Book-A-Day 2010 # 179 (8/1) -- Tokyo Days, Bangkok Nights by Vankin Fisher Camuncoli Martinbrough

I felt like presenting the author credits in the title as if they were a law firm -- since so many comics credits feel that way, particularly with the long list of random suits in the front matter of corporate comics collections -- but, to be nice, I'll untangle them before there's any confusion. Tokyo Days, Bangkok Nights collects two "Vertigo Pop" miniseries, part of one of DC Comics's many aborted efforts to start a new line doing something-or-other, though this one was even vaguer and died even faster than most. Both series -- which have only thematic connections -- were written by Jonathan Vankin, with art for Tokyo provided by Seth Fisher and the drawing side of Bangkok from the team of Giuseppe Camuncoli and Shawn Martinbrough.

These are both stories about Americans -- not fully Ugly, but definitely with some warts and deformities -- journeying to The Mysterious East, and being stymied by the fact that They Do Things Differently Here. In other words, they're both piles of hoary cliches -- Bangkok even more than Tokyo, since the former seems to want to be the happy-ending version of Chinatown, while the latter is happy just to be manic and goofy -- that were old when Rudyard Kipling bent them to his use.

To be more specific, Tokyo follows the adventures of Steve, a blonde naif of an American who moved to Tokyo -- despite the fact that he speaks no Japanese, even after six months, nor does he have any kind of a job -- because he likes gadgets, and the Japanese have more gadgets than anyone else. (Pay attention to that, because it's all that's going to pass for character development for ol' Steverino.) He accidentally runs into a local schoolgirl who wants to use him to practice her English, which snowballs into a one-damn-thing-after-another plot, gathering up cosplayers, an idol band, both incompetent and competent yakuza gangsters, and several kitchen sinks as it rolls along. It's never quite as silly as it seems it should be, but Fisher's very cartoony (and utterly noseless) art holds up its side of the goofball derby very well.

Bangkok is more "serious," in the usual Vertigo style -- an American couple (he: minor actor Marshall, her: vaguely feminist Tuesday) go on vacation in Bangkok to fix their relationship. Neither of them have any reason to want to go to the sex-tourism capital of the world, but, of course, they do get caught up in the plight of two young women from a rural village, held in a Bangkok brothel against their will by the usual gangster. Add a cut-price elephant, an obsessed American man who does travel to Bangkok for what it's world-famous for, his only very slightly less morally repellent British friend, and a lot of dialogue that substitutes attitude (of several different kinds) for meaning, and you have an unpleasant broth that seems to come down with a moral of "you just can't stop Those People from sexually enslaving their hot poor women, so you might as well just enjoy it." (I seriously hope that wasn't what Vankin intended to express, but it's the message that does come across.)

So, together, it's two big slabs of Oh, Those Inscrutable Orientals! That may not have been why Vertigo Pop ended after these two series, but it's a good enough reason to be happy it did. Now the only question is: why did these two failed series from 2002-03 got a combined trade paperback in 2009?
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Read in July

It's been pretty damn hot this past month, so I haven't felt like spending any more time in the basement in front of the computer than I had to. So I suspect several of the reviews below are somewhat half-assed, and I apologize for that. (On the other hand, at this time last year, I think I'd read a dozen or two books that I hadn't written about, so there's always something wrong.)

Since Book-A-Day keeps rolling along, all you'll find below are links; this is basically just an index. And there's no reason for me not to get right into it:

• Matt Wagner, Grendel: Behold the Devil (7/1)
• William Poundstone, Priceless (7/1)
  
• Jason Shiga, Meanwhile (7/2)
  
• Darby Conley, Treasury of the Lost Litter Box (7/2)
  
• Guido Crepax, The Story of O (7/3)
  
• Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms (7/3)
  
• Dash Shaw, BodyWorld (7/5)
  
• Gahan Wilson, Fifty Years of Playboy Cartoons, Book One: 1957-1973 (7/5)
  
• Jason Shiga, Bookhunter (7/6)
  
• Herbert Warren Wing, The World of P.G. Wodehouse (7/6)
  
• Gahan Wilson, Fifty Years of Playboy Cartoons, Book Two: 1974-1993 (7/6)
  
• Mike Mignola & various, Hellboy, Vol. 10: The Crooked Man & Others (7/7)
  
• Louis Bou, We Are Paper Toys! (7/8)
  
• Anna Jane Grossman, Obsolete (7/8)
  
• Ross Campbell, Wet Moon, Book 4: Drowned in Evil (7/9)
  
• Charles M. Schulz, The Complete Peanuts, 1973 to 1974 (7/10)
  
• Jerry Holkins & Mike Krahulik, Penny Arcade, Vol. 6: The Halls Below (7/12)
  
• Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa & Mike Perkins, Stephen King's The Stand: Soul Survivors (7/13)
  
• Kazu Kibuishi, editor, Flight, Vol. 7 (7/14)
  
• Mark Millar & John Romita, Jr., Kick-Ass (7/15)
  
• Alex Robinson, Tricked (7/16)
  
• Tove Jansson, Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, Vol. 4 (7/19)
  
• Matt Wagner, John K. Snyder III, Jay Geldhof, Bernie Mireault, & Tim Sale, Grendel: God and the Devil (7/20)
  
• Jonathan Strahan & Lou Anders, editors, Swords & Dark Magic (7/20)
  
• Matt Kindt, 2 Sisters (7/21)
  
• various, The Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Vol. 11 (7/22)
  
• Jonathan Vankin & several artists, Tokyo Days, Bangkok Nights (7/23)
  
• Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour (7/25)
  
• Jules Feiffer, Backing Into Forward (7/25)
  
• Isuna Hasekura, Keito Koume, & Jyuu Ayakura, Spice & Wolf, Vol. 1 (7/26)
  
• Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (7/28)
  
• Jason Thompson & Victor Hao, King of RPGs, Vol. 1 (7/29)
  
• Gahan Wilson, Fifty Years of Playboy Cartoons, Book Three: 1994-2008 (7/31)
  

And that was that.

Book-A-Day 2010 # 178 (7/31) -– Spice & Wolf, Vol. 1 by Hasekura, Koume, & Ayakura

This is definitely getting old. I’m still (as I write this) in a hotel down in Maryland, for a conference, without Internet, elevators, or air conditioning. (It only got up into the low 90s today, which is what counts for good news.) Tomorrow the conference ends, and I think I’ll be driving back home in the evening instead of staying over and leaving in the morning, as originally planned. (Who would willingly stay an extra night in a hotel without air conditioning in DC in the summer?)

So I’m in a particularly foul mood tonight, which may alarm some of you when you recall reviews I’ve written on relatively sunny days. (Kick-Ass, anyone? I may have been slightly cruel there; there’s no reason to believe that Kick-Ass readers can’t be successfully reintegrated into society after an intensive regiment of electroconvulsive therapy.) But the book I read today – during downtime in the booth, which (thankfully) is in a facility that still has working AC – isn’t big or definitive enough to be worth an overwhelming response in either direction.

Spice & Wolf began as a series of light novels – they’re just like regular novels, only with fewer calories words – by Isuna Hasekura, but, in the usual Japanese dominate-all-media fashion of successful properties, quickly spread into other media. What I read is the first in a series of manga volumes, written by series creator Hasekura, with art by Keito Koume from character designs by Jyuu Ayakura. (That last detail makes me suspect that there was an anime of some type in between light novel and manga, but I can’t check that – as I noted above, I have no Internet access as I type this.) Spice & Wolf, at least in this incarnation, is a mercantile fantasy that so far isn’t making much use of its fantasy element, preferring to veer strongly in the direction of mercantilism (to the point of wonkiness, actually).

Kraft Lawrence is an itinerant merchant – the kind beloved in fiction of several genres, seen as the “tramp starship captain” or, as here, a guy with a cart, a horse, and a load of stuff he’ll sell in the next village to buy more stuff, ad infinitum – in a vaguely medieval world, who comes to the small farming town of Pasloe during their harvest festival. Their local harvest god – called a “god” throughout, though her current form is definitely female, as proven by the many pages where Koume draws her nude – is Holo the Wisewolf, and he/she has decided that it’s time to move on – the fields are as fecund as they’ll ever be, and her continued presence won’t add anything. So she – I’ll call Holo “she” from here on, to reduce confusion – hops into Lawrence’s load of grain, leading to the inevitable meet-(nude-and-)cute.

There’s an unspecified (but vaguely Catholic and mildly repressive) “Church” in the background of this unnamed world, which would disapprove of Holo if it knew of her, but Lawrence is enough of a man of the world that finding a naked, wolf-tailed and –eared girl in his wagon at night just leads him to quizzically talk to her until he agrees to let her travel with him back to her ancestral home far to the north. In return, Holo (eventually) declares that she will use her age-old wisdom and feminine wiles – not necessarily in those terms, mind you – to make Lawrence’s deals more profitable to him than they would be out of his own efforts.

And that leads to the pulse-pounding mercantilism of the main plot, as Lawrence is recruited into a scheme – he’s told – to profit from the upcoming secret plan for a nearby nation to increase the weight of silver in their silver coins, as part of a moderately complicated currency arbitrage gambit. Holo has the ability to tell if someone is lying, though – not infallibly, and not to tell what is the truth – and notes that Lawrence’s contact, Zheren, is lying about something.

After several long speeches about various mercantile topics – buying cheap and selling dear, currency exchange rates, the attractiveness of several sorts of cargoes – this volume of Spice & Wolf bounces to an end without finishing up the current plot. But that’s OK; no one expects a manga to finish even its introductory story in only two hundred pages.

Holo is a pleasant example of that manga staple, the spunky girl who Is Vastly More That She Seems, even if Lawrence is little more than a dry stick that gives plausible speeches about economics. It’s pretty pedestrian for a book that comes shrinkwrapped with a “mature readers” label – the latter is purely because Holo prances around naked for several pages at a time in most of the chapters here, though it’s entirely non-sexual nudity – and I suspect that most of the readers who are attracted to shrink-wrapped manga will be disappointed to find Spice & Wolf’s full-page explanation of how to profit from changing weights in silver coinage. To an American eye, this series is an unlikely mix of the generic (spunky goddess-girl, traveling trader hero) and the idiosyncratically unique (currency arbitrage, extended negotiation sequences about the scent of apples), but I bet Japan’s large and diverse ecology of manga has built an entire micro-climate of books much like this. It’s just weird enough to be worth reading, even given the familiar elements, and I have to admit that I wonder if it will turn into a deal-of-the-volume series, with Holo and Lawrence bootstrapping their load of pelts into silver coins, and then into fine timber, or into rice cakes, or foreign jewelry, or something even more unlikely, on their way north to the city that Holo doesn’t know ended several centuries ago. Or maybe something else unexpected will happen in the next volume; I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 177 (7/30): Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour by Bryan Lee O’Malley

I’m writing this into a Word file, in a half-dark hotel room slowly getting warmer, with no Internet access, intending to copy it into a blog post some time in the near future. You’re reading this – assuming you are at all – close to a week later.

A lightning strike, or downed tree, or something, cut power to this side of the street of National Harbor, Maryland – the mall that walks like a mixed-use development – early this afternoon, and it still hasn’t been fixed seven hours later. Hence the darkness, the warmth, the lack of phone and TV and Internet – there’s a generator somewhere, but it only provides emergency power. If it doesn’t get fixed soon, we’re all in for a hot, sweaty night.

Such are the joys of accounting conferences. [1]

But even when I can’t connect, Book-A-Day rumbles forward – partially because I’m five days ahead to begin with, and partially because the whole point of this stretch of Book-A-Day is to make me write, every single day, about a book I’ve read recently. (I may write well, or badly, say stupid or obvious or profound things; that doesn’t matter as much. I’d prefer to write well and be profound, obviously, but this is an essentially journalistic exercise – to bang out copy again and again, like punching a heavy bag, to build up that muscle and fix the habit.)

This afternoon, when the room was about ten degrees cooler and I could still hear the ducts rattle occasionally, I sat with the sun streaming through the windows and read the sixth and final volume of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s “Scott Pilgrim” saga – the one in which Scott kinda looks like a girl on the cover (despite his Power of Love sword also looking like a portion of his external genitalia) – and it made me laugh and cheer and smirk and smile, several times over. It’s not perfect – in some ways, I’m not sure if it’s as strong and unified as the better earlier books in the series – but it has some great scenes, and more of O’Malley’s patented precise and perfect video-game references, and an ending that doesn’t promise too much for the romance of two twentysomethings but is still hopeful and romantic and transcendent in a way that turns the whole series into one rising arc.

Scott Pilgrim is still young, still brash, and still tends to forget every inconvenient fact or action in his past – but he’s less so as he goes along, his friends are continuing to call him on his flaws, and he’s getting better at the little details of being an adult. (Once again, the most exciting, special thing about the Scott Pilgrim books is the way O’Malley has channeled the standard shonen fighting-and-growing-up plot through 8-bit video games into a caricatured but recognizable story about real young people in real relationships.) Finest Hour starts out a bit slowly, as does Scott himself in most situations – he has to wander around and mope for a while before he can get down to doing what he really needs to do.

O’Malley works a complicated juggling act here – telling a story that seems to be all surfaces and secondhand action, while actually weaving complicated references (both to a shared culture of video games, and backward and foreword in this story) and using the fake-matter-of-fact video-game captions to both move forward the action and ironically comment on it. Most of all, his characters are real twentysomethings – confused, passionate, itching to do something but rarely sure about what. And, of course, there’s a big Kung Fu sword fight for the climax, with characters leveling up and fighting the real-world equivalent of the End Boss: their own doubts, fears, and pasts.

Or, to put it another way: all your base are belong to it.

[1] It’s not that bad; I have music playing – from my iPod through the clock radio – and a bottle of Redbridge – an actually non-sucky beer from the vast satanic mills of Anheuser-Busch – beside me to keep me cool. But it’s more fun to pretend to be tormented.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Quote of the Week: What Doesn't Kill You?

"What I was learning about fear, on a trial-and-error basis, was that instead of backing away from it, in which case you might back up all the way to the womb (dear God, no!), if you turned and headed right for what most scared you, it would more than likely turn out to be not that big a deal. Or you could get killed. This was not an exact science."
- Jules Feiffer, Backing Into Forward, p. 138

Incoming Books: 29 July

I'm recovering at home today from a trip to lovely National Harbor earlier in the week -- short reason: that storm on Sunday cut off power to my hotel for most of the trip -- and what's more relaxing than going to a book store? So I found my way to the Montclair Book Center this afternoon and grabbed a few things:

Songs for the Missing, Stewart O'Nan's 2008 novel. His books are emotionally draining, so I'm not working my way through his backlist as quickly as I thought I would, but he's such a damn good writer that I want to give him whatever support I can.

Simon Rich's second collection of short humorous essays, Free-Range Chickens. I read and liked Ant Farm when I found that randomly at the library three years ago, and I've seen some of his work in The New Yorker as well.

I'm with Stupid, a humorous book on the battle of the sexes by Gene Weingarten and Gina Barreca from most of a decade ago -- I know I heard somewhere that this was funny, and I guess now I'll find out for myself.

Elsewhere, U.S.A., a look at the changing face of American family and work life over the last generation, by sociologist Dalton Conley. I guess I was feeling serious when I saw this on the shelf.

Martin Amis's new novel The Pregnant Widow. I guess I am still buying Amis's books in hardcover -- I got into the habit around The Information, and haven't shifted yet -- even though several of them have been serious disappointments. (I still haven't read Yellow Dog, for example, and word is that I haven't missed much.) This one has gotten decent reviews, so I'm cautiously optimistic -- though there's a good chance it will sit next to Yellow Dog, equally unread.

Speed Bump, which seems to be the first collection of the single-panel daily strip by Dave Coverly. (If it makes any sense to say "single-panel" and "strip" in the same phrase.) It's from 2004, so I'm very late in stumbling over it.

Entirely random, I know. Once again, I was mostly looking for Mieville's Kraken and didn't find it.

Book-A-Day 2010 # 176 (7/29) -- 2 Sisters by Matt Kindt

Titles can explain a lot about a work...or they can be misleading. Take, for example, 2 Sisters, which was Matt Kindt's warm-up graphic novel for Super Spy, telling a few entwined stories related to WWII espionage as Super Spy would later tell a tangled, twisted web of stories in the same milieu. (I reviewed Super Spy, a couple of years back, for ComicMix.)

2 Sisters does primarily tell the story of two women, and one of them, Elle, does have a sister, Anna. But the other woman 2 Sisters follows is not her sister -- though there is a resemblance -- but a nameless woman a few hundred years before, who becomes a pirate when the ship she's traveling on is attacked. But, perhaps, in deeper ways, these two women are like sisters -- in the ways that they're both manipulated and used by men, both surviving alone and by their wits in a hostile world, both strong and self-reliant enough to change themselves to survive and make it out to the other end.

Elle comes to London as a young orphan, and gets a job driving an ambulance. She meets a young man, starts to fall for him -- and then sees him killed by a German bomb. Soon afterward, she's recruited as an "operative" for some branch of British Intelligence, to work behind enemy lines, passing messages and performing the occasional murder. Elle joins up, perhaps because she doesn't have much choice, or perhaps to do her bit for the war effort, or perhaps just to do something.

The other woman goes through her own travails -- wordlessly, without explanations or filters -- as most of 2 Sisters is told with only passing dialogue and no narration, letting the events stand for themselves. Kindt's raw, blocky style works well with this kind of stark storytelling, and he uses a lot of pages to tell this particular story -- nearly 350 of them, spanning centuries and continents but always circling around WWII and the life of Elle and her sister.

That lack of explanations leaves the reader a lot of ground to fill in himself, to work out the details and fit together the pieces of the puzzle (as a real spy does, of course) -- and that's deeply appropriate for 2 Sisters. For a book of this physical size and heft, it tells a remarkably quick, tight, personal story, of two different women each going through their own trials to come out the end, not unchanged but still themselves.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 175 (7/28) -- Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Vol. 11

Back in the '90s, when I was the one buying comics for the SF Book Club, I only very rarely abused my position. (Every reviewer or reprinter knows about those abuses -- there's something you really want personally, so you pretend that you want it professionally, and then it wanders home with you before too long.) In fact, the only thing I can remember blatantly asking for that had no chance of getting into the club -- and I think I made that clear, after the first volume -- were the first ten DC Archives editions reprinting the early years of the Legion of Super-Heroes comic.

I hadn't entirely soured on superheroics then -- and it didn't hurt that the Legion had just come off a great series of runs, from the Paul Levitz/Keith Giffen era in the '80s through the Birnbaums in the early '90s, which I'd read partially at the time and partially in retrospect -- so I would eat up the Archives volumes, which reprinted much sillier templated superheroics from a much simpler era. (I also suspect there's some crossover between Legion fans and readers of big fat fantasy, in a common love for sheer volume of characters, complications, and coincidence.)

In any case: I knew that the Legion stories of the '60s and early '70s were more fun than good, but I was happy enough to read them. Eventually, though, things changed: I wasn't buying comics anymore, and my main contact at DC moved on to other things. DC published two more Archives, and I bought one of them (this one, Vol. 11) but never bothered to get Vol. 12. And as I wandered away from contemporary superheroics -- it didn't help that the Legion was aggressively rebooted and dumbed down several times in this period -- so Vol. 11 slipped lower and lower in the piles of books that I planned to read "someday."

But then Book-A-Day came, and I dug deeper in those stacks -- that's one of the reasons I do this; to make myself read the books that pile up -- and so I finally got to the collected Legion stories from July 1974 to October 1975. They're still silly stories, though, at this point, the Legion was in the middle of a string of stories sexing them up (and making them more popular along the way) with a lot of peekaboo costumes for the female characters and more explicit stories about dating and heartbreak among these teenage crime-fighters.

These are mostly stories written by Cary Bates, with a few seeing Jim Shooter return to the Legion, and they're as overwritten and wordy as the Legion ever was, particularly since many of these issues had two shorter stories, meaning even more plot and dialogue had to be crammed in. On the art side, these are all from a young Mike Grell, who had a pretty strong dynamic post-Neal Adams style at this point (though he got even better later on).

This kind of thing is either a guilty pleasure or pure nostalgia; I didn't read anything like this as a kid, so it was entirely the former for me. Until Levitz turned them into actual human beings, a few years later, Legion stories are interesting in the way DC Silver Age stories are: they're big, and garish, and strange, more like fever dreams than reports of events that could have ever happened to real people.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 174 (7/27) -- Grendel: God and the Devil by Wagner and various artists

More than twenty years ago, when I read God and the Devil as issues 23-33 of the Comico color Grendel run, I thought it was an excellent, gripping, story about a believable, textured future with a lot of exciting "action." This time through, I found it slick but obvious, with a buffoonish Catholic Church both run by a vampire and featuring Elvis as a Saint (either one of which would be enough to swallow), and featuring incredibly overwrought and unnecessary narration.

So either I was an idiot then or now; I'll leave that question open.

This was only the second "big" Grendel series, after the Christine Spar story ("Devil's Legacy") and a bunch of shorter pieces. This time out, writer and Grendel creator Matt Wagner shifted the focus away from the person possessed by Grendel -- Eppy Thatcher, a secretly brilliant assembly-line worker addicted to a very convenient drug and who has equally convenient genius-level tinkering abilities, whose characterization is limited to being a tormented drug addict who repeatedly gloats that God hates him -- to the society around him. Unfortunately, Wagner isn't subtle about any of his background, tossing in vampire popes, torture-happy nuns, smirking corporate government officials, and the maniacally cackling Eppy, who wanders in and out at random to provide Grendelian anarchy as needed. His real hero, Orion Assante, is also pretty blandly comic-booky in this story, out to audit or rein in or topple the power of the Church and otherwise without a lot of personality. (Though he does have an incestuous relationship with his twin sisters to spice him up)

If the original Grendel, Hunter Rose, was something like an attempt to do "evil Batman," the later stretches of the Grendel timeline are like the result of playing an iterative game of "and then what's the worst thing that could happen?" with the world, salted with a slightly more "real-world" version of DC's old Crime Syndicate Earth-3.

The various dystopic elements of this world -- a libertarian-ish independent police force, those corporate governments, the evil Catholic Church, the supposedly ecologically-ravaged planet -- don't come together all that well, with each of them remaining a separate flavor in the Grendel gumbo. But it is a big, complex world, filled with odd things -- Wagner avoided most of the major mistakes of similar SF, though his 26th century is stereotypically obsessed with our own times, as usual.

The art is energetic, moving the story ahead well (even weighed down by all those narration boxes). But the style bounces around, as a "chapter zero" by Tim Sale gives way to a main story told by John K. Snyder III, Jay Geldhof, and Bernie Mireault -- each a distinctive and interesting artist, but quite different from each other -- in some kind of unspecified rotation; each artist seems to be inking himself, but the book doesn't say who did what. (Some sections are clearly Snyder and others are equally obviously Mireault; it's harder for me to say what was Geldhof, unless he's just the remainder.)

The story putters along, as the evil Pope schemes, Eppy-Grendel capers, Orion investigates, and other background stuff does its thing as well, for about three hundred pages. There really isn't an overall structure here; each of the original issues has some events that mostly hold to the Aristotelian unities, but they just stack up next to each other until the last issue sees the giant climactic battle between the forces of vampire-pope, another band of vampires, Orion's conjured-out-of-thin-air army, and Eppy, the least scary and dangerous Grendel. (Sure, he does kill people, but they mostly deserve it, and he mostly goes in for unpleasant pranks, not mass slaughter, like the other big Grendels.)

God and the Devil is a solid late-'80s adventure comic, following in the footsteps of American Flagg! and the earlier Grendel arcs to tell a story that audiences then thought was vastly different from Big Two superheroics -- though, at this distance, it looks like very much the same thing, and very much a precursor to the particular excesses of the early '90s.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 173 (7/26) -- Moomin, Vol. 4 by Tove Jansson

The artifacts of other people's childhoods can be disconcerting, particularly when they're presented in such a way as to attempt to evoke memories of one's own childhood; it's like biting down on a sandwich and finding only air.

Tove Jansson's "Moomin" stories were the stuff of many childhoods -- particularly those of mid-20th century kids in the UK and Scandinavia -- but they were not universally known, even in the Anglosphere. I'm over forty, and this book is my first direct experience of Jansson's work -- despite the existence of ten novels for children, the strips collected here, and a number of other objects. So my experience of these Moominstories are entirely unaffected by nostalgia, for good or bad -- I'm coming to them as an adult and a blank slate.

But these stories -- originally syndicated in newspaper strip-cartoon form in The London Evening News from 1953 to 1959 -- presumably attracted an adult audience back then, so being an adult shouldn't hurt anyone's appreciation of these stories. And the fact that this is the fourth of four volumes -- which fact is hidden on the outside of the book and only revealed, as if furtively, on the copyright and table of contents pages -- also shouldn't be a major issue, since a newspaper strip has to be based on the assumption that readers will drop in and out, willy-nilly, and that each strip must stand somewhat on its own.

That last assumption turns out not to be true: the Moomin strip was divided into discrete storylines (this volume collects five of them, each around 80 to 100 strips long), but individual strips don't always stand alone. In a reprint volume like this, that's an advantage, avoiding the stutter-step progress of so many strips that attempt to both tell a story that moves forward and bring new readers up to speed every single day, but it may have confused some readers in London back in the mid-50s. (Even if so, who cares about them?)

The main characters of Moomin are iconically standard: the young Moomintroll, driven by whatever fad or fancy takes him at the time; his more-or-less girlfriend, Snorkmaiden, typically "romantic" by the standards of young women of her era; the tinkering and occasionally self-improving Moominpapa; and the mostly colorless Moominmamma. A number of secondary characters parade through as well, who also mostly exhibit one major trait, in the standard way of stories for youngsters. (Think Winnie-the-Pooh, or Wind in the Willows, or what-have-you.)

And Jansson's stories are in that classic stories-for-youngsters mode, too: there's a lesson of some sort buried not too deeply in each of these stories. Luckily, Jansson's morals are rather less dour and Protestant than most of the classic books for children: "The Conscientious Moomins" is about finding the good life by slacking off, and "Moomin and the Golden Tail" has a similar message against fame and fortune -- mostly because it's uncomfortable and short-lived.

I found these Moomintales pleasant in a whimsical, old-fashioned bohemian way without entirely giving in to them -- but, again, I'm coming to them for the first time as a grown man, and a pretty grumpy, hard-hearted one as well. Anyone less curmudgeonly than me will likely find Jansson's work sweetly endearing, and her mid-century illustrator's line smooth and endlessly expressive.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 7/24

I'm in the middle of a string of weeks with very little mail -- possibly due to the usual publishing summer doldrums, possibly because the massed publicists have finally wised up and purged small blogs like mine from their lists -- which is just fine with me, since it means less time sitting in a hot basement, tapping away at this keyboard.

But below are two swell-looking books I did get this week, both from the fine First Second graphic novel imprint of Roaring Brook Press, a for-younger-readers division of the vast Holtzbrinck publishing conglomerate. I haven't yet read either of them -- so what I can tell you before is based mostly on looking at the covers and publicity letters -- but I do expect to read both of them withing the next month.

Brain Camp is the second graphic novel written by the team of Susan Kim (who has also worked as a playwright and scriptwriter for animated TV shows, such as Courage the Cowardly Dog) and Laurence Klavan (Edgar award-winning novelist and also a playwright), after the WWII homefront adventure City of Spies earlier this year. (I reviewed City of Spies here as Book-A-Day #78.) This time, the art is provided by Faith Erin Hicks, whose The War at Ellsmere I read during my Eisner comics-to-brain download weekend last year. Brain Camp is about two teenagers, a boy and a girl, who are separately sent to the strange and mysterious Camp Fielding to jump-start their academic achievement. Of course, Fielding is not what it seems to be at first -- how could it be, in a story like this? -- in a Stepfordian way, if I don't miss my guess. Brain Camp will be published in August, so it's likely already on its way to a store near you.

And then coming a month later, in September, is The Unsinkable Walker Bean, a new graphic novel by Aaron Renier, author of Spiral Bound. It's some kind of adventure story about a boy whose grandfather was cursed by a menacing skull -- I presume the glowing one on the cover, unless this book has two menacing skulls -- and has to set off on the high seas to set everything right. It looks weird and unique and roisterous, with can only be good -- and it has nice quotes from Lane Smith and Jeff Smith on the back cover.

Book-A-Day 2010 # 172 (7/25) -- Tricked by Alex Robinson

Alex Robinson doesn't get the acclaim he rightfully deserves -- he's got three substantial graphic novels behind him (Box Office Poison, this book, and Too Cool To Be Forgotten), all in a modern realistic vein, all strong fictional works, not sublimated or thinly veiled autobiography, all published mostly to the sounds of crickets. (Though Too Cool did win a Harvey award last year.)

Tricked is the middle Robinson book, midway in time and in length between Box Office Poison (serialized in the '90s and collected in 2001 at a whopping 600+ pages) and Too Cool (a slim 150ish pages, published in 2009). It's a substantial work -- about 350 pages -- and wasn't serialized; it's a real book, with a book's structure and solidity. (Robinson's never worked in commercial comics, so he hasn't been infected with the never-let-anything-end syndrome; he knows how to shape stories, and how to end them properly.)

To be glib about it, Tricked is the story of six people -- three good women, and three bad men:

• Ray, the rich rock star in his early 30s, coasting on his one big hit album from several years back and drifting aimlessly while he waits for inspiration (or his work ethic) to strike again
• Nick, the whitebread-looking suburban father and husband who works as a forger of sports memorabilia in a stripmall storefront for a possibly-criminally-connected boss, unbeknownst to his wife
• Phoebe, the teenager from somewhere in rural Texas, running off to the big city to find the father she's never known
• Steve, the badly socialized and fanatic IT support guy, who has just stopped taking his medication as the book opens, whose obsessions will gradually consume him
• Caprice, the waitress at the Little Piggy diner, who's just been dumped by her boyfriend
• and Lily, a young intern at Ray's record company, who he takes an immediate interest in when he sees her -- more so when she won't have sex with him in the limo.

Their stories start out separately -- except for Ray and Lily, of course, since that's the first connection -- and gradually come together, as Phoebe's father turns out to be one of the owners of the Little Piggy, and Steve becomes more obsessed with Ray, and other characters visit Nick's shop. They do all come together in the end, but, for most of the book, there's a Ray-and-Lily story, a Caprice-and-Phoebe combined story, and separate stories about Steve and Nick.

In the usual Robinson style, the stories are heavily narrated by the internal monologue of the characters, and we get to know them all well -- except Nick, who is essentially slippery, and who Robinson only sees from the outside. (In his story, Robinson also focuses entirely on his work at the shop -- the first two pages of his first story show his wife and baby, but they're not even mentioned again until the very end of the book, after all of the stories have collided.) The women have flaws, certainly, but they're all much better than unhinged Steve, lying Nick, or that smooth hedonist Ray. And that dangerous collision of all of the stories that forms the climax of Tricked is caused, one way or another, by the bad behavior of all three.

Tricked is a big book about small things -- trust, truth, understanding, and second chances. Ray's life is larger-than-life, but in a realistic way, and that's the only part of Tricked that isn't simply down-to-earth. It's a more integrated and controlled story than Robinson's first graphic novel, Box Office Poison, and more expansive and encompassing than his third, Too Cool to Be Forgotten. For now, this is his best work -- but a creator who can be this good three times in a row is likely to keep going, and perhaps get even better.

(I've previously reviewed Too Cool to Be Forgotten for ComicMix and Box Office Poison here.)
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Incoming Books: July 23rd & 24th

I hit a bookstore yesterday, and both a library and a comic book store today -- if I buy an e-book tomorrow, I'll have officially run the table this weekend. (But I don't expect that will happen.)

Borders sent me another coupon -- for 40% off this time -- so I wandered over to my local on the way home from work to see if they had a copy of Charles Stross's The Fuller Memorandum on hand -- and they did. It's the third "Laundry" files book -- after the highly excellent The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue -- which is my favorite work from one of the very best SF writers working today. So I'll be getting to this one quickly, I hope.

(And I love that cover -- it's so quintessentially Ace, in ways I can't entirely define. The fonts, the placement, the figure -- even with that almost Terry Pratchett-esque spectre of death, that's a deeply Ace-ian cover.)

While I was there, I checked to see if they had the brand-new (released at midnight on Tuesday) Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour -- the finale to the excellent graphic novel series by Bryan Lee O'Malley -- and was happy to note that Borders is still keeping up with their reputation as the stronger chain for manga/graphic novels. I also expect to be reading this really quickly.

At the comics shop, I got a couple of floppies for the boys and a Previews catalog. (For last month, I think, since the new one will be out any minute now.) It's a small store, mostly for undiscriminating young Big Two fans -- there's a sizable section of toys in the back, which I always think pegs the mental age of the customers of a store very well -- so I didn't see any of the books I was half-hoping to find there (Matt Kindt's Revolver and the new B.P.R.D., Jack of Fables, and Ex Machina collections).

And, as usual, I didn't find the one book I thought of looking for at the library -- China Mieville's Kraken, which I'll get on the reserve list for before long -- but I did run into three other books that I already knew I wanted to read. (And all of them were non-fiction, interestingly enough.)

First was Tom Bissell's Extra Lives, a book about video games that's been getting good review attention. (It's pro-games, which is unusual in book form.)

Then I bumped into Lynn Barber's memoir An Education, basis for the movie of the same name (which I saw a couple of months back). I'd almost bought it once or twice in a bookstore, so it was an easy choice to nab at the library.

And last was the new book by retail guru Paco Underhill, What Women Want. I'd liked his first two books -- Why We Buy and Call of the Mall -- which was enough for me to want to see if he had anything new to say this time out.

So, if you're wondering what I'll be reading for the next two weeks or so, add a few graphic novels (it's probably time for a string of manga, actually) to the above, and that's likely to be it.

Book-A-Day 2010 # 171 (7/24) -- Kick-Ass by Millar and Romita

There's an always-roiling debate among critics -- and the people who read them -- about sensitivity and tact, about how nice reviewers should be and how honest, and about whether one can, or does, or should always come to a book with a positive outlook. I often have sympathy toward the "reviews should be positive" viewpoint, since I've known a lot of writers and generally don't want to deliberately injure people I know.

But, on the other hand, a book is not its author. A book is a standalone artistic work, which (we all hope) will still be available to be appreciated and enjoyed and savored long after the author is dead. So the stakes are actually much higher than any consideration of the author's state of mind, and an artwork can never be flattered or offended or depressed. And it's stupid to think one must wait until an author is dead to say, for example, that Henry James was a horrible writer, able to make social minutiae endlessly dull and never capable of writing a medium-length convoluted sentence when there were three or four more unrelated clauses he could jam in there. The time to take aim at a bad book is when it first enters your sights, and to blast away with all the ammunition that the book's own flaws provide (though never more than that).

So critics do have to grapple with bad books, and face them squarely -- have to be willing to say, right out in public, that something is lousy. And sometimes those critics will deliberately read a work they're pretty sure is horrible, to give it a chance (however slight) and to know what it really is.

For example, right now: Kick-Ass is a piece of shit, a deeply conventional piece of superhero mythologizing in the currently fashionable pseudo-deconstructive mode that masquerades -- as that strain of dull superheroing generally does -- as a fresh and vibrant and transgressive look at the same old bullshit that it has swallowed whole. It's a carefully calibrated kiss-slap in the face of jaded superhero readers, bringing the relationship of the writer and the reader even closer to a true sado-masochistic scene than the big corporate characters have yet allowed, as writer Mark Millar in turn fawns over the puerile power fantasies of his readers and then stomps all over them with his high-heeded vinyl boots -- though, again, since this is a S&M relationship, he never hits to wound, but only to hurt, and only to keep the scene going until the reader slinks out of the dungeon, sated but too woefully un-selfconscious to feel bad about his filthy passion for boys in skintight suits.

Kick-Ass (the poisoned well that watered the recent stunted movie) is neither real -- as Millar and his defenders claim -- nor fantasy, as some detractors have argued. It's a decadent, self-conscious parody of both modes, coming so late in its genre that what should be parody can be played utterly straight and get roaring approval from the jaded herd. It's the story of yet another dope who wants to save the world -- or is it aggrandize himself? or perhaps push his sensation-jaded nerves to feel something new? or is it that Millar wants to feint in all those directions at once and not settle anywhere? -- and does so in a way that only makes sense in the context of a superhero comic book. There's a lot of violence, which is simultaneously too easy (for this dweeb to do, without knowledge or ability or training) and "realistically" bloodily dangerous...except that it's still pulp-novel violence, which either kills outright or is something that can be shaken off for a speedy return to full "fighting trim."

John Romita, Jr. draws it all in a crisp, easily readable mainstream style -- he's done much better work than this (though Millar has not), and will undoubtedly get to illustrate stories that aren't self-servingly wretched in the future once again. But Kick-Ass is the apotheosis of the modern violence- and realism-obsessed superhero comic; if you want to be able to continue reading them without instinctively flinching, I recommend either avoiding Kick-Ass or reading it with only cursory and transitory attention. Luckily, the kind of person who seeks out Kick-Ass for pleasure is incapable of reading any other way.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Top 45 With a Bullet

I have to admit that I've entirely lost track of the awards and accolades that groups on the web give out to each other...but I don't think the one that I just won is generally considered massively important. (But do I care? I do not, since I'm always happy to accept a sliver of egoboo.)

Awarding the Web -- of whom I have not previously heard -- and OnlinePhDPrograms -- of whom I have heard, if possible, even less, and at whom I cock a skeptical eye -- have teamed up to present the 2010 Top 45 Sci-Fi Book Blogs, and have stuck Antick Musings on the list at #27. (This was apparently voted on, somehow, by someone -- the whole thing is pretty vague, honestly.)

So:

1) I've never been fond of that awkward neologism, "sci-fi."

2) I'm not sure how much respect I should have for this award.

3) I placed solidly in the middle of a large pack.

4) And it's a pretty tightly circumscribed category to begin with.

Um.....yay?