All in all, over two hundred pages in this book, of which the first sixty (the title story) is worth reading for an adult with a normal reading level in the 21st century.

We can note that '60s Marvel comics were a major advance over the competition, with more realistic motivations and characters that spoke more clearly to the teen and young adult audience of the time,  and that they were popular and a welcome surge of energy for the field, while still pointing out that they were not very good, and that the things that came afterward in the same style were not even as good as that. Most of Disturbs You is hacky minor '70s and '80s yardgood comics, pages made to fill an editorial hole and entertain an audience that didn't want and probably wouldn't recognize nuance or subtlety. The book itself is one-half an celebration of all things Russell (even those apprentice pieces that maybe should not be celebrated quite so loudly with such fervor), and one-half cynical package so that Marvel could charge substantially more for the sixty-page story that it knew audiences actually wanted.

Ninety-Two Days by Evelyn Waugh

I doubt there is a travel book with as much of a throw-my-hands-up title as Evelyn Waugh's Ninety-Two Days. It's as if he was saying, "Look, I went to a place and spent some time there, and this is the book I wrote about it. Can't say it any more clearly than that."

I'm getting the sense that Waugh's travel books were often, perhaps always aimless and faintly mercenary - his older brother Alec had, I believe, already made a successful career as a travel writer, and maybe it took some time for Evelyn Waugh's novels to be seen as the magnificent things they are. [1] Whatever the reason, his travel books can be close to the pure old-fashioned "I am an Englishman, one of the world's aristocrats and a deeply cultured individual. I will go to This Strange and Foreign Land and tell you about it."

See my post, earlier this year, on Remote People, for some more detail. That trip had a slightly more obvious trigger, and yet also involved a lot of random bumming around in search of local color.

In December of 1932, Waugh went to Guiana, more or less because it was a British colony in a different part of the world, and he wanted to see how things there compared to what he'd seen in British Africa (in Remote People). He traveled up-country, by horse and foot, crossing the border into Brazil, and then came back, via a somewhat different route that also included some boats.

The point was not to visit some particular place or person, though he did pass by the famous Kaieteur falls, or to understand local government, or even any obvious anthropological interest in the people of Guiana. No, it purely seemed to be "this is a part of the world my people own; I want to take a look at it." And so he did, spending, as he noted, ninety-two days doing so.

If one were cruel, one would here note that there is no point to Ninety-Two Days. Waugh didn't plan to learn anything specific, and he succeeded at that. He wandered around what seems to be a fairly harsh, somewhat depopulated wilderness for three months, battling insects and heat and dehydration, meeting only a few particularly colorful characters (all white settlers), and spends most of his pages talking about logistics, privations, and hardships. He was supported by a variety of porters and guides and assistants, and makes some effort, in that very eugenics-era way, to make clear which of them were natives and which were black and which were various "mixed breeds," using the local terms and explaining them. But most of those people are just names, sometimes a few traits - usually that this one was lazier than Waugh would prefer for a local hired for a pittance to carry heavy burdens through a tropical wilderness - and that's it.

Of course, all this is written by Evelyn Waugh, who even this early in his career was a master of prose and deeply entertaining. It's an often-true cliché that travel books are better the more uncomfortable they were for the writer, and this trip was deeply uncomfortable for Waugh. There's a lot of insight and fine writing and thoughtful sentences throughout: the whole thing might seem vaguely pointless, but it created a deeply readable book, of the kind where the reader is happier the greater the contrast between Waugh's travails and the reader's comfort, perhaps in a nicely overstuffed chair.

Waugh's novels are more important than his travel books, and I suspect (only having read a few so far) that this is one of the least of his travel books. So I would not recommend coming to Ninety-Two Days early in one's Waugh reading. But if you've already read about a dozen Waugh books, it will definitely suit.

[1] There's a point in the book where Evelyn Waugh points out that he and Alec have divided the world between them - well, I think it's more that Alec declared particular regions (like North American and the Caribbean) as "his" and warned Evelyn off his turf. Guiana is allowed, but his journey there was out of bounds.

Better Things: Twin Cadillac Valentine

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

This is one of the greatest driving songs I know, by a band I loved for their three records but think has been completely forgotten in the thirty years since.

And that paragraph actually refers two different songs by the Screaming Blue Messiahs. I originally wrote this post about one of them, and now I'm going back to switch it to the other one.

So you may like Big Brother Muscle better - I almost did. If I was less committed to the one-song-a-week thing, I'd list them both here.

The Screaming Blue Messiahs came out of nowhere - as I understand it, they were all British, all veterans of multiple bands that sort-of or almost made it, all middle-aged in 1986 when their first record Gun Shy came out. The best song on Gun Shy is Twin Cadillac Valentine, and I'm going back, about a week after originally "finalizing" this post, to write about that song.

It's a song about cars, about driving, snarled over a driving beat, staring out with a unique chiming noise, as if to tell you these guys have arrived. The Messiahs were a power trio, and that power comes out really starkly here.

Well you could be driving two Cadillacs at the same time

And one's going 45 and one's going 99

It's near-apocalyptic in the middle, ominous and unsettling - almost random lines and images. What does it all mean? Is it telling a specific story? Forget all that.

What do you do: get in the car

This is a loud, insistent, jangling rock song, setting off at top speed and lighting out for the territory. Punch the gas and go along with it.

Quote of the Week: Getting Paid Enormously for Committing Crimes Against Which No Laws Had Been Passed

When the United States of America, which was meant to be a Utopia for all, was less than a century old, Noah Rosewater and a few men like him demonstrated the folly of the Founding Fathers in one respect: those sadly recent ancestors had not made it the law of the Utopia that the wealth of each citizen should be limited. This oversight was engendered by a week-kneed sympathy for those who loved expensive things, and by the feeling that the continent was so vast and valuable, and the population so thin and enterprising, that no thief, no matter how fast he stole, could more than mildly inconvenience anyone.

Noah and a few like him perceived that the continent was in fact finite, and that venal office-holders, legislators in particular, could be persuaded to toss up great hunks of it for grabs, and to toss them in such a way as to have them land where Noah and his kind were standing.

Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.

 - Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, pp.196-97 in Novels & Stories, 1963-1973

Safely Endangered Comics by Chris McCoy

I haven't seen any official figures, and I don't know who would produce them, but the webcomics field seems to be at least as broad and potentially remunerative as newspaper comics at this point. Although "about as good as a thing that has been publicly shrinking and dying for a generation" is not necessarily a positive, I admit. And webcomics have their own financial pressures, as the ad market online has sharpened and tightened.

I guess what I'm saying is: I'm still finding "new" webcomics that have been collected into books. Things that are reasonably popular, have been running for a few years, have a style I'm pretty sure I've seen on social media here and there, have a profile that I hope means the creator is getting something like a living wage from it.

For instance: Safely Endangered! By the British creator Chris McCoy, it runs on McCoy's website to this very day, had a run on Webtoon in the mid-teens, and a bunch of the strips were collected as Safely Endangered Comics in 2019 by Andrews McMeel, the American strip-format-comics goliath.

The book collects a hundred and forty strips from the earlier years of Safely Endangered - it's been running almost as long since then as when the book came out - and they're modern, crisp, often-NSFW, standalone gags, usually in a four-panel format. McCoy draws people consistently as those bright-colored outlines, like on the cover, somewhat in the Mr. Lovenstein mode. There's a lot of jokes about sex and death and superheroes, and it's the kind of strip where people will say "fuck" and "holy shit" when appropriate - that's what I mean.

I find this is a distinctive style of humor: McCoy isn't making the same gags as War and Peas or Lovenstein or Poorly Drawn Lines or several others, but he's working in the same general territory, the same way all newspaper gag-a-day family strips are roughly similar to each other. It just means "gag-a-day webcomic" is basically a genre these days, and we can predict a lot of what that implies about any specific strip.

These are often-sarcastic comics, with video game and Marvel-movie references - not overly geeky, but set in a modern media landscape, aimed at an online audience that will know and recognize the things McCoy is making jokes about. If you like comics like that - and a lot of us do - this book is out there for a sample, and McCoy is still plugging away at Safely Endangered, with what looks like new comics twice a week.

Hypericum by Manuele Fior

Manuele Fior is an Italian cartoonist - or maker of graphic novels, if you want to put it that way - who does interesting books about particular people, told quietly and distinctively, as far as I've seen. (I've gotten to about half of his books - 5000 KM per second, which is magnificent, the short-story collection Blackbird Days, and the chilly post-apocalypse Celestia.) He seems to use SFnal elements pretty regularly, but not all the time, and doesn't focus on them.

Hypericum is, I think, his most recent book to be published in English - the original copyright is 2022, and this Matt Madden-translated edition from Fantagraphics was published in early 2023.

It starts with the Howard Carter 1922 expedition that discovered Tutankhamen, which is our "B" story. The main story is set about twenty years ago - this isn't clear at first; I realized it when a cell phone was a strange and wondrous thing in one scene - and centers on Teresa, a driven young Italian woman in Berlin to be the youngest member of a team working on an exhibition of the materials Carter discovered about seventy-five years before.

Teresa is regimented, precise - the kind of person who has always just moved along a single unvarying line, on to the next thing and the next, following the path laid out for her life. She's also subject to horrible insomnia, barely getting two hours of sleep a night, burning off the hours of the dark by re-reading Carter's diary of the dig.

But on her second day in Berlin, she runs into a young man from Italy, about her age: Ruben. He's her opposite in almost every way: living in a squat, living completely randomly, doing whatever he wants. She's somewhat frustrated by him but immediately intrigued, and the two quickly start a relationship, and she moves in with him.

By the way, we learn fairly quickly that the reason Ruben is able to be so carefree is that he's a remittance man: his father gives him a large monthly allowance, so he doesn't need to pursue his art or do anything in particular to pay for his living. As always, that's a very nice life if you've happened to luck into it.

Hypericum follows those two tracks: Theresa's work and relationship with Ruben; Carter's painstaking excavation of the wonders of Tut's tomb. We mostly get Carter during Theresa's night, as if we're reading the diaries along with her. Like much of Fior's work, it's mostly quiet and character-focused; Teresa does have some big decisions to make over the course of the year or so the book covers, but she doesn't make them in a big way. The Carter sections are primarily, I think, for parallax - background on what Teresa does, history and explanation, and some thematic connections. But there's no serious drama, no real surprises in the historical sections, just methodical digging and a succession of unearthed wonders.

Fior has a painted style that feels entirely down-to-earth to me here, unshowy and matter-of-fact in both timeframes. He depicts sex and priceless Egyptian gold equally in the moment, both things that are there in his panels, both things that are interesting to look at, and of this particular moment, but not more important than that. Hypericum is a quiet book of connections, one you assemble large pieces of in your own head as you read it.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut

I've been re-reading Vonnegut novels, slowly - Slaughterhouse-Five in 2019, Breakfast of Champions in 2023. And now I came to the book just before them, 1965's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.

I read it long, long ago - as a teenager, I think, during that first Vonnegut phase that a lot of teenage readers go through. It's the Vonnegut novel with the quote that's stuck with me the most, the one that I really do think encapsulates all of Vonnegut's concerns and obsessions. I usually just quote the end of it, but I want to present the whole thing this time.

This is a novel about capitalism, to be blunt - or, more specifically, about the role of unearned dynastic wealth in a society. The main character, Eliot Rosewater, is a Vonnegutian oddball, whose sanity is a major question in the novel. He's fabulously rich, but lives, at this point, quietly in his family's ancestral seat in Indiana, running a Foundation that mostly consists of him giving small sums of money to woe-begotten locals and providing moral support to them on the phone. He's been asked to baptize the newly-born twin daughters of a local woman, even though he's not religious. He says he couldn't get out of it.

"What will you say? What will you do?"

"Oh - I don't know." Eliot's sorrow and exhaustion dropped away for a moment as he became enchanted by the problem. A birdy little smile played over his lips. "Go over to her shack, I guess. Sprinkle some water on the babies, say, 'Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies--:

"God damn it, you've got to be kind.'"

I almost want to just leave it there. Vonnegut novels are loose, shaggy assemblages, held together by his obsessions and his sentences, always more carefully constructed than they seem, and writing in detail about them can make them seem trite or small or silly. Like all his novels, Rosewater is not terribly plotty; it runs through a number of characters and scenes - if I were being pretentious, I'd say motifs - before coming to something like an ending that mostly sums up everything that happened before. The other elements of Rosewater include Eliot's distant cousin and his family in Connecticut, a rapacious young lawyer, Eliot's very "red in tooth and claw" Republican Senator father, and, as Vonnegut puts it in the opening sentences of the novel, "a sum of money."

Vonnegut is clear-eyed in Rosewater. Everyone knows the Rosewater Foundation isn't going to save the world, or even save any of the people it helps. The narrative voice admits that the poor, downtrodden people of Rosewater County, Indiana are pretty lousy people, who will take advantage of any out and can't be expected to better themselves in any way. It basically says that all people are like that - that, all in all, people are not very nice, good, or useful. What Eliot, and his Foundation, do is to help a subset of those lousy people, the ones the worst off in this particular place, to make sure they can keep going. To let them get as much of that hundred years at the outside. Even if they don't get good jobs and upstanding lives and contribute meaningfully to the public.

Vonnegut is as stark as he can be here. They deserve help because they're here, because they're human, because they're alive. That's all they needed to do to be worth it. To be babies. To be born into a world round and wet and crowded. Because we all have got to be kind.

And, of course, Rosewater is mostly about people not being kind, because Vonnegut was not an optimist. He might have been a visionary, but he knew very well his visions didn't correspond to the actual world. And that's what his novels were about. Rosewater is more focused on money than most, as one particular element of the modern world that makes it hard for people to live, but all of his novels took particular elements and made them central, at the same time as the bulk of the concerns and insights and thoughts were broadly similar: people are not all that great. But they're all we have. We need to treasure what we actually do have, and, more than anything else, be kind to each other.

(Note: I read this in the Library of America omnibus Novels & Stories, 1963-1973, and, as always, I highly recommend LoA editions for any writers they publish. The books are elegant and a pleasure to read, with good scholarly notes and the best texts available.)

Free Pass by Julian Hanshaw

Comics are about sex less often than most artforms. Call it a lingering prudishness, the hangover from long decades seen as a medium just for kids, or just the fact that drawn sex is inherently a bit more fleshy than the written kind. But it's true: comics avoid sex a lot of the time, and often only wink when they come close to that territory.

Free Pass, Julian Hanshaw's 2022 graphic novel, isn't winking. Hanshaw avoids drawing the nitty-gritty of sex most of the time, or obscures it, but this is a book about one couple and their sex life - and they're young and reasonably energetic. And...but then, I'll get into the plot in a moment.

The book opens with the couple - Huck and Nadia, young British tech workers who are maybe thirty, maybe a few years one side or the other of that - talking sex, while we see their house from outside, porno movies playing on a big screen we can see through a sliding door. They're discussing having sex with other people, we come to realize, possibly partner swapping. They haven't done it yet, but they're both intrigued, and running through the other couples they know, the times they wonder if it might have happened, and what comes next.

Eventually, they decide to make "Free Pass" lists - five celebrities for each of them, people they could have sex with guilt- and consequence-free if it somehow happened. We see Huck making his list over the next few days - the book mostly follows him, mostly lets us understand what's in his head - in his job at a tech company, Abrazo.

They both work at Abrazo, which is mostly a fictionalized Facebook: big, all-encompassing, dominant. Nadia is a programmer; we don't see a lot of what she does, but she's more technical, more specifically skilled, than Huck is. Huck is on a moderation team, maybe a low-level supervisor there. We don't see the things he moderates, just the complaints about them, and something of the internal Abrazo double-speak about what they get rid of and what they don't.

Frankly, I think Hanshaw has a specific political point here, and it's a bit opaque to me. In the US, especially now, three years later, what we saw the big tech companies trying to do with moderation was largely getting rid of the worst of the worst: hate speech, death threats, attacks on people with racial and sexually-charged language. The complaint with that approach was that they tended to censor right-wing voices - the unspoken underpinning was that the right wing was deeply hateful, sexist and racist, but that they saw that as a good thing and wanted free rein to spew their anger and vitriol everywhere, to yell as loudly as they could and take over any spaces they could drive other people out of. I'm pretty sure Hanshaw isn't saying he's in favor of that, but, from a US perspective in 2025, I'm not sure what else he means. Maybe it's some more lefty flavor of Abrazo being too chummy with the government, and getting rid of anything against their interests.

Because, you see, there's an election coming up. The candidates are fictional, and we don't know what parties they represent. But there's a "four more years" person (Libby) and a "change it all" person (Maynard) - which I think codes them as Tory and Labour, respectively. The book is organized by the days until the election: we start a little more than two weeks out. But, like Abrazo's moderation decisions, any actual political policies are presented in coded, nonspecific terms - so I think what it means is clearer if you're British, particularly if you are British and it is 2022, looking towards the general election that eventually happened in 2024.

The election itself is mostly background, but Abrazo's moderation decisions are a huge part of Huck's day, and a source of stress to him. He's listening to podcasts from "the other side" - I think Hanshaw means people like the EFF, free-internet types, rather than Nigel Farage and the kick-out-the-foreigners crowd - which some of his co-workers look askance at. He's also a bit awkward, in that tech-guy way, and for a while I wondered if he was meant to be seen as incel-adjacent, as having picked up some of those thoughts and ideas despite being in an on-going successful relationship.

That's all swirling around, when Huck gets a new product to test - from Ali, the male half of the couple he and Nadia hit upon as the perfect choices for their first swinging experience in the first scene. It's an AI sex robot, Ali says. It comes in a big box; it's a blank humanoid form that has a tablet to control it. On that tablet is a menu of people, men and women, and the user can choose who the robot turns into. And, of course, the robot is a wonderful, perfect, lover, in that time-honored way that traces back to at least Tanith Lee's Silver Metal Lover (or maybe Barbarella, or even, if you accept much more winking and hinting, "Helen O'Loy").

Many stories with a sex robot like that would be about jealousy, about a break-up, but Huck and Nadia are enthusiastic and experimental and geeky, and they take to their new fuck-buddy like fish to water. Hanshaw presents this imagistically, but I think it's mostly "turn it into a man for you, and then into a woman for me," with maybe some three-way fun along the way. But they have a lot of sex - even more so once Nadia realizes she can mildly hack the tablet and turn the robot into anyone, not just the hardcoded choices. They spend something like a week just fucking celebrity simulacra, and seem to be fantastically happy at it, if maybe a bit sore and tired by the end.

But, meanwhile, Nadia has been interviewing with a newer tech company, Hapus, which promises to be more responsive and independent. They specifically do not moderate in the way that's problematic with Abrazo, whatever that's meant to be. She gets the job, and Huck is supportive, but maybe not entirely happy - because she might be moving away from him or because he feels guilty about what he does for Abrazo, or both.

Huck and Nadia actually call out sick from work for several days for their fuck-fest, which is yet another element that leads to a confrontation between Ali and Huck. They give back the sex robot, and the election happens.

I think we're meant to guess who won; Hanshaw doesn't say. The last section jumps ahead a year: Nadia is happily working for Hapus, Huck is running for a local political office, and the sex robots are rolling out broadly. I think it's meant to be a happy ending, but I don't know what party Huck is standing for or what his platform is, and ubiquitous easily-hackable sex robots might not be the most stabilizing element to add into a society. So maybe ambiguously happy.

Hanshaw has a fairly lumpy way of drawing people, which is surprisingly excellent for this story: his people are real and flawed, not porn models. Huck and Nadia look like relatively fit, fairly young, absolutely normal people, and even the sex robot doesn't come across as pure pneumatic distilled sex, just another body with which they can have fun.

And Free Pass is absolutely packed with ideas and thoughts - about sex, relationships, online discourse, how to think about governments - mostly posed in non-specific, non-partisan ways, so it doesn't trip anyone's propaganda detectors. It's a fun, quirky, mostly positive book about a couple who have a lot of sex with a sex robot and come out of it (and associated events) with a stronger relationship.

Better Things: 5:01 AM (The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking)

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

I was a teenager in the '80s; I was at least as dramatic as the average; of course I was a Pink Floyd fan.

I had a Floyd song in This Year: When The Tigers Broke Free, which can still make me tear up when I hear it.

This time around, I have a song from around the same era, from Roger Waters's first solo record, The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking. This is more or less the title song: 5:01 AM (The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking).

The whole record, as is standard for Waters, tells one story - in a loose, disjointed, not straightforward way, which is also typical. It's the story of one night, of one set of dreams, probably, for one man, who may or may not be Waters himself.

This section, or song, has some of the best guitar work on the record - the saying at the time was that the only way Waters could get a better guitarist for his solo work than Floyd's David Gilmour was by hiring Eric Clapton, and that's what he did.

The first two verses are scenarios - it's exactly what the title promises. The implied main character is a man, in the middle of his life - like Waters and his narrator. First comes the "cons," he's hitchhiking and picked up by "an angel on a Harley" who 

takes your hand
In some strange Californian handshake
And breaks the bone

In the second verse, the narrator gets picked up again, in what counts as the "pros:"

A housewife from Encino
Whose husband's on the golf course
With his book of rules

And Waters heavily hints they have a bit of afternoon delight.

Then the main character has a weirder, more clearly dreamlike vision, in which Yoko Ono urges him to jump to what would probably be his death - or maybe that's the shock that makes the main character pull back from his dangerous activities, since the whole album is the story of him going wild and then coming back to his wife.

Waters always has complicated metaphors and deep meanings, which aren't always completely clear or explicable in his songs. But the general idea is bold and upfront, and this is one of his best-sounding songs, from a record that I tend to think gets forgotten. That guitar is hard to resist...as is the sense of possibility and adventure on the open road.

Quote of the Week: How an Artists' Model Makes an Entrance

I slipped behind her; she arched her shoulders and her coat came off in my hands. Her only item of clothing was a pair of high heels, in which she clacked down my hall. "I thought why bother getting dressed."

"Perfectly sensible." I gave her my arm at once, as one has been trained to do for a woman who's just arrived naked at a party, so that her entrance remains a simple statement of preference, rather than a thing too calculated or too keenly imaginative.

 - William Kotzwinkle, The Midnight Examiner, p.50

The Black Incal by Alexandro Jodorowski & Mœbius

I read The Incal at least thirty years ago, during the burst of Mœbius republications from Marvel. As I recall, I thought it was OK space opera, with an annoying main character and more mystical mumbo-jumbo than I preferred. (At the time, I was much more enthusiastic about the Blueberry stories, a long Western series drawn by Mœbius and written by Jean-Michel Charlier.)

Humanoids republished the original Incal series - in six volumes this time, matching the original French albums, unlike the Marvel 2-in-1s - in 2012, going back to the original French colors by Yves Chaland and taking out some minor censorship that had crept into English-language editions in the '90s. And so, for no good reason, I'm taking another look at this series.

The Black Incal is the first of the six albums of the main series, written by Alexandro Jodorowski and drawn by Mœbius. The stories originally appeared in Metal Hurlant in the early '80s; Jodorowski went on to write a lot more in this universe - some of it under an "Incal" title and some not, a few with Mœbius but mostly not. And I have to admit that I do not have a high opinion of Jodorowski's work, though I've mostly read the comics he wrote for Mœbius - he's also a filmmaker and has done lots of other projects, so I may be reacting most strongly to their gestalt. (The worst thing I've seen is Madwoman of the Sacred Heart, if you want to see my heights of spleen and bile.)

The Incal, on the other hand, starts off as more-or-less conventional skiffy adventure, with only a few eruptions of Meaning. Our hero is John DiFool (a worrying name, admittedly), a "Class-R" private investigator in one of those ultra-urbanized, stratified medium futures, in an underground city on what seems to be Earth. He starts out being beaten and terrorized by mysterious masked figures, is thrown to what should be his death, and then saved by the Cybo-Cops. He tells them a plausible story - which might even be mostly true - about him bodyguarding an aristo woman for a night of debauchery among the lower classes before things went sideways and he ran away and was knocked out in the inevitable gigantic service tunnels.

John neglects to mention that he got a strange box from a gigantic dying "mutant," or that other mutants and the alien Berg (from another galaxy, Jodorowski offhandedly remarks, to underscore how little he understands how any of this works) are fighting over this MacGuffin.

The MacGuffin itself is The Incal, a small luminous pyramid that talks and can bestow strange and wondrous powers on its possessor in ways that aren't clear at all in this book. Descriptions of the series call it "The Light Incal" in distinction to the Dark Incal, the title object that John is sent by the main Incal to find in the back half of this book.

Most of this book is frenetic action overlaid with lots of talking. It's the kind of action story where people narrate their every last action and emotional state, like a '60s Spider-Man comic with slightly less quipping but vastly more emoting. John gets one story of What He Needs To Do and What It All Means from the Incal, but, as I recall, this changes somewhat as the series goes on, and the story gets bigger and more grandiose. There are various forces arrayed against John, but we're not clear yet on who they all are, how they connect to each other, or what they want. But it is clearly John on the run with the vastly powerful thingamabob, with All Hands Against Him.

Oh! Also, near the end, one group of villains hires the Metabaron, a sleek figure in a metaleather jacket with a metashaved head and steely metaeyes, to find John and retrieve the Incal in his metacraft. (OK, not every noun associated with him has "meta" attached to it - but a hell of a lot of them do, in a way that gets silly within two or three pages.)

It ends entirely in the middle of the action; John has been captured yet again by someone we're pretty sure is a villain and the Metabaron is getting metacloser. I suspect every volume ends more or less that way; I'll see.

The Dark Incal is stylish and would move really quickly if it weren't for all of the repetitive dialogue. Mœbius's art is detailed - maybe to the point of being overbusy a few times, but mostly right in that sweet spot of Big SF action, with lots of gigantic constructed stuff looming and swooping around. I have the lurking suspicion that it will all add up to less than it seems, but that may be my memories of the last time I read it. It is the epitome of '80s SF adventure in French comics, in all of the good and bad ways.