Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/19/20

I actually have one book in the mail this week, which is surprising: partially because of the time of year, partially because of the well-documented (and, not to get political, deliberate) problems with mail delivery this year, and partially because I wouldn't send me review copies if I were a publisher. But new books are a wonderful thing, particularly so when unexpected.

And this week I have one from Dancing Lemur Press, coming as a trade paperback and ebook on July 6th of 2021.

Blood Red Sand is Damien Larkin's second novel, after Big Red. And I think this is a sequel -- both books are military alt-histories launching out of WWII, apparently both with German super-science making the war go in a different direction, both have British soldiers fighting Nazis on Mars.

So it's possible that this is a different alt-hist about fighting Nazis in the 1950s on Mars, but my guess is that it's not. And it's coming in the middle of next year, so you'd have plenty of time to get to Big Red ahead of it, to have the maximum amount of Nazi-fighting in your 2021 diet.

Quote of the Week: Splunge

I reversed out of the parking lot and drove down into the town square, past Howell Harris and the lorry still stuck fast on the bridge. Toccata stared at me the whole time, then reached out a hand and tweaked my bony forearm.
'You're very skinny,' she said. 'Did you do any dreaming on your four-week sojourn to the dark side?'
'No, ma'am.'
'Good,' she said. 'The only thing I loathe more than winsomniacs is dreamers. Feet on the ground, head out of the clouds. Agree?'
'Yes, ma'am.'
'I don't like subordinates always agreeing.' she said. 'Sycophants have no place in my department. You're to speak your mind when the opportunity calls for it.'
'How will I know when that is?'
'I shall inform you. Park over there.'

 - Jasper Fforde, Early Riser, pp.216-217

Love and Other Weird Things by Rich Sparks

I don't want to say the blurb from Roz Chast is the best thing about this book: it's a great book, collecting lots of neat scratchy, funny cartoons by a unique talent, a book that made me giggle and titter and guffaw and maybe even laugh out loud at least once. Let me say that first.

But I love the cover quote, which also says a lot about cartoonist Rich Sparks' sensibility that he thought it was a great idea to prominently feature it.

You probably can't read it clearly from the bookshot. So I'll type it in here as well, to show you what cartooning genius Chast wrote when Sparks asked her to do a blurb for his then-upcoming book:

I'm actually trying to get out of the 'blurb game.' Unless it's for my kids, or someone I owe a ton of money to.

If just seeing that on the cover of a book makes you smile, Rich Sparks' cartoons, and the book Love and Other Weird Things, is right up your alley.

These are all single-panel cartoons, each presented on a wider-than-it's-tall page (like a Garfield book, or one of the millions of similar collections of newspaper daily strips from the past eight decades or so). From the copyright page, I think at least some of them appeared in American Bystander and Weekly Humorist, which I still insist are the fake names for fictional magazines in some Hallmark romantic comedy.

I don't know that I've seen much of Sparks' work before, but he's awesome and unique -- he's not like Gahan Wilson or S. Gross, but he's equally unique, if you know what I mean. A Sparks cartoon is its own thing, from a different viewpoint, and no one else could have thought up any of them.

He's also got a nice matter-of-fact drawing style that works well with his lumpy tighty-whitey-wearing characters and quirky situations.

It's hard to write about cartoons with spoiling some of the jokes, but I'll limit myself to one line of dialogue in one cartoon, which I think will give you the flavor of full Sparks: "I'm not the kind of rabbit who usually picks up hitch-hikers but you look like someone I could easily take in a knife fight so just keep that in mind."

This is funny stuff, by a distinctive talent. Anyone who likes single-panel cartoons should check Sparks out, and keep an eye out for more of his work.

The Dying Earth by Jack Vance

I assembled an omnibus, under the title The Compleat Dying Earth, back in the late '90s for my then-employer, the Science Fiction Book Club. My awesome art director -- I think it was Toby Schwartz at that point, but we were gifted with a series of wonderful artistic collaborators -- commissioned a neat, atmospheric cover by Brom and designed a nice package for that art. The book itself included the four "Dying Earth" novels. It may have been the first time all four appeared in one volume together: I don't want to claim that if it isn't true, but it's my memory.

(In those days, if there was a previous omnibus, we'd just buy that one, because it was vastly easier to use someone else's files than to set the whole damn thing ourselves.)

Anyway, that was the last time I read the Dying Earth books.

That edition is now out of print, and the copy I had of it went beneath the waves in my 2011 flood, like so many other things. Some years later -- the book itself is silent as to when it was published -- Tor borrowed or bought the files for Compleat from whatever entity owned the book clubs at that point and published the same collection of words as Tales of the Dying Earth, under a lovely but really inappropriate John Berkey cover that I have to wonder if it was just hanging around the art department and needed to be used by a specific date.

I have a copy of the Tor edition now. And I thought this was as good a time as ever to re-read some Vance. So I read the first book, the original The Dying Earth, assembled by Vance as his first book in 1950 from stories originally published in magazines over the previous year or two.

If you've never read Vance or the Dying Earth stories, they might read as oddly familiar these days: huge swaths of later fantasy (most obviously, the first iteration or three of Dungeons & Dragons, but plenty of prose writers as well) borrowed, adopted or stole ideas from these books, and it might not be clear that Vance was there first. The protagonists are mostly users of magic at this point, each knowing a few powerful spells and owning a few puissant devices to protect themselves from each other and the other myriad dangers of this last dark age of the world. And they're mostly adventuring to get something: knowledge (in the form of more spells, or more broadly), some other lusted-for object or person, or just power. 

Vance's style was also solidly in place even at this point: the long sonorous sentences, filled with slightly obscure words that are exactly correct, the slightly artificial, sprightly dialogue, the casual cruelty of his worlds and many of his people. I was thrilled and happy to be reminded that Vance was Vance from the beginning.

Dying Earth contains six stories of varying length, with overlapping characters and action. Each one tells its own story, but some characters will pop up again, particularly as the title protagonist of a later piece. Some of the protagonists are heroic, some much less than that. Dying Earth came out of the pulps, so the endings tend to fit the accepted morality there: the good end well and the evil end badly -- but Vance's tone always makes it clear that is not usually the way of the world, and is never to be assumed.

I'm reading slowly these days, so I didn't dive right into The Eyes of the Overworld (the second Dying Earth book, from the mid-60s) afterward. But I was tempted. And I may need to get to Eyes before too long: Vance is wonderful and magnificent, and I haven't read any of his books in far too long.

I do have to admit that Vance is probably not a writer for everyone. If fine writing repels you and you just want to get into a story, he's not a good fit for you. You need to enjoy words and wordplay and subtlety to get the most out of Vance, and many people don't. But, frankly, I have to admit that, for my money, the kind of readers who like Vance are the best kind of readers, and hope that the rest of you will someday level up and realize that. Come join us! It's awesome here: we have Jack Vance!

Department of Mind-Blowing Theories by Tom Gauld

Some books you don't review so much as point at, to show that they exist. You might talk a bit about why you enjoy them, but that's about all. For me, books of cartoons -- especially themed collections of funny cartoons -- are squarely in that category.

Once you say "he's a fat cat, and he hates Mondays! It's hilarious!" what else is there to say?

So I'm here today to point at Tom Gauld's new book of cartoons, Department of Mind-Blowing Theories. It contains 152 cartoons, each presented in color on a separate page, all originally appearing in New Scientist, all on the subject of science, all funny and inventive.

You might know Gauld from his previous books Baking with Kafka (cartoons from The Guardian's book section) and You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack (all over the place, with a general tropism towards SF and mad science). Those books are also about the same length, in the same format, and are full of funny and inventive stuff.

At this point it's usually typical for a reviewer to spoil a few of the jokes, in order to make it clear he really has read the book. (Like, duh. It's a short book of funny cartoons; it's harder not to read it once it's in front of you.) So let me say: cut-price science park, out-of-universe messages, #alchemists, classic fiction in binary.

Gauld is fond of doing variations on a theme, often starting with a common phrase like "fount of all knowledge" and extending the metaphor. He also gets a lot of mileage out of mad science, horrors from between the angles of normal space, robots, and of course the usual furniture of scientists' lives: papers, research, theories, experiments.

Again: I think this is very funny, very inventive. I like smart humor, and Gauld is one of the best at smart humor today. If you do as well, this is a book for you. If not...you just might be a redneck.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/12/20

This week's list is a lie. The first three books -- two from the library and one from the mail -- arrived late last Saturday, after I'd written up the previous week's post and set the publish time.

But if we can't manage our obsessions to suit ourselves, what can we do?

So I held those three books for this week, thinking I probably wouldn't have anything else to mention. (Spoiler: as I type this, there are two more books on hold for me at the library. Further Spoiler: two more came in the day after that. See the end of the list for the non-lie titles.)

Publicity Copies in the Mail:

Allergic is a new graphic novel from the powerhouse program at Scholastic, written by Megan Wagner Lloyd and drawn by Michelle Mee Nutter. (As far as I can tell, this is their first work together, and their first major work of comics, though Lloyd has written a number of picture books, which are not a million miles away from comics.)

It is somewhat in the tradition of Raina Telgemeier, though Scholastic is (smartly) not playing that up: the story of a pre-teen girl with an unexpected medical issue, somewhat based on the author's life, and how that plays out for her and her family. This time, as the cover implies, it's about young Maggie, who really wanted a dog but realized as soon as she got one that she's allergic to animal fur.

Allergic publishes on March 2nd in both hardcover and paperback formats.

The Mighty Emmanuel Einstein Free Public Library:

Piranesi is the new novel by Susanna Clarke, author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

(I almost want to leave it at that.)

I was one of the many people who read and loved JS&MR back in 2004. My memories are hazy, but I'm pretty sure it came in to the "mainstream" clubs first, rather than the SFBC -- since it was Classy and Serious and from a non-SF publisher (Bloomsbury). I did get to it before publication, as I recall, though I have no memory if I (or the SFBC in general) was any part of the decision to offer it in the clubs. Anyway, it was a great book, and then it was a Big Book: bestseller, Hugo winner, et cetera.

And then Clarke went quiet. There was a small book of stories, The Ladies of Grace Adieu, two years later, collecting mostly work she'd published in magazines and anthologies during the decade-long writing of JS&MN, some of which were loosely related to that book. But that was it.

Then, earlier this year, there was news: Clarke had finished a new novel, which was not the rumored loose sequel to JS&MN, set among much lower-class English folk. Instead, Piranesi was short where the earlier novel was long, with a small cast, set in a Gormenghastly structure that may be the entire world and where only two people live.

And of course I have to read it.

Clyde Fans took even longer than Piranesi to emerge, though we knew it was in progress, and sections have been published separately over the past twenty years. It was supposed to be the "second book" by Canadian cartoonist Seth (just Seth, born Gregory Gallant, and you'd think up a new name too if that was your original name), after the sublime It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, but...well, he's been working on it since 1997, and some other things have leapfrogged over it during that time, most notably the lighter George Sprott.

But it's finally complete: the bug-crushing slipcased edition was published late last year, and (somewhat more recently) I realized a copy was in a library system I had access to, so I didn't have to actually pay the full price for a bug-crushing slipcased edition. (When you lose five thousand books at once, as I did in 2011, you lose something of your enthusiasm to spend lots of money on books forevermore afterward.)

Further Books from Emmanuel Einstein's Hallowed Halls

This is going to be difficult on desktop; I got four more books in series where I already have one at home, so I've just written about all of these, in exactly this context, only a week ago. And, as I have been complaining about recently, on the desktop version of this blog, there's an ugly gap of whitespace if the text about a book doesn't run longer than the image of that book's cover.

On mobile, the image shows up full-width, so the issue doesn't apply. I suspect this is a responsive-design thing -- the old Blogger editor used to wrap text fully around images on desktop, which was a cleaner look there but may not have worked as well on mobile. (I like the idea of responsive design, but in practice it seems to be an exercise in deciding where most of the readers are and making giant sweeping design decisions based on that, so that the minority platform of the time gets the crappy look.)

So, anyway, I don't have a lot to say, and those of you reading on desktop would suffer visually because of that. So, instead, all of you get to suffer from me vamping -- isn't that better?!

H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, The Second Volume concludes Gou Tanabe's adaptation of the Lovecraft novella of the title. I've already read the first book, and now (I hope) I can read this one and write one post about the thing as a whole.

The Arab of the Future, Vol.4 is the latest in the series by Riad Sattouf about his childhood, which has been mostly in Libya and Syria up to this point, though I gather much of this volume sees him living in France. Sattouf's father was Syrian and his mother French, which created a certain amount of tension in that childhood -- that's underlying all of the books. (See my posts on one and two.) Again, I've already read #3, and I believe this one is the end -- it covers five years and gets Sattouf to about the age of fourteen, so it will stop being a "childhood" somewhere in the middle there. And we know Sattouf ended up in France as an adult, making comics and directing movies.

Giant Days, Vol. 9 is another book collecting the great comics series written by John Allison, about three women at a fictional British university and some of the other people surrounding them. This time out the credits are slightly different -- Liz Fleming is still credited as inker, but there's "with" credits for Jenna Ayoub (issue 35) and penciller Max Sarin (issue 36). I don't know if that means Fleming got behind and needed some support, or if there are specific sequences in those issues that needed a different artistic look. I guess I will find out when I read it -- once more, I read #8 a few days ago and am hoping to hit more than one in one review. (Well, I'd love to get all the way to the end at Vol. 14 in one big post, but I doubt the library will get me all of them in time or let me hold onto them long enough to do that. As usual, we navigate between what we want and what we can get.)

Last up this time out is By Night, Vol. 3, written by the same John Allison I mentioned mere moments ago. This one is drawn by Christine Larsen and colored by Sarah Stern, and it concludes the series. At the danger of being a broken record -- here's my post on book one, and I have already read the middle one.

Quote of the Week: Heraclitean Rivers

Miriam looked at this man, Boris, this stranger who had been someone that the someone that she had been had once loved.

Lavie Tidhar, Central Station, p.18

the bus 2 by Paul Kirchner

The title is in lowercase on the book, so I did the same on my post. Sure, it's pretentious, but this book was published in France, so it comes by its pretension honestly.

No seriously: the text, where it exists, is in English, but the book was published by Tanabis Editions of "19, rue Francis Chirat 69100 Villeurbanne, France." (My assumption is that Villeurbanne is the name of the town, but it could be a district or arrondissement or something else for all I know.) As proof I also offer that the spine reads up rather than down.

Anyway, it's the bus 2, the sequel to the original the bus, published in 1987 and collecting a bunch of surrealist strips about a guy and a bus by Paul Kirchner. I never read the original, as far as I can remember, but they did run in Heavy Metal in the late '70s and early '80s, so it's likely I saw at least one of them.

This one opens with an arch comics-format preface, talking about how "the studio that produced 'the bus' was forced to shut down" many years ago, but a surge in interest brought it back in 2002 with the son of the original "commuter" stepping into his father's shoes. The truth? I have no idea -- my best guesses are either Kirchner suddenly had new bus ideas, or some paying editor popped up and mentioned loudly loving the old strips and wishing he could publish some new ones. However it happened, either in 2002 or somewhat later (since this 58-page book came out in 2015, collecting nearly fifty single-page strips and a couple of related illustrations), Kirchner did a new batch of the same kind of thing he'd done thirty years before.

Most of the strips are wordless, though a few have captions. All are pantomime -- the commuter, the bus driver, and various other characters never speak on-panel. And they're all surreal: bus seats as ski-lifts, a Busby Berkley commuter extravaganza, plays on size and shape and direction, and so on.

Kirchner draws it all with a clean, precise illustrative line, almost like advertising art: his buses are solid and specific (General Motors "New Look") and his people are a bit more generic, especially the balding commuter.

It's amusing rather than laugh-out-loud funny, but that's what it's supposed to be: various weird things happening, one per page, to a generic commuter on a generic bus. Someday, maybe, there will be a massive (by which I mean: more than a hundred pages) the complete bus with everything, and that will be even better. But this is just fine for what it is right now.

Central Station by Lavie Tidhar

Diversity is not one thing. Books can be diverse in authors, in characters, in style, and in ideas. Preferably, the world of books would be diverse in all of those things, plus others I'm not thinking of right now, and individual books slot in interestingly into multiple diverse categories simultaneously.

Sometimes it feels to me like the current diversity drive in SFF is entirely around authors and characters -- so the Chosen One defeating the Big Bad to Save The World can be someone different, and their author can be someone different as well. That's a great step forward, but I don't want to read stories about any Chosen One, no matter what kind of person they are or who's writing about them. I don't become more interested in your book about dragons just because you're Chinese rather than Welsh.

Diversity in ideas was the killer app for SFF from the beginning, so that's just table stakes. If you can't bring that to the party, this isn't the party for you to begin with.

That leaves me with diversity in style, as you might expect from a self-declared literary guy. (Hey, I got an English degree from a fancy liberal-arts school, and I don't get a lot of opportunity to use it in everyday life.) So I tend to gravitate to books that do interesting literary things -- told in quirky ways, incorporating techniques from literary fiction, or just telling different kinds of stories.

I liked Lavie Tidhar's The Violent Century when I read it last year. More importantly, I was deeply impressed by it: it was a taut, smash-cut race through a hundred years of alternate history. From that, and what I've heard about the rest of his books, he sounds like my kind of writer: always doing something different, as influenced by literary traditions as by SFnal ones. And as I get older, I appreciate writers who do interesting books more than the ones who do the same thing over and over, even if I loved that thing. 

So I wanted more Tidhar. I had several of his books on my shelf: this is what happens if you keep acquiring books but aren't reading them as quickly. Central Station looked enticing: a linked collection, or maybe a fix-up, of stories set in an indefinite future, around the beanpole spaceport of the title, right on the border between an Israel and Palestine that are at least somewhat less hostile to each other than the current versions.

The quotes mentioned Naguib Mahfouz rather than A.E. Van Vogt, which was a good sign to me -- not that I've read Mahfouz (to my shame), but I've definitely read too much Van Vogtian stuff already.

And Central Station is quieter and more personal than most SFF. Its cast is large and diverse; several loosely related families of mostly the descendants of people from all over the world who came to help build the beanpole and who then put down roots in the neighborhood. Each story is about one or three or five of those people; they interlock and appear in each other's stories. But there's no overall plot -- Central Station is about these people and this neighborhood and their relationships. There are no Big Bads to be defeated, no Chosen Ones -- just people.

Some of those people are robotniks, transformed into mechanical bodies an unknown time ago to fight in now-forgotten wars. Some are Others, or paired with Others, the purely AI consciousnesses that live in a system-wide shared mental space called the Conversation. Some are physically unable to access the Conversation at all. Some have been off-planet, and come back inherently changed -- some have never been here before, and were also changed, against their will.

All of them are good people, more or less, the way we like to think we and our families are good people, more or less. All have basically good intentions, though some are more destructive than others, and some of them, as Tidhar puts it dryly in his list of characters at the end, "tend to meddle."

All of their stories are personal ones, which is not the same thing as small ones. All the best stories are personal.

This is a wonderful book, full of life and nuance. Each story is a separate gem, but together they combine to show a more complete picture of this world and these people. Tidhar never says how far in the future this is, though some hints imply "centuries" is the low bound. And he's never quite clear on how long these people can or do live -- though, in at least some cases, centuries would also be a low bound. Tidhar's cast is large and interesting, and their world is equally so: this is the kind of book that implies vastly more than it says, and lives in your head for a long time afterward.

I Know What I Am by Gina Siciliano

I know I've said this before, but a book can be impressive and magisterial and a wonderful achievement, but still be a chore to read. (Some people might say those things are always correlated; I wouldn't go that far.) Today's book is a case in point.

Scholarly books have extensive footnotes and lists of references; they show clearly the author's reasoning and defend how the author arrived at specific, potentially controversial, points. They are often dense: they have a lot of detail to cover, and only a limited number of pages. Art books show great works of art and architecture with similar apparatus, giving context variously historical, site-specific, personal, and cultural.

I Know What I Am: The Life and Times of Artemisia Gentileschi is something like 75% of the way to being a scholarly monograph on the 17th century painter of the title in comics form, which is hugely impressive but still makes I Know What I Am a bit of a slog to work through.

Gina Siciliano letters most of it in an all-capitals format, which is a bit tiring, particularly since she has massive captions in nearly every panel. It's all entirely reasonable: she has a huge cast with complicated connections to each other and is covering nearly sixty years of one of the most tumultuous times and places in history on one hand, and specifically uses sentence case to show where she's directly quoting from source documents [1], which is a great use of the comics form in service of clear scholarship.

But it does leave her with over two hundred pages of comics -- oversized pages, occasionally falling into something like a 9-panel grid, but often breaking out of that -- filled with long explanatory captions in all capitals, and another fifty-plus pages of two-column text backmatter to accommodate the copious notes and a long list of referenced works. So this is a dense book -- even if the reader just reads through the comics (and I'm enough of a purist that I followed along with the notes as I went), it's a long, slow read.

Siciliano works in what looks almost like pencil, light and expressive with lots of shading and crosshatching. Her faces are excellent, and I never had trouble distinguishing between characters. (Remembering who they all were and why they were important...maybe, but that's on me.) She draws a lot of major architecture in her backgrounds, and talks about getting it just right in her notes -- I didn't find this really obvious in the work, though, since the people and their concerns are always central in her layouts.

I'm not an art history scholar, so I'm not qualified to comment on the liberties Siciliano may or may not have taken here with the life of Artemisia Gentileschi, the most famous and successful female painter before modern times. (Some would argue for Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun, whose work I know a bit more and like a lot.) It was a tumultuous life, even more so than her male contemporaries, which is saying a lot. For example: Caravaggio was a pimp, they all lived through the Black Death, and several served in various wars of the era. Artemisia's just being a woman meant she had Ginger Rogers Syndrome in everything she touched: just having the career and life she had was only just barely this side of impossible to begin with.

 I Know What I Am is an inherently feminist book; I'd like to think any telling of Arteminia's life would have to be. One of the central events of her life was a trial of her rapist Agestino Tassi, and Siciliano does not shirk from describing just how biased and horrible the justice system was in that time and place. (For just one thing, rape was not illegal. Deflowering a virgin could be, if the culprit didn't marry her afterward and/or didn't have other extenuating circumstances.) This is the kind of book that will make any reader with the slightest bit of compassion a bit more feminist than he went into it.

So I was deeply impressed with I Know What I Am, and I'm glad I read it, but it's not a happy book -- biographies often aren't, since their subjects always die at the end anyway -- and it's harder work than most of us expect from comics. It is worth it, though: it shows a world and a life that most of us will know very little about.

[1] Well, translations of source documents -- Siciliano is American and is working in English; Gentileschi and the people around her were mostly Italian and spoke Italian most of the time.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/5/20

This is the week where a nice librarian called the house and The Wife thought she said "none of the books Andy reserved are available." And that confused her momentarily, since why bother to call? [1] But the real number was nine, and here are those nine library books (all of which I hope to read by the end of the year, and maybe even get posts up for many of them by then):

H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, The First Volume by Gou Tanabe -- As far as I can tell, I've never read any of the manga created by Tanabe. But I do have an interest in Lovecraftian stories, and reviewed one book-length comics adaptation of Mountains of Madness (by I.N.J. Culbard) a few years back. This particular adaptation is longer than one volume -- one more is already published, and I'm not sure if that's the end to begin with.

It also looks like Manga Alan Moore is staring out of the cover at the upper right, daring me to read this, and who am I to gainsay Manga Alan Moore?

Are You Listening? by Tillie Walden -- Walden burst out a couple of years ago with a really strong memoir, Spinning, about her childhood as a competitive skater (among other things; that was the big through-line). She had a couple of shorter books before that which I haven't managed to track down yet, and followed it up with On a Sunbeam, an idiosyncratic and deep SFnal story originally published on the web. This book, if I have the sequence right, was the official follow-up to Spinning: Walden's next big book conceived and produced as a book, set in the modern world.

But that may be me still talking like a publishing person: for actual readers, creators make books and we read them. Some of the books might be exactly what we want, some not quite, and some much too far away -- I imagine Sunbeam's SF might have been too much for some readers who wanted more real queer girls in a real queer world. (Though the world of Sunbeam is very queer, in several overlapping senses of the word.) Listening is clearly that follow-up, about two young women -- I think upper teens, maybe not -- who meet each other on the run in what mostly seems to be our America.

The Adventures of Tintin, Vol. 4 by Herge -- I have to admit, once again, that I never read Tintin as a kid. The books were available in the US, and I'm pretty sure I saw them here and there, but I wasn't really a comics reader as a kid to begin with. I wanted real books, with lots of words, and in particular I wanted the ones on the other side of the library, in the adult section. (Admittedly, mostly the Mystery and SF sections, for those who deduct points for genre, but sucks to those people anyway.)

So comics for kids were not on the radar after the age of, oh I don't know, seven or eight?

I started Herge's famous series a few years back, and plan to read the official omnibus reprints and then hit the two semi-expunged scandalous books (due to racism or tedious didacticism) last. We'll see if that actually happens, but I have already hit omnibuses one, two, and three. And now I'm up to the fourth one, with stories from the end of WWII and soon afterward.

The Arab of the Future, Vol. 3 by Riad Sattouf -- On the one hand, I do think there should be a limit as to how much any one person can string out retelling his own childhood for profit. But on the other, I have to admire someone so devoted to building a career entirely out of telling the story of his own life in smaller and smaller chunks for each book. (See the first volume, covering Sattouf's life to age six, and the second, covering roughly his first year of school.)

I say this in part because I know there already is an Arab of the Future 4 lurking out there, and in part because I know enough about publishing to assume that 5 is either in process or the subject of intense discussions among Sattouf, his agents, and his publishers.

And in part so I can quote myself about the second book:

one can hope that he's not going full A la Recherche du Temps Perdu on us here, with successive books of memoir covering every-shorter periods of time in his ever-more scrutinized childhood.

On the other hand, maybe that would be pretty cool. So we might be in for The Arab of the Future 25, covering the hours from noon to seven PM of May 23, 1991, around 2040 or so.

Giant Days, Vol. 8 by John Allison, Max Sarin, Liz Fleming & Whitney Cogar -- Now here we see my biggest problem with the current Blogger format (and it's not the crazy line-spacing, although that is both horrible and apparently completely uncontrollable within the laughingly named WYSIWYG editor). Realistically, what I have to say here is "coming back to this series, which I love," and probably tossing in links to the earlier books, since I'm compulsive like that.

But that will leave a big chunk of white space, which is even worse than the horribly crazy line-spacing, and I just cannot deal with both of those things going wrong in one post. (And moving to Wordpress at this stage in the life of blogs, particularly this blog, would be utterly stupid. I mean, I haven't even bothered to tweak the template or clean up the ridiculously outdated blogroll for more than a decade, and I'm going to migrate the whole thing? Please. I know me better than that.)

So, anyway, instead I'll just rant about something I'm getting free on the Internet, since that's what we do in the 21st century. Thanks for your time. Here's some stuff I wrote before about Giant Days.

By Night, Vol. 2 by John Allison, Christine Larsen, & Sarah Stern -- And here's the same problem, but even more so. I like Allison's work, and I realized the library has the second and third volumes collecting this series. Since I enjoyed the first book but didn't love it, buying the others was lower on my priority list -- but now I can still read them relatively quickly and maybe change my mind about the series.

And that's all I had to say.

But that will leave that horrible white gap. And I actually can do something about the white gap, as I cannot about the line-spacing. (Which, honestly, bothers me even more, particularly since there's nothing I can do to fix it.)

So I have inserted the image, and I am typing here until I fill up the space with lines of text. It's not the point of blogging, but does blogging even have a point in 2020? (all work and no play makes johnny a dull boy allworkandnoplaymakesjohnnyadullboy) That should just about do it. Maybe one more line just to be sure, as a vamp to fill up space with things that look like meaning. My apologies to those who are actually reading this.

Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye, Vol. 1 by Jon Rivera, Gerard Way, Michael Avon Oeming, & Nick Filardi -- I am a cynical old man, so I didn't really read any of the "Young Animal" books as they were coming out. (Well, also, I stopped reading floppy comics around a decade ago -- had mostly stopped to begin with, and when my 2011 flood destroyed every last comic I'd ever bought, I took that as a clear end.) In fact, I'm pretty sure the imprint petered out, but I'm not totally sure it's not running now, or "not officially dead," even if nothing is currently being published.

But I am also old enough to be vaguely interested in "DC dusts off a stupid old character and lets new creators do crazy stuff with him," since that worked really well for the proto-Vertigo books in the '80s and a lot of Vertigo in the '90s. (And I am, as noted, old enough to remember that.)

So: I have no personal interest in Cave Carson, or Gerard Way, who I keep wanting to define as "in some sort of Pop Band" as if I were several decades older than I actually am. But I'm willing to check out crazy pseudo-Vertigo stuff on occasion, and I guess this counts as an occasion.

Shade the Changing Girl, Vol. 2 by Cecil Castellucci, Marley Zarcone, Ande Parks, Marguerite Sauvage, & Kelly Fitzpatrick -- More Animals Which Are Young! I read the first collection of this series a couple of years ago, since I was doing a Book-A-Day run, and that always gets me diving into odder and less likely things. (Which, you might realize, is one of the reasons I do it.)

The Castellucci Shade is a reboot of the '90s Shade, mostly written by Peter Milligan and drawn by Chris Bachalo (and which I also re-read part of two years ago), which was itself a comprehensive reboot of the original series from the '60s by Steve Ditko (which I have never read, and which I doubt anyone younger than me has read for pleasure any time in the past forty years).

That's a lot of boots up the ass of a comic about a wacky guy in a silly costume fighting crime, but, hey, corporate comics, amirite? If you own an asset, you want to leverage that asset every last chance you can get. And so as long as there's a thing called DC Comics -- and don't think I'm claiming that's necessarily all that much longer; I can read tea-leaves as well as anyone -- they will keep pumping out books like this, in hopes some old crap they own will make them some new money.

And it may be good, who knows! I liked a lot of things about the first volume of the Castellucci Shade.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 7 by Ryan North, Erica Henderson, & Rico Renzi -- And last for this week is a series that ran a long time, and has finally ended, and which I enjoyed but read substantially after publication. So I'm still somewhere in the middle -- I think there are fourteen volumes, so maybe exactly in the middle -- but maybe this renewed burst of reading will see me through to the end of the stories about Doreen Green and her furry pals.

If not, not.

Anyway, here's what I wrote about the earlier books: one, two, three, four, five, six, and the obligatory OGN. (And I keep wanting to turn "OGN" into some early-90s rap thing, but I am far too white and suburban to even make a decent joke in that direction.)

[1] It was also the week where The Wife accidentally applied for a job at Chic-Fil-A and then thought the manager was from "Triple A" when he called, so it's more than normally sitcom-wacky in my household the past few days.

No, seriously: both of those are things that happened in the last few days right in front of me. If I start hearing a laugh track, it won't even surprise me.

Quote of the Week: Why They Call It a Break-Up

"Why are you here?"

"Well. I mean, I still live here, don't I?"

"You tell me."

"I don't think you can just tell someone whether you're living with them or not. It's more a consensual thing," said Duncan.

"Do you want to live here?"

"I don't know. I've got myself into a bit of a mess, haven't I?"

"You have, yes. I should warn you, Duncan: I'm not going to fight for you. The whole point of you is that you're not the sort of person anyone fights over. You're my easy life option. The moment you stop being that, you're no option at all."

"Right. Well. That's telling me straight. Thank you."

Annie shrugged, an it-was-nothing gesture that capped what she felt had been a flawless couple of minutes.

"Would you say there's any way back for me? If that's what I wanted?"

"Not when you phrase it like that, no."

 - Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked, pp.144-145

Guts by Raina Telgemeier

Several hundred thousand people -- mostly girls, mostly under the age of fifteen -- already have very strong opinions on this book in particular and Raina Telgemeier in general, and it's unlikely that anything this One Old Guy could say will shift any of them in the slightest. (And most of them love it and her -- not everyone, since nothing is universally beloved, but close.)

Raina Telgemeier is the pre-eminent maker of comics in our time: the crest of the YA graphic novel boom, the reigning queen of the Scholastic Book Fair, author of some of the most circulated books in thousands of libraries. A whole lot of comics fans have no idea who she is, though: the dismissive explanation is because they think only superheroes (or maybe the slightly larger pamphlets-on-Wednesday* market) count as comics, the more reasonable explanation is that everyone focuses on the stuff they like and care about, and comics is now big and capacious enough (like books, or movies, or TV) to have entirely separate, disjoint worlds within it.

But, yeah, Raina is huge. When she had a new book out last year, it was a massive publishing event. It was called Guts; I got to it this week.

Telgemeier started her comics-making career by adapting four of Anne M. Martin's perennially-popular "Baby-Sitters Club" books into comics, and then, just about a decade ago, had her first comics memoir, Smile, about dental troubles she had starting in middle school and how that affected her life. It was a massive bestseller, and was followed by the similar memoir Sisters and the fictional GNs Drama and Ghosts (both about tween girls not unlike the way Telgemeier portrayed her younger self).

Guts is in the same vein as Smile and Sisters: starting from a moment in Young Raina's life and moving forward through the months after that to show her dealing with a medical/personal issue. This time, it's a stomach flu or something similar when she was in fourth grade: probably the first time she vomited since she was a toddler. That led to more worry about intestinal issues, which led to anxiety-induced stomach pains, and so on -- the whole spiral, at the age of about ten. (And that's not uncommon, actually -- especially for relatively smart, sensitive kids of that age, even more so for girls.)

Of course, anxiety is never just about one thing, and it doesn't stay compartmentalized: Young Raina's school work suffers, and it causes trouble with her friendships (and one definitely-not-a-friendship, with Michelle, who starts off bullying Young Raina) as well. Young Raina eventually starts talk therapy, because her parents are worried about her. (And Telgemeier has an afterword, frankly about the fact that she's in therapy even now, and that her anxiety is more controlled, but never "went away.") That's the story: how Young Raina started an anxiety/stomach spiral, and how she started to deal with it. Like a lot of things in life, dealing with it is ongoing and continuous.

Guts is personal and true and specific, and I'm sure a lot of librarians and teachers are happy to put in the hands of other kids going through something like Young Raina did. But Telgemeier's work is more than just that: we were all kids once (some of us still are), and we all had and still have things that make us anxious and worried. Guts is about that feeling, that process -- understanding what makes us concerned, what can lead into that spiral. And it's also a good story -- Telgemeier draws open-faced kids whose emotions are all right there (as they are at that age) and shows us what it's like to be those kids, whether they're named "Raina" or not.

The Unsinkable Walker Bean and the Knights of the Waxing Moon by Aaron Renier

My first reaction to this book is idiosyncratic and petty; it may also come off as a minor spoiler. So flee now if you need to.

If you call your organization the "Knights" of something, it implies certain things: people chosen for specific qualities, organizational structure, a martial bent. Calling the family that survived a cataclysm "the Knights of the Waxing Moon" does not check any of those boxes, or any of the other boxes that people think of when they think of knightly orders. The family can be the equivalent of a secret society, they can keep ancient mysteries and protect the treasures of the ancients -- but they are in no way knights.

But here we are, in Aaron Renier's graphic novel The Unsinkable Walker Bean and the Knights of the Waxing Moon. It continues the story of the original Unsinkable, picking up almost immediately after the events of that book and continuing to add more complications and dangers for young Walker and his friends.

I didn't enjoy this one as much as I think I liked the first one: maybe I was in the wrong mood, maybe I didn't remember the details well enough ten years later. This time out, I kept thinking too much of Knights was vague and unfocused: the shipwrecked pirates are divided into factions, sort of, but don't have clear leaders and also don't seem to be jockeying to create leaders. Their goals are equally vague or unclear: getting off the island they're shipwrecked on feels like it should be a bigger deal than it is, or there should be a "we want to settle here" faction. The aforementioned Knights are mostly just living where they live and occasionally repelling people who wander in, without any larger plans. There's a creepy family that clearly has some goals -- riches and power, most clearly -- but also already has a lot of unexplained power and abilities, no clear leaders, and underpants-gnomes-levels of fiendish plots. (Send more family members to the place where our family always dies...something something...we get the secret metal that controls the world!)

All in all, Knights felt like a book with a lot of people running around in circles for a couple of hundred pages. Sure, they found some Neat Stuff, and battled over that, but why they were doing any of it was always muddy. It looks great, and the characters are interesting and specific -- but the ways they interacted didn't quite click for me. To be brutally honest, it's probably a combination of me not paying enough attention this time and forgetting what I read in the first book. So this is likely what we call a Me Problem -- check out the first book if you haven't already (and which I loved at the time), and then maybe move on to this one if you like Walker's first adventure.

Tales Designed to Thrizzle, Vol. 2 by Michael Kupperman

Michael Kupperman has a deeply weird sense of humor, if his Tales Designed to Thrizzle comics are any indication. (And he'd be even weirder than that if he made funny comics like these that aren't based on his own sense of humor, if this was some odd attempt to deliver what he thought a mass audience wanted.)

One major running theme is the adventures of Twain & Einstein -- they look almost identical, get it? -- who fight crime or have other random adventures, usually in a vague "now" that corresponds to neither of their lives. (Which I don't think actually intersected, though they were both alive from 1879 to 1910.) Another is the duo of Snake & Bacon, an actual hissing snake and a presumably sentient piece of cooked meat that only says "I'm real bacon."

Anyway, Kupperman's comics are filled with surrealist nuttiness, which is why I'm back for Tales Designed to Thrizzle, Vol. 2. (I read Vol. 1 a couple of years ago, only about a dozen years late.)

I probably said most of what I could say about Kupperman's style the first time; writing about surrealism tends to deteriorate into listing the random references ("and there a one-page Odd Couple gag with vampires!", "and Quincy, M.E. plays a major role, as does Saint Peter, to the point that they appear in each other's comics!", "did I mention the pseudo-horror story about men who suddenly have sexy women's legs?") and that's not terribly interesting for the reader.

This is funny in its own way, deeply steeped in pop-culture references: Kupperman is from Gen X like me, so I stewed in much the same media world as him in childhood, and that may be important to fully appreciate what here might Thrizzle you. (If you're too much younger, a lot of this will seem entirely random, rather than references to odd things that were originally meant to be serious.)

I didn't find Vol. 2 quite as funny as the first one: maybe there's a bit too much Twain & Einstein here, and not enough of the really crazy stuff like sex blimps and criminal fingertalk. But it's definitely more of the same kind of thing for people who liked the first one, and is very similar in tone and style and art. (Kupperman draws like a grainy photocopier about half the time and colors with a garish cheap-printing palette almost all the time; his humor comics also look like nothing else.)

If you're looking for a Thrizzle, you will find one nowhere else.