Dungeon: Zenith, Vol. 5: Fog and Tears by Sfar, Trondheim, and Boulet

Zenith is the one that will run forever, or as close to forever as human life allows. The Dungeon series started with Zenith, with Marvin and Herbert and the Dungeon itself at its height, and I expect as long as there are any Dungeon books, there will be Zenith titles. (Twilight ended once, though it seems to have restarted. Early Years could easily end. The sidebars - Parade, Monstres, Antipodes - are all separate books to begin with, and so begin and end in the same book.)

Dungeon, as a world and an overall series, took a long hiatus in the last decade or so, after the initial burst around the turn of the century: there was one book in 2009, two simultaneously in 2014, and then nothing until 2020. But it has roared back since then: according to the list of publications in French, there were five volumes in 2020, four in 2021, five more last year, two already in 2023 with one more coming out this month, and nine more announced for the next two years. I'm not the only one watching NBM, the US publisher of Dungeon, hoping they can keep up, and I've been happy to see a new Early Years omnibus this past spring and the previous Zenith omnibus last year.

Perhaps I should back up, for the new readers. Dungeon, as I've hinted, is a big epic fantasy series, set in a world populated by monsters and anthropomorphic people and odder things, in several sub-series set in different time periods, written by the French creators Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim and drawn by...well, just about everyone in French comics, by this point. [1] Their influences are probably more from fantasy gaming - mostly TTRPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, where anything can happen and probably will - than from epic fantasy books, but there's a lot of ideas in the stew. 

The series is published by Delcourt in France, and here by NBM in omnibus editions, tending to be 2-in-1s at first publication and then reorganized into 4-in-1s later in their lives, with translations that I think have all been by Joe Johnson. As of right this moment (assuming the new book, Changement de programme, is out in Europe), there have been fifty-three books:

• Zenith, the first sub-series, is about a fantasy Dungeon at the height of its fame and power; there are ten books so far (all now available in English).
• Early Years, about the young man who will later become Keeper of that Dungeon, with six books so far (all available in English).
• Twilight, in which Dungeon, and the world it's on, suffer a major epic-fantasy apocalypse, partially caused by the now-Dark-Lord-ish Herbert, in nine books so far with one announced for next year (the first eight are available in English; I wouldn't be surprised if NBM is looking to do another volume late next year).
• Parade is a deliberately sillier sub-series, with adventures of Marvin and Herbert set early in Zenith; there have been six so far, with six more announced for 2024-25; only the first four have been published in English.
• Monstres was the original "sidebar stories" catch-all, which I thought could be set anywhere in the timeline - the official description calls it "great adventures of secondary characters." There have been seventeen so far, with one more coming out next year; twelve of them  - the whole classic era, but none of the new batch - are available in English.
• And with the resurgence of Dungeon, two new subseries were announced: Antipodes- and Antipodes+, which tell stories set far in the past and future, respectively; there have been two minus books, two plus books before this month, the new one in October, and one more plus for next year; none of these have been translated yet.

During the hiatus, in 2018, I had a series here on the blog running through the (then-existent) series, in something like a coherent order, under the overall title Dungeon Fortnight. I've kept that tag for the new books for simplicity.

That's a lot of links, a lot of backstory, a lot of books. But this is epic fantasy: there's always wads of backstory - call it lore or legends or geas or destiny - even at the very beginning of an adventure. And you can always just dive in anywhere; none of this is forbidding or gate-keeping.

So Dungeon: Zenith, Vol. 5: Fog and Tears collects the most recent two books about the height of Dungeon, Larmes et brouillard (Nov '22) and Formule incantatoire (Apr '23), both drawn by Boulet in an intricate style filled with crosshatching that sometimes looks too detailed for this world to me.

The first of those books is mostly unrelated to the overall get-back-the-Dungeon plot that's been running for three or four books now; series hero Herbert (a duck) and his wife Isis (a Kochak, and also a cat, which I think means the same thing here) are expecting their first child any minute now. Herbert learns, to his great surprise, that the Kochaks, who they are living with, have some unusual birth customs. Namely, "baptism" means dropping the newborn into a pit with a bunch of wolves, to win or die.

Herbert does not think a half-duck will do terribly well in this ordeal, and so first tries to argue against it and then steals away his newborn son to stymie the plans. This, of course, means that a tribe of ferocious, and angry, nomadic warriors are chasing him, led by his now-very-pissed wife. And there are other complications as well, as of course there must be.

(I don't want to get into more of the plot than that, but it ends happier than you'd expect for Dungeon.)

The second book gets back to that main plot, with Marvin - who also has just had a baby with his magician wife, and who also has complicated and weird rituals about that baby to follow as part of his own culture - is pulled into stopping a minor magical apocalypse unleashed by Delacort, the usurper of the Dungeon, during a mostly-successful assault by Our Heroes. There's a lot of running around, a lot of Marvin's blunt style not meshing well with the detailed plans and work of a bunch of magicians, and a big bang at the end. But it does, mostly, resolve that long-running plot...in a way that I'm sure sets hooks for the next two or three books.

As always, Dungeon is full of humor - mostly dark, always dry, usually quick in ways an unsuspecting reader could miss, but very funny a lot of the time in a lot of ways. It's a world full of extremes, with death lurking around every corner: an epic fantasy world, where everything is keyed up as high as possible almost all of the time. This is yet another wonderful romp in that world, and looking at the list of unpublished-in-the-US books just makes me want three or four more books like this right now.

[1] I think the original idea, between Sfar and Trondheim, was "you draw this one and I'll draw that one and we'll get our friends to do the others!" Sfar drew the first three Twilight books and Trondheim the first four Zenith, but they handed even those sub-series off to others afterward.

This Year: 2011a

"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.

2011 is the second year with two choices, after 1982. To keep things even, next week will have 2011b, and then go right to 2013.

Sometimes I quote a lot of lyrics in these posts: that won't be the case this time. This is a minimalist, slowcore song - loud, certainly (or it should be), and one that builds to a tremendous crescendo in its slow relentless way - but the lyrics are minimal. They say all they need to say.

I'm nothing but heart

My song for 2011 is Nothing But Heart by Low, an eight-minute slow boil of skittering guitars, more than a little noise, minimalist drums relentlessly keeping that slow beat in the background, and a swirl - growing slowly, oh so slowly - of catharsis and redemption.

This is another song I would play very loud in my car, driving to and from my train station, over and over in the fall of 2011. I can't tell you exactly what it means: as a song on its own, or what it meant to me at that moment. But it was a real, true thing, a mantra and method for getting through life, and it was exactly what I needed.

It's on my list because of those moments, because of what it meant then. And still can mean to me, any day I need it. Or to you. Or anyone. That's what makes it a great song.

Quote of the Week: Graphic Design Is My Passion

He never met a font he didn't like; the more the merrier. His layouts looked like the menu at a Mediterranean restaurant. He used Photoshop the way a kid uses a knife to spread peanut butter. I thought he was just incompetent, until I realized how malevolent he was.

 - Nick Mamatas, I Am Providence, p.159

Keeping Two by Jordan Crane

Each reader brings a different perspective to a book. A lot of the discussion about this book has focused on the central couple's squabbling - about how couples fight each other, that snippiness you get with someone you love and don't want to really hurt but still want to win when you're exasperated with each other.

And that's in there, to be clear. But it's not as central, to my mind.

Instead, I read Keeping Two - a magnificent, encompassing, deep graphic novel Jordan Crane put out last year - as a meditation and exploration of catastrophizing, of all the ways we think through what is happening now and what might have happened and how will I go on if it's really the worst.

We open with a couple in a car, coming home from what was supposed to be a restful holiday weekend. Connie and Will are grumpy: maybe at that point where they're just a bit sick of each other after so much time together in close spaces. Traffic is horrible - stop and go - and Will is driving too aggressively, following too close. Connie is reading a story out loud, some kind of literary novel about a couple (like them, not like them) and the tragedy of a pregnancy.

Crane uses that novel as a way to show the reader how to read Keeping Two: flashbacks, dreams, fiction, imaginings will be presented with wavy panel borders. Reality has solid straight borders. It's a small difference, easy to mistake, so the reader has to pay careful attention as panels bounce back and forth between real and imagined. The mind can slip into fantasy at any moment - a stream of thought moving from what is to oh god, what if at any time.

It begins slowly. They do get home, before too many pages. They're still snippy with each other, but clearly love each other - the couple in the novel are nastier, saying more cutting, thoughtless things, in a worse situation.

One of them goes out to pick up food for dinner; the other one stays to wash up the dishes left in the sink. And time passes.

Again, this is a book about catastrophizing. About those intrusive thoughts of they've been gone too long and what could have happened and what if they're lying dead in a ditch. (In my family, the term is usually "if I get hit by a bus.")

So reality is intertwined with the novel - we see the end of that couple's story, and Connie pointedly says that story ends at a moment of inevitability but before we know what really happens, so the ending is our decision, each individually - and with those worries and intrusive thoughts, all the horrors we all imagine all the time. (We do, right? It's not just me?)

It ends brilliantly. That's all I'll say about that part of it. I do wonder if Connie's point about the novel's ending is a clue about this ending, though I have to be very elliptical to avoid spoilers. There's no obvious impending threat for Connie and Will, as there is for the novel's couple - but something happened, and has not been, um, addressed before the last page, and so could have complications for one of them - potentially very serious complications. I don't think that's a "Lady or the Tiger" ending, the way the novel is: I think Crane's ending is more straightforward - as evidenced by the fact that the last dozen pages have consistently solid borders: they're together, in reality, living now.

Well, except. The very very end, the iris out. The panel borders disappear entirely, hidden on most of one full-page panel and gone on the closing double-page spread. It's beautiful, emotionally satisfying, a perfect moment: a clear ending for Connie and Will.

All the catastrophizing is over, for this moment at least. Everything is all happening at once. And they are together for it.

The Bend of Luck by Peter and Maria Hoey

Peter and Maria Hoey - they're brother and sister, and work together despite living at opposite ends of the North American continent - make comics that look like no one else's.

They look like other things, though: when I read Animal Stories, I thought the visual style was reminiscent of online Flash-game graphics, something flat and clear and schematic. Reading another one of their books, I see similarities to advertising art, or some kind of informative pamphlet.

It looks impersonal, maybe official. There's a chilliness baked in on a basic level, in the backgrounds and facial expressions. And their writing leans into that feeling, too - it's clearly deeply purposeful - with distanced narration and a flat affect.

None of the characters in The Bend of Luck are named. For any particular scene, "the man" and "the woman" and "his partner" and "his father" works fine - occasionally, they need to specify "the old man." The Hoeys mostly lay this out in an unconventional five-panel layout: four squarish panels for the four corners, a circular inset in the middle, reading rigidly NW, NE, center, SW, SE. Characters live in environments that look like they came out of a template: city streets, wilderness, mid-century urban interiors. Clothing is similarly templated, precise, looking just like the abstraction of itself from an official government handout.

The story the Hoeys tell here is expansive, and takes time to come into focus. They tell it in fragments, in fourteen separate chapters that cover what eventually is clearly two generations of the same family, in San Francisco and a wilderness region, suitable for mining, somewhere more-or-less nearby. The two generations aren't this generation - the more modern sections seem to take place in the 1930s, or the '50s - but dates aren't important to begin with.

In this fictional world, luck has a physical form. It can be found and mined, retrieved and sold. It is fragile, dissolving on contact with air. It is valuable but illegal, sought by gamblers and other underworld types. And two prospectors, down on their luck, find a vein of it, under a river, in the earlier generation.

Meanwhile, a generation later, we see a man disappear, and his wife cope with his loss.

The main prospector - the other is, pointedly, "his partner" - and the man in San Francisco are the central characters, and turn out to be father and son, but we will meet many other people along the way: sailors and gangsters, hat shoppers and Western thugs. And we learn more about how luck works, by the end: in particular, that our assumption that "luck" means "good luck" is not necessarily true.

Again, it's all chilly, deliberately distanced. Not quite a fable, but inevitable, inexorable, already determined. All in a look and an idiom like no one else's comics. It's good stuff, rich and deep and worth spending the time to think through and pay close attention to. And I'm happy to see the Hoeys have another book coming out soon to look forward to.

Onion Skin by Edgar Camacho

Two young people meet cute, share their dreams with each other over the course of a long drunken night, find they have a lot in common, separate for a while, and find each other again to achieve those dreams.

He's Rolando; she's Nera. Unusually for a story like this, there's no romance or hint of it - no reason not to, it just doesn't happen. They connect in other ways, the way any two people do.

This is Edgar Camacho's graphic novel Onion Skin. Other stuff happens, too - and he doesn't tell the story in order to begin with - but I'll get to that. There's only one copyright date in the book, 2021, so maybe it was translated quickly (by Camacho himself) for US publication after it originally appeared in Mexico? Or maybe the date of US publication just isn't listed, and it made its way north in '22 or this year.

Rolando worked as a graphic designer in advertising; he hated it. He hated it so much he injured himself - not quite deliberately, but maybe unconsciously - in order to lose the job and free himself. He wants to do something else - probably related to art - but he's a bit vague.

Nera lives in a broken-down food truck. She's self-sufficient and self-assured, but wants to be cooking food for people and has no idea how to get there.

None of that is where we start in Onion Skin. We start with the food truck Dawg Burger - they don't seem to serve burgers, but never mind that - on the run from three bikers, on a lonely road somewhere in Mexico. There are two people in the truck: we don't know yet they are Rolando and Nera. They get away.

And then we flash back, and we realize this story will be told in at least two timeframes: something like "now" and something like "then." We meet Rolando; we meet Nera. Eventually, they meet each other. And we keep flashing forward to the two of them in that truck, some time later - traveling around, making great food, gathering a big following, attracting the attention of those bikers, getting into danger and out of it.

Camacho is serious about his characters and their concerns, but not overly serious. The big conflict with those bikers is just a couple of clicks down from cartoony: they are clearly dangerous, but not homicidal, and we're pretty clear Rolando and Nera will make it out OK in the end. And telling the story inside-out as he does lets him breathe new life into a kind of story we've all seen many times before: he can bounce between the high points and interesting moments and never get bogged down in getting from Point A to Point B.

He also brings a stylized art style, design-y and modern, to add more energy. He's particularly fond of quirky sound effects, another source of fun here. On top of all that, the focus on food is making me want to eat chilaquiles!

Onion Skin is a fun, energetic, visually interesting book by a strong new creator, telling its story with verve and excitement. It already won a couple of awards in Mexico, including the first National Young Graphic Novel Award, which I hope will be enough encouragement for Camacho to keep going and make more books like this.

I Am Providence by Nick Mamatas

Nick Mamatas is a genre-fiction writer, but this 2016 novel is not in the genre you might expect. It's a book about Lovecraftians rather than a book that is Lovecraftian. Nothing squamous or rugose shambles through the pages here; no one has a momentary vision of the depths of geological time and his place in the universe that sends him quavering into madness.

On the other hand, I'm not going to say the characters here are entirely sane to begin with.

I Am Providence is a murder mystery set at the Summer Tentacular, an annual horror convention devoted to H.P. Lovecraft and taking place in steamy August in (of course) Providence, Rhode Island. Anyone who knows Mamatas's online presence over the past two decades can guess that he does not have a positive and friendly opinion about those people and that scene and the whole concept of making Lovecraft central to a kind of literature or a fan lifestyle.

I am convinced that all, or maybe just most, of the characters in Providence are versions of real people in the horror/Lovecraftian world, though I was only tangentially connected there (and that fifteen years ago), so I'm not going to try to trace them. (OK, just one: Bhanushali is so obviously a gender-swapped S.T. Joshi that no one will miss that.)

Well, maybe one more, the central one: Panossian, the murder victim. He's dead on page one, and he narrates alternate chapters in first person, posthumously [1] - the even-numbered chapters are from a tight third-person POV on Colleen Danzig, a new writer coming to her first convention, expecting to room with Panossian and instead finding herself amateur-sleuthing her way around the BNFs. [2] Panossian is a gadfly, a deliberately annoying minor writer whose single novel, The Catcher in R'lyeh, is seemingly too clever by half (especially for the very traditionalist Lovecraftian crowd) and sank almost without a trace.

Panossian is Mamatas himself, slightly transmuted (Greek to Armenian, Move Under Ground to Catcher, etc.). That's the metafictional joke here: Mamatas is saying, somewhere between jokingly and honestly, "these people probably want to kill me for making novels like this and admitting Lovecraft was a massive racist, among other things."

Providence is not just a gigantic in-joke, but the in-jokiness is central. It rambles around the convention for three days, alternating between Panossian's newly-dead ruminations and Danzig's investigations, which ape the form of a play-fair mystery but end up more like a shaggy dog story. Frankly, there's no good reason for Danzig to care that much about Panossian's death, and spend all her time playing Nancy Drew - but that's the novel, so it's what she does.

It's OK as a mystery; it's killer as a stab in the back of Lovecraftians. "Is there a reason for a literate person to read century-old pulp fiction? For the most part, no, which is why most of it has been forgotten by all except obsessives and weirdoes." (p.3)

There are a lot of events in Providence; there's a lot of opportunity for Lovecratians to demonstrate the various ways they are obsessives and weirdoes; there's a lot of theorizing about the murder from various people. Mamatas is more or less in control of the plot, but there are several Signals from Fred, as when Danzig realizes, more than half-way through the book, that she's talked to several different uniformed cops but never even seen the detective running the case. That's the shaggy-dogness again; this is a book that rambles and wanders, to hit all of the scenes and ideas Mamatas had and to showcase all of these people in their (un)natural habitat.

I dog-eared a bunch of quotes while reading it: Mamatas is excellent at the cutting takedown, the epigrammatic attack. Here's some good ones:

• Hiram seemed harmless, but only in the way a heavily medicated inpatient at a lunatic asylum seemed harmless. (p.107) 
• Ranger was pretty important in Lovecraftian fandom, after all, since he had access to a photocopy machine and made his little 'zine, Dreamlands, with it sometimes. (p.189)
• Most people who are inexplicably confident despite being talentless and more than a little stupid have warm, affectionate parents. (p.232)

I didn't entirely believe in Colleen, the sleuth. I completely believed Panossian, the self-loathing dead loser. I somewhat recognized all of the other weirdoes and obsessives at the Tentacular. And I read Providence with some joy and multiple laughs and a lot of recognition. I think this book got a bad reception, because it's for that thin segment of fandom that both understands the jokes and can take them; fandom is famously humorless when it comes to itself. If you think you fit in that segment, check it out, but don't be surprised if you feel "attacked."

[1] To put in Panossian's own words, from p.4: "We dwell in darkness, anxious and panicked and alone without the benefit of senses or a future, and for who knows how long after death."

[2] Big Name Fans. Not entirely accurate: Lovecraftiana is a small, incestuous pool, and nearly everyone in it is a filthy pro, at least in their own heads. But Providence is a book all about in-group behavior and markers, so the term is appropriate.

This Year: 2010

"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.

I'm trying to be personal in this series, but not confessional. I may have said too much, some weeks - that's always the danger. And this one has that potential as well. Let's see if I can navigate that stormy sea.

Josh Ritter is one of my favorite artists: full stop. I initially thought the song I'd pick for him in this series would be To the Dogs or Whoever, an absolute barn-burner from 2007 that encapsulates everything he does well and was the first song of his I heard. From the same year, there's also The Temptation of Adam, a wonderful, deep, twisty story-song that I memorized without trying and own a T-shirt with the first line. To be hipster-y, there was also A Country Song, the early version of Golden Age of Radio, title song of his first big-label record.

But this one eventually won out. Partially because of how powerful, how loud it is live; partially because of the emotion in it. And partially because my wife and I both really like a song that is, well, about a deeply unhappy relationship on the verge of breaking up. (And that is understating the case in several ways.) I think we both love the power and the intensity and the emotion of it, especially that tat-tat-tat-tat-tat drumstick sound, over and over and over and over again [1] - but, still, it is weird for a couple to both love a song so much about a breakup.

So my song for 2010 is Rattling Locks, another song about love gone bad, frustration, and that feeling that the world doesn't fit, at all.

All along I thought I was giving you my love
But you were just stealin' it, now I want it back
Every single thing you took

I always like metaphors in songs, and times singers can sneak something by the audience, so this bit was particularly fun - and I wonder how many people don't get both ways it can be taken?

But something has changed, it's all wrong
I'm out here in the cold with a wet face
A-rattling your locks

But, again, this song is mostly about that relentless beat: unchanging, demanding, loud, pounding. Like the blood in your head as you have a not-quite-argument with the person you realize isn't special anymore. It's better live - so many of the greatest songs are, of course - but the studio version is loud and demanding enough for most purposes. And I like a spot of nihilism in my songs....

I had a dream where I was dyin'
But it wasn't no nightmare
I was peaceful as I fell

[1] In concert, several other members of the band would have drumsticks and hammer out that beat, as the actual drummer hit the more complicated bits. It was all beat, all staccato, all relentless. Here's a performance from Jimmy Kimmel that has some of that energy, but it hit much stronger at about the hour-twenty mark of a headliner set in a theatre.

Quote of the Week: Where Everybody Knows Your Name

The Fountain Café (Proprietor Miss Gloria Adam) was all Tudor and horse brasses and local honey at sixpence more than anywhere else. Miss Adam herself dispensed the nastiest coffee south of Manchester and spoke of her customers as "My Friends." Miss Adam did not do business with friends, but simply robbed them, which somehow added to the illusion of genteel amateurism which Miss Adam was so anxious to preserve. Her origin was obscure, but she often spoke of her late father as "The Colonel." It was rumored among those of Miss Adam's friends who had paid dearly for their friendship that the colonelcy in question had been granted by the Salvation Army.

 - John Le Carré, Call for the Dead, p.27

Snoopy Vs. the Red Baron by Charles M. Schulz

I have to assume Charles Schulz would have approved of this book. He didn't rubber-stamp every bit of merchandise and brand extension - he had high standards, and kept a close eye on his licensors - but he liked to do different packages, and he clearly enjoyed putting more well-made Peanuts stuff out into the world.

He might have even had this idea, eventually - though, if he did, I bet he would have done some new work, at least a page or so, for the book.

Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron is a thematic Peanuts collection; this 2015 book collects what I think are all of the strips in which Snoopy appears as "the World War I flying ace." [1] I think the strips are more-or-less in chronological order from page to page, but there are several unexplained sections in the book - I think roughly "longer sequences," "one-off strips," and "Sundays." It's in the same format as the Complete Peanuts series, wider than it is tall, with generally three dailies or one Sunday per page.

And my mind immediately turns to my old publishing-hand track: I wonder "how did they do that?" This was towards the end of the two-plus-decade Complete Peanuts project (see a whole lot of my posts on the series over the years), so my assumption is that the folks at Fantagraphics were seeing that end in sight and brainstorming other ideas for books. Maybe they even had a big database of the strips, since I think they had to scan and clean up all of them as part of the project, and - here's where my flights of fancy take over - maybe they even tagged the strips, so they could run a search like "give me all the Rerun strips" or, if they were insane, "every Charlotte Braun appearance."

I belabor that point because, if I'm right and the Big Brains at Fanta do have a detailed tagging system, we could presumably get a near-infinite number of quirky, specific Peanuts books, from Schroeder Celebrates Beethoven's Birthday to Spike's Greatest Excursions. Sure: most of those would never sell, but that's what ebooks are for!

Anyway, this book is full of the sillier side of Peanuts, featuring a beagle sitting on his doghouse and pretending to dogfight (and lose, always - Peanuts is Peanuts to its core) with the Red Baron and then running around a suburban neighborhood pretending it's either behind enemy lines or wartime Paris. He drinks a lot of root beer, and curses the war. He even flies some commercial airplanes "after the war" to take other cast members various places.

I don't want to anatomize this: it's silly and fun, and silly fun things don't deserve to be dissected. But I'll just mention two things Schulz does that I saw several times and appreciated.

First is a tiny thing: when flying out, Snoopy faces right. When coming back to base, or running away from a flock of Fokkers, he turns and faces left. It's such a comics thing: funny, understated, unremarked.

Second is how Schulz weaves his different bits of business together. These are all Red Baron strips, but that doesn't mean they're only Red Baron strips. The World War I flying ace went on a POW train to a detention camp off with Charlie Brown to summer camp several times. He even shows up on the baseball field a couple of times. Peanuts was a tapestry, with different threads rising and falling in the weave over the years, but it was all of a piece, from the more serious sequences like "Mr. Sack" to the silliest Red Baron strip.

And this is the silliest stuff - there's a lot of fine Schulz wordplay and slapstick. (Snoopy pushes Peppermint Pattie "out of the plane" at least five times, always drawn the same way.) And I love the way he draws the doghouse/plane riddled with bullet holes: it's so good at selling the idea.

If you want to read one Peanuts book, and want it to be a frivolous one, this is a great choice. But I warn you: reading a bit of Peanuts will probably make you want to dive into the whole thing.

[1] Do not confuse it with Snoopy and the Red Baron, a 1966 book reformatting some of the early Red Baron stories into a small-format hardcover, part of the same loose series of Peanuts books as Happiness Is a Warm Puppy and Snoopy and "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night".

Hâsib and the Queen of Serpents by David B.

As far as I can tell, I've never read a book by David B. before - maybe some shorter pieces in Mome and other anthologies, but never a full book. And I have my doubts that this one is typical.

So I may be coming into this from a strange angle, or otherwise badly - that's always the danger. I also should say that I try to figure out what a book is trying to do, and then think about how well it does that. I do understand, technically, what Hâsib and the Queen of Serpents is doing - retelling a story from The Thousand and One Nights - but the why of it is vaguer to me, leaving me with theories about nested narratives and stylized art and maybe a bit of exoticizing.

David B. is French - I see from Wikipedia that his "real" name is Pierre-François Beauchard - and has been working for thirty-some years; he's best known for the big autobiographical book/series Epileptic. (It's one book in English translation; it was six volumes as it came out in France. It has a very different title in French, too: l'Ascension du Haut Mal.) This is a fairly recent work of his: published 2015-16 in France, translated by Montana Kane for this 2018 US edition. I get the sense that he is important and major, but his works haven't been translated much - yes Epileptic, yes this book, but his bibliography is a sea of French titles with few indications of English editions - probably because he's "difficult" in one way or another, too French or too stylized or too personal or too something else I'm not thinking of.

What I'm saying is: this is a gorgeous, interesting book. It retells a world-famous story in an engaging way, with that deliberately archaic "I am telling you a story" language. The pages are full of visual delights.

But I have no idea why David B., or anyone, would choose to make a version of this story now. It's distanced, slightly chilly, in that classical story-telling way. It tells three nested stories, and the transitions between levels are quick and sometimes confusing. These are originally moral fables, more or less, with that very traditional moral "do the things expected of your class and station, and obey your God and King." But they're not strongly moral fables; they're also very much "shit happens" stories, a series of complications unexpected and unpredictable.

The frame story - literally a frame; with two characters bordering the images several times as it drops back out to the storytelling level - is Scheherazade telling this story to the King, that core idea of the 1001 Nights. (There's no indication here Scheherazade is telling stories to save her life; we're four-hundred-plus days in and presumably the King is hooked at this point.) Her main story is about Hâsib, a young man in what we eventually learn is Greece, though places are really just names here. He is the son of a great sage who died - which seems like it should be important, and never is - and goes to work for lumberjacks, who betray him when he discovers a great treasure.

But that leads to his meeting the Queen of Serpents, who both helps him and tells him the second story. (And then someone in the second story tells the hero of that story the third story. Eventually, we finish stories two and three and get back to Hâsib.) The heroes of two of the three stories get happy endings; the third may have happiness later. All is wrapped up by Scheherazade on the last page...which is the opposite of how the 1001 Nights are supposed to work.

But a book has to end somehow, with some kind of closure, so it's entirely reasonable. And it does frame the whole thing up nicely.

I loved looking at Hâsib and was amused by the convolutions of the tales without really engaging deeply. This is a distanced story by its nature; the reader is not going to identify with Hâsib or anyone else here: they're story-book characters, from "long, long ago," in a colorful and unrealistic world. For readers up for that kind of book, this is a good choice: it's particularly visually inventive, for fans of ornate comics art and designed pages.

Olympia by Vivés, Ruppert + Mulot

Can you cook the same soufflé twice? You can certainly try - and the trio of Bastien Vivés, Florent Ruppert and Jérôme Mulot do so here.

Olympia is a direct sequel to the stylish thriller The Grand Odalisque, by the same trio of cartoonists: Odalisque was a 2012 book translated in '21; Olympia was originally published in French in 2015 and came to the English-speaking world in this Montana Kane translation in '22.

Everything I said about Odalisque is still relevant here: the lack of clarity around credits for the trio of creators, the style, the energy, the sense, the substance, the way this is basically a "turn your brain off" action movie on paper.

We start in the aftermath of Odalisque, with the three art thieves Alex, Sam, and Carole having successfully stolen a major painting from the Louvre, but been separated in the mayhem. Carole is in hospital, and allows herself to be thought dead. Flashforward a year later, and Alex and Sam are being their typical selves: Alex is partying all night with Eurotrash, Sam trying to be serious and plan a new heist.

They do manage to steal something major, and head off to Venice to meet with the buyer. Alex, as usual, sends things in a bad direction, but the trio is reunited and must now steal three paintings from the same Paris museum to get out from under a nasty gangster (who might well decide to kill them anyway).

Most of the book is the big three-painting heist, which is more complicated than the one in Odalisque - and I should say messy as well, in several ways - but not as exciting or iconic. You can bake the soufflé again, but it never comes out quite as fluffy or delicious. It's still a lot of big-screen fun, and ends well - in a way that could lead to a third book, or could be a real ending, depending on what the creators want - but it's clearly another run at the same thing, which here, as usual, leads to diminishing returns.

Call for the Dead by John Le Carré

I have nowhere to go from here but forward.

I've been reading Le Carré's early novels in a weird sequence - first (ten years ago), understandably, the famous one, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, then the book before that, A Murder of Quality, and then the book after that, The Looking Glass War.

I seem to be keeping that pattern, since I've now read Le Carré's first novel, Call for the Dead. So I suppose I'm now in for A Small Town in Germany and then moving forward like a normal reader.

And the first thing I realized from Call is that Murder was entirely a one-off. From things I'd read, I thought it and Call for the Dead were mysteries involving a spy (Le Carré's series character George Smiley), but Call is a novel of spycraft and working government departments. Only Murder is the outlier, as far as I've seen.

I still think a fair bit of Le Carré's initial motivation was to write against the mythologizing of Ian Fleming and his followers; he presents Smiley here as nearly a failure as a man and a professional, with a badly broken marriage behind him (as an introduction, in the first chapter) and a job where's he's at best stagnated. He's smart and incisive and good at what he does, but his world was tawdry to begin with and his piece of it is dwindling as he grows older and the glories of The War dwindle ever further in the background.

Early Le Carré is largely about The War, I'm coming to believe. I wouldn't think something fifteen years in the past would loom so large, but it does, doesn't it?

Smiley recently interviewed a Foreign Office functionary - Samuel Fennan, an up-and-comer with a high-level security clearance - about rumors he'd been in the Communist Party as a youth. Smiley liked Fennan, and told him this was routine, and that he saw no problems and would be saying so in his report. In the words of a later generation: a nothingburger.

Fennan is now dead, in what I'm afraid I have to signpost by calling an apparent suicide. (But all suicides are apparent in mystery novels, aren't they? And a fair number of apparent murders are actual suicides, too.) Smiley needs to rush to Feenan's place, in the middle of the night, and talk to his widow, who discovered the body.

I've already called this a novel of spycraft; so I've given that part away. There is spying going on, and Feenan was connected to it. Further than that, I'll leave to other readers to discover by reading - this is a short novel, but a twisty, thorny one, filled with Le Carré's wit and careful mid-century British phrasing. Smiley does end up chasing a spy ring, and, I suppose, solving a murder along the way - but the point is the spycraft; that's his job and he's good at his job.

If you want to read Le Carré, I coming to think you might as well start at the beginning. I read these first four novels out of order, but they're all strong, they're all in the same voice, and I expect they work better read in the correct sequence. So start here: even sixty-plus years later, it's tight and precise and icy, in ways I'm coming to think is characteristic of everything Le Carré did.

This Year: 2009

"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.

This may be the most obscure song in this series. [1] It's also the one I'm sure should have been a big crowd-pleasing moment in a gigantic Hollywood movie, the one that's used in all the trailers and defines that movie for a generation.

That could still happen. The wonderful thing about obscurity is that it can end at any time, and obscure things don't seem old, because they're unfamiliar. So let me have my dream.

For 2009, my favorite song is the apocalyptic We're All Gonna Die, by Mieka Pauley.

(She re-recorded it three years later for her record The Science of Making Choices - and that's a great record, don't get me wrong, with the devastating Never Fuck a Woman You Don't Love among several other killer tracks - but, as usual, I like the first, rawer version better. For me, Gonna Die is a generation-later avatar of the Psych Furs' Pretty in Pink: the second version is good, but the first version kills. So I'm specifying the version from the EP From the Mouth of Paris here.)

Gonna Die is a story-song - one of the reasons why I think it would translate to Hollywood so well. (The sound is another, of course.) The story is simple and straightforward: the title basically says it.

The part that would play over the giant expensive SFX is, of course, the chorus:

The scientists proved it: we’re all gonna die
They got charts & equations, the how when & why
You did not invite them, and neither did I
But they’re here—drink up, we’re all gonna die

This song rocks. I don't know how better to say it. It is big and imposing and just a great rock song, the kind that takes over a room and pushes everything else happening to the side. Again, it would be awesome over expensive Dolby speakers booming in the darkness on all sides in some multiplex, with CGI eye-kicks popping on a giant screen in front of you.

Until that happens, you'll just have to listen to the song, and imagine the apocalypse. That's pretty damn good, too.

[1] Since it is obscure, and I'm choosing the less-known version of an already obscure song, here's a link to it directly on Bandcamp. Really, you need this song in your life.

Books Read: September 2023

Another month; more books read. Here's the list:

Jordan Crane, Keeping Two (digital, 9/1)

Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King (in Novels 1944-1962, 9/1)

Jean "Moebius" Girard, Inside Moebius, Part 3 (digital, 9/2)

Malaka Gharib, I Was Their American Dream (9/3)

Diana Wynne Jones, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (9/3)

Kazu Kibuishi, Amulet, Book Eight: Supernova (9/4)

Josh Rountree, The Legend of Charlie Fish (9/4)

Rina Ayuyang, The Man in the Macintosh Suit (9/9)

René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, Asterix, Vol. 1 (9/10)

Jim Benton, Attack of the Stuff (digital, 9/16)

William Poundstone, The Doomsday Calculation (9/16)

Katie Skelly, Maids (digital, 9/17)

Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions (in Novels and Stories 1963-1973, 9/17)

A.J. Dungo, In Waves (9/23)

Justin Madison, Tin Man (9/24)

Jean-David Morvan, Séverine Tréfouël, David Evrard, and Walter, Irena, Book One: Wartime Ghetto (9/29)

P.G. Wodehouse, Enter Jeeves (9/29)

Carla Speed McNeil, Finder: Five Crazy Women (in The Finder Library, Vol. 2, 9/30)

I'm writing this the morning of October 1st, so I have not yet read any books in the new month. But I'm pretty sure I will, and do another post like this in a month.