Better Things: All I Want Is You

"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 my favorite love songs: big, bold, demanding, overwhelming, all-encompassing, so long it almost exhausts itself by the end.

For this week, the song is All I Want Is You by U2.

You say you want
Diamonds on a ring of gold
Your story to remain untold
Your love not to grow cold

It's from 1988, which means I first heard it new, as an eighteen-year old. If there's a better audience for "big, bold, demanding, overwhelming, all-encompassing" love songs than a teenager, I don't know it - I was poised to love big emotions, giant gestures, strong stances. And U2 delivered: their '80s work was always big in all the important ways, and they worked on weaving subtlety in, in fits and starts, as their careers went on.

It has that classic-era Edge guitar sound, supple and rippling, ringing throughout - sounding like nothing and no one else, rising up at the first chorus and rising and falling in the music after that.

It has one of Bono's best vocal performances, relatively subdued, world-weary, straightforward. He always had the vocal power, but didn't always want to rein it in - here, he does, to great effect.

What's it about? All the things lovers tell each other - especially promise each other - the plans they make and the goals they set and the dreams they have, maybe especially the big expansive ones the two do not 100% share.

All the promises we break
From the cradle to the grave
When all I want is you

Books Read: November 2025

Here's a list of the books I read in the past month. As always, it's mostly an index, and almost entirely for my own use later. Also, the posts about these books mostly haven't gone live yet, so I'll be updating this later to include those.

Naomi Nowak, Graylight (11/1)

Roy Thomas, Michael T. Gilbert, and George Freeman, Elric: The Sailor on the Seas of Fate (digital., 11/2)

John Sladek, The Muller-Fokker Effect (in SF Gateway Omnibus, 11/2)

Matt Kindt, Tyler Jenkins, and Hilary Jenkins, Apache Delivery Service (11/8)

Doug Savage, Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Time Trout (digital, 11/9)

Jack Vance, Marune: Alastor 933 (in Alastor, 11/9)

Ludovic Debeurme, Renée (11/14)

Tom Toro, And to Think We Started as a Book Club... (digital, 11/16)

Richard Wolinksy, ed., Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods! (11/16)

Ulf K., Hieronymus B.: 1997-2007 (11/21)

Bill Griffith, Photographic Memory (digital, 11/22)

Jim Henson, Jerry Juhl, and Roger Langridge, Jim Henson's The Musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow (11/23)

P.G. Compton, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (11/23)

Walker Tate, Laser Eye Surgery (digital, 11/27)

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (in Christmas Books, 11/27)

Jennifer Hayden, Where There's Smoke, There's Dinner (digital, 11/28)

Asher Perlman, Hi, It's Me Again (digital, 11/29)

P.G. Wodehouse, Spring Fever (11/29)

Debbie Tung, My Perfectly Imperfect Body (digital, 11/30)

Loren D. Estleman, Burning Midnight (11/30)

Next month I'm pretty sure I will read more books.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of December 6, 2025

I was getting a movie from the library for my weekly "Movie Night" with my twenty-something kids, and thought "why not look at the ongoing list of books and see if I want to read any of them now?" And so I did, and so I requested these two, and so they were pulled for me.

If you have a local library, check to see if they do this - being able to request specific books online and have them held for you is a really neat feature. (Especially if you already have too many books in the house and are trying not to overly increase that number.)

Here's what I just got, which I'm actually reading this very weekend (one yesterday, one today):

The sixth book in the Asterix series by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo: Asterix and Cleopatra. I read the first three in the current, too-small-for-my-aging-eyes omnibus, then jumped to the older album-sized English-language version for #4, Asterix the Gladiator. #5 is not available as a standalone in my library system, and plot/theme/character development does not seem to be a huge issue with these books, so I just moved on to the next one.

Um. And a misaimed search at that big e-commerce site gave me the surprising revelation that there was a recent French live-action series of Asterix movies? How did they find a lead actor short enough?

And the third (of a planned four) book in George O'Connor's current mythology-retold-for-younger-readers series, Asgardians, is Loki, just published this past fall. The first two books in Asgardians were Odin and Thor, as you'd expect; I haven't seen any hints as to who will be covered in #4. O'Connor previously did a long series about the Greek gods, as Olympians, and his work is detailed and smart, filled with insights from myth and fable and told in modern, compelling ways with complex characterization and a muscular, adventure-comics art style. (He also gets in a lot more quirky material than some people might expect from that "young readers" above - his books are suitable for smart middle-schoolers rather than aimed at them, is how I'd put it.)

Quote of the Week: How a Lying Liar Lies

"The chief thing," I advised them, "is not to let her tire you out. When you catch her in a lie, she admits it and gives you another lie to take its place and, when you catch her in that one, admits it and gives you still another, and so on. Most people - even women - get discouraged after you've caught them in the third or fourth straight lie and fall back on either the truth or silence, but not Mimi. She keeps trying and you've got to be careful or you'll find yourself believing her, not because she seems to be telling the truth, but simply because you're tired of disbelieving her."

 - Nick Charles in Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man, p.893 in Complete Novels

The Disappearance of Charley Butters by Zach Worton

Charley Butters is probably dead. He was a painter in his mid-life during the later 1950s, so by the time of this 2015 graphic novel - set, as far as I can tell, basically contemporaneously - he would have been at least in his eighties. But there are two more books in this series, so I suppose he may show up as a centenarian eventually.

This is not really the story of Charley Butters, though. He's in the title, and his model and mystery is important, yes. But it's the story of Travis, a young man who works in a record store and sings in a black metal band.

Travis and his two bandmates are going off into the woods with filmmaker Stuart, to gesticulate and grimace in extreme makeup - they're making a video. The four guys are bickering, complaining about each other, nagging, picking on each other - they're grumpy and combative, in a bad mood.

That's probably good for death metal, though. You don't want to be too happy when you're invoking the devil.

After a couple of hours of mugging in one clearing, they head over to their next filming location - but stop when they see an old shack. Maybe there's something cool there they can put into the video?

They "break" into the shack - the door was jammed shut but not locked, and the place is decades old, untouched for who knows how long. Inside, they find a lot of notebooks, some old canned goods, and what looks like a couple of dozen versions of the same painting.

This was Charley Butter's cabin: he built it, after running away from the art scene in whatever the local city is. (This is set somewhere in Canada, probably around one of the smaller cities in Ontario - creator Zach Worton is from Mississauga, so that can be Guess #1.) The guys poke through his stuff, realize he was a "schizo," and head off to finish up the video.

But Travis comes back later, to collect all the notebooks, to read Butters' diaries. He's becoming fascinated with what I suppose I should call The Disappearance of Charley Butters.

Travis is unhappy - he started this band on a lark, but it's not his kind of music, and central figure Mike is an alcoholic asshole with very particular, demanding notions of what's appropriate for black metal. So he quits the band, cuts his hair, starts dating a girl named Kat, and spends a lot of time reading the Charley Butters notebooks.

Parallel to Travis's story, we get flashbacks to Butters - he has a successful gallery show, but starts having auditory hallucinations, which leads him out to that wooded cabin. He becomes entirely reclusive, avoiding all people.

Travis is becoming fascinated with Butters' story - and, coincidentally, so is Stuart, the filmmaker who made their video. The two decide to make a documentary about Butters, with Travis as the on-camera interviewer and Stuart directing. Their first interview is with Butter's wife (ex-wife? widow?) Eleanor, which doesn't go well - Travis keeps interrupting her, and asking the wrong questions first - and gets cut off early.

But they still want to make the documentary. That's where this book ends: they know that Butters existed, that he lived in the woods for a while and then wandered off somewhere else, and they intend to keep investigating.

Worton has a fine storytelling eye here; he's mostly working in a four-panel grid, and has a crisp style that's particularly good in silent panels and contemplative moments. The story is obviously not done, but what's here is satisfying enough while clearly being the first part of a longer piece. (Worton did make two more graphic novels to complete the trilogy between 2016 and 2018; I haven't seen them yet.)

The Incal, Vol. 2: The Luminous Incal by Alexandro Jodorowsky and Mœbius

I used to work in the book-mines, years ago, so I notice things about the veins of books and how they've been hewn out of the rock. This time, I noticed that the cover of the second book in a series has wandered off from the trade dress established by the first book - though the title page, inside, has the same typography (generally) as the cover of book 1, The Black Incal.

What does that mean? Well, in my experience, it's either a designer, editor, or publisher - or even all three - who likes tinkering, who wasn't quite happy, who didn't value consistency. Or who just forgot and didn't bother to check their work.

Well, I might have to take that back. The cover of this book in the digital platform where I read it is different from the design of the first book - but the cover on Amazon is in the same style as book 1. They also have the main image flipped from each other - in Hoopla, John DiFool is running right; on Amazon, he's breaking left. See Hoopla up top and Amazon slightly lower and to the right, so John is running towards himself.

As far as I can tell, the current republishing of the Incal series by Alexandro Jodorowsky and Mœbius is only available digitally, so the question of which cover is "real" is somewhat academic: Humanoids can (and maybe has) changed the cover at any time, since it's just one JPG in a digital file. (Wait, is it a JPG? Maybe a PNG? I don't think the whole thing is a PDF. Now I want to dig into the file to find out, and that would be silly cat-vacuuming.)

Anyway, I'm vamping to avoid actually talking about The Luminous Incal, second in the six-book space-opera series. This was early in the Jodorowsky/Mœbius collaboration, so it was still fairly a straightforward adventure story, with only a light glazing of mysticism for spice. (That would ramp up in later years.) But it's still a lot of running around and people loudly declaiming things - often with silly names - as Big Important Stuff happens repeatedly, only to be overshadowed by the Even More Important Stuff, and so on.

This book is very much middle. We start with John having been captured by the Technopope and his Technominions - TP doesn't use his prefix quite as lavishly as the Metabaron does, but it does pop up repeatedly - and will be sacrificed to a giant mechanical spider (?) to further the TP's goals of conquering the universe. But John's pet/partner, Deepo the concrete seagull (??) is still free, and smashes through the giant black orb floating above the TP's head, which is not itself the Black Incal, but somehow focuses or gathers the TP's power. That allows John to run away with Deepo, into a giant containment thingy called the Inside/Outside, where he is attacked by the fiendish Cardioclaw (the monster on the cover).

Meanwhile, the Metabaron is metastalking through a metasnowy landscape to get to the Technopope's Techno City, killing a squad of Bergs - an alien race from another galaxy also seeking the incals - along the way.

John kills the Cardioclaw, which super-ages the Technopope and makes Techno City collapse - or maybe his taking the black incal did that, which was somehow tied to the Cardioclaw. Anyway, John emerges from the Inside/Outside with both incals and is immediately met, in the wreckage of Techno City, by a bare-breasted woman, to whom he gives the black incal during a mystical moment without much dialogue. She disappears, and he immediately tries to chase her. (She's Animah, and will be important as the series goes on, as you might guess from the super-portentous name.)

John is metacaptured by the Metabaron, who metadelivers him to his current metaemployer, Tatanah, the head of the Amok rebels. Those rebels have been battling to capture Shaft City, the seat of government (at least on Earth), as we've seen in moments throughout the book so far, and they are close to the Prezident, a handsome but corrupt and stupid leader who flees to his superior, the Emperoress, who I think rules all of human space, while the Prezident just handles Earth (and not very well).

There's a lot of confused fighting, with ever-more powerful superweapons brought out by one side and the other, with their names yelled out in tones of awe by the other side, along with the inevitable many deaths and vast destruction, all reported on gleefully by media personalities.

Tatanah betrays the Metabaron, planning to kill him, John, and the Metabaron's son Solune, who she was holding as a hostage. But those three slaughter a vast number of Amok rebels, and a government superweapon - the Necrodroid, the last piece of the escalation ladder I mentioned last paragraph - breaks even more stuff.

Tatanah's lieutenant Kill Wolfhead - who is, indeed, a guy with the head of a wolf whose job is to kill people, so full marks there on clarity - arrives, to find only main characters left alive. Since they are all main characters, they have to put their differences aside and travel together deep into the earth, to the secret realm where Tatanah and Animah (they're sisters!) originally came from.

The Metabaron and John agree to this, instead of continuing their murder streak to get rid of Wolfhead and Tatanah, as smart people would have done. All head deep into the earth, where they find...another cliffhanger! Come back in the third incal book to find out what happens!

It's all a lot, and it's difficult for anyone with a normal level of intellect to take it seriously. The Mœbius art is supple, energetic, and great at story-telling, so my working theory - everybody fell in love with this back before it was translated, so they don't care about the words anyway - is still intact. Or maybe there are a substantial number of people who find Jodorowsky bafflegab compelling: remember how dumb the average person is, and that half of humanity is stupider than that.

This is a silly space opera that thinks it's profound. It gets much more fake-profound as it goes, and, as I recall, that pretense gets much more annoying. Let's see how I take it this time through.

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

This was more hard-boiled than I expected - though not quite as hard-boiled as Hammett's earlier novels. (See my various posts on his other four books, from earlier this year.)

The Thin Man was Hammett's fifth and final novel, coming at the beginning of 1934 and launching the famous film series later the same year. It's narrated by former private detective Nick Charles, who now spends his time managing his rich wife Nora's affairs...and drinking far too much. (Even given that it's set during Prohibition, and the drinking culture of the '30s, I'm pretty sure Hammett meant his readers to realize Nick is an alcoholic - or whatever word they would have used in 1934, probably "drunk.")

Nick and Nora live in San Francisco, but are in New York for the end-of-the-year holidays - as Nick says in passing late in the book, to get away from Nora's relatives, who are annoying that time of year.

He meets Dorothy, the now-adult (but barely so) daughter of a former client, Clyde Winant, who asks him to help her get in touch with her estranged father. Nick replies that he's not in the PI business anymore, but gets caught up in the case anyway, as he's also contacted by Wynant's lawyer Herbert Maculay, Nick's army buddy from the Great War, and learns from the police that the reclusive Wynant's secretary, Julia Wolf, was murdered two days after he talked to Dorothy.

Events circle around the missing Wynant - an inventor who gave up his lab a few months ago to go do something unspecified, and has only been communicating through Macaulay since then - and his ex-wife, Dorothy's mother Mimi Jorgenson (remarried to a gigolo named Christian, though the money she got from Wynant is about to run out).

Nick keeps insisting he's not investigating anything, but keeps talking to Lieutenant Guild, who is looking into Julia's murder, and shares theories and ideas with Guild. He also keeps talking to all of the major characters - I skipped a few above; there are also some gangsters and a speakeasy owner, plus some minor-character drinking buddies who turn up repeatedly but don't have much to do with the actual murder or investigation.

Well, I should be fair: Nick mostly spends the book drinking, and he's talking with the people who are where he's drinking - speakeasies and their homes. And several of the principals of this case - Dorothy and Mimi and Maculay in particular - keep urging him to solve it.

And, in the end, he does, not entirely to the satisfaction of all of those people (hint hint). There is the usual "I guess you're wondering why I called you all here" scene, and the murderer - who actually killed three people, as Nick details - is carted off by Guild to face justice.

It's an amusing novel, though it does still shade a bit to the hardboiled side, with its gangsters and speakeasies and moral decay, than to a more frivolous drawing-room mystery, like the popular conception of the movie series. (I don't think I've seen any of the movies, so don't count on me for any specific genre-typing there.) Nick does drink a hell of a lot, which is a bit disconcerting, but Hammett clearly meant it to be, which makes it an element of the novel rather than just a bit of the culture at the time.

All in all, if you want to read a Hammett novel, my recommendation would be the first or the last: Red Harvest is still one of the great foundational hardboiled novels, and this one is fun and lively and somewhat lighter in tone. If you want more than that, the Library of America volume Complete Novels includes, as its title implies, all five of them.

George Sand: True Genius, True Woman by Séverine Vidal and Kim Consigny

Most lives don't have a specific story. People do things, they live and die, and it doesn't form any particular shape. Famous people are more likely to have stronger story elements - there's at least a rise, possibly a fall, probably phases or eras - but that only means better raw materials for a biographer.

So if I say that George Sand: True Genius, True Woman tells an "and then this happened" version of the famous 19th century novelist's life, I'm mostly just saying that George Sand had a normal kind of life. Things happened, she did her work, she was involved in causes and had love affairs, and then she died. That's the story writer Séverine Vidal and artist Kim Consigny tell here: one woman's life, from fairly early childhood to the moment of her death, in some detail. Vidal focuses somewhat on Sand's writing, but more so on her relationships - with her mother and grandmother in youth, with other family members and the men she was involved with later in life.

And I appreciate that. Some biographies, especially in graphic-novel form, find a story in their subject's lives by focusing on a moment or a period on the person's life. That's certainly valid, but, especially in a case where I don't know the person's life all that well - as here - I'd really prefer to get the full sweep of the story. And George Sand does just that.

She was born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, daughter of what seems to be a minor noble in the very early 19th century, and the Napoleonic Wars somewhat impinged on that childhood - spent primarily at the family estate in Nohant in central France - but the drama of her early life was more centered on the conflict between her aristocratic paternal grandmother and her Parisian mother after the death of Aurore's father at a young age.

Vidal and Consigny show young Aurore as strong-willed, rebellious, prone to visions, and often unhappy with her role as a young aristocratic woman. (As seen later in life, she was against both the roles of "woman" and "aristocrat" as they existed in France at the time.)

She grew up, she started to write, she had affairs - but, before most of that, she did what women in her time had to do: she got married, at the age of eighteen. It was not a success, and maybe that lack of success led to some of the rest.

This is a fairly long graphic novel, over three hundred pages, and it's packed with details from all of Sand's life - again, more skewed to her personal life than to details of the themes and reactions to her works, though we do see her talk about and work on her major books here.

There's a lot of text, particularly dialogue. I assume a lot of it is taken from Sand's own extensive memoirs, or third-party accounts - I don't know if we can entirely trust any detailed account of a conversation before sound recording, but Sand's life was well-documented. Consigny brings a lose, breezy, amiable, energetic line to the proceedings, giving a lot of life to a story of people mostly in rooms talking to each other.

I've never read Sand, and knew very little about her life or work before this book. So I'll say it's a fine introduction, and a strong portrait of an interesting, influential figure who lived through tumultuous times and was close to a lot of other cultural figures of her day.

Better Things: American Girl

"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.

And this week I'm back to one of the obvious ones. This is a song, and an artist, that I tried to fit into the This Year series, but it just didn't go.

(This song was from 1976, and the other 1976 songs that I couldn't make fit were the transcendent live version of Richard and Linda Thompson's Calvary Cross and the inimitable Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. As it was, the song I had for that year was the Eagles' The Last Resort, a song that's much more personally important to me.)

But Better Things is not tied to the calendar, and can celebrate great songs wherever they fell. So, this week, it's Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers with what I think was their first world-class song, American Girl. (You could make an argument for Breakdown, which is earlier on the same record and was released as a single earlier. But I think American Girl is bigger, stronger, longer-lasting, more iconic.)

As usual with my favorites, it's not a happy song.

God it's so painful
Something that's so close
And still so far out of reach

The urban legend is not true: it's not about a suicide. We can assume from that, from what Petty said about the song, that she got through this - the sad, depressive, hopeless moment catalogued in the song - and went on with her life.

And that's one of the things this song is about - going on, continuing, even after heartbreak.

Oh yeah, all right
Take it easy baby
Make it last all night
She was an American girl

Maybe the way to take that "was" isn't to think of her as gone. Maybe she's just less innocent, more battered by life, wiser, older. Maybe what's gone is the "girl."

Quote of the Week: The Work Ethic of Interwar British Writers

Most Englishmen dislike work and grumble about their jobs and writers now make it so clear they hate writing, that their public may become excusably sympathetic and urge them to try something else. I have seldom met a male novelist who enjoyed doing his work, and never heard of one who gave it up and took to anything more congenial. I believe it would have been better for trade if writers had kept up the bluff about inspiration. As it is, the tendency is to the opposite exaggeration of regarding us all as mercenary drudges. The truth I think is this - that though most of us would not write except for money, we would not write any differently for more money.

 - Evelyn Waugh, Ninety-Two Days, p.378 in Waugh Abroad

Infernal Angels by Loren D. Estleman

Amos Walker is an old-school PI, with all the baggage that comes with that. The first novel about him came out in 1980, and his creator Loren D. Estleman is still writing Walker novels; I think the most recent book is 2023's City Walls.

I read a lot of hard-boiled PI books in the '90s and somewhat into the Aughts; I started with the old guys but gradually shifted tastes (partially guided by Maryann Eckles, then the Editor-in-Chief of Mystery Guild and a great colleague, who got me to do some first-reading for her) towards women like Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, and Marcia Muller. And then I tapered off the mystery reading after I left fiction publishing and was no longer reading on an industrial level to begin with.

So there are things I think of as favorites even though I haven't touched them much in two decades; that's the peril of living. I read a big bunch of Walker novels back in 2007, right after leaving that editorial job, and have quietly accumulated most of the novels since then on a shelf without reading any of them between '08 and '24.

But the thing about life is that you can always do something today, even if you haven't done it for twenty years. So I read the 2010 Walker novel The Left-Handed Dollar about six weeks ago, and now I'm back again. No promises, but maybe I'll clean out that shelf, one book at a time, as I rotate through my to-be-read shelves.

Infernal Angels was the 2011 Walker novel; it's a bit more thriller-y than I prefer in my mysteries - I was grumping about this twenty years ago here about Lawrence Block novels, so it's not a new complaint; at least I am consistent.

Walker is a middle-aged man and deeply old-fashioned: by the point of this book he's using a cell phone (dragged kicking and screaming, mostly) but resolutely refuses to understand computers or anything else modern. He's a Vietnam vet whose age hasn't quite advanced as quickly as the thirty years since his first novel, but it's starting to tick up noticeably; he's not quite fifty but it's not far away.

And this novel kicks off when a police contact connects him with a vintage-merchandise dealer - that merchandise seems to be largely big-ticket items; furniture and TVs and large-scale home décor - who just had a burglary. Crossgrain, the dealer, had a shipment of TV converter boxes stolen, and asks Walker to try to track them down.

Walker promises three days from his retainer, and goes off to talk to his contacts. He gets the names of three potential fences for material like this. One is a white rapper (Bud Light) who mostly runs a music store now while he works through a murder charge in Guam from the death of his ex-manager. (Bud claims to be completely innocent; Walker believes him.) The other two are, first, another, more traditional scavenger/fence called Johnny Toledo and, second, Eugenia Pappas, the widow of the scion of a long line of fences and stolen-goods receivers - she claims to have gone aboveboard, but Walker and his contacts never believe anyone goes straight in Detroit.

Things get complicated from there - Crossgrain is murdered the very next night, by someone apparently looking for the last converter box, which he unwisely showed on a TV news story about the break-in. There's another death soon afterward, probably killed by the same person. And the converter boxes turn out to be part of a smuggling operation, with ultra-high-grade heroine hidden inside them.

So Walker is pulled into a cross-agency investigation, with Mary Ann Thaler from the feds and John Alderdyce from the locals. Both were in the previous novel; both are management-level but not tippy-top brass; both are old friends who somewhat bend the rules for him, mostly, I think, because it's that kind of PI novel.

There's a villain behind it - who was in a previous Walker book, though I didn't remember her - and the vaguely racist dragon-lady stuff in the previous book gets a workout here, with her frankly silly (and almost James Bond-ian) rationale for her criminal enterprise. Of course, truth and justice win out in the end, but Walker doesn't have to do a whole lot of serious detecting here: contacting Crossgrain and the three fences set everything in motion, and he just has to survive what happens afterward.

As I said, I tend to like mysteries better than thrillers, and particularly mysteries where cops act like real cops and don't just let a random civilian run around causing trouble because his name's on the book cover. This is much more like the latter; I enjoyed it, and Walker's voice is still a fine classic-PI mixture of grumpy and world-weary, but I might not make it through all of the remaining Walker books if they keep being full of eeevil Chinese masterminds and cops who always bail Walker out.

All the Presidents by Drew Friedman

I still wish Drew Friedman was making comics regularly. Oh, sure, his ultra-detailed stippled style takes an immense amount of time, and I have to imagine it's not great for his health to crane over a drawing table making all of those little boxes for hours on end.

But his comics were something unique, a stew of curdled weird pop-culture and photorealism, all filtered through a unique, funny sensibility - not to mention that magnificent, unparalleled art. His portraits have the same artistic strengths, but the bizarre storytelling of his comics is mostly absent.

The Fun Never Stops! will be probably the last book of Freidman comics; that was almost two decades ago. It now looks like comics is something Friedman did in his early career, mostly the '80s and '90s, before he moved into work that paid better and didn't require the same insane level of back-breaking effort. And, again, I completely understand. My wish is more that the universe isn't different - that comics weren't so remunerative that Friedman had to keep doing them, a few stories a year, and hadn't been seduced by the One Big Head model of drawing.

All the Presidents was right in the middle of Friedman's (still ongoing) One Big Head period, from 2019. It followed the three Old Jewish Comedians books, two books of Heroes of the Comics, and Drew Friedman's Chosen People (covering Jews who were not necessarily comedians, though still largely old). Since then, he's put out Maverix and Lunatix (basically a third Heroes of the Comics, focusing on the underground generation) and the very miscellaneous Schtick Figures.

And Presidents is just what it says it is: full-page headshots, drawn by Friedman in his inimitable, labor-intensive stippled style, of the first forty-five presidents, each opposite a page of their vital statistics. (Just the very basics: dates of birth and death, party, term in office, age at inauguration, and one "fun fact.")

This is possibly the least of the One Big Head Friedman books: most of them, for one thing, have more full-figure portraits throughout, but this is entirely One Big Head. It looks like a review of the money of a slightly sweatier and more disreputable world. Friedman doesn't have a personal connection to most of the Presidents - just JFK on - so it is somewhat a long succession of funny-looking dead guys with various outdated permutations of facial hair and jowls.

It can be amusing to poke through and turn up interesting coincidences - did you know Grant was the youngest President ever at the time? All those 19th century guys looked prematurely old, so it was a surprise to me. But the joys of  Presidents are slighter than the other Friedman books; keep that in mind if you dive in.

Bang! by Matt Kindt and Wilfredo Torres

Stop me if you've heard this one before: James Bond, John McClane, Modesty Blaise-as-Miss Marple, and a gender-swapped Michael Knight are recruited by Philip K. Dick to save the world from a secretive nihilistic terrorist organization...and learn a shocking secret!

OK, it's not literally those characters, for what I have to assume are largely not-getting-sued reasons. But we start off, in the first issue of five collected here, with suave British superspy Thomas Cord of MI-X, who has been many different men over the past seven decades or so as he battles the evil global organization Goldmaze, and is currently a stylish Black man who doesn't look unlike a young Idris Elba. He's sent to investigate mysterious writer Philip Verge, who has written a long series of books - it's not clear if these were actually published in ways most people noticed; that detail seems to waffle back and forth - about Cord, which predicted in minute detail everything about his missions, including his death.

(Don't worry, the death already happened - that was a previous Thomas Cord. We see it happen on the page.)

This is Bang!, a stylish mildly reality-bending action thriller by writer Matt Kindt and artist Wilfredo Torres. It was a five-issue series in 2020, and collected in a single volume the same year. There's material in the book that teases additional stories to come, but, as far as I can tell, they didn't come.

But anyway, issue two follows John Shaw, who keeps getting caught up in Goldmaze terrorist incidents in his bare feet (and, to be skiffier, has a continuing supply of a mysterious set of "inhalers" with designer drugs keyed to his DNA that give him specific superhuman abilities - superhuman in the Captain America sense rather than the Superman sense). At the end of his adventure, he's recruited...by Thomas Cord, who hands him the novel telling the story he just lived through.

Next up is Dr. Michele Queen, a brilliant paraplegic cyberneticist with a skintight exosuit that allows her to not just walk but do the usual spy-style karate fighting, and is mentally linked with the intelligent car BOI. She also fights Goldmaze.

Last is Page Turnier, who was a hot-cha spy babe in the '60s - and teamed up with Thomas Cord then - but is now an old Vietnamese lady who is the smartest person in the world and solves drawing-room mysteries. It doesn't seem that Goldmaze would be doing a lot of murders in drawing rooms, but she's recruited, too.

Once they're all brought together, in the last issue, Verge gives them their orders and sends them out: to save the world! (Or is he secretly behind Goldmaze the whole, time, and this is all a trap for the only people who could stop him?)

Verge is Phildickianly-coded, and had a similar Exegesis-like experience that showed him what the world really was, but he's not quite as wild-hair and particular as the real-world Dick - he's here to be mysterious, to be a writer, and to be ambiguously tied to both the good and bad guys for maximum shocks and thrills.

And there are a lot of shocks and thrills. Torres has a fine action-storytelling style for this story, slick and modern, with inventive page layouts, excellent faces, and well-choreographed action. Kindt keeps it all moving swiftly and keeps it basically plausible, for all that I might seem dismissive above. Again, I think the plan was to have a second Bang! series - maybe more than that; the concept is based on reversals so I don't expect it would ever be an ongoing but it could run through three or four iterations before exhausting the idea - but that hasn't happened and, after five years, is getting less likely by the day. But this is a complete story, for all that it ends on a hook for a sequel - you can absolutely read it as a completed thing, and be happy with that.

Freddy Lombard, Vol. 5: F.52 by Yves Chaland

As it happened, this was the last: Yves Chaland published five volumes in his "Freddy Lombard" series in the 1980s, before his untimely death in 1990 in a car wreck. In some better world, he could have gone on to do more of them, over the next three decades - Chaland would only have been in his late sixties now - but that's not the case.

All five of the Freddy Lombard books stand alone, and I think all of them comment or refer in some sly ways to classic bande dessinée stories and tropes, in ways I don't have the cultural knowledge to trace. They also were all historical - not just now, since they're about forty years old, but they were set twenty or thirty years before their publication, in the shiny post-war era of the '50s or very early '60s. The books don't say this very explicitly, except for the fourth, Holiday in Budapest, which has to be 1956 given the events in it.

This fifth and final book, F.52, is not quite as obviously set in the 1950s, but there are strong indications for readers who are looking for them. The title refers to a new gigantic intercontinental jet, flying from Paris to Melbourne in twenty-four hours - the idea of a "giant" airliner and the flight time and the newness of both of those things place it strongly in historical time. The fact that the plane is flying from Le Bourget, which had lost all regular scheduled flights and was purely a business aviation hub when Chaland made this story, would have been a major signpost to its original European audience, too.

Our three heroes, Freddy and his two friends Dina and Sweep, are working as attendants on the maiden voyage of this plane. They are central, but, somewhat like the other books in the series, this isn't entirely their story. F.52 begins a bit languidly, with our heroes having a flat tire in their famously unreliable car, and needing to hitch a lift to make it to the plane on time. (Well, not on time - but not too late to make the flight.) There are some thriller elements, including a Soviet spy taking dirt from a secret site back to his spymasters, and a pair of young schoolgirls switched for deliberately-unclear reasons by a rich couple, but those are part of a larger, workaday narrative of the whole flight, taking only a little more page-space than an nasty purser sexually harassing Dina.

Chaland gives the switched-girls plot real power here - some elements are odd, such as why the rich parents do it at all, and why they thought switching dresses on two girls who look so different would actually work - but it comes across as inevitable, and we see the plane's staff defer to the rich passengers in first class over and over again, so we understand how it could work and how those parents might decide to just do what they want, assuming they will get what they want, this time as always before.

In the end, this is fiction, so it all comes out satisfyingly by the time the plan lands in Melbourne. Chaland's drawing is excellent here, in that mid-century ligne clair style - his people have energy and life, and his spaces look real and clearly of their time. If this had to be the end, if Chaland had to die so young, this is about as good a version of this story we could have asked for to see him off.

Better Things: Eye Witness on the Run

"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.

Here's another obscure one, I think. (I always hope I'll post something like that and there will be an immediate comment to say "No, man! This song was huge! Sold a million copies, the band is still on a global tour, piling up the simoleons!" We always want the things we like to be liked by everyone.)

My song for this week is the bluesy stomp Eye Witness on the Run, by the band TJ Kong and the Atom Bomb, from their 2012 record Manufacturing Joy.

As far as I can tell, the official lyrics aren't anywhere online, so anything I quote below is me listening to the song and trying to parse it out.

This is one of those songs that starts slow, and gets slow in the middle - I'm listening to the great shuffle-y section at about 3:30 as I type this - and then speeds back up for the lyrics. I don't think it means much of anything; I think this is a "telling the mundane story of a recent day in my life" kind of song.

And that's just fine, when it sounds like this, and the musicians are jamming together so well.

Oh it was late last night
And the Texaco light burned
Like a moon on the map of his face

That's how it starts; that's the way it goes - that kind of imagistic, allusive description of events that were probably fairly pedestrian. But any events can be big and exciting and meaningful with the right music - and this is.

Just let it start to play, that stop-and-start guitar line, the maracas or whatever in the background, and then let the rhythm section kick in. I suppose there are people out there who won't find it compelling, but, man, it must be sad to live like that.