Making Money by Terry Pratchett

One of the great truisms of the fantasy field has collapsed. One used to be able to tell the "adult" Discworld novels from the "young adult" novels easily -- the latter were divided into chapters, while the former were not. But Making Money is an adult novel -- and also is divided into thirteen chapters. The chapter heads of Making Money also make it clear that Pratchett has discovered clip art, and is quite taken with it.

In the vast, complicated, far-flung Discworld mega-series, Making Money is part of the Ankh-Morpork sub-set, and, more specifically, a direct sequel to Going Postal. The con-man-turned-postmaster hero of that novel, Moist von Lipwig, finds himself ensnared by the unstoppable Lord Vetinari and destined to become the new head of the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork. At this point I could say something like "the usual hijinks ensue," but that would do a great disservice to Pratchett -- his plots are not mechanical, and his novelistic breadth and skills at characterization have been increasing steadily for years from an already high level. His plots do tend to be somewhat similar, and his big ending confrontations in particular share strong family resemblances, but his best novels are as breathtaking, universal, and engrossing as anyone's, in or out of the fantasy genre. I could go farther: Pratchett is a master at writing about the real world through the lens of fantasy; there is no aspect of the modern world or human life that he cannot turn his hand to, no bit of knowledge or emotion that he cannot make use of in the omnium gatherum of Discworld.

Pratchett is the true heir of the great 19th century English novelists; he has their concern for the living pulse of a great city, a style and panache that the public loves but which does not condescend to that public, and a sweeping eye that covers all levels of society. It's not hyperbole to say that Pratchett is our Anthony Trollope. He's a prolific writer of almost misleadingly entertaining novels who delights in building up a fictional world that we still recognize as our own, who creates characters that have lives beyond the page, who has a deep humanism, a true empathy for his world and its inhabitants, and who always, always remembers the power of a good story well told. We forget, sometimes, how lucky we are to have a writer like him in our end of the publishing world -- a writer who is not just delightful, but thoughtful.

The main plot of Making Money concerns Lipwig and the Royal Bank; of course there are those who oppose him in his new position, and of course his actions there unsettle segments of the city. That's what Pratchett heroes generally do: they shake things up, and help the world settle into a new shape afterward. The golems, which have been of increasing importance in the last several Ankh-Morpork books, also continue to change local society, culminating in the big ending confrontation I alluded to, above. But Pratchett now keeps everything in the air together -- Making Money doesn't have an "A" plot and a "B" plot, which intersect at the end, but has one plot with many parts. And the joy of a well-plotted book is in following it yourself, so I won't say more than that.

Making Money is one of the high points of a great series by a great writer; it's hard to believe that there may be readers who haven't tried Pratchett's work before, but, if you're one of them, either this book or its predecessor Going Postal would be excellent choices to show you what you've been missing.


Postscript: Has C.M.O.T. Dibbler's full name been revealed before? Because, on page 155, we learn that he is, in full, Claude Maximilian Overton Transcribe Dibbler.

Robert Jordan, 1948-2007

According to a post this evening on his blog, bestselling fantasy author Robert Jordan died this afternoon at his home in Charleston, South Carolina after a long battle with a form of cancer. He had been diagnosed with primary amyloidosis with cardiomyopathy in March of 2006 and had received several rounds of chemotherapy treatment at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota for his condition.

Jordan was best known for the still-unfinished "Wheel of Time" series: eleven novels and a prequel had been published before his illness. The status of the projected final novel, A Memory of Light, is unknown at this time. Jordan had also written a number of well-received "Conan" novels and a number of historical novels under the name Reagan O'Neill.

"Robert Jordan" was a fairly open pseudonym for James Oliver Rigney, Jr., a Vietnam veteran, graduate of the Citadel, and nuclear engineer before he turned to writing in 1977. He is survived by his wife and editor, Harriet McDougal, and a legion of readers and enthusiasts.

Wikipedia article on Robert Jordan; Internet Speculative Fiction Database listing of his work.

Incoming Books, Week of 9/15

Not a whole lot this week -- three things for review (here or on ComicMix), and the new "Pearls Before Swine" treasury, Lions and Tigers and Crocs, Oh My!

(I've decided not to list individually books that I get for review from here on; it can be embarrassing when I don't manage to read something, and I want to keep at least a hint of mystery about my upcoming reviews.)

A Comparison of The Best American Comics 2006 and An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories

I started this post months ago, wrote a lot of it, and bogged down in the story-by-story notes. Since Best American Comics 2007 is being published in less than a month, this comparison will very quickly be pointless, if it isn't already. It should have been done last fall, for its own purposes. Anyway, I've finished it up tonight to post:

I recently finished the Ivan Brunetti-edited An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories, after reading it on and off for a couple of months. I read that partially overlapping with The Best American Comics 2006, edited by Harvey Pekar (guest editor this first year) and Anne Elizabeth Moore (series editor). For some reason, these two books seem to be opposing each other among the lit-comics crowd, even though they're not doing the same thing. (Anthology intends to be a teaching book for college classes on the graphic novel -- or for modern culture/literature classes that have a unit on graphic novels, while Best American is a brand extension from Houghton Mifflin, joining the Best American Short Stories/Essays/Sports Writing/Etc. empire. Anthology covers more or less the second half of the twentieth century, and the '80s and '90s in particular, while Best American covers January 1, 2004 to August 15, 2005.)

So, instead of doing my usual thoughts on Anthology, I decided to instead do a compare-and-contrast for both books.

First, Best American Comics 2006 is a hardcover, without dust jacket but in quarter-cloth, with a handsome but unspectacular cover (designed by Christopher Moisan with illustrations by Lilli Carre). It was published by Houghton Mifflin, who have an extensive list of "Best American" books in various genres -- and this book seems to generally follow that meta-series' trade dress.

It contains:

• a useful preface about the series and comics in general by general editor Moore
  
• an introduction, mostly about the individual pieces chosen, by guest editor Pekar
  
• "The Amazing Life of Onion Jack" by Joel Priddy (10 pages)
  A cute nearly-stick-figure story that takes superhero ideas and goes somewhere more interesting with them.
• "Ready to Die" by Kim Deitch (6 pages)
  Reportage about the execution of a murderer; not what you'd expect from Deitch, but powerful.
• "The Gift" by Anders Nilsen (18 pages)
  A deliberately in medias res and minimalist (hardly any backgrounds, no borders, crude lettering) story about violence.
  
• "Adventures of Paul Bunyan & His Ox" by Lilli Carre (8 pages)
  A very literary take on the mythic duo, full of conversation, but solid.
• "Diary of a Bread Delivery Guy" by David Lasky (1 page)
  A nice slice-of-life piece.
  
• "Goner Pillow Company" by Ben Kachor (2 pages)
  I always feel that there's some secret subtext behind Kachor's comics that I just don't get -- either that, or he's like Gertrude Stein's Oakland.
  
• "Only Disconnect" by Alison Bechdel (Dykes to Watch Out for strips, 1 page)
  A piece of middle from a much longer story. Works as a vignette, though.
  
• "Complacency Kills" by Joe Sacco (8 pages)
  Tight, well-presented reportage on the Iraqi War.
  
• "La Rubia Loca" by Justin Hall (48 pages)
  A full story, not part of anything else (as far as I can tell), with enough room to do what it needs to do. Quite impressive.
  
• "Comics: A History" by Chris Ware (2 pages)
  Somewhat true, somewhat flippant, and all Ware-ized: made despondently cartoony and depressingly well designed.
  
• "Rabbithead" by Rebecca Dart (25 pages)
  A mostly successful attempt to tell multiple stories, all wordlessly, in the same unreal realm and starting from the same action. Inventive and technically impressive.
  
• "Untitled" by Ivan Brunetti (1 page)
  A wordless comic about art that comes off a bit like second-rate Chris Ware.
  
• "Dance with the Ventures" by Jonathan Bennett (12 pages)
  Another autobiographical story about a cartoonist obsessed with particular bits of past culture and who considers himself a failure; done pretty well, but I could do without reading that particular story again for about the next hundred years.
  
• "Day by Day with Hopey: Tuesday Is Whose Day?" by Jaime Hernandez (4 pages)
  Hopey flirts with various women -- a decent character piece, but I bet you have to know who Hopey is for it to really work.
  
• "Busted!" by Esther Pearl Watson (7 pages)
  A really weird autobiographical strip about a really weird person (not the cartoonist) drawn in a primitive style that made my eyes itch.
  
• "Chemical Plant/Another World" by John Porcellino (7 pages)
  A very loose, cartoony style works well for a real-life tale.
  
• "Portrait of My Dad" by David Heatley" (5 pages)
  Autobio comics, subtype 3C: tiny panels, primitivist art, loser cartoonist, crazy family.
  
• "A Street-Level View of the Republican National Convention" by Lloyd Dangle (2 pages)
  He's against it.
  
• "The Supervisor" by Hob (1 page)
  Vignette from someone else's life -- incisive but doesn't really go anywhere.
  
• "Wonder Wart-Hog: The Wart-Hog That Came in from the Cold" by Gilbert Shelton (8 pages)
  Embarrassingly puerile, retro in the worst way, and laughable in its politics.
  
• "Solidarity Forever" by Olivia Schanzer (2 pages)
  I can't even begin to describe it.
  
• "Thirty-Three" by Alex Robinson (from Tricked, 10 pages)
  Character-driven storytelling; done well, though clearly part of a larger story.
  
• "Missing" by Jessica Abel (from La Perdida, 14 pages)
  Doesn't entirely work out of context, though the art is nice and the dialogue works very well.
  
• "Nakedness and Power" by Seth Tobocman, Terisa Turner, and Leigh Brownhill (9 pages)
  Did you know Kenya had become a Utopia due to the power of Woman Unleashed? Neither did I. Agitprop, in an appropriate style and tone of voice, but I wasn't sure if I could believe any of it.
  
• "Recollection of Seduction" by Rick Geary (1 page)
  A wonderful anecdotal story by a master. I wish Geary did more short strips.
  
• "The Executive Hour" by Tom Hart (6 pages)
  The author is a leftist, and wants you to be absolutely certain of that fact.
  
• "Passing Before Life's Very Eyes" by Kurt Wolfgang (13 pages)
  An old man dies, and looks over his life. The grotesque art style doesn't entirely help, but it's a strong story.
  
• "Thirteen Cats of my Childhood" by Jesse Reklaw (20 pages)
  Very slice-of-life storytelling, and very appealing.
  
• "Two Questions" by Lynda Barry (12 pages)
  I'm afraid Barry's appeal has always been lost on me: I can't stand her art, and I can't stand her characters. This is the same sort of thing she always does, and that's about all I can say about it.
  
• "Walkin' the Streets" by Robert Crumb (13 pages)
  A minor autobiographical work, mostly about Crumb's early years.
  
• the backmatter has extensive, useful notes on the contributors, arranged alphabetically, including their own thoughts on the stories included. After that is the full list of "100 distinguished comics" from the above time period, the list Moore made as a first cut of all of the work she saw from the period covered and sent to Pekar for him to make the selections in the book

So that's 276 pages of comics, including thirty separate stories or excerpts, for $22.00. (For obsessives like me, that's 8 cents a page.) No cartoonists appear twice in Best American, and there's no obvious organizational principle. (Of course, there usually isn't, with a "Best of," and there doesn't need to be.) Pekar is obviously tending toward the autobiographical and the political (as long as it agrees with him); that's pretty much what we expected.

On the other side, An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories is burdened by a terribly unwieldy title, but the book's cover design (by Seth, including comics on the back cover and flaps) is much more engaging than Best American Comics's. Anthology is a jacketed hardcover from the Yale University Press. And this one contains:

• three pages of comics in lieu of a title page, looking like scribbles in a kid's notebook, with no title or artist listed I can find
  
• an artistically interesting but useless table of contents, done entirely as thumbnail sketches
  
• an odd and not very useful introduction by Brunetti
  
• "Life Is So Full of Whimsical Little Nuances" by Sam Henderson (1 page)
  If The Far Side were crudely drawn and scatalogical...
  
• two single-page cartoons and "Love's Savage Fury" by Mark Newgarden (6 pages total)
  Deconstruction at its best and worst; if I had been editing this book, I would have put these very formalist strips much further back (if I used them at all).
  
• "Underworld" by Kaz (2 strips to a page, 6 pages)
  Late '80s pseudo-underground ennui for college students; Kaz does draw great grotesques, though.
  
• "Maakies" by Tony Millionaire (2 strips to a page, 3 pages)
  The usual despair drawn in a faux 1900s newspaper engraving style. I always think I should like this strip more than I do.
  
• two full-page "Griffith Observatory" strips and three "Zippy the Pinhead" strips by Bill Griffith (3 pages)
  Griffy likes old things; Zippy likes insane things. Stir well.
  
• "The Boy Who Loved Comics" by David Mazzucchelli (2 pages)
  Very self-referential, and I don't quite get it. (One might need to be a cartoonist to get it, actually.)
  
• "Abstract Thought is a Warm Puppy" by Art Spiegelman (3 pages)
  The first really great work in the book; Spiegelman's personal history and take on Peanuts.
  
• "Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy..." by Chris Ware (1 page)
  More or less the same thing, though less knowing and comprehensive.
  
• "Good Grief!" by Seth (1 page)
  Seth illustrates a few lines of Schulz narration.
  
• "Developing a Comic Strip" (essay) by Charles M. Schulz (3 pages)
  Just what it says. It seems to be full of good advice and thoughtful reflection.
  
• "Good Ol' Gregor Brown" by R. Sikoryak (2 pages)
  Kafka's Metamorphosis told as Penauts strips. Works pretty well, actually.
  
• "Barnaby" by Crockett Johnson (5 strips, presented age-faded and browned on the page, 1 page)
  Other than being shown as an artifact rather than as art (like all of the contemporary pieces), this is OK: I don't love Barnaby, as some do, but it's amusing.
  
• strips from "The Sketchbook Diaries" by James Kochalka (3 pages)
  Slices of life, drawn day-by-day. They work better when presented in a larger size, though.
  
• "Ernie Pook's Comeek" by Lynda Barry (3 strips on 3 pages)
  See above for my take on Barry; I'm afraid all of her stuff is equally unappealing to me.
  
• "Smell" by Lynda Barry (3 pages)
  Ditto.
  
• excerpts from Boys by Ron Rege, Jr. with Joan Reidy (5 pages)
  Primitive-looking (but heavily designed) strips about sex from a young woman's point of view.
  
• 1 page each (faded, presented as historical artifacts rather than as "art" like the rest of the book) of George Herriman's "Krazy Kat," Cliff Sterrett's "Polly and Her Pals," "Frank King's "Gasoline Alley," Otto Soglow's "The Ambassador," and Lyonel Feininger's "The Kin-der Kids" (5 pages)
  I didn't love any of these.
  
• one painting by Henry Darger, related to his "Child Slave Rebellion" novel/painting sequence, with accompanying unsigned essay (2 pages)
  Bizarre in the best way, though not really comics. Yes, many modern artists (and cartoonists) have been influenced by Darger, but this book doesn't make that case, and slipping his stuff randomly into the middle makes little sense.
  
• "Terror from the Grave" by Rory Hayes (1 page)
  Weird, late-'80s looking horror comic with too many panels in too small a space.
  
• "Of What Use Is a Bunch?" by Aline Komisky-Crumb (3 pages)
  I don't really get her, either.
  
• excerpt from Agony by Mark Beyer (5 pages)
  Horrible things happen to Amy and Jordan, over and over. Ho hum.
  
• "Oaf" by Mat Brinkman (4 pages)
  A bizarre wordless story that has some power, but which I suspect its author considers a metaphor for something Important.
  
• "Frank's Fish" by Jim Woodring (3 pages)
  Indescribable as usual, but definitely...something.
  
• excerpt from Oedipus Junior by Peter Bagge (wordless "Junior" stories, 4 pages)
  I think Bagge got much better than this, later, but it shows his wonderfully loose cartoony style well.
  
• excerpt from The King of Persia by Walt Holcombe (2 pages)
  An old guy dances, in a wordless vignette. The art is angularly appealing, but what's the point of running two pages of something?
  
• "Shakyamuni" and "Untitled" by Ivan Brunetti (2 pages)
  Putting yourself in your own anthology is a sin. Doing so with minor pieces is a mortal sin.
  
• "Here" by Richard McGuire (6 pages)
  Terribly, intensely formalist, but effective. It does feel more like an art installation than a comics piece, though -- it would work better on successive walls of a gallery.
  
• cover for the June 1947 issue of The Record Changer by Gene Deitch (1 page)
  Brunetti is just grabbing random things from under his bed at this point.
  
• "Hey Look!" by Harvey Kurtzman (1 page)
  A fine piece from a master...and, of course, it''s presented age-faded so we don't forget that it's old. Why does Brunetti keep doing this?
  
• "Night Delivery," "Gloom," and "One of the Wonders of the World" by Richard Sala (4 pages)
  Sala's forte is long, intricate plots, so running three very short stories does not show his strong points. These are reasonably representative of his artistic and thematic strengths, but that's about it.
  
• "Sof' Boy" by Archer Prewitt (4 pages)
  Oh God, not another naif. I can't stand it. The art is nicely detailed, though.
  
• "Vaughn" by Wayne White (3 pages)
  Tiny little panels, scatology, crude drawings, attempts to "subvert" classic strip-cartoon premises and ideas. Again.
  
• "Snoot Grolo" by J. Bradley Johnson (3 pages)
  More grotesques subverting the dominant paradigm or some-such nonsense.
  
• excerpt from Jimbo in Purgatory by Gary Panter (8 pages)
  I usually appreciate Panter's primitivist art, and sometimes I can make sense of his stories...but not here.
  
• excerpt from "Curse of the Molemen" by Charles Burns (8 pages)
  Burns is excellent, but a full story -- or a relatively complete chapter from Black Hole -- would have been better.
  
• "Young Ledicker" by Kim Deitch (10 pages)
  Dietch in top form, and it even works well out of context. Finally, a good choice for a good cartoonist.
  
• "Troubles With Gassel" by Terry Zwigoff and Robert Armstrong (2 pages)
  Apparently about a fictional character, but feels like an autobio comic. If it's not true, it's pretty pointless.
  
• "Jack Survives" by Jerry Moriarty (3 pages)
  Very dark, woodcut-looking slabs of black, in which '50s types refuse to emote, and hardly speak.
  
• excerpts from Cheap Novelties by Ben Kachor (8 pages of "Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer" strips)
  Let's talk about retail signage and storefronts for a while, until we've all lost track of anything interesting or important.
  
• excerpt from Maus I: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman (13 pages)
  A piece of one of the high points of modern comics, and it works as a separate piece.
  
• excerpt from Berlin by Jason Lutes (4 pages)
  Really just a vignette; doesn't give a sense of the larger work.
  
• excerpt from The Golem's Mighty Swing by James Sturm (5 pages)
  Nice storytelling, but utterly out of context.
  
• excerpt from Passionate Journey by Frans Masereel (8 originally full-page woodcuts on two pages)
  Historically (and artistically) interesting.
  
• excerpt from Somersaulting by Sammy Markham (3 pages)
  Very slice-of-life, and I get the feeling that this, too, does not give a good sense of the larger work.
  
• excerpt from "Hawaiian Getaway" by Adrian Tomine (8 pages)
  Badly socialized young Asian-Americans in Northern California, viewed dispassionately but with understanding, as usual for Tomine.
  
• "A Little Story" by Gilbert Hernandez (6 pages)
  A little slice of Palomar, which works out of context.
  
• "Flies on the Ceiling" by Jaime Hernandez (15 pages)
  A great, great story -- in all ways -- that's tangental enough to Hernandez's major works that it's perfect as an introduction.
  
• excerpt from Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary by Justin Green (10 pages)
  I presume this is autobiographical. Brown/Green is both utterly insane, and from the hallowed fictional ridiculously Catholic family. This didn't work for me on any level.
  
• "Fun Things to Do with Little Girls" by Phoebe Glockner (3 pages)
  Glockner had an unpleasant stepfather. We see one aspect of his unpleasantness.
  
• "Visitors in the Night" by Debbie Drechsler (6 pages)
  A creepy tale of incest, in an appropriately Gorey-meets-Sala art style.
  
• excerpt from I Never Liked You by Chester Brown (9 pages)
  Panels float loosely on the pages -- mostly clustered in the middle, but not gridded -- in this story of childhood nastiness.
  
• excerpt from The Poor Bastard by Joe Matt (9 pages)
  Ends very abruptly, but otherwise is a decent introduction to Matt's work.
  
• excerpt from It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken by Seth (14 pages)
  Atmospheric and quiet; I'm not sure if it's a great excerpt, but it works reasonably well.
  
• excerpt from My New York Diary by Julie Doucet (8 pages)
  Yet another excerpt -- this one has a beginning (unlike most of them) but has no real end. So it's not actually a story, but it's OK as a piece of story.
  
• excerpt from Clumsy by Jeffrey Brown (2 pages per Anthology page, 4 pages)
  I'm not sure if Brown is deliberately being primitive and minor-key in his single-page stories, or if that's just the way he knows how to work. It's OK in small doses, like here, but gets annoying at greater length.
  
• excerpts from King-Cat No. 63 by John Porcellino (4 pages per Anthology page, 4 pages)
  Small-scale comics, with a very loose, cartoony line, that work well.
  
• "A Paragraph by Saul Bellow (1915-2005)" by John Hankiewicz (2 pages)
  The cartoonist, a literature professor, really really likes one paragraph of description in The Adventures of Augie Marsh.
  
• "Torrential" by Jonathan Bennett (9 pages per Anthology page, 2 pages)
  An entire slice-of-life small-press pamphlet -- well-told but very minor.
  
• "Northern California" by David Heatley (3 pages)
  I think this is the record of a dream -- or maybe more than one -- but it's not clear. And that, of course, is a problem.
  
• "Cecil and Jordan in New York" by Gabrielle Bell (4 pages)
  A small, magic-realist story that's OK but not spectacular.
  
• excerpt from The Sunset by Kevin Huizenga (3 pages)
  Lots of formalist drawing stuff is going on, and I can't make any sense of it. Looks purty, though.
  
• "Black Cherry" by Michael Dougan (3 pages)
  An autobiographical anecdote -- pleasant but doesn't really go anywhere.
  
• "The Tub" by Lauren R. Weinstein (3 pages)
  Weinstein had a horrible childhood, which she apparently recounted in ugly, oddly-colored art. This is one anecdote out of a longer book.
  
• "Gone" by Carol Tyler (7 pages)
  Metafiction with a bit of actual fiction (or non-fiction) embedded in the middle. The art is nice, but the narration strains a lot.
  
• "A Short History of America" by Robert Crumb (4 pages)
  Stuff gets built. Crumb disapproves. It was on every other hippie's dorm-room wall in 1972.
  
• "Uncle Bob's Mid-Life Crisis" by Robert Crumb (8 pages)
  Autobio comics from a couple of decades ago; too many panels on a page for my money, but it does get into the cartoonist's head well.
  
• "Jelly Roll Morton's Voodoo Curse" by Robert Crumb (6 pages)
  Crumb uses blacks a lot more effectively here than in his autobio pieces, telling a historical story about a bandleader and music producer in the late '20s.
  
• "Where Has it Gone, All the Beautiful Music of Our Grandparents?" by Robert Crumb (5 pages)
  Crumb is yet another cartoonist -- OK, he's the epitome, and the original of the cartoonist -- who hates the modern world and fixates on specific cultural artifacts of the past. And this is one of his most famous expressions of that feeling.
  
• "Lunch With Carmella" by Harvey Pekar and Robert Crumb (4 pages)
  Early Pekar autobio comics.
  
• "Hypothetical Quandary" by Harvey Pekar and Robert Crumb (3 pages)
  Ditto, but a number of years later, with an art style more like the Jelly-Roll Morton piece.
  
• excerpt from Soba by Joe Sacco (8 pages)
  An anecdote from Safe Area Gorazde, starting in the middle and ending in the middle. I appreciate the idea of wanting Sacco to be in a book like this, but I'd have preferred using something with more of the attributes of a story.
  
• "The Ethel Catherwood Story" by David Collier (14 pages)
  The true story of an Olympic champion high-jumper from Canada, as narrated by a guy with an oddly tiny head.
  
• "Scott Joplin" by Chris Ware (1 page)
  Ware, as always, is obsessed with loneliness, death, and despair.
  
• excerpt from Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware (12 pages)
  More loneliness and despair, with a pseudo-beginning and end. This works better than most of the excerpts in this book.
  
• "Thrilling Adventure Stories" by Chris Ware (6 pages)
  Remembrances of being a young, comics-obsessed, socially-awkward kid, presented as the dialogue and narration in a super-hero strip. A nice idea that doesn't really succeed the way it wants to.
  
• excerpt from Building Stories by Chris Ware (3 pages)
  Ware is still a heavily formal cartoonist and concerned intensely with a few specific (negative) emotions, but Building Stories might -- might -- just give him a chance to show a little more range. (I certainly hope so.) These pages, like all ofit I've seen so far, are excellent.
  
• "A Feeling" and "An Idea" by Chris Ware (1 page each)
  More short stories related to Building Stories.
  
• "Gynecology" by Daniel Clowes (22 pages)
  A good representative Clowes story, in its entirety.
  
• edited version of "The Fallen World of Daniel Clowes" by Daniel Raeburn (interview, 1 pages)
  A very stilted dissection of the previous story. It's not very useful.
  
• "190 Dublin Street" by Seth (1 page)
  Pure atmosphere -- nice, but disposable.
  
• and then two pages of short contributors' biographies; these are just fine for what they are, but not as useful or interesting as the bios in Best American. They also don't make up for having a useless table of contents.
  

Anthology, then, has a total of 388 pages of comics for $28.00. (Again being obsessive: 7.2 cents per page, a bit cheaper than Best American.) There are 91 pieces in the book, including the pre-introduction scribbles and the two essays, but many of those are very short. (And my count could be disputed -- I'm basically counting everything with a different title as a separate thing -- but, still, Anthology clearly has many more pieces, and shorter pieces, than Best American does.) Anthology also has no obvious structure, but it's a problem here, since this is a historical anthology -- it should have some sort of structure, if only an implicit historicism. Instead, it starts with a very abstract comic, moves pretty quickly into a clump of Peanuts-inspired stories for no obvious reason, and then meanders its way along from there. There is a lot of good stuff here, but Brunetti has made no attempt to connect any of it, and so it feels a bit like a trackless wilderness. It is designed as a teaching anthology, but that didn't mean it should have been constructed to require a strong teacher's hand to lead readers through it.

I can't really reccomend Anthology, despite its strengths: it's so disjointed and random that it's hard to simply work through. It's possibly of interest as a sampler, but -- if you like any appreciable fraction of the works in here -- you'll end up buying the full versions of the excerpts in Anthology anyway, so there's no reason not to start with Maus, or La Perdita, or Music for Mechanics, or (God help you) Binky Brown. Best American does have a definite slant, attributable to the guest editor, but it also focuses more on complete stories, and on lesser-known names. It's simply a more interesting and useful book for anyone who already knows anything about modern non-longjohns comics.

Saturday Evening's All Right for Linking

At ComicMix today:
Andrew's Links: Lactose Intolerant

Quote of the Week

"We should like to have some towering geniuses to reveal us to ourselves in colour and flames, but of course they would have to fit into the pattern of our society and be able to take orders from sound administrative types."
- J.B. Priestly

Friday Linkage

Today's ComicMix links:
Andrew's Links: Tentacoo Wape!

Hey! They kept my title this time. (I was sure someone would object to that one...)

Olive or Twist? by Jack Ziegler

Abrams has been publishing a series of cartoon books over the past several years -- each one collects cartoons by one New Yorker cartoonist, on (roughly speaking) a single subject. I've been grabbing them as I find them, because I'm a sucker for good single-panel cartoons. I have another one by Ziegler, and two by Leo Cullum, and there are probably nearly a dozen in all by now.

This one's from Jack Ziegler, and it's all about drinking. What more should I say? There's an awful lot of cartoons here about guys in bars, as one would expect. I found most of them at least amusing, and a number of them laugh-out-loud funny. Whether you would agree depends, I suppose, on your personal sense of humor.

So let me give you a little taste (besides the cover cartoon). In the hopes Mr. Ziegler doesn't mind (and considering it in the nature of a short excerpt embodied in a review), here's my favorite cartoon in the book:

















If you like that one, you'll probably like this book. If not, not.

Self-Referentiality

My linklist at ComicMix today:
Andrew's Links: Isn't He a Little Short...?

If I Were Not a Barrister, An Engine Driver Me

So I ran across another four or five people doing that same what-job-should-you-do quiz as the previous entry, and realized that there were several other categories of questions I could answer. I'm not one to leave anything half-done, so, now, my totally exhaustive list of potential careers is:

1. Technical Writer
2. Political Aide
3. Public Policy Analyst
4. Professor
5. Lobbyist
6. Corporate / Commercial Lawyer
7. Certified Public Accountant
8. Archivist
9. Auditor
10. Appraiser
11. Researcher
12. Personal Financial Planner
13. Editor
14. Venture Capitalist
15. Economist
16. Computer Trainer
17. Customs Broker
18. Historian
19. Purchaser
20. Real Estate Appraiser
21. Property Manager
22. Corporate Trainer
23. Lawyer
24. Civil Litigator
25. ESL Teacher

Somewhat better, though, for most of the good jobs on that list, I would have had to have done some very different work and/or study at least a decade ago. I'm sure the Alternate History Andrews are enjoying their Law jobs, but that doesn't have much to do with Earth Prime me.

And, according to things I stripped out when I copied it, I'm best suited to being a Public Policy Analyst or an Editor. I'm probably not ideologically pure enough (on any side) for the former, so I think this test is officially trying to teach its grandmother to suck eggs.

If I Were Not In the CID, Something Else I'd Like To Be...

A career matchmaker meme from Patricia Bray, very appropriate for me in my current circumstances:

Instructions:
1. Go here: http://www.careercruising.com/default.asp
2. Put in Username: nycareers, Password: landmark.
3. Take their "Career Matchmaker" questions.
4. Post the top results.

And the jobs I could be doing are:

1. Curator
2. Economic Development Officer
3. Historian
4. Archivist
5. Foreign Language Instructor
6. ESL Teacher
7. Association Manager
8. Editor
9. Home Inspector
10. Interior Designer
11. Cartoonist / Comic Illustrator
12. Medical Secretary
13. Computer Trainer
14. Professor
15. Desktop Publisher
16. Communications Specialist
17. Casting Director
18. Political Aide
19. Musician
20. Health Records Professional
21. Writer
22. Critic
23. Market Research Analyst
24. Administrative Assistant
25. GIS Specialist

Some of them are reasonable (such as #8), and some of them show the flaws in the test. (Interior Designer?) Oh, and at #27, just below where I cut it off above, was "Comedian." Yes, this test thinks I could be a stand-up comedian. Thank you, thank you -- I'll be here all week.

If This is Wednesday, I Must Be Spartacus

Today's ComicMix links:
Andrew's Links: Defending Freedom

Another Busy Day

More traveling-to-stuff this afternoon that it would be inappropriate to talk about, and then the kids wanted to go to TerraBite (a gaming center in my town that has loads of PS2s, Xboxen, Wiis, and so on) for an hour this evening, to use a coupon they got recently.

So the day has been full. (And tomorrow, since there's no school, The Wife is dragging us all down to The Shore because she's a good Jersey girl who realized that Thing 2 has never seen the ocean in his six years. So that'll be another another busy day.) This is turning into a hectic week, with unspecified stuff Monday and running around on errands with The Wife yesterday.

Luckily, I got some time on a train today (I did also on Monday), which was soothing and pleasant. I don't know if it's true everywhere in the world, but, around here, trains tend to run around the backsides of things, on the other side of buildings, through small semi-wild areas, and so on -- so a train ride shows a completely different view of an area than a ride on the road does. And, after sixteen years of commuting regularly by bus, I really appreciate a decent train.

One last thing before I wander off to gather ComicMix links -- I saw a license plate today that I couldn't quite translate, so I hoped someone here would grasp it instantly and make me look dumb. It was a little bitty car, probably a Mini Cooper, and it read 4U2MTR6.

I can get "For You Too, Empty" out of that, but the R6 stumps me. (Unless it's a weird way of saying "my other car is a Mazda.") Any thoughts?

Linking to Links

Today's ComicMix selections:
Andrew's Links: Rap War on Sesame Street

The Quills Returneth Like a Bad Penny

This year's Quill winners were announced yesterday, with about as little fanfare and pomp as can be imagined. There will be a "gala awards ceremony" on October 22nd, said ceremony to be televised on NBC at some point (though certainly not live).

Let's review the process, just in case our eyes are blinded by the glare. Publishers Weekly editors nominated five books each in eighteen categories, based on those books' PW reviews, appearances on PW's bestseller lists, and good old-fashioned unspecified "industry expertise." Then, a group of industry professionals -- chosen by PW -- were allowed to vote on what we're all agreeing not to call the Publishers Weekly Awards.

Now, I seem to remember that there is a "Book of the Year" Award -- a Quill of Quills, if you would -- that will be voted on by the general public, but I can't find any reference to that in those linked press releases. So that will have to hang in limbo for now.

The categories we might care about include:

• Children's Chapter/Middle Grade: The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick (Scholastic)
• Children's Picture Books: Flotsam by David Wiesner (Clarion/Houghton Mifflin)
• General Fiction: The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Knopf)
• Graphic Novel: Making Comics by Scott McCloud (Harper)
• Mystery/Suspense/Thriller: What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman (William Morrow)
• Romance: Angels Fall by Nora Roberts (Putnam)
• Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror: The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (DAW)
• Young Adult/Teen: Sold by Patricia McCormick (Hyperion)

By my count, there are three winners with fantastic content: Flotsam, The Road, and The Name of the Wind. (I'm not sure if Invention of Hugo Cabret has any specifically fantastic elements, but it certainly sounds like a steampunk book otherwise.) There could have been a few more (fantastic works lost in the Romance, Graphic Novel, YA/Teen, and Chapter Book categories), but that's a good showing.

Nothing against Scott McCloud's book, which is pleasant and probably useful to wanna-be graphic novelists, but I really wish Ode to Kirihito, a completely insane and sui generis work, had won in its category. (On the other hand, Flotsam is wonderful and Wiesner a master of wordless picture books, so I'm happy about that category.)

I wrote about the Quills earlier this year, when the process was announced. If this post wasn't sarcastic enough for you, please click on that link.