Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/11

Hey, remember last week, when I had no mail to write about? Well, this week makes up for it in spades, with nearly two dozen books (most of them from a single big box from one publishing company).

As always, I haven't read any of these particular books yet -- but I might have read other books in the series or by the same authors, or I might have unreasonable prejudices for other reasons, and I'll try to explain that as best I can. And every single one of these books is going to be someone's favorite of the week or month or year, so I hope that's you, because I want people to be happy.

Every author famous and popular enough eventually gets a Festschrift anthology, and some are lucky (or unlucky?) enough to hit that point while they're still alive. Gene Wolfe has just gotten this particular brass ring, in the form of Shadows of the New Sun, an anthology edited by the team of J.E. Mooney and Bill Fawcett and published by Tor in hardcover on August 27. (Yes, that does seem like an odd team to head up this project, though "Mooney" is a bit mysterious --  the copyright page credits "Mooney's" introduction to tie-in writer, anthologist, and erstwhile SFWA Bulletin editor Jean Rabe.) All of the stories in Shadows are written in homage to Wolfe, one way or another -- some are direct pastiches set in versions of Wolfe's fictional worlds, some have looser connections, and two stories (to begin and end the book) by Wolfe himself. Some of the names here are obvious -- Neil Gaiman, Nancy Kress, Michael Swanwick -- and some are less obvious but apropos, including David Drake, Jack Dann, and Joe Haldeman. Among the other authors featured here are Aaron Allston, Todd McCaffrey, Jody Lynn Nye, Timothy Zahn, Judi Rohrig, Michael A. Stackpole, David Brin, and the team of Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg. So this may be an interesting mix of stories, is what I'm saying.

Also from Tor, in hardcover on the same day (August 27) is Douglas Lain's first novel, Billy Moon, a magic realist novel about Christopher Robin Milne (turned into a world-famous Winnie-the-Pooh character by his father before the age of ten and stuck in the public's mind as such thereafter) and the Paris riots of 1968. It has adoring quotes from Rudy Rucker, James Morrow, Eileen Gunn, and Jack Womack, all to the effect that this odd idea has turned into a wonderful, moving book. If you like your fantasy closer to the literary side -- if, for example, you're a devoted reader of Gene Wolfe, of whom we were just speaking -- Billy Moon should be on your radar.

Kindred and Wings is the second book in an epic fantasy series by Philippa Ballantine, after Hunter and Fox. It's a trade paperback from Pyr on August 6th, and the back cover is full of updates on the characters of the first book -- Finn the Fox is traveling the world via dragon-back, Talyn the Hunter is doing a semester at the halls of the Last Believer -- that puts me in mind of a Christmas letter from a family I don't actually know. So this is not the place to begin: go back to Hunter and Fox instead.

And now I'm getting into that one big box -- it's mostly manga (except for a couple of light novels at the end), and it's all from the fine folks at Yen Press. They're mostly July books, which means they're probably all available already. There's quite a lot of it, and I'll probably be at sea for large swaths of it, so here I do:

I have two more side-stories from the Puella Magi Madoka Magica series, which, as far as I can tell, is the current big Magical Girl thingy. There's Puella Magi Oriko Magica, Vol. 1, with story by the Magica Quartet and art by Mura Kuroe, and then there's Puella Magi Kazumi Magica: The Innocent Malice, Vol. 2, which has an original story by the Magica Quartet, story by Masaki Hiramatsu, and art by Takashi Tensugi. (The single different word in the titles identifies the particular middle-school girl saving the world in that particular sub-series -- I'm pretty sure of that at this point.) I suspect the Madoka books are the best place to start, but this was probably an anime first anyway, so you might just be able to grab whatever character that you like best.

BTOOOM!, Vol. 3 continues Junya Inoue's Battle Royale-esque story of a bunch of strangers shanghaied to a remote island to play a deadly, live-action version of a popular FPS game that uses different kinds of explosives -- see my review of the first volume (in the middle of a long manga round-up) for more details. This, I think, is primarily for the more bloodthirsty and games-obsessed among us, which certainly includes a lot of young men, the traditional audience for shonen like this.

Is This a Zombie? you might ask. No, it's just the fith volume of the manga with that arch title, I'd reply, by the team of Sacchi, Shinichi Kimura, Kobuichi, and Muririn, which is some kind of fan-service-y (rated "M" and sealed in plastic" harem manga with a supernatural adversary lurking about in the background. I am also informed that the story began in a series of light novels, though I'm not sure if the novels are easily available in English or on my side of the Pacific. Still, I'm certain the book I'm holding is not a zombie. You're welcome.

Yana Toboso's Black Butler is back for a fourteenth volume, in which a little-boy Earl and his demon butler continue their Edwardian adventures, doing things that I really don't know the importance or significance of.

Speaking of series that I can't describe clearly, here's a Nabari No Ou, Vol. 14, by Yuhki Kamatani. It's the final volume of this series -- which I have to admit that I've never read -- and I couldn't even begin to explain what genre it's in.

I'm on much stronger ground with Atsushi Ohkubo's energetic and enjoyable shonen adventure Soul Eater, Vol. 15 -- I've read several of the volumes, and both of my sons are big fans of this demon-fighting series. Still, if you haven't read it, you definitely don't want to start here.

Jun Mochizuki is back with a new volume in Pandora Hearts, Vol. 17. This originally was a sideways take on The Wizard of Oz, but that was about 3000 pages ago, so your guess is as good as mine about what's going on now.

The comics based on the game Kingdom Hearts II are being re-collected in two big fat volumes this month (volume one, volume two) -- the comics are by Shiro Amano, and the "original concept" is credited to Tetsuya Nomura. (That always sounds like a really weak credit -- hey, I have the idea that Wolverine should fight Doctor Doom! -- though I suspect it means something like "original writer" or "supervising producer" or even "head of the company that owns the property.") The story? Well, this kid wanders through various Disney-esque alternate worlds to save Mickey Mouse, and I am not even kidding.

The girls from the K-On! manga have graduated high school, which means it must be time for K-ON! College, by Kakifly, the creator of the series. The original K-On! was a 4-koma -- each strip was four panels long, much like a US newspaper comic printed vertically -- but I don't think this is meant to be read that way, even if most of the pages have exactly eight identically-sized panels organized in a grid. (Though some pages don't make much sense to me any direction I read them -- possibly because I'm trying to read a middle page without any context.)

Bunny Drop, Vol. 9 is fully into the plot twist that many of the fans found creepy -- the series started off when bachelor Daikichi started raising the baby girl Rin, but the series has jumped ahead to Rin's teen years and the plots started focusing on their respective love-lives -- in case anyone was anxiously tapping her feet and waiting for that. The series, as always, is by Yumi Unita.

It's really rare to see a manga series wrap up quickly, but Yoshiki Tonogai's Doubt, Vol. 2 is billed as the conclusion of its story. The first volume set up the premise -- it's another child of Battle Royale, crossed with those live-action murder mystery games, in which a bunch of online friends are stuck in a warehouse and forced to play a game in which one of them tries to kill all of the others before he's found out.

And Tonogai is back the same month with the launch of another series -- Judge, Vol. 1. The big difference is that, on the covers of the Doubt books, everyone is wearing rabbit masks, but the characters on the cover of Judge are wearing different animal-head masks. It sounds like another carefully contrived blood-fest, with a back cover promising "a group of sinners who bear the guilt of the seven deadly sins" who were abducted to the obligatory un-escapable location to decide which one of them will die for their collective sins. Pardon me: I'm certainly I should have said "which of them will die first."

Until Death Do Us Part, Vol. 4 is another big slab of Hiroshi Takashige and DOUBLE-S's story -- seriously, each volume is 400+ pages and in a larger format than the usual manga volume -- which is probably still about the precognitive girl and her blind swordsman protector, as various yakuza and other unsavory types try to use her powers to enrich themselves.

And the last of the manga is the one with the longest, most complicated title: Umineko: When They Cry: Episode 2: Turn of the Golden Witch, Vol. 2. It's written by Ryukishi07 and drawn by Jiro Suzuki, from the long-running series of atmospheric horror story-games. The main characters are called Battler and Beatrice, but, as far as I can see, it's meant to be utterly serious.

Diving into the light novels, there's the box-score style Spice and Wolf 9: Town of Strife 2 by Isuna Hasekura, continuing the story of an itinerant merchant and the slumming goddess who acts as his assistant. This time out, there's still in a town with a lot of strife.

And the other light novel from Yen is Mizuki Nomura's Book Girl and the Scribe Who Faced God, Part 1, the seventh of the original eight books in the series. (As is usual with a popular Japanese media entity, there are as many side-stories and ancillaries as there are books in the main sequence.) It's the love story of what seems to be the Japanese high-school answer to Nicholas Sparks and a paper-eating demon in the form of a cute girl (because all Japanese demons have the ability to appear as cute girls, of course!)

And then last for the week is an interestingly odd and belated tie-in novel: Dark Shadows: Wolf Moon Rising is based on, not the movie from last year, but the TV soap opera from three decades ago. (Sometimes you get the license you deserve, not the license you want.) Or maybe this exists simply because Lara Parker -- an actress on that original TV show -- wanted to write it, and that would create enough buzz among whatever Dark Shadows fans are still out there. Anyway, "Angelique" has written a novel about a teenage member of the Collins family who gets swept back in time (from what period, the back-cover copy sayeth not) to the 1920s with his girlfriend, there to encounter supernatural troubles, I expect.

Two by Tim Kreider: We Learn Nothing & Twilight of the Assholes

I've got another blog, Editorial Explanations, which tends to devolve into my making fun of right-wing cartoonists. Sure, I there are some left-wingers in the mix, but those are fewer -- mostly because (I like to think), lefties do wordier, more convoluted cartoons that are harder to complain about rather than because I'm just a big stinky biased cretin. (Though, if you're on the Internet at all, you'll hear the latter opinion about yourself very often. It could even be true, some of the time.)

I have never featured a Tim Kreider cartoon on Editorial Explanations. There's a simple reason for this: he quit doing political cartoons -- his alt-weekly editorial cartoon, "The Pain -- When Will It End?" did end, back in 2009, and Editorial Explanations only got started two years later in 2011. So I hope no one imputes bias to the fact that he got out of the way before I started targeting his profession.

Twilight of the Assholes was the third and final collection of "The Pain," published by Fantagraphics in 2011. I've actually been reading it since then -- maybe even slightly earlier, since I got it as a PDF from the fabled Secret Fanta Online Repository for Comics Reviewers during the brief period when it looked like I would keep writing regularly and seriously about comics -- and only just finished it. Kreider is pretty much the archetype of the liberal cartoonist, with a massive need to overexplain everything, so nearly every cartoon here comes with a full-page essay (some essays are substantially longer than that) about how much Kreider really, really hated George Bush.

I kid Kreider -- he hated many other things, too. But Bush was #1 with a bullet, and the various functionaries and policies of his government made up most of the rest of the list.

So Assholes was a PDF, which meant that I forgot about it for months at a time -- I've mentioned here before that ebooks are certainly convenient, but they don't mesh all that well with my picking-books style, which revolves around staring at shelves -- and read it in bits and snippets on trains and elsewhere when I remembered it existed.

That's not a good way to read editorial cartoons, I think -- it might work a generation or two later on, when the particular politics are safely historical, but not when they're just receding into the recent past, and still resonant with the current news. Editorial cartoons, at their best, are created in a white heat, right at the deadline, to capture a particular feeling (usually anger; let's be honest) and moment in time. So you want to experience them as close to the time of creation as possible, for maximum gestalt. But I've never been good at doing things the right way.

Kreider has a smooth, flowing line -- he draws more like Aubrey Beardsley than any other editorial cartoonist I've ever seen, and vastly more than I'd ever expect any editorial cartoonist to do. He also -- I've said this repeatedly, and I'll keep saying it -- fits lots of words into a cartoon, in the liberal manner, either to throw in all of the ideas he has surrounding a news event or to head off several potential interpretations of his politics ahead of time. (Right-wingers are vastly more likely to make simple, stark cartoons with few words -- Obama is a Muslim, liberals are all America-hating wimps, that kind of thing.) So Kreider's cartoons can be physically hard to read -- his lettering gets flowery and expressive in dialogue, and there's often big blocks of hand-lettered text as well.

And, of course, this collection covers the second administration of the second, and lesser, Bush, which was not a high point in American civilization. There was a lot for Kreider to hate and complain about, from the bungling of Hurricane Katrina to the multifarious problems with our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and he took full advantage of that -- this is not a book for anyone staunchly in favor of the Iraq War (surely there are still a few such idiots, right?) or for neocons in general. Kreider knows the point of an editorial cartoonist is to have strong opinions and to express them forcefully, and he's very good at that. It all feels like old news, now, but that's what happens to all editorial cartoons: first they're timely, then they're dated, then (if they're lucky) they're history. Kreider's stuff is currently in that big ditch called "dated," we'll all have to check back in fifty years to see if they turn out to be history. For now, though, they're vastly more palatable for those of us who thought invading Iraq was a really stupid idea ten years ago.

And then "The Pain" ended -- I'm not clear on all of the details, but the continuing death-spiral of alt-weeklies (just slightly ahead of the rest of the newsprint business) certainly had something to do with it. In a not-necessarily-related move, Kreider has been doing more essays and fewer cartoons over the past few years -- though, looking at Assholes, it does have more words than pictures, so he's been moving that way for a while.

To amplify that thought: We Learn Nothingis one step on from Assholes -- the latter was a collection of editorial cartoons with explanatory essays, while Nothing is a book of essays with illustrative cartoons. (Not completely different, no -- but subtly different enough that Nothing was published by the classy NYC house Free Press, not a comics company.)

Nothing is not a political book -- there's a flavoring of politics around the edges, but it's essentially a collection of personal essays (in the tradition of either Montaigne or Sedaris, depending on how cynical you are), telling stories from Kreider's life and his take on various aspects of modern society. If newspapers weren't clearly dying, he probably would have transitioned from a newspaper cartoonist to a newspaper columnist, but they are, so he didn't.

The essays here tend to be substantial -- ten pages or more, much longer than the newspaper gig I postulated above would have allowed -- which gives Kreider room to wander around all sides of his topics. They're not heavily structured essays, but they're not baggy monsters, either -- they have a purpose and a shape, and pretty much do what they set out to do, whether that's concerning unrequited love, Kreider's near-death experience, dealing with people with radically different political views, or, most often, telling stories of Kreider's misspent last decade or so, and the people he spent it with.

Kreider has a way with words -- I've marked a couple of passages from Nothing for "Quotes of the Week" here, and there are a number of other paragraphs that equally well crystallize an interesting thought or important distinction. And Kreider is very entertaining, whether he's fulminating against some stupidity by Republicans or telling stories of his friends -- and the stories about friends are guaranteed to have a larger potential audience. We might learn nothing, but we can have a lot of fun along the way.

Hereville: How Mirka Met a Meteorite by Barry Deutsch

How Mirka Met a Meteorite is the second Hereville book, about a spunky Orthodox Jewish girl who lives somewhere undefined: a small town or suburb nestled away in a forested area where, apparently, no goyim ever tread and what people do for a living is kept mysterious. (Perhaps it's the Orthodox utopia, since all we ever see the men doing is study.) I reviewed the first one as the middle book of a trio of completed unrelated graphic novels, and enjoyed the spunk but was left uneasy by the tension between Mirka's desires for her life and the clearly defined Orthodox culture that is devoted to turning her into something completely different.

(I'm still not sure how much of this Deutsch is doing consciously, but Mirka is exactly the kind of nail that gets hammered down hard in a society like this -- though people who believe in the values of that community would call it something like "sanding off rough edges.")

Meteorite is even starker about that tension; if the message of the first book was "a girl can have adventures and make her own way," this one comes down much more heavily on the old renormative standbys, "be careful what you wish for" and "know your place." Mirka herself does have a great moment of strength early in the story -- she saves her entire town -- but she's quickly outmatched by the meteorite, who is transformed into a simulacrum of Mirka by the witch from the first book.

So Mirka spends most of the book ineffectual, buffoonish, and useless -- doing badly both on her own terms (being a tough, self-reliant adventurer) and her society's (being a quiet, polite, hardworking, modest worker bee). She can't work out how to share her life with the meteorite, her anger and defiance do her no good, and a contest with the meteorite to decide "who is the best Mirka" becomes a series of painful failures. Mirka doesn't win out in the end so much as survive by luck and family -- again, not by the virtues that she's trying to live by, but by the things her society is trying to make her do: trust in God and do what her relatives tell her to.

I hope this series won't end with Mirka a quiet, respectable young woman, married to some man who doesn't seem to do anything but read, but it's difficult to see any other trajectory at this point. It's becoming clear that "Orthodox" is much more important to Hereville than "Mirka" is -- that's unusual for a series of stories in Western society, certainly, since we usually demand that our self-actuated heroes get everything they want because they want it, but, still, this particular twisting of that expectation is sad, for what Mirka could be and for what her society clearly is bent on turning her into.

Say No to Dope

Now, I'm not a big sports fan. I used to watch football in college semi-seriously, and I was more-or-less a Mets fan for almost two decades until I had kids. But times and priorities change, and I haven't seen more than a few minutes of a game in years. (I do sometimes watch a bit of baseball when flipping channels in odd hotel rooms, since it's soothing -- but there I don't really care who's playing.)

So that establishes the (lack of) my bona fides.

I don't care about doping in the slightest. More than that, I'm not surprised in the least when it happens -- in fact, I expect it. I don't think it's a big deal, and I don't think it will ever go away -- if I were magically in charge of all sports, I'd let athletes do whatever the hell they wanted with their own bodies, as long as they were adults. This all seems really obvious to me, and I'm continually surprised when I see people getting all worked up -- as if it's a personal affront -- when there's yet another inevitable doping scandal.

Here's the thing: professional athletes are the second-most competitive people on earth. (After only professional stock/bond traders.) They've devoted their lives, and in many cases sustained serious, permanent, life-destroying injuries to get to where they are. Their bodies are tools, and they're used to honing those tools to the highest level possible. So my assumption is always that the best -- the most competitive, the ones most driven to succeed at all costs -- will do whatever it takes to win. And thus I expect the top performers will always, by definition, be the ones using prohibited "PETs."

Are you seriously expecting them to avoid using a specific list of chemicals, when those chemicals are proven to make their performance better? Really? After they've been willing to ruin their knees and brains and childhoods just to get a little more speed or strength or power?

I just can't believe that -- the top athletes are always looking for that tiny bit of edge, and they're clearly willing to ignore everything else in life in pursuit of winning at their sport. Ergo, they're going to dope; it's the logical solution.

Sure, it's against the rules, but those are the secondary rules. Because every sport has two sets of rules, and every athlete knows the primary set -- the ones that govern actual play, the ones that decide who wins -- always outrank the technical details of eligibility and paraphernalia and good sportsmanship and the other "nice to have" stuff.

The bodies running those sports will, and should, enforce all of the rules, and catch as many dopers and other violators (bat-corkers, pine-tar-grippers, and so on) as they can -- understanding that no enforcement mechanism can ever be 100% effective. Some dopers will slip through, and never be caught -- I'm sure many of them are in Halls of Fame right now, and will stay there.

But fans that see this level of extreme competition as a moral failing should look in their mirrors: you want those athletes to fight as hard as they can, because you want them to win. Well, this is how to win. It's not pretty, but it works.

And remember: nobody ever talks about how nice it is that they all played fair when your team loses.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/3

Every so often, the tides of mail go out for a few days, and nothing washes up on my doorstep. (Yes, it's a lousy metaphor, but go with it.) Sometimes, that happens for an entire week, and I have nothing to write about in these weekly posts. In those rare cases, I post anyway, because I have a tidy mind like that, and just in case there's one fanatic Antick Musings watcher who expects it every Monday.

The sharper-witted among you have already realized that I'm talking about this week.

Next week I expect to have more things to write about -- unless the publicists have collectively come to their senses and realized I'm a horrible excuse for a "media outlet" and have blackballed me, which would be sad. (For me, that is -- I'd have to get more books through other means.) But, for now, this is what I've got for you: a big, fat nothing.

MST3K 30-Day Challenge

Yes, it's a meme, and I'm going to do it wrong -- I don't have the patience to stick each answer into a separate post and dole them out over a month (even though that would do nice things for my post count).

"MST3K," of course, is the 1990s puppet cable show Mystery Science Theater 3000, in which a guy (well, two guys in succession) and his robots made fun of bad (and often SFFnal) movies. It's solidly in my fandom, which I'm coming to think more often is congruent with comedy than it is with "science fiction" or other genre terms. But that could easily shift tomorrow. (For instance, I might have to start watching Doctor Who for the first time in twenty-plus years just to see if they let Capaldi swear the way he's so good at.)

Anyway: the meme.


Day 1: First episode?
Season 5, Episode 15 -- Alien from L.A. The cable system where The Wife and I lived in the '90s didn't have Comedy Central, but my in-laws home (just a town over) did. So I watched this on one of the very many Sunday afternoons we spent there, because I'd heard good things about it. (And felt guilty because I didn't get as much manuscript-reading done that day.)


Day 2: Joel or Mike? Why?
Mike.

My take on the great divide is that Joel is cooler and Mike is funnier. Some people like one, some the other.

Also: I saw Mike episodes first (and, still, more or them), and the style of the show got more dense as time went on: the Mike episodes just have more jokes, more references, and more complicated joke-references. (E.g.: "Peter Fonda is Richard Petty in the Marcel Marceau story!" from Riding With Death.) I love that kind of joke-on-a-joke structure.


Day 3: How did you get into the show?
I watched it religiously (maybe obsessively) once it moved to the Sci-Fi Channel in 1997 -- taped pretty much all of the episodes on seasons 8-10, and watched them every week.

I did get some of the episodes available on video then, but didn't go whole-hog into collecting them all, which is unusual for my obsessions -- I'm a real completest.


Day 4: Favorite episode?
Tough to narrow that down, but I'd say 820: Space Mutiny. It's a bad movie that's often funny inadvertently, populated with mediocre actors who struggle to overcome less-than-mediocre material, and the jokes are sharp and specific, with some good running gags.

Ask me tomorrow, though, and I might say Riding With Death or Werewolf or Overdrawn at the Memory Bank or Time Chasers or Pod People or Mitchell or Master Ninja I.


Day 5: How many episodes would you say you’ve seen?
At least 80 -- possibly 90 or 100, since some of the titles are bland in that old-horror-movie way, and I'm not sure exactly which crawling thing or what terrors I did see. I'm still watching episodes new to me -- mostly Joel episodes.

I've also seen all of the shorts, since I could watch them on my iPad on the train. I may end up watching all of the episodes the same way, but each one takes more than one leg of my commute. 

Day 6: Least favorite episode? Why?
I have Red Zone Cuba on VHS and I think I watched it once -- as I recall, it was just a dull movie that they couldn't bring any life to.

Day 7: Do you own any merchandise?
I've got nearly all of the DVD box sets (missing the really rare ones and the one that just came out), and a "Greetings from the Satellite of Love" T-Shirt.

(Mildly amusing story: a guy asked me in a supermarket the other week if that shirt had something to do with the Velvet Underground -- the source of the SoL's name -- and I had to tell him it was for an obscure TV show.)

Day 8: Cinematic Titanic or RiffTrax?
I've seen a few RiffTrax -- Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny is a particularly amazing piece of work. (And I use those words precisely.) I like their shorts, and might end up buying more of them to watch on trains (see above).

I haven't yet gotten any Cinematic Titanic pieces, purely because I've already got enough to keep me busy for a long time.

I do miss the silhouettes and the inter-movie skits; MST3K had a larger gestalt than just "watching movies with commentary." 

Day 9: Fave fan site?
I get my regular MST3K fix from Fuck Yeah, MST3K! (There are a lot of video posts there, which I tend to save for a binge once a week or so.)


Day 10: Have a favorite season/station it was on?
I only watched it "live" for the last three seasons, so I can only choose from the Sci-Fi era. And there's great episodes each of those three years, but I'd lean towards Season 8, because it was the longest and there was a lot of energy from the new channel.

Day 11: Have you gotten any friends into the show?
Friends, no. My twelve-year-old son (whom I call Thing 2 here), yes. We've watched a lot of episodes together, and it was the five Gamera movies, Werewolf, and the two Master Ninjas that made him a fan.


Day 12: Follow any of the Brains on Facebook/Twitter? Who makes you laugh the hardest?
I follow and have retweeted Bill Corbett. (Possibly others, but I remember him, because the thing I RT'd was the excellent "The frenemy of my frenemy is my frfrend.")


Day 13: Quick! Without cheating, list as many cast members as you can!
Joe Hodgson as Joel Robinson
Mike Nelson as himself, more or less
Trace Beaulieu (Dr. Forrester and Crow I)
Frank Conniff (TV's Frank)
Mary Jo Pehl (Mrs. Forrester)
Bill Corbett (Crow II and Brain Guy)
Kevin Murphy (Tom Servo II and Professor Bobo)
J. Elvis Weinstein (Tom Servo I)
and whats-his-name the producer who did Gypsy most of the time
didn't Patrick Brantseg do Gypsy for a while?

Day 14: Any riffs that struck a chord with you?
"Every male of any species has the biological urge to panty raid." from Horror of Party Beach

(Subject to variation by day.) 

Day 15: Favorite quote?
Isn't that the same as the last question?

OK, how about the long and very funny "and he wakes up" sequence at the end of Space Mutiny?

Day 16: Have you met any of the Brains?
Nope. I hate meeting people, especially famous ones. They'd have no reason to want to meet me, and what can I say to them they haven't heard a million times?


Day 17: Have you been to any live shows?
Nope.

Day 18: Favorite SOL character?
I guess Tom Servo edges out Crow, since he has more of an edge in the inter-movie sequences. (Cf. "Tom, I don't get you." "Nobody does -- I'm the wind, baby!")

Day 19: Favorite Mad?
Oddly (given that I like the Mike-era best), it has to be TV's Frank. He's one of the great comedy second bananas, up there with Marty Feldman's Igor and Hey, Abbott.

Day 20: Least favorite character?
Professor Bobo usually just led to poop-flinging and butt-showing (and some general bad-hygiene) jokes; I don't dislike the character, but he wasn't as strong a character as Pearl or "Brain Guy". 

Day 21: Last episode you watched?
I think it actually was Alien from L.A., which I watched with Thing 2 a couple of weeks ago. So this is very circular right at this moment.

Day 22: Manos: Bad or the Worst?
I haven't watched that one in a while, but I remember it as a really horrible movie that was well-riffed.

Day 23: One-word opinion on Joel?
Big-brotherly.

Day 24: One-word opinion on Mike?
Planet-destroyer.

Day 25: One-word opinion on J. Elvis’s Servo?
Can't do it in one: Nipple Nipple Tweak Tweak Fly Fly Fly!

Day 26: One-word opinion on Kevin’s Servo?
Time-twisting.

Day 27: One-word opinion on Trace’s Crow?
Befuddled.

Day 28: One-word opinion on Bill’s Crow?
Intellectual.

Day 29: Something you can’t look at without thinking of MST3K?
Um, a shelf of my DVD collection? There's nothing in the real world that consistently makes me think of MST3K.

(However, a lot of things in the real world make me think of LEGO City Undercover, mostly because I spent 6 months or so playing that game.)

Day 30: Why do you love MST3K?
It's not just funny, but it's funny commentary on something else, in a way that seems live. I like that connection, and the difficulty of fitting jokes into something that already exists in a way that adds to the original without just drowning out the original story.

Heads in Beds by Jacob Tomsky

This book was inevitable: after Waiter Rant (see my review at the end of this monthly roundup), my colleagues in trade publishing were beating the bushes for more of the same kind of thing -- semi-anonymous semi-memoirs from the fancier end of the hospitality business, to tell us that our worst fears are not just true but not even close to what's really happening.

Tomsky has worked in fancy hotels -- mostly at the front desk, mostly in midtown Manhattan -- for about a decade, and I detect a certain amount of "but I really want to be a writer" in Heads in Beds, so he's precisely the person those editors were searching for. He tells his story -- a military brat who hit the end of his academic career in New Orleans, with a useless philosophy degree and a burning desire to make a lot of money without working too hard -- under the bizarre guise of "Tommy Jacobs," whose story he tells in first person. (Surely he realizes his real name is on the cover, so this serves no purpose?)

There are some juicy stories along the way, but not all that many of them -- Tomsky is telling his story (just like Waiter Rant did), and not itemizing all of the things that desk clerks and bellmen and doormen and housekeepers get up to when you're not looking. He's not a reporter; he's a memoirist, so all you can get is what he personally saw and did and heard about. A more comprehensive book would be better -- juicier, obviously, but with a wider scope and a deeper sense of authority -- but that book would have required a publisher to bankroll a real reporter, send that person across the country to talk to a whole lot of hotel folk (and for that reporter to be good enough to get the real dirt), and then give time for the book to be synthesized and written. It's much easier to find someone who can write and just get him to tell his own story -- and that's close enough for a bestseller audience, anyway.

Don't get me wrong: Heads in Beds is entertaining, and lots of fun. It goes down easy, and the reader hopes that Tomsky has some stuff in reserve -- or some buddies he can hit up for stories -- to fill out the inevitable second volume.

Rough Justice by Alex Ross

Alex Ross has painted many covers for DC Comics. And they've been collected...almost ten years ago, in his book Mythology. Rough Justice, on the other hand, has sketches and preliminary art, and so will be of most interest to other artists.

Ross's pencil lines are as precisely and closely observed as his more-famous painted art is; he's an artist who really looks at models and objects and tries to draw them like real, solid things. His story ideas, in common with most of the popular comics creators of his generation, are almost entirely rehashed versions of the stuff he loved as a kid -- untold tales of Kandor, a '70s-style Shazam!, lots of Justice Society, and even a new story of the Super-Sons. Hardcore DC fans will love that, of course -- Ross is one of them, and deeply cares about this stuff. Those of us who just like to read stories will look at it, be impressed at the craft, and quietly move on to something with more substance of its own.

Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Creator Joe Shuster edited by Craig Yoe

Joe Shuster got half of the rawest deal of the 20th century -- a few bucks in return for Superman, a character that made hundreds of millions of dollars for other men (mostly not creators, mostly not scrupulous, mostly already rich). His story is perfectly crafted as an object lesson -- the artist who went blind, the creator thrown away from his own creation, the man who died just a step above poverty as his images were loved by millions worldwide -- and yet it's completely true.

Secret Identity wouldn't exist in a juster world: it collects the art that Shuster created in the early '50s for a trashy, badly-produced and frankly exploitative magazine called Nights of Horror, printed to be sold under the counter at a number of newsstands in New York. It has a lot of characters that look like Kent and Lane and Luthor and Olsen, because that's how Shuster drew, but these folks are whipping each other and engaged in other kinds of sadistic and sexual torments. This book exists because of prurient interest -- the art in the first place, and its republication in this form after it was rediscovered by Craig Yoe -- and I read it because of prurient interest, and, if you're at all intrigued by it, that'll be because of prurient interest as well. That's a kind of purity, I guess.

Secret Identity has interest primarily in the fact that it exists at all; there may be a few really devoted students of Shuster's line, but there are vastly more who will pretend to be while reading this book. It's a sad and tawdry symbol of the Original Sin of Comics, set to remind us that the house always wins and the little guy always gets screwed.

Read in July

I'm going to stop moaning here about how little I'm reading -- for this month, at least -- and just dive into the actual list. So here's what I did read this month:

R. Crumb, The Life and Death of Fritz the Cat (7/5)


Charles Burns, The Hive (7/8) -- This doesn't publish until October, so I expect I'll be able to get something down in words in a timely way. For now, go check out X'ed Out, the first book of this trilogy.

Walt Kelly, Pogo Vol. 2: Bona Fide Balderdash (7/11)

I read the first volume of the syndicated-strip Pogo reprints around this time last year, and burbled excitedly about it here. This volume continues the reprint project, with the complete strips from 1951 and 1952...and, somehow, I'm not as excited.

Kelly's line is just as lovely and expressive, and the characters go through the same kind of adventures -- Kelly was particularly good at telling long continuities with funny stuff every day -- but my reaction, this time, was more "hmm, this is quite good" than "I've got to read more of this." I may be just far too jaded for a man of my years, since Bona Fide Balderdash is full of laughs and great art -- but this book didn't strike me as strongly as the first volume did.

Brian Ralph, Daybreak (7/15)

Ian Frazier, The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days (7/16)

Alex Ross, edited by Chip Kidd, Rough Justice (7/18)


Paul Cornell, London Falling (7/19)

Craig Yoe, editor, Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Creator Joe Shuster (7/21)

Jacob Tomsky, Heads in Beds (7/23)

Nick Hornby, More Baths Less Talking (7/24)

Hornby's been writing a column called "Stuff I've Been Reading" for The Believer -- entirely focused on the positive, which implies that he leaves out books he disliked -- for a number of years now, and there have been four collections of that column: The Polysyllabic Spree, Housekeeping Vs. the Dirt, Shakespeare Wrote for Money, and this book (which covers May 2010 through the end of 2011). The first book was one of the inspirations for this blog, way back when I started in 2005 -- which explains why I so often fall into just posting slightly annotated list of books -- and I reviewed Housekeeping in 2006. All of those books are deeply enjoyable to read if you're at all bookish. But trying to "review" a book of lists of books in another list of books is just far too meta, so I'll leave it at that. Oh, and the title is explained on page 115 -- you've got that to look forward to.

Jeffrey Brown, Vader's Little Princess (7/26)

Hey, remember Darth Vader and Son? (If not, see my quick precis at the end of this monthly roundup.) It was fun, and quite popular, so Brown got to do another one. This time out, Leia is the focus -- sometimes with Luke running about as well -- and Brown takes advantage of his severely out-of-continuity premise to do teen-daughter jokes as well as little-girl jokes. They're good jokes, generally, and they reference famous Star Wars lines that you will recognize and enjoy. If you need a quick gift for a geeky friend, this is exactly what you want.

Austin Grossman, You (7/29)

Barry Deutsch, Hereville: How Mirka Met a Meteorite (7/30)

Ernie Bushmiller, Nancy Likes Christmas (7/30)

Yes, she does. Nearly all of us do, actually. And almost as many of us like the clean, crisp cartooning of the late Ernie Bushmiller. This book collects all of the Nancy dailies from 1946-1948, early enough in Bushmiller's career that the gags aren't quite as precise and honed as we expect. This isn't quite Three Rocks Bushmiller, but it sees him heading in that direction: tightening his gags, focusing ever more on universals rather than gags based on current life. And even on-the-way-up Bushmiller is pretty darn good -- this shows him turning into the pure gag cartoonist he quickly became, and that may be of particular interest to budding gag cartoonists.

Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing (7/31)


Several of those italicized titles will turn into links over the next three days, and I expect (hope?) I'll be banging out things on the rest of them through the weekend. In any case, it was a decent month, with a good pile of books, nearly all of which I can recommend to the right readers.