Reviewing the Mail: Week of August 6, 2022

Two books this time out, both of them things I bought from That Big Internet Retailer, both of them the next book in a series I've enjoyed. So this will likely be short....

Quillifer the Knight is the middle book of Walter Jon Williams's Quillifer trilogy (so far; I've seen at least one reference that Williams may have a plan for six books in mind), which is fantasy set in an secondary late-medieval world. I read the first one recently, though my post won't go live for another few weeks. Williams is one of the most criminally underrated writers in SFF; everything he's done has been excellent, and his range is breathtaking. So read his books, OK? Pick whichever one is in the genre you like best - he probably has at least one (space opera, historical sea fiction, cyberpunk, far-future urban fantasy, near-future thriller, humorous caper, and I could go on).

Trese, Vol. 4: Last Seen After Midnight is the fourth book in the comics urban fantasy series about supernatural investigator Alexandra Trese, by Philippine creators Budjette Tan and KaJo Baldisimo. I first saw this series a decade ago when it was first published in the Philippines, through the kindness of Charles Tan (the then, and maybe still now, greatest booster of the SFF works of that nation), and have been thrilled to see them finally published in the US. There's also a Netflix show, which I haven't seen, but that can't hurt the visibility of the books. Here's what I've written about the previous volumes: one and two (2009 ComicMix link, may be hijacked), three (2010), one (2021), two (2022), three (2022).

Bonus Quote of the Week: World Without End

It's a bit far-fetched, but try and imagine a war between two sides: One's unimaginably stronger, and the other can't die. The strong one always wins, but he can never win. The weak one keeps getting shredded, but can't be defeated, not so long as he resists, Opposes, rather. There's got to be an opposition, even if it never wins a battle.

 - K.J. Parker, Inside Man, p.125

Books Read: July 2022

I do this post monthly, as soon as I remember, and update it with links eventually. It's an index more than anything else, for me more than anyone else. But here's what I read this past month:

Evan Dorkin, Veronica Fish and Andy Fish, Blackwood (7/2, digital)

Lewis Trondheim, Little Nothings, Vol. 3: Uneasy Happiness (7/3)

Koren Shadmi, Bionic (7/4, digital)

Maia Kobabe, Gender Queer (7/5, digital)

Jeff Lemire, Michael Walsh, and Nate Piekos, Black Hammer/Justice League: Hammer of Justice! (7/6, digital)

Frank Stack, Foolbert Funnies: Histories and Other Fictions (7/7, digital)

Paul Theroux, On the Plain of Snakes (7/7)

Carolyn Nowak, Girl Town (7/8, digital)

Yannick Pelegrin, Aldo (7/9, digital)

Peter Milligan and Duncan Fegredo, Girl (7/10, digital)

Lilli Carre, Heads or Tails (7/16, digital)

Andi Watson and Simon Gane, Paris (7/17, digital)

Walter Jon Williams, Quillifer (7/17)

Aude Picault, Amalia (7/23, digital)

Claire Bretecher, The Trials of Agrippina (7/24, digital)

J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (7/24)

Jade Khoo, Zoc (7/30)

Lee Lai, Stone Fruit (7/31)

Algis Budrys, Michaelmas (7/31, in SF Gateway Omnibus)

Next month, I expect I'll read some more books. And, assuming I remember, I'll list them here.

Quote of the Week: Well, Obviously

- Darryl Cunningham, Billionaires, p.111 (two of six panels), referring to Charles Koch

Alone in Space by Tillie Walden

A novel, prose or graphic, is one thing. You can grasp it in your hand, make big statements about it, sum it up in a few words. (Maybe badly, maybe incorrectly. But you can do it.)

A collection, on the other hand, is already multitudes. It flows through your hands when you try to define it: a little more over here than you first thought, oh wait maybe it's more like this, no no I've got it now it's totally thus.

Alone in Space is a collection: it's basically the first four years of Tillie Walden's comics career in book form.

Well, wait. Like all collections, I need to immediately back up. This does include work from about 2013 to 2018 - three published books and a bunch of shorter works. That timeline somewhat overlaps her first two "big" graphic novels, 2017's breakout Spinning and On a Sunbeam in 2018. So maybe the first thing to note, as I have before, is how hard and diligent a worker Walden is: this is a lot of pages, a lot of different stories, a lot of writing and drawing, to come out of one person in a short amount of time.

Another caveat: I say "career," but pretty much all of the short pieces here were schoolwork, assignments when she was studying at the Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS). And to caveat the caveat: so was Spinning. Schoolwork can become published work, and did.

But here's how I think the timeline worked. Walden made comics in highschool, and published them online, the way anyone can these days. Some of them may have been short stories; one of those stories is here. But I think what became her first book, The End of Summer, was in that mix too - maybe was most of that mix. The small British publisher Avery Hill - who also published this book - noticed her, and offered to publish her work. That must have happened right around the time she decided to got to CCS: she was there for a two-year program in 2014-15 and 2015-16. And her three books from Avery Hill were published in June 2015, November 2015, and sometime in 2016 - so all, I think, reached the print world while she was at CCS but largely was work done before that.

So these are stories from a young creator, one working very hard to get better and to tell stories the way she wants. They show a lot of variation and change, obviously: they're from someone going from age sixteen to twenty and studying how to do this.

I'm almost happy to say that I find the first book, The End of Summer, the least successful. It has real strengths, especially in characterization, but it tries to do too much, has too many characters who are all part of the same family and all look very similar, and is set in a milieu that I don't think Walden meant to be a honkingly huge metaphor but comes across that way. It's about an aristocratic family, a very dysfunctional one in quiet, buried, aristocratic ways, in a world where winters are years-long and killingly cold, and some of the events during one particularly eventful winter. Frankly, I think I missed large chunks of what Walden was trying to do here: I had trouble telling characters apart a lot of the time, so I'm murky on who, exactly, the more horrible members of the family are.

I Love This Part, though, feels like mature Tillie Walden right away: a love story set in probably middle school, with vignettes each on single-panel pages, often with surreal backgrounds, telling a bittersweet growing-up story about two girls who don't quite want the same things at the same moment.

A City Inside is even heavier on the surrealism, and may be one more step in that same direction. It's a dream vision of the future of one woman's life, or maybe a true premonition, or something else - a life as it is or was or could be, presented more poetically than naturalistically.

The back third of the book is the shorter pieces: one very dark story from highschool and then mostly a bunch of work for CCS classes. They are varied and different, sometimes working out the same kind of material as the longer stories, sometimes very clearly class assignments of the "talk about yourself in this way" or "do an X story in the style of something you like a lot" style.

Again, this is a collection: a bunch of work by one person over a few years. It's not thematically unified. It doesn't cleanly map out artistic development. It's a bunch of stuff, all of it at least reasonably successful, by someone ferociously talented and (this is more important) even more ferociously devoted to doing the work and getting better. If you've liked any of Walden's longer books, you'll find pieces to love here.

Inside Man by K.J. Parker

I think this is a sequel. It's isn't exactly coy about it, but it is, let us say, strategically vague on the subject. But all of the details line up. It might as well be a sequel. We can read it as a sequel.

Although....any book narrated by a demon must have some seed of doubt in it, right?

K.J. Parker's Prosper's Demon was the story of an exorcist, in an early-Renaissance world that was not our Europe, but was very parallel. (Monarchies turning into vaguer autocracies, almost steam-engine time, actual demons from actual hell possessing people and needing to be cast back out.) Our narrator was not a good man in any way, but he did have the power to compel demons to vacate human minds, which is both useful and rare. He tangled a lot with one particular demon, who he found in his mind before birth, as soon as he was aware of anything - and, as is the nature of an exorcist, always bested that demon.

Other things happened in that novella, but that's the through-line: one human exorcist, one immortal demon, scheming against each other, each other's best enemies.

Inside Man is...well, again, it's not officially a sequel. As in Demon, there is an unnamed human exorcist and an unnamed demon. They're not necessarily the same. We cannot prove it.

But they are. We assume they are; we believe they are. We read the story because they are.

This time, the demon is our narrator. And he, of course, has a different point of view than the exorcist did: he's embedded in a complex organizational structure, all the way up to the Highest, full of bureaucracy: the whole Screwtape thing we're all familiar with. He has no free will, you see; he has a pleasant voice and a sophisticated point of view, but everything he does is because of wheels within wheels, blah blah blah, ineffable something and unknowable something else, who art thou to etc., and so on to the fall of a sparrow.

That's a tough position for a main character: essentially powerless in an powerless world, caught up in chains of requirement that bind everyone and everything. It works for the course of a novella, but I don't know if I'd want to spend much longer than that: it's very constricting.

This demon has his jobs to do. Man, as far as I can tell, takes place primarily after Demon, but the big ending of Demon is never mentioned. But don't worry: there's a bigger ending here.

Much bigger, I could say. In implications, certainly.

I don't think I should say much more than that. I didn't find Man as much immediate, chortling fun to read as Demon, but it's thornier, more theologically detailed, and it delves into some things implied in the first book. This one is also not quite so quotable as Demon, or at least I didn't find it so. But it sticks the landing very well.

There may be a third, I suppose: never bet against a third. But I don't think so. I think there were two sides, and we learned both their stories. And now we are done.

Billionaires by Darryl Cunningham

Billionaires is a long, detailed book, with many more words than you'd expect for a graphic novel, and a long list of sources at the end - a well-researched and carefully-organized work of non-fiction. So my post here may be less detailed; any questions raised by the book will be best answered by the book.

Darryl Cunningham makes non-fiction comics, I think - the book I've previously seen by him was titled How To Fake a Moon Landing in the US (and less puckishly in his native UK), and his bio in this book lists several other similar titles. From what I've seen, he's not entirely serious - there's a thread of humor here, mostly in commentary about events, or in how he draws things - but his purpose is essentially serious, and, in this book, mostly a warning.

This is a book, broadly, about how massive concentrations of wealth tend to degrade and destroy both democratic institutions and human lives, and, more specifically, about four very very rich men and how they have demonstrably made the world worse while they also accumulated massive amounts of money for themselves.

The four are Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul and owner of Fox News; Charles and David Koch, the oil & gas magnates, libertarian nutbars and founders/funders of most of the most corrosive institutions of the American right wing; and Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and the single most destructive influence on the American working life of the past generation.

They're all horrible in their own ways, though I tend to think Cunningham has arranged them in order of decreasing horribleness. Murdoch is a nasty old bastard whose creation was central in the near-coup that is still resonating in American life, and which has been proven, repeatedly, to make its habitual viewers stupider, worse informed, and more prone to radical violence. The Kochs have an even longer-term corrosive effect, made worse by the intellectual sheen they put on the brute selfishness of their libertarianism, and have been important for decades in climate-change denial that may well lead directly to the deaths of millions of people worldwide. Bezos, by comparison, is just a normal unpleasant tycoon: driven, obnoxious, with stupid manias (space travel!) and the usual mix of arguable benefits to the world (get things in a day from one retailer anywhere!) that come with obvious unpleasant side effects (horrible working conditions for both white and blue-collar workers! destruction of myriad competitors who provided jobs and careers and ownership for huge numbers of people! low-key demands for government handouts for new offices!).

Cunningham also says, near the end, that he could have done a similar book about lefty billionaires, which I think is at least partially disingenuous. That book might be clearer on how any billionaires, even ones who try to support charity as they get older and mellower (see: Bill Gates) are bad for democracy and everyone poorer than they are, but it would not have the frisson of these four very horrible people doing their very horrible things. Evil billionaires make a better case than vaguely neutral ones, or even inadvertently-destructive ones. And at least three of these four are very much evil billionaires.

This book may make you want to sharpen your guillotine and start gathering cobblestones for barricades, which is no bad thing.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of July 30, 2022

One book this time, which came from the library. (I asked for two last weekend; one came through quickly and the other, I suppose, is still stuck in the gears somewhere.)

Stone Fruit is a 2021 graphic novel by Lee Lai, published by Fantagraphics, about three women and the kid they all connect to. I believe it's Lai's first major work - or maybe first long work - and I've seen it on some "Best of the Year" lists last year. I don't know a heck of a lot more about it that that, which is pretty much how I like to go into new stories: some people say it's good, I have a vague sense of genre (modern, kitchen-sink, family travails, in this case), and that's it.

I expect to read it before this post goes live, too. Call that a recommendation of a sort, if you like.

Quote of the Week: Family Traditions

I am dreaming, and in my dream I am in church, naked from the waist down. But that's okay, because so is the rest of the congregation.

The weird bit is not the unscheduled underpants deficiency but the being in church. I don't do churches. I grew up in a nonobservant household, raised atheist by default until I lost my disbelief. Now that I know the gods are real, I would never willingly engage in any act of worship - it only encourages the bastards.

 - Charles Stross, Escape from Yokai Land, p.40

Escape from Yokai Land by Charles Stross

This one is a "Laundry Files" book. Not all of the books with that logo on the cover are, in the purest case, but Charles Stross's publishers have decided to keep using the logo for anything set in the same world for simplicity's sake. (See my post on the novel Dead Lies Dreaming for more details, and to begin a link-trail back earlier in the series.)

Escape from Yokai Land is a flashback, or a previously-untold story; it covers what happened to "Bob Howard" on his trip to Japan just before the events of The Delirium Brief. It's also a novella, which is not always clear to a purchaser, so understand that: this is a shorter story, only eighty pages long. But, if you want more of Bob, this might be the only dose for a while.

As readers of the series know, this is a Lovecraftian universe: horrible many-angled ones lurk just outside our world and are trying to get in to eat the brains of humans and do even worse things. More seriously, such incursions are easier the more people and computing devices are in the world, as well as the traditional "when the stars are right" - and all three metrics are trending hugely up as this series hurtles towards what will be at least a minor apocalypse.

Bob is the current host of an entity called The Eater of Souls for good and sufficient reasons. Luckily, he's in as full control of that entity as is possible. Slightly less luckily, he's a fairly new host; his predecessor was killed in the line of duty the year before. (The undertone being: even a powerful, skilled, old sorcerer with a scary thing called the Eater of Souls in him can get snuffed out in this world.)

Bob has been requested by the Miyamoto Group, which seems to be the Japanese equivalent of the Laundry - the fully or quasi governmental body that manages supernatural stuff secretly for their country and snuffs out all of those budding apocalypses - to do a every-four decades check on their local warded sites, and eliminate some current yokai (local folkloric creatures) manifestations. The previous host of the Eater did not leave a good impression during his visit in the 1970s, though.

More seriously, a big manifestation is bubbling up, and Bob will need to contain it, with the aid of his local liaison officer.

That manifestation is centered on a theme park in Tama New Town, and will manifest as something that the book almost consistently calls Princess Kitty. (There are a couple of "Hello"s lurking, which I gather the publisher's attorneys missed in what may have been a late and rushed review.) As Stross says in his short afterword, this is the story that asks: "What if The Color Out of Space were...Pink?"

The Laundry books are often amusing, on the borderland of funny, in a buried, whistling-past-the-graveyard way; this one slots into that stream and is full of quirky little touches having to do with "Princess Kitty" and Japan in general. It is short, and entirely focused on this one short trip of Bob's, but it does just fine in its length.

Celestia by Manuele Fior

Some books tell you their background in exquisite detail, laying out all of the world-building carefully and clearly, so the reader knows exactly what has happened.

I generally prefer the other kind. I'm a grown-up; I don't need someone to hold my hand.

Manuele Fior, I think, does entirely stories of the other kind - 5,000 km per second was a great story about people, told sideways and indirectly, and the shorter pieces in Blackbird Days were also non-obvious. His new graphic novel Celestia is also one of the other kind: a modern story with no thought bubbles or long explanatory speeches, set in a nearish future world that was utterly transformed by something that I doubt anyone left in the world understands.

Here's all the background we get, before the first page of comics:

The great invasion came by sea. It spread north, up the mainland. Many fled. Others took refuge on a small island. An island of stone, built in the water over a thousand years ago. Its name is Celestia.

We never know who or what invaded. I tend to doubt it was anything human, but it never gets any clearer than that. What happened to those who "fled" is also unclear. Unless they fled the planet somehow, though, they don't seem to be there anymore. Take that as as you wish.

I suppose it's possible that this was relatively local: maybe just this continent, this land. But that's not the sense I get.

Celestia, a generation later, must be self-sufficient by definition. It has no contact with the rest of the world, if there is a rest of the world. A new, post-invasion generation has grown up: this story follows two of them, Dora and Pierrot, the two characters on the cover. They both have telepathic powers, not entirely under control - and I would say that is not uncommon for this new generation. Maybe even more so as time goes on.

This is a story about humanity transformed, but that story is mostly in the background. The Great Invasion perhaps had something to do with the transformation: in the best possible scenario, it was some kind of Childhood's End thing. The worst possible scenario? Whatever your biggest fear is. Whatever is the most horrible thing you can think of.

Pierrot's father, Dr. Vivaldi, is one of the leaders of Celestia. At least, he has followers, so he's leading them - it's not clear if there's any real government on Celestia, and the back cover describes it as "an outpost for criminals and other outcasts." (As I've said before: if you're the only people left, there's no other government and you are not criminals, by definition.) Vivaldi has some kind of plans; I'm pretty sure they have to do with self-aggrandizement and power and likely some underlying theory of the outside world.

Pierrot is privileged, respected. He can reject his father and still come and go in his father's circles as he pleases. And his telepathy is mostly a positive thing in his life.

Dora, on the other hand, is being chased. She's in hiding, her telepathy lighting up unexpectedly, her mind only half her own. Vivaldi's group wants her, for something that the reader may suspect will not be good for her.

Before long, Pierrot and Dora flee Celestia, with the threat of violence behind them. They are the first to do so, we think, though Vivaldi talks about exploring the larger world, all the time.

Pierrot and Dora find people outside Celestia. But very few. And most of them are from the new generation: even younger, and even more different than their elders than Dora and Pierrot. (More Childhood's End, with maybe a touch of Midwich Cuckoos or creepier stories about transformed children.)

As they must, Dora and Pierrot visit a few places on the mainland, and will eventually return to Celestia for a confrontation with the people chasing them. We still don't quite know why they are in conflict, what the factions in Vivalid's group are, and why some of them would dare to threaten their leader's only son. But we come to the end, even without that knowledge.

Fior tells this story mostly quietly, in soft colors on large pages. Even the scenes of violence seem frozen; his panels are each a moment in time, inherently still. He will not tell you how to think about this; will not tell you everything that you want to know. If you only like the kind of story in which everything is explained five times, with captions including everyone's code names, this is not a book for you. But I hope more of you are grown-ups than that.

Cruel Shoes by Steve Martin

This is a book by a young man. We sometimes forget things like that: we think that Albert Einstein was born the old guy with the bushy hair, or that Lawrence Welk's '60s style was what big-band music sounded like when the WW II generation was young and on the make. Everyone was young once; everyone thought the world was ahead of them and they could do anything they wanted. Some of them were right.

Forty-five years ago, Steve Martin was an up-and-coming young comedian: weird and distinctive and quirky, beloved by youngish Boomers and mostly confusing to their parents. He'd hosted Saturday Night Live a few times - and was probably known by that point as much as "the wild and crazy guy" as for the blindingly-white-suit standup routine - toured the country to sold-out shows in ever-larger venues, but hadn't been in any full-length movies yet.

His standup was random and anarchic, with obvious sight gags (the arrow through the head, juggling "kittens") interspersed with non sequitur outbursts, frantic banjo playing, some actual songs (those of my age will remember "King Tut"), and absolutely nothing with a standard joke structure. It was funny and bizarre and different, and it had been building for most of the '70s; Martin was 32 in 1977.

And then he put out a short book of essays and poems, Cruel Shoes. It's copyright 1977, but everything I can find says 1979 is when it was really widely available: the year The Jerk hit theatres, the year Martin got even bigger and, I suspect, started to think about movie work as the off-ramp for the crazy standup act that may already have been palling for him.

This is not that standup act: go to his first couple of albums if you want that. But it's like the standup act: off-kilter, refusing to abide by standard joke structures or ideas of what's "funny," full of weird transitions and juxtapositions. It also points towards Martin's later, more literary ambitions - the novels he wrote early this century, the screenplays based on famous older works, and so on. His ideas were wild and crazy, but his prose, even this far back, was tight and precise - as we should expect, since a standup comedian is the next thing to a poet as someone who needs to make very specific words say precisely what he wants.

Cruel Shoes has fifty-one pieces in its 128 pages; they're mostly the length of comedy routines, just a page or two, and a few of them did make it into his act or onto his albums later. (Or simultaneously; I don't know the sequence, this many years later.) They are very nearly indescribable, but the book can be read in little more than an hour, so why bother to describe it when someone can just read it?

This seems to be solidly out of print, but Martin was a superstar in the making when it came out, in a world where books had massive print-runs, so copies are available in probably every last used-book store and church sale and flea market in the entire nation. If you want Cruel Shoes, I doubt it would be hard to find.

Oh, and something I didn't know when I started. There is a title story. It is about cruel shoes. They are shoes, and they are very cruel. Really. I always thought it was some kind of metaphor; I didn't realize how deeply Martin had committed to the bit back then. If there's one thing I'd want to tell you, you being a person who might read this, it's that: Martin was committed to the bit.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of July 23, 2022

Two books this week, both of them from the fine folks at Tachyon and both of them brand-new books being published for the first time in the summer of 2022. Here's hoping at least one of them looks interesting to you.

The Extractionist is, I think, Kimberly Unger's second novel, after Nucleation. The publisher calls it a technothriller, which I guess is what cyberpunk becomes when the world catches up to it: it's about a VR expert whose job, as the title implies, is to pull people out of virtual spaces when they're unable to do that themselves. As you might guess, this is about a job that Goes Wrong, and it sounds like there's action in both virtual and meat spaces, possibly simultaneously. Looks like zippy fun, and it's available as of July 12th in trade paperback and digital formats.

Coming next month (out August 9) is The Bruising of Qilwa, a debut fantasy novel from Naseem Jamnia. (And the back-cover copy is looking very familiar to me...because, as I just realized, James Nicoll reviewed this a couple of months back.) It's about blood magic (the good kind, apparently), non-binary people, found families, political oppression, and the refugee experience - so this one looks quite a bit heavier and more issue-oriented, if you want that in your reading.

Quote of the Week: Forgive Me Not

It had never occurred to Sophie that she would be forgiven so readily for her trespasses and she wasn't sure that she liked it. She had refused to visit her dangerously ill father in hospital because her career was more important to her, and the least he could do was judge her. You could get away with anything, it seemed, if you were on the telly.

 - Nick Hornby, Funny Girl, p.111

Tunnels by Rutu Modan

OK, is this just me suffering the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, or are a lot of cartoonists really deeply influenced by Tintin? I wouldn't have expected that to be so central to so many different creators, but I keep seeing it: the manic plots, the dot eyes, the same kinds of "comic relief" thrown in even when it feels forced.

Rutu Modan is only the most recent example, but just look at the eyes of her characters on the cover of Tunnels. Am I crazy, or is there something there?

(There's also some plot elements that are very Tintin-esque, including the big kerfuffle at the ending, but I don't want to spoil the plot. But I do want to assure you this is not just me obsessing about how some cartoonists draw eyes. Well, only partially.)

Tunnels is an adventure story about archaeology, and, like all of Modan's books I've seen so far (Exit Wounds and The Property), they're deeply Israeli: they could only be told about people in that part of the world, with that heritage, at this point in time. That's entirely a good thing - everything should be as specific and particular as possible - but it does mean I'm looking at it from the outside, and may miss important bits of context and nuance.

Nili is a middle-aged woman. It would be unfair to say her life was ruined by her now-dementia-ravaged archaeologist father, but...she spent most of her childhood in the '80s on an obsessive dig with him, has never gotten past that, and never got any serious formal education. She now has a young son, her obsession with that old dig, and a dwindling bank account: basically nothing else in the world.

Oh, wait: she also has a deep and abiding hate for her father's old partner/rival, Rafi Sarid, now the chair of the department at the university where they were both associated.

Nili thinks she can pick up that dig, thirty years later, and complete it. She thinks there's a fabulous treasure deep in that ground: the Ark of the Covenant. (Yes, the one from Raiders of the Lost Ark.) She thinks she can manipulate all of the people around her: her younger brother, an archeological protégé of Sarid's; a dealer in Biblical antiquities and his bankrolling, controlling wife; local Palestinians when it turns out a big West Bank wall is right in the middle of her dig site; a group of very devout (and possibly meant to be nutty; it's hard for me to say) Jewish diggers; Sarid himself; and even the military. She thinks she can tell most of them the real purpose of the dig, promise the Ark to most of them, and still come out the other end on top, with everything she wants and no consequences.

She's almost smart and sneaky and driven enough to do that; the world almost has elements that will let her do so. How it all gets more and more complicated, and falls apart in increasingly baroque ways, which then need to be repatched in even more baroque ways, is the story of Tunnels.

The Tintin-eqsue elements are that air of manic energy, the ever-complicating plots, and a lot of the humorous elements along the way. Modan has no villains: her worldview, I think, is entirely anti-villain; both the JDF and actual Palestinian terrorists come across as quirky but understandable people, maybe blindered, maybe wrong-headed, maybe destructive. But there's no force of evil here; even Sarid is right, sort of, by his own lights.

There's a lot of material here, and Modan treats it all honestly and with a sense of even-handedness. She's writing about a cramped land, full of people who have been there for thousands of years, leaving crap in the ground and squabbling with each other above it. She's sympathetic to all of her characters, even as she shows most of them as deluded in large ways, and all of them as deluded in at least small ways. People are fallible in Modan's comics - and not just fallible, but always deeply human, always themselves and always doing the odd things they need to do even when they should be following their plans and pursuing their real aims.

Tunnels is a big book filled with activity and action and slapstick and just stuff. It feels like a book by a creator trying to Go Big in everything: to cram in all of her thoughts and ideas and feelings even loosely related to the central matter. It can be a little exhausting, but it's a great ride if you can hang on.