The Last Days of Black Hammer by Jeff Lemire and Stefano Simeone

A cynical reader, such as me, could look at that title and think "oh, good, they're finally ending this repetitive superhero waffling that never actually goes anywhere." But that reader would be wrong.

This is not "last" in the sense of anything actually ending. This is a superhero "last," meaning it's about something in the past, and retelling a story already at least half-told multiple times before - but now telling it in greater detail. Even more so, what we have here pretends to be the actual issues of the 1986-era comic in which the original Black Hammer snuffed it, with covers that have fake high numbers and everything.

So The Last Days of Black Hammer is actually a prequel to nearly all of the Black Hammer stories we've already seen. (Black Hammer '45 takes place almost entirely before this, as does Barbalien: Red Planet, but I think those are the only ones - OK, maybe Doctor Andromeda, too.)

The whole premise of the entire vast Black Hammer-i-verse was that there was a big superhero fight (cough Crisis! cough) against the "Anti-God," who looks nothing like Darkseid, in the sky over Spiral City, which apparently also turned the skies of the rest of the world red, because that's the thing comics geeks still latch onto from Crisis even thirty years later, and that the Greatest Hero of All Time, Black Hammer, whacked said Anti-God with his big, um, Black Hammer, and that made the Anti-God go all "ouchie!" and run away forever and forever but also alas! killed Black Hammer in the same way that every superhero dies at least once.

For the dull ones in back: Black Hammer is the Silver Age Flash. He died so worlds can live. Got it? (Character-wise, he's actually more like the Black Racer crossed with Thor, but that's a different kind of derivative-ness.)

This pretends to be the 1986-era issues 234-237 issues of the Black Hammer comic book, including both a "hero no more!" and an "all-new! all-different!" cover, plus the double-sized epic conclusion. There's also a coda or epilogue at the end, outside that "old comics" schema, to show how Sad it all was, how Important was The Sacrifice of Black Hammer To Save Us All, and that His Daughter had to Grow Up Without a Father, Alas! 

Otherwise, though, this is exactly what we already know and what we expect. Black Hammer is conflicted, and wants to give up hitting things with a big hammer to Spend More Time With His Family Before It Is Too Late. But, alas! He Is Needed, because The Bad Guys Will Destroy The World And Only Black Hammer Can Stop Them. The superhero group that still doesn't have a name - the Spiral City Sluggers? the Saviors? the Bad Guy Whompers? the Fabulous Dudes? - more or less breaks up after the events of the first "issue" here, having stopped what was believed to be Their Greatest Threat, and several of them need to be brought back out of retirement - quickly, perfunctorily - for the big ending.

Reader, there is nothing here you will not predict, nothing that gives a true moment of surprise or wonder, nothing that isn't entirely derivative and utterly pre-determined. This is a piece of product, an engineered jigsaw puzzle piece that slots in exactly in the middle of all of the other pieces to make a bland picture of people punching each other.

I usually praise creator Jeff Lemire's writing when I talk about these books, though I know it feels like faint praise. (He can, and does, do a lot better than this. But the Black Hammer books are professional, and the characters are as dimensional as anything in generic superhero-dom can be.) This time, the art is from Stefano Simone, who has a looser, sketchier line that might not quite say "1986 Big Event Comics" to me, but it's energetic and fun and doesn't look like fifty years of superhero comics, so I count that as a plus.

But, as always, I question the whole point of the exercise. We know everything here already. Last Days adds nothing.

The Locusts Have No King by Dawn Powell

I don't claim to be an expert in everything I read. Sometimes I have history or experience that's relevant. Sometimes I'm just a reader, finally getting to something I maybe should have read decades ago. But I like writing here about the books I just read to crystalize the thoughts that book inspired - positive or negative, interesting or banal, useful or ridiculous.

I've never read Dawn Powell before. I had two volumes of her novels, in gorgeous green-cloth Library of America editions, sitting on a shelf for a decade or two - long enough ago that I've never mentioned her on this blog at all. She was a novelist of the interwar and post-war era, one of the many who came from somewhere else (Ohio, in her case) to New York and wrote largely about New York. She had a cutting tongue and an unflinching eye, two things I've always admired in writers; I thought I wanted to read her works for a long time, and I finally did.

The Locusts Have No King is her 1948 novel, considered one of her best and most characteristic. (I did a little research, weighing this one against A Time to Be Born and finally choosing Locust because I found its kaleidoscopic first paragraph meatier.)

In the cliché of literary fiction, it's the story of one affair: married playwright Lyle Gaynor, female despite the confusing name, has taken up quietly with literary essayist Frederick Olliver. Most of the main plot of the novel, such as it is - it's more a swirling social satire than a straightforwardly plotted novel - is about how they separate for a while but eventually come back together.

(In a way, it feels like the relationship version of that old plot, where a bad character reforms and a good character goes to hell, and they pass each other along the way - except that Lyle and Frederick somewhat switch social circles and outlooks on life for a while. They're both bad or both good, I suppose - Powell doesn't really do absolutes like that.)

We are not meant to sympathize with Lyle's husband and collaborator Alan, who is cruel and obnoxious to her in the few scenes where we see him. He's an invalid - some kind of leg injury put him in a wheelchair, years before, and turned him from an actor/director into the weak link in the playwriting Gaynor marriage - though that does make him an echo of Lady Chatterly's Sir Clifford, which I have to assume is on purpose. (Alan is assumed to be incapable of seduction, by Lyle as by everyone else, though that turns out, very late in the novel, not to be true.)

We are meant to like Lyle and Frederick equally: she's smart and hard-working, social but not snobbish. He's a bit of a stuffed shirt, but in an endearing way - devoted to doing his work well and, as the novel begins, just coming up for air after finishing a major work that is described very vaguely and never even given a title. (It seems to be non-fiction of some kind, maybe some kind of wide-range literary criticism shading into social history.)

So they have been having an affair, which is mostly secret. In what I think may be a typical piece of Powell irony, rumors only start to circulate about the two of them after they're not longer seeing each other. They have some tension, mostly involving their social sets - Lyle is plugged into a fairly commercial literary/high society/Broadway world, which Frederick claims to detest. Frederick in turn is central in a more downtown, "authentic" literary world anchored by Edwin Stalk and the small Swan magazine.

Lyle seems to be happy in the affair; Frederick, though, suffers pains in Lyle's world, where he has to spend a lot of time slightly distanced from her:

But being too reasonable to wish for complete fulfilment did not keep the denial from corroding inside you, until the constant analysis bared a torturing sense of injustice. Even in this resentful mood he could not stay away from her, must follow her to any party, be introduced again and again to people interested only in flamboyant success, be conscious of his inadequate tailoring, lack of small talk and find himself shamed by a fretful desire for millions merely to avoid adolescent humiliation. (p. 253 in Novels 1944-1962)

But Frederick has two big upheavals in his life: second, his work at the publishing house run by Benedick Strafford - formerly mostly ceremonial, as an editorial advisor to the list - is increased when he's given the crude but popular magazine Haw, just bought by Strafford's, to edit. And, first, he meets Dodo Brennan, a much younger woman just arrived in New York and on the hunt for men. She is demanding and coquettish and frankly horrible in a lot of ways, but Frederick is weirdly fascinated - perhaps because they met in a bar and no one in this novel thinks straight when drunk, and they're drinking all the time - so Frederick ends up taking up with Dodo.

(This is not exclusive. I don't think there's a single relationship in the novel that is within spitting distance of exclusive. Everyone is obsessed with someone else, except for the few who are obsessed with Art or Money. And probably them, too, come to think of it.)

Frederick starts avoiding Lyle, and things spin from there. At the same time, the various complications surrounding Frederick's roommate Murray Cahill also pile up, circling the same parties and dinners and bars and people as Lyle and Frederick's sets. Murray's ex-wife Gerda hits town, looking to rekindle things just as he has a young painter, Judy Dahl, more-or-less living in their apartment and has mostly disentangled himself from two other women, Caroline and Lorna, one of whom is Gerda's old best friend and the other one lives next door. (And Caroline and Lorna are also close friends, for most of the novel.)

There are a lot of characters and a lot of scenes and a lot of great sentences - I dog-eared five quotes, when I usually try to limit myself to two - but not a clear obvious plot. This is a book about people who keep getting involved - professionally, romantically, randomly - with each other, with positive and negative changes to their lives along the way. It all rolls out over what seems to be more than a year, though the timeline is deliberately vague.

I should also mention that these people don't necessarily like each other - even the ones having affairs seem, often, to have more hate than love. And, as a group, they have deep wells of scorn and dislike. For one example:

Both were astonished to discover themselves linked in the warmest friendship by mutual dislike of their host. To Strafford, his first visit to the Beckley home was a needling reminder of his own inadequacies in business. … Frederick's feelings were similar; in Strafford he saw the only person here besides Lyle who remembered his name and respected (without quite understanding) his talents. (p.261 in Novels 1944-1962)

It's a book of thoughts and gossip and people's conceptions of themselves and each other, a book set in and around the literary world in its various incarnations - small magazine, commercial publishing house, Broadway, the improving lecture series - that is quite happy to satirize and disparage every single one of those worlds. (But quietly, in an undertone, so that you could miss the blade if you're not paying attention.)

I enjoyed it, and found the characters true and well-drawn, even if I felt they were left at a distance. The writing is wonderful, full of amusing thoughts and deep insights and quirky takes. It's not a novel for everyone - I think Powell is a novelist you have to want to read; you need to be interested in that kind of satire and literary polish - but it's deep and capacious for a relatively short book.

Finder: Five Crazy Women by Carla Speed McNeil

This was the eighth storyline from Carla Speed McNeil's Finder series, and, if I'm reading correctly, the breakpoint where she transitioned from initial publication as floppy-comics issues to page-by-page on the web. Also, as a technical matter, it was last available as the back quarter of The Finder Library, Vol. 2 and is now deeply out of print in all formats, so it's neither a good starting point for the series nor one that readers are likely to stumble over.

I've found McNeil's world-building intriguing and occasionally frustrating; she has extensive notes in the Library editions but tends to focus on anthropological details, which never come anywhere near answering my questions about the world. (This time out, the big one is: how are these domed cities actually constructed? Her notes talk about "towns stacked on top of each other" and looking up at the "undersides of buildings," without any hint of a superstructure to keep those buildings up in the air. [1] There are also streets with fast vehicle traffic in the middle of these cities, which makes it seem more like a blown-up version of downtown Chicago than a traditional futuristic domed city. My central concern keeps being that everything feels contingent and jury-rigged, that nothing in this world was ever planned or organized or engineered by anyone, that there's no government or controlling authority of anything, anywhere.)

On the other hand, this is the book where series hero Jaeger is finally called out on his (central, annoying) bullshit. So, even though I'm reading this close to twenty years after McNeil made these stories, she anticipated at least some of the things that I've been writing about Finder.

Speaking of which, here's the back-links: Library Vol. 1, Dream Sequence, Mystery Date, and The Rescuers. Oh, and also Talisman, which I read as a one-off a decade ago and then re-read in the first Library edition.

So: I'm going to take as read all of the background questions and arguments I've been having with this series, in all of those old posts.

This time, Jaeger is back in Anvard, and looking to find some girl to sleep with for a day or so, as he always is. The book is called Five Crazy Women, but, frankly...well, you know the old saying? Meet an asshole in the morning, you met an asshole. Meet assholes all day long, you're the asshole.

Every girl Jaeger meets, everywhere, all the time, is crazy. You get it. [2]

There's a loose frame story of Jaeger talking about his woman troubles with an old friend - who is a gay guy, so McNeil can side-step any sense of competition or immediately relevant "here's what I would do."

As usual with McNeil, there are anthropological reasons behind everything. Jaeger is a half-Ascian (the name-swapped Noble Savages Native Americans of this far-future world), whose central, unbreakable fate in life - Finder is stuffed full of such things, on every goddamn page - is to be a sin-eater. That means he's seemingly even more nomadic than normal for Ascian men, and that the hot young Ascian women - I may be reading between the lines here - are not interested in him, though their aunts may be.

But hot young city girls see him as exotic and exciting - at least the crazy ones do, since he's the kind of guy who comes to town unexpectedly, crashes at a girl's house to fuck her, clean up, and disappear in the morning, and repeats with as many girls as he can manage before running off somewhere else to do some violence.

At the beginning of this book, though, his little black book is failing him. He calls some expected good prospects, but multiple girls - presumably previously hot and young and crazy, conquests in a previous trip to town - have settled down enough that unpredictable sexy asshole from the sticks calling her out of the blue looking for a piece of bed and a piece of ass is no longer an enticing proposition. So he gets called out, he gets shouted at, he gets the "how dare you" reaction.

And, of course, this means they are crazy.

Luckily for Jaeger, he's still young enough - I'm thinking maybe thirty here, probably not quite that - and enticing enough that there's still a solid number of hot young crazy girls willing to take him home. He meets a new crazy girl in the course of this story, and is stuck with her for longer than usual because he managed to get himself seriously injured.

In the end, he doesn't learn anything, as we expected. He will get older, though - I think, he has some kind of minor healing factor that might keep him young-looking semi-permanently, which would alter my predictions - and find that hot young crazy city girls who also have daddy issues are not just even more crazy but also somewhat scarcer. And their aunts and mothers will probably start warning them about Jaeger...which, come to think of it, is probably enticing to the craziest ones. But that's all concerns for the future: right now, Jaeger got his wick dipped and he's about to head out of town, just like always.

I found this to be lighter in tone than a lot of the Finder stories; Jaeger has plot armor in ways the other characters don't, so we know he'll always come out in the end, exactly the same as he went in. Though, in the end, he may be a charismatic, talented, interesting asshole...but he's still an asshole.

[1] Though, at work, I've just been connected to someone who used to work for a company that I'm told figured out how to "build skyscrapers from the top down," so maybe it's me that's unimaginative here.

[2] From the evidence here, I also tentatively conclude that crazy girls have an expressed preference for cowgirl. Further research is clearly warranted, so if the committee funds this grant request, I will....

This Year: 2016

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

2015 was a scratch, like 1971 - as I was making this list, I ended with fifty-two songs, exactly matching the weeks of the year, and thought that was exactly what I wanted. So I jump forward two years this week, to 2016.

I wanted a song by Lydia Loveless on this list, and for a while I thought it would be Head, which is quietly devastating, or maybe European, which could come across as a joke to some people. (It isn't: or, rather, it's the kind of joke someone makes in the moment to play off a moment of pure emotional honesty that hits so horribly wrong.) Boy Crazy is a lot of fun; her cover of Elvis Costello's Allison is lovely; Can't Change Me and More Like Them might be more quintessential Loveless attitude.

But, instead, it came down to Same To You. I've had a lot of break-up songs this year, but this one, well - can you break something that wasn't in one piece to begin with?

Well is there nothing I could do to make you look at me that way again?
I’m not gonna fall in love with you man but if that’s really it
Could you just wave goodbye?

I like the tension in this song, the way it feels like the singer gives as good as she gets - both I’ll have to take a few so I don’t talk back and That’s where I almost killed you but honey give me one more chance. The relationship isn't clear - probably on purpose. This could be new and not clicking, it could be old and falling apart.

(It reminds me, a bit, of the "Alpha Couple" from a lot of Mountain Goats songs, especially the record Talahassee. This is another couple that isn't good for each other, though not as pyrotechnically.)

One last thing: I always heard the refrain as If it's the same to you, then I'm gone.

But the lyrics on the Bandcamp page have it as If it's the same to you that I'm gone, making the whole refrain a longer, more complicated question.

And that's what I love about great songs: they have further depths, more questions. As this one does, they open up instead of closing down.

Quote of the Week: Today, in Confusing Theatrical Terms Used Blithely

Lady Malvern was a hearty, happy, healthy, overpowering sort of dashed female, not so very tall but making up for it by measuring about six feet from the O.P. to the Prompt Side. She fitted into my biggest arm-chair as if it had been built around her by some one who knew they were wearing arm-chairs tight about the hips that season.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, "Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest," (p.78 in Enter Jeeves)

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.