Reviewing the Mail: Week of 3/8

Another week; another pile of books. I should mention that a couple of these things are ones I spent my own money on during a recent comic-shop trip, but all of the rest arrived in the mail for review. (And, as always, I hope to get to many of them, either here or at ComicMix, but I've learned that my hopes often exceed my abilities.)

Del Rey Manga is publishing the first two volumes of a new series called Fairy Tail at once on March 25th, and they sent copies of both to me. The manga-ka behind this project is Hiro Mashima, who created Rave Master. (And my older son loves Rave Master, so maybe I should ask him what he thinks of this series.) It's rated T-for-teen, and looks like another one in the long line of boys' adventure stories.

The newest volume of Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima's Path of the Assassin manga series is volume 9, Battle for Power. It's published by Dark Horse, it's available now, and you'd really have to start with the first volume to have any idea what's going on. I like these but, as I've mentioned a couple of times, I'm never quite sure if I'm really getting them.

I know The Bakers: Babies And Kittens has been out for a few weeks now, since the comics shop almost let me buy it the last time I was there. Unfortunately for me, it was a Tuesday, and, after Clerk 1 had already rung me up and I'd finished paying, Clerk 2 noticed The Bakers and said sternly that it wasn't available until the next day. So they had to put it back in my hold box and process a refund. (Yet another example of the bizarre business practices of the modern comics shop: everything has an unbreakable street date. The Direct Market is like a newsstand run by a guy with OCD.) The book itself is by the mighty Kyle Baker and published by Image; it collects some of his recent comics about his family -- and, in particular, his cute young children.

Marvel has brought out the fifth collection of Walt Simonson's great run on Thor under the title Thor Visionaries: Walter Simonson, Vol. 5. Of course, the actual cover implies the title is Marvel Visionaries: Walter Simonson: The Mighty Thor and has no number on it, but that's par for the course for the confusing world of Marvel branding. (On the inside front cover, we can see that the first and fourth volumes were "Visionaries," but the second and third were officially Thor Legends (with a cover treatment implying their titles were actually Marvel Legends: yadda yadda yadda). Someday Marvel will grow up into a real publishing company and realize its own name is not the most important part of the packaging...or maybe not, actually, since that strategy has served them awfully well for the last couple of decades. (Another point to note: even though the book is now published, none of the online sellers have the actual cover, just the piece of art Marvel sent at the time of Diamond's solicitation. It's clear where their priorities are.) Whatever the new book is called, it's by Simonson and collects one of the great superhero runs of the '80s. It's available now.

New mass-market paperback lines are nearly as rare as hens' teeth, and the conventional wisdom has been that the format is in a deep slump, if not totally doomed. But, as always, Night Shade Books laughs at the conventional wisdom; they launched a brand new line in mass market last year. And this year they're bringing out Liz William's fine "Detective Inspector Chen" novels in that format -- Snake Agent was published in January and The Demon and the City in February, with Precious Dragon to follow this month. It's an engrossing detective series set in a supernatural near future -- and yet manages to be utterly unlike all of the "urban fantasies" that are so common these days, in large part by using real Chinese mythology (including an impressively bureaucratic Hell). Everyone who has not tried the series because the books are "too expensive" or because "my shelves are purpose-built for mass-markets" are now officially on notice -- you have no excuse now, and I expect you to buy, read, and enjoy these books. That is all.

Also from Night Shade, and also in the "I'm so glad" category, is Walter Jon Williams's new novel, Implied Spaces. Williams is probably the least-known best writer in the SF field, or maybe the writer who had the worst run of luck in the '90s, with great novels as various as Aristoi, Days of Atonement, and Metropolitan, and enough great stories to fill two big collections. But various publishing stuff has kept him from getting the audience he deserves -- and the audience that will really, really love his books, too -- until, I hope, now. Implied Spaces looks like a medium-future post-scarcity book, with pocket universes, massively powerful AIs, and flashing swords. I expect to love it, and I fervently home I'm not the only one. It's coming April 1st in hardcover.

Movie Log: Death at a Funeral

Death at a Funeral came along to my mailbox, only a day or two after I'd expected it, so The Wife and I watched it immediately and sent it back into the Netflix machine, to pop up in someone else's mailbox.

It's a pleasant comedy, dark grey rather than actually black, about the members of a British family who gather when one of the older generation (father to the most important character, Matthew Macfayden's David) dies. David and his wife Jane (Kelly Hawes) have been living with David's mother (Sandra, played by Jane Asher) for an undisclosed amount of time, and what they do for a living is also left vague. (David has written a novel, but that's all we know.) And yet they may have trouble now paying for an apartment of their own, which would normally make me think they're horribly bad at managing money -- but the movie's not about that, so I accepted it as background.

Other important characters include David's younger brother, the successful novelist Robert (Rupert Graves); Howard (Andy Nyman), who seems to be a friend of the family; cousin Martha (Daisy Donovan) and her soon-to-be-fiance Simon (Alan Tudyk); and Martha's ne'er-do-well younger brother Troy (Kris Marshall), who is training to be a pharmacist.

With that many folks jockeying about (and I haven't even gotten to Martha's father or the character played by Peter Dinklage, who had an unexpected connection to the dead man), Funeral doesn't have time for sensitive depictions of characters -- and that's not what it's there for. It's a slightly tonier, British version of the kind of adult comedy that Americans used to be able to make through the '70s and '80s. ("Adult" here meaning "for grown-ups," and not "involving bodily fluids.") It's not a doors-slamming farce, but there are a couple of plotlines, and most of them get slapstick and broad at least once. The actors are solid enough to make it work; it never gets too silly for its own good.

Frank Oz is the director, and he brings his usual classy but unspectacular competence to the proceedings. There's nothing here to greatly advance the course of cinema, but it's a very entertaining comedy. And there's a great unexpectedly hilarious moment near the end that was set up perfectly and put aside, like a palmed card by a magician.

Movie Log: The Darjeeling Limited

The Wife and I had hoped that Netflix would send us Death at a Funeral last week, but I guess it was slightly more popular than we rated, so we got our next choice, The Darjeeling Limited, instead. And we finally watched it Monday night.

It's about three brothers -- you can probably read the names of the actors who play them on the CD case to the left -- who are traveling through India for a reason only one of them knows. (And that's because he hasn't told the other two -- it's not quite clear what he did tell them, to get them to come along, but they all seem to be rich enough to run around the world at a moment's notice, and the organizing brother did recently have a near-fatal motorcycle accident.)

Things move on from there, but rarely in an linear way -- the movie, though, is totally honest about itself, since it starts off with five minutes of Bill Murray racing to catch a train and then shifts focus away from him for good. The Darjeeling Limited starts off by telling the audience "I'm going to show you some things, and not all of them will be relevant, and many of them may well be pointless tangents. But I'll get somewhere in the end. Are you with me?"

If you can say yes to that, The Darjeeling Limited is for you. If you prefer a movie that will make more regular stops according to its timetable -- if you've got somewhere else to be, unlike these three pampered rich dudes -- you should find another movie.

I don't have much more to say, other than to stand back and point in amazement at what's possibly the single most blatant bit of symbolism I've ever seen in a movie. You see, near the end, the three brothers have to throw away their father's baggage to catch their train together. I laughed out loud at the audacity of it. It's a moment when you can hear the director, Wes Anderson, mumbling "They'll get it if I have to beat their heads in with it!" We get it, Wes, we get it. But you might dial it back a bit next time.

ComicMix Deals in Yen

My "Manga Friday" column at ComicMix this week reviewed the second volumes of three titles from Yen Press: Black God, Alice on Deadlines, and Zombie-Loan.

Movie Log: Beowulf

So I'm watching Beowulf tonight, just to see if it lives up to its reputation. And, so far, it does -- it's melodramatic in all of the worst ways, full of the most blatant dick jokes, intensely silly, and the best object lesson in the Uncanny Valley I've ever seen.

I've got posts on two other movies half-way finished, but I see no reason to waste valuable time thinking about this movie. So I'll type a bit as the movie goes on, and post this once it's done.

The physics is rotten in this film; the gold coins fly like leaves and have no weight. The bodies are worse, if that's possible.

There might have been one or two believable figures in the entire movie, but I can't think of who they might have been. Beowulf is like a million animated Real Dolls, bouncing in variable gravity and bending in unlikely ways.

And did I mention the dick jokes?

Every character seems to have a completely different accent. Beowulf is a South London gangster and Grendel's mother is some decayed Eastern European baroness. Most of the rest have random Irish or Scottish accents; no one at all sounds at all Danish.

The subtitles can't manage to spell "Heorot" correctly.

The whole thing looks like the world's longest cut-scene from a second-rate videogame. My fingers kept itching for a controller so I could finally fight Grendel myself.

Oh, sure a horse is going to gallop over a burning, collapsing bridge and then jump a thirty-foot chasm.

I've heard the phrase "my heart was in my throat" so many times, but I guess I just never visualized it before.

And, inevitably, there's a bad pop song playing under the end credits -- I don't want to check, but I bet it's called "The Ballad of Beowulf."

I'm outta here.

In Which I Point and Laugh

Now James Cawley, the producer of "Worlds Enough & Time," is stating strongly (nearly at the bottom the page) that it is not a professional production, and implies -- as I suspected and have said several times -- that it isn't authorized by Paramount in any way, and exists on sufferance as an "amateur" project that Paramount doesn't choose to crush as long as it stays that way.

Can I say "told ya so!" now?

[via Den of Geek out of SF Awards Watch]

A Meme! A Meme! I Do Confess't!

I'm mostly doing this one because I'm picking it up from someone entirely different: Barbarienne.

1. You have 50 dollars in your pocket. What do you do with it?

Yes, I do. Most of the time. It's most likely to buy food for me and the family, in one way or another.

2. What is your most guilty pleasure?

Far too guilty to mention.

3. Have you ever had anyone close to you die?

No closer than grandparents, though a friend from high school died while I was in college.

4. Are you confused as to what lies ahead of you?

A computer is immediately ahead of me, as it is for most people answering this meme. Is it common to be confused about that?

5. What was the last movie you saw, for pleasure, and would you recommend it?

Death at a Funeral, last night. It's a bit obvious, but a lot of fun.

6. Superman or Batman?

Flaming Carrot.

7. If the person you like does not accept you, would you continue to wait for them to change their feelings?

Oh my, are the questions for twelve year old starting already? "Ohmygod! I so totally like whoosiz!" Let me translate that question out of teenagerese: "If you are romantically interested in someone who doesn't reciprocate your interest, are you the kind of idiot who hangs around in the desperate hope that your life will turn into a bad romantic comedy?"

Even if I weren't married, the answer would be Hell No.

8. If the person you secretly like is already attached, what would you do?

Oooh! I secretly like someone! Pshaw.

What I do is mention it to my wife, actually, and she says something like "You think she's pretty?" and the conversation goes on from there to places you don't need to know about.

9. Is there anything that has made you unhappy recently?

Things make me unhappy every day; life is like that. Nothing big, though.

10. If you could have chosen at birth whether to be a boy or a girl, which would you be?

I'm well over six feet tall, with straight oily hair on my head (and too much of it other places), big feet, anti-social tendencies, and a general clumsiness. As a man, I'm only mildly notable.

And how do you know I didn't choose?

11. Which of the 7 Deadly Sins do you think you relate to the most & why?

That's a tough one -- they're all so much fun. I don't get nearly enough Wrath in my life. Gluttony, Sloth, and Lust are all old friends. Greed, Ency, Pride -- it's all good.

12. If you find out that your best friend is going out with your boyfriend/girlfriend, how would you react?

My "best friend" is my wife, and if I somehow had a separate person who was my "girlfriend" whom my wife was "going out" with...I'd have woken up in an episode of Red Shoe Diaries, so I'd break out the popcorn.

13. Who is currently the most important person to you?

You ask me to choose between my children? Whichever one has been less annoying lately, so Thing 1 right at the moment.

14. Would you rather be a really good person or a really interesting person?

If "really rich" and "really powerful" are off the table, I suppose interesting is a good consolation prize.

15. Do you believe in some form of life after death?

I don't habitually lie to myself, no.

16. Which fictional character could you most see yourself marrying?

What a bizarrely random question. I don't think of collections of words that way, thank you very much.

17. Would you give your all in a relationship?

Sometimes I give my All. But I'm using Tide at the moment.

18. Do you have a motto? If yes which one?

"Don't you start!"

19. What type of friends do you have?

Invisible alien ninja elves. Who come bearing custard.

20. What place most speaks to you?

The kind of place that is human-shaped and has a mouth.


Whee! I'm done. That was dumber than I expected.

Another Trip to the Uncanny Valley

I have no idea what this is all about. But it's weird, and Ben Jeapes linked to it. So now it's my turn.

The Obligatory "My Life As a Gamer" Post

E. Gary Gygax, the man who launched a million nerds, died earlier this week, and so the world's blogs are filled with remembrances of everyone's mis-spent youth. And, since I missed posting anything at all yesterday, who am I to pass up an opportunity to indulge myself horribly?

My geek credentials are a bit worn and outdated, but I think still quite serviceable. For, you see, I was a co-founder of the D&D club of my junior high! This is way back in 1980 or 1981 -- I can't remember if it was 7th or 8th grade -- and the club limped along, having adventures at a half-an-hour a meeting, once a week, until the initial members moved on to high school and the whole thing died. I'm sure we also played at other times, but we were all about 12, so nobody could drive or stay out late. (We also played a bit of Gamma World in those days, and were generally in the thrall of anything and everything emanating from Lake Geneva.) I might have even DM'd a bit in those days, but I was mostly a player, albeit one who always bought the game and read all of the secret rules.

But I dropped AD&D as a system almost entirely on going to high school -- when I look at the TSR history timeline, I recognize owning just about everything published from 1977-1981, but anything from mid-1982 on is foreign to me. D&D was for kids -- now we were ready for some serious role-playing.

I'd fallen in with a group of gamers that played two very different campaigns. One, run by a guy named Harry Smith, was pure house rules, the most free-wheeling RPG I've ever heard of. Characters were a mish-mosh of every media and literary source the players could think of -- we could claim "media rights" to things if we were the first to think of them; I grabbed Doc Savage, among others -- and, as far as I could tell, there was no specific published rule system behind it all. (Though, of course, we did still have to roll dice a lot.) I think this campaign had a name, but I don't remember what that was anymore. It was a very weird, high-energy experience, and the characters were practically gods very quickly -- looking back, it might have been more an excuse to hang out together, swear too loudly for Harry's grandparents' liking, and drink cheap supermarket cola. It was always fun, but generally incoherent, and calling it a "campaign" is probably stretching the point.

The other DM was a little younger than the rest of us, and was intensely serious. I can't remember his name anymore, unfortunately, but he was more of the typical DM: obsessive, organized, secretive. He also liked to run what we thought of as certain-death campaigns; we spent a lot of time making up new characters, and then having all of them die. I think we started off with a brief, ill-fated Twilight 2000 adventure, in which we all died horribly in Poland. This adventure was also notable for the day when I tried to strangle the DM (whose name I still can't remember). It probably wasn't the first instance of that gamer cliche, but we were pretty early, and I feel good about my place in history.

But then the nameless DM dragged out another game system, and this one clicked. It was what we called "MERP" -- Middle-earth Role Playing. It was just as deadly as the previous campaign, but, being Tolkienesque, we accepted it. It was set, unlike vanilla MERP, during the era when "the Necromancer" was still active in Mirkwood...and one of our first adventures was trying to infiltrate his tower. We died a lot, but it was a great world, and a great system, so we had fun doing it. (MERP was the source of my single favorite RPG item, the Ram-Butt-Bash-Knock-Down-Slug-Attack-Table, which I always say in one breath.)

And then there was our friend who loved RuneQuest, but we mostly tried to ignore him.

I also spent a lot of money in both junior high and high school buying RPG materials that I never really did anything with. I bought Call of Cthulhu and some '30s pulp adventure RPG I can't remember the name of, various adventures for all sorts of things, and whatever I could get my hands on. But I just read them -- never even seriously tried to play any of that stuff.

And then I threw it all out, either sometime when I was in college or when I moved out to get married. After I graduated high school in 1986, I never gamed at all. And I don't really miss it -- I miss those people, but not the pretending-to-kill-monsters part. Gaming is a way of socializing; it's something to do while you're all around a table together. And I've found other ways to socialize since then -- not that I like doing it all that much to begin with.

The World Is Tiny

First, an amusing anecdote: last, I met Rose Fox for lunch at the Shake Shack. As we were waiting for food -- and this is in the middle of winter, mind you, with only about five other people nearby, not the usual teeming hordes -- John Douglas wandered up, and we all said hello for a few minutes. Proving, once again, that if two people in any sub-group are present anywhere, a third will soon appear.

I was reminded of that moment this morning when I read Michael Swanwick's blog post about Janet Kagan's recent death. Now, I don't think I'd ever met Kagan, since she'd been ill for quite a while. I did read Mirabile, and liked it, and was among the many people in SF who hoped that she'd write more. But I just realized that she lived (and died) in Lincoln Park, New Jersey -- two towns over from me, the place where I catch a train to work every morning.

I wish I'd known that before she died -- not that it would have made much difference, since I didn't know her. But still.

Lunacon, Sweet Lunacon

Even though I was bodily kicked out of SF publishing last year, the people programming Lunacon were distracted enough to allow me to be on programming again this year. So, if you happen to find yourself in the Rye Town Hilton the weekend of March 14th, and want to see me bloviate in person, these are your best opportunities:

Jane Austen's Blogging Adventure
Remember when letter writing was dead and no one sent thank you notes? Nowadays, people write more letters than they have since Jane Austen's day. And with the advent of blogging, there's been a noticeable improvement in student writing, as people become accustomed to writing arguments that will be challenged by others. A look at how the communications revolution has affected the way we write and, well... communicate.
(Mianus River, 03/14/2008 4:00:00 PM)
Participants: Kathleen O'Shea David, Leigh Grossman, Andrew Wheeler[M]

Literary Spinoffs
Jane Austen's novels have been revisited by a number of authors in the past few years, from stories of the heroines' children to choose your own adventure novels that blend all of her books. Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" and Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" have also had quite popular spinoffs. What other great novels of of the past do you predict will be next?
(Odelle, 03/15/2008 10:00:00 AM)
Participants: Greg Feeley, Esther Friesner, Peter Heck[M], Andrew Wheeler

10 Best and Worst Moments in Comics
Panelists select and discuss the best and worst moments in comic history.
(Poplar, 03/15/2008 5:00:00 PM)
Participants: James Chambers, Lynn E. Cohen Koehler, Andrew Wheeler, Alex Wittenberg

The Year in Science Fiction
How did 2007 treat the world of Science Fiction? What not-to-miss books came out and what books should we avoid? A discussion of the genre over the past year.
(Grand Center, 03/16/2008 1:00:00 PM)
Participants: Mike Flynn, Nathan Lilly, Chuck Rothman, Andrew Wheeler

Don't ask me why there's a sudden surge of panels on Jane Austen. And I have no idea yet what I'm going to say about any of those things. Hope something comes to mind in the next two weeks....

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 3/1

It's all comics this week -- guess the SFF publicists are ignoring me at the moment -- so let's dive right into it:

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (not the well-known Dutch author) was adapted into comics by Rick Geary in 1990 for the excellent but short-lived series of Classics Illustrated from First comics. It's been dusted off and is being reissued as the first volume in the new series of Classics Illustrated from Papercutz. It will be released in April. I remember this as one of the best books in a quite impressive line, so I'm happy to see it coming back into print. (And, possibly, saving thousands of kids from failing their tests when they can't quite manage to finish the real book.)

Papercutz's older brother NBM sent the new edition of Boneyard , Vol. 3 by Richard Moore. NBM has been reissuing the early collections of the Boneyard series in color at a slightly smaller (presumably "backpack-friendly") trim size. Actually, I'm not entirely sure if the new trim size means anything -- this series is a bit racy to be aimed at young teenagers. And the plotline probably moves a bit slowly if you're reading it in individual issues. But if you start now with the collections, there are three color volumes (and three more not in color yet) ahead of you, which neatly solves that problem. The color edition of Boneyard, Vol. 3 is publishing in March, which means it should hit comics shops and bookstores near you in the next week or three.

Also from NBM, under the ComicsLit imprint, is Lewis Trondheim's Little Nothings: The Curse of the Umbrella. Trondheim, as I understand it, is one of the major cartoonists working today in France, but I've never read him. With any luck, Little Nothings will break that streak. It's also being published in March, and so should also be available everywhere very quickly.
Alice on Deadlines, Vol. 2 came from Yen Press, and is by Shiro Ihara. It's the second in a manga series about a teenage girl who ended up in the body of a skeleton when a n incompetent shingami (minor demon who collects the dead) took over her body accidentally. The bureaucracy of the supernatural is working to fix the situation, but...it's a bureaucracy, so it will take a long time. Meanwhile, poor Alice is trying to protect her body from both Lapan (the shingami) and Ume (another supernatural being, obsessed with Lapan and now manifested as another attractive young girl in their household). In this book, apparently, they deal with yet another supernatural creature that steals underwear while it's still being worn. I enjoyed the first volume, which probably proves there is no hope for me. This second volume is also publishing in March.

Also from Yen was the second volume of With the Light Vol. 2: Raising an Autistic Child by Keiko Tobe. I've heard great things about the first book, and I have to admit to an interest in the subject -- one of my sons has a much milder developmental issue in the same spectrum. This is yet another book coming in March.

And last for this week was First Second's Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, a book about creating comics from Jessica Abel and Matt Madden. From a quick glance, it looks like a book for aspiring comics creators -- about how to go about writing and drawing for comic books. The subtitle specifies "manga, graphic novels, and beyond," which implies an orientation away from traditional American monthly superhero comics...but that might be there more because "manga" and "graphic novels" are hot topics right now. In any case, Drawing Words will be published in May, and I might review it then -- if looking at it doesn't make me feel too completely incompetent to judge the subject matter.

Probably The Last Thing I'll Ever Say About "Worlds Enough and Time"

SFWA has decreed that it is indeed eligible for the Nebula Award it was nominated for, and the director/writer, Marc Scott Zicree, has written a long, Hollywood-style account of how wonderful and special and professional the experience was.

OK, fine. I'll stop grumping about it in comments on SF Awards Watch.

Maybe it is authorized ...but, still, reading Zicree's essay, I'm struck that there's still absolutely no hint of a legal relationship between "Star Trek: New Voyages" (or whatever they're calling it this week) and Viacom, the corporation that actually owns all of the trademarks and copyrights pertaining to Star Trek. I see a whole lot of "these creative folks think it's awesome" and a helping of "Paramount knows about it and hasn't sued us," but no "and they didn't even ask for any changes!" Zicree also states that this project doesn't violate their copyright...when, obviously, it's the trademark rights in characters like Kirk, McCoy, Spock and so on that are most important. Maybe I'm just a cynic, always looking for the worst side of things; that happens a lot.

And maybe saying, "well, some people were paid, some of the time" is enough to make something professional in Hollywood.

And maybe SFWA collectively does want to honor Star Trek and similar skiffy things...but only when they're big and flashy and on TV, never when they're written down on paper (which is, of course, what most of them do in the field the vast majority of the time -- write things on paper meant to be read on paper). It's certainly their prerogative to make those distinctions.

But, as I keep thinking about what I don't like about the situation, I've come to think that the most dangerous aspect here is how backwards-looking SFWA (and much of the American SF-writing establishment in general) has become. The "Worlds Enough and Time" project is deeply, deeply fannish in both the best and worst ways -- the best, because it shows a large number of people working together to do something they love, and do it well; and the worst, because it's an obsessive attempt to replicate a vision of the future from forty years ago, as if, with enough willpower and dedication, they could change actual history and get the world they thought they wanted as young fen.

Folks, I was born in 1969, the year "Worlds Enough and Time" tries to pretend it was created in. (Matter of fact, in a nicely ironic note, I see that the very last episode of original Trek aired the day before I was born.) I'm nearly forty. And the US median age is less than that -- more than half the population wasn't even born when the old, hammy Trek went off the air. It's ancient re-runs for most of us.

Dream some new dreams, why don't you? This one is way past its sell-by date. SFWA needs some of tomorrow's tomorrows; it's had far too many of yesterday's already.

Read in February

Here's the full list of what I read last month, posted more out of my vague obsessiveness than for any attempt at transparency. Several of these things didn't get full reviews, though, so there will be a bit of content in the trackless waste of links.

Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 3 (2/2)
The library that I find myself at nearly every Saturday has a full set of Naruto (I think), but most of them are out most of the time. (Actually, I think they have multiple copies of most volumes, and the shelf is still usually half-empty.) I claim to be reading this as a way to keep up with Thing 1, but it's actually an engrossing ninja-action comic. I don't know if I can manage to catch up with it -- there are 28 volumes now! -- but I'll keep reading until I've had enough.

Hank Ketcham's Complete Dennis the Menace: 1957-1958 (Volume Four) (2/2)
Ketcham's art in the early days of Dennis was the epitome of the slick '50s magazine illustration style: precise lines that seemed effortless, a strong sense of design, and a great eye for very specific, particular characters. It's too bad that the writing, and the whole point of Dennis, was just as dull and obvious back then as it is now. Dennis was more of a terror in his salad days than he is today, but the strip in 1957 was still a parade of cute-hellion cliches. (Admittedly, some of them may have only become cliches after Ketcham beat them into the ground for forty years.) Old Dennis cartoons are much more of interest to aspiring illustrators than to writers -- unless, of course, you're a writer who needs a boost of self-confidence, and wants to see just how low the bar to mega-success can sometimes be set.

• Sue Grafton, T Is For Trespass (2/3)
• Shin Midorikawa, Aventura, Vol. 1 (2/4)
• Ryotaro Iwanaga, Pumpkin Scissors, Vol. 1 (2/5)
• Reiji Saiga & Sora Inoue, Samurai Girl Real Bout High School, Vol. 1 (2/6)
• Tohru Fujisawa, GTO: Great Teacher Onizuka, Vol. 1 (2/7)
• Jonathan Strahan, editor, Eclipse One (2/7)
• Yuki Urushibara, Mu Shi Shi, Vol. 2 (2/11)
• Ai Morinaga, My Heavenly Hockey Club, Vol. 2 (2/12)
• Charlie Huston, No Dominion (2/12)
• Tadashi Kawashima & Adachitoka, Alive, Vol. 2 (2/13)
• Hitoshi Iwaaki, Parasyte, Vol. 2 (2/14)
• Anton Strout, Dead to Me (2/15)
• Stephan Pastis, Da Brudderhood of Zeeba Zeeba Eata (2/16)
  All of the Pearls Before Swine strips from late January of 2005 through the day before Halloween of that same year, in one handy book. I see that there's another Treasury edition coming out next month, with all of the cartoons in this and The Sopratos, plus color, plus commentary. I like me my Pearls Before Swine in any format, but -- if that's the way this series is going to be packaged -- I think I need to remember not to buy the smaller books, and just to wait for the treasuries. (My shelves would thank me as well.)
  
• Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima, Path of the Assasin, Vol. 8: Shinobi With Extending Fists (2/17)
  More sex and violence in war-torn Japan. More sex than violence, actually, which is very uncommon for the manga I've seen. (Are there other series being translated that have adult relationships, including sex, like Path of the Assassin? I've seen teenage sex comedies, and there's always the bizarre reaches of manga porn, but nothing else on this level. Hey, if you publish it, and you're out there, drop me an e-mail and I'll review your books at ComicMix!) The politics still often confuse me, as does the philosophy (as far as I can separate the two, which isn't always very far). I don't think I'm just reading this series for the sex and violence, but sometimes it feels that way. I do like it, though.
• Bryan Talbot, Alice in Sunderland (2/18)
• Jane & Michael Stern, Roadfood (2/18)
  This was the book I've been reading upstairs -- in the bedrooms of the two Things, in odd moments -- for the last I-don't-want-to-say-how-long. (Though this is the 2002 edition, and there's been a 2005 edition since then, and another new edition coming this year -- so something like that long.) It's a state-by-state guide to good eats, with an emphasis on "real" places, not fancy "fine" restaurants. It was a great book to poke through, and it's going into my car now, in hopes that I can drag it out on long driving trips somewhere. (I don't know how much of that I'll be doing, but I expect to be driving this car for the next eight years, so I've got time.)
• Machiko Sakurai, Minima!, Vol. 1 (2/19)
• Suzuhito Yasuda, Kozakura Quartet, Vol. 1 (2/20)
• Kairi Fujiyama, Dragon Eye, Vol. 2 (2/21)
• Michael Swanwick, The Dragons of Babel (2/21)
• Renee French, The Ticking (2/21)
  I read French's Micrographica, reviewed it at ComicMix, and liked it, so I'd been looking out for this larger graphic novel by her since then. (And my library had it all along -- go figure.) It's the story of Edison Steelhead, who is born on the first page: he has his father Calvin's big, deformed head, and his birth kills his mother. So his dad takes him to a remote island to grow up, and later introduces a monkey in a dress to the family as his "sister," Patrice. Once Edison grows up, he decides not to have plastic surgery, moves to the mainland, and lives quietly as an artist. All this is narrated quietly, mostly in captions, mostly with only one or two centered, soft-pencil panels to a page. It's quiet and atmospheric, but I can't help feeling that I missed something important along the way. This is a book that feels like it's about something other than its events, and I didn't figure out what that was.
• Charles Addams, Drawn and Quartered (2/23)
  Addams's first cartoon collection, originally published in 1941 and still available on the shelf at my usual library. There are some minor cartoons here, and some more that aren't as sharp as they could be -- partially because of the reproduction, and partially because Addams hadn't learned all of his tricks at that point. But it's Addams, and even when he's not at his best, he's still pretty darn good.
• John Mortimer, Rumpole Misbehaves (2/24)
• Marisa Acocella Marchetto, Cancer Vixen (2/24)
  Marchetto is a New Yorker cartoonist who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004, just as she was about to marry the man of her dreams (the proprietor of a chic downtown restaurant who was crazy about her). This is her story, in comics form. Her art gets a bit manic for my tastes at times, and she's very much the New York fashionista woman -- not that there's anything wrong with that -- but this is a touching and very personal story.
• Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2/25)
• Keiko Takemiya, Andromeda Stories, Vol. 3 (2/25)
• Kaoru Kurimoto & Kazuaki Yanagisawa, The Guin Saga Manga: The Seven Magi, Vol. 3 (2/26)
• Chip Kidd, The Learners (2/27)
• Tou Ubukata & Kiriko Yumeji, Le Chevalier d'Eon, Vol. 2 (2/27)
• Yasunori Mitsunaga, Princess Resurrection, Vol. 2 (2/28)
• Andi Watson, Glister, Vols. 1-3 (2/29)

And that's it.

The Learners by Chip Kidd

This is a sequel to The Cheese Monkeys, which was widely seen as a thinly-veiled autobiography, even though it was set a decade or so too early to be Chip Kidd's real life. As The Learners starts, "Happy" -- he never gets a real name in this short novel -- has graduated from "State," and in 1961 gets a job at a small advertising firm in New Haven, entirely because his beloved art teacher from The Cheese Monkeys also had his first job there.

Happy gets depressed after meeting Himillsy Dodd, a girl he knew in college -- I'll leave out the details of exactly why he gets depressed, since that would give away too much of the plot. Complicating this section is the fact that I can't tell if Happy is meant to be straight or not; he doesn't have any obvious interest in women or men over the course of the novel, and his relationship with Himillsy might be sublimated lust...but it doesn't have to be. (I suspect that Kidd just doesn't have much of an idea what a young straight guy thinks about women -- or maybe that Happy is so deeply in the closet that he hasn't figured out for himself that he's gay yet. There is at least one moment that argues for the latter, but Happy's relationship with Himillsy tends the other way.)

The small ad agency -- Spear, Rakoff & Ware -- should also be mildly depressing, though Happy doesn't take it that way at first. The "how a graphic designer works" aspect of the book ebbs and flows, though it's never as dominant as it was in Cheese Monkeys. The agency is small, populated entirely by eccentrics (and not humorous ones), and its outlook for continued existence is somewhat gloomy. But Happy's boss, Milburne "Sketchy" Spear, is a master draftsman, and that's enough for Hap for quite a while. But his Himillsy problem starts him down the path to clinical depression.

And then he signs up for an experiment in memory at nearby Yale University -- which turns out to be Stanley Milgram's famous experiment in obedience. Happy ends up like most of the people who took part in that experiment: he "kills" the learner with fake electric shocks. But he takes it terribly badly -- over-the-top badly, I'd say; since he reacts as if he actually did kill someone, and has a sin that can never be expunged -- and so the rest of the novel is the record of Happy completely falling apart.

The details of art direction and typography that were central in The Cheese Monkeys are still there, but they fit very uneasily with Happy's psychological anguish in the second half of the novel. And the ending struggles for pathos, but ends in grotesquerie. The Learners is much less successful than The Cheese Monkeys, and isn't sure of what it wants to be: is it the continuing story of an graphic designer's education, or the story of a young man devastated to learn that he's capable of murder? (And, if the latter, this is a very thin way of learning that -- many young men find out they're capable of killing another man by doing it, either in war or elsewhere.) Chip Kidd may have been the proverbial guy who had one novel in him: The Cheese Monkeys was quite good, while The Learners is much less so.