Trese, Vol. 1: Murder on Balete Drive by Budjette Tan & KaJo Baldisimo

Thirteen years ago, I saw this book for the first time (in an earlier edition). I was fairly late: it was published in comics form several years before that, but I did have the slight disadvantage of being on the other side of the world.

I was impressed then; I'm equally impressed now. The Trese stories are great urban fantasy in comics form: taking a lot of the standard furniture of the genre (attractive young female protagonist with a mysterious past, powerful protectors, and a complicated relationship with the local supernatural powers, plus a lot of the mystery-plot aspects) and using them well, while also centering on very specific supernatural elements that we non-Filipinos are unfamiliar with. (See also my post on the third volume; that's as far as I've seen so far.)

It didn't have to be Philippine mythology: there are probably dozens of places in the world that could support a similarly new and energetic series, from Vietnam to Nigeria to Chile to Nunavut. (Not the Lake District or Transylvania or Bavaria.) But these creators were Filipino, so that was the world they knew, and they have been making great use of it.

The good news is that you can find Trese now, which you mostly couldn't for the last decade. (After I lost my copies in the flood of 2011, I didn't have them, either.) The American comics company Ablaze published an edition of this first collection, Murder on Balete Drive, late last year, and the second one is scheduled for June. There's an animated series on Netflix, though some googling hasn't gotten me to any solid information on the date it will be (or was?) released. With any luck, the rest of the eight books published in the Philippines will come here (and the rest of the world) as well, and creators Budjette Tan and KaJo Baldisimo can spend more time making these stories and less time being high-powered global advertising guys.

Balete Drive collects what were the original first four issues, all standalone stories. Baldisimo has redrawn the art, so it's even stronger than it originally was: stunningly inky and atmospheric, in a style immediately accessible to Americans but still inherently Filipino. (Remembering how many Filipinos have done great work in American comics for the past six or seven decades, this should not be a surprise.) Tan has added short sections after each story to give a little more background on the supernatural entities in each section - these aren't necessary, but they're useful for us non-Filipinos. So this is the best possible edition of these stories: possibly annoying to Filipinos who have been supporting it for a decade, but gratifying to those of us elsewhere in the world who finally get to see it for ourselves.

All of the stories are about Alexandra Trese. She's young, she's called in when the Manila police have a weird case that they don't know what to do with, she has skills and knowledge and contacts that can solve those problems - usually in ways that at least do not add more violence. But the supernatural is a dark and dangerous place, for anyone caught up in it and and possibly even for Trese. Her father, Anton, was respected and powerful but does not seem to be around now - and she's very clear she is not her father. So there are story hooks for later, set carefully and with skill.

These are the first four cases of hers we know about. They clearly were not the first cases of her life: Tan and Baldisimo may some day go back and tell those stories. (They may already have.) They are dark and dangerous cases, with various monsters causing trouble and relationships that need to be carefully talked back into place. Luckily, Manila has Alexandra Trese to do that for them.

And, luckily, you have the stories of Alexandra Trese to look forward to.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 3/13/21

These books all came in from the library, some of them as long as a week and a half ago. And I'm already reading some of them as this post goes live, which is a good thing.

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me is a graphic novel written by Mariko Tamaki and drawn by Rosemary Valero-O'Connell; it's showed up on a lot of "best of" lists for last year. Tamaki wrote the graphic novels Skim and This One Summer, which I have read, and several Lumberjanes novels, which I have not. (And probably other stuff, too - I don't know that I've paid enough attention and she does this for a living.) I don't know Valero-O'Connell, but I'm always up for a creator with a double-barreled name.

The Hard Tomorrow is the most recent full-length graphic novel from Eleanor Davis, author of You & A Bike & A Road and How to Be Happy and Why Art? I think this one is at least mildly SFnal, or I may be just getting that from the title. Anyway, Davis is excellent, this got good notices, and I finally got my hands on a copy.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 8: My Best Friend's Squirrel is another one on the series of books collecting the series by Ryan North and Eric Henderson, with color by Rico Renzi. (And, as of this book if not earlier, cover credit as well, so I'm making sure to mention him.) I think this series has since ended - this book came out in 2018; I'm running behind - but as far as I've seen SG has not yet been rebooted into a grim & gritty gun-toting pneumatic blonde with a boob window. But it is only a matter of time: Marvel owns her, and Marvel will do something else with her eventually. When it comes to corporate IP, we must always prepare ourselves for the pointless and inevitable disappointment. I've written about the previous collections here over the past few years.

I also got three Giant Days collections -- Volume 11, Volume 13, and Volume 14 -- all of which were written by John Allison and drawn by Max Sarin, with colors by Whitney Cogar. Well, actually, it looks like there are stories in two of the volumes actually drawn by Allison, so give that one an asterisk. This is most of the end of the series; I already have a copy of Vol. 12 on hand, and plan to read them straight through pretty soon. (It has to be "pretty soon," since libraries want their books back in roughly that timeframe.)

Your Bluesy Stomp of the Moment

The record's not even out yet, so there's nothing I can embed here.

But go right now to Bandcamp and listen to The Living Pins excellent song "Raven," which leads off their upcoming EP, Freaky Little Monster Children.

Trust me: it's awesome. Psychedelic guitar rock meets bluesy swamp-rock. I just listened to it three times in a row across two devices: that's how awesome.

Quote of the Week: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

Growing up in Buffalo, New York, I was given to understand early on that the city was not named after the animal and that no bison had ever been anywhere near the city until the local zoo acquired a brace of them, The name of the city, I was given to understand, was a corruption of the French beau fleuve, "beautiful river." Presumably some English settlers ran into some French trappers and asked them where they were, and the French thought the question related to the Niagara River and responded accordingly.

You know something? I don't believe a word of it, I don't think a Frenchman would call the place beau fleuve in the first place, and I don't think an English colonist would hear beau fleuve and turn it into Buffalo.

When Buffalo was first settled, there was another town a few miles distant called Black Rock, which Buffalo later grew to absorb. I think Black Rock got its name from the presence of a rock in the neighborhood, and a dark rock at that. And I likewise believe that Buffalo got named after a buffalo. Someone either saw one hanging around, not a far-fetched notion, or thought he saw one, or something that looked like one, or something.

There's a place in Arkansas named Toad Suck. I haven't been there, not yet, and I don't know how it got its name, but don 't expect me to believe that toads didn't have something to do with it. I won't accept that it was named for an itinerant Rhinelander named Taussig or that there was a plague of tussock moths in the area. There's a toad at the bottom of this one. I'm fairly sure of it.

 - Lawrence Block, "Hunting Buffalo," pp.161-161 in Hunting Buffalo with Bent Nails

Hunting Buffalo with Bent Nails by Lawrence Block

It would be difficult to get a purer collection of miscellaneous nonfiction than this one. I may have found the platonic ideal of the odds & sods book.

First up, Lawrence Block is a novelist, mostly: he's written about seventy of them, almost all of them in the crime genre, more or less. (The early days were "less," since he started out writing sex books, but even those often ran on crime plots.) Plus a hundred-odd short stories: that's the mass of his career. Nonfiction is a sidebar at best.

When he does write nonfiction, it's mostly fallen into categories: he wrote a column for Writers' Digest for a decade or so, and that and other activities added up to six books of advice for writers. He also wrote a full-length book about racewalking, Step by Step.

This century, he's been republishing his old books, because he's got a devoted audience and a huge backlist. And why shouldn't he publish his own books and make the money from them? So he's put out editions of a dozen or three of his older, mostly genre-straitjacketed books over the past decade.

And, along the way, he's made a few new books out of the pieces that didn't get collected by external publishers: a book of his Matt Scudder stories, a book of his Bernie Rhodenbarr stories. And then some nonfiction: Generally Speaking, all of his columns about stamps. The Crime of Our Lives, with nearly all of his pieces about the crime and mystery-fiction world.

So he's done a lot of publishing before he got to Hunting Buffalo with Bent Nails. This is very much what's left after he parceled out all of the other pieces that made sense to be collected together. (I don't want to say "bottom of the barrel," since it's not the same barrel -- it's like a storeroom full of barrels, and he's gotten back to the far corner, and the one marked "Stuff & Things, Various.")

Hunting Buffalo is explicitly the nonfiction pieces that didn't fit into earlier books. Even more so, it's those pieces arranged alphabetically by title, since Block didn't have a better idea, or want to be fancy about arranging them. So there is no elegant procession of topics, arranged according to some secret schema: no, we begin with ""Abridge This!" and run straight through to "Writing My Name," because it is an organizational principle everyone already knows, and Block hasn't written over a hundred books by being precious and wasting time.

So this book is random. It's all of the things that Block wrote about, for various publications, over several decades, that were not stamps or writing. (Well, some of them are about writing, since he's a writer and he forgot about some of these pieces the other times he was collecting stuff. 'Cause they were in that back-of-the-room barrel is my guess.)

All of it is in Block's mature voice: wry, thoughtful, discerning, amusing. A lot of it is about the two kinds of "how do you get your ideas" for writers -- going random places around the country for no clear reason, or sitting in a room reading and researching and thinking. But it's so varied that I'm not going to try to characterize the pieces -- there's one about collecting subway cars, for chrissakes.

This is inevitably a book for Block fans. It's published by him to include his rarest and quirkiest pieces; how could it be otherwise? If you're not a fan, try a Scudder or Rhodenbarr book first. But if you are a Block fan, and didn't know this existed, you probably want it.

Descender, Vol. 6: The Machine War by Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen

I don't think I can avoid spoiling this book entirely, so leave now if you care. Know that I am very much not recommending it.

The Machine War collects the end of  the space opera comics series Descender: the big finale in which several space fleets and a scattering of giant anthropomorphic robots meet, the main characters yell and run around for a couple of hundred pages, and it all gets tied up in a bow. (For the story of how we got here, see my posts on volumes one, two, three, four, and five.)

And, on a single two-page spread at almost the very end, creators Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen blithely list the deaths of twenty billion sentient beings. In context, it seems to be primarily to clean things up so they can do a different story for the follow-up, Ascender.

But fuck that.

You do not make a story that just includes the deaths of billions of people as an afterthought. ("So I survived, which is nice, but everybody else died -- sucks for them.") There is nothing in your story that could be more important than those deaths; you've framed your story horribly from the beginning and focused on the entirely wrong thing. This is not a background detail. It is not a sad moment. It is not a failure on the part of our heroes. This mega-death is the most important moment in the entire history of this civilization, the moment of the end of that civilization: the only way to tell that story, especially in a popular-fiction context where the expectation is that the heroes will save the world at the last minute, is to announce it from the start.

You don't get to fucking back into a tragedy after six hundred pages and say, "Oh, well. It's so, so sad. Come back next month for the thrilling adventures of a girl in a eerily depopulated universe of magic!"

Descender was a strong story up to this point, with good characters and interesting moral dilemmas and thorny conflicts and striking art from Nguyen. But this is bullshit, and it does not work at all.

I may have been the person who coined the phrase "Backswing Fantasy," [1] about post-apocalyptic stories where the authors kill off the vast majority of humanity so that the mightily-thewed hero will have a little more room for the backswing of his sword, so that his struggles are more meaningful.

I hate those fucking stories. I waste a lot of energy hating those fucking stories. This turned into one of those fucking stories at the last minute. Again: fuck that. Fuck all of that right down to the ground.

You can kill all of your characters: that's not a problem. You can even blow up all of the military ships they're on (OK, I did have some good friends on that Death Star), and it'll only be a minor reader quibble. But when you oops! an entire civilization as a thrilling plot twist five pages from the end and have your protagonist survive but be very, very sad... Fuck. That.

[1] It was more likely James Nicoll, though. He's both more quotable and more prolific.

5 Worlds Book 3: The Red Maze by Siegel, Siegel, Bouma, Rockefeller & Sun

I am bad at reviewing books in a timely fashion. And that can lead to being bad at reviewing books, period. I'm going to keep this post short, but I reserve the right to decide it's pointless to begin with and delete it all.

(If you're reading this, I didn't.)

5 Worlds is a young-readers graphic novel series, coming out roughly annually. I missed the first book, The Sand Warrior. If any of what I type below sounds interesting, go check out that book. I did look at the second one, The Cobalt Prince, during my 2018 Book-A-Day run. I've now just read the third book, 2019's The Red Maze. Last year there was a new book, The Amber Anthem. And the finale, The Emerald Gate, is coming this May, but doesn't seem to be available for pre-order yet.

I didn't remember Cobalt well when I dove into Red, and I obviously never went back to Sand, and won't move on to Amber or Emerald. So most of what I could say about this book is beside the point - and that pains me, since a publicist actually sent this to me, back in the spring of 2019, in the hopes I would give a little attention to it when it was new and shiny and looking for an audience.

The five worlds are an interesting, mildly complex soft-SF universe, with five habitable spheres (I think four are actually moons, though it's not super-clear if they're moons of the same thing or not) and different governments and people on each of them. It's all pitched at a level for young readers, but these stories are about ecology and corruption and believing in yourself and doing the right thing and finding the people who can make things better. All good things, obviously.

I read this too quickly, and I'm not going to get into plot details. There is a mild case of Chosen One-itis in our heroine, Oona Lee, and maybe almost as much in her friend Jax Amboy. Actually, the third major character, An Tzu, might be equally chosen for other things.

This isn't really a book for me: I try to engage with YA graphic stories, since I love their energy and the sense of possibility in great books for young readers. But I somewhat bounced off of this, after not quite clicking with Cobalt. So all I can do is point to it, say that it looks to be quite good for what it is, but that I've been reading it half-assedly, and that's not good for me or the book.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 3/6/21

This week, I got in a big box of books from the remainder dealers at HamiltonBook.com. I spent money on these books, but not very much money, and, as always, I recommend them highly. I've been ordering big boxes from them irregularly, but at least once or twice a year, since the early '90s. If you like buying books in volume, and particularly if you have wide interests and are willing to try out books because they're cheap, Hamilton is for you.

(End of commercial.)

I also got a few books from the library, but I'm going to hold those to next week's list. One, just because I can, and I revel in my power. And two, because I'm expecting more library books in the next few days, and that feels tidier. And three, because the Hamilton list is already really long to begin with.

Swearing Is Good For You is a nonfiction book, based on real science (so it says here) by British scientist and journalist Emma Byrne. And it's published by Norton, who tend to be on the slightly more serious, stodgy side, so I'm inclined to think it's not quite as frivolous as the Crown-published version of this book would be. (Yes, more than a decade out of trade publishing, I still stereotype houses. I bet I'm not wrong, either.) It is, as the title implies, a layman's wander through behavioral research about usage of the word "fuck" and its best friends.

Flesh is an early Philip Jose Farmer novel, republished in this edition in 2013 by Titan Books as "A Grand Master Novel," and I bought it at least in part because it's a bonkers choice for a series like that. Admittedly, Farmer's work is full of similar bonkers choices; he was a bonkers writer nearly all the time, and I say that with admiration and affection. I'm not sure I ever read this one; it was originally Framer's second novel (from 1960), but this edition is copyright 1974, right smack-dab in the middle of his explicit-sex period, with Lord Tyger and Image of the Beast, so I suspect he hotted it up for the re-issue. (And Farmer was not shy about writing about sex even in his earliest days, though he had to hide it more when writing for Campbell and crew.) So this is the story of a spaceship that returns to Earth eight hundred years later to find - no, not apes, this is a few years before Boulle - a tribal society riven by fertility cults and other shocking behavior.

Stuff Brits Like is by Frazer McAlpine, lead writer for BBC America's Anglophenia blog, and I suspect it is something of a brand extension (though it bears no official connection to the blog or to Auntie Beeb.) McAlpine is actually British - from Cornwall, which he seems to insist on specifying, which is terribly British of him - and that's a good sign. He's also still resident there, another good sign - sometimes books like this are written by expat screenwriters in Hollywood pining for the home soil, but McAlpine is still stuck in that home soil and so presumably ready to complain about it as the natives do. For a taste of the humor included, the first chapter is entitled "Pedantry."

Let's Start a Riot is a memoir of some sort by Bruce (Kids in the Hall) McCulloch, a book I never even suspected existed, even though it was published in 2014. (What can I say: the world is big and books are many.) It seems to be primarily designed to contrast his KitH life and stories with new stories (well, new for 2014) about his grown-up life as a Hollywood multi-hyphenate (screenwriter, director, etc.) with the requisite wife and family. McCulloch was always the quirkiest of the KitH kids, the ones whose monologues headed off the deepest into the territory the quickest, so I'm hoping for some of that here. (I still love "An Open Letter to the Guy That Stole His Bike Wheel," and, maybe even more so, "An Open Letter to the People Who Watched the Guy Steal His Bike Wheel.")

Astounding is a history of the magazine of the same name, more or less, by Alec Nevala-Lee. Well, maybe it's more of a biography of Astounding's founding editor and towering figure, John W. Campbell, along with three of his most important writers in that early era (Asimov, Heinlein, and Hubbard). To know exactly, I'd have to read the book, and I haven't done that yet. Nevala-Lee is himself a SF writer who has been published in Analog, which probably shouldn't be a requirement for writing this but will be in some circles. And I guess I still haven't given up on SF, since I think I want to read this.

Reynard the Fox is a famous - well, in medievalist circles - trickster narrative from 12th century Europe, known previously in an English translation by William Caxton from 1481. James Simpson provides a new translation here, though I'm not clear if he's translating Caxton into Modern English or starting from the underlying tales (or even what languages those tales were in; the book's flap copy and other descriptive bumf vaguely says "Europe" most places). This is not a book I previously knew about, or thought I had any interest in, but it had me at "medieval trickster narrative."

Go Figure is a book from The Economist, written by Economist deputy editor Tom Standage, and subtitled "The Economist Explains" [1] So it is very Economist-y, for those seeking such things. Standage has previous written other breezy histories, such as A History of the World in 6 Glasses, which I read more than a decade ago (and his name was still vaguely familiar, for whatever reason). It is indeed a book full of short sections explaining things that most people do not know, mostly on questions that they would want to know and might not know how to research themselves. It is, in short, a bathroom book, but a terribly classy, Economist-grade one.

Perfect Circle is Sean Stewart's 2004 fantasy novel, which may still be the last full-length SFF fiction he's made. (Assuming you don't count the artificial-realty games, and other ludic writing, he's done since -- and I do not.) I may have bought it for the SFBC at the time, but I haven't read it since, and didn't have a copy. And this is the nice, classy Small Beer edition, which implies that is now out of print. (Sad, but it happens. All books go out of print, eventually. The thought comforts Alan Moore in his warlock's mansion.) I hope to read this again. When, who knows? But I couldn't read it if I didn't have it, could I?

Space Opera is Catherynne M. Valente's SFnal version of Eurovision, to be really reductive. And I've read some of Valente's "Fairyland" YA books, but not for a while, and none of her adult fiction, despite having a couple of my shelves. So, clearly, the way to remedy that is to buy another book and put it next to the ones I haven't read yet, because that will make me read one of them. Let's see if that works.

Captain Cuttle's Mailbag is a collection of miscellaneous queries and answers (sometimes even in that order) from the Victorian magazine Notes and Queries, as  edited by Edward Welch in the modern day. It sounds incredibly random and odd, and so probably another interesting bathroom book.

The Praxis is the first book of the original "Dread Empire's Fall" trilogy by Walter Jon Williams. I understand the series has grown additional sequels since then, and is sometimes called "The Praxis," because every series will eventually be called by the name of its first book. (David Hartwell taught me that - he was actually more fatalistic and definitive about the subject - and I do mostly believe it myself.) I used to have the trilogy in their original mass-market paperbacks, back before my flood. But this is a nicer, newer, "Author's Definitive Edition" so clearly my delaying reading it for more than a decade is a good thing, right?

Now we get into the comics -- more than halfway done! My notes may also get shorter at this point, out of weariness or lack of material.

The Ultimate Cartoon Book of Book Cartoons is edited by Bob Eckstein, and it is what it says it is: a bunch of cartoons about books, arranged into a book of cartoons. It looks like they're mostly New Yorker cartoons - because who else runs a lot of cartoons about books, unless you are Tom Gauld? - but this was actually published by the Princeton Architectural Press, which is a bit odd. (I suspect that a deal fell through elsewhere, and somebody knew somebody, and hey! let's put on a show!)

Showcase Presents Jonah Hex, Vol.2 is one of those big fat black-and-white DC collections, and it gathers 27 issues of Weird Western Tales and Jonah Hex from 1976-1979 between two covers, mostly written by Michael Fleisher and drawn by a whole bunch of people, including Rich Buckler, Vincente Alcazar, Ernie Chan, and Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez. I don't think I've ever read any of this stuff, but it's always sounded like an interesting corner of the comics world -- and, hey, this was cheap.

Starport is a standalone SF graphic novel based on a George R.R. Martin screenplay of the same name, adapted and drawn by Raya Golden. (And guess whose name is big and whose is small on the cover? But it's not about credit - it's about what will get people to pick up the book and spend money on it, which is what everyone actually wants.) I have no idea if this is any good, but you takes your new GRRM material where you finds it.

The next three will get lumped together: The Complete Peanuts series by Charles M. Schulz, the first three books in paperback format: 1950-1952, 1953-1954, and 1955-1956. I had copies of the hardcovers in the pre-flood days, and I guess I'm now planning to rebuild that shelf, maybe in paper. I also had a blog post about that first volume, some years ago - well after I wrote about the middle books, since the beginning of the series started before this blog did.

Rusty Brown is another big, complicated, difficult-to-read graphic novel by Chris Ware, whose name can only be discerned on the cover through the use of high-powered instruments.  I kid, I kid. I still haven't read his previous gigantic book, Building Stories, maybe because that was not so much a "book" as "a collection of printed objects stuck in a box to be sifted through in a search for meaning." I mean, I bought the thing, and plan to read it, but it always feels like more work than I want to jump into at any particular moment -- and a normal Chris Ware book is already more work than almost anyone else's graphic novels. So, I might end up reading this first, and see if that gets me into the Big Box.

[1] OK, sub-subtitled. The primary subtitle is "Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know."

Books Read: February 2021

Like last month, this is going up at a random time, on a random day, about a week into the month. (Because weekends are the time I have to do blog maintenance; the weeks are too busy with the actual Dayjob and recovering from same.)

Here's what I read in February, linked (eventually) to posts about those books:

Mark Siegel, Alexis Seigel, Xanthe Bouma, Matt Rockefeller, and Boya Sun, 5 Worlds, Vol. 3: The Red Maze (2/6)

Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen, Descender, Vol. 6: The Machine War (2/7)

Lawrence Block, Hunting Buffalo with Bent Nails (2/10)

Budjette Tan and KaJo Baldisimo, Trese, Vol. 1: Murder on Balete Drive (2/13)

Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot Comics: Omnibus, Vol. 1 (2/14)

Graham Chaffee, To Have and To Hold (2/15)

Dean Motter + co., Mister X: The Archives (2/20)

Todd Alcott, Cease & Desist: Inspired by the Music of They Might Be Giants (2/21)

Bill Willingham, Paul Guinan, and Ron Randall, Proposition Player (in Bad Doings & Big Ideas) (2/22)

Kat Leyh, Snapdragon (2/27)

Box Brown, Cannabis (2/28)

Posts are actually written for every single one of those books, as of a couple of hours ago. But they're scheduled to post over the next month or so - thus, if I get hit by a bus any time soon, there will still be bits of my thoughts dribbling out into a world probably not as saddened or changed as I would hope.

Icky

Just because the word "icky" came up in conversation earlier this week, this song has been stuck in my head for days.

So now I'll inflict it on you as well:

Quote of the Week: Exactly This

 "You are wondering how I can possible know not only the one word, but, by implication, every word in every book in my office."

"Yes"

"I am old, child, old, and I have spent my life in the service of the Law -- writing laws, enforcing laws, interpreting laws, inventing ways to circumvent laws.... Also, I am cursed with a perfect memory -- that is a tale I may well inflict upon you another time -- and consequently there is very little that can surprise me anymore."

"But if you know every word in these books -- why keep them?"

"For the same reason a young woman such as yourself might know every inch of her lover's skin, and yet want nevertheless to touch it, taste it, luxuriate in its smell."

 - Michael Swanwick, The Iron Dragon's Mother, pp.126-127

Time Pieces by John Banville

We read books for odd and idiosyncratic reasons, so we shouldn't be surprised that they get written the same way.

I came to Time Pieces, a miscellaneous memoir of novelist John Banville's life in the city of Dublin, because I've read a few of Banville's novels - not as many as I'd like, and not in a while - and middle-aged men like me find it easier to get through short books and non-fiction.

Why did Banville write it? My guess is that he had a couple of slightly overlapping requests for essays: parts of Time Pieces originally appeared in books called City Parks and Sons + Fathers. Working writers follow their heads, and look for ways to turn what they've already written into books: I think he did something like that.

So he realized he was writing multiple pieces about Dublin, and leaned into it. Time Pieces has seven chapters, or essays - they're all pretty separate. They're all about Dublin; some about his memories of the place and the later ones about wandering about it, in recent years, with a man he calls Cicero and might actually be named that. They're all discursive; they're all short; they're all as much about memory as about the thing remembered. Banville was about seventy when he wrote these pieces; there's a lot of looking back at that age.

Time Pieces is a short book: even shorter than it looks, since fifty-three of its two-hundred-odd pages are taken up by quiet classy photographs by Paul Joyce rather than Banville's words. The photographs were, as far as I can tell, mostly chosen to accompany the words, but not taken because of the words. There are a few photos of the back of Banville's head, such as the cover, but most of them are landscapes and still lifes. It's possible that Joyce wandered around Dublin after reading the manuscript and snapped pictures of all the appropriate things, but it seems more that Banville wanted Joyce for a mood, and the mood was already present in his past work.

Banville was not a Dublin boy: he makes that clear at the outset. He was born and grew up in Wexford; Dublin was the big city he got to occasionally as a boy and escaped to when he grew up. (And, before long, escaped on to other places, which he is never clear about here.) This is not a memoir in any conventional sense. Each essay is about an element of Dublin, a place or a time or a concern, and Banville brings in some personal details while waxing rhapsodic about those things, but he's writing about Dublin here, not himself.

And he's writing, I think mostly, for people who know the city decently well: this is an insider's reminiscences. He's a fine writer, and Joyce's photos are pretty if awfully minor-feeling. Time Pieces is a small thing at its core, the kind of book that sells best at a history centre in the place it celebrates. It's really just for huge fans of Dublin or Banville or, preferably, both.

Clifford the Big Red Dog: The Movie Graphic Novel by Georgia Ball and Chi Ngo

No media property is "real" until it becomes as big as it possibly can be, until it becomes a movie. Every novel, every comics series, every TV show, every webseries, every nonfiction book, every song, every TikTok sea shanty aspires to turn into a big budget motion-picture that will dilute and adulterate what was special about the original thing while making vast amounts of money for the same few global multimedia conglomerates and making the newly shiny, market-tested and subtly stupider thing vastly better known among people who would never bother to pay attention to the original thing.

This is yet another sign that our world is inherently flawed, and that, if there are any gods, they hate us.

Norman Bridwell wrote and illustrated over fifty books about Clifford the Big Red Dog, using first his own imagination, his wife's stories of her childhood imaginary playmate, and his daughter's name (Emily Elizabeth). As the years went on, those books were influenced by the generations of kids that grew up with Clifford between the original book in 1963 and Bridwell's death in 2014.

Those books still exist, and are the real Clifford. Nothing else will ever replace or tarnish them. (Though plenty of them are pretty minor: ABCs and other unexciting series entries. If there's fifty of anything, not all of them will be gems.) Since then, there's been a couple of animated TV shows, with either the usual gigantic Clifford or the equally canonical tiny puppy Clifford.

And, of course, people tried to make a movie at various times. Over the past two years, they finally succeeded: a live-action movie with a CGI Clifford was released this past November. Since line extensions are a thing, there was eventually a book of the movie of the books, Clifford the Big Red Dog: The Movie Graphic Novel, adapted by Georgia Ball from the screenplay and story, and drawn by Chi Ngo. It featured a more cartoony Clifford and a modern comics-rounded versions of the movie actors, rather than trying to be photo-accurate.

(I like cartoony, and think cartoons should be cartoony. So I'm inclined to like this better than the movie anyway.) 

I don't quite see why the movie exists in the first place, but I like what Ball and Ngo have turned it into here. There's a movie-level story here, as there must be, and they have to roll that out. But they have a light touch with character and Ngo in particular has a knack for open, expressive faces. So this is pleasant even as it hits all of the same kid-movie story beats that all of us will see coming from miles away.

In this story, there is a girl named Emily. Her middle name is Elizabeth, but she doesn't use it on a daily basis. She lives in New York City: her mother is a harried paralegal and her father is mostly out of the picture, forgetful and divorced and away. We're a far way from the nuclear suburban family of 1963; Emily is also mildly bullied at her fancy school, since she's the scholarship kid and clearly not rich like the others. And she's going to be in the care of her Uncle Casey for her birthday, as mom has to jet off to Chicago for a big case.

And, elsewhere in the city, there's a little red puppy looking for a home, and a mysterious man named Bridwell who helps and cares for animals. That latter is a very nice touch: I can forgive a lot of the generic plot of this story because it clearly has its heart in the right place.

I regret to inform you that there is also a rapacious corporation that wants to profit from big-red-dogness, since a Big Movie must have a Big Movie Villain, and this one is no exception. From the graphic novel, it looks like this element is handled about as well as one could hope, given that it exists at all.

This is the book of a movie for kids, so of course there is a happy ending. Everything must come out for the best in the best cinematical worlds. And I am deeply cynical, but this is a nice story that a lot of kids, I hope, will enjoy. Whether they need or want the story in graphic-novel form rather than the movie, I can't say: I have no interest in seeing what this story would look like with John Cleese as Bridwell (!!!!??? which I discovered while typing this), but I am not ten and have not been for a long time.

So: this is a thing. It exists. It is derivative of the movie, which is probably somewhat derivative of the John Ritter TV show, which was clearly derivative of the Bridwell books. But it's pretty nice, for all that. You could definitely do worse.

Maria M. by Gilbert Hernandez

If you are me, you will have noticed that this post is not tagged "I Love (And Rockets) Mondays," and that it is not appearing on a Monday. If you are not me, you did not notice and do not care.

But that tiny, silly issue of nomenclature is at very central to this book -- Gilbert Hernandez's full-length graphic novel Maria M. is not a "Love and Rockets" story. But it is a meta-Love and Rockets story, a comics version of a movie from his L&R world, like his previous stories Chance in Hell and The Troublemakers and Love from the Shadows. (And then there's Speak of the Devil, which is really weird -- supposedly the "true story" of the events that inspired a movie of the same name within the L&R world, so the true fictional version of something that we previously half-saw a fictionalized fictional version of.)

So this is a version of the story we've already seen part of in Poison River - but Hernandez is specifically telling us it is a packaged story, designed for a purpose, turned into fiction and cleaned up for a particular audience. I think it's meant to be a '90s movie set mostly in the '60s, something from the Goodfellas era, in a world where that gangster era was more Latin than Italiano.

And, of course, all of Hernandez's graphic novels are fictions. But the level of fiction in them is clearly important to him: that some are the "real" story and some are the sensationalized movie version. This one is a movie version, but Maria M. looks to be a relatively big-budget, moderately prestigious picture - probably not made with serious expectations of Oscars, but one that would be reviewed well and remembered fondly, that was a strong stepping-stone for its cast and crew and a sturdy, dependable, engrossing piece of entertainment for its era.

It is is that: Hernandez is good at making fictions that resemble other fictions. (Though, this time out, he isn't deliberately trying to ape wide-screen images with his panels, the way he mostly did with the earlier movie-books; Maria M. is laid out like a "normal" Hernandez comic, with standard panel progressions and lots of variations in size.)

And the story itself? We are somewhere unclear. From Poison River, we know it's an unnamed Latin American country, but here it's left entirely unspecified. It's probably that same country; it's probably not the US. We begin in the late '50s; Maria is a voluptuous eighteen and has no daughters. Unlike Hernandez's Palomar and Luba stories, Maria M. is not about family - not about that kind of family, not about Maria's family. It is about family in the way that all gangster stories are.

Over the course of the next couple of decades, she weaves in and out of the lives of a group of pornographers and gangsters, many of whom become obsessed with her. She never accomplishes much, never gets rich and famous the way she wants to be, never really gets out. But she does come to be happy with what she gets, as far as we see, which is not nothing.

The later parts of the story are largely about her relationship with the fictional version of Gorgo - I won't spoil any of that, but I mean "relationship" in an expansive sense that is not at all equivalent to sitting-around-talking-about-our-feelings. This is a Hernandez book about gangsters, and a crime movie presented on the page: there will be gunplay and ambushes and torture and various horrors along the way. But Hernandez means this to be a movie, and he knows how movies are supposed to be structured: he knows how audiences want movies to end.

Maria M. is the most successful of the Hernandez movie-books, which is unsurprising. It was designed to be the capstone of them to begin with: the book that was actually based on a good, successful movie, with the biggest dramatic sweep and the strongest story. We should not be surprised that Gilbert Hernandez can make a strong, crowd-pleasing story when he sets out to do it; we should remember that he usually sets out to do different things each time.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 2/27/21

This week, a few books arrived from the library -- I'd ordered another big batch because my shelf of graphic novels to read has dwindled to practically nothing. (Literally: there's barely half a shelf right now, including several books that are "comics" by courtesy and are mostly text.) So these were the first round of stuff that the mighty SirsiDynix was able to provide me:

Snapdragon by Kat Leyh -- I can't remember where I first heard of this, so it's probably a good example of that old saw, that you don't read a book until you've heard about it ten times. I do know Leyh's work from Lumberjanes (which I think I have stopped reading at this point, since it kept feeling like it really was Not For Me and I always felt like I was intruding on something). It's a YA story about a girl and an old woman -- at least one of whom is a witch -- and seems to be one of those stories in which stuff now has to untangle a whole lot of events from the past.

Cannabis by Box Brown is subtitled "The Illegalization of Weed in America," and take another look to make sure you didn't miss the IL there. It's a nonfiction graphic novel roughly tracing the history of what I want to call marihuana in the best old-timey manner, starting off with some prehistoric fellow on a beach and jumping to the ancient Hindus pretty quickly. From the subtitle, I imagine it settles down to the New World not too much later. Brown has made a bunch of nonfiction books like this before: I've seen Tetris and Andre the Giant, and his career, I think, is roughly in that space: pop-culture stuff of interest to people around my generation and his.

Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh -- You may have heard of this one; Brosh is kind of a big deal. Her first collection, Hyperbole and a Half, was a major bestseller and critical success nearly a decade ago; this book has been announced several times since then and finally came out this past September. Brosh's work is often painfully personal: pseudo-comics essays about how she interacts with the world (or, far too often, avoids doing so). I think a lot of us are worried about her, in a low-key way: she's good enough at making her stories that we almost understand her pain and that makes us want to be able to fix it. Of course, there are millions of other people we should be worrying about at least as much, who haven't written bestsellers. I don't have a good solution for that problem. But caring more, for whoever, is a good start. Anyway, Brosh's work is deep and resonant and powerful in its quirky MS Paint way, and makes you think about important things even before you read it.

Slaughterhouse-Five is a novel by Kurt Vonnegut that you may have heard of; Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics and Squirrel Girl) adapted it into a graphic novel drawn by Albert Monteys. I re-read the novel about a year and a half ago, and keep thinking I should re-read more Vonnegut -- but this is here and this is short and I remember this story well, so I can compare it in my head and write possibly interesting stuff here. And it's one of the most important novels of the 20th century, in my mind, so new versions of it for new audiences are a good thing. There are a lot of people who haven't read Slaughterhouse-Five even once yet.

Paying the Land is the new book by Joe Sacco. As usual for him, it's reportage in comics form, but he's been slowly moving away from warzones over the last decade or so. He's still concerned with the downtrodden, with ethnic groups displaced and disenfranchised, and with systemic inequities, of course: he is still Joe Sacco. But he's less often writing about places where bullets are currently or recently flying. This time out, he's looking at the Dene people of Canada's Mackenzie River Valley, and how well their traditions and lives are holding up in a land that was always cold and dangerous and now is deeply appealing to quick-buck resource-extraction operations who would be happy to ruin mountains and meadows and rivers just to yank out a few tons of valuable minerals. I suspect the answer is "not all that well."