Book-A-Day 2014 #11: Crogan's Loyalty by Chris Schweizer

The third volume of the Crogan Adventures -- each one telling the story of one of the male members of that very danger-prone clan, over the last three hundred years or so -- integrates the modern frame story more closely with the main historical plotline, and Schweizer is gaining enough confidence in his work to leave his moral strongly implied rather than spelling it out. So Crogan's Loyalty is both a ripping yarn and a thoughtful story of the ways that family and country (and other demands) can conflict. (It might be even better that the first two books, Crogan's Vengeance and Crogan's March.)

As usual, it begins with the present-day adult Crogan -- who, come to think of it, doesn't appear on the end-paper genealogy and has not yet showed any evidence of an adventurous youth like the rest of his family -- telling a family story to his two young sons. (I don't remember if their ages have ever been specifically given; they're probably not in middle school yet, but not far short of it.) They're on their way to the funeral of Crogan pere's mother -- the boy's grandmother -- where their ne'er-do-well Uncle Chad, who nearly ruined their father, who's been out of touch with the rest of the family for a decade, will be as well. And the fact of Uncle Chad, and the modern family falling out, leads the senior Crogan to tell his sons the story of two teenaged Crogan brothers during the American Revolution.

In 1778, William and Charles Crogan were each fervent in their causes, and each was out in the woods of the Western frontier in service of those causes. Unfortunately, young Will was a colonial scout, and his slightly older brother was a Ranger in service of George III. And, because Crogan's Loyalty is an adventure story, they run into each other on page seven of this graphic novel. They fight, they argue, but they don't kill or seriously wound each other, which could be counted a major achievement.

And they end up on the farm of the Dockreys, in a thinly settled part of the woods, over the official Proclamation Line into Shawnee country -- mostly because Will has been lingering there to court Bess, their pretty daughter. But both of them have work to do, which leads them -- squabbling and together -- to the Shawnee village to meet their chief, Jonah Red Legs, where Will is to trade on his father's old friendship with Jonah to bring the Shawnee into the war on the colonial side.

From there on, the adventure story kicks into high gear, though Schweizer doesn't rely as heavily on cliches this time out -- wisely, since most of the cliches involving Indians on the frontier are a bit musty and racist these days. But there are chases, surprise attacks, captives taken and tracked and freed, homesteads brutally attacked and men who set off for vengeance. And, of course, both Will and Charles have to make hard decisions under great pressure -- as the title says, they each have to decide, more than once, where their true loyalty lies.

Crogan's Loyalty blends fast-paced action with thorny moral dilemmas, and it all works because Schweizer makes all of his characters -- the warring brothers, the aged and weary Maquachake chief, the steely professional soldiers, the vengeance-seeking angry men both Indian and white -- real and believable, not just pieces of the yarn he has to tell. There's something like a villain in this book, but he's not the only one who does bad things -- and he's right to do what he does, in his own head at least. The Crogan books are great for teenaged boys -- though I may be biased, because I have two in my house, and they enjoy these books -- but they've got depths older readers will appreciate as well.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index
 

Book-A-Day 2014 #10: Marble Season by Gilbert Hernandez

I've been staring at this blank page for a good half an hour -- interspersed with looks at what I've written about Gilbert Hernandez in the past, in hopes that would give me a way in -- and I'm still at a loss of how to start to write about Hernandez's semi-autobiographical story.

Do I mention the obvious influences, like Peanuts and Dondi? Do I muse that Gilbert is wandering into his brother Jaime's territory -- most obviously Jaime's great recent story "Browntown," also a story about growing up Hispanic and working-class in a small Southern California city -- and speculate about that? Do I try to dig into the "semi" in that semi-autobiographical, and try to sift Hernandez's remembered childhood from his fictionalized story? Do I point out that this is one of the best-reviewed and most lauded graphic novels of last year, and endorse that judgement?

I could do any of those things, but none of them seem adequate. Marble Season is assured and self-contained -- the former is standard for Hernandez, but the latter is more rare -- telling the story of one boy growing up in the mid-60s somewhere in Southern California: the hardscrabble, tickytack part of SoCal, far from the beaches and the mansions and the beautiful people, where kids fight and play and scheme and steal and lie and torment each other. And, more than anything else, in that pre-Internet world, they talk to each other -- about the things they want, about how they should play, about stories they read or saw on TV, about other kids, about what they'll become when they grow up.

This is one of those rare stories set right on the cusp of knowledge, among girls and boys who are looking at each other and thinking about each other without knowing why yet. That's not the only thing they don't know yet, of course: there are a thousand pieces of the adult world they don't understand yet. But it's all starting to make sense to them, and they -- especially Huey, our main character, the fictional version of Hernandez -- sense that they almost understand what's coming, and that thrills and frightens them. So there are some kids who are a little older and a little farther along -- like Huey's older brother, Junior; the one to the right on the cover -- getting into fights, looking at girls a little more seriously, getting in trouble for falling grades and not caring that much when they lose their formerly-beloved comic books.

It's a story about kids that's entirely for adults, because it relies on our knowing what these kids are in for, and on our knowledge of our own childhoods, our own times when we were on that same cusp. It's a quiet book, following the rhythms of a kid's life in those long months of school between holidays, in a land where it's always mostly warm. It's about the Marble Season: we all had one. And we didn't realize it until it was over.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Quote of the Week: Running to Type

A little shaky in the knees, we continued trudging and met Franz Gussik, the dog breeder. Here was a classic slob, taller and fatter than me, with a three-day growth of beard, wearing greasy thermal long johns, overalls, and insulated boots. He had an openmouthed, gaping, staring expression and drooled slightly. He stood listing to the left or right and looked at us with his head cocked to the side. He breathed loudly and scratched himself with dirt-encrusted fingernails. I had no basis for comparison at the time, but I now know that as dog breeders go, he was above average. He could read and write, and I believe had never eaten a child of his own.

 - Daniel Pinkwater, Uncle Boris in the Yukon and Other Shaggy Dog Stories

Book-A-Day 2014 #9: You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack by Tom Gauld

Tom Gauld is the kind of cartoonist even the literati like, particularly since his work is usually about literature (high or low, in one way or another). He's committed graphic novel with the Jason-esque Goliath, and has also cartooned a lot for The Guardian newspaper, providing them with a weekly cartoon.

You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack collects more than 150 of those cartoons, which are funny and smart and sneaky, each one typically constructing a collision of high and low culture for the amusement of all of us who get the references. (Bronte Sisters: The Videogame! Samuel Beckett's Adventures of Tintin! Professor Ian Rigby: Academic Stunt Driver! The Realist Novel and the Experimental Novel! Lost in Venice: a Game for 2-4 Players! Feminist Fairy Godmother! Various Scenes Involving Pudding!)

OK, so not every cartoon specifically does the high-low thing -- many of them shove together two elements of low culture, or high culture, or things that aren't precisely culture, even -- like that pudding example. But they're sly and intellectual in the best way, taking standard ideas and the canon of Great Literature (among many other things) and standing them up sideways in the hall so Gauld can toss cream pies at them.

Best of all, Gauld manages to not condescend to any of that -- not low culture, not even the pudding. The title cartoon after all, is about the cultural sneer towards SF, and provides a great new explanation for that sneer. It's the one I'm going to assume is true from now on, certainly.

If I haven't convinced you yet, check out Gauld's Tumblr, which features many cartoons from this book, among other work. And then go buy You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #8: One Summer by Bill Bryson

There's nothing wrong with bourgeois history, in its place; it's just that "its place" seems to be every damn place in the world. But since I am pretty darn bourgeois myself, I probably shouldn't complain too much.

Bill Bryson has made a very comfortable career about telling Americans (and Brits, at least some of the time) things that they either already know or that make them feel smarter and better. His early work was mostly books on language (e.g.: The Mother Tongue) or travel books of the I-wandered-around-there-for-a-few-weeks style (Notes from a Small Island, forex). And I have to admit that I greatly enjoyed pretty much all of those books; Bryson is an engaging writer of bestselling nonfictions, very able with plausible sentences and research-derived facts.

About a decade ago, Bryson apparently decided he'd rather stay home to write, and the travel books stopped. He'd also run through the bulk of what he had to say about words, as well, so he turned to more general nonfiction, though -- to his great credit -- he has never committed a "why this seemingly boring thing changed The Entire World" book. He did write a paean to Boomer exceptionalism -- disguised lightly as a memoir about how he had the bestest childhood in the bestest city in the bestest country in the bestest decade in the whole wide world -- in The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, which came close to erasing all of the good work he'd done up to then. But he settled down, before and after, to old-shoe comfort histories like A Short History of Nearly Everything and At Home, in which he went on at great length about the social history of the stuff in his gorgeous old house.

Bryson is now a middle-aged man, which means he's required to do a book about baseball, or how wonderful a particular moment in the past was, or some now-forgotten murder case, or a great American hero. Being Bryson, he decided to shove them all together and get it all over with at once: the result is One Summer: America, 1927.

One Summer is mostly about Charles Lindbergh and Babe Ruth, with major digressions to Sacco & Vanzetti, Herbert Hoover, and Calvin Coolidge. Minor digressions include Al Jolson, Al Capone, Henry Ford, Philo T. Farnsworth, Jerome Kern, famed executionist Robert G. Elliott, Gutson Borglum, the great Mississippi flood of that year, Prohibition, the Ku Klux Klan, the eugenics movement, Jack Dempsey, the pole-sitting fad, and Charles Ponzi. Bryson's thesis, such as it is, is just that these four months in 1927 in the US were a particularly interesting time and place, though I imagine a skilled writer could do an equally compelling book about any four months of the last hundred-and-fifty years, even if restricted to a smaller geographic area than an entire country. It's organized partially by time and partially by subject -- Lindbergh and Ruth recur throughout, but most of the other folks get their moment and then disappear again -- as it meanders through various things that happened in mid-1927, backtracking to explain their history and fast-forwarding a bit to reveal what their eventual ends were.

So this is quintessential bourgeois history: it's set long enough ago that even the most reactionary reader won't be disconcerted by the politics -- who today will honestly claim to be on the side of eugenics and the KKK? -- and it's full of semi-random facts that its readers will struggle to remember and bring up in conversations for the next six months. It's quite pleasant to read, but entirely pointless; Bryson isn't really trying to prove anything, or even give a picture of what ordinary life was at the time. He just wants to hit some highlights in a year with a bunch of them.

If you have some time to kill, and particularly if you're the kind of middle-aged man who is constitutionally incapable of reading fiction, One Summer is right up your alley. If you're still hoping Bryson will get back out into the world and talk to people, you have some more time to wait.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #7: An Uncommon Scold edited by Abby Adams

This one's probably going to be quick 'n dirty, folks; there's not much to say about a book of quotes. But if you're looking to read a book a day, they can't all be long 'uns full of details to ponder and cogitate over.

Interesting facts:

• An Uncommon Scold was originally published in 1989 and reprinted by S&S's Fireside imprint in 1994, during what I remember as a flurry of quote-collection publishing. (If you live long enough, and pay attention, everything comes into vogue in publishing, which is either encouraging or frightening.)
• I have the paperback, which has a cover similar to the one pictured to the left, but with most of the same elements arranged somewhat more conventionally and less calculated to call attention to how design-y the package is.
• Uncommon Scold collects quotes by women, generally in the acerbic manner, in the obligatory topical chapters arranged alphabetically.
• It's actually credited as "compiled and arranged by Abby Adams;" I simplified that to "edited" because I think editing usually does include compiling and arranging, and I believe in credit where it is due.
• Abby Adams is the wife of Donald E. Westlake, who provides a foreword here on the history of the term (and the type) of the Uncommon Scold.
• I should have said "was" in the prior bullet; Adams is still alive (as far as I know), but, in yet another proof There Is No God, Westlake died on New Year's Eve of 2008.
• Women are just as quotable as men, if not more so. Though, when I search "quotes by women" on That Big Online Bookstore, what comes up is a lot of inspirational glurge, much of it in the form of blank books. Women deserve better than that; they deserve more books like this one.
• Well, at least they do have this one, I suppose.

Here, let me give you a random quote for flavor:

"Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication."

That's from Fran Leibowitz, in the "Literature" section. An Uncommon Scold has several hundred other quotes, all equally as good, chosen carefully and arranged tastefully. What more can I say?

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #6: Blown Covers by Francoise Mouly

A small industry has recently grown up of works that didn't appear in the New Yorker. First, Matthew Diffee edited two collections of cartoons rejected by the New Yorker -- The Rejection Collection, original and Vol. 2 -- and later re-edited them with some new material into a comprehensive edition of cartoons the New Yorker did not run. I'm not aware of any outlet running stories or journalism that was spiked by the New Yorker, but I wouldn't bet a penny that doesn't exist, somewhere.

And recently the New Yorker itself decided to get into the act of publishing things that it didn't publish, which is circular in some very convoluted way. Francoise Mouly, the legendary editor of RAW and art editor for the New Yorker for nearly two decades, has put together a book of covers that she almost ran on the the magazine, or that nearly were chosen, or otherwise came thisclose to being real magazine covers.

But they're not; they all got kill fees at best -- many of the ideas here are in sketch form, and so probably didn't even get that. (Of course, now all of those artists are getting paid -- I fervently hope -- for their appearances in this book. But that's not at all the same thing, and doesn't have the same cultural cachet as a real magazine cover.)

The covers here are nearly all topical -- with a few exceptions for areas that are always vaguely topical, like sex and race relations -- and mostly cluster in the last decade, from 2000-2011 (the aftermath of the Bush-Gore election and 9/11) on. Mouly organizes them into a half-dozen topical chapters, covering sex, religion, politics, celebrities, and so forth.

Blown Covers has a lot of commentary by Mouly, on the subject of covers in general, the kinds of topics and ideas that make good covers, and about the specific unused covers and sketches she's assembled in this book. There's a lot of work here from Mouly's husband art spiegelman, as would be expected, but probably even more from Barry Blitt, who has a great eye for the topical image and a zeal to tackle the biggest and most divisive news stories of the week.

(I should mention that Blown Covers also contains a lot of actual covers of the New Yorker, both in Mouly's introduction -- which explains her theory of covers, and something of the history of the New Yorker cover -- and in the thematic chapters, illustrating what Mouly did run with after she shows the also-rans.)

Since this is Mouly's book, it's entirely about her reign as art editor and the choices she made, but that's reasonable, since before the Tina Brown era (which was just shortly pre-Mouly), the New Yorker avoided topical covers almost entirely, and any details of the decision-making process for covers would probably be much less interesting. ("Well, for September 16 of '57, we wanted something autumnal, but not too autumnal, so Larry Horsehand's falling leaves over a covered bridge was just a bit too far.")

Actual and potential New Yorker cover artists have already scoured this book for any scrap of direction -- it came out in 2012 -- and diehard New Yorker fans probably already have their copies as well. But it's interesting even to non-diehards; Mouly is grappling with the question of how to tastefully illustrate and comment on the news, which is always going to be an open question in the media. And she does it thoughtfully, with some great examples.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/4

For the third week in a row, I have only one book this week to write about. And, once again, I am not complaining, because even one free thing is really nice. (And not having to write more here on a Sunday morning when I need to get out to a gala birthday lunch for Thing 2 is not to be scorned, either.)

As usual, I have not read this book yet -- haven't even removed the protective shrink-wrap -- but here's what I can tell you about it anyway.

BTOOOM!, Vol. 4 -- the bang is part of the official title, as are the three Os and the all-caps -- continues the manga series by Junya Inoue from Yen Press. (It's from what seems to be a "games" imprint at Yen -- the Japanese editions has a fake "DXBox 720" logo on the cover, to make them seem even more like actual videogames, but the US edition is somewhat more restrained.) I did a quick review of the first volume in a round-up post last May, if you're interested.

This is one of the descendants of Battle Royale -- a bunch of random people are kidnapped to a remote island and forced to play a live-action version of a kill-everyone-with-bombs videogame for purposes that were obscure in the first volume and probably don't really matter anyway. Our hero, as is traditional, is a diffident young man with no social skills, job, or prospects, but who was really, really good at that game. (One could wish that manga broadened their pool of protagonists, because That Guy is a bit wearying after a while.) This fourth volume is available now, but I'd recommend beginning at the start; you don't have far to catch up at this point.

Incoming Books: January 3

I usually try to get at least one good big book-shopping binge in during my vacations, but I nearly missed that this time out of inertia. Finally, it was the last weekday of my vacation, and I'd missed the window to get into the city and hit the Strand -- we'd gotten about half a foot of snow the night before, so getting around was a pain. But I could still get over to the Montclair Book Center, my big local indy shop, and so there I went.

And here's what I found:

Levels of Life, the new book by Julian Barnes, about his life with his late wife (and longtime literary agent) Pat Kavanagh. Barnes's last major nonfictional work was also about death and aging: Nothing to Be Frightened Of, which came out in 2008, soon before Kavangh's death. I suppose that's what happen as you get older: one's attention focuses more and more on the end.

Hyperbole and a Half is a collection of comics and essays and other things, mostly if not entirely from the blog of the same name by Allie Brosh. Brosh is the source of the "do all the things!" image that's all over the Internet, and also a thoughtful, interesting writer -- which may not be unrelated to  her ADHD and depression, the subjects of many of her pieces.

What Were They Thinking? by Bruce Felton -- a collection of short bits about bad ideas throughout history. I'm 99% sure that I've seen this or held this before, but I'm about equally sure that I never actually read it. And it looks like an excellent bathroom book.

How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff -- this is a classic, and my first copy died in the flood. So now I have an excuse to read it again and write about it here, which can count as a win if you squint.

Taxes, the Tea Party, and Those Revolting Rebels is a graphic novel history of the American Revolution by Stan Mack. I believe Mack is left-leaning, so I expect making "Tea Party" so prominent in the title does not have the contemporary political implications one might expect. But I'll have to see when I read it.

META 4, the collection of a comics series by Ted McKeever. I liked some of McKeever's early work, but I haven't seen anything of his -- out of my own laziness and not paying attention, I'm sure -- in a long time. He's an interesting creator, so I should probably catch up on his work.

Reporting, which is a collection of articles for the New Yorker by David Remnick -- I believe all from the era when he was the Editor and general Big Cheese of that operation. I had a copy of this before the flood, but that was a hardcover and this is a trade paperback -- so not only is it totally different, this new one is more portable and thus more likely to get read. Also, Remnick won a Pulitzer for one of his books, so he's gotta be good.

Bandette Vol. 1: Presto! is the first collection of the adventures of the title character, who is the world's greatest thief and also a teenage girl. It's by Colleen Coover and Paul Tobin -- who also did Gingerbread Girl together and a lot of other things separately.

And last is Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2. I still haven't read the first one -- I have a bookmark about twenty pages into it, though, so I'm officially reading it, and have been for about three years -- but I will, eventually, and so I'll want this one to follow.

Book-A-Day 2014 #5: Uncle Boris in the Yukon by Daniel Pinkwater

Daniel Pinkwater, as I've insisted here many times and will continue to do so, is not just one of the very best writers for teenagers to come out of the 20th century, but one of the finest writers period of his time, someone who regularly captured both the ordinary-ness and sublimity of life, and did it in fabulously entertaining novels. (Most recently Bushman Lives!, one of the best books of his career-- he's still going strong in his seventies.)

But, like so many other writers, he's never been content to do just the one thing he's best-known for. So he did commentaries for NPR for years, which turned into the excellent books of autobiographical essays Chicago Days, Hoboken Nights and Fish Whistle. And he ran a dog-training business in the '70s with his wife Jill -- and that turned into a book, Superpuppy, a bestseller in its day and still, I understand, influential in its field. That latter experience -- or, more generally, the fact of being a dog person and owner of many dogs over the years -- led to this book in 2001: Uncle Boris in the Yukon is subtitled "and Other Shaggy Dog Stories," and it's a collection of stories about Pinkwater's relationships with the dogs in his life, with a digression to begin about his uncle's career as a prospector and dog-musher in the far north (after Boris and his brothers escaped their early, pre-WWII life as Jewish gangsters in Warsaw -- Pinkwater gives hints of several incredibly colorful lives in the opening chapters).

Pinkwater has always written stories about odd, interesting, specific children, so it's no surprise to find out he was one himself, a semi-only child (he had older half-siblings, on both sides) who lived various places (Chicago, California) and even was sent to military school, mostly because his father was a successful businessman who wanted his son to grow up with the future leaders of America. Uncle Boris, though, isn't really about the young Pinkwater -- maybe we will still get that book, someday -- but about the dogs he knew and trained and loved.

So Pinkwater grows up, on about page fifty of this two-hundred page book, and most of the length is about the various large and somewhat wolflike friends he's had over the years. There's a lot of detail about the personalities of the dogs, and how they interacted with each other, including the obligatory funny stories about "when Dog X was new" and "how Dog Z dealt with Dog Q".

I'm not a dog person, myself -- heck, I'm not an animal person of any kind, and I'm not that thrilled about people, if you get right down to it -- but Pinkwater's stories are full of love and insight and deep knowledge of his subject: the interaction of dog and man. If you are a dog person, you should absolutely love this book, and I bet you've never heard of it. It's not that long, either, so it could be a nice little gift for your dog-loving friend, too.

And even if you're not a dog person, you very well might enjoy this book -- I certainly did, and it would be difficult to be less of a dog person than me.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #4: American Elf by James Kochalka

James Kochalka kept a daily diary comic, posted online at americanelf.com, for more than fourteen years, starting in late 1998 (with a few hiccups in the early months) and running through the end of 2012. That's one of the little-acknowledged great achievements in modern comics, a sustained burst of story and art unmatched by anyone else working today.

Even more important than the raw fact of American Elf's existence is that the strips were good all of the time, and sublime a lot of the time. Kochalka's life had interesting aspects and moments -- he fronted a rock band as well as being a cartoonist, and the years of the strip saw him grow from an ambitious but rough-edges young man into a slightly more settled husband and father -- and he launched the strip with a strong sense of focus on those aspects and moments. And that only got better as he gained more experience putting an entire day, or a moment that encapsulates that day, into four little comics panels.

All but the last year of American Elf has been collected, and I've written about much of it here -- Book Two, which collected the strips from 2004 and 2005; Book Three, which did the same for 2006 and 2007; and the double-sized (and, in retrospect, ill-timed) Book Four, which covered 2008 through 2011. The first four-plus years of the strip were originally self-published by Kochalka in a few smaller books under the title Sketchbook Diaries, and were then gathered together to make the first volume of the collected American Elf. And it's that first book that I came to last -- which isn't even ironic, since the whole point of a good diary is that each entry explains itself, and so it can be begun anywhere.

There's definitely an element of Kochalka finding himself in these early years, and a lot more questioning of the point of the exercise itself than he'd do later. But even from the beginning -- there's a comics introduction by Kochalka that makes this point explicitly -- he was trying to show a whole life through the small everyday moments, so the focus and detail and drive was there from the beginning.

It all began with a short run of strips -- two and three a day, actually -- during the San Diego Comic-Con in August of 1998, which inspired Kochalka to start doing it daily. (Though it did take him about two months to get around to that, showing that we're all procrastinators.) The early strips are more whimsical and sillier than Kochalka's later work -- not that he stopped being silly, but he worked out ways to be seriously silly as he went on, if that makes sense. These early years of American Elf are also more metafictional than the later ones -- Kochalka's strips were often about being strips, or about trying to find of twist moments to make better diary strips.

But the real joys of American Elf are of seeing this young man -- often too angry, always too energetic, a raw nerve vibrating against a world that doesn't know what to do with him -- as he works and plays and thinks and lives his life, building a work of art around those little moments. Maybe American Elf couldn't have gone on forever -- no life can be examined all the time -- but, still, we can wish that it went on longer, or could come back somehow, someday.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #3: Watchmen and Before

The great sin of mainstream American comics is that they never end. There are no stories of American superheroes, only tales -- and a tale can be embellished and retold, extended and amended, embroidered and bowdlerized to fit the particular moment. There is no story of Superman, or Spider-Man, or Captain Marvel, only issues -- only tales, telling the same fragments of narrative in slightly different permutations over and over again until the audience gives up and moves on to another, slightly less shop-worn tale.

There was a time when it looked like it could be otherwise, as if the weight of continuity could ground the field and allow new depth and possibilities. Then, the world had only been rebooted once -- or less than once -- and the before-world was still a sharp, fresh object in the readers' minds, always there, deliberately, as a comparison to the new world. But that time was over more than twenty years ago, as successive continuity crises and shocking revelations and amazing retcons and fantastic inserts shattered that consensus view of the fictional world. Now, every person who still reads superhero comics has his or her own canon -- every reader decides which stories "count," in her head. Some of those readers -- a Bendis or Johns, Morrison or Straczynski -- count for more than others. But not by much.

Watchmen stands as a monument to that potential -- a major superhero story, possibly the major superhero story, with a de novo beginning and a deep middle and a clear, definite ending. For twenty-five years, it stood almost alone in superhero comics: a singular major achievement, without sequels (the Batman: Year Twos and Dark Knight Strikes Agains that entangled its late-80s classmates) or retcons or rewrites, a world complete that was never revealed to be really Earth-92 all along.

Of course, it was never that simple: Watchmen's ending was famously dodgy even in 1987 -- nicked from a minor Outer Limits episode (consciously or not) and grotesquely out of proportion to the story it was supposedly part of, a sacrifice on the altar of superhero pulp. And Alan Moore would have been very happy, apparently, if Watchmen had not been as de novo -- if he'd been allowed to use the Mighty Crusaders (his first choice) or the Charlton heroes (his second), it would all have been different. But every great work of art is partially the result of chance and happenstance, and so it was with Watchmen: it was big, it was dense, it was full of wonders and details and ideas, and it was a superhero comic that demanded and rewarded as much attention as a serious novel or painting. Even more so, the whole work was equally strong -- conceived and executed in one burst of work by two men (three if you count John Higgins, the indispensable colorist), with strong contributions by both to create a gestalt work that neither of them could have done alone.

Watchmen is a major graphic novel, the one superhero story that every comics reader should read. (Though I admit that's an odd phrasing -- the other problem is still much more prevalent.) And even the worst trash strewn around it -- even if Dr. Manhattan is someday shown to have traveled to Earth-1 after the end of Watchmen to team up with Batman, lose his powers to Lex Luthor for a maxi-series, and fall in love with Power Girl before dying nobly to save the world from Sun-Eater XVI -- will not tarnish it, the same way that no amount of shabby Robert Downey, Jr. movies can tarnish the legacy of Sherlock Holmes.

And that's good, because most of Before Watchmen is pointless at best, and dull pandering at worst. Brian Azzarello uses a lot of captions -- and is supported by flashy modern art, particularly by Lee Bermejo -- to obscure the fact that his Comedian and Rorschach stories are extended exercises in not saying anything new at all. Worse, if Rorschach were actually as bad at fighting crime as Azzarello shows here -- as easily captured, as un-threatening, as ineffectual -- he'd have been dead a dozen times over before the main story of Watchmen even began. Azzarello massively mis-estimates how Rorschach has to operate, and his story is a cartoon because of it. (As I said, though, Bermejo's art is moody and strongly evocative of the '70s -- he'd be great for a Jaques Tardi-esque noir story set in that grimy New York.) The Comedian story has different mis-steps -- Azzarello seems to take joy in foiling the reader's expectations as to what the Comedian really did in the '60s, and replacing those with dull "revelations" of things that we already know that other people did, so there's no shock that they're possible, or that a sociopath like the Comedian would do them. Honestly, if you wanted to do a new Comedian story, to tell a story that wasn't told in the original Watchmen -- and I'll admit that very much does not seem to be the point of the Before Watchmen stories, which instead wallow in continuity porn and embroidering single panels into entire issues -- the one to tell would be his service in WWII, when he was young and presumably still shockable.

J. Michael Straczynski got to tell the most conventional, obvious stories possible in Nite Owl and Dr. Manhattan, hitting all of the cliches Moore left out of the original Watchmen as if he's running down a punch list given him personally by Dan DiDio. So we get the training-the-replacement montage, the secret-sacrifice poignant moment, a tedious evil evangelist, the obligatory bondage-themed and sexually available heroine who is nothing at all like Catwoman, gratuitous female nudity, and lots and lots of the superhero equivalent of Talking About the Relationship, as Dr. Manhattan's internal monologue takes up entire pages with proof that even an omniscient, omnipotent being can be dull as dishwater in his own mind. And the less said of his Moloch, the better -- at least that's short. Adam Hughes seems to be trying to stretch his usual style in Dr. Manhattan, which is admirable, and even works, some of the time, though. All in all, if you wanted to see what Watchmen would be like as an ongoing universe in the ham-handed modern style, Straczysnki is right there to show you.

Len Wein's contributions are along the same lines -- the story he tells in Ozymandias is utterly unnecessary, adding nothing at all to the original except Jae Lee's gorgeous, stunning pages. The Crimson Corsair story (written with John Higgins, who also did the art) has the least relationship to the original Watchmen -- it's a pirate story that supposedly ran in a comic in that universe in the late '50s, but the style and matter and substance of it make that a laughable premise -- is gory and stylish and pointless, like the entire Before Watchmen project in miniature. And Dollar Bill is a fun little single issue, with exceptionally lively Steve Rude art, that shows what a Before Watchmen project with far smaller ambitions and more sympathy for the original work could have been, and how that could have succeeded modestly.

The best of this bad lot are the stories written or co-written by Darwyn Cooke, who as we all know has a real love of and affinity for the 1960s. His Minutemen -- the only work in all of Before Watchmen conceived and executed by a single person -- is told by the first Nite Owl, as he finalizes his memoirs in the early '60s, with copious flashbacks to the earlier days. It does some of the same things that Azzarello did in Comedian -- taking things Moore hinted at in Watchmen, and giving a different "real" explanation -- with somewhat more success, though it's still a shabby tactic. Silk Spectre, co-written and gorgeously drawn by Amanda Conner, actually tells a completely new story of the very young second Silk Spectre, running away to San Francisco to put flowers in her hair and fight some crime while she's there. It's easily the most successful piece of the entire Before Watchmen project, because it stands on its own, or as close to that as possible.

American comics have embraced, or fallen into, a business model that denigrates stories and endings in favor of endless product, delivered weekly through a carefully cultivated distribution channel that has shown itself actively hostile to the traditional virtues of stories. For a long time, it looked like that channel, and that business model, and the superhero comics that relied on both, were slowly dying out. But that has changed radically recently -- all of those things have been growing again for the past few years. So we may be stuck with "product" like this for the foreseeable future. Luckily, the infestation is restricted to superhero comics through the direct market -- and there's no reason to dive into that muck unless you actually enjoy reading pointless, endless shards of narrative weekly in the company of a few hundred thousand equally engaged folks.

• Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1987)
• Before Watchmen: Comedian by Brian Azzarello and J.G. Jones (2012)
• Before Watchmen: Rorschach by Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo (2012)
• Before Watchmen: Nite Owl by J. Michael Straczynski, Andy Kubert, Joe Kubert, and Bill Sienkiewicz (2012)
• Before Watchmen: Dr. Manhattan by J. Michael Straczynski and Adam Hughes (2012)
• Before Watchmen: Moloch by J. Michael Straczysnki and Eduardo Risso (2012)
• Before Watchmen: Ozymandias by Len Wein and Jae Lee (2012)
• Before Watchmen: The Curse of the Crimson Corsair by Len Wein and John Higgins (2012)
• Before Watchmen: Dollar Bill by Len Wein and Steve Rude (2012)
• Before Watchmen: Minutemen by Darwyn Cooke (2012)
• Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre by Darwyn Cooke and Amanda Conner (2012)

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #2: London Falling by Paul Cornell

Ah, the horrors of good intentions! I read London Falling back in mid-July, and wanted to take some time to write carefully about it -- so I set it aside to review "a little later." That never works, but I keep trying -- this time for sure! So I'm left, almost six months later, with an excellent novel I read too long ago to say anything clear or coherent about. But let's see if I can jog my memory at all...

This is urban fantasy -- meaning that it's set in the modern world, full of steel and computers and capitalism and complex societies, not that it's about a tough chick in tight pants and the seventeen gorgeous supernatural men who lust after her. The place is London, the time is now, and if London Falling was originally plotted as the pilot script for a TV show that was never made, well, that's not really a concern. It's a police procedural, in the direct tough line from Prime Suspect, set in that tough, nasty, gritty London that was once called the Big Smoke.

And the characters are from that tradition and that world: two undercover policemen, at the end of a long and stress-filled and unrewarding stint in the camp of a gangster whose major crimes all seemed to be done away from his gang; their controller, frustrated and angry and sure at least one of them have turned to the other team; and the female back-office support agent who worked for all of them. All of them are specific people with quirks and foibles, though those quirks and foibles also have clear, actorly hooks that could easily turn into an arc of the series this probably will never be.

And the four of them are involved in an event -- at the end of that long undercover assignment, when the higher-ups finally lost patience and decided to grab whatever evidence they can and end it all -- that turns London Falling from the gritty procedural of the first fifty pages into the urban fantasy that every reader is expecting. They get the Sight; the learn the secret of the world; they are initiated into a world that they never thought could exist.

More importantly, they stay cops. They know that they have a job to do -- and the fact that only they can see that job, and only they can do that job, and only they know that job even needs to be done...that doesn't matter. Since my biggest complaint about urban fantasy is the casual attitude towards vigilantism and mob violence in that subgenre -- that it's a field full of protagonists who have to casually commit murder, because they're special and always right -- London Falling is perfectly calculated to appeal to me: these people are supposed to take care of these problems.

This could easily be the beginning of a series, and I hope it is: the characters and world are rich and engrossing, with depths and specifics Cornell only has room to hint at in this novel. And there will definitely be more problems in this London, more things that only these four cops can see and fight and stop. So they had better be back.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #1: The Hive by Charles Burns

Burns is the master of creepy comics, from his early work on characters like Big Baby and El Borbah for RAW and others in the 1980s through his masterpiece, Black Hole, which appeared in parts throughout the '90s. But his slow pace does mean that we only see a Burns ending every other Presidential administration, at best -- Black Hole took him a decade to complete, though the end product is worth every minute of that.

So it's no surprise to find ourselves in the middle of another dark, unsettling Burns story in The Hive. It's the middle book of his current trilogy -- each of them a European-style album of around 50 pages of story, deliberately evoking Tintin in format as well as in a few visual ways -- following 2010's X'ed Out, and to be completed, in another year or so, by a final book. The Hive begins in the middle and ends in the middle, as the center of a trilogy always must, serving to deepen and complicate rather than to explain or complete. And that's assuming that expecting a clear explanation from Burns at all is a reasonable thing to do.

Our young hero, Doug, continues his unsettling adventures in two worlds -- the "real" one of which may be entirely in flashbacks, the fantastic one of which may be entirely in his head, or both or neither -- where he is nearly as confused and uneasy as the reader is. In the realistic world, Doug looks like a normal young man of his era -- probably the middle days of punk, in the late 1970s or early 1980s -- with a girlfriend, Sarah, who is drifting away from him as they both try to continue their art and it becomes clearer that she has more ambition and focus and talent than he does. Not unrelatedly, she also has more problems than Doug does, including a nasty ex. In the fantastic world, Doug has a simpler face -- one which echoes the mask he used for his art in his own world -- and a simpler existence, toiling in the titular Hive for the foul-mouthed lizard men, cleaning and fetching and doing other menial tasks.

The two worlds are linked mostly by Doug's face, and by his relationship with the women in the two worlds -- Sarah, who may be pregnant, and the "breeders" of the Hive, who are something less defined so far but more unsettling than just pregnant. So the body horror of Black Hole is back, though the focus on women's bodies could feel just a bit regressive here -- Doug is a naif, almost an innocent, rather than one of the participants of Black Hole, and all of the lurking unpleasantness is caught up in women's sexuality and reproduction.

Still, we don't have the whole picture yet, and it's not at all clear if we're seeing scenes in anything like the order they happened -- there's plenty of room and time to learn more about Doug, and to have him turn out to be more or less than he seems to be. And there's no one who does horror in comics form like Burns: he's the master of the lurking dread, the uneasy suspicion, and the creepy implication. We may well have the end of this story to look forward to in 2014, so lets leave those questions open, and see how Burns ends this all.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index