Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/9/20

A bunch of books from the library (which I'd hoped to get to during my vacation) didn't come in until the first week of the year. And that means that I wasn't the only person taking time off and relaxing around the holidays, which I should have realized.

But then, we're always thinking of ourselves first, even when we shouldn't, aren't we?

So these are the books that arrived this week, and that I expect I'll be reading next:

Dreyer's English is a book about writing style, I think mostly along the lines of Strunk & White, from Benjamin Dryer, head managing editor and copy chief for Random House. I haven't been an editor for a decade now, but the editor brain still lurks, so I expect I will Have Opinions on it. This has been pretty much universally lauded, so those opinions may be mostly positive, but I can never predict just how contrarian I will be, so no promises.

Pumpkinheads is a graphic novel written by noted teen novelist Rainbow Rowell and drawn by Faith Erin Hicks. My guess is that Rowell is the bigger draw here -- though their names are the same size on the book, so I could be wrong -- but I've never read her books. (My vague sense is that they are modern-teen relationship books, so the kids are gay or trans or different races rather than the similar books I read as a teen, which were all about broken homes and sad rich kids and rebellion against parents. Every generation gets the books their elders think they deserve, I guess.) I'm a low-key Hicks fan, though -- especially her wonderful The Adventures of Superhero Girl -- so that's why I'm here for what looks like a sweet on-the-verge-of-growing-up story about one night between two friends.

Superman Smashes the Klan by Gene Luen Yang and Gurihuru -- I'd put in a request for this book well before the felonious activities of this week, but, if I hadn't, I'm sure I would be searching it out anyway. We all need to pay attention to stories of how to stop fascists, especially those marching in our streets and threatening violence. And in our world, we won't have a superpowered alien boy scout to save us. This also is supposed to be very good, and is loosely based on a famous old radio series that supposedly had a marked negative effect on the Klan, so that's good stuff all around.

Dragon Hoops is also by Gene Luen Yang, and he's solo this time -- this is his big graphic novel follow-up to the two-book Boxers and Saints, from almost a decade ago. (Comics take a while, a lot of the time -- especially big comics that tell one story all by one person.) This looks to go back closer to the model of American Born Chinese, Yang's big book before B&S, which was a (slightly fictionalized? I haven't read it in years) story about his own life, and concerned with representation and assimilation, with how to grow up into a world that was made for people who are different from you and still say essentially yourself individually and culturally. Hoops seems to be narrated by Yang himself, though I'm not sure if it's all his story, or a wider look at basketball, sports, and representation in America.

Maggy Garrison is a graphic novel about the title character, a youngish (I think) woman in London who falls into a criminal underworld but (also I think) comes out well all the time. It's written by Lewis Trondheim -- whose work I haven't seen as much the past few years; I'm not clear if he's been focusing more on editorial work or his stuff is not getting translated like it was a decade ago or if I'm just missing it -- and drawn by Stephane Oiry, who's work I haven't seen before. So this looks like something different from Trondheim: my sense is that he did SFF (either silly and for younger readers or Donjon dark for adults), artsy autobio and conceptual comics, and some general adventure, but it all was in an essentially French millieu before Maggy. (As opposed to someone like Tardi, who's done a lot of stories set in various noir versions of the USA.)

Giant Days, Volume 10 is written as usual by John Allison, though the art is divided between Max Sarin (the regular artists, possibly taking a break for two of the issues collected here) and Julia Madrigal (who has a style that's similar enough to Sarin's to slot in nicely, though she has a fussy thing about drawing noses with an extra line across the bridge that kept drawing me up short). Whitney Cogar does the colors as usual. And here I might just have to give up: if you're reading this on a full-size screen it might look wonky before the next book image, since I don't have anything more to say. I've already read this; I'm hoping to write more about it (and volumes 8+9) later today. So: there it is.

Last is Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye, Vol. 2: Every Me, Every You, which was written by Jon Rivera and Gerard Way and drawn by Michael Avon Oeming, with colors by Nick Filardi. Again, I read the first book, realized the library system had the second (and concluding volume) and decided sticking both into one post would be a better thing. I have, as of right this second, read one of the issues collected here, and have a bookmark stuck into it. But that's as far as I've gotten. But this will probably run under my eyes later today, and we'll see what flows out from that through my fingers in the next few days.

Quote of the Week: America

What I've been interested in, of course, is writing about America -- or, as I realized a few years after I began "U.S. Journal," in writing about America without an emphasis on politics and government. Some ways of doing that didn't suit my needs. I wasn't interested in doing what is sometimes called Americana -- stories about people like the last fellow in Jasper Country Georgia, who can whittle worth a damn. I didn't want to do stories about typical or representative Americans -- stories about, say, the struggles of a Midwestern Farm Family to make ends meet. Although I was interested in places, I wasn't comfortable writing about a city or a state or a region in general terms; I didn't do stories that could be called "Boston at Three Hundred" or "Is the New South Really New?" I went every three weeks not to a place but to a story -- to an event or a controversy or, now and then, a killing.

 - Calvin Trillin, from the Introduction to the 2017 edition of Killings, p.xiii

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 7 by North, Henderson & Renzi

This is volume seven of something, I'm coming to it about two years later, and I'm typing this on Christmas day between other festivities. [1] So I expect this will be a short and perfunctory post -- those of you who care about Squirrel Girl likely read this book a while ago, and I don't have high hopes of convincing any of the rest of you at this point.

So, first up, this comes after the previous collections of the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl comic: one and two and three and four and five and six. And also the OGN, which slots in around volume four or so.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 7: I've Been Waiting for a Squirrel Like You is written by Ryan North (except one short story in issue 26), drawn by Erica Henderson (except issue 26, though she wrote one story there) and colored by Rico Renzi (who only did part of issue 26). It collects issues 22-26 of the comic of the title and something called A Year of Marvels: The Unbeatable #1 -- which is actually written by Nilah Magruder with layouts by Geoffo and final art by Siya Oum -- that I think was part of some series of one-offs (maybe to introduce new talent?) that I have never heard of before and which is unconnected to the main story.

The Unbeatable is a perfectly OK sixteen-page story in which Squirrel Girl's sidekick Tippy-Top (a squirrel) teams up with Rocket Raccoon (from the Guardians of the Galaxy) to defeat a villain in New York's Central Park, who has brought trees to life and intends to Conquer the World! So, yeah, that's a thing tacked on the end of this book.

The aforementioned issue 26 is a jam issue -- I suspect it was also the "help Henderson stay on track with monthly deadlines" issue, since drawing twenty-plus pages of girls and squirrels monthly is relentless and time-consuming -- featuring stories drawn by Madeline McGrane, Chip Zdarsky, Tom Fowler, Carla Speed McNeil, Michael Cho, Razzah, Anders Nilsen, Rico Renzi, and Jim "Garfield" Davis. It has a lot of clever stuff, but -- since it's all officially stories told by characters from the Squirrel Girl comic -- it's also pretty inside-baseball, amusing and fun but slight and entirely for fans.

The main bulk of the book, though, is a five-part story in which Doreen Green (also known as the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl) and her best friend and roommate Nancy Whitehead win a computer-programming contest to go to the Savage Land, the alien-created area of Antarctica where dinosaurs still roam. Complications ensue there, not least the discovery of "Ultron, who is a dinosaur now." (One might be surprised that it took North, famously creator of Dinosaur Comics, to get dinosaurs into this book.) If you are wondering if Doreen and her friends -- including a supposedly-unfriendly programming team from Latveria, Doctor Doom's homeland -- defeat Ultron and save the world, please see the title again.

As always, this is fun and zippy and does not take itself entirely seriously. It is a comic set in a superhero universe featuring a young woman who is a bit zaftig, has sensible hair and a reasonably sensible costume, and prefers to talk to people rather than punch them. Of course it ended: how could such a thing last? (Has she been rebooted with peekaboo cutouts and a tragic backstory yet?)

[1] Not a whole lot of festivities, since it is 2020, but small, sensible, socially distanced festivities.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

He is pretty sure his name is not Piranesi. But there is only one other person in the world, and that person calls him Piranesi -- so what else can we call a man who doesn't know his name?

Perhaps the Devoted Son of the House, I suppose -- but that is awfully long as a name, and he doesn't call himself that until nearly the end.

(For a long time, I tried to hold doubt in my head that Piranesi was necessarily a man. That's a bad assumption to make with any fiction, especially a tricky one, especially a twenty-first century one, especially one by a woman, especially one told in the first person. But, in the end, he is: that is not one of the tricks Susanna Clarke is playing here.)

Piranesi lives in a House that is a World, a place of capitalized nouns: Halls and Vestibules and Passages, Statues and Staircases and Windows, Doorways and Plinths and Courtyards. As far as he can tell, it extends infinitely in all directions from a room he has designated the First Hall -- and that is indeed first, though he does not know why. The House has three levels, connected by Staircases with steps built as if for giants -- the Lower Halls are inundated by the Sea, with Tides that pursue complicated patterns and rise into the middle level on dependable schedules. The Upper Halls are full of clouds, the domain of the sky. Piranesi travels to both of those areas, but doesn't stay long -- Lower to fish and gather seaweed, Upper to flee dangerous Tides and to navigate around collapsed sections of the Middle Halls. He lives in the Middle Halls, among Statues and birds and vast, endless vistas. He spends his days exploring -- ever farther, in every direction, if he can -- fishing, mending his nets, and doing all small survival-oriented tasks.

The reader knows something is very unusual in this world; Piranesi does not. As far as he recalls, this the the entire world, and the way a world should be. Manufactured objects come to him from The Other -- that second person, who he sees twice a week -- and he never questions what they are or whence they came. (The reader may spend a lot of time thinking about these objects, and what they imply about the House.) He doesn't even realize that The Other is absent from the House between their meetings. In his view, the World contains fifteen people, which is a lot. There is himself and The Other, who are alive, and the bones of thirteen others, who he cares for and maintains and keeps safe from the Tides.

He thinks, often, about a Sixteenth Person, alive or dead. Someone new and different in the House, something to discover other than more Halls full of Statues and occasional birds. The Other indulges him in this. The Other is seeking a Great and Secret Knowledge: some ancestral human power that once existed, imbuing selected practitioners with magical abilities to control and span and transform. And The Other is using Piranesi to get that knowledge.

The reader knows that. Piranesi thinks they are colleagues and equals. Piranesi is wrong. Piranesi also thinks The Other is his friend: he thinks many things that are not true, and the reader will learn, by the end, why he came to believe those things.

Piranesi is the story of the man who is not named Piranesi. He has a habit of writing down his daily activities in a series of journals: the novel is a collection of those entries, over the course of five or six months in what Piranesi calls The Year the Albatross Came to the South-Western Halls. The reader will wonder if Piranesi has forgotten our world or if he never knew it: the reader will learn the truth.

There will be a Sixteenth Person. There will be unexpected Persons not included in the count. Piranesi will delve in his back journals and in the Halls to find answers to questions he did not even realize were questions. And this reader will not spoil any of that.

This is a magnificent short novel, precise and entirely itself, creating its entire World -- limited in things, unlimited in scope -- and then unrolling explanations of that World bit by bit as Piranesi learns or rediscovers them. It is fantasy. It is very much the next book by the writer who wrote the magisterial Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It has been more than a decade, and Piranesi is a much shorter, sharper thing than its predecessor, but it does not disappoint.

The Adventures of Tintin, Vol. 4 by Herge

I always have to begin these Tintin posts with a disclaimer: this is my first time reading these books, and I am a middle-aged man. I read the first three Tintin omnibuses during my last Book-A-Day run, in 2018 -- one and two and three -- but never saw any of the series in my childhood.

So this is not a re-read; I'm coming to seventy-year-old adventure stories for tween boys fresh and with the eyes of someone who grew up on a different continent and several decades later. There may be good things and bad things about that perspective, but it's the only perspective I have, and I'm stuck with it.

The Adventures of Tintin, Vol. 4 is an omnibus of the twelfth through fourteenth books of the series [1] -- Red Rackham's Treasure, The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun. And it thus shows the main problem with this 3-in-1 format; Treasure is the second half of the story begun in the last book of Vol. 3, The Secret of the Unicorn. But Balls and Prisoners are also linked stories, so separating them would also have been problematic. (I briefly looked at the list, trying to construct a plan for 2-in-1s or 4-in-1s, but there's no way to be consistent and include all of the canonical books in order -- either some omnibuses would be longer and some shorter, or books would be out of order.) That's a minor issue, though -- Balls has more of a cliffhanger ending than Unicorn did, and even that isn't all that much of a cliffhanger.

Herge is still building his core cast, more than a dozen years into the series and with Treasure the twelfth book. Professor Calculus -- your standard absent-minded genius, here represented as basically deaf and unaware of it -- shows up in that book to provide a high-tech submarine for exploration, and never leaves, since he never understands what anyone tells him. (And that is funny, get it? Most of the humor in Tintin is on that schoolboy level -- slapstick among clearly comedy-relief characters, fake swearing, and painfully extended misunderstandings. Herge is good at this stuff, and it is mostly actually funny in small doses, but it's all quite juvenile.)

As usual, Tintin, our boy hero, is described as a reporter but he never does any reporting or has an identifiable source of support (financial, parental; romantic -- take your pick; they're all missing). He seems to be eternally about twelve years old, living by himself in an apartment in a city that Herge never actually says is Brussels, until he has to dash out on some adventure or other around the world. He is clearly the hero-boy that a few generations of European boys (and probably some girls) wished they could be, which is the source of his success -- it's all vague enough that all of those kids could project themselves into being Tintin.

Treasure is a story of hunting for a shipwreck, and the treasure that may be contained there; it doesn't have anything like a villain, despite some early hints.

Balls sees an Incan curse (well, maybe) befall the seven members of the just-returned Sanders-Hardiman expedition, one by one, as Tintin and his best friend, the blustery and mostly useless alcoholic Captain Haddock, run around and fail to stop any of it. That one has some mild implied racism, though it does also seem to accept that if you dig up the dead kings of some other civilization and drag them away to your home on another continent, the descendants of that civilization are entitled to be quite unhappy with you, and you may suffer nasty consequences.

Tintin and Haddock continue chasing the source of that "curse" back to South America in Prisoners, which is slightly more racist (and reliant on one of the oldest gags in the book for a last-minute escape from human sacrifice [2]) and features a very long slog through dangerous scenery and then captivity at the hands of the aforementioned descendants.

These books in particular are not very plotty: it's the same kind of thing over and over until Herge exhausts the premise or his page count. (Treasure: moving the ship around, diving here and there, going back to that one island yet again. Balls: this guy is in a coma! Quick, let's save the next guy! Oops, too late. Repeat. Prisoners: you say there's a forest and then a mountain chain and then another forest and then another mountain chain? And we get to fall off the mountains and be ambushed repeatedly? Oh, joy.) Each page is fun and full of incident, but it's difficult for Herge to hide that he has a lot of the same kinds of incidents one after another.

Again: these were for boys. And, specifically, for boys born in French-speaking Europe in the 1930s to begin with, and then for boys born in the '40s, '50s, and '60s in a slightly wider geographical remit. That they're still fun adventure stories for an American middle-aged man in 2020 is a nice bonus; a lot of work from that era (these stories were serialized in the mid-to-late 1940s and published as books immediately afterward) have aged much worse.

[1] See Wikipedia for the full list, including the brain-numbing details of the first two (politically and racially offensive) books that are slightly repressed and not part of the omnibus series, and the final unfinished book which is also not included in an omnibus. Thus, the number of books in the series is anywhere from twenty-one to twenty-four, depending on how you want to argue.

[2] You're thinking you know which one. You are probably right. It is that obvious.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/2/2021

Just one book this week: it did come in the mail, but not as a publicity title. I paid for it, more or less, since it was part of a larger package that a jokey oath says I'm not supposed to talk about. [1]

Cease & Desist is more of an art object than a book -- it contains 90 images by LA-based visual artist and screenwriter Todd Alcott based on the lyrics and album covers (and, occasionally, faces) of the band They Might Be Giants. I think everything is a pre-existing manipulated image, rather than brand-new things, mostly from the mid-20th century. There's lots of retouched photos of other bands, old paperbacks with new titles, advertising pieces, toys and similar ephemera, and so on. It's in a nice hardcover package, suitable for leaving on the coffee table of somewhere much hipper than my house.

I may post again about it when I actually "read" it -- again, it's more an art thing than a book to be read, and I've poked through a bunch of it already.

I don't think it's going to be widely available. I do not have a link to share with you, where you could purchase it. As I said, it was part of a specific package at a specific time, and that window closed in time for the book to have a print run set and for this book to get to me (and to however many other people) from China. The ISBN is 9780578633886, if you are a massive TMBG or Todd Alcott fan and didn't hear about it until just this moment.

By the way, Alcott has an Etsy store with lots of stuff (mostly prints) in this style based on other bands -- including a couple for TMBG -- and much of it is deeply awesome. (If I were buying one for myself, it would likely be Life During Wartime.)

[1] "Oh, I don't know. You must be thinking of some other band."

2020 In the Rear-View

For most of the Years of this Blog, I had several standard posts on the first of the year -- a listing of my favorite books of the prior year, a meme-ish thing where I linked to the first and last sentences of each month, and occasionally other things (launching or ending a Book-A-Day run, the weekly Reviewing the Mail post when it was a Monday). That hit a peak for the Book-A-Day run of 2018, but last year's beginning saw just one white-flag-waving post to say that I wouldn't post a list of favorites, since I read too few books to feel comfortable doing that.

This year was slightly better, but (as I type this on December 28th) it still looks like I'll end the year having read about 75 books, which is about half of what I thought of as my latter-day nadir. In the '90s and Aughts, I usually read 300+ books a year, topping out at 419 in '93. That dipped into the 140-180 range mostly for the last decade, with bumps for the Book-A-Day years of 2014 (383) and 2018 (433).

So I'm still not comfortable saying, "I read six dozen books, and here are the one dozen best ones!" And I will not be doing that here.

But I also neglected to do my monthly lists of books read this year, for all of the same ennui and way-too-much-work and did-you-notice-it-was-2020? reasons. So instead I will list everything I read last year, linking to their posts, and maybe include a sentence or two about the ones that would be Favorite Candidates in a better year.

So my favorite books of the year are contained in the list below, and it may even be clear to the reader which they were. But you're probably better off checking out someone who read more books (particularly new books) during 2020 if you're looking for serious recommendations.

(You may also note that I began the year rather, um, slowly. And it may be quite obvious what days I was on vacation this year. Reading during working days was a thing that basically didn't happen in 2020.)

Adam Hart-Davis, Eurekaargh! (2/6)

Gideon Haigh, The Uncyclopedia (4/20)

Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (5/3)

Charles Burns, Free Shit (5/4)

Doug Gray, The Eye of Mongambo, Book One (5/5)

John Allison, Christine Larsen, & Sarah Stern, By Night, Vol. 1 (5/6)

Jason, O Josephine! (5/7)

Rick Geary, The Wallace Mystery (5/8)

Jaime Hernandez, Is This How You See Me? (5/11)

I'm glad I don't have to calculate the Top 5 Jaime Hernandez L&R storylines, because that's a thankless task. These days, I think "Love Bunglers" is #1, but does "Death of Speedy" come next? Or "Flies on the Ceiling?" Or something else? The main story in this book tries its best to muscle into that company, and arguably does so. Jaime's one of the few whose "Top 5" needs about ten entries.

Box Brown, Tetris (5/12)

Landis Blair, The Envious Siblings and Other Morbid Nursery Rhymes (5/16)

Kevin Huizenga, Glen Ganges in: The River at Night (5/25)

A masterwork of comics and of literature in general, from a creator who keeps finding new ways to get better.

Caitlin Major and Kelly Bastow, Manfried Saves the Day (5/29)

Ian Frazier, Hogs Wild (6/28)

Kim Deitch, Reincarnation Stories (6/29)

Martha Wells, Network Effect (7/3)

An actually new SF novel that I read quickly and can highly recommend. Pity you've all already heard of it....

Ulli Lust, How I Tried to Be a Good Person (7/5)

Ken Jennings, Because I Said So! (7/10)

Jasper Fforde, Early Riser (7/26)

Another excellent, and still reasonably new, book from a quirky author. He might not need my recommendation, either, but he does have it.

Calvin Trillin, Killings (8/6)

Steve Erickson, American Nomad (8/23)

More people should read Erickson's two non-fiction books about American presidential campaigns, Leap Year and this book. They won't, but they should. Erickson's visionary style gets at essential truths in a way nothing more straightforward can.

Jonathan Bernstein, Knickers in a Twist (9/1)

Kage Baker, The Anvil of the World (9/2)

Jason Lutes, Berlin, Book Three: City of Light (9/3)

Rick Geary, Carrizozo: An Illustrated History (9/4)

Lawrence Block, The Night and the Music (9/5)

John Allison, Bad Machinery, Vol. 8: The Case of the Modern Men (9/7)

Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado (9/13)

P.G. Wodehouse, Uncle Fred in the Springtime (9/26)

Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked (10/2)

John Kessel, Corrupting Dr. Nice (10/11)

Daniel Pinkwater, Adventures of a Dwergish Girl (10/18)

Lawrence Block, A Time to Scatter Stones (10/24)

Vera Brosgol, Be Prepared (10/29)

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War (10/31)

Another book I got to slightly late (post-several award wins). Just about as good as everyone says, but I may be souring on the entire idea of "these people are really good at violence, which is wicked kewl, and so now they will kiss."

Brian Fies, A Fire Story (11/7)

Bill Griffith, Nobody's Fool (11/8)

John Allison, Max Sarin, Liz Fleming, & Whitney Cogar, Giant Days, Vol. 7 (11/9)

Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang, Paper Girls, Vol. 6 (11/12)

Roger Rapoport and Marguerita Castanera, editors, I Should Have Stayed Home (11/16)

Jacques Tardi, I, Rene Tardi, Prisoner of War in Stalag IIB, Vol. 2: My Return Home (11/21)

Michael Kupperman, Tales Designed to Thrizzle, Vol. 2 (11/22)

Aaron Renier, The Unsinkable Walker Bean and the Nights of the Waxing Moon (11/23)

Raina Telgemeier, Guts (11/25)

Paul Kirchner, the bus 2 (11/26)

Lavie Tidhar, Central Station (11/27)

Gina Siciliano, I Know What I Am: The Life and Times of Artemisia Gentileschi (11/28)

Tom Gauld, Department of Mind-Blowing Theories (11/29)

This probably would have made it onto my list -- Gauld's writing is smart and funny and his art is stylish and precise, all things I love.

Rich Sparks, Love and Other Weird Things (11/30)

If I wasn't doing the only-one-book-per-month thing I usually do -- which would have been unusually punishing in 2020, where I had three separate months where I didn't finish a single book -- this might have also made it onto the list. Sparks is both unique and consistently funny, in his ideas and his drawings, which is a really big deal.

Guy Delisle, The Handbook to Lazy Parenting (12/2)

Jack Vance, The Dying Earth (in Tales of the Dying Earth, 12/2)

Ben Sears, House of the Black Spot (12/3)

Craig Hurd-McKenney and Rick Geary, The Brontes: Infernal Angria (12/4)

Tillie Walden, Are You Listening? (12/5)

A book both quieter and more impactful than it seems at first, and another big graphic novel from one of the strongest (and most prolific) new talents in the field.

Gou Tanabe, H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness: The First Volume (12/6)

John Allison, Max Sarin, Liz Fleming, & Whitney Cogar, Giant Days, Vol. 8 (12/7)

John Allison, Christine Larsen, & Sarah Stern, By Night, Vol. 2 (11/9)

Riad Sattouf, The Arab of the Future 3 (12/11)

Jon Rivera, Gerard Way, Michael Avon Oeming, & Nick Filardi, Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye, Vol. 1 (12/12)

Gou Tanabe, H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness: The Second Volume (12/13)

Riad Sattouf, The Arab of the Future 4 (12/19)

John Baxter, A Pound of Paper (12/19)

John Allison, Christine Larsen, & Sarah Stern, By Night, Vol. 3 (11/20)

John Allison, Max Sarin, Liz Fleming, Jenna Ayoub, & Whitney Cogar, Giant Days, Vol. 9 (12/21)

Cecil Castellucci, Marley Zarcone, Ande Parks, Marguerite Sauvage, & Kelly Fitzpatrick, Shade the Changing Girl, Vol. 2 (12/22)

Herge, The Adventures of Tintin, Vol. 4 (12/23)

Ryan North, Erica Henderson, & Rico Renzi, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 7: I've Been Waiting for a Squirrel Like You (12/24)

Susanna Clarke, Piranesi (12/25)

Proof that 2020 was not entirely horrible (as, in its own way, was November 3rd). I hope writing this gave Clarke whatever she needed to keep writing more stories -- Jonathan Strange was a great book, but I'm greedy enough to think she could be a great writer, with many more books in her. Piranesi is a fine signpost, giving me reason to think that's true.

Seth, Clyde Fans (12/26)

Jeff Lemire, Royal City, Vol. 3: We All Float On (12/27)

Jeff Lemire, Frogcatchers (12/28)

Lawrence Block as Jill Emerson, Threesome (12/29)

Barry Blitt, Blitt (12/29)

Edward O. Wilson, Jim Ottaviani, & C.M. Butzer, Naturalist: A Graphic Adaptation (12/30)

Michel Rabagliati, Paul at Home (12/31)

If I did have a Favorites list, this would certainly be on it -- a great new book from a master of cartooning, grappling with life in later middle age when the troubles and changes start to stack up hard and fast. And the fact that I read it on the last day of the year is something I'd call out to validate my eternal "the year's not over until it's over" instance.

As I type this, I have seven books that I've read and haven't written about, though a few are in series that I will clump together. And I have posts scheduled through mid-January, on my new, weekdays-only standard. So I expect I will come back and fill in the missing links (ha ha) once those go live.

I also note that I read more books in November and December than the previous ten months. That seems to be a good sign, but I have no idea if it means anything.

But this is what I read last year, and, if there's any lesson, it's this: unexpected crap happens. Life is weird and twisty. You can figure out how to deal with it and head in the direction you want. You may not get as far as you want. You may not go as quickly as you want. You may suddenly be hit by a nasty unexpected disease, as nearly 20m Americans have been. You may even die from it, as almost 350k Americans have. (I don't want to be a Pollyanna here: we will all die, some sooner than others, and everything we want to do past that point will be gone.) But you can at least adapt and keep your goals in mind in the time you have.

This lesson is more widely applicable than to your reading life.

Shade the Changing Girl, Vol. 2 by Cecil Castellucci, Marley Zarcone & others

First, about that "others" in the post title: Marguerite Sauvage drew one of the six issues collected here, Ande Parks inked the pages set on Meta, Kelly Fitzpatrick colored all of it, and several other artists contributed to the back-up stories. Including all of them would make it look like a law firm.

But Cecil Castellucci wrote all of it and Marley Zarcone drew all but the first issue in Shade the Changing Girl, Vol. 2: Little Runaway, so it's reasonably fair to attribute it to the two of them. And it is, as you might guess, the immediate sequel to Vol. 1: Earth Girl Made Easy, by the same team, and concludes the initial arc of this comic. (It dove into a Young Animal crossover that had something to do with milk immediately afterward, and then reappeared, briefly, as Shade the Changing Woman.)

I thought this Shade was going to be focused on the alien-in-high-school thing, but I was wrong: the first issue here blows that up to send Loma Shade (current possessor of the M-vest, traverser of the strange interdimensional Madness between her planet Meta and Earth, minor criminal, college dropout, refugee and all-around flighty person) off on her own journey across America, in the mode of the Milligan/Bachalo Changing Man series of the '90s.

Loma intends her journeys will go farther than that -- she has a bucket list covering the whole Earth, including several things either mythological or eons-gone (like meeting dinosaurs) -- but her journey turns into a quick stop in Gotham City (here entirely a stand-in for NYC, with no notable Gotham characters even appearing) and another in Los Alamos (somewhat muted; I seem to remember Milligan/Bachalo did something more pointed in their run, but I may be misremembering) on the way to Hollywood. Loma is an obsessive, and all of her love for Earth has been filtered through the '50s TV show Life With Honey, which was a minor fad on Meta when its TV signals arrived, fifty years after it was broadcast on earth and about ten years before this story takes place.

(As a sidebar, Castellucci slyly makes it clear that Life with Honey was never a big deal for anyone but Loma. The marketing copy for the Shade books tends to take Loma's point of view -- this is the biggest hit in the galaxy! -- but that very much seems not to be actually true. Loma is not a reliable narrator of anything.)

So the arc of Changing Girl turns out to be entirely about Loma chasing down the heroine of an old TV show, for her own obsessive reasons, and ending with a character reset -- not unlike the multiple times that happened in the Milligan/Bachalo run, but maybe a bit more quickly. (Milligan/Bachalo ran seventy issues, with about three resets during that time.) I'm not complaining: I like seeing supposedly superhero comics focusing on obsessive, damaged people who never do anything remotely heroic or even punch anyone. I'd have liked to see Loma's journeys have more time and space, but everything in comics these days needs to wrap up in a couple of arcs for the TPs and to make room for the next crossover, so this is probably all we ever were going to get.

Oh, and the "villains" on the Meta end do chase Loma, in a way that seems like it will be the usual mad-scientist thing, trying to Conquer The World! or something like that. It goes an entirely different way, which is amusing and welcome, but that all ends slightly rushed and uneventfully.

The art is still excellent: Sauvage's issue in particular is a delight, in a much more comics-realistic style than Zarcone and making me think she would be awesome for a new Millie the Model or some other high-fashion book, centering on attractive women wearing attractive clothes and doing something interesting. Zarcone still works in what looks to me like a modern version of Bachalo's Shade look from the '90s, a nice bit of visual continuity. And Fitzpatrick's colors are still vibrant and eye-catching, essential in a book all about "the Madness" and what it does to people.

This didn't go as far as I hoped it would, but it has a great tone and style, and a central concern unusual in Big Two comics: about people and their connections, and (without being obvious about it) something of that what-is-the-right-thing-to-do idea that's always so central to superhero comics.

By Night, Vols. 2 & 3 by John Allison, Christine Larsen, and Sarah Stern

This is the remaining two-thirds of John Allison's attempt to see if he could reconfigure the essential Britishness of his writing and port Tackleford wholesale to its American equivalent: Spectrum, South Dakota.

(No, I don't quite see it, either. I'm thinking some old mill town in western Massachusetts would be better, or somewhere in coastal Maine, but I am an East Coaster to begin with.)

In case that's confusing: John Allison writes sprightly, fun stories with various levels of fantasy elements, set mostly in the English Midlands, often centering around the quirky town of Tackleford, first as a series of webcomics (Bobbins, Scarygoround, Bad Machinery, and see these posts of mine) and increasingly as floppy comics that people actually pay money for (most famously Giant Days). A couple of years ago, he launched a series called By Night, with many Tacklefordian flourishes, set in, as I said, the distant town of Spectrum. The comic was drawn by Christine Larsen and colored by Sarah Stern, who also provided variant covers.

I covered the first collection here back in May, and now I have the rest of the story: Vol. 2 and Vol. 3 collect the rest of this twelve-issue series. So far, it doesn't seem to have spawned a sequel.

And I still find it basically the same kind of thing as the first volume: fun, but subtly off and not quite as enjoyable as Allison's stories set in a greener and more pleasant land. The dialogue often falls somewhere between Allisonly snappy and actually colloquial American, as if he were trying to stretch to speak in a foreign tongue and not consistently succeeding. Nothing is actually wrong here: it's a fine adventure comic, with snappy dialogue, quirky characters, and a plot that bounces around and makes things happen. It just feels like someone trying to "do John Allison in the USA" and subtly missing the point.

So: former friends Jane and Heather have discovered a portal into a fantasy world, and of course intend to monetize that...by making a documentary film about it. (Allison is always quirky, even when he's trying to be American about it.) This is slightly hampered, first, by their being driven out of the fantasy world by the authorities there, and, secondarily, by the increasingly heavy-handed tactics from authorities here related to the corporation that built the portal and then went bankrupt, pauperizing the town.

These two volumes feature a lot of running about, and an array of colorful characters, from drug dealers to a small green troll-like fantasy-world person, from aged (and possibly insane) scientists to salt-of-the-earth vermin-extermination working men. There are nefarious plots from both ends of the portal, surprising revelations, applied mad science, semi-random murder, and pulse-pounding board meetings.

All of the ingredients are fine, and By Night could seem really awesome to someone not familiar with Allison's other work. (Or to someone violently allergic to anything non-American, I suppose: goodness know we do have those.) It's not one of his best works, but that is a very minor quibble on my part -- this is a better run of comics than nearly anything cover-featuring a person wearing a mask and published in the last eighty years.

I still think most readers would be better served as an introduction to Allison by diving into Bad Machinery or Giant Days (depending on their preferences), but what do I know?

The Arab of the Future 3 & 4 by Riad Sattouf

I had vague hopes that I was going to cover the end of the Arab of the Future story in this post, but I'm wrong: there is at least one more volume. (The end of Vol. 4 would be a horrible cliffhanger to end on, anyway, even given that this is a memoir.)

Riad Sattouf is a Syrian/French comics creator, associated with the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine, who has published several series of graphic novels in France, most of which seem to have semi-autobiographical elements. But his Arab of the Future series, the most explicitly autobiographical, was the first to be translated into English and published in the US, starting with the first volume in 2015, only a year after its French publication. There have been five volumes to date, with the fifth Arab of the Future book published in France earlier this year -- that one brings Riad up to the age of sixteen, so it may be the end. (But maybe not.)

I saw Volume One back in early 2016 and Volume Two later that year; Three was published in France in 2016 and the US in 2018, and then Four had its first French edition in 2018 and American in 2019. So my guess is that we'll see Five on this side of the pond in mid-to-late 2021, and will know for ourselves then if Sattouf has finished up the story of his younger days.

These two books see young Riad finally getting to an age where he's not just a witness -- Three covers about two years, starting at age 7, and the more episodic Four covers five more years after that, getting Riad up to his early teens. Three is split almost in half: Riad and his family start out still living in the village of Ter Maaleh, Syria, but his father is increasingly distant, working as a professor first in a nearby city and eventually in Saudi Arabia. Riad's mother takes him and his younger brother back to France with her after about another year, for the birth of her third son there...and does not return to Syria, since she's fighting more and more with her husband and he's in Saudi Arabia almost all the time, anyway.

And then Four is mostly set in France, with two long trips back to Syria to punctuate it.

Sattouf presents all this cleanly, mostly from the point of view of the kid he was then, and seems to be honest about his parents. His mother comes off better, since she's Western to begin with and wants the life for her family that the vast majority of readers would want. Ter Maaleh is dirty, full of horrible people, and Syria is corrupt to its core in a way that seems to taint nearly everyone -- plus the local strain of Islam is cruel and punitive, focused entirely on evil and obligation.

Both books see Riad struggling: he's in between these two cultures, but not entirely part of either one. Ter Maaleh is full of cruelty and superstition, and Riad will never fit in there unless he becomes a "good Muslim" -- which even his father, a relatively modern, educated Arab man with a doctorate from the Sorbonne, struggled with into middle age. But Riad is an academic star there, in his elementary years, which pleases his father and gives him a certain position -- even if the other students hate and scorn him at the time, and even more so on his returns, where they take him for an Israeli Jew (likely because they have no other concept of foreigners: they live in a world of good Arabs and evil Jews, and nothing else).

France is more complex and sophisticated, but Riad doesn't fit in well there, either. His voice is soft and high, so he's teased for being "a girl." His work is not as advanced in France, particularly with the disruptions of years back and forth between France and Syria. He turns to drawing as a way to make friends, and that works...for a while, at least. But he's odd and different, and Four in particular covers the tween years, where being different is the worst possible thing in the world.

Sattouf avoids making explicit value judgements: he's telling the story of his life, not specifically making points against people. But the tone and angle is pretty clear: Syria was a horrible place, in ways most Syrians wouldn't even realize. And some part of the horribleness is down to their particular strain of Islam: cruel, medieval, authoritarian, inflexible, punishing. France, on the other hand, was mostly a nice place where young Riad didn't fit in -- cleaner, prettier, with more opportunities...but just as many horrible, cruel people who took just as much joy in tormenting people weaker than themselves. Religion was not a factor as Sattouf describes France, nor was it even really racism against Riad: his schoolmates didn't shun him because he was an Arab, they didn't think he was an Arab and shunned him because he was weird for a French kid. (They were racist against Arabs, to be clear: Sattouf shows this. But they were mean to him for entirely different reasons.)

Not that makes any of it better, obviously. But in France, the torments were mostly psychological. In Syria, Riad had rocks thrown at his head. If you have to choose one, pick the one where you're less likely to be killed.

Again, Sattouf is not giving explicit value judgements: just telling his story, cleanly and clearly. He also makes it clear that he was a pretty self-centered kid without a whole lot of emotional intelligence at that age: he didn't even know what he could do differently to make people like him. Everyone comes across warts and all in Arab of the Future: Riad is a little pill a lot of the time, his mother spends much of her time complaining, and his father is a mix of distracted academic and would-be sharpie political expert, with a sideline in loudmouth horrible opinions. It's a compelling view of a world full of a lot of nastiness and cruelty: you can easily see why someone coming from there would end up creating satire.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/26/20

Nothing actually in the mail this week, but I do have three books that I bought myself got as Christmas presents bought myself and got as Christmas presents! (At my stage of life, if you want the right presents, you need to buy them yourself.)

The Iron Dragon's Mother by Michael Swanwick -- I'm a year late for this one, but I've read all of Swanwick's novels (and most of his short fiction, too), and didn't want to miss the third novel in the world of Iron Dragon's Daughter and Dragons of Babel. I wouldn't call this a trilogy, though I bet the publisher does: my understanding is that they're three separate novels (the first two definitely were) written years apart, about different people in different parts of this world.

Swanwick has been one of my favorite writers since probably Vacuum Flowers (I think I read that before In the Drift, and it's a more pyrotechnic, instantly lovable novel), and I acquired a bunch of his books for the book clubs for a decade or so. (In fact, there's one Swanwick book, Jack Faust, that I acquired there even though at the time and afterward I wondered if the book wouldn't have been better served if it were offered by The Other Folks. But I couldn't have made that happen; you can never make other people do things. All you can do are the things in front of you.)

So: fantasy novel set in an industrialized, dystopic world of traditional folklore. By one of our best writers. I can't recommend it until I actually read it, but I bet it's well worth reading.

Dead Lies Dreaming by Charles Stross -- The author says that this is not actually part of the main "Laundry Files" series -- the protagonists do not belong to that UK government organization, not that the same organization even exists as it did before The Delirium Brief -- but his publishers know the lure of a series title, so it's badged that way so his fans can find it. It is set in the same world, and that's Stross's most popular world, which is good for we readers and (we all hope) similarly good for the bank accounts of Stross and the publishers.

(I also get the sense that Stross has traditionally been a writer who finds himself cramped and shoehorned by his previous choices when writing sequels, so long series may annoy him more than some writers. If sidebars and new sub-series like this allow him to create a series more like Discworld than like Foundation, that's good for all of us.)

So this is a caper novel, set in a world on the precipice of a Lovecraftian apocalypse -- well, of one particular Lovecraftian apocalypse, with several others bubbling along at various levels as well. The UK, for example, is now ruled personally by Nyarlathotep in one of his slightly more personable and reasonable forms. My traditional answer, when someone asks if the Laundry books are SF, fantasy, or horror, is to say "Yes. Yes, they are. But 'and' rather than 'or.'"

Paul at Home by Michel Rabagliati -- This is the most recent book in a sequence of semi-autobiographical graphic novels by a French Canadian (it's translated from French by Helge Dascher and Rob Aspinall), following Paul Up North, Paul Joins the Scouts, Paul Has a Summer Job, and several others -- not all of which have "Paul" in the title, actually. The main character is "Paul Riforati" rather than "Michel Rabagliati," but, otherwise, Rabagliati seems to have stuck very close to the details of his own life, fictionalizing only as much as any other memoirist does, to protect others or just because memory is always faulty.

Most of the Paul books have covered "Riforati's" younger years -- childhood, schooling, meeting the woman who became his wife, some of his early career in the printing business. But Paul at Home has a middle-aged Riforati, divorced and with his single daughter now grown and moved out. This Riforati, for what I think is the first time, is a published and popular author -- the previous books were all about a Riforati who had not yet created his world's equivalent of the Paul books. (And I wonder how metafictional Rabagliati will get here? It would amuse me, if maybe no one else, if Paul's fictional alter-ego was named Michel.)

So this may be a tougher book, emotionally, than most of the ones about a young Paul venturing out into the wide world -- maybe closer to The Song of Roland or even more death-haunted than that. Rabagliati knows this character well, and I'd like to see how he handles bringing the character closer to his present-day life.

Quote of the Week: Take Me to Your Leader

There is a shrine to Ogko in most places nowadays. Though Ogko did not approve of shrines. He was the most cantankerous of deities, a reluctant messiah, If you subscribe to the Alien Theory of Spiritual Beings, which was briefly popular around the time of the Shangri-La Affair, Ogko would be considered, alongside Jesus, Mohammed, Uri Geller, and L. Ron Hubbard, as an alien entity. It was the answer to Fermi's famous paradox. The reason we don't see aliens out there, reasoned the proponents of the AToSB, is because they're here. They walk -- and preach -- among us.

 - Lavie Tidhar, Central Station, p.72

H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness by Gou Tanabe (2 vols)

Adapting a book is always a tricky thing, especially in a format where you're turning words into pictures. (Radio dramas, I suppose, have somewhat different issues.) And when the author you're adapting is...um, shall we say overly fond of long, ornate, elaborate words in general and detailed descriptions in particular, getting those pictures to resemble the mental images from those words gets even tougher.

And that's just for just the adaptor -- every reader will interpret "partly squamous, partly rugose" a little differently, so how will they take your pictorial description?

All of that is to say that adapting H.P. Lovecraft into a visual medium is a tricky thing. There have been some movies, a few of which have been more-or-less successful. He's been a bit better served in comics, which is much more of an auteur medium to begin with -- for example, I.N.J. Culbard adapted four long Lovecraft stories into graphic novels about a decade ago, each in its own style, and all successfully. (Well, successfully to my eye, since that's the point I just made.)

Not long afterward, the manga-ka Gou Tanabe embarked on a longer adaptation of Lovecraft's novella "At the Mountains of Madness" in 2016-17, in twenty-three chapters (plus prologue and epilogue) and over six hundred pages. That was published as two volumes in English translation last year: The First Volume and The Second Volume. I'm not clear on what the original Japanese publication schedule was, but my guess it was the usual: the chapters appeared individually in some magazine or other (weekly or monthly), and then objects closely resembling these two books came out as tankobon.

This is a very faithful adaptation -- Tanabe uses a lot of chunks of Lovecraft prose, both to set up chapters and as narration over his pages, and the length allows him to get all of the events of the novella into his adaptation. He also keeps the 1931 setting and all of the technical details the same, which other Lovecraft adaptations don't always do. So, if you're familiar with the Lovecraft story -- and that's the audience for this book, obviously -- Tanabe's version won't surprise you in the storytelling.

The art, though, might surprise you, particularly if you have an outdated view of what "manga art" looks like. Tanabe uses a very detailed style here, with lots of blacks and washes, and he clearly draws the fantastic elements of Lovecraft's story while often keeping them in shadow to suit the dark caves and cyclopean ruins the characters wander through. For Western readers, getting used to manga-style "reading backward" might be an issue to begin with, but Tanabe's panel flow is clear and he sticks to boxy, square panels with occasional splash pages -- there's nothing here to throw off people who aren't regular comics readers.

As for the story itself: it's that Lovecraft staple, the man of science describing events that led him (always him, always a very particular kind of him) to learn Things That Man Was Not Meant to Know and putting them down on paper in hopes that everyone else will listen and never go back there again. In this particular case, it's an Antarctic expedition, out of Lovecraft's fictional Miskatonic University [1] in Arkham, Massachusetts, with specialists in a variety of disciplines (geology, biology, and so on) planning to explore, collect samples, and do some basic science.

But instead they find calamity and an escalating series of discoveries: bodies of a totally unknown type leading to a giant previously unknown mountain chain leading to a vast ancient city beyond those mountains where two of the team will find....well, that would be telling.

The thrills and joys of Lovecraft are in those moments of discovery, where the veil is lifted, bit by bit, on visions of deep time and unexpected creatures. Tanabe is good at translating that feeling into comics, and his page count and the generally unhurried pace of manga pages serves him well here -- there's enough space and time to go step-by-step with Lovecraft through all of the stages of disbelief and dawning understanding.

So this is a good adaptation. "Mountains" is one of Lovecraft's less-problematic major stories, and Tanabe silently eliminates any vaguely racist stuff about the swarthy crewmen of the expedition's ships. (I don't remember anything specifically, but Lovecraft was vaguely racist all the time, so I'm assuming there's at least a few sentences to make a modern reader wince in "Mountains.") And Tanabe's art style is a great fit for Lovecraft: he's detailed in a dark, horror-tinged way, and can make the ancient architecture and alien creatures creepy and menacing rather than just funny-looking.

I understand Tanabe did one book of shorter Lovecraft adaptations before this, and has been adapting other Lovecraft stories since then, so, odds are, if this sounds appealing, you'll have more than just this story to enjoy.

[1] Go, Pods!

Are You Listening? by Tillie Walden

This book makes we want to get Hegelian, but I have to immediately insist that it's not the book's fault -- I'll overanalyze anything given half a chance, and this just happened to wander into my sights.

So, with that caveat: Are You Listening? feels like a synthesis. Tillie Walden started her comics career with shorter books and stories -- which I still haven't seen, and which may, for those who know them well, utterly shatter this idea I have -- and then moved on into big books with first Spinning, then On a Sunbeam, and then Listening.

Spinning is the thesis: a memoir about Walden's own life, growing up mostly in Texas, a girl realizing she's queer, beginning to think about what she wants and doesn't want in her life, focused through the lens of her decade-plus as a competitive skater.

On a Sunbeam is the antithesis: a SFnal story, set in an entirely imagined universe (one with no male gender at all, as far as the story showed, though there was, oddly, one "non-binary" person), with strange and quirky rules, and a story of first love thwarted by the universe and (more prosaically) by the fact that first loves tend to end anyway.

Last year Walden came back with Are You Listening?, a graphic novel set in real-world Texas but featuring fictional characters, about two young queer women who are not going to have any quote-unquote "relationship" with each other, a road trip on a smaller scale than Sunbeam but featuring eruptions of fantasy unlike Spinning. So: synthesis.

Walden is already an interesting and subtle graphic novelist, even this early in her career, so I don't want to try to pigeonhole her, but I think this could be a signpost. What I hope to see from her over the next years or decades is more books like Listening: based in a realistic world but with fantasy elements, about young women (probably getting older as Walden does herself) navigating things other than just first love and coming out, who are more and more at home in their own lives as time goes on.

(We'll see if that's the case: Walden is clearly smart and talented enough to go an entirely different way, somewhere along the line.)

So Listening is the story of these two women and this one trip. Bea is in her late teens, and is clearly running away from her small-town home, for reasons we won't learn for a while but are clearly powerful. Lou is almost a decade older, a small-town mechanic making a trip to visit family -- but it also quickly becomes clear that she's also running away, in the quieter way of a more settled, slightly older person who has gotten deeply unhappy with some of the major things in her life.

Along the way, they find a cat, and try to take it back to its home. Lou teaches Bea how to drive. They open up to each other, at least somewhat. And they are pursued by the mysterious, unexplained Office of Road Inquiry as they drive further and further into West Texas.

As far as I can see, that Office has nothing to do with Bea's secrets or Lou's restlessness. They do have an interest in the cat, though: maybe it's the cat that ties everything together. Listening is not a story in which everything is tied up in a bow at the end -- it's the story of a few days in Bea's and Lou's lives. Important days, transformational days. Days where they change each other and move on in their own directions with more purpose, but just a few days.

Like Walden's previous books, Listening is about people and their relationships. There are other things going on in her books, but the people are central and their emotions are the drivers of her books. Listening feels like it has a tighter focus than Spinning, which covered whole years and all of young Walden's concerns, or Sunbeam, with its larger, complex cast and richly imagined universe. Walden here is bouncing two characters off each other -- both of them feel like getting out, of different things for different reasons, and then throwing other complications at them to see how they react and what kind of people they are when they come out the other end.

It's a surprisingly quiet book for a road-trip story about two women pursued by potentially-supernatural and definitely threatening entities, but surprising is par for the course for Walden so far. And surprising is a wonderful and amazing thing for any creator -- even more so for someone who can put out lovely, deep books like these this often.

The Handbook to Lazy Parenting by Guy Delisle

This is the fourth and last of Guy Delisle's "Bad Dad" books, following A User's Guide to Neglectful Parenting, Even More Bad Parenting Advice, and The Owner's Manual to Terrible Parenting. Like the others, it's a small book of comics, just a bit bigger than a mass-market paperback and about two hundred pages long.

Generally, with a book like The Handbook to Lazy Parenting -- collections of short strips with the same premise and no real internal continuity -- you can start with any of them and hit them in any order. That's still the case for the first three books, but Handbook is clearly the end of this string; there's a more touching story at the end, where Delisle basically turns around and notices his kids are growing up: Alice and Louis are no longer the early-elementary kids he's been drawing them as, but eleven and fourteen. So don't start here: pick one of the other books first.

It's entirely possible to do funny comics about families with teenage kids, and I have hopes Delisle will try that: he's very funny and not shy of making himself the butt of his jokes. But any further books won't be like these books: his kids have outgrown the age where they believe everything "Dad" says and rely on his judgement, knowledge, and experience implicitly. Delisle clearly knows that, and underlines that at the end here.

But, before that, we do get a hundred and fifty-plus pages of more Bad Dad hijinks, all focused on Delisle as a world-class slacker dad. The kids are cute and fun, but Delisle is the draw: I'm sure he was never quite this self-centered and forgetful, but it's funnier like this, and Delisle know how to make it funny.

I do think this stuff is better and more resonant if you've had kids, because you've been the lazy parent. (Well, I suppose there may be some people either superhuman enough or forgetful enough to not remember any lazy/self-centered moments with their kids, but those people are tedious bores anyway.) Looking back myself, I spent years encouraging my boys to learn how to pump their legs on swings so I didn't have to push them as much...and I now have to wonder why I cared. But it was effort, and sometimes just a little bit more effort dealing with the energy of a five-year-old is Way Too Much.

That's the vibe of the Bad Dad books: knowing that you love your kids, of course, but also wishing they would make your life easier for once rather than more complicated, hoping that whatever this new demand on your time is (homework, errands, feeding & clothing them, all of that stuff) won't take too much effort, and wanting more of that uncomplicated unalloyed little-kid admiration that disappears so quickly. Delisle does it all really well in all four of these books.