Enter Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

Some books exist because they could; this is one of them.

Someone - presumably editor David A. Jasen, though also possibly some functionary at Dover Publications - realized, in the late '90s, that the first eight Jeeves stories were all published before 1923, and therefore already in the public domain, in that long period where nothing was entering the PD each year.

But those eight stories would only add up to about 130 pages, which would be an awfully slim book.

Wodehouse, though, was very prolific, and had another series of stories, somewhat similar, and just prior to those earliest Jeeves-and-Wooster pieces: 7 stories about a somewhat dim young man named Reggie Pepper, who had wodges of the stuff, friends with romantic complications, but no near-supernatural valet to navigate all of that.

The Reggie Pepper stories were also already in the public domain, and PD was Dover's bread-and-butter. (I saw "was," but I think they're still out there; I hope so. They were never big, or major, but they republished a lot of quirky, interesting stuff over the years and I love having a Dover Publications in the world.)

And so Enter Jeeves was born. It collects first those eight Jeeves stories, mostly from The Saturday Evening Post and originally published between 1915 and 1921, and then the seven Reggie Pepper stories, which appeared various places from 1911 to 1915.

Wodehouse was in his early thirties and fairly well established as a writer by that point; he'd moved from his early school stories into comedy with the first Ukridge and Psmith stories, and was writing for a lot of the top magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, living on the New York side as much as in England. (Wodehouse's is a deliberately archaic, unreal, story-book world: it is a world of England rather than the UK.) So these are reasonably mature works: both groups of stories see him casting about to find comic material and trying out different premises, but all are funny and written with his customary tone and energy.

Things shifted later, but, in these stories, Bertie Wooster was not so much a general dim bulb reliant on Jeeves as he was a fashion plate whose horrible decisions in the matter of socks, hats, and ties needed to be overruled by the ends of each story. That was a thin row to hoe, so it's pretty clear why Wodehouse found his way out of it - but he makes it work for the course of these stories.

Reggie was even less defined, just a first-person voice that was vaguely aristocratic in that Wodehouse way, young and upstanding and silly. His background shifts back and forth across the Atlantic during the stories: he's English in most of them, but American for at least one in the middle. He's also resident variously in London and New York with no explanation. (The Jeeves stories take place primarily in New York, but that's built into the premise and explained: I assume that means Wodehouse learned from the Reggie pieces and set out to be a bit more consistent the next time.)

Organizing the book with Jeeves before Reggie tends to put the good stuff up front; the Reggie stories are clearly more minor, decent work but eventually a dead end in Wodehouse's career. Oh, it's all breezy Wodehouse fun, so I don't recommend stopping in the middle, but anyone coming to this book should know that Reggie is just inherently less interesting than Bertie, though his plots get more convoluted and his stories tend to end with more of a snapper.

I believe the Jeeves stories have also been collected, at least once, in a big omnibus of all the short Jeeves-and-Wooster work: anyone who wants a deeper dive should look for one of those books. But this one is cheap, available, fun, and does everything it says it will.

Irena, Book One: Wartime Ghetto by Jean-David Morvan, Séverine Tréfouël, David Evrard, and Walter

I'm treating this as a book made for younger readers - which I think is true - but it touches on a lot of things that a lot of adults would be hesitant to lay in front of children. It definitely not a book for young children, or any particular sensitive ones. But the world is vast and full of cruelty, which children need to learn as soon as is reasonable: this could help show that it's not just full of cruelty.

Irena Sendlerowa was one of the last-discovered heroes of WWII. She worked for the Social Welfare Department of Warsaw, Poland, where - to be blunt about it - she spearheaded a vast conspiracy that snuck 2,5000 children out of the Jewish Ghetto and saved their lives over the course of the war. [1] She was discovered, imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis late in 1943, but didn't give up any of her compatriots. After leaving prison, she worked as a nurse for the end of the war and was wounded then. And she went on to a long career in public service, mostly for children, after the war, only dying in 2008 at nearly a hundred.

Irena, Book One: Wartime Ghetto collects two French albums, of a six-book series (there are two further US editions, collecting the rest), telling Sendlerowa's story. It was written by Jean-David Morvan and Séverine Tréfouël, drawn by David Evrard, colored by Walter, and translated by Dan Christensen.

I think the second volume tells the story of the end of the war, and probably the immediate aftermath. The third volume seems to cover the rest of Sendlerowa's long life, and how she became famous outside Poland much later - Israeli accolades began in the 1960s, and American attention followed in the late '90s, which, as usually happens, brought her to the attention of the rest of the Westernized world.

But this book is the core of her story: 1940 to 1943. The beginnings of the conspiracy, how it ran, the dangers they were in, the tightening grip of the occupying Nazis on the ghetto, and on all Poles. Her torture happens on these pages, and is presented tastefully but without flinching.

There's a two-page spread, about half-way into the first album, with a map of the ghetto, a few comics panels, and text boxes detailing the relentless encroachment of Nazi controls on Jewish life from 1939 to 1943, showing how the noose was set - businesses confiscated, curfews instated, removal to the ghetto, the required armband, death sentences to Poles trying to help Jews escape - on and on and on. There are other, equally crystalline moments here, but that's the best, first one: the one that sparks the "what would you do" thoughts.

Sendlerowa was a hero, period. At great cost to herself - she was very nearly executed - she not only did her job (feeding the poor of the ghetto, taking care of their health) but actively fought against an evil occupying army attempting to genocide her fellow Varsovians. And this book tells a clear, focused version of her story, as appropriate for young readers as it's capable of being.

Evrard uses a cartoony style which softens it a bit - just enough to make it bearable, which a more realistic or action-adventure style would crush. This is about the ones who survived, because it's about Sendlerowa and the children - mostly babies, as we see it here - she smuggled out. But the ones who didn't survive are behind them, in their long line, in our heads, throughout.

[1] The clearest proof that their lives were saved is that, according to all accounts, when after the war the records of the children were unearthed (literally), essentially none of them could be connected to living relatives: the children were the only survivors of their families.

Tin Man by Justin Madison

First up, I have to answer the question I had when I picked up this book: yes, that tin man. Well, one of those tin men, to be clearer.

Justin Madison's debut graphic novel Tin Man is set in a version of L. Frank Baum's Oz, and his tin man, Campbell, has the familiar shape and form Americans expect from their tin men since 1939. But that's not particularly clear at the beginning of the story, and it's never important. It's something bigger than an Easter egg, I guess, since there are plenty of references to Baum here, but it's all background.

We're in a recognizably modern world: suburbia, TV news, two-paycheck families, junkyards, high school students who play video games and hang out to do mischief. The land is called Oz, which is mentioned but not emphasized. It looks mostly like our world, with a few tweaks.

There's a major space industry, and people can build space-capable ships in their backyards, in best Tom Swift fashion. Kids can aspire to get out of their dead-end towns by getting into the very selective VASTE Institute, something like a STEM magnet high school with much more emphasis on spaceships and big wrenches.

But they're still kids, and that's what Tin Man is about. Three young people who each want something - though they don't all exactly know what they want, when the book begins - who meet, and who each find something like what they want (or need) by the end.

One of them is Campbell, the tin man. He grew up with his people, in the forest, chopping down trees. But he heard of a wizard, in a far-off city, who makes mechanical hearts for tin men that allows them to feel, and Campbell wanted that for himself. His father didn't understand why; they fought; Campbell ran away. There's a bit more to the story, but that comes out in the course of the book.

Campbell meets Fenn in a junkyard. Campbell is there: living or hanging out or just existing. Fenn is a local kid, maybe ten or so. He's obsessed with space; his hero is Jed Astro, a famous explorer. And Fenn is picking through junkyards as he tries to build a spaceship himself - he finds a mechanical heart, he befriends Campbell, he's the glue that pulls this story together.

The third character is Fenn's older sister, Solar. She used to be an academic whiz, head of the class at her high school, recruited for VASTE. But she's hanging with the stoners and bullies now, dating the worst of them: slacking off, skipping school, avoiding work and responsibility, looking to get a job at a local garage and give up on all expectations.

Fenn wants his old sister back: the one who cared about space and science and the future. The one that worked with him and was good at the same things he cares about.

Solar wants... Well, she used to want to go to VASTE, to go to space, to get out of this town and make something of herself. Now, she doesn't seem to want anything.

Campbell wants that mechanical heart, we think - but we learn that he'd already gotten it, and how that went.

Meanwhile, Terrible Twisters are running through Oz, getting closer. And Solar's new friends - especially her boyfriend, Merrick, their leader - are mean and destructive and getting worse. And we learn why Solar changed, what happened in her life (and Fenn's) recently that soured her on life.

And they all get what they want, or maybe need, at the end, as the twisters hit and Merrick continues to be a horrible human being and Fenn's homemade spaceship turns out to be unexpectedly useful.

Madison has a somewhat indy-comics style, a little grungy, with dot eyes: it reminds me a little of Jeff Lemire, though not that grungy. His places are real, his people expressive, his colors crisp and bright. And he's just sneaky enough, with his Oz references and unobtrusive storytelling, for a reader like me who eats that stuff up. Tin Man is another one of the flood of recent graphic stories aimed at teens, but, like the best of that flood, it's not limited to them.

In Waves by A.J. Dungo

A.J. Dungo obscures the central theme of his first graphic novel for a long time. The cover copy only hints at it. I have to assume that's all on purpose. And, to be a fair reviewer, I feel like I should do the same.

But know that In Waves is a true story, that it's about something major and important in Dungo's life - I hate to say "that happened to him," for reasons that would only be clear to people who've read the book - and that is related to but very distinct from what In Waves says it is about. I might say a little more, at the very end here, if I can do it without spoiling.

In Waves says it's about surfing. And it is: it's a four-hundred page graphic novel that largely traces the history of the sport, from pre-contact Hawaii through the greats of the early twentieth century.  It's informed and interesting, a cultural history rather than the story of a sport's winners and rules and contests. But that's just one-half of the book; as the minimal back-cover copy puts it, the other half of In Waves consists of Dungo's "personal narrative of love, loss, and the solace of surfing."

Dungo came late to surfing, personally, despite - as far as I can see - growing up in Sothern California, somewhere near the beach. His girlfriend, Kristen, loved to surf, as did many other members of her family, so that's how Dungo got into it. That half of the book is the personal part, the part I'm going to avoid talking in detail about. It is a narrative of loss, in the end - Dungo constructs the story so the loss happens about mid-way through the book, but it's clear from early on that this will not be an entirely happy story.

Dungo tells those two stories on crisp light pages - the present-day storyline in a green-blue, a couple of shades lighter than the cover, and the past in a similarly light amber. He gives them both lots of pages, plenty of room to tell the story, to have small moments in both timeframes. The modern story is more personal, more immediate than the historical one, as of course it has to be. The historical story is mostly background or explanation: what this all means, the deeper history or significance, and maybe what Dungo researched and learned about to process that loss. But the core of In Waves is his story, as it should be.

This Year: 2014

"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 back to the old well again: another song of heartbreak and desolation. It's the kind of song I love best, I think.

And this is a great one, from a fine songwriter who also has a lovely voice just right for her material, especially this song: breathy and quiet, already devastated.

For 2014, I want to tell you about Let Me Go by Kate Tucker and the Sons of Sweden.

It’s my fault
It’s your fault
If you don’t give a damn
Forget about it

It's a break-up song; it starts quietly. If you know anything about break-ups, you understand it won't stay quiet.

There's a chugging drum line that starts in right after the first verse. I want to say it picks up speed, a bit at a time, as the song goes on, but I may be mishearing power and volume for speed. This is a song that gets bigger and bigger, more and more demanding, verse by chorus by verse, as Tucker runs through this break-up moment.

It's not even a strident break-up song: Tucker isn't complaining or listing faults, just talking about this moment and how everything is broken and irreparable.

And it doesn't get that loud: just loud enough. Just clear enough. Just, precisely, to be clear how entirely over it all is, right at this moment.

Find a fire to light
Go set your flares off in the night
I’ll be miles out of sight
Cause you just let me go like that

And it's all done in three-and-a-half minutes, that perfect pop-song length.

You go you go
You go on down
You dream you dream
You dream out loud
You eat your heart out
Everytime

Books Read: October 2023

My monthly index of the blog, in the initial not-useful form, is below. The actual links will be added once the posts go live; I'm running anywhere from 4-7 weeks ahead on my posts, depending on timing of vacations and other boring minutia.

Joan Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, and Boulet, Dungeon: Zenith, Vol. 5: Fog and Tears (digital, 10/1)

Jeff Lemire and Stefano Simone, The Last Days of Black Hammer (digital, 10/7)

Neil Gaiman and Rafael Albuquerque, A Study in Emerald (digital, 10/8)

Sir Thomas Mallory and Peter Ackroyd, The Death of King Arthur (10/8)

Álvaro Ortiz, Ashes (digital, 10/13)

Luca Debus and Francesco Matteuzzi, Funny Things: A Comic Strip Biography of Charles M. Schulz (digital, 10/14)

Michael Blumlein, Longer (10/14)

Alex Norris, Oh No (digital, 10/15)

Ryan Pagelow, Buni: Happiness Is a State of Mind (digital, 10/21)

Jim Woodring, Jim (digital, 10/22)

Joan Didion, Where I Was From (in We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, 10/22)

Jane Zei, Success Is 90% Spite (digital, 10/23)

Eddie Campbell, The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell and The Fate of the Artist (digital, 10/28)

Christopher Grady, Lunarbaboon: The Daily Life of Parenthood (digital, 10/29)

Next month I will read more books.

Quote of the Week: I'll Have What She's Having

Patty Keene was stupid on purpose, which was the case with most women in Midland City. The women all had big minds because they were big animals, but they did not use them much for this reason: unusual ideas could make enemies, and the women, if they were going to achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends they could get.

So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines, All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.

 - Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions (p.608 in Novels & Stories, 1963-1973)

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

I thought I was going to read Cat's Cradle - that's the first or second most famous Vonnegut book, and I'd re-read Slaughterhouse-Five a few years back, so it seemed the obvious next step.

But what I had was a Library of America book, with Cat and Slaughterhouse and also God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Breakfast of Champions. So I poked at the beginnings of the other three novels, and ended up reading this one. Who knows why? The first pages were more open, maybe more purely Vonnegutian, and that hooked me.

So I read Breakfast of Champions, or, Goodbye Blue Monday! for the first time since the early Eighties. The novel that began Vonnegut's late period, if we're being polite, or his minor period, if we're being honest. I'm using the cover of the edition I read in paperback, way back when, instead of the current paperback cover, or the serious, bland LoA cover, just because.

Vonnegut was always discursive, and got more so as he went on - his early novels have plots and clear character development and all that, but, as he went on, his books turned more and more into mosaics, in which Vonnegut spoke directly to the reader about his concerns at the time, telling the story and interrupting it in turn. Well, I haven't re-read the novels after Breakfast for a long time: I have a sense this may have been the peak of that style, that he calmed back down a bit after this. So maybe I should focus on the novel I just read.

Breakfast contains a lot of Vonnegut's best paragraphs and sentences, and, in many ways, is the culmination of the ideas and concerns of the first two decades of his career. But the ending fizzles rather than snaps, and the overall impression is of a big shaggy-dog story, with the readers both the dogs and the audience. What it shows, I think, most of all, is that Vonnegut style - which seems so random and flowing, artless and immediate - is actually both carefully constructed and terribly fragile. When it works - and it does work, for most of the novel - it's immediate and overwhelming, the voice of truth and reality. But when it stumbles, everything it carries drops and the artifice is obvious.

Vonnegut says, early on, that this book will be swan-song for a lot of his continuing characters. Most of all, this was to be the final appearance of Kilgore Trout, the visionary science fiction writer - Vonnegut quickly sketches out, as an aside, the rest of his life and how he dies - who had wandered through several Vonnegut books before this one. This time, though, as Vonnegut puts it at the beginning of the first chapter:

This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.

One of them was a science-fiction writer named Kilgore Trout. He was a nobody at the time, and he supposed his life was over. He was mistaken. As a consequence of the meeting, he became one of the most beloved and respected human beings in history.

The man he met was an automobile dealer, a Pontiac dealer named Dwayne Hoover. Dwayne Hoover was on the brink of going insane.

Not to anatomize too much, but "on the brink of going insane" is pretty close to the Platonic idea description of every Vonnegut protagonist. Dwayne, in particular, is poised for a psychotic break, and gets one after reading a Trout story in which the reader is the only real person in a universe constructed as an experiment. This happens in the very last chapter - Breakfast is all build-up and no pay-off - where Dwayne goes on a violent rampage during an arts festival.

Vonnegut's point is clear, and consistent from earlier books: human beings need to care about each other. Not doing so leads to ruin, he says, gesturing around himself. He says this over and over, in different ways, usually with a sense, buried or obvious, that it's already too late and that empathy would have been needed long ago. (See that "dying fast," above.)

It's a quick read, and, as I said, it's full of great Vonnegut sentences and thoughts. If you're at all in sympathy with his ideas, it will be a strong experience. But the ending is both deliberately telegraphed from the beginning and accidentally fumbled, which means it ends more quietly, less definitively than it should.

Oh, well. Or, perhaps I should say instead: so it goes.

Maids by Katie Skelly

The most interesting creators are the ones you have to learn how to read. They tell stories their way, making their choices but not going out of their way to explain. And it can take reading a few books to figure that out: not all readers will want to spend that much effort.

I think I'm beginning to understand how to read Katie Skelly's comics. I'm getting more excited, more interested, with each new book I read, which is a good sign: creators should be engrossing, should be exciting, as you learn what they care about and how to see things through their angles. So I may not have quite clicked with My Pretty Vampire, but there was something unique there, which brought me back for The Agency.

And now I'm back again for Maids, Skelly's 2020 book. I think this is her most important book to date; it's also her most recent major graphic novel, which might be saying the same thing in a different way.

This is a true story, at its core - a true crime story. As I think is her standard, Skelly works in a cinematic fashion, connecting scenes through images and having a clear "camera" that views the action on her pages. Also as usual, she doesn't go out of her way to explain things: she's not one for captions, and her people talk to each other in the ways real people do; they're not going to explain themselves for your benefit.

It is 1933 France. Christine and Lea Papin are sisters, who grew up poor - dumped in a convent school by their mother. Christine has been a maid for the wealthy Lancelin family for some time; she's just gotten them to hire Lea as well.

The hours are long, the work both endless and tedious and never enough. The Lancelins - mother and daughter - are not actively oppressive or cruel out of proportion to their station and time, but that still leaves a lot of ground for oppression and cruelty. It is a horrible life for the young Papin sisters. They see no other options, no ways to get any better life. And Lea has visions or breaks; if she was living in the modern world she would probably get medical treatment, but a poor woman in 1933 just has to muddle through.

Skelly's work is about women, always. The murderers and victims here are all women; all the violence, in both directions, physical and emotional and economic, is from women to women. The anger and scorn and fear and disgust are all between women.

And I think Maids is the purest, most extreme expression of that so far from Skelly, the book where her cinematic eye and genre-fiction influences click together to tell one crisp story of death and revenge and oppression and horror. I don't know that I'd recommend this book for people who haven't read Skelly before, but I do recommend it.

The Doomsday Calculation by William Poundstone

This is likely to be either quite short (because there's not that much to say about a non-fiction book surveying an interesting field of knowledge) or way too long (because I give in to the impulse to complain at length about some underlying things the author explains). Let's see if I can avoid that specific Scylla and Charybdis this time....

The Doomsday Calculation is a 2019 book by William Poundstone, who has worked as a financial journalist, writing for various major publications, and also written a number of books mostly circling the intersection of business, popular science, and information theory. (He started off with a loose series starting with Big Secrets, about, roughly, trade secrets of consumer goods, in the '80s, and that's when I started reading him.) Poundstone is one of those writers that I think of as someone I read regularly, but the last book of his I mentioned here was Priceless in 2010.

Doomsday is about the possibility of the end of the human race, and related topics, mostly pitched at a philosophical or loosely statistical level. It covers a swath of intellectual history, roughly the last thirty years, starting from the question: given what we know now (age of the universe and of Earth, length the human race has existed, and some other considerations), can we estimate how much longer there will be a human race?

And the answer is, of course, yes. We can estimate anything. But the expected range can be quite large, and is hugely dependent on the numbers you plug into the assumptions. Most of the book is about the squabbling over assumptions, various theories about related things (from the Drake Equation to Bayesian statistics), and how this general idea can be actually useful when applied to events that aren't one-and-done, as human extinction would be.

I find that the arguments are typically pitched in the kind of thought-experiment mode I find deeply unrealistic, relying on the human equivalent of spherical cows to make them come out correctly. (I have a similar problem with the Monty Hall Problem, which doesn't come up here: my assumption of how that works in the real world is that Monty has discretion to open or not open a door, which throws the math utterly askew.) So they're all intellectually interesting, but I rarely find them convincing. They all depend on assumptions that don't match reality, and so extrapolating them to reality is a big leap - sure, the theorists want to make that leap, because it's interesting and provocative, but if you don't agree with the priors, it all falls apart.

Poundstone is a good writer for this kind of material, a born explainer, and he lays out the players and their theories clearly and succinctly. Doomsday is a fun, intellectually interesting book to read, even if (like me) you don't buy a whole lot of it.

OK, one last quibble: the last section is about AI, and it might seem to be more relevant now than even when Poundstone wrote the book a few years ago. And, again, Poundstone is clear and precise about what various people say and are worried about. But the idea of killer, self-bootstrapping AI is so vastly far away from the reality of Large Language Models and Machine Learning that even the doom-mongers have to assume a discontinuity - the singularity or something similar - to get from where we are to the doomsday scenario. What we have now are input-driven tools that generate plausible text (and other formats), but that are not self-directed. Getting from there to a computer mind that makes plans for itself and self-organizes is not even a path: it's just a bold assumption that it could happen.

Frankly, I blame the Turing Test, which built in the sleight-of-hand that anything that can fool a human should be considered human. That's a stupid metric; huge numbers of things fool humans, all the time. Half the animals in the world look like other things, human minds see faces in chicken nuggets and moon-craters - the human brain makes patterns out of things; it always will generate false positives from anything halfway close. So "if a computer program talks like a human, we can consider it equivalent to a human" isn't true in any useful sense - it's a nice benchmark, but that's about it.

Anyway, none of that can be laid at Poundstone's feet: he's explaining the state of things in this area of human knowledge, and, as always, some humans are conspiracy theorists, some are paranoid goofballs, and some are unimaginative math-heads. If you like arguing with books in your head, this is a great one.

Attack of the Stuff by Jim Benton

I haven't decided how far I'm going to go down the Jim Benton well. I discovered him through his gag cartoons for adults - Dog Butts and Love. And Stuff Like That. And Cats. and Man, I Hate Cursive; see also GoComics for the ongoing feed - and I'm solidly on board for one-off graphic novels for middle-graders. (There are days I feel like a middle-grader myself, still.)

But I don't know if I'm going to dive into the clear middle-grade illustrated-novel series, like "Franny K. Stein" - those seem a bit more like product, and might turn into diminishing returns for a middle-aged man pretty quickly. So far, I'm finding everything Benton does to be a hoot, and I don't want to break that streak. My aim is to check out all of the things I would find awesome, and quietly avoid the stuff that really is just for the ankle-biters.

So I liked Clyde (a standalone) a couple of months ago, and came back for Attack of the Stuff, also a standalone, right now, and thought both of them were great. But I'm looking at the rest of the Benton catalog and trying to figure out what would be next.

What I like about both Clyde and Stuff is how wacky and random they are from the jump: Benton works in weird ideas like Seurat works in paint, providing a surface that looks conventional at a glance but gets quirkier the closer you look.

Stuff is about Bill Waddler - he's the duck on the cover. This is the kind of world where everyone's an anthropomorphic something, ducks or pigs or bears or dogs or things that really aren't clear. Bill hears things talk: all kinds of things, all the time. His toilet LaToyat Toiletstein wants to be a movie star. His peanut butter and jelly complain they're allergic to each other. His clock radio complains that he snores when he sleeps. All his stuff whines and kibitzes at him all the time, and he's sick of it.

Even his job - he runs a small street-corner stand called Hey Man, where he sells hay for cash - isn't particularly rewarding. So, after a couple of bad days of filthy old guys ranting about nature and moderately-helpful orange-juice-store workers and pig customers who can't quite decide if they want hay, Bill gives up and runs off to "live in nature."

There, he is almost immediately attacked by a large number of snakes. It is not entirely clear if they are farting snakes, which he dreamed about previously.

Meanwhile, back in civilization, the Internet collapses three days later, and everything goes to chaos immediately. And the orange-juice-store guy, Kris, remembers that Bill can talk to things, and figures he might be able to talk to the Internet and find out what's wrong.

Kris finds Bill, who is no longer being attacked by snakes for reasons I will not spoil.

And of course Bill can talk to the Internet. And of course the Internet wants something - a hat.

In the end, the Internet gets a hat, Bill and Kris get a whole lot of stuff from the government for fixing the Internet, and everyone is happy.

Benton's line is loose and open, his pages flow quickly, and his dialogue is always zippy, amusing and at right angles to what the reader expects. Yes, it's all pitched at a level that will work for ten-year-olds - that might be a deal-breaker for some people - but unless that's a problem for you, Benton's cartooning is wonderfully specific, funny, and quick-moving. Hornswoggler says check it out.

This Year: 2013

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

As I said the last two weeks, 2012 is a scratch, because I had two songs for 2011.

I may have done this entire series, the whole "This Year" sequence, just to put this down in words. It's been bouncing around my head for a few years now.

Songs affect us strongly, of course - every person (I hope I speak for everyone but I probably don't) has some songs that are personal or important or special, for different reasons and in different ways. We can't choose that, mostly. It happens. It hits us.

I'm not a visual thinker. My mind works in words, or concepts. But this song - it's like there's a video for it, that I could make. I don't see it - my mind just does not work that way - but I know how it would go, I know the beats, how it lines up with the music, I know the emotions and the story.

I could probably do an AV script for it - time it out to the second. If I could draw at all, I could storyboard it. It's all that clear. And it came out of nowhere, from listening to the song.

For 2013, it has to be Heat Death Infinity Splitter by 65 Days of Static. It's an instrumental. And, in my head, it's a SF story.

(Oh, I should also say, before I completely dive down my rabbit hole, that 65dos - that's the short form of their name, all internetty - is thoroughly awesome and has a bunch of other songs equally good. Radio Protector. String Loop. Weak4. Dance Parties (Distant). Come To Me. Those last two are the only ones I know with actual lyrics, if you need that to get into a band.)

You can quit here if you want; it will run long. It is hugely self-indulgent.

No one knows what is happening
No one knows what is happening
There is a lot of danger out there, OK?

This is spoken, to open the song. From here, I'm going to tell you the story - again, it's my story, it's not official or "real" or anything. Just what came, full-formed, into my head from listening. (You may want to start the video below, as you read.)

There are two main characters: The Engineer and The Kid. The Engineer is that speaker; The Kid is, well, her kid. Ten, eleven, something like that. Boy or girl, doesn't matter. A kid, the child of an engineer, inquisitive, daring as any tween, smart.

We're on a big old spacestation, out in the depths somewhere. Lived-in, loved, full of people and life. We open with a longshot, the camera moving in and wandering around the surface as we hear The Engineer speak, as we move into the station and see her talk to The Kid. I don't think they're in person: she's talking over some speaker or comlink, already at work keeping the old hulk running when The Kid is ready to start the day.

We think The Engineer might be in charge of maintenance or systems. We see her bustling around, quickly, giving orders, looking at things, making fixes. We know this station needs a lot of attention to keep it going.

Cut to space: a ship is approaching: shiny, angular, inhuman.

Cut again: leaders of the station, assembling. Clearly nervous, some happy some apprehensive. Ready to meet the envoys. The aliens.

Interspersed: The Kid heading through the station. Purposeful, inquisitive. Going to see the big event. Snaking through crowds, going through sneaky ways. The Kid knows this station intimately: can get anywhere and see anything. Isn't going to miss this.

The music is quietly ominous as the alien ship docks. Doors open. At 1:10 the envoys start moving through the station, to that slow drumbeat.

They float. They are not humanoid at all. I see them as something like a Grant Morrison-era Doom Patrol creation: partially drapery and partially boxy, moving slowly, at a stately pace, down the corridors of the station. There is nothing human about them. There is nothing obviously organic about them.

The assembled human leaders see a feed of the envoys; they're unnerved, shuffling. But they're committed, it's going to happen. They swallow, collect themselves, whatever. They're professionals. They can do this.

The Kid is everywhere, sneaking around to see everything. Our viewpoint, our identification character. We are The Kid, in a way. We see it all through The Kid's eyes.

As the envoys move - more slowly than seems reasonable, painfully slowly, like the procession to the headsman's axe - the station is under stress. We know the envoys are doing it even if we have no idea how. Dials slowly turn into the red. Maybe steam comes from unexpected places. The Engineer and her team is working faster, keeping it all together - this is nothing new, it's what she does every day. As the song goes on, it gets harder (especially with that discordant note starting about 3:00 and getting louder thereafter, like a warning siren), but she's the best, she can do it. It's an old station; these things happen.

This all builds for what feels like far too long. Almost three minutes of the envoy's slow procession - we see them approaching the square or plaza where the human leaders wait; from our glimpses of The Kid we understand the layout of the station and the main route. Cutting from them to the human leaders, to human crowds watching from the fringes (shocked or surprised or increasingly frightened), to The Kid, to The Engineer.

Slow build. Slow burn. For three minutes.

The envoys reach the human leaders at 3:42. Everything quiets down. They stop. The camera shows us everything one more time, during that quiet, that waiting. Then, just before 3:59, the first envoy - slightly larger or shinier or boxier; clearly the leader - makes some sort of gesture. And all the dials around The Engineer crash into the red at once; everything shakes and is pushed to the limits.

The station is falling apart. It is doomed.

Mass panic: the crowds run, trample each other. The Kid is cool but clearly amazed, keeping clear of crowds, keeping an eye on the envoys, wondering what just happened and how.

The envoys turn. They don't interact with the human leaders at all. They head back to their ship, only slightly quicker than before. Maybe we see their ship leave, somewhere in the chaos.

The cuts are quicker, the action frenzied and chaotic. Everything is going to hell.

The human leaders are just as panicked as everyone else, heading to lifeboats or whatever. Trying to save themselves. We see mass panic and destruction for about forty seconds, as the music screeches the song of the destruction of this world.

The Kid reaches some kind of escape pod about 4:40. Closes the door, ejects - that cuts the volume of the music. Looks back towards the station. Sees, through some kind of window, The Engineer, in some decaying fragment or another, still at her duty station, even though it's now far too late. She is not dead yet, but she has no way out.

They share a glance. There's no way they can communicate. There's no way The Kid can save her. And, as the song ends, the fragment of the station rotates or bounces away, and The Kid sees The Engineer disappear forever.

That's the story this song gave me. Happy Halloween.

Quote of the Week: Storm's A-Brewin'

Many of those who'd gathered at the beach scattered back to the street. The smart ones had already found someplace indoors to shelter. But others still lingered near the waves as they battered the shore. Lightning broke across the sky like cracks in an old silver mirror. The air was humming, and the earth rumbled. The violence of the storm burrowed into my bones, made me feel small. Rain kept pace with the wind, coming down in a torrent, gave the impression that everything people had built here could be broken into bits and disappeared from memory. We could all vanish tomorrow, and the ocean would continue to feed.

 - Josh Rountree, The Legend of Charlie Fish, p.119

Asterix, Vol. 1 by René Gosciny and Albert Uderzo

I'm going to try not to analyze too much here, but looking at sixty-year-old commercial properties, created for children, from another continent, can give one a lot of parallax to shove Deep Thoughts into. I do want to resist that urge. These were meant to be quick entertaining stories for a mostly young audience of French and Belgian Boomers - were they called "Baby Boomers" in Europe the same way as in North America? I realize I don't know - and I want to see them on that level, to be clear about what they're trying to do.

So maybe the way I lead off is by admitting there are a lot of silly names in Asterix, Vol. 1, the recent (2021) US omnibus of René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo's first three bandee dessinée of that series. Roman camps called Laudanum and Aquarium, major leaders named Vitalstatistix and Marcus Dontmesswithus, Goths named Rhetoric and Lyric and Satiric - that kind of thing.

They're amusing funny names: they work on the level they're aiming for. But a book that starts off with funny names for humor is not going to get sophisticated - it's going to be slapstick and alarums and goofy misunderstandings and a whole lot of stylized, punch-em-up, nobody-really-gets-hurt violence.

It's somewhat classier than the US version of that kind of comedy might be - I tend to think the US jumps right into stoopid humor like the Three Stooges when it descends to slapstick, and Asterix has more thing-everyone-knows-from-history jokes. Well, it would, wouldn't it?

Anyway, let me explain the set-up, for anyone unfamiliar: Asterix is the little guy on the cover. He's a Gaul, in 50 BC, living in the one small plucky village in Gaul (modern France, more or less) that was not conquered by the Romans. Roman camps circle that village; they have not given up. But the Gauls, our heroes, are smarter and sneakier and have powerful magic and are the protagonists, so they will always win. In particular, druid Panoramix makes a magic potion that gives drinkers super-strength, which Asterix (and probably others) use to beat up Roman patrols on the regular.

Gauls are plucky and have names that end with X. Romans are stern (if leaders) and vaguely cowardly and work-avoidant (if legionnaires) and have names that end with "us". There are some Goth (German) stereotypes later, and some people who seem to be Italian (I guess civilians and not from Rome itself) as well. I expect, as the series went on, we got Britons and Poles and Turks and who knows what else, with their characteristic foibles and quirky names, and that they were all always bested by our heroic Gauls.

The three books here originally appeared in French in the early 1960s, and have been translated by Joe Johnson for the 21st century in language that keeps the goofy, kid-friendly, mid-century tone of the originals. (Note my massive assumption there; I don't read French and have never seen "the originals" as such.)

First up is Asterix the Gaul, which sets it all up: small village, Romans circling, trying to find out why the Gauls have been able to hold out, that whole thing. A Roman soldier (Caligula Minus, aka Caliguliminix) infiltrates the village, learns about the potion and runs back to his centurion, Crismus Bonus. So the Romans capture Panoramix, to get the secret of the potion, but Asterix also gets himself captured and the two Gauls outwit the Romans repeatedly before finally "escaping" just as Julius Caesar himself shows up for the big ending.

Asterix and the Golden Sickle sees Asterix and his buddy Obelix (the usual giant soft-hearted guy, who has permanent super-strength from being dipped in the potion as an infant) heading to Lutetia to get Panoramix a new golden sickle from Mettallurgix. Of course it's not that simple: there are bandits and Romans and a sickle-market-control scheme, among other things. Asterix and Obelix are imprisoned multiple times, breaking out each time as soon as it's funniest. Obviously, by the end, they get the sickle they need, foil the bad guys and get Metallurgix back to his shop.

And then there's Asterix and the Goths, which also centers on Panoramix getting kidnapped, which seems like a weird thing to become a standard plot this early. He goes to the annual gathering of druids, yadda yadda yadda, and is dragged over the border by Goths who want to invade and were looking for a secret weapon to help them do that. Asterix and Obelix give chase, getting tangled with Goths and Romans and bandits along the way, before fomenting a massive all-against-all power struggle among the Goths and returning triumphantly with Panoramix.

Again, these are stories originally made for maybe middle-grade kids: quick, fun, with lots of appropriate jokes and physical comedy, set in a vaguely familiar historical milieu. They come across as slightly more highbrow to Americans, especially three generations later, than I think they did to the original audience. The current editions are a decent size, though smaller than the original album format - and I do think books like this, full of small panels and lots of dialogue, are best read at their original size. And, of course, if you like this one, there are a lot more - I think Asterix #40 was recently published, by a new generation of creators.

The Man in the McIntosh Suit by Rina Ayuyang

The publisher describes this graphic novel as a thriller, but I'd put it solidly in noir - that may seem needlessly nitpicky, but if you're the kind of reader who has strong opinions on the location of the border between mystery and thriller, it may be helpful.

It's written and drawn by Rina Ayuyang in a soft, mostly blue palette - I am not an expert on art or tools, but it looks like some kind of art crayon or soft pencil to me, with lots of texture and shades of a few colors but relatively muted lines drawn with a quick, energetic hand.

It's 1929, somewhere in an agricultural field in Northern California. There's a group of fruit pickers, who seem to be all Filipino. They aren't exactly mistreated directly, but the larger white society is prejudiced against them, worker protections are scanty to begin with, and these guys do the poorest-paid, lowest-skill work: it's a hard life. They all, we think, came here to the US to make money to send back home, either intending to return once they made "enough" or to bring more family members over, one by one, to make a new life in the USA.

The story starts centered on three of the workers, but one quickly becomes central: Alessandro "Bobot" Juaňez, trained as a lawyer in the Philippines and married to Elysia, who he hasn't seen since he emigrated and hasn't heard from in longer than he's happy about. (The other two workers are Angel and Edison; they're not unimportant, but Bobot is our viewpoint character.)

Bobot is mercurial, with a strong sense of justice and a tendency to do things when they come into his head rather than thinking them through. He's clearly smart, but doesn't always let his smarts guide him. His life hasn't gone the way he hoped it would, but he seems to still be looking forward, planning a better life in California. But he wishes he would hear from Elysia: it's not clear if he even knows whether she's in the Philippines or America.

Bobot gets a delayed letter from his cousin, Benny, saying Elysia is in San Francisco; he steals Angel's fancy suit - this gives the book its title, The Man in the McIntosh Suit, though the suit itself isn't as important as the weight that title seems to give it - and heads out to find her.

And that's where it gets noir - or more so, since "migrant workers looking for better lives among prejudiced locals" can already be pretty noir, and there were hints of that plot in the first pages - as Bobot looks for Benny, and gets caught up in the local Filippino community in SF. He gets a job in a small restaurant, alongside Danilo and Dulce, who know Benny - he's away on some sort of trip, vaguely explained, when Bobot arrives.

He sees the woman Benny wrote him about: La Estrella, the star of the late-night Baranguay Club (probably a speakeasy of some kind, illegal in at least one way), the center of the nightlife of the Filipino ghetto. His impulses get the better of him, and he runs afoul of Renato, who runs the Baranguay and, as he says, pretty much all of the Filipino community in SF.

Bobot wants to get La Estrella away from the Club, and she's...not uninterested in him. But it's more complicated than it seems, and Renato might either just swat Bobot down or have work for him to do. And some other players have aims that are not entirely aligned with Bobot's - for instance, who did send that letter, and why?

All that adds up to noir: people living tough lives, with tough choices, random violence, and outbursts of anger. Men and women in relationships sometimes hidden, sometimes not what they seem. People not who they seem, hiding or mistaken for others. All of them looking for more, for better, and willing to go to extremes for it. And, above all, people making bad choices: that's the core of noir.

Bobot makes it out at the end of this book; the very last pages imply he will return again. Ayuyang is not done telling the story of this 1929. But McIntosh Suit tells a full story: it stands on its own. It's a deep dive into a murky world, focused on that essential noir hero, the man who can't stop himself from his impulses and keeps getting dragged deeper into problems.