Book-A-Day 2014 #239: Blue by Pat Grant

We rarely like those new people at first -- they look funny, their food smells, and they probably jabber away using words we don't recognize. And they're here, in our place, instead of wherever it was they came from -- and that's, for some of us, the worst thing.

Australian Pat Grant knows that feeling: he grew up a working-class surf-bum kid out in the middle of nowhere, linked to the next bit of nowhere by a train line. And, a few years back, he turned some pieces of his own teen years, a little bit of the fantastic, and enough fiction to make it all cohere into the graphic novel Blue.

(You can read Blue for free on his website right now, if you want. You could also buy the book version from that first link. As always in life, you have choices.)

Christian is a teen in the Aussie town of Bolton: it's close enough to Sydney that urbanites can visit, but far enough out to be its own little place, settled and closed-in like small towns everywhere. Christian is the kind of mildly disruptive hell-raiser that Grant himself was: he'd prefer to surf than to go to school, and he's rude and unthinking and rough-edged like so many teenagers are. His best friends are Verne and Muck; they have ditching and surfing and egging each other on in common.

Blue is the story of those three teens and one day: the day they ditched school because the waves were high and because the grapevine said there was a dead body out on the train line, only half-cleaned up. (And teens, especially restless, unhappy teens, love both of those things: love poking at the rough and painful spots repeatedly to prove they can and to show how strong they are.) So the three of them set off to do two things: to surf the big waves, and to see the dead body.

It's also the story of Bolton before "those people" started showing up -- Grant draws them as blue bulbous things, with stripey tentacles coming out of large holes in a gourd-shaped body, somewhere in between childrens-book goofball and Lovecraftian creepy -- since the day of the dead body was the first time Christian ever saw any of the blue folks. Christian and his friends don't like the blue people, of course -- even modern day Christian, who is telling the story in flashback, is casually racist and cruel about them -- but that's only to be expected for people like them in a town like Bolton.

Blue shows rather than tells: it's entirely told by Christian, and is inside his mindset the whole time. Grant's cartooning is lovely and expressive, with a strong, rounded line and muppety, rubber-hose characters. It's a serious book that never tells you it's serious, that never descends to lecturing or the author's thumb on the scales. It will definitely hit harder if you're Australian, or from somewhere else with a recent influx of "those people," but it's an age-old, deeply human story that we all recognize. I recommend it highly.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #238: Welcome to Tranquility Book One by Simone & Googe

Another day, another random book from my unread shelves. Today's choice is particularly random: a book I never would have bought myself, and didn't really know existed. But it was in one of the post-flood care packages, so it went up on the shelves, to surprise me at unexpected times. And then I finally read it, because why not?

Welcome to Tranquility was a failed superhero series from 2007-2008, an extension of the Wildstorm universe, so it's probably officially one of the less-popular DC earths now. Welcome to Tranquility, Book One collects the first storyline of that series, the first six of what was eventually a dozen issues. It's entirely professional, thoroughly modern superhero stuff, written by Gail Simone and drawn by Neil Googe. And it was no more superfluous than a million other superhero series, but this one failed to catch fire: primarily because it couldn't be really about the famous characters that the Wednesday Crowd already loves.

Tranquility is a small town somewhere -- the Wikipedia article on the series says it's in Oregon, so we'll go with that -- where all of the famous "maxies" from WWII went to retire when they got too old to keep fighting crime, or committing it. Since no history in a superhero comic is ever dead, they're all -- except the one who died tragically in the origin story, a la Jetboy or Silver Agent -- still alive and remarkably hale seventy years later, when they must all be pushing a hundred. There is An Explanation for this deep in this particular story, but the real reason, of course, is that comics fans can't give up the myth of the Golden Age, and profoundly misunderstand how generations work.

Anyway, since this is a revisionist superhero story, it has to begin with the death of a major hero (cf. Retro Girl), and so Mr. Articulate is stabbed with his own sword-cane in the middle of a busy fight scene in the obligatory small-town restaurant where everyone spends all their time. Sheriff Thomasina "Tommy" Lindo -- one of the few characters in this volume not to have superpowers, and probably coincidentally also one of the few characters of color -- sets out to find his killer, which of course rips the lid off all of the long-simmering secrets and lies of this corrupt little town. (cf. Peyton Place)

So Simone is working with a lot of cliches here: most of her "maxies" are vaguely familiar, from the not-Captain Marvel to the not-Doctor Strange to the not-Silvana to the not-Crypt Keeper to the not-Nick Fury. The mayor of the town, though, is somewhere in the vague territory between not-Batman and not-Superman, which counts as original in this company. There is nothing in this first volume of Welcome to Tranquility that will surprise anyone who's been reading superhero comics for more than a year and who has two brain cells to rub together. But, on the other hand, it knows what it is and does what it does entirely professionally and with energy and style. If you read a lot of superhero comics, you'll probably want to look up this one: it does a lot of things that you presumably like to read about, and does them well.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #237: I'm Pretty Sure I've Got My Death-Ray in Here Somewhere by Sam Hurt

It's not quite ironic that I found this book -- the very first collection of the great but obscure Eyebeam newspaper strip, covering the Daily Texan years, published by some guy out of his garage in 1982 -- three years after a flood destroyed all of my graphic novels, including the Eyebeam books. I was missing just one of those books, true -- but the missing book was Our Eyebeams Twisted.

If we really did live in a universe run by a malevolent, fly-torturing god -- which seems to be what a lot of people believe, though they all also seem to think said malevolent god likes only them -- then the book I found would have to be Our Eyebeams Twisted. It was not, and so there is no god. QED. Random chance reigns.

Anyway, so I found ...I'm Pretty Sure I've Got My Death-Ray in Here Somewhere! in a random box at the Strand earlier this year. I'm pretty sure I read this book once before, but that was a long time ago. Though, if you do find a random book from an obscure artsy newspaper strip that you read twenty years ago, it's really helpful if that was the first volume of that strip. And this is. So yay!

I know nothing about Sam Hurt's life except what I can glean from the Internet and remember from random bios in his books. But I'm pretty sure this book collects his earliest strip cartoons, starting in 1978 during his undergraduate tenure at the University of Texas -- maybe not all of them, maybe not in the precise order they originally appeared, but the bulk of those strips that turned into Eyebeam over the course of the next three years. It begins with random characters and general academic jokes, but pretty quickly develops the core cast: Eyebeam himself, the Sam Hurt stand-in, an Everyman undergrad and then law-school student; Ratliff, his feckless roommate; Sally, his girlfriend; and Henry, his regular hallucination. (Also showing up before the end of the book: Betty, Sally's old friend and possibly the shallowest woman in the world; her jock boyfriend Rod, who plumbs even greater depths of shallowness; Vernon, Eyebeam's law-school classmate; and the inimitable Law School Nurd.) Eyebeam moved away from the academic setting over the next few years, but this is the pure school-version of the strip, when everyone was still hitting the books (or avoiding doing so) all the time.

Hurt set up good gags, crafted amusing sequences of strips, and had a solid sense of character: if Eyebeam had nothing more than that, it would have been a fine, enjoyable strip. But Hurt was also a wonderfully inventive and weird cartoonist, equally prone to flights of philosophy and to bizarre hallucinatory fantasies -- relatively low-key here, but they would explode in later years when Hurt had larger pages and full color to work with. It's rare to find a cartoonist who is really inventive either verbally or pictorially -- one who is equally at home doing both is a marvel. Sam Hurt was, and is, one of them. He may be obscure, but he's as quirkily brilliant in his own way as Bob Burden or Jim Woodring.

And now I have one Eyebeam book, which means I just have to try to complete the collection. I hope I haven't been too convincing here; I don't want you folks to go buying up all of the Eyebeam volumes lurking out in the world, waiting for me to find them.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/23

I've got a long list this week -- the big Yen box for the month came in, which means a vast assortment of manga and similar goodies -- so I'll keep the preliminaries to a minimum. These are books that showed up on my doorstep this week, real old-fashioned books on paper, and I'm hoping to review at least some of them here. But I know I won't get to all of them, so I do these weekly posts every Monday morning to write a quick paragraph about each, based on a cursory glance, to at least give them that chance to catch you attention.

First up is Exo, the new novel by Steven Gould. It's the latest in his YA-ish series that started with Jumper, initially about Davey Rice, a young man who discovered he could teleport but now about his family, now that he's grown up and started one. Exo is the direct sequel to last year's Impulse, which was told in first person by Davey's teenage daughter Cent, and this one continues her story. Gould's writing is compellingly readable and the Impulse books are a hell of a lot of fun: I'm looking forward to this one. It's a Tor hardcover, officially available on September 9.

Jasper Fforde's current YA series, The Chronicles of Kazam, reaches a third book with The Eye of Zoltar. (And that reminded me that I missed #2, The Song of the Quarkbeast, so it's off to the library for me. Do see my review of #1, The Last Dragonslayer, as well.) As usual for Fforde, it's set in a weirdly quirky world -- the Ununited Kingdoms, a massively Balkanized Britain where magic has been ebbing for centuries, until recently -- and has a great, engaging heroine in Jennifer Strange, a teenage founding and default head of the ramshackle Kazam Mystical Arts Management company. Zoltar is a hardcover from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, coming on October 7th.

And now I have the beginning of a series, for those who would rather jump in on the ground floor. M.C. Planck's Sword of the Bright Lady begins the World of Prime fantasy series, as modern man Christopher Sinclair accidentally travels from Arizona to a fantasy world. It looks like Sword is a distant cousin of Lest Darkness Fall and similar books; Sinclair is a mechanical engineer and his way of surviving in a world of magic seems to rely heavily on his professional knowledge and skills. (So this looks like a fantasy novel that SF readers will particularly enjoy.) It's a trade paperback from Pyr, available September 9th.

If you are or have a teenager, I probably don't have to introduce James Dashner, whose mega-seller The Maze Runner has just become a big movie. His current series began with The Eye of Minds, a near-future cyberpunky story (oh, it's a dystopia as well, since SFnal YAs are required to be dystopian these days) with virtual worlds and self-aware programs and the teen boy who has to save everyone. And there's a sequel already in The Rule of Thoughts, a Delacorte hardcover on September 19th.

Another novel published for teens -- though I find that 99+% of those are equally as entertaining for adults -- is Alan Gratz's The League of Seven, which begins a trilogy set in a steampunky 1870s. (This is in the half of steampunk where Edison is the evil genius behind everything -- which I presume means Tesla will show up eventually as a white hat.) The setup here is that electricity is the energy that powers an ancient race of gigantic monsters, who were defeated long ago and secreted in underground prisons. But now the evil forces of Edison have foiled the secret society that kept electricity from the masses, and one plucky boy must gather six others with very specific skills to save the world. This one's from Tor's Starscape imprint, and is available now.

From here on out, it's all manga and similar stuff; if any of you have an unreasoning fear of Japanese cooties (or maybe even comics cooties, though my blog is infested with those as a matter of course), you'll want to run screaming now. As I usually do, I've organized them in rough order of volume number, moving from most accessible to least, with the odder things (light novels and adaptations) at the end. All of these are from Yen Press, and all are available now, having published either this month or in July.

So we start easily with High School DxD, Vol. 2 by Hiroji Mishima, adapted from Ichiei Ishibumi's light-novel series of the same name. (See my review of the first volume.) It's quite fan-servicey, but I liked the first one despite that -- Mishima has a solid shonen-manga style, and he pushes some obvious buttons with some individual style.

Then there's Cocoa Fujiwara's Inu x Boku SS, Vol. 4, the confusingly-titled story of a group of supernatural kids of rich Japanese families who all live in a Tokyo apartment building (some of them as the pampered residents, some of them as the elite "secret service" bodyguards to those residents). I reviewed first the initial two volumes, then went back for number three. And I gather that this volume is where The Big Event happens that sets up the rest of the series, so we've all got that to look forward to.

Nico Tanigawa is back with No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!, Vol. 4, continuing the story of the geekily self-blinded Tomoko. (I covered the first two books as Day 56 and then went back for number three as Day 89.) Tomoko is a great, unique character -- obsessed with sex but repelled by people, hugely introverted but with a massive desire to be popular -- and I'm glad to see she's back.

And then there's Junya Inoe's BTOOOM!, Vol. 7, another two hundred or so pages of people trying to kill each other with various bombs on an isolated island for the amusement of the shadowy forces that set it all up. (Or, more obviously, for the amusement of the kind of readers who like stories about teenagers killing each other.) I reviewed the first volume in a round-up post last summer, and haven't kept up since; I'm not really a fan of the Battle Royale genre.

Shouji Sato's series about impressively-chested hospital personnel stylishly killing gangsters rumbles forward in Triage X, Vol. 7. I reviewed the first five volumes in one post -- I intermittently decide that covering individual manga volumes is about as useful as looking at one issue of an American comic -- and then came back later for the sixth. You probably won't respect yourself for reading any of these, but they are stylish and entertaining.

Speaking of things you might not respect yourself about in the morning, I also have the new volume of Sacchi's harem manga: Is This a Zombie?, Vol. 8. In fact, I'm chagrined to realize that this is the final volume, which means my review of the first seven was just slightly premature, and I could have done the whole thing if I waited a little while. Anyway, this is the end of the manga based on the light novels of the same name by Shinichi Kimura.

Another final volume is Omamori Himari, Vol. 12 by Milan Katra, but I haven't read any of this series. I believe this is a romance series among supernatural creatures -- so there might be some demon-fighting mixed in -- but I don't know much more than that. But the series is complete in English now, so anyone old enough to read it -- it's rated M, and sealed in plastic -- can run through the whole thing now.

I might start writing shorter here, as we're getting into the deep volumes of things I know very little about, like Yana Toboso's Black Butler, Vol. 17. It's set in some version of Victorian England, has a super-competent butler, and, um, other stuff happens to, OK?

Similarly, I can't tell you anything specific about The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Vol. 19, a manga by Gaku Tsugano from the light novels by Nagaru Tanigawa. (Or maybe Tanigawa actually scripted this stuff, too: I don't really know.)

And I'll similarly skip lightly over Pandora Hearts, Vol. 21 by Jun Mochizuki, because again I could only reveal my innocence. It's had a long run, so it clearly has a devoted audience and a complex story -- apologies for not being able to say more.

But I do know a bit about Soul Eater, Vol. 21, the new book in the series about demon-hunters and their sentient shape-shifting weapons by Atsushi Ohkubo. The series moved from the professional hunters into a school setting along the way -- manga have a tropism to high school like teenage boys to porn -- but Ohkubo still has a clean, energetic shonen art style and tells zippy stories.

His side-series is also back in Soul Eater NOT!, Vol. 3. I don't remember exactly why this is a side-story, I'm afraid: I've only read a few of the main books. But this is more in the same world, if you're a fan of the parent series and have somehow missed this.

There's a series of horror-tinged games in Japan that retell something like the same story with variations, and -- since every media property in Japan has to be adapted to every other media possible -- they've been turned into manga along the way. Umineko WHEN THEY CRY Episode 4: Alliance of the Golden Witch, Vol. 1is in that tangle of story, beginning the adaptation of that particular game in the middle of the series. The manga credits story to Ryukishi07 and art to Soichiro, both of which could be actual human beings, corporations, or post-human uploads running on a unobtanium substrate, as far as I know.

It's odd to name the first book in a series Accel World, Vol. 1: Kuroyukihime's Return, but that's what Reki Kawahara did with this light novel. (Which also has illustrations by Hima.) It's another book about a schlubby junior-high boy approached by a gorgeous slightly older girl, who initiates him into the secret world (and will probably finally fall in love with him about volume four). This time, the secret world is in a computer, and I think it's some kind of virtual reality.

The Infernal Devices: Clockwork Princess has a big number 3 on its spine, but resolutely refuses to explain what that means. (The first page of comics here also starts with a caption that says "Chapter 17," so it's clearly a more-detailed-than-usual adaptation of a book.) This is credited to Cassandra Clare with art by Hyekyung Baek, so it's clearly based on Clare's steampunk novels -- how, exactly, and whether Clare did her own comics scripting, the book declines to say.

I thought the Spice & Wolf light novels had individual titles, but what I have in hand just says it's Spice and Wolf, Vol. 12 by Isuna Hasekura. This is mercantile fantasy as you love it -- hardcore trading action on nearly every page! Oh, and our merchant's assistant is an ages-old fertility goddess in the form of a wolf-girl.

Last for this week is Sword Art Online: Aincrad, Vol. 2, one more light novel. This one is by Reki Kawahara, with illustrations by an entity credited as abec. (All lower-case.) In the near-future, virtual reality has finally become a thing, and our heroes are, inevitably, trapped in a fiendishly complicated one and will Really Die if they die in the game. (Perhaps this is why virtual reality will never really become a thing; we all assume that playing games there will be fatal.)