The Complete Bloom County Library, Volume Two: 1982-1984 by Berkley Breathed

The current explosion of comic-strip reprints has not been primarily driven by nostalgia, unlike the previous bursts -- there's no substantial audience that remembers Gasoline Alley from the 1920s or Popeye from the '30s, and even the Peanuts fans don't, for the most part, have personal memories of reading the strip in the mid-'50s. No, strip comics have finally grown up to the point of being like any other part of our cultural heritage: the interesting stuff is pulled out and lovingly repackaged every generation or two, like the complete works of Robert Johnson or The Castle of Otranto.

But that doesn't mean that nostalgia has no part to play, or that some strip reprint projects don't strike stronger chords with some audiences than others. Anything from the last three decades -- such as the gigantic slipcased reprints of The Far Side or Calvin and Hobbes -- are selling, I'd guess, primarily to people who remember those works rather than to those discovering them for the first time. And, since strip cartoons were ephemeral until the last decade or so -- appearing in the newspaper one day, wrapping fish the next, and then possibly appearing in books that were themselves pretty disposable a year or five later -- returning to those cartoons returns the reader to that time, and those concerns, and that life. For strips that exist in their own worlds, like Far Side and Calvin, it's a soft-focus return, not too tied to anything specific. But for strips that had strong storylines, and particularly those that commented on issues of their time, the reader is reminded, over and over, that 1982 was a very specific time, and that it hasn't been 1982 for a long time.

Bloom County isn't remembered as a particularly timely strip -- it's mostly remembered for its madcap energy and its impressive array of broad characters -- but it was deeply steeped in the daily foibles of its '80s run. Creator Berkeley Breathed knows that well; it's why he'd been hesitant to allow the strip to be reprinted in any serious way for many years, and his occasional annotations in Volume Two, which collects all of the Bloom County strips from 9/27/82 to 7/1/84, mostly signpost the "you had to be there moments," the bits of '80s culture that were hilarious then but are nearly incomprehensible now.

Some of those are political references -- Edwin Meese, James Watt, and other minor oddballs of the Reagan years -- but more are just topical, as characters obsess about the Oscars or Liz Taylor's love life (or that of Lee Majors, an topic no one has cared about since the mid-80s). All of this is thrown out with the live-wire energy of Bloom County, a strip that rarely ran a single continuity longer than a week and tossed out new ideas every other day -- so the references become like streetcars, whizzing past, and if you catch one every once in a while, it's all fine.

Bloom County probably was too wacky, too manic to continue at that high pitch for too long, but Breathed kept finding new things to be manic about, even as the strip rolled through its third and fourth years. It's not quite a rampaging id -- Breathed kept it all under control -- but Bloom County at is best always had a sense of free-association, as if it were the comic-strip equivalent of Robin Williams's stand-up routine from the same era, firing off new riffs on topics as soon as they came to mind.

If you never read Bloom County, you have a treat in store for you. The comics page was shrinking back then, as it is now, but a strip was still big enough for Breathed to fill the corners with his quirky characters, their off-kilter dialogue, and plenty of visual appeal. And it'll make you laugh about things that you probably don't remember -- either because you weren't there at all (you whipper-snappers!) or because you've utterly forgotten that there was ever a public figure named "Phyllis Schlafly."

The Perils of Too Many Books

Hey, remember a couple of days ago, when I said I got a bunch of new books?

Well, one of them was the sixth volume of Penny Arcade, and I started to read it on the way to work yesterday...only to find it very familiar. Very familiar.

So I fired up the old external memory -- you're reading it right now -- and discovered that I had, indeed, already read that book. To make things worse, the copy I read the first time probably went to the Montclair Book Center as a used book, where I bought it again on Monday. So it's very likely that, not only did I read this book before, but that this is the very same copy that I read last year, and that I'd paid for the privilege of reading that copy again.

Of course, this means that I need to put the book back onto the stack to be sold as a used book, and see if the cycle repeats itself....

Nebula Winners for 2011

This has been widely reported across the Internet; if you're relying on my for your SFnal news, I'm afraid you will be sadly out of date.

So here are the winners of the 2011 Nebula Awards, and the other stuff given out by SFWA at the same time, which are not to be confused with Nebulas even though it's totally confusing. (And my characterizations of those awards are, it goes without saying, entirely my own. I may be wrong, or misleading, or simply more honest than most SFWAns would prefer.)

• Novel:
• Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis (Spectra)
• Novella:
• "The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen's Window" by Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean Magazine Summer '10)
• Novelette:
• "That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made" by Eric James Stone (Analog Science Fiction and Fact 9/10)
• Short Story: [Tie]
  • "Ponies" by Kij Johnson (Tor.com 1/17/10)
  • "How Interesting: A Tiny Man" by Harlan Ellison (Realms of Fantasy 2/10)  
• Andre Norton Award (for YA books that SFWA members are still too stuffy to consider "real" novels):
• I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett (Doubleday)
• The Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation:
• Inception, Christopher Nolan (director), Christopher Nolan (screenplay) (Warner)
• Solstice Award (for people who will never get a Grand Master Award, due to being already dead, or not writers, or some other reason):
• Alice Sheldon (aka James Tiptree, Jr.)
• Michael Whelan

• SFWA Service Award:
• John E. Johnston III

I've seen Rose Fox complain (or perhaps muse) that SFWA "had a chance to really shake things up this year and recognize the up and coming generation of writers, and they missed that chance in favor of lauding the longtime stalwarts of the genre," which strikes me as 180 degrees off from the way one should criticize a literary award -- if you're focusing on it as a means to reward people and intensely checking their personal characteristics as compared to each other, then you've entirely lost sight of the point of the award, which is to reward the best works of the year, as far as the voters can determine that. If an award like this is about the person, it's utterly failed already, and should be scrapped.

That said, the Connie Willis diptych is a lousy choice that I suspect a lot of SFWAns voted for because Connie is nice and friendly and she's worked on it for a long time -- and the outlines of the excellent novel it could have been are faintly visible. I've only read one of the other nominated works (Shades of Milk and Honey), which is solidly better than the Willis, and I suspect but can not prove that the other choices are stronger novels, as well. Willis has written much better before, and she will do so again, but I would not have honored that particular work.

I Shall Wear Midnight, though, is the best of the three works I have read in that category, so I won't grumble about it. (Until and unless I read another nominated book and find it clearly superior, of course!)

And cue the jokes about how you have to be a SF writer to understand Inception. I still think that category, and its predecessors, has no real place in the Nebulas -- SFWAns are fans of SFnal movies rather than colleagues in the creation of them, which is a crucial difference between that category and all of the others -- but clearly SFWA wants to give their praise to Hollywood types who will continue to mostly ignore them. (I'll forgo the usual metaphors about geeks and prom queens.)

Where I'll Be in June

Short version: not here.

Longer version:

I have three conferences for work, back-to-back-to-back, and I was originally planning to split them with my assistant. Well, unfortunately, that assistant left for greener pastures (still within Wiley, though, so it's not too bad), so the planning changed. Luckily, two of those conferences are in the same city, and in adjacent facilities, right after each other. (So I was already planning on one of us -- I'd planned on "not me," actually -- doing those two together.)

But now, my itinerary will be:

Flying down to lovely Orlando, Florida next Thursday afternoon, in the company of The Wife. Spending a couple of days there together, to celebrate a combination of slightly-belated-anniversary (we'd been together 25 years at the beginning of May, and our 18th wedding anniversary was yesterday) and my birthday.

Then she flies back on Sunday morning, as I hunker down to the first of those conferences: IMA. (If you happen to be there, say hello -- Wiley is the official bookstore of the conference, so I'll be easy to find.)

On the following Tuesday evening, I fly off to San Diego, where my colleagues will already be setting up for the NACVA conference, which begins the next morning at an ungodly hour.

That runs through Friday, and then I actually have Saturday off, more or less. The ACFE conference then starts up on my second Sunday away, in that big convention center they have in San Diego. (And, yes, that will be my only time in it this year -- and my first time there since Comic-Con back in 1998.)

Then, finally, I get a red-eye flight home on Tuesday night, getting back to scenic JFK airport somewhere around 5 AM on Wednesday the 15th.

But...even before that, I've got an event the night before, nine days from today: I'm the "opening act" for my author Jonathan Spira, who will be speaking at the Public Relations Society of America-New York about his brand new book Overload!. I'm going to talk about how to promote books these days -- the hook is "in an age of ebooks" -- but Spira is the real draw, since he's an expert on a topic all of us on the Internet know far too well, the fact there's just too much data in front of any of us to keep up with. This is a paid, ticked PRSA-NY event, so I doubt anyone I know will show up.

And then...only half the month will be over, and I'll be completely exhausted and close to two weeks behind on work. Ah, the glories of publishing!

Hugo Thoughts

So I just spent some time loading the massive Hugo Voters Packet onto my iPad (and selections onto my iPod Touch, just in case), in preparation for a massive trip I've got coming up.

And I realized, as I was tagging all of those thing to make sure I can find them -- amid the raft-load of public-domain books that I grabbed for free, like we all do in ebook form -- that I now have eleven book-length works, plus at least a fat book's worth of stories, plus a pile of full magazine issues, just from this packet. I could spend all of June reading this stuff, and not even get through all of it.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you -- I'm just wondering how conscientious a Hugo voter I'm going to be this year. I didn't manage to nominate -- yes, yes, it was very bad of me, but it's been a massively busy season at work -- so I do want to at least vote, and vote with some sense of knowledge about the works nominated. But I'll have to see how serious that feeling is, as I confront the virtual tower of Hugo Packet day-by-day.

Incoming Books: May 23, 2011

I took a day off from work today -- you've got to do that, every so often, to keep your sanity, and I don't want to end up with all of my vacation time back-loaded in the year like 2010 -- so I took the opportunity to go to my favorite local indy store, the Montclair Book Center, for what was the first time in nearly a year.

I grabbed a couple of books for my sons -- probably both for Thing 2 -- and more for myself. Nothing that I was actually looking for was there -- that's one of the perils of being so plugged into publishing; anything you want isn't likely to be right at hand -- so this is an interesting example of what I get when I don't get what I want:

The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely, one of those hugely popular bestsellers that I read, once in a while, in hopes that they're not as least-common-denominator as my snobbish heart always assumes they are. (For example, recently I started reading a massively popular nonfiction book from the past decade -- which I'm never going to name, since it's in the business space and my employer might some day try to woo the author over to us -- and found it not just trite and badly written, as expected, but actively stupid and afflicted by terminal "pump up your thesis to Explaining Everything status" disease, so I gave up on it in less than a day and will never speak of it again.) I also have the vague sense that I read a good review (or maybe mention) of Upside, possibly in the Times Book Review. Assuming I find time to read it, I'll report back.

Kiss & Tell, a graphic memoir by a woman who styles herself MariNaomi (she's from California, where such things are apparently required). I'd never heard of it before, but graphic novels are always quick to read, so it's easy to at least try to keep up with everything. And I do like to encourage "real" publishers (this one's from Harper) to keep publishing comics-style books.

Did you know there was a graphic novel adaptation of Allen Ginsburg's long poem Howl by the cartoonist Eric Drooker? I think I vaguely knew about it, but I couldn't prove it if I had to. But when the book was in front of me, how could I not buy it? I've never read Howl, I'm badly read in the Beats to begin with, so what the hell.

Penny Arcade, Vol. 6: The Halls Below, as always by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik. I've mostly stopped buying collections of strip comics -- both web and newspaper -- unless there's "bonus content" of some kind, since just about all of them are freely available online. (Not that I ever go back and read six months of some strip online, though -- at least, not on purpose, since I got sucked into a string of PvPs from about 2005 last week -- so this is more of a complaint in theory.) But this book does have comments on all of the strips -- which are also old enough (2005) to make them of almost historical interest -- and it was there, so I got it.


And last was The New Yorker On the Money, a big collection of cartoons about economic matters culled from the vast catalog of the magazine. (They've done at least one similar book earlier, since I read the other one -- and I think I've read two of them.) If there's ever a future book like this, there's a decent chance it would come from my employer -- for boring contractual-relationship reasons -- so I'm going to pretend that I bought this for research purposes.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/21

Another week has come and gone, which means it's time for me to tell you, once again, about the books that showed up in my mailbox during that week. I haven't read any of these yet -- I'd think that's pretty obvious, since they just arrived, but some people have been unclear on that aspect of "Reviewing the Mail" -- but I can tell you something about them based on looking at them and thinking really, really hard.

(Reading the descriptions on the cover letters and the various blurbs on the books -- plus a judicious flip of the pages of the actual text -- doesn't hurt, either.)

First off this week is the new novel by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, City of Ruins. City is the sequel to last year's Diving Into the Wreck, which itself followed up a series of novellas from Asimov's magazine. All center on Boss, a spacer whose precarious living involved "diving" derelict spaceships out on the depths of space -- and, as happens pretty often with archaeological SF, she hit a "Big One" in Diving, finding an ancient Dignity Vessel and claiming its stealth tech. Now, in City, she's head of a team -- living up to her name, I suppose -- investigating a series of endless caves underneath the city of Vaycehn. Pyr published City of Ruins in trade paperback last week.



Those of your distraught about the imminent loss of The Mighty Oprah -- her last show is on Wednesday -- as the guide to every aspect of your life might be interested in the next book, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Superheroes. It's from the Oprah-approved guru, Deepak Chopra, extending the brand of his bestseller The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success with the aid (and, presumably, the comic-book-world knowledge) of his son Gotham Chopra. If you ever desperately wanted to look to superheroes as a moral guide to how to live your life -- and a million DC and Marvel fanboys and -girls do just that on a weekly basis -- I think you're obligated to buy this book as soon as you know it exists. It's being published by HarperOne in June as a slim hardcover with a generic super-babe on the cover, but you could place your pre-order with your favorite retailer right now. And isn't that the spiritual thing to do?

And last for this week -- and very appropriately, since I'm writing this early on Sunday morning before learning the winners of the 2011 Nebulas, which were announced at a banquet in Washington, DC last night -- is The Nebula Awards Showcase 2011, edited by Kevin J. Anderson. Due to the vagaries of publishing schedules [1], this book contains the stories nominated for last year's award (all of the short stories and novelettes and the winning novella), along with some related material, such as a listing of all of the previous winners, short bios of all the nominees, and snippets about the other categories. What I don't see, however -- and maybe I'm just not looking hard enough -- is an actual list of the winners of the 2010 Nebulas, which were given away a whole year ago. The compilers of the book clearly knew what those winners are -- they only included the winning novella, after all -- but I can't see that they tell us what won in any other category, though they do, semi-helpfully, give the whole ballot up at the front of the book. Tor is officially publishing this tomorrow, so I have to hope that there were nice stacks of them down in DC two days ago for the fabled annual Massive Nebula Booksigning.


[1] Though I have to point out that the company I work for is signing up books right now that we'll publish by the end of this year, and that we do that routinely. There's no reason anyone has to have an eighteen-month publication schedule, if there's a good reason not to.

In Which I Pose as a Physics Teacher

I have no idea why I thought I was qualified to offer this particular explanation about dark matter in a Straight Dope Message Board thread from 2000, and I'm not at all sure today if I got it right at all. And I'd triply not sure why I should bother to resurrect it now. But it's a long post, and I certainly seemed to know what I was talking about, so let's hope I was closer to right than wrong about the state of cosmological knowledge eleven years ago:

Since no one else has jumped in yet, let me start off.

First, the term generally used is "dark matter" (which you probably slightly misremembered), though sometimes you may hear references to "missing matter."

Now, on to my wildly simplified explanation: Why is this matter "missing?" Well, we (meaning cosmologists and physicists, not me personally) have a pretty good idea of the age of the universe, from evidence like the cosmic background radiation and the observed motions of distant galaxies. From these and other data, scientists have been able to determine roughly how much mass the universe must have. (Because we can observe the effects of gravity, and know how gravity operates, we can deduce how much mass there is.)

For example, the Milky Way (our favorite galaxy) can be seen to contain a whole lotta stars (400 billion, roughly, IIRC). Judging from the evidence of our solar system, in which the sun is by far the greatest concentration of mass (everything else is trivial compared to the sun), we can make a rough estimate of the amount of matter in the galaxy. That calculated amount is lower than the amount of matter the Milky Way needs to have to revolve and stay together in the way that we've observed it to do by a factor of ten. In other words, the matter we know if there is only 10% of the matter needed to make the system operate in the way we know it is operating. Whether or not the missing mass is composed of the same elementary particles as the matter we're familiar with (quarks up through protons and their friends to atoms) is not quite clear.

So, where is that mass? There are several theories.

MACHOs are MAssive Compact Halo Objects -- dark, extremely massive objects in space. These would most likely be neutron stars and/or black holes. One problem with this theory is that if you chuck that much matter into what's effectively a single point, the gravitational effects would be very obvious -- it wouldn't really be "missing."

WIMPs are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles -- theorized elementary particles that have great mass but only interact with "regular" matter rarely and weakly. The problem with this theory is that particles that interact weakly have so far without exception been massless or nearly so; in fact, many scientists believe that it's physically impossible for a particle to be both massive and weakly interacting.

Then there are the more exotic theories (which I think are actually gaining in popularity at the moment), such as that the matter is a function of space itself. I don't pretend to understand this one, but it seems to say that "empty" space itself has a measurable mass.

If you're really interested in the subject, I recommend you pick up a recent book called Quintessence by Lawrence Krauss. It's not easy reading, but it's a serious look at the missing matter problem from one of the major theorists of the day.

Quotes of the Week: The Day the World Ended

In honor of the apocalypse scheduled for tomorrow, a few previous prophecies, all gathered from The Cassell Dictionary of Regrettable Quotations:

"The world will end by a giant flood on February 20th 1524."
- Johanned Stoffler, Tubingen University

"The world will be destroyed by fire on April 3rd 1843."
- William Miller

"The world then to an end will come
In Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One."
- The Life and Prophecies of Ursula Sontheil (Mother Shipton), 1881 edition

"The world then at an end we'll view
In Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-Two."
- The Life and Prophecies of Ursula Sontheil (Mother Shipton), 1882 edition

"The world then to an end will come
In Eighteen Hundred and Ninety-One."
- The Life and Prophecies of Ursula Sontheil (Mother Shipton), later editions

Characteristic Ages of Genres

Every genre has a characteristic age -- not the age of the people who read it, necessarily, but the personal age of the stories, if they were people. Some genres are made up of old stories -- thoughtful, experienced, tricky, seen-it-all. Others are as young and wide-eyed as a three-year-old, or demanding and passionate as a teenager.

Actually, that's a great place to start: YA novels, as they have to be, are teenagers. They're immediate, heart-on-their-sleeves types, passionately interested in the way the world works, and generally unhappy with that world. Because it should be better, and who has more energy and enthusiasm to make it better than a teenager?

But the other side of adolescence is boundary-pushing, the discovery or creation of a durable self. And the genres that grow out of that age of testing and relentless introspection are the fraternal twins Horror and Erotica, both obsessed with the body, its wonders and terrors.

Science Fiction and Fantasy are off to college or adventures on the cusp of adulthood, exploring vast new worlds and enthralled by raw possibility. What can happen next? Everything. All-night bull sessions about religion, politics, biology, particle physics -- this is the time of deep knowledge, when we all go geeky in our own ways.

And the two biggest, most dependable genres are the stuff of early adulthood -- of finding a place in the world, working and living, having our adventures and then settling down. Thriller and Romance nearly always start with single characters for a reason -- these genres are free, open, jetting around the world, allowing for all possibilities to come true, but expecting it all to end by settling down and getting into real life.

A little older, a little more tired, starting to get cynical but still insistent on the place of hope and trust in the world: the age of Hardboiled Mysteries is the thirties. These stories are still spry enough to jump through all of their hoops, but they'll feel it in the morning, and they've lost their illusions and dreams about how the world should work.

Literary fiction comes from the growing feeling of middle age: forty-plus, aware of death, with the slowly crushing realization that nothing anyone does matters. And yet life is so sweet, so worth living while it lasts -- even if it can't last.

But even older than that is the Cozy Mystery, as old as Miss Marple. There's a cool and detached view of mankind as chess pieces on a great board, and a deep memory of all the horrible things people can do to each other. They're never surprised, never shocked, but always ready to see what happened this time.


....or, at least, that all seemed a really good schema while I was staring out the window of my train recently. I hope it's at least an amusing concept.

Getting Out of the House

I expected not to be able to make a real post tonight because The Wife and I had tickets for an Elvis Costello concert in Montclair (only a couple of towns over from us in bucolic suburban New Jersey, and much more convenient than NYC). We were looking forward to it; I was particularly happy to hear that EC had broken out the Spectacular Spinning Songbook for this tour, for the first time since the mid-80s. (I like randomness almost as much as I like silly, demented ideas.)

But Elvis was afflicted with bronchitis, and the show was "postponed." (No clue what that means, or if we'll ever get either a concert or our money back.)

We are smart parents, though, and we know the Inviolable Rule: Thou Shalt Take Advantage of Babysitting. So we regrouped, and had dinner at a nice restaurant that we've been going to for twenty years (Miele's, an excellent Italian joint in fair Verona) and then went to see a movie, just because we could.

(It was Bridesmaids, as the most adult general-release movie out there, and we liked it -- I expect I'll do a "review" here later.)

So I wasn't able to make a real post here tonight for a slightly different reason than I'd expected.

Savage Chickens by Doug Savage

People say that things change, but they really don't. They just go round and round again, with slight variations each time. And that's tremendously satisfying for us -- for one thing, it means we have to spend far less time worrying about what comes next, since we already know.

Take publishing, for example. There have been little books of cruel, funny cartoons for generations -- think of The Book of Bunny Suicides or 101 Uses for a Dead Cat. And there has been workplace humor for just as long -- exemplified by Dilbert for what seems like generations now. And Doug Savage [1] put the two things together -- funny little cartoons, about the bleak, depressing landscape we like to think we all work in -- and started posting them on the Internet, which lead inevitably to those cartoons being collected in a book.

The book is Savage Chickens; Savage draws his characters as chickens, which plays to his simple cartoony line and reinforces the "hapless loser" image he's going for. (He also draws all of these cartoons on Stick-It Notes; I don't have a deep art-history explanation or excuse for that, but I suspect it's because he can grab them for free at work.)

It's all pretty funny, on the same level as the books I mentioned above. Savage only has a few jokes here -- mostly "work is hell" -- but they're jokes we all know and have enjoyed many times before. But this is not a book to be reviewed or deeply investigated; it's a book to come across next to a cash register, chuckle a few times, and then buy on impulse, for yourself or as a gag gift. And the world still needs books like that, so I hope you'll come across Savage Chickens -- preferably randomly, not by running off to buy it on purpose -- the same way you found all of those Truly Tasteless Jokes books that you pretend you've never heard of.


[1] Not Dan Savage, the sex/relationship writer. Not Terry Savage, the personal finance writer. Not Jon Savage, who wrote books about punk rock. Not Rick Savage or Bob Savage or Don Savage, but a whole new Savage. And certainly not Savage Henry.

Reunion by Pascal Girard

I may have unrealistic expectations for Pascal Girard; I reviewed his short graphic novel Nicolas (a quiet, perfectly poised book about the death of Girard's younger brother at the age of five) for ComicMix two years ago, and was massively impressed. So I was thrilled to see a new graphic novel from him, and even mildly encouraged by the fact that it was another memoir.

But Reunion is no Nicolas, and wanting it to be isn't at all helpful. Nicolas was a quiet, small work about one horrible event, told afterward purely through the eyes of the child Girard was at the time. Reunion is a bigger, wider work, full of dialogue, about the foibles of an adult Girard -- it turns into a farcical version of a poor-me memoir towards the end, as all of Girard's illusions and fakeries and baseless hopes all catch up with him at once. (Reunion also could make a good, and mostly conventional, movie, while Nicolas was pure comics in a way that wouldn't translate to another form.)

So Pascal Girard -- as he presents himself in Reunion -- is coming up on his tenth high-school reunion and is a raw bundle of repressed self-loathing and anxiety, worried that he's a "loser," worried about his teeth, his weight, his clothes, his glasses, his looks. He makes Woody Allen look composed and self-assured, all right? It's not a pretty sight; the Girard of Reunion is deeply unhappy about everything in his life, and his attempts to make himself better are all outward-directed: they're designed to make other people like him better, to fix his problems, because if the world thinks he's a "winner," then everything will be fine.

The Girard creating this graphic novel never lets that sad-sack pose slip for a moment: the Girard of the book is entirely unaware of his real problems from beginning to end, though he does realize, eventually, how badly he's handled the opportunity of the reunion. But the Girard of the book is so blinded by his own neuroses and needs that he botches every opportunity he has -- he exercises to look good, and gets unhealthier and more injured as he goes, he can't manage to just have fun at his own reunion, since he's so focused on "winning," and he ends the book hiding in his apartment from people who just want to be his friends.

Clearly, Girard in real life could not have been this clueless and tormented, or else the Girard telling this story would not have realized how bad he was. But the Girard of the story never comes to the realization that Girard-the-author must have -- or, possibly worse, Girard-the-author has played up all of the misery and neurosis to make it all more obviously "funny" and conventional. There's no catharsis at the end; the Girard of Reunion doesn't learn anything, and the reader expects that he's just going to sink further into his own misery as time goes on. There's no reason for him not to.

And so Reunion ends up being a sad, dispiriting book despite all of its aren't-I-ludicrous set-pieces and copious physical humor. It's no fun laughing at a fool; it's only fun to laugh at someone playing a fool. And Girard-the-author doesn't allow Girard-the-character a moment of not being a fool to allow for the possibility that it was an act, or that he could (or did!) get better afterward.

Girard's art is sweet and evocative, with lumpily real faces and bodies -- he's great at drawing comedy, and Reunion is honestly funny a lot of the time. His grid of six borderless panels to the page also keeps the flow moving; Girard uses a lot of dialogue, and the low number of panels per page keeps the text from overwhelming the art. But I wish he'd thought more about the shape of his story here, and less about how to shoehorn more funny bits in at his own expense.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/14

Here we all are once again -- well, I'm here, and I'm assuming someone will read it, eventually, which counts as "we" -- for my weekly run-down of the books that came in the mail. As always, I haven't read any of these yet, so the things I'm about to tell you are one part regurgitated sell-copy and one part interpretation -- both of which could easily be wrong. (I've written sell-copy, so I have no illusions as to how accurate it is.)

First off, just to be confusing, is a book I didn't get in the mail. I bought it yesterday, in an actual physical bookstore -- the kind that are supposed to be DOOMED -- in the form of a stack of papers inside a cloth cover (also supposedly DOOMED), after ordering it online to be sure it would be there. And that book is A Drop of the Hard Stuff, the seventeenth novel about the detective Matt Scudder, and it was written by the incomparable Lawrence Block. It's the first new book in the series since 2005's All the Flowers Are Dying, and it's a flashback novel, like When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, which is most people's choice (including mine) for the best book in a series of excellent novels. So I'm greatly looking forward to it -- so much so that even a guy who gets books in the mail all the time was willing to not only pay money, but actually go out to a real old-fashioned store and pick it up with his own hands the week of publication. If you haven't read Block before, don't start with this one -- either go find Sacred Ginmill or just start at the beginning of the series, The Sins of the Fathers. If you have read Block before, this is your signal to get to your preferred bookseller ASAP for your own copy of Hard Stuff, just published in hardcover by Mullholland Books, the new mystery imprint of Little, Brown. (And my "mystery imprint," I mean "imprint that sells books which are mystery novels," and not "imprint whose output will be deeply mysterious" -- though the latter would be an interesting experiment for some publisher with deep pockets and the willingness to lose a lot of money.)

And then on to the books that did come in the mail, of whom the first was Haven by Joel Shepherd. It's the fourth book in the "A Trial of Blood & Steel" epic fantasy series -- no points for guessing the template for that series title -- which began with Sasha. I still haven't read this series -- even when you read a book every day for a year, the new books pile up much faster than you can get to them -- but I did meet Shepherd once at a Worldcon, and, on that basis, I can say that his books are entirely worth your time and energy. Haven, which seems to end this series, was published on May 3rd in trade paperback by Pyr.

Turning to science fiction, I also saw a new book from Robert Charles Wilson this week: Vortex. It's the third book in the series that began with the Hugo-winning Spin and continued in Axis; I've read the first (my review is here) but not the second. Vortex will be a hardcover from Tor in July.

And last for this week is an odd book called Japanese Fantasy Manga, credited to the "Tokyo-based editorial group" ricorico. It's not a guide to the many actually existing fantasy manga series, nor is it a writing/drawing guide to creating manga with a fantasy flavor. Instead, it's a catalog of character types, skills, and monsters that you might find in a fantasy manga, or perhaps that you might use to create a fantasy manga yourself. The introduction says that the book is "structured like a role playing game (RPG), the fantasy hero games that spread like wildfire across Japan and then throughout East Asia, and  are now popular around the world," [1] though it also doesn't provide any actual RPG rules or statistics for these elements, just text descriptions. In short, I have no idea who would want this book, or what value it would provide to them -- this may, of course, be purely a failure of my imagination and knowledge. It does have a lot of decent four-color art, with a full-page for each element and plenty of spot art as well. And it will be published, as an oversized trade paperback with those fancy French flaps, by Harper Design on May 24th.


[1] Gary Gygax, among many others, might take umbrage at this description.