Quote of the Week: Say on Pay

"The salary of the chief executive of the large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself."
- J.K. Galbraith

Book-A-Day 2010 # 170 (7/23) -- Flight 7 edited by Kazu Kibuishi

The Flight books have always been gorgeous exercises in a bland mass-market strand of story telling -- I got into that issue in greater detail when I reviewed Flight 5 for ComicMix -- and this seventh volume lives both up and down to the series legacy. The Platonic ideal of a Flight contributor is still a storyboard artist at a decent animation studio -- say Blue Sky, for example -- though there are a number of full-time makers of comics and several artists who work by day on video games. That brings with it a tremendous variety and depth of attractive art -- there are no outsiders here, but the gamut ranges from the cartoony black lines of Kean Soo's Jellaby stories and Katie & Steven Shanahan's "Fairy Market" to the confident paintings of Kostas Kiriakakis's "Premium Cargo"and Stuart Livingston's "Overhead" -- but all of that art is uniformly crisp and clear and carefully laid out and entirely nice.

(Reading a volume of Flight almost makes me want to run out and find a Johnny Ryan book, just for a palate cleaner and to prove that comics don't have to be utterly respectable and polished.)

This seventh volume contains nearly three hundred pages of attractive comics, mostly about young people or young-people-stand-ins (like animals), and nearly all of the stories here could find themselves the basis of a major animated movie rated no higher than PG. The Flight creators are all very good at what they do, but three hundred pages of that at a time can be a little much; I always find myself wishing, as I reach the end of an annual Flight book, for something that's not quite so tasteful, or that doesn't feel like it's been carefully formed with a focus group in mind. Still, this is a fine collection, and reading it in smaller doses will completely eliminate the feeling of sameness -- I recommend that for all Flight readers.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

SF Masterworks Meme

This is another one of those "long list of books" memes, in which we all try to impress each other with how much time we've spent indoors, our noses stuck inside old skiffy novels. (I got it from James Nicoll.) It is, as the name implies, a list of the book in the "SF Masterworks" series from the UK publisher Gollancz.

The standard instructions for memes like this is to bold books one has read, italicize books one owns but hasn't read yet, and strikethrough books one violently disagrees with. I also often add comments, since that's the kind of blogger I am.

The list:

• I – Dune – Frank Herbert
• II – The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. Le Guin
• III – The Man in the High Castle – Philip K. Dick
• IV – The Stars My Destination – Alfred Bester
• V – A Canticle for Leibowitz – Walter M. Miller, Jr.
• VI – Childhood’s End – Arthur C. Clarke
• VII – The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress – Robert A. Heinlein
• VIII – Ringworld – Larry Niven
• IX – The Forever War – Joe Haldeman
• X – The Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham

• 1 – The Forever War – Joe Haldeman -- what, again?
• 2 – I Am Legend – Richard Matheson
• 3 – Cities in Flight – James Blish -- I hates it, I does, but I did read it. And it is important.
• 4 – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
• 5 – The Stars My Destination – Alfred Bester
• 6 – Babel-17 – Samuel R. Delany
• 7 – Lord of Light – Roger Zelazny
• 8 – The Fifth Head of Cerberus – Gene Wolfe
• 9 – Gateway – Frederik Pohl
• 10 – The Rediscovery of Man – Cordwainer Smith -- not in this edition, but in the separate Del Rey paperbacks of the late '70s
• 11 – Last and First Men – Olaf Stapledon
• 12 – Earth Abides – George R. Stewart -- though it once featured in a contest here
• 13 – Martian Time-Slip – Philip K. Dick
• 14 – The Demolished Man – Alfred Bester
• 15 – Stand on Zanzibar – John Brunner -- I don't think I finished it, so this may be cheating.
• 16 – The Dispossessed – Ursula K. Le Guin
• 17 – The Drowned World – J. G. Ballard
• 18 – The Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut
• 19 – Emphyrio – Jack Vance
• 20 – A Scanner Darkly – Philip K. Dick
• 21 – Star Maker – Olaf Stapledon
• 22 – Behold the Man – Michael Moorcock
• 23 – The Book of Skulls – Robert Silverberg
• 24 – The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
• 25 – Flowers for Algernon – Daniel Keyes
• 26 – Ubik – Philip K. Dick
• 27 – Timescape – Gregory Benford
• 28 – More Than Human – Theodore Sturgeon -- I have serious issues with the "gestalt entity," and it's less than the novella ("Baby Is Three") it grew out of.
• 29 – Man Plus – Frederik Pohl
• 30 – A Case of Conscience – James Blish
• 31 – The Centauri Device – M. John Harrison
• 32 – Dr. Bloodmoney – Philip K. Dick
• 33 – Non-Stop – Brian Aldiss
• 34 – The Fountains of Paradise – Arthur C. Clarke
• 35 – Pavane – Keith Roberts
• 36 – Now Wait for Last Year – Philip K. Dick
• 37 – Nova – Samuel R. Delany
• 38 – The First Men in the Moon – H. G. Wells
• 39 – The City and the Stars – Arthur C. Clarke
• 40 – Blood Music – Greg Bear
• 41 – Jem – Frederik Pohl
• 42 – Bring the Jubilee – Ward Moore -- another book I can't stand for suspension-of-disbelief reasons
• 43 – VALIS – Philip K. Dick
• 44 – The Lathe of Heaven – Ursula K. Le Guin
• 45 – The Complete Roderick – John Sladek
• 46 – Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said – Philip K. Dick
• 47 – The Invisible Man – H. G. Wells
• 48 – Grass – Sheri S. Tepper
• 49 – A Fall of Moondust – Arthur C. Clarke
• 50 – Eon – Greg Bear
• 51 – The Shrinking Man – Richard Matheson
• 52 – The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K. Dick
• 53 – The Dancers at the End of Time – Michael Moorcock
• 54 – The Space Merchants – Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth
• 55 – Time Out of Joint – Philip K. Dick
• 56 – Downward to the Earth – Robert Silverberg
• 57 – The Simulacra – Philip K. Dick
• 58 – The Penultimate Truth – Philip K. Dick
• 59 – Dying Inside – Robert Silverberg
• 60 – Ringworld – Larry Niven
• 61 – The Child Garden – Geoff Ryman
• 62 – Mission of Gravity – Hal Clement
• 63 – A Maze of Death – Philip K. Dick
• 64 – Tau Zero – Poul Anderson
• 65 – Rendezvous with Rama – Arthur C. Clarke
• 66 – Life During Wartime – Lucius Shepard
• 67 – Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang – Kate Wilhelm
• 68 – Roadside Picnic – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
• 69 – Dark Benediction – Walter M. Miller, Jr.
• 70 – Mockingbird – Walter Tevis
• 71 – Dune – Frank Herbert
• 72 – The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress – Robert A. Heinlein
• 73 – The Man in the High Castle – Philip K. Dick
• 74 – Inverted World – Christopher Priest
• 75 – Kurt Vonnegut – Cat’s Cradle
• 76 – H.G. Wells – The Island of Dr. Moreau
• 77 – Arthur C. Clarke – Childhood’s End
• 78 – H.G. Wells – The Time Machine
• 79 – Samuel R. Delany – Dhalgren
• 80 – Brian Aldiss – Helliconia
• 81 – H.G. Wells – Food of the Gods
• 82 – Jack Finney – The Body Snatchers
• 83 – Joanna Russ – The Female Man
• 84 – M.J. Engh – Arslan

I note that nearly all of the roman-numeraled titles turned up later in the main sequence, one of them very, very quickly. I'm sure this is a secret coded message from the Illuminati to their sleeper agents, and not more evidence of the weird ebb and flow of publishing.

Book-A-Day 2010 # 169 (7/22) -- Stephen King's The Stand: Soul Survivors by Aguirre-Sacasa and Perkins

Middles can be tricky things -- they have to get from the beginning to the end, making sense all the way, and still preserve enough interest among the audience that know the ending is coming, and mostly just wants to get there. Middles can be even trickier, though, when they come as ostensibly separate objects, with very little explanation of how middle-ish they really are.

Soul Survivors is the collection of one of several miniseries published by Marvel adapting Stephen King's novel The Stand; it was written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and drawn by Mike Perkins. It comes shrinkwrapped, and the only indication that it is a piece of middle -- not an independent side story set in the world of The Stand, or any of the other possibilities -- is the word "continues" in a small paragraph of copy on the bottom of the back cover, down by the price and ISBN barcode and Marvel logo. I believe that Soul Survivors is the third such miniseries, but don't quote me -- that's based on the very last page of this book, which has two bookshots (of the collections Captain Trips and American Nightmare) under a headline reading "The Story Starts Here." There's also no indication how many more series will be required to finish adapting The Stand -- I'd assume a lot; it's a huge book, and this adaptation seems to include every plot point and event -- but the next one will be called Hardcases.

All those things would generally be considered more important to a reader -- and to the successful marketing of a book adapting one of the best-known and -loved books by a hugely bestselling writer -- than the name of Marvel's Senior Vice President for Strategic Development (Ruwan Jayatilleke), but the latter is easily found in Soul Survivors, and the former is entirely missing. One thus begins to understand why Marvel has had relatively little luck getting its products into bookstores; they're still packaging those products for an audience that already knows everything about the things they care about, makes detailed lists of the things they're going to buy, and visits their chosen retailers obsessively. Occasionally, Marvel can reach the larger audience that does not do any of those things, but only by luck.

The story of Soul Survivors, as I said, is entirely middle. A number of people -- the most important of whom were introduced in the earlier books, and just appear here -- continue their journeys through an America depopulated by the government-created (and accidentally released) "Captain Trips" supervirus, after the death of 90% of us. They meet new companions, face some new threats, and converge on the Nebraska home of a centenarian black woman, Mother Abagail. Meanwhile, all of the evil people left over are similarly heading towards Las Vegas, drawn by the "dark man," Randall Flagg. (And, as usual for that period in his career, King's symbolism is nowhere within a country mile of subtle.) It begins in the middle and ends in the middle, focusing almost entirely on the "good" characters as they gather together for their inevitable battle against evil.

There's no reason to read Soul Survivors alone -- either you're a big King (or Stand fan), and want to follow the story in every medium, or you read Captain Trips and have been following along since then. It's middle-ness is so perfect that there's no good opening into it for anyone not already familiar with the story, and so it should be left to them.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 168 (7/21) -- Penny Arcade, Vol. 6 by Holkins & Krahulik

It might not seem that way sometimes, but I do actually try to keep the length of my post titles from getting ever-longer. For example, I could have called today's post Book-A-Day 2010 # 168 (7/21) -- Penny Arcade, Vol. 6: The Halls Below by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, but I didn't, thereby saving about thirty characters. So don't say that I never do anything for you folks....

Penny Arcade is critic-proof; it'll stay vastly popular until that moment when it suddenly seems old-fashioned and its host of readers stop taking it seriously. That may happen tomorrow, or not for thirty years, and it entirely depends on Holkins and Krahulik remaining connected to that audience -- thinking like them (only smarter), playing the same games as them (only for longer hours, and caring more), and making the same kind of jokes (only better). Luckily for them, Holkins and Krahulik clearly have an exceptionally strong work ethic when it comes to playing video games and posting JPEGs about them to the Internet. (And a sense of humor about it, since they regularly say that their job is playing video games and posting JPEGs about them to the Internet.)

I've reviewed Penny Arcade books in the past -- the recent Splendid Magic anniversary coffee-table book earlier in this Book-A-Day stretch, and the first collection about two years ago -- so I'll try not to repeat myself.

Halls Below collects all of the strips from 2005 -- I still have no idea why the reprints are so far behind, or even if it's a deliberate strategy or an accident -- with about a paragraph of annotations/comments/thoughts by Holkins, the writer for each strip. Opinions vary widely on the efficacy and usefulness of annotations like that -- I've seen near-knifefights about the worth of author afterwords in SFnal circles, and I expect similar high spirits reign in the even more enthusiastic world of comics -- but I'm firmly on the side of wanting more background detail, so I enjoyed these annotations a lot. (Though they do make this book take much longer to read than it would appear to -- again, this will be a feature, not a bug, to most people.) Also -- and this is no small consideration -- a Penny Arcade strip is usually very tied to the geeky obsessions of the moment, and can be deeply opaque several years later even to people who cared deeply about that issue at the time, so the annotations serve to explain exactly what the joke was supposed to be about.

There's also a concluding section about the world of the horrible fantasy series "Epic Legends of the Hierarchs: The Elmenstor Saga," mostly consisting of excerpts from the extensive wiki about those (utterly nonexistent) books. This shows, once more, the fiendish intelligence by which Holkins and Krahulik harness the restless energy of their fans -- not just to buy their products and increase their traffic, but to actually write content for them. When you get to the point when you can have your fans telling jokes to each other, and paying you for the privilege, you know you've made it.

I hope Del Rey manages to speed up the publication speed of the Penny Arcade collections; it would be great to have the book of 2010's cartoons on sale (for example) sometime in mid-to-late 2011. And, selfishly, wishing for that also means that there would need to be three more new Penny Arcade books in quick succession to catch up, which would be a damn good thing.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Amazon Algebra

Amazon sent out another press release this morning, filled with glowing phrases attributed to Jeff Bezos and a whole slew of numbers carefully chosen so that they don't actually correlate with each other at all. Their clear aim is to show how their sales are growing immensely -- the underlying tone of every single Amazon press release dating back to 1995, though what, precisely, is growing hugely has changed often -- and that they have some big, impressive numbers to throw around.

So I wanted to try to quote some of those Amazon declarations, and put them into equation form, to show what it is we know, and what we don't know.

The full press release is here, for those of you who want to follow along at home.

the growth rate of Kindle device unit sales has tripled since we lowered the price from $259 to $189,"

So the first derivative of K1 (Kindle unit sales), has increased from x to 3x since June 21st. We do not know what K1 was before or afterward, nor what N1 (unit sales of Barnes & Noble's Nook device) is, nor what the similar sales are on any other e-reading device.

One month ago, Apple announced that they had sold 3 million iPads in three months. One may postulate that K1 has not yet reached this milestone -- because, if so, Amazon would mostly likely have said so -- but there is no solid data to support that assumption. (Amazon has sold four different physical Kindle units -- original, second generation, DX, and second-generation DX -- since November 19th of 2007, but total unit sales have never been released.)

Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books

K2 (Kindle book units) > B2 (hardcover book units), over an unspecified unit of time.

Note that this implies that K2 is less than B1 (total book units), though that's unproven.

Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books.

K2 = 1.43 B2

Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books.

No, wait -- K2 = 1.8 B2.

Amazon is clearly not willing to use a moving average to smooth out bumps in their data, and may well have timed this announcement to take advantage of specific bumps. (One possibility: the book business often slows down in the summer, and so Amazon is cherry-picking data to emphasize a recent peak.)

Also, see below -- the "past three months" may be Mar-May.

The Association of American Publishers' latest data reports that e-book sales grew 163 percent in the month of May and 207 percent year-to-date through May. Kindle book sales in May and year-to-date through May exceeded those growth rates.

The first derivative of K2 (not to be confused with the first derivative of K1, mentioned above) is larger than 163% for the month of May and 207% for Jan-May, compared to the same period the previous year.

It is unclear how, if at all, this statistic correlates with the "last three months" data above.

On July 6, Hachette announced that James Patterson had sold 1.14 million e-books to date. Of those, 867,881 were Kindle books.

Kindle is claiming a 76% market share in James Patterson e-books. (My own doubts about whether that Patterson number represents the true ceiling so far of e-book units by a single author still stand, with no further data on either side of the question.)

Amazon, as usual, is throwing around the largest numbers they can mine from their data, salting those numbers with their standard triumphalism, and declaring their obvious victory -- while, at the same time, not actually revealing the most important numbers. (K1, K2, the actual rate of growth of both of them.)

If you're impressed by that, and would like to join the bandwagon now before it leaves you behind, just click on the below banner and you can buy your very own Kindle -- and have your purchase be part of the next round of Amazon Algebra, sometime later this year:

Book-A-Day 2010 # 167 (7/20) -- Wet Moon, Book 4 by Ross Campbell

I knew Ross Campbell's work from Water Baby -- a book he did for DC's ill-fated Minx imprint a few years back, which I covered at the beginning of a comics round-up post -- but Wet Moon looks to be his central and most popular series, coming regularly from Oni since 2004, with five collections to date.

I've only seen one of those collections so far: this one, #4, with the ominous (and unearned) subtitle "Drowned in Evil," which was published in 2008 and collects issues 17-21 of the comic. This book has no introduction, and the only description on the back cover is a jokey quote from Campbell himself -- "This one's the best volume yet!" There is a page of character headshots with their names and ages...after the end of the story. And there's nothing else to bring a reader into the book -- I can't remember the last time I saw something this reader-hostile. If a new reader does dare to pick this up, though, it's reasonably clear what's going on -- this is yet another story about college students (mostly) that focuses on their interpersonal travails and drama.

Most of the cast -- which circles around roommates Cleo Lovedrop and Mara Zuzanny -- are students at Wet Moon Art College, in the fictional Southern city of the same name. Wet Moon -- at least in these issues -- doesn't venture into or anywhere near the classroom; these issues take place over the two weeks around Halloween, but no one goes to class or mentions school or homework once. Their personal lives are far too complicated for that, I guess; Wet Moon is primarily about their tentative love affairs, and equally tentative forays into work and the rest of life. (For multiple-pierced tough-acting girls, these are a bunch of softies.)

Campbell is good at getting into their heads -- and not just through the expressions in his nearly manga-sized limpid eyes, since we also get diary entries from three of these young women to wallow into their emotional turmoil in more depth. (Campbell is excellent at capturing that aimless, restless yearning of late adolescence -- perhaps too much so for readers whose own adolescence is a distant memory.) Refreshingly, the cast is almost entirely young women, and they come in various body shapes, sizes and races -- though they're all vaguely shabby, dressed in raggedy cut-offs and torn layers of ill-treated shirts.

I bet that there's a small but passionate Wet Moon fandom, made up of women (and some men) whose lives are very much like this, and the men (and some women) who are strongly attracted to that type of young aimlessness. But these issues only hint at a larger plot, and quotidian details can only sustain an ongoing series for so long -- I'd have preferred to see these girls working on something they cared about, whether it be school or their 'zines or some cause; they come across as more distracted and frivolous than Campbell intended. Of course, they're still young -- they have plenty of time to grow out of it!
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index
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Listening to: CocoRosie - Lemonade
via FoxyTunes

Book-A-Day 2010 # 166 (7/19) -- The Complete Peanuts, 1973 to 1974 by Charles M. Schulz

A previous volume of The Complete Peanuts -- covering the cartoons from 1969-70, since I'd accidentally gotten out of order -- was Book-A-Day #135, and interested readers can drop back to there for more detailed musings on how Peanuts was changing at this point in its life. (For those with more time to kill, there's also my ComicMx reviews of the 1967-68 collection and the recent biography Schulz and Peanuts. And a review of 1965-66 here. Oh, and 1961-62, from the last run of Book-A-Day. And, also from that Book-A-Day run, a very short squib on 1959-60.)

So I've babbled a lot about Peanuts over the past couple of years, leaving me with less to say this time. These years do see Peanuts in its slow slide from an often-bleak look at the cruelties of childhood and the inevitable failure of life to be what we want it to be into something lighter and less tethered to reality, as Sparky Schulz's Minnesota childhood got further and further in the past and the pleasant fat years of adulthood in Santa Rosa became a greater and greater proportion of his life. But it's still often sad or bittersweet -- these are the years of "poor, sweet baby," of Sally's first conversations with her school building, and of perhaps Charlie Brown's greatest triumph, when he was a respected president of his summer camp after becoming "Mr. Sack."

And Peanuts still ran close to half the time on unrequited love -- Charlie Brown for the red-headed girl, Peppermint Pattie for Charlie, Lucy for Schroeder, Woodstock for his mother, Snoopy for his mother. Where most American gag strips were about the silly things that happen every day, Peanuts was about how to keep on living when you don't get what you want. It was still vital and true at this point, even if more and more of the stories focused on Snoopy quaffing root beers with Bill Mauldin, or writing bad novels, or playing tennis.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index
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Listening to: Hallelujah The Hills - Slo-Motion Records Broken At Break-Neck Speeds
via FoxyTunes

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 7/17

I do this every Monday, and the few of you that read this very minor blog are probably used to this by now, but -- just in case -- here's the scoop: these are the books that came in the mail last week, from the publicity folks at various publishing houses, in the hopes that I will read and review these books. I have not yet read any of these books, and this is not a review -- but I can tell you some things about these books by looking at them, and by staring off into the distance and thinking very hard.

The Bird of the River is a new novel by the late Kage Baker -- she died, much too young and too early, in January of this year, after a career of little more than a decade that saw a dozen novels and a flood of shorter (but, in many cases, even better) fiction -- in the world of her novels The Anvil of the World and The House of the Stag. Tor will publish Bird -- a short novel about two teenagers working on a gigantic river barge -- on July 20th as a hardcover. Tor's cover letter doesn't say that this is Baker's last novel, so perhaps there's something else, finished or nearly so, still among her papers. But, even if that isn't the case, we still have this novel to remember Baker by.

From Fantastic Books -- an imprint of Wilder Publications (whoever they are; their web site is no help) -- comes a reprint of Paul Di Filippo's oddball 2003 novel Fuzzy Dice (originally published by Byron Preiss's ibooks). It's a bizarre dimension-hopping adventure about a man who gets access to infinite worlds to fulfill any wish he has -- but, as always, wishes cause more trouble than expected.

Also from Fantastic is an original collection of stories by Trent Zelazny, The Day the Leash Gave Way and Other Stories. Leash collects twenty-four horror/dark fantasy stories originally published over the past decades in House of Pain, Psrhea Magazine, Deviant Minds, Shadow of the Marquis, The Swamp, Horrorfind and a number of other places I've never heard of. (Which means nothing; I'm entirely innocent of the dark fantasy small-press scene, so I don't know if these are the most prestigious outlets or not.) Zelazny is the son of Roger Zelazny -- and, according to the flap copy, named his own son Corwin Random, which I can only tsk-tsk at; you need to give a kid at least one normal name, just in case.

Book-A-Day 2010 # 165 (7/18) -- Obsolete by Anna Jane Grossman

Comments about the pace of change over the past century -- or half-century, or generation, or decade, or presidential administration, or TV season -- being ever quicker and quicker have been cliches for nearly as long as the period of time they're talking about, and have nearly lost all informational content in the process, becoming almost as bland and meaningless as "hot in here, isn't it?" It's still possible to wring some interest out of the flickering parade of ever-changing stuff, but the focus needs to be on specifics.

Luckily, Anna Jane Grossman is entirely specific in Obsolete, an alphabetically-organized collection of things she considers gone and forgotten -- and I'll get back to her sometimes parochial idea of what's obsolete later -- from "Adult Book Stores" to "Writing Letters," with stops along the way at "Boom Boxes," "Landlines," "Getting Lost," and "Doing Nothing at Work." Some of the entries have only a quick, arch paragraph about the lost concept or object, written as if we've never heard of it, but a third to a fourth of them have longer, discursive entries -- short essays about what that thing meant to society, or to Grossman herself, or (sometimes) to another person that I suspect she reported on for some other gig and is repurposing here.

Obsolete leaps from superseded technology -- Manual Typewriters, Polaroids, Rolodexes, Video Stores, Blackboards, CDs, Dial-Up Modems -- to social concepts -- Hyphenated Last Names, Men Treating, Miss (and Mrs.), Eating for Pleasure, Secretaries, Traditional Names -- to things that many of us would be surprised to discover Grossman has wished into the cornfield -- Aging, Bald Spots, Body Hair, Cash, Comb-Overs (it's remarkable how many of these have to do with hair, by the way -- one can make wild surmises about Grossman's social circle, if one is so inclined), Getting Lost, Landfills, Mail, Meetings, and Privacy. Since everything is organized alphabetically, and since Grossman has a quirky sense of what's obsolete -- one begins to suspect that she's willing to consider something gone if she can think of something pithy, humorous, or thought-provoking to say about it, and can argue that it's less prevalent among people she knows than it used to be at some arbitrary past date -- Obsolete is never boring, though a reader may find himself moving rapidly from "Oh, I remember that" to "everyone in my neighborhood still does that" to "say what?" as he turns the pages.

It's an amusing book to poke through, though it does end up feeling much too narrowly focused on things that youngish urban women used to notice when they were even younger, and now don't see as often, rather than diving into really obsolete things, like telegraphs, key parties, phonebooth stuffing, and the original kind of computer dating. There's a slightly lost opportunity there -- or, to look on the bright side, there's now ample scope for Grossman to write a sequel, with even more obscure and forgotten social customs, pastimes, and gadgets. Obsolete is a lot of fun as long as you don't take it too seriously.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index
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Listening to: Bettie Serveert - Deny All
via FoxyTunes

Book-A-Day 2010 # 164 (7/17) -- Hellboy, Vol. 10 by Mignola, Corben, and Others

I've already covered four Hellboy-iverse books from Mike Mignola and his merry crew just in this stretch of Book-A-Day -- B.P.R.D., Vol. 11, Hellboy, Vol. 9, B.P.R.D., Vol. 12, and Sir Edward Grey, Witchfinder -- not to mention the books that I reviewed earlier, either here or at ComicMix. (Links heading backwards into that thicket are available by tracking backward through the links in the previous sentence.) And I don't want to turn into one of those bloggers who writes about how awesome the twenty-four page story fragment of Batman was this week -- there are too many of those on the Internet already. So I want to be brief here, and not too laudatory about something I've already made it clear that I like.

On top of that, this trade paperback primarily reprints the Mignola-scripted and Richard Corben-drawn The Crooked Man miniseries, which was an Eisner nominee for Best Limited Series last year -- when I was one of the judges that voted for it in that category. (The voters -- of whom I wasn't one -- gave it the award, as well.) So you might reasonably assume that I think this is a pretty good story -- especially so if I've ever mentioned here how I've never quite warmed up to Corben's overly fleshy art.

I liked Corben's art here more than anything else I've seen of his -- I think I like Dave Stewart's colors better than when Corben did them himself, or maybe I'm just getting more tolerant and open-minded in my old age -- but what really makes Crooked Man for me is Mignola's folklore-steeped story of witches, curses, the Devil, and redemption in the Appalachians. Which still has room for Hellboy to range through, cursing and smoking and punching things, of course.

Also in this book is an introduction by Gahan Wilson; "They That Go Down to the Sea in Ships," a story co-written by Josh Dysart and illustrated by Jason Shawn Alexander in which Blackbeard's head is reunited with his body; "In the Chapel of Moloch," one of the few all-Mignola stories from movie-frenzied mid-aughts, about a sculptor and his muse; "The Mole," a short nightmare illustrated by Duncan Fegredo; and a short section at the end with sketchbook pages and covers.

Hellboy is what it is: I think it's one of the great adventure comics of our time, with a hero that can be both pulpy and touching, and a scope that includes everything from several kinds of Lovecraftian horrors to more subtle and folkloric monsters. I'd love to see Mignola spend some time doing more Hellboy short stories; I find his best work is those short, atmospheric pieces jumping off from specific folktales. But all of the kinds of Hellboy stories are good comics, and I hope to keep seeing them for a long time.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index
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Listening to: The Builders And The Butchers - Devil Town
via FoxyTunes

Book-A-Day 2010 # 163 (7/16) -- BodyWorld by Dash Shaw

Dash Shaw's work is incredibly, intensely structured, full of complicated schematics and mechanisms to guide the reader through the world of the story (or, perhaps, originally to help Shaw organize that story to begin with) -- which belies his often loose and simplified drawings. (He's also fond of very comic-booky alliterative names that call attention to themselves and underline the fictionality of his stories -- he often doesn't seem to want his readers to forget that they're reading a made-up story.) He's also been fond of complicated science-fictional premises in his short stories -- like "Look Forward, First Son of Terra Two," "Satellite CMYK" and "The Galactic Funnels" -- but his first major graphic novel, Bottomless Belly Button, was an entirely mundane story of a contemporary family dealing with divorce.

BodyWorld is Shaw's follow-up to Bottomless, and it's just as carefully structured and organized as its predecessor -- there are fold-out grid maps of the town of Boney Borough tucked into the endpapers (looking like the campaign maps of some weird D&D group), backed with drawings of the major characters -- but the premise is as SFnal (as as pulpily unbelievable) as those short stories. It's 2050, and the US is about a generation into the aftermath of a second Civil War -- Shaw never explains what the war was fought about, or even who won -- as a freelance writer "professor" travels to the rural Virginia model town of Boney Borough to find and document a newly-discovered psychotropic plant for a major encyclopedia of hallucinogens.

The "Professor" -- Paulie Panther -- is jittery and intense, an addict perpetually coming down from something-or-other. The other three major characters have equally Shavian attention-demanding names: the science teacher Jem Jewel, homecoming king and "Dieball" player Billy-Bob Borg, and Billy's girlfriend and local wild child Pearl Peach. Boney Borough's claim to fame -- other than its offhandedly utopian ultra-planned-community origin; which Shaw mentions but doesn't make much use of -- is Dieball, something like basketball played outdoors with a giant D10. (And that detail doesn't help dispell the geeky air raised by the endpaper maps and the secondhand SFnal tropes -- Dieball doesn't make much sense as a game, in the same way that the maps don't function well as maps; both mimic the outward forms of usefulness, and show the results of energy and effort, but don't quite gel.)

The drug Panther came to investigate turns out to amplify empathy intensely -- to turn the user into a telepathic receiver for the urges and unconscious thoughts and feelings of whoever is closest. (As Panther badly explains it to Peach, "My theory is that the plant allows my body to "read" someone's bodymind in stages" -- though, the first time he used it, he very quickly was getting Jewel's conscious thoughts and was mimicking her actions -- so his folderol about "bodymind" is at best misleading.) Panther is an addict and a drug connoisseur, so he experiments with the drug, in the half-assed but intensely focused way of the addict, and he uses it with all of the other main characters: Jewel, Borg, and Peach.

The merging of "bodyminds" allows Shaw to draw fantastic overlapping scenes -- of past and present, of several people's perceptions, of minds merging and separating. He's less in control of the story, though, which spins out in pulpy directions more suitable to a paranoid thriller or '40s SF. The source of the plant, and its purpose, aren't even as up-to-date in SF terms as early Philip K. Dick -- there are a dozen prose writers who did more interesting things with similar themes fifty years ago, so it's difficult to see the last third of BodyWorld as anything less than a lost story opportunity...though this also the section where Shaw's carefully-constructed art comes into its glory, with multiply overlapping frames of reference rising to a big confrontation that Shaw keeps chaotic and fluid, just this side of incomprehensibility.

BodyWorld isn't as successful as Bottomless Belly Button was, because Shaw's less in control of the story and thematic material, and because his weakness for the pulpier side of SF leads him away from the subtleties that his art would otherwise lead him toward. But it's still an impressive second (graphic) novel, and it's great to see Shaw stretching himself and finding new, unique stories for his odd-faced, drippily sweaty, lumpy figures.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index
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Listening to: Voxtrot - The Future Part 1
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Book-A-Day 2010 # 162 (7/15) -- Bookhunter by Jason Shiga

How much did I like Jason Shiga's Meanwhile (Book-A-Day # 154, for those of you who have forgotten)?

So much that the next time I was in a comics shop, I found and snagged this book, which I'd vaguely been looking for over the past few years. (It was published in 2007, by Spark Plug Comic Books, and I'm amazed that a random comics store in North Jersey had it three years later.)

Bookhunter is a story torn from the files of the most hard-bitten, devoted, and resourceful of all police forces -- the Oakland, California Library Police, in 1973. Special Agent Bay leads a team of experts to crack the case of a stolen book -- a Caxton Bible that once belonged to John Quincy Adams and is now on loan from the Library of Congress, but has somehow been replaced with a forgery. The Caxton was kept at night in a locked safe inside a locked office in the locked library -- and the display case when it resides by day would be even more difficult to break into.

But stolen it was, and now Bay and his experts must track down the few clues they have -- the bookbinder who created the fake, a forged library card, and hacked patron records. Using their fabulously high-tech equipment -- well, high-tech for 1973, which is the point -- they find the culprit, though not before engaging in the usual action-movie chase scenes through the library and across rooftops.

Bookhunter is sneakily funny in the way it takes standard thriller tropes and straight-facedly applies them to '70s library science, but it also plays completely fair; Shiga isn't winking at his readers, he's trying to show that stolen bibles and 75-baud modems and microfiche and kettle stitches can be just as exciting as Glocks and nuclear devices and flying cars. (He also was inspired -- very loosely so, of course -- by actual cases of book theft.) It's all presented in Shiga's simplified, Simpsons-esque drawing style, in a muddy palette of grayish browns and beiges.

Bookhunter will be a hoot to anyone who loves books, and likely a favorite of anyone who's ever worked in a library and dreamed of being able to just bust a cap on those guys who try to sneak books out under their coats.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index
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Listening to: ShellShag - Resiliant Bastard
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Book-A-Day 2010 # 161 (7/14) -- We Are Paper Toys! by Louis Bou

Every artistic movement goes in unlikely directions if it lasts long enough; that's one of the endearing things that keep the rest of us from completely ignoring artists altogether. And the artisanal plastic toys boom of the last decade -- I don't know what else to call it; that proliferation of toys driven by increased efficiency in short-run production and the near-ubiquity of decent computerized design tools -- has collided with the free-cheap-and-fast ethos of the Creative Commons web to make an overlapping boom in paper toys.

These toys are sometimes sold as kits, but more often are free -- made as downloadable patterns that only cost end-users their time, glue, paper and printer ink. Like every other web-inspired activity, there are forums and superstars and enthusiasm (and, I'm sure, also feuds and in-jokes and drama). And now there's also a book.

We Are Paper Toys! contains photographs of at least a hundred of these toys, organized by the thirty-two designers who participated. (As far as I can tell -- I have to admit that I don't know the paper-toy scene at all, since I have a printer with lousy color and fingers unsuited to fiddly little cutting and pasting work -- these are most if not all of the major names in the field.) The photographs are excellent, the art direction is fine, the book is well-designed and laid out on nice solid white pages, and the toys themselves are inspiringly diverse and exciting.

There's also a CD-ROM included, with PDF patterns for several dozen of the toys included. (Patterns are printed on the pages for a number of the toys, but the CD-ROM has much more, and is much easier to use.)

So We Are Paper Toys! is a neat coffee-table book, very suitable for picking up and leafing through at random, with lots of fun and exciting designs -- many of which imply heavily that the average paper-toy designer is still very young, which is no bad thing -- and a very usable do-it-yourself component for people more adventurous than me. As the subtitle promises, this is indeed "Print Cut Fold Glue Fun!"
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index
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Listening to: Richard McGraw - Hurting Heart
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Becoming Synonomous With Something Indescribable

So all of the cool kids are spending the day checking out who they write like, and I guess I'm just a sheep, because I did it, too.

Only I have a suspicion that the algorithm just looks for specific trigger words, because my post on a nonfiction book about P.W. Wodehouse was like...

I write like
P. G. Wodehouse

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

and a grab of the entire Antick Musings home page is like...

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

and my most popular post ever, "On Being Skipped," is like...

I write like
Isaac Asimov

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

One begins to suspect this is random, but it's amusing enough for a couple of minutes. (I also got Dan Brown somewhere in the middle there, but I forget what piece of my writing was that horrible.)