Frogcatchers by Jeff Lemire

Jeff Lemire is at least two different comics creators -- metaphorically if not in reality. (Maybe in reality, too, since otherwise I wonder how he finds time to sleep.)

There's the Big Two Lemire, who writes punch-em-up comics for other people to draw. He's pretty well regarded for that, but I wandered off from the Big Two around the beginning of this century, so I have no personal experience with that side of his work.

The original Jeff Lemire, though, who started his career with the Xeric-winning Lost Dogs and broke out soon afterward with the three books that make up Essex County, was and is a indy-graphic-novel guy, who makes book-length stories all by himself and shoves them out into the world.

That Jeff Lemire also works in comics issues, sometimes -- yesterday I wrote about the third volume of  Royal City, which is indy-Lemire but originally a fourteen issue series from Image -- but what he mostly does is make stories about Canadian blue-collar men (sometimes women) with various problems, usually at a moment when they're being beaten by life more than usual.

(And the Schroedinger Lemire is the one in the middle: who writes books that usually come out as issues, who works with other artists, but doesn't do superhero stuff. Think Descender and Plutona; books like that. Again, it makes me wonder when the man sleeps.)

Frogcatchers is very much in indy-Lemire mode, following on previous solo books like The Nobody, The Underwater Welder, Trillium, and Roughneck. Lemire draws it very loosely, like his earliest work, giving this atmospheric, surrealistic story a jolt of immediacy and energy. It feels like he drew it almost as quickly as you can read it: that's obviously not true (there's a lot of hidden work in a comics page), but it gives a story with few characters and big transcendent themes a a strong sense of velocity and vector.

It opens with a boy catching frogs under an overpass, somewhere. Then a man wakes up in a hotel bed -- maybe the same man, dreaming of his youth? But he soon finds the hotel is locked and empty, except for that boy -- who still looks a lot like him -- and the boy tells him the story of this world: they're trying to escape the hotel, to get away from The Frog King, who lives in a locked room across from where the man woke up. A room the man has a key to, in fact -- the only key to any of the rooms in this hotel. Monstrous frog-like Agents of the King chase them -- the boy is right, at least in some way.

But the man may be right about other things. And escape might not be what it seems.

Frogcatchers is deeply metaphorical, obviously. I'm not going to spoil the metaphor here: it's a good one, though the focus on frogs is quirky and specific. (I suspect Lemire himself caught frogs as a kid; I never did or even thought of it as a thing people did in the modern world.) I think this is a book most resonant for those of us in middle age or later: you need to have done things to look back on (with regret, or nostalgia, or whatever) to get the most out of it. Maybe not catching frogs, but something. We all have something.

If it resonates for you, if there something in your past or present that connects to Lemire's metaphor -- and there probably will be -- this is a fine, resonant, deep book about the meanings of a life and the decisions we all make and regret.

The thing about frogs is that they're slippery: hard to catch, hard to keep. And what do you do after you catch them: what happens next?

Royal City, Vol. 3: We All Float On by Jeff Lemire

Somehow I'm over two years late on this Jeff Lemire comic, despite reading the first two (see my posts on volumes one and two) right when they came out and liking the series a lot. What can I say? There are too many good books in the world, and keeping up with them all can sometimes be challenging. But I made it to the end eventually.

Royal City is a family story, and Vol. 3: We All Float On is where it all comes together. The first volume brought brother Patrick back to town, to join his siblings Richie and Tara and parents Patti and Peter -- and, most importantly, brother Tommy, who died in 1993 but has been haunting the entire family, in very different ways, ever since. The second volume went back to '93 to show the week of Tommy's death, and now the conclusion brings in a new, unexpected family member and brings everything to the final crisis.

(No, not the usual comics kind of Final Crisis. The real people living in a real world -- well, mostly real, since they're all seeing Dead Tommy all the time -- kind of crisis, where all of the problems peak at once.)

This is an ending, so I don't want to talk much about the plot -- but I will say that it does all end, and it does end well. Lemire is, as always, good at stories about people, especially damaged people, and the Pike family are all damaged in different ways. It does all center on Tommy, as it must, even though he has been dead for over twenty years.

I see that Royal City is now available as a single spiffy hardcover, and that's probably the best way to read this going forward -- it is a single story that happened to be published as individual comics issues and then three trade paperbacks for market reasons, but it would work best as a single book, since it tells a single story.

A Pound of Paper by John Baxter

I think I owned this book before the flood, and didn't read it. (My personal flood, in 2011, I mean, not the Biblical one. I'm pretty sure I didn't own any books before the Biblical flood.) The US cover is familiar, once I googled it to start preparing to write this post -- what I read, somewhat appropriately for a book about books, was the UK first edition.

As far as I can tell, I never read that first copy of A Pound of Paper: the words here, and the story of John Baxter's life told in those words, were new to me. So it's another one of those odd fragments of a reading life: the book that's partly familiar and partly unfamiliar, and you can't quite remember why. Sometimes those are books you almost read -- poked through in a store, glanced at during a boring party. Some are just books you heard about a lot -- read a few reviews and got enough knowledge that ten years later it feels like you forgot the rest. And some are like this: books you never did read, but had around for a while and probably picked up several times.

A Pound of Paper is somewhere between a general memoir of Baxter's life and an examination of the world of bookselling and his life in that world in the '60s through the '90s. It was published in 2002, and was Baxter's first foray into memoir, though it was followed not long after by the more specific We'll Always Have Paris, largely about how he married a Frenchwoman in midlife and moved to Paris. (That story, in miniature, is told here, with the focus mostly on how French bookdealers, like all French shopkeepers, are more like friendly neighbors than commerce-driven capitalists, and that causes friction with folks used to the norms of the Anglosphere.)

This book meanders quite a bit -- it's organized more or less chronologically, but Baxter backtracks a lot and drops what seem to be major threads (like the whole I-bought-and-sold-books thing) for entire chapters at a time. For example, he opens with three chapters talking about bookselling, booksellers, and the world of first editions -- the profitable end of bookselling, then as always. But that then drops away for a more normal autobiography of his childhood for the next few chapters -- with notes on the books he read, some of which he notes he still owns -- and how he entered the literary world in general. He seems to want this to be the Sam Eagle of autobiographies, a salute to everything in his life but mostly bookselling.

He was born in Australia in 1939, grew up largely in a town way out in the middle of nowhere, with stints in Sydney before and after that. He left school in his mid-teens to work on the railroad -- apparently still a thing one could do in Australia in the '50s -- and meandered into literary society through Australian SF clubs.

(I'm amused that Baxter was a SF writer and anthologist -- had a novel published by Ace in the '60s and everything -- but I didn't discover his work through that connection, but because I randomly picked up I think, this book, and then slightly later read We'll Always Have Paris because it was partially about the grande horizontales of his new hometown. And from there I wandered over to his "encyclopedia of modern sex" Carnal Knowledge and a biography of J.G. Ballard called The Inner Man.)

From there, Pound of Paper stints on Baxter's literary career -- Wikipedia lists a bunch of publications in the '60s and '70s, novels and books about film, but Baxter doesn't mention any of them -- to talk about buying books instead of writing them. Again, it's pretty meandering, much like Baxter's life: he moved to London in the late '50s (I think), and there became the kind of guy who finds rare-ish books and resells them, which led to being something like a partner of the bookseller Martin Stone -- Baxter talks about deals rather than business arrangements, and I think that was the level of everything. He never had a storefront or a business entity; he just found books, collected books, and sometimes sold books, either individually or in job lots. From London, he moved to Los Angeles for a decade or two, when his career was mostly writing books about film, and then moved on to Paris for the aforementioned Parisian.

Baxter has not organized all of this terribly well, but he tells it well. It feels like a loose bag of party pieces -- "Have I told you about how I came to London and met Martin? Well, there's a tale..." -- spruced up and put into a plausible order than something actually conceived as a book-length manuscript to begin with. I've read better books about bookselling, certainly, but this is a fun and interesting one, and the bookselling stuff is mixed in with the general story of a life spent in the literary world, which is a nice combination. 

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/16/21

This week I have two books to mention: one that came in the traditional way (in the mail, from the company that published it), and one that I got in a completely new way.

In a park near my house is a Little Library -- a box with a glass door on a post with a bunch of books jammed into it. The idea is to take books or leave them, as you can. It's maintained by the local Girl Scouts, or at least was built and installed by them -- I'm not sure how much maintenance is necessary. I've dropped books off there a few times: mostly YA graphic novels and similarly inoffensive stuff, since it's in a public park very near the play equipment.

On a way last weekend, I dropped off three books -- it was tough to fit them in; the box was pretty full -- and something caught my eye. So I ended up, for the first time, taking something away.

But first, the publicity book!

Clifford the Big Red Dog: The Movie Graphic Novel is exactly what it says it is: a comics adaptation of the mostly-live-action movie about the gigantic red dog beloved from the series of books by Norman Bridwell and (probably much more, these days) the animated series adapted from those books. The movie had a screenplay by Jay Scherick, David Ronn and Blaise Hemingway, from a story by Justin Malen and Ellen Rapoport, and Georgia Ball adapted that into comics for Chi Ngo to draw. Seven writers (counting Bridwell, which I definitely do) is an awful lot for a story about a big lovable dog, but that's Hollywood for you.

Apparently, Clifford's growth spurt this time is "magical" and the source of hang-wringing villainy, because this is a movie and they can't just rely on Bridwell's original "well, he's just a really big dog, OK?" premise. But the kid is still named Emily Elizabeth, she still loves her dog, and Clifford looks to still have the same personality as ever, so I think I can allow that.

My kids are well past the Clifford years, but I read the Bridwell books as a kid and read them to my sons early this century, so I do have plenty of affection for the character. So I might just have to see what Scherick and Ronn and Hemingway and Malen and Rapoport have done to him, and if Ball was able to get that back to a decent story. (My sympathies are always on the side of the ink-slingers on paper, not the screenwriters.)

This book went on sale September 7th; I have no idea why I got it so late...or, indeed, why I got it at all. But, hey, free books! I am definitely not complaining.

And the book I plucked from a Little Library in bucolic Hirschfield Park in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey was a UK edition of Ray Davies' book of short stories, Waterloo Sunset. Davies is of course the singer and frontman of the Kinks -- or was, when the Kinks were an active band, which they don't seem to be these days -- and "Waterloo Sunset" is one of the Kinks' most famous songs. This book seems to be a linked collection, with some or all of the stories based (loosely? directly?) on Davies' songs -- titles include "Art Lover," "Celluloid Heroes," Mr Pleasant," "Afternoon Tea," and "Rock and Roll Fantasy."

I say "linked" since there seems to be a Davies-esque character, the aging popstar Les Mulligan, threaded throughout the book, though I'm not sure if he's telling the stories or experiencing them. I guess I'll find out when I read it, huh?

This was not Davies' first foray into long-form prose (and of course he wrote a hell of a lot of really good songs for thirty-plus years) -- he wrote a weird, baroque memoir called X-Ray in the mid-90s, a few years before this collection, and a second (seemingly more straightforward) memoir called Americana a few years later. I've read X-Ray and haven't gotten to Americana yet.

Quote of the Week: Just So

There comes a time in a man's life when he realises stories are lies. Things do not end neatly. The enforced narratives a human impinges on the chaotic mess that is life become empty labels, like the dried husks of corn such as are thrown down in the summer months from the adaptoplant dwellings, to litter the streets below.

 - Lavie Tidhar, Central Station, pp.162-163

The Brontes: Infernal Angria by Craig Hurd-McKenney and Rick Geary

In our timeline, the Bronte siblings created several fictional worlds -- they started with Glass Town, which grew (mostly from Charlotte and Branwell) into the somewhat separate Angria, while younger siblings Emily and Anne invented the entirely separate land of Gondal. All of those were explicitly set in odd, "exotic" corners of the real world they were familiar with, and peopled with various lords and adventurers and such. And, of course, the three sisters all published novels set in the real England of their day, all beginning with debuts in 1847.

The Brontes: Infernal Angria simplifies this, as fiction often does. There is one land: Angria. It is real, somewhere other than Earth, and accessed, wainscot-style, from the playroom of their childhood house in Haworth. Time works differently there; visitors from England can enter Angria, have any number of adventures, and return at the moment they left...but time can also pass in Angria between visits. (If the reader suspects this is entirely for storytelling convenience, he can hardly be blamed.)

Craig Hurd-Kenney makes the origin of Angria specifically in the children's isolation and grief, starting in 1825 when their two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died. (And a few years after their mother also died.) But he actually begins this graphic novel with a prologue set in 1861, years after all four of the younger Bronte siblings were dead, in which Charlotte's widower attends the death of her father, Patrick, and then destroys all references to Angria in the house. This seems to be setting up a later conflict, but it really doesn't pay off in the current version of Infernal Angria -- I suspect Hurd-McKenney originally had a much longer, more dramatic story in mind, and the current 90-page version is what he and artist Rick Geary were able to actually get done in the twenty-ish years they were working on it.

So Infernal Angria is one part secret history -- this is what the Bronte children were really up to -- and one part unfinished drama. We see the Brontes enter Angria and have adventures and interactions there, but it's all fairly thin and quick and melodramatic, as one might expect of plot points based on the stories told by a bunch of nineteen century pre-teens -- it's almost a distraction to the real concerns, back in England, which center on whether going to Angria at all is a good thing. The core tension is between the nature of Angria, that time-stopping power which is health-reviving for English travelers, and their father's religion. Hurd-McKenney is not always clear why these things should be in tension, unless he's implying Angria is an alternative afterlife. (My understanding is that the Brontes' fictional worlds were not pagan, so they should be as close to their god in Angria as in England. Hurd-McKinney, or his characters, seem to have different ideas but don't quite make them clear.)

I think this is Hurd-McKenney trying to construct a plausible secret history based on real history, and not quite succeeding, to my mind. It's also possible that the original conception of a longer, fuller story would have had more room to make that conflict clearer and stronger. But, as it is, it feel like the Brontes, as they each sicken and get near death in turn, make random choices about who they feel about Angria and Heaven without quite saying what those choices are and what the stakes are.

So I can't find Infernal Angria entirely successful. It's interesting, and knotty, and a thoughtful weaving of secret history. but everything didn't quite come together the way I would have liked. I should admit that I came to it as a fan of Rick Geary, the artist, rather than as a Bronte scholar or knowing anything about Hurd-McKenney -- so the fact that I think the pictures are more successful than the framework they support might just be what was to be expected. Either way, it's quirky and specific: fans of the Brontes, of secret history, of 19th century literature in general, and of vague religious conflicts will find things of interest here.

(Note: this book is not available from the usual hegemonic Internet retailer, nor from B&N or IndieBound -- finding it might be a problem. ISBN is 9781532386244, if you want to do some searching.) 

House of the Black Spot by Ben Sears

Now, I tagged this book as "You Know, For Kids," but I don't think it was published for kids -- it's from the small comics-focused press Koyama [1] and I think they just do comics in general. But it's appropriate for kids of most ages, and it's a more modern adventure story than many I've seen in comics (see my recent post on another Tintin omnibus). So that's worth flagging.

Of course, on the other hand, I say "more modern" when House of the Black Spot reads an awful lot like a '70s Scooby-Doo episode translated into comics with a new cast. (That's not a complaint: figuring out skullduggery and making things better is a solid plot, and a great one for younger readers.)

This is, as far as I can recall, the first time I've ever seen the comics work of Ben Sears. I got this book because it was inexpensive to begin with and there was a good sale at my "local comics shop." [2] And it seems to be the fourth in the "Double+" series, about a crime-fighting duo, the boy (?) Plus Man and the flying robot Hank -- they have a day-job delivering things (groceries at the beginning of this book, I suspect other things in other books), but clearly also are "nosy kids" when occasion warrants.

Sears' world is mildly SFnal; robots like Hank seem to be a minority group -- there are some of them, but not a lot, and they have families rather than coming from an assembly line somewhere. But otherwise the world is basically "now," or maybe slightly historical, with computers and airplanes but no cellphones. 

Hank has to go back to Gear Town, where he grew up, when his uncle Bill (who raised him) dies. Plus Man goes with him as support, and, at the reading of the will, they're told (along with a motley crew of other family and friends) that Bill was murdered, that his estate (physical) will be sealed until the crime is solved by one of them, and that his estate (financial) will go to the person who solves the crime.

Everyone assumes that the two mean real-estate developers, who were buying land out from under Bill even before his death, are responsible -- but they seem too ineffectual and frankly incapable of murder, and there's also the matter of proving anything. So Plus Man and Hank investigate the house and grounds, digging into papers, finding secret passageways, having long conversations with people friendly and not, and getting captured by what seems to be the ghost of a long-dead evil industrialist -- the usual stuff.

In the end, the crime is solved, and a mask metaphorically pulled off a metaphorical Old Man Jenkins, who curses the Double+ duo for foiling the fiendish plot.

Sears draws this with thin lines outlining rounded, plump objects -- his people have big faces, and other things are softly boxy, with round corners and a sense of cartoon solidity. The coloring tends to the bright for backgrounds but more subdued for figures and scenery; it's a friendly, subtly happy look.

House of the Black Spot was fun: I enjoyed it enough to think about checking out the other Double+ books. I went into it with no real expectations -- the book has no blurb on it, except for a quote from Charles Forsman [3] -- but it is somewhere in a very broad territory between Tintin and the Scooby gang.

[1] Which I think is mostly or entirely one woman named Annie Koyama. And that's pretty impressive, since this book is my first Koyama title and it's well-made and nicely designed.

[2] It was local to my office when I worked in NYC in the mid-90s, and I might have shopped there a couple of times then. It was local to my bus station (the ugly and unpleasant Port Authority) for a subsequent decade, and became my regular shop somewhere in there. And it was still pretty close to Penn Station once I started using trains to get into NYC much of the time. But it's never been "local" in any normal sense of the word.

[3] Which, incidentally, amused me. It's credited to him with "(TEOTFW, I Am Not Okay With This)" afterwards, which is actually the titles of his two major books to date (first is the thing also known as The End of the Fucking World), but looks like a parenthetical comment with some baroque Internet initialism leading it off.

Clyde Fans by Seth

Seth has been telling this story for twenty years now, so you probably already know this, but: Clyde Fans is a business, not a person.

It was a small enterprise, manufacturing and selling fans for home and business, mostly in the smaller cities of Ontario, Canada, flourishing from the late thirties through the early sixties, and then rapidly declining to end in 1981. It was founded by a man named Clyde Matchstick, who does not appear in this book at all. His two sons, Abraham and Simon, are our viewpoints -- first one, then the other, then both, and one and the other once more to end symmetrically. (This is a long book, despite the "picture novella" label on the cover -- nearly five hundred pages of comics, with each of the five chapters pushing a hundred.)

The two brothers never really understood each other, or valued each other. But I've already said they were brothers.

The father is the hole the story circles around. He walked out on his family when they boys were grown but still young -- in their twenties, I think -- and they don't seem to have recovered from that, or from having him as a father before that. But, despite the name, the book is not Clyde's story. His wife -- or ex-wife, maybe, or even widow; they have no idea what happened to him -- has cut his face out of every photo she could find, so Clyde appears in Clyde Fans in dialogue and as a jagged scissor-cut shape, nothing more.

Abraham was the doer: he leapt into the business, first as a salesman for his father and then to run the office after the old man ran away. It looks like he grew it for a while; the late forties and all of the fifties were fat years. But the business model evaporated under him as air-conditioning became cheaper and more available, and Abraham never adjusted to that shift. (He never says "business model" or anything like that concept here, but it's what happened: I've seen it hit several businesses I worked for as well and it is not pretty.) The first chapter here is one long monologue, with Abraham holding forth (to the reader, or to no one) on his theories of selling, the history of the company, and related topics.

Simon was quieter, colder -- vastly less verbal, vastly less personable. He tried to be a salesman only once, with poor results. We don't see what drove him to that, but we do see that failed trip, and the man he became afterward: obsessed with novelty postcards, spending his entire life alone in the Clyde Fans building, caring for his aging mother in his halting, distracted way. His head is full, but it doesn't come easily out of his mouth -- certainly not with other people, though he does have the disconcerting habit of talking to his collection of mostly-racist novelty toys, often in loud and argumentative tones. There possibly was something wrong with Simon, some mental condition he could have been treated for, but that never happened. He is dead before the first section of this book, set in 1997, having died in the 1970s during the company's long slow decline.

So this is a book of contrasts: doer vs. dreamer, outer world vs. inner world, looking forward vs. looking back. As usual, Seth's essential sympathy is towards dreamers, inner worlds, and looking backward, though Simon is a deeply flawed exemplar of all of those things. Abraham was a healthier, better adjusted man -- but that's only a matter of degrees; he's hurt vastly more people in his life, just by living among more people and interacting with them (affairs with housewives all across Ontario, shutting down the manufacturing plant to save the core sales business for a few years).

And, even more, it's a book about memory and time: about how things change, and how it's impossible to hold onto moments of happiness and joy, no matter how much you want to. Maybe also about what trying to hold onto those moments, instead of moving on, will do to someone.

Seth's art changes over the twenty years he took to draw this -- his lines were thin in the first chapter, much like It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, but they grow fatter as the book goes on, and the endpapers and opening art is all in his modern style: solid blocks of black and tone with chunky confident lines defining the spaces and people. The book is long enough that it wasn't really noticeable in the reading, though the transition from frontmatter to chapter one is potentially jarring. (But Seth calls it out in his afterword, which is largely about how the book did take twenty years to complete, and how he'll never do anything like that again.)

Frankly, this is a small, personal story -- five hundred pages does not make it an epic, and it was never meant to be. It is physically a bug-crusher, but that's because of the nature of comics: despite the old saw that a picture equals a thousand words, telling a nuanced, dialogue-driven, thoughtful story about people in comics simply takes more space than it does in prose. If you go into Clyde Fans expecting bigness, you'll be disappointed. But if you know Seth's previous work, you'll be properly calibrated.

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.