Book-A-Day 2014 #252: Is This a Zombie? Vol. 8 by Sacchi

Good intentions can be a bitch sometimes. About two months ago, I read the first seven books in a popular manga series, thinking that covering a bigger swath than one volume would allow for a better understanding of a long work, and (I hoped) leading to a more interesting post here. And so I looked at a bunch of the very breast-obsessed manga Is This a Zombie? by a manga-ka billed as Sacchi as Day 192.

And then it turned out that the series -- which I assumed would run for a good long time, since it was based on a popular light novel series by Shinichi Kimura -- was only eight volumes long in all. Oops. So I reviewed nearly all of it in one go, without realizing it, and then would have to come back for the last bit.

Well, it's time for that last bit now: the story ends in Is This a Zombie?, Vol. 8, and I'll have to send you to the link above for all of the set-up.

(In brief: it's a fairly Platonic harem manga, with everyman highschooler Ayumu Aikawa having been killed and brought back as a zombie by a mute necromancer, then turned into a "magikewl girl" complete with frilly costume and transformation song by another such girl, and then had a vampire ninja show up as well. All three of those girls -- necromancer Eu, magikewl girl Haruna, and ninja vampire Sera -- moved in with Ayumu, because Japan, that's why. A secondary harem of other magikewl girls, serial killers, ninja vampires and others also sprung up around the central cast -- there's literally only two other males with speaking parts -- and the intros in each book detail their breast size and personalities in equal detail.)

As we open this final volume, Ayumu has been cursed, so all of the girls have forgotten who he is -- and forget him again every time he leaves them for a moment. This would lead to pathos if Sacchi allowed it to actually go on for more than a page, but they all immediately believe his story, remember everything, and agree to stay with him at all times until the curse can be lifted. (Cue a long bathing sequence and then Ayumu trying to sleep with two of the girls draped over him -- ho ho ho!) This also serves mostly to wipe out the previous hints of a love-triangle plot; Ayumu isn't trying to date or screw any of these girls, he just wants them to be around him.

There's also a battle against what's declared to be the toughest, nastiest megalo ever, but who, as usual, is shown as a cute little stuffed animal and who doesn't actually seem to be hurting anyone or causing trouble. But, don't worry, Sacchi doesn't focus on the tension there, either -- Is This a Zombie? has an irresistible tropism for vague sweetness and windy "we're all family" piffle in this last volume, deflating what tension and energy that was generated in the complications of the earlier books. (It might not be Sacchi's fault: it's entirely possible that he ran out of story from the original novel and is vamping to hit a required episode count.)

So this book is a sequence of jiggly flesh -- sometimes covered, but usually just strategically placed -- and dialogue about how everyone cares about everyone, and it feels like a spring slowly winding down. If you read them all in one rush, that probably won't be as noticeable -- this series was always a softball, equally about boobs and pseudo-familial love -- but this one, all by itself, feels particularly thin and puffy.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

False Equivalencies

I've seen a couple of formulations of this style recently:

A: Racism sucks!
B: Yes, but being falsely accused of racism sucks, too!

Insert "sexism" or "rape" or whatever noun fits the particular situation; it's a one-size-fits-all comeback.

That response is true in the sense that it's not completely wrong, but the problems are so radically different in scale and scope that the effect is to lie.

Here's what these people are effectively saying:

A: It sucks to starve to death.
B: Yes, but it also sucks to lose my morning break and have to go hungry until lunch!

The fact that two things are both not-good does not mean that they are the same, or that they cancel each other out, or that they are even comparable. If being "falsely accused" of something doesn't involve actual law enforcement and at least potential jail time, it doesn't count.

Look, white guys, here's a good test: if you're about to deploy an argument, ask yourself if John Wayne would say that. (Anybody who would use this line of reasoning, I'm pretty sure, is entirely cool with the Duke.) Would he whine about being falsely accused of something? No, he would not. Follow that lead.

You're welcome.

Book-A-Day 2014 #251: The Undertaking of Lily Chen by Danica Novgorodoff

It can be thrilling to see a creator entirely shift focus and discover something new. I reviewed Danica Novgorodoff's first two full-length graphic novels a few years back -- Slow Storm, an original story about horses and forest fires, men and women; and Refresh, Refresh, about war and the home front and boys who thought they were men, with a long complicated path from literary short story to screenplay to comics -- and thought they both had real strengths, but told more than they showed and were overly burdened by their foregrounded themes.

Novgorodoff is back after five years -- it take a long time to write and draw nearly five hundred pages of comics -- with The Undertaking of Lily Chen, a new original that almost seems to be by an entirely different woman than the earlier two books. The art is lighter and brighter, with Novgorodoff's lovely watercolors as backgrounds or strategically placed in her panels to give the sense of a Chinese painting, and figures that are much looser and more lively, just this side of rubber-hose and full of energy and action.  And the story is more matter-of-fact, flowing out organically on the page with only a few captions -- and it's set in a very different milieu from those first two books, among different people, with very different worldviews and lives.

Lily Chen is mostly the story of Deshi Li, the put-upon second son of a successful businessman somewhere in rural north China. After a drunken escapade kills his golden boy older brother, Wei, Deshi is sent off by his hateful parents: he must find a freshly dead young woman to be married to Wei, so the favored son can enter Heaven with an appropriate wife.

Lily Chen, on the other hand, has her own unpleasant parents to deal with: they've just realized that they're at the end of the thirty-year lease on their home, and the only way to extend it is to marry young Lily off to the slimy land agent Mr Peng.

After Deshi's original plans fall through, he meets Lily, who claims to be heading to Bejing to find her rich doctor cousin. And she would be perfect as a bride for his brother -- if only she weren't so alive. Along the way, Deshi and Lily run into a host of other characters, nearly all of whom are working one scheme or another: if they traveled much farther, it would be a picaresque.

The Undertaking of Lily Chen is as serious as Novgorodoff's previous books, but it's funnier and slier at the same time: it's full of characters who all have their own aims and delusions and plans and dreams, and all fully intend to live up to all of them. It's big and bold and exciting and real and does all of the big important things her earlier books strived for, but does it with a light touch and a wry smirk at the same time.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/6

It's going to be a short post this week. So I'll make the intro match. All short sentences! (This is very tough for me.) I review books. So I get books. Most books are surprises. I post Mondays to list those books. I haven't read them yet. This week there's just one. But maybe you'll love it!

OK, enough of that. My one book for this week is Gideon Smith and the Brass Dragon by David Barnett. (Not to be confused with Paul Barnett. For that matter, not to be confused with the Gideon Smith who is a succulent expert and author of non-fiction books. And not to be confused with Gideon Smith and the Dixie Damned, either.) It's a steampunky adventure, the sequel to Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl, and a Tor trade paperback that goes on sale in about a week. The cover pull quote on this one has the Washington Post calling the first book "a fun and bawdy romp" -- and "bawdy" is so rarely used to describe steampunk that I expect this is something a little more different and interesting than the usual corsets-and-brass-goggles assemblage.

book-a-Day 2014 #250: Mind MGMT Vol. 1 by Matt Kindt

Comics have always been about secret stories, the hidden truths behind what we've been told, from the earliest days of pulpy comic books. All of those mystery men, with their origins and powers carefully hidden behind insubstantial domino masks -- and then their stories retold and changes all the time, each time the shocking new true secret behind the story you thought you knew.

Matt Kindt doesn't really come from that end of comics -- his earlier books mined secrets mostly through espionage stories like Super Spy and semi-related Phildickian fantasias like Revolver. But his books are steeped in secrets: operational, national, personal, unspeakable. And he's finally started a major ongoing series, after a bunch of discrete projects, that is all about secrets, their manipulation, and the people who find or hide them.

There are already several collections out -- I'm running behind -- but the story begins in Mind MGMT, Volume 1: The Manager. Like a mainstream novelist -- rather than like a SF writer or like most comics -- Kindt starts with a few odd events and builds up from there, rather than dropping the reader directly into his strange world. So we follow a young woman named Meru -- no second name, just Meru -- who wrote one bestselling work of true crime and have been casting about for a couple of years trying to find her next subject. She becomes obsessed with "Amnesia Flight 815," a plane where all of the people on board, passengers and crew alike, lost their memories entirely in flight two years before.

So Meru sets off to research that plane -- and of the one passenger who wasn't found when it landed, the ominously named Harry Lyme -- and she quickly discovers she's not the only one searching. There's a CIA agent, who helps her. There are two "immortals" who chase both of them, implacable and apparently unstoppable. And there's Lyme himself when she finally finds him, who claims to be, essentially, one of the secret masters of the world. He tells her a fantastic story of superhuman abilities -- to regenerate from any wound, to control others mentally, to create perfect propaganda that simply can't be disbelieved, to infallibly predict the future unconsciously. He doesn't tell her names for most of these abilities, just the people that have them. He doesn't explain where they came from, or why they exist: just that he was trained, he developed certain skills, and among his co-workers there were other skills. They all worked for something called Mind MGMT, probably a government agency, though Lyme is vague on that. He knows what he did, and his guilt for that, and he believes that he was the best agent in the group, and that when he cracked the whole agency was disbanded, with just a few "immortals" on detached assignment to clean up the loose ends.

As usual, Kindt is more focused on interesting questions and options than definite answers; this first volume of Mind MGMT only sketches the framework in which these agents worked and what they could do. Frankly, they could be gods, and in other comics-maker's hands, that would be the inevitable way the story would bend. But I don't know if Kindt cares about that angle; we'll have to see. From this introductory story, we know that Mind MGMT exists, or existed, that it had counterparts all around the world, and that some of its veterans are too damaged to go on, but that others are quite capable of going on absolutely indefinitely. It remains to be seen what any of them want now: Meru or Lyme or those implacable immortals or the shadowy figures that ran the group and possibly still do so now.

And, more than anything, we know that in the world of Mind MGMT, absolutely everything is suspect: any fact or name or action could be a lie or a false memory, every story a false trail or a pure invention. And we know that normal humanity, so far, has no defenses or safeguards against the mind managers: we are all nothing but sheep to their wolves.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #249: The Star Wars by Rinzler and Mayhew

Every story has a sausage factory behind it -- the rough drafts and deleted scenes and aborted ideas and half-baked concepts that were smoothed out and cleaned up by the final product. Stories that require a lot of people, such as movies, usually have a substantially bigger sausage factory: it had to make sense to that many more people, and a lot of them had to contribute some sausage of their own.

George Lucas's Star Wars saga has an unusually large sausage factory, and a possibly even greater legend: for a while, Lucas had "always planned" to make nine movies, and then he'd "always planned" to make only three, and then he'd "always planned" to make six, and then the eternal plan for nine came back again. (Though you must remember that whatever the story was at the time, it had always been the case, and other reports were misleading: we were always at war with Eastasia.) And, like most movies, there were a number of treatments and outlines and rough-draft screenplays along the way, as Lucas bashed his material into a shape that he liked, that could be filmed, and that would be green-lit by the folks with money.

The very earliest full draft screenplay had the title The Star Wars, and -- since everything Star Warsian must eventually become a salable product, from a toy version of the fifth alien from the left from the Cantina scene to a genuine Tauntaun sleeping bag -- it was turned into a full story of its own over the last year, an eight-issue comics series under that original title: The Star Wars. The script was by J.W. Rinzler, the pen art by Mike Mayhew, and the colors by Rain Beredo. And if it's not entirely clear if elements of that script were picked up by Lucas and his screenwriters for the prequel trilogy, or if Rinzler incorporated those elements into this version of the story, well, that's only another piece of the sausage factory.

This version of the story is much more like its pulpy '30s original inspiration, a particularly Republic-serial-esque sequence of hairsbredth escapes, feat of derring-do, and last-minute plans. It's even more of a space opera, and has even flatter characters that the movie that Lucas did make a couple of year later, and it likely would not have been as successful, if it could even have been made. (I suspect it would have been at least four hours long, and cost a large fortune.)

In this universe, the Jedi-Bendu were merely a warrior order, without any supernatural powers; the Force of Others was a vague religious concept; and the Knights of the Sith were a competing order that battled the Jedi for power now and again -- chivalrously, in general -- and had recently almost destroyed their ancient rivals. Han Solo was a roguish tramp spaceship captain: a green-skinned Ureallian who looks an awful lot like Swamp Thing. General Luke Skywalker was an older man, the last great Jedi, head of the military forces of the planet Aquilae, which itself was the last major human planet outside the great Empire. And Annikin Starkiller was Skywalker's new padawan, the son of Skywalker's old compatriot Kane Starkiller, now a cyborg with only a few human parts.

The plot is closer to the prequels than the original movies: good King Kayros of Aquilae wants to let Skywalker save his planet, but, gosh darn it!, only the squabbling and fractious Senate has the power to unlock the war computers, and they're led/controlled by folks already suborned by the Empire. After a brief battle against the overwhelming Space Fortress, Aquilae falls to the Empire, but Annikin and Luke (and Luke's top spy Captain Clieg Whitsun) smuggle out the sixteen-year-old Princess Leia and her young twin brothers after the king dies early in the occupation.

Our heroes enlist the help of Solo to get off-planet, and are chased by the implacable Imperials, led by General Darth Vader, the right-hand man of Governor Crispin Hoedaack, personally appointed by the Emperor to rule Aquilea. (The boring politics and tropism to monarchy over democracy was in Lucas's creation from the start, clearly.) Along the way, they gather two very familiar droids, both of whom talk clearly in this version. But the whole crew crash-lands on Yavin, planet of the primitive Wookies -- who are a little more Bigfoot and a little less walking carpet in this version -- and end up teaching that race to pilot starfighters in about a page and a half. (I said this was a space opera.)

There's also a knight of the Sith, Prince Valorum, who doesn't get enough to do and doesn't show up until nearly the end: he's the Fortinbras of this book. But there's plenty of running around, shooting blasters at each other, fighting with "lazerswords," and starship combat to keep the plot ticking along quickly -- though there's also a lot of dialogue and captions to load up the exposition and explain what's happening. And the good guys win in the end, in scenes that oscillate between the endings of Star Wars and Phantom Menace.

The Star Wars is frankly a curiosity: it exists because a screenplay is a difficult thing for most people to read, and so it turns that screenplay (which would have made a perfectly good book by itself, perhaps filled out with early conceptual art and/or essays about its creation) into something more user-friendly to a larger portion of the universe of Star Wars fans. And so it will be read by every single reader with an eye to the differences -- ahh, Alderaan is the capital of the Empire here, with a Cloud City-esque capital! Oh ho! the TIE Fighter-looking things are called hunter-destroyers, and "stardestroyers" are also two-man fighters! And so on.

If you find those things amusing, and know Star Wars reasonably well, then you'll probably like The Star Wars. Me, I was hoping for more of the Whills, but I guess they were only in the middle drafts.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Because, That's Why

Here, have a video, for two frivolous reasons:

First, we got into a discussion of Broadway musicals (sure, mostly Chicago, but go with me here) at dinner this evening.

And, second, I just wrote up a Book-A-Day post for a book in the manga series No Matter How I Look At It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular! which inevitably reminded me of...

Book-A-Day 2014 #248: RASL by Jeff Smith

It's always worthwhile to watch a creator very carefully, when he's coming off of the biggest success of his life. Will he try to replicate that same success? Will he do the same thing over again with the serial numbers crossed out -- or, even less daring, just do a plain sequel?

Jeff Smith had a massive, worldwide hit in the nine-book Bone series, and it took him more than a decade to get that story down on paper. (And that doesn't count the time before the first issue that it was percolating in his brain and pen, or the years since when he was reissuing it in new formats with new partners.) I am sure that there have consistently been people dangling large checks in front of his face to do Bone: The Next Generation or The Boneville Chronicles or Untold Tales of the Bone Cousins, and it's to his massive credit that he didn't do any of those things: everything even remotely similar was clearly a side project, and never positioned as "the next Bone."

No, instead Smith decided to exercise entirely different storytelling muscles. Instead of semi-medieval fantasy, he'd have modern-world SF. Instead of romantic struggles to save innocents, he'd have one morally compromised main character fighting to save himself. Instead of the cute little Walt Kelly-esque Bones, he'd have scientists and soldiers and government functionaries and whores. Instead of dragons, he'd have the spirit of Nicola Tesla. And so to follow Bone he made RASL.

Rasl is a dark, noirish book, and if all of its disparate pieces don't entirely come together -- the explanation for the name Rasl is silly, and Rasl himself transitioned in a suspiciously short time from duplicitous government scientist to cunning master art thief in the backstory -- it's compellingly told, with the energy and darkness of the great noir stories. There's a bit too much Nicola-Tesla-was-soooo-cool narration -- seriously, there needs to be an inoculation given to the geeks of the world to avoid Tesla Fever -- but, most of the time, Rasl moves at a strong pace, explaining the things it needs to explain but knowing that some major elements can and should remain mysteries.

Noir has not historically been kind to women, and that's the case here: all of the women here are whores or femmes fatale or victims or schemers, or more than one at a time. But that's OK: this is the story of Dr. Robert Johnson, who became the art thief and dimensional traveler Rasl because of what he discovered, and who went on the run so that his inventions wouldn't doom the whole world. He's a deeply flawed man, but, like a Chandler hero, he will go down those mean streets and do the things that have to be done.

Rasl is even more complete and final than Bone was: even if someone wanted Smith to tell more stories of dimension-hopping, he's definitively completed this story, and anything new would be entirely separate. And, as of last year, it's all available in a single book, to be read through all at once, the way it was meant to be. So go to it: even, or especially, if you thought Bone was too soft and twee and light. This is an entirely different thing, and a sign that Jeff Smith intends a long cartooning career: he won't be "the Bone guy," but the creator of a sequence of very different, equally compelling stories.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index
 

Hacking the Cloud

So you might have heard that a number of celebrities had their personal (meaning: naked) photos stolen recently, through their accounts with Apple's iCloud system. Various low-information talking heads have made a lot of noise about this for close to a week now, blaming "the cloud" and mostly neither increasing their own or anyone else's level of information.

David Linthicum, of InfoWorld's "Cloud Computing" column, thinks the cloud is getting a bad rap throughout all this furor -- and it is, certainly -- but he also engages in the disingenuous "all systems can be hacked" argument to handwave it all away.

Yes, there have been other data breaches that are more serious than this one. And, yes, this was at most a failure of user security rather than a direct failure by the cloud provider -- Apple could have provided two-factor authentication, but most people hate that, and don't tolerate it for anything less serious than financial matters. (Though there may now be a market opening for a nude-selfie cloud provider with upgraded security -- especially if they throw in the ability to add and delete authorized viewers for specific pictures on the fly and have a Snapchat-esque purging system that actually works.)

But this breach was enabled entirely by the nature of the iCloud system. Whoever this hacker (or hackers) was, he used a publicly accessible distributed system (aka a "cloud") and was able to guess IDs and passwords for a number of famous people whose lives are well-documented. If those celebrities' photos were not automatically uploaded to a cloud storage system -- if they only lived on those individuals' phones and any computers they used to synch with those phones -- such a theft would not be possible. Absent iCloud, the only way to get these photos is to obtain the phones (or personal computers) themselves, and that's not scalable the way "hacking" the passwords of Jennifer Lawrence and her ilk is.

Placing data on a platform that can be accessed from any appropriate device that successfully accomplishes a security handshake makes that data inherently less protected. This is the case for pure cloud systems, as well as the credit-card databases that major retailers keep having trouble with. (I'm not a systems guy, so there's probably a good reason why those retailers don't use locked channels of communication that function purely between their known store locations and their data warehouse. At least, I hope there's a good reason, and it's not a case of "using the Internet was cheaper.")

If your data needs to be locked down because leakage to unauthorized users would be very damaging, perhaps it shouldn't have an IP address at all. That's all I'm saying.

Book-A-Day 2014 #247: Frommer's EasyGuide to Walt Disney World and Orlando 2014

Don't worry: I'm not going to waste as much space in this year's Book-A-Day for travel guides to Orlando as I did in 2010. (Then, I had five posts covering nine books; the last of them was Day 267, which links back to the earlier ones.) I think this will be it: I hit this year's Unofficial Guide as Day 222, and now I have a slightly more out-of-date book with a different perspective.

It's probably rude to mention the out-of-date thing, since Frommer's EasyGuide to Walt Disney World and Orlando 2014 was published in January, and that wouldn't make much of a difference most years. But this has been a year of major change in the Orlando theme-park world, with Disney entirely revamping their FastPass ride-reservation system (and finally opening the last piece of the "New Fantasyland" in a minor, kid-friendly roller coaster) and Universal opening a major new themed Harry Potter area in their original park. I've got a voracious appetite for information, and the world of RSS feeds only makes that too easy, so I'm in the odd position of knowing more about what's going on in a place I haven't been for a year than the expert book I'm reading.

Most people, though, won't focus on the cutting-edge changes: they want to know the basics of when to go, where to eat, what to do, and where to sleep at night -- and, even more so, how to save money and time doing those things. Frommer's is a long-running, trusted travel brand, and it's developed an excellent, info-packed style for its books that makes them browsable as well as useful to read straight through. And the author of this book, Jason Cochran, is also the editor-in-chief of Frommers.com, which I imagine makes him one of their top guys.

Cochran has a smart, engaging writing style: he definitely has a point of view, and can be funny much more often than I expected. Anything I lost in a book that went to press in late 2013 was more than made up for by Cochran's informed opinions and choices. More than that, though, this is a relatively brief book (250 pages) that covers all of the important aspects of an Orlando vacation: theme parks, restaurants, hotels, and even some other things to do while you're there. It will not list every option, due to its size -- it doesn't even cover the Bonnet Creek resorts, one of my favorite tucked-away corners of the not-quite-Disney world -- but it does include all of the options you'd expect and plenty of others that you didn't.

I still think the Unofficial books are the very best choice for a WDW vacation -- particularly for people like me, who like to gather as much information as possible and over-analyze every situation -- but I've seen two different Frommer's books in recent years, and both were excellent and very useful. If you're looking for a book with less opinion than either this EasyGuide or the Unofficial book, the main, larger Frommer's book may be right for you -- that one also is mama-bear-sized, between those other two options in breadth. (Though, from a quick check at That Book Store, Frommer's may have eliminated the bigger book -- the most recent edition came out in fall of 2012.)

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #246: What Fools These Mortals Be: The Story of Puck by Kahn and West

I am frankly shocked and amazed that today's book even exists -- and, to go further, that it was published by a commercial publishing house that evidently expects to at least break even on the thing. If anyone tells you we're not living in a golden age of comics reprints, show them this and laugh very loudly in their stupid faces.

Perhaps I should explain.

Puck was a satirical weekly magazine published out of New York for about forty years, starting in 1877 and dying out just after The Great War. It was the major American entry in a once large and thriving genre -- England's Punch survived the longest, and so is probably the best-known now, but there were several dozen of them, in every major European language, making mild fun of the political figures and social scenes of the day for much of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Puck's fame lives on only in moldering print archives, in the minds of a few scholars, and in its eponymous Puck Building, which wonderfully served as the headquarters of the not-entirely-dissimilar magazine Spy for most of its twenty-year run a hundred years later. But, for two generations of the Gilded Age and afterward, Puck was a major force in molding American elite opinion and in determining what we would take seriously and what not. If you've seen late nineteenth century political cartoons -- any that are not by Thomas Nash -- they were probably from Puck originally.

Michael Alexander Kahn and Richard Samuel West, two scholars of the history of editorial cartoons and each in possession of a complete run of Puck, wanted to bring the best work from Puck back into the public eye. Somehow they were able to convince IDW's The Library of American Comics to go along with that scheme, and so they assembled What Fools These Mortals Be: The Story of Puck, which be published at the beginning of October.

(I saw it in a digital format via NetGalley, which meant the reproduction of fine detail -- and late nineteenth century political cartoons are chock full of fine detail -- was severely limited. I am recommending What Fools These Mortals Be as a tremendous historical artifact and assembly of important work, even though I wasn't actually able to read a lot of the tiny text on the cartoons reprinted here. I expect the real book will be vastly clearer, as real books always are.)

Kahn and West give a short history of Puck along the way, and talk a little about the different cartoonists who worked there over that forty-year span; they divide What Fools These Mortals Be into ten thematic chapters and generally reprint cartoons -- all but a handful of them in gorgeous full color -- in chronological order. Puck, for most of its life, had a color cover, back cover, and inside centerspread -- those of us who work in publishing are grinning, because we know exactly what that means on the presses -- and those color pages were always devoted to art, and usually devoted to cartooning. (That was one of the main purposes of a satirical paper: to have cartoons making fun of things.) So this book is mostly full color.

The work reprinted here is generally in the lush, lavish, heavily detailed nineteenth century style, descended from engraving and full of precise caricatures of real people and lots of metaphorical imagery, which Kahn and West explain carefully in their captions. (Since Puck ran so long, it outlived that era of illustration, and there are also a few more modernist pieces -- along with parodies of the then-new newspaper comic strips and similar things -- near the end of the book, in a section with work that has nothing to do with politics.)

Again, it's a wonder and a joy that this book could even exist. I don't know who is the audience for hundred-plus-year-old political cartoons (besides me, of course), but I hope that IDW is right and that such an audience does exist. There's a lot of excellent, interesting, historically important cartooning here -- Puck has been credited with denying U.S. Grant a third term in 1880 and with scuttling the ambitions of could-have-been-President James G. Blaine in 1884, among other things. If this sounds at all appealing to you, you will definitely love it.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #245: Attitude Featuring Andy Singer "No Exit"

I spent three years picking on editorial cartoons at my other blog -- Editorial Explanations, still available in mothballs, though the references are as old as three-year-old news -- and I still look at them, though not in the quantity I used to. (For EE, my goal was to see every editorial cartoon published that day, and comment on the egregious ones.)

And so recently I realized I had a random book of editorial cartoons on my shelf, with the ungainly title Attitude Featuring Andy Singer "No Exit". It was an offshoot of the Ted Rall-edited series of Attitude anthologies from the early aughts -- there were three of them in all -- and declared itself to be the first of its own series of books featuring individual cartoonists. At least two more books in that series followed, featuring the work of Neil Swaab and then Stephanie McMillan, but the series seems to have petered out quickly.

Two things to note, then: first, that Singer comes from Rall's end of the political spectrum, and can be expected to fall somewhere in the liberal-to-leftist zone. (There are loud, tendentious arguments online about both of those terms -- even within the left side of the political spectrum, or maybe especially within the left side -- so I won't define either of them.) Second, this book is from 2004, pretty much the point when lefties were at their most angry and upset. They made slightly fewer jokes about killing the President when it was their turn, and their irrational anger didn't immediately turn into racism the way righties do these days, but otherwise it was a similar affect: loud and raw-nerve and striking out randomly.

Singer doesn't have many anti-war cartoons here, for whatever reason, but he makes up for it with anti-car and anti-consumerism work. (I believe this was meant to be a career retrospective, rather than a collection of current cartoons, which could explain the lack of focus on the two useless and wasteful wars raging at the time.) Singer has the fervor of a true believer, and the equally fervent desire to always to the perfect thing, which leads to a few cartoons where his characters bemoan the fact that they have to make choices about least-bad consumer goods. This is Singer at his whiniest, and is an excellent tonic for those of us who have been vaguely sliding leftward over the past decade: there's no way anyone wants to be associated with such prima donna whiners.

But most of Singer's cartooning is stronger than that: he has a very easy-to-read, cartoony style, full of bullet-headed men and their scowling eyes, and his lines are dark and straight and true. He's on-message most of the time, but his message is so all-encompassing that he gets a lot of good gags out of it. And Singer was still working in the old editorial cartoon mold at this point -- bold images, few words -- rather than the wordier lefty style that's grown up since then, driven by Rall and Jen Sorensen. Make no mistake, he's very leftist -- many of the cartoons here seem to argue against capitalism entirely -- but he's also incisive and smart, and can both write funny and draw funny.

If you, too, want to smash the hegemonic militaristic state and usher in a new world of collectivism and happiness, Andy Singer is your man. This appears to still be his only solo cartoon book, so it's still the one to look for.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #244: Celluloid by Dave McKean

I am about to commit dancing about architecture; I'm sorry up front but there's nothing else to be done. I set out to write about one book I just read every single day for a year, and I didn't think what I'd do if I ran across a story that didn't have a single word in it. (If my skills were other than they are, I could draw a response to a drawn book, but they're not, and I can't, and I won't.)

So: words are what I have to describe Dave McKean's 2011 "erotic graphic novel" Celluloid, and words are what I'll use, even if the book itself entirely avoids them. It has no flap copy, no quotes, nothing: the only words in or on it are the usual definitional stuff: title, author, other books by author, copyright and printing details, a sentence of acknowledgements. This review, at this point, already contains roughly twice as many words as the entire book Celluloid.

What's it about? A woman arrives home alone, and calls her man. They check schedules, and apparently the answers aren't good. She takes a bath, and when she emerges, nude, there's an old film projector in front of her couch that wasn't there before. She watches the movie, which is of a woman being taken from behind by a man -- it's blurred, but I believe we're supposed to realize the woman is her. Then the film breaks, and a door appears, and she passes through into into a realm where everything is drawn differently, and further erotic adventures continue through several realms, with an Earth-Mother-y woman and a red-skinned devil-man and others. Her man may have been part of those adventures, somehow, and he arrives home at the end of the book, to find and turn on the projector himself.

McKean, as ever, is a lovely draftsman and creator of pages, but his mercurial style raises a lot of questions in this context. He's a very impressionistic artist who alters the look of pages to show different moods or places or events, and who draws faces and bodies very differently in different contexts -- but, without words, the reader is never quite sure which of those things has just changed. The woman is clearly the same woman throughout, no matter how she's drawn, but are the people around her always different? There are hints her man is part of this, through the workings of these erotic other realms: is that true, or was this purely her own journey?

For example: there's one sequence where the woman is fondled by several dozen hands, lovingly and slowly. Are we to take those as disembodied, somewhat supernatural hands -- as if she's wandered into a zone of maximum manual pleasure? Or are we to see this as an artistic way of indicating a large number of friendly, loving partners, reduced on the page to the important point of contact?

Either would be appropriate; either interpretation could be justified by McKean's art. Neither, I suppose, is authoritative. With a wordless book about fluid, polymorphous sexuality, every page -- full of fleshy images, half photographic and half drawn, some sharp and crisp but most of them blurry and evocative -- is open to interpretation, every page is at least half what the reader brings to it.

Celluloid is sexy and lovely and artsy in roughly equal proportions, but it's not the kind of sexy that leads to an immediate physical reaction. (To go Elvis Costello on you, it's not likely to be rhythmically admired.) If you're looking for deeply, artistically classy erotica, this is at the top of the heap. If you'd like something more rough-trade than that, you're looking in the wrong place.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/30

This post will go live on a US national holiday, so it's appropriate that I only have two books to write about: I don't expect many people will be here in the first place. As always, these two books arrived semi-unexpectedly; they're both new publications from the Great American Machine, and I haven't read either of them yet.

Blood Lad, Vol. 5 is the latest in the supernatural adventure manga series by Yuuki Kodama; I reviewed the first volume last year in a round-up, but haven't kept up with it since then. It's a Yen Press paperback that hit stores in July.

And Charles Stross's The Bloodline Feud is the remixed and revised combination of the first two books in his Merchant Princes series, The Family Trade and The Hidden Family. Long-time Stross fans will remember that he plotted those out as a single novel, back several publishing upheavals ago, and this edition has already been out in the UK for a while, getting good notices there. This is possibly Stross's darkest series -- and I say that measuredly, since he has several other novels where mankind is already extinct -- set in something like Roger Zelazny's Amber if the Amberites were gangsters with nuclear weapons rather than medievaloid sword-wielders. This new edition, with two novels for the price of one, is a Tor trade paperback hitting stores on September 9th.

Read in August

This post should actually go up on time, which makes it slightly less useless than its counterparts for most of the months this year. Here's what I read this past month:

Aaron Renier, Spiral-Bound (8/1)

Michel Rabagliati, Paul Joins the Scouts (8/3)

Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Fallen Words (8/4)

Joe Kelly & JM Kim Niimura, I Kill Giants (8/5)

Jason, Athos in America (8/6)

Gabrielle Bell, The Voyeurs (8/7)

Mike Mignola & Duncan Fegredo, Hellboy, Vol. 12: The Storm and the Fury (8/8)

Bob Sehlinger & Len Testa, The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2015 (8/8)

Charles Rodrigues, Ray and Joe: The Story of a Man and His Dead Friend (8/8)

Art Bathazar & Franco, Itty Bitty Hellboy (8/9)

Mike Mignola, John Arcudi & Max Fiumara, B.P.R.D.: 1948 (8/10)

Mike Mignola, John Arcudi & Toni Zonjic, Lobster Johnson, Vol. 2: The Burning Hand (8/11)

Mike Mignola, et. al., Abe Sapien, Vol. 2: The Devil Does Not Jest and Other Stories (8/12)

Robert Sullivan, My American Revolution (8/13)

Jeffrey Brown, Star Wars: Jedi Academy: Return of the Padawan (8/13)

Bob Fingerman, Minimum Wage, Book Two (8/14)

Kyle Baker, Special Forces (8/15)

Carl Sternheim & Steve Martin, The Underpants (8/15)

Jerry Holkins & Mike Krahulic, Penny Arcard, Vol. 3: The Warsun Prophecies (8/17)

Peter Bagge, Apocalypse Nerd (8/18)

Christophe Blain, Isaac the Pirate, Vol. 1: To Exotic Lands (8/19)

Sam Hurt, ...I'm Pretty Sure I've Gor My Death-Ray in Here Somewhere! (8/19)

Gail Simone & Neil Googe, Welcome to Tranquility, Book One (8/20)

Pat Grant, Blue (8/21)

Jose Oliver & Bartolo Torres, Young Lovecraft, Vol. 2 (8/22)

Charles Stross, The Rhesus Chart (8/24)

Peter Milligan & Brendan McCarthy, The Best of Milligan & McCarthy (8/26)

Jack Cole, Betsy and Me (8/26)

Dave McKean, Celluloid (8/28)

Ted Rall, editor, Attitude Featuring Andy Singer, "No Exit" (8/28)

Michael Alexander Kahn & Richard Samuel West, What Fools These Mortals Be: The Story of Puck (digital proof, 8/29)

Jason Cohran, Frommer's EasyGuide to Walt Disney World and Orlando 2014 (8/30)

Jeff Smith, RASL (8/30)

J.W. Rinzler & Mike Mayhew, The Star Wars (8/31)


As of this moment, Book-A-Day is two-thirds done, and I'm running almost a week ahead. Next month I hope to hit a lot more comics (as always this year) the back two-thirds of Jasper Fforde's YA trilogy, and the newish book by Michael Lewis. I might also have another post reviewing the first half-dozen volumes of a manga series and might even get into a fourteen-day stretch covering the Dungeon series, as it exists today in English.

Or maybe not: it's always difficult to predict what you'll want to read next.