5,000 km per second by Manuele Fior

I wish I could just hand this book to you so you could go into it as ignorant as I was. I knew I'd read a good review or two of Manuele Fior's 5,000 km per second somewhere, and I knew it was translated. (I thought it was French, but it's actually from the Italian.) But that was about it. I'd picked it up a couple of times and poked through it before eventually buying it: what that mostly meant was I was impressed by the moody, color-coded art and thought it was some kind of domestic story.

If you want, you can stop there. This is one of the best graphic novels I've read this year -- maybe for much longer than that; I have to think about it -- and you don't need to know any more than that. It's a story about people in the real world, and their interactions through time. A love story, maybe. A people story, definitely. And the world needs more emotionally smart people stories like this: there are never enough.

If you want more, here's what I can tell you: we begin in Italy. A teenage girl, Lucia, is moving into an apartment with her mother, after the father went away. Two local boys, maybe a year or two older, are lurking around, and catch sight of her --they're Nicola and Piero. That scene is mostly yellows and greens. A few pages later, there's another scene, in blues, set in Norway, and one of those three is now studying there, a few years later.

5,000 km per second continues on like that, jumping into different scenes in different times, circling around the lives of Piero and Lucia and Nicola, with a palette suitable for each time and place and mood. Each moment is true, every character is real.

This isn't a story about easy answers or romantic gestures or big emotional moments: if your idea of a love story is a Hollywood movie, you will be hugely disappointed by Fior's much truer, much more mixed story. But he tells this story beautifully and lovingly, through body language and dialogue -- even more of the former than the latter; just look at the cover to get a sense of that -- and it's a stunning, deep experience. This is another book to put on the short shelf of comics to hand to people who think comics are junk: it's deep, and meaningful, and lovely, and bittersweet in the best way.

Garden of the Flesh by Gilbert Hernandez

OK. Even for a creator who does weird comics practically every year, Garden of the Flesh is particularly weird. Here Gilbert Hernandez retells a big chunk of the first book of the Christian Bible as a series of fuck-fest vignettes starting with Adam and Eve naked and humping in that 'ol garden called Eden. And he does it in a relentless two wide panels for each of his small-format pages, with (deliberately?) stiffly posed figures and lots of unrealistically spurting fluids.

Yes, Biblical sex comics in a deliberately crude style. Was Hernandez inspired by Crumb's The Book of Genesis, Illustrated from a few years ago, or did this Adam-and-Eve stroke book come from some other wellspring? Is this some kind of reverse Jack Chick tract? Hernandez has always come across in his interviews as more instinctual than calculating, so there may not be any single reason why, no matter how much we search for one.

More importantly: is the fact the the sex here is all very bland and hetero some kind of clue? Is Hernandez mellowing in his middle age from the pan-sexual Birdland of his youth, or is Garden of the Flesh's relentless focus on sex as one-man, one-woman, two or three acceptable positions and some gratuitous oral a commentary on Biblical literalists? (Or on fundamentalists?)

It has to be said that Garden of the Flesh is a not particularly sexy sex comic, and I have to assume that Hernandez knows this. He's done sex comics before; he can move the bodies around to make them more appealing. So, if he doesn't do so here, it must be on purpose.

I find it hard to recommend Garden of the Flesh. Compared to most of Hernandez's work, it's stiff and mannered and dull and flat, and I can't give you an coherent reason why it is. I think this one is just for completists: either of Hernandez or sex comics.

Hellboy in Hell, Vol. 2: The Death Card by Mike Mignola

Hellboy was dead: to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about that. But in Mike Mignola's fictional universe, being dead just means that you're not here anymore. You can still go somewhere else, if there's somewhere that will take you. Hellboy could always go home. [1] And so he did: Hellboy in Hell, Vol. 2: The Death Card collects the back half of what creator Mike Mignola originally thought was going to be a substantially longer story.

But it turned out that Hellboy's story was already over: his story took place on Earth. Sure, things happen in this book. Hellboy even spends some quality time punching various monstrous entities with that big right hand of his, which is the sine qua non of any Hellboy story. There are murky scenes in creepy landscapes, and hellish creatures and doomed souls talking eruditely or crudely about their fates and threatening violence to each other. There are flashes of brilliance and wonder, as in all Hellboy stories. But none of it means anything. Mignola has an afterword in this book where he writes about how this story moved more quickly, and ended more abruptly than he expected -- if you read closely, you can see how it went from "open-ended" to twice the current length to barely this. He claims killing Satan was the big change-point, but my theory is that he was already done with Hellboy and just didn't know it. Hellboy's story, again, was on Earth.

Many creators write past the ending. Novelists, these days, have the luxury of noticing that before publication and trimming the story down. Comics, though...comics has a long tradition of ignoring or disregarding endings, for that eternal moment of Now and a new issue every Wednesday. And I think that mindset led to Hellboy in Hell. Twenty years from now -- assuming Mignola doesn't find some more things for Hellboy to do, later in fictional time than his sojourn in Hell -- this story will be seen as a vestigial appendage to the main Hellboy story, or at best a coda summing up some themes and presenting them in a different way.

Now, it's still about a hundred and fifty (unnumbered) pages of Mignola Hellboy comics, so it's a very nice thing. But it's a very nice faintly unnecessary thing, for those who are picky about such matters.


[1] I'll also note, in passing, that Our Hero notes during this book that it's kinda silly to be called "Hellboy" when he's actually in Hell, showing that Mignola can lampshade with the best of them.

Mighty Jack by Ben Hatke

You got a kid named Jack. You got some beans. But it don't go the way you expect, see?

(Will he write the whole review in a bad '30s gangster patois? Let's hope not!)

Ben Hatke's new graphic novel Mighty Jack is indeed a partial retelling of a certain well-known folktale -- though this book ends with Jack and his companions heading off to parts unknown in a bean-related way, so it is not the entire story. And, other than the kid being named Jack and the bean-centricity, so far this is pretty divergent from the folktale.

OK, Jack does trade the family car for a box of magic beans at a flea market -- but that's only because his autistic sister Maddy tells him to...even though she never talks. And he plants the various packets of beans outside their house -- but, again, only because Maddy is awake before him the next morning, turning over the soil and wordlessly insisting on doing so. Jack is the sensible one, trying to be as grown up as a kid (of ten or so, I think) can be. The two of them are mostly on their own this summer; their single mother is working two jobs to barely make ends meet, so it's just Jack and Maddy.

Well...and, before long, Lilly. Lilly, the home-schooled maker-kid who Jack keeps seeing out in her front yard doing sword-practice with a dummy. Lilly, who is strong and tough and brave and has a lot of gear that will be really helpful. (For the younger readers Mighty Jack is aimed at, Lilly will just be cool. For people my age, she will be a reminder of all of those otherwise-bland protagonists with suspiciously-useful skills in classic SF -- the kind of guys who get accidentally thrown into 40 AD but luckily are master fencers and experts on the chemical composition of gunpowder.) Lilly quickly realizes something weird and cool is going on at Jack's house, and latches on to it -- not that Jack can't use her help, since he very much can.

Some of the beans grow mischievous plants, and some grow helpful ones -- but all are weird, grow overnight, and seem to have intelligence. And, before long, the three kids learn that "mischievous" is only the half of it.

Eventually there's a large manifestation, and a rampage of destruction, and the use of the one seed packet that should have stayed unused. A path is opened to somewhere else -- and paths are there to be taken.

There will be at least one more book; Jack and Lilly and Maddy have only just gone down that path as the book ends, and we have no idea what lies ahead for them. (Giants, maybe?) So Mighty Jack does not end so much as pause: this may be a problem for some readers. Perhaps particularly smaller ones, who are often not as good at waiting.

But the reason they won't want to wait is that Mighty Jack is n engrossing, colorful, energetic romp from the creator of the Zita the Spacegirl books. Hatke is good at hooking this audience...and, maybe, good at hooking people substantially older than that audience, too. Mighty Jack is the kind of book you buy if you have a kid aged somewhere from five to thirteen (depending on the kid) and then read it yourself first, because it's that good. And if you don't have a kid in that range -- I know I don't, anymore -- you can always just read it yourself first even if there's no one to read it "next."

Read in November

I'm getting closer to the way this is supposed to work, so I don't need to waste as much space up here with excuses. So, um, these are the books I read in November 2016, and they probably all have links to the posts I wrote about those books.

Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin, The Private Eye (11/1)

Jules Feiffer, Cousin Joseph (11/2)

Bill Griffith, Invisible Ink (11/7)

Ben Hatke, Mighty Jack (11/8)

Mike Mignola and Dave Stewart, Hellboy in Hell, Vol. 2: The Death Card (11/10)

Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang, Paper Girls, Vol. 1 (11/11)

Gilbert Hernandez, Garden of the Flesh (11/13)

John Baxter, Carnal Knowledge (11/13)

Manuele Fior, 5,000 km per second (11/14)

Jeff Parker and Erika Moen, Bucko (11/15)

Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham, Miracleman: The Golden Age (11/16)

Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsuruku Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (11/17)

Gina Wynbrandt, Someone Please Have Sex With Me (11/17)

Richard Thompson, The Complete Cul de Sac, Vol. 1 (11/18)

At the moment I type these words, I'm still reading Vol. 2 -- there are only two; the world is cruel and capricious and took Thompson's drawing ability away before it even took him, much too early -- in the same room of the house where I read this first volume. And it doesn't really make any sense to me to write about one and then write about the other: the two books come in a slipcase together, and so have to be considered part of one thing.

So this is just to say that this book has not been forgotten. I will write about both books, eventually, once I get to the end of Cul de Sac. And then there will be a little link above for you to follow.

Kyle Baker, Cartoonist (11/21)

Neil Gaiman, Fabio Moon, and Gabriel Ba, How To Talk to Girls at Parties (11/22)

Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky, Sex Criminals, Vol. 3: Three the Hard Way (11/28)

Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats (11/28)

Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, Saga, Vol. 6 (11/29)

Mike Mignola et. al., Hellboy in Mexico (11/30)



As of this moment (11:06 AM on Christmas Eve), there are finally posts on all of those books written and scheduled. So I'm going to put this index carefully in its place, and update it with links as those last few posts go live. I still think December will go up on time, since I'm on vacation this week, but I make no promises.

The Nameless City by Faith Erin Hicks

In a country that is not China -- but, if it were actually in our world, might be -- there is an important city that has been fought over by three great nations for hundreds of years, with control going back and forth repeatedly. Each of those nations has its own name for the city, but the inhabitants prefer not to give it a name -- since that will only change with the next conquest.

(This is a book aimed for teen readers, or perhaps set in a world slightly more rational than ours, so the inhabitants of that city can have a policy to stand aside and let the three nations fight it out each time. In this world, that means that they survive and continue their lives under different rulers, not that they are sacked and raped and murdered with each change of overlord.)

Faith Erin Hicks tells a story in that city: The Nameless City. That story doesn't end here; there will be at least one more volume. (And what writer can resist a trilogy? Or an expanded trilogy? We'll have to see if Hicks can resist, or wants to.) But the action of this book ends by its last page; this is not a cliff-hanger.

Kaidu is a young man -- say twelve or thirteen, right at the age to begin seriously training for his manhood -- of the Dao nation, the latest conquerors of the city they call DanDao. He grew up with his mother in the homelands, but has been sent to train as a warrior in the city where his never-seen father is an advisor to the Dao general who conquered it thirty years ago and has ruled it since.

Rat is a girl of the streets of the Nameless City, a fearless orphan racing across rooftops, contemptuous of the Dao as her people have been contemptuous of each invader in turn. (So...there's never been any intermarriage among any of these four people, for hundreds of years of turn-and-turn-again conquest? That seems implausible. The people of this city should be utter mutts by this point -- and much stronger for it.)

Kaidu and Rat meet cute, and don't entirely hate each other. They each have no other friends, and so become something like friends when they're not being enemies. Because this is a book for younger people, you may guess that their story is positive and has something like a moral -- don't worry, it's a good moral. If you squint, it might even be a moral about the best government requiring the consent of the governed, rather than that the good overlords will make good decisions because they are good.

This isn't my favorite Hicks book -- there a lot of unexamined neo-feudalism here, and the world is just a hair more cartoonish than I'd prefer -- but it's vibrant and exciting and full of action and has two great characters at its center. Even better, the girl is the more accomplished and level-headed of the two, besides being better at physical derring-do. But, since it's supposed to be for people a third of my age, I can't fault it -- it's very good at doing what it sets out to do, and is a lot of fun as it goes along that path.

This Census-Taker by China Mieville

I like to think I'm a thoughtful reader.  Not perfect, of course -- who is? -- but good at working out metaphors and allegories and fictional schemas of all kinds. If I can see that there's a shape moving under the surface of a book, I can usually make a decent guess at what kind of leviathan lurks down there. (This may not need to be said, but authors generally want to be understood: some things may be obscure or subtext, but they do expect that a lot of readers will figure them out nonetheless.)

There is something lurking behind China Mieville's short 2016 novel This Census-Taker. I would swear to that on whatever is worth swearing on. But I can't for the life of me quite figure out what that thing is.

So whatever I say about this book is at least half-wrong -- know that up front. Census-Taker is fabulistic, the story of a deliberately unnamed Boy in a clearly potent landscape. And I'm not going to be able to explain the implications of that landscape, or of the actions of the characters in this story. All I can do is tell you, if you decide to read This Census-Taker, to pay close attention and think about what everything might mean. You could be better at this than I am.

In an unnamed country, a decade or so after an unnamed war, a nine-year-old boy runs down the steep slope from his isolated house to the small town nestled around a bridge over a river between two equally sharp peaks. He says his father has killed his mother -- or perhaps the other way around. He is comforted, taken in, and preparations are quickly made to investigate.

Then the father appears. The mother is not dead, he insists: the boy heard an argument, their final breakup. The mother has left forever, gone away from this town where she grew up (but left once, admittedly), and will never be seen again. But she is definitely not dead, he insists again. Not at all, though he has no proof of this.

The boy is handed over to the father with apologies. The two return to that isolated house, where the father is even more demanding and cold than before, as if the boy has betrayed him. And the father kills animals, now and then -- quickly, and perhaps under a compulsion. The boy thinks the father has killed other people, but never sees it happen. We see this all, interspersed with memories of the time when the mother was still with them, in the way a boy's memories can be mixed and jumbled.

Many years later, the boy is a functionary of a larger political entity. The functionary is telling us this story of the boy's childhood -- well, we think the two are the same person, and they probably are. But This Census-Taker is twisty enough that you'll want to put a pin in that assumption, to mark it. (You may need many such pins before you're done reading.) One of the things our narrator tells us is how another functionary -- now his boss, or the boss of the person telling the story, if that makes a difference -- came to that isolated house, and what happened there.

Does it matter that the father is a foreigner, perhaps a refugee from that war in the past? There's no solid indication that he was a soldier, but it's not impossible. My essential problem in trying to encompass This Census-Taker is trying to figure out what is impossible. And that list is not long.

Mieville's voice is confident and controlling: he tells this story precisely the way he wants to, doling out moments and sentences that glisten like jewels -- but jewels just far enough away that their outlines are less than crystalline. I don't doubt that this is exactly the story he wanted it to be. And perhaps he intended this uneasy confusion, too.

I do recommend reading This Census-Taker: Mieville is one of our best writers, and his prose is a joy to grapple with, even if that grappling feels like a knife-fight in the dark for much of this book. Bring your A-game when you read This Census-Taker; that's my primary advice. You'll need all your wits about you for this one; I was clearly missing a few.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/26

Those of us in the US of A are just coming out of a weekend-long food coma, raising our heavy heads, and looking around bleary-eyed to see if the world is still there. And then a Monday hits us, right when we're not expecting it. (If you think we'd be more prepared after a four day weekend, you don't know Americans.)

But at least I can offer you a few books -- books are quiet and friendly, unlike the outside world or those people you work with. These three came in my mail last week -- I don't know much about them, but let's take a look, shall we?

First up is a story collection by South African novelist Lauren Beukes: Slipping. It collects twenty-one stories -- some of them quite short, as you might guess -- along with five non-fiction pieces and a Glossary for those who are not au courant with SA slang. It's available right now in trade paperback from Tachyon.

From Yen Press -- their Yen On imprint, and that distinction I have to admit I don't entirely understand -- comes Goblin Slayer, Vol. 1, a light novel by Kumo Kagyu with illustrations by Noboru Kannatuki. It seems to be set in a RPG-ish world, focusing on a young Priestess joining a party of dungeon-crawlers for the first time. This particular party contains the title character, the usual enigmatic figure clad in dark armor with a quixotic obsession -- his is slaughtering every last goblin, as you can guess from his name -- and that presumably leads to complications.

And last for this week is a big manga volume: Blame! Master Edition, Vol. 2 by Tsutomu Nihei. I didn't see the first volume, and this one doesn't have any description -- literally the only thing on the cover other than title and author is "Toha Heavy Industries Manga Production Division," which I think is the author's puckish name for his studio -- can I can tell you it's about a robot girl who fights creepier robots in an at least mildly post-apocalyptic future. This one if from Vertical.

Carnal Knowledge by John Baxter

Would you say the 20th century had more sex than previous centuries, or less?

John Baxter set out to encyclopedize the sex of the 20th century -- he called it "modern sex," which basically means from the tail end of the Victorian era up to 2009, when he published -- in Carnal Knowledge, which could be taken to imply the answer to that question is "more." (Truly, though, it's probably all a wash: we just don't like to think about our grandparents knocking boots, and previous generations were either more discreet, used euphemisms we don't recognize anymore, or were posthumously bowdlerized in the occasional waves of prudery that followed them.)

Carnal Knowledge runs from AC/DC -- not the band, in case you're wondering -- to Zoophilia, covering a few hundred people, places, kinks, ideas, and erotic works along the way. And, if you're looking for a book to while away stray moments, an encyclopedia of sex is hard to beat: it's chock-full of interesting tidbits (most of them prurient, obviously), but easy to pick up and put down repeatedly. Baxter affects a globalist outlook here, though his default cultural milieu seems to be the UK. This may disconcert those who think that the US is the rightful center of the world in all things, but I found it lended a quirky parallax to the various forms of spanking and other activities covered here.

I hope I don't need to say this bluntly, but Carnal Knowledge is not itself particularly arousing, though it does have some soft photographic and cartoon nudity among its many black-and-white illustrations. It's not a book to put one in the mood, but to list and comment briefly on a wide range of moods that a whole lot of people have had for the past century or so. You'll probably find a decent fraction of them perverted or appalling, but that's how sex is: if you're not scaring the horses when you do it in the road, you're not doing it right.

I found some facts here I could quibble with, but I didn't take notes -- really, it's not that kind of book -- so I can't attempt to dazzle you with my inappropriate knowledge. I do think the timing of Carnal Knowledge meant that Baxter's descriptions of the porn-film industry as it is "now" means that it's already a historical document; the Internet has transformed all content businesses a lot this past decade. But its whole point is to talk about sex historically, so that's not a bug so much as a feature: just file the descriptions of mid-aughts porn as "historical" in the same way you do Baxter's descriptions of the mob-dominated big-hair porn scene of the '70s.

This is an essentially frivolous book, but in the best way. It will not make you smarter, and any facts you learn here will be difficult to bring up in conversation in most circles. But it's amusing and interesting in a wholesomely voyeuristic way, and sex should be treated seriously, like any other aspect of human behavior.

Paper Girls, Vol. 1 by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang

I tend to treat Brian K. Vaughan as just another comics writer --  whether that's a positive or a negative thing, I'll leave to each of you to decide -- but he really has the instincts of a TV writer, befitting the other half of his career. Vaughan loves high concepts, even if they seem inherently destined to deflate, as similar concepts have dozens of times before.

And Paper Girls is definitely a high concept: four spunky (and mildly ethnically diverse) 12-year-old paper-delivery girls in 1988 -- perhaps because that's close to the end of the time in which delivering news by hand in pulp-paper format overnight was a bedrock part of the American landscape [1] -- are out on their bikes, hurling big piles of newsprint at front doors late the night after Halloween.

And then...weird shit happens!

Well, it's not so weird that the careful reader can't figure it out pretty quickly: there's a time-war on, and the Snakes and Spiders this time around are different generations of future-dwellers. (Yes, a generation-gap time war! There's probably a Harlan Ellison story on the same general idea from about 1967.) And our girls are stuck right in the middle of it: apparently the only civilians left in their neighborhood after the warring time factions cleaned it up for whatever nefarious purposes they each are contemplating. (We're still really early; we have no idea what the aims of each side is, and they both claim to be on the side of the angels, as of course they would.)


Now, Cliff Chiang has a grounded, realistically-detailed art style that helps to sell all of this very well. And Vaughan is, I should admit, really good at throwing bizarre concepts up into the air and creating a sense of mystery. (Catching all of those concepts and resolving the mystery...well, it's too early for Paper Girls to dwell on that.)

So Paper Girls, Vol. 1 is a hoot: it's all mysterious questions and bizarre ideas and strange moments. It even ends on another great moment, showing Vaughan will keep throwing complications in for as long as he can think of them. Since comics is mostly about beginnings and only rarely about endings, it's been quite popular, and for good reason: this is a great beginning. I just hope there's something left here once it stops being a beginning -- but, then, I'm well-known as a grump and a curmudgeon, so of course I would take the darkest view possible. This book is a lot of fun; my only quibble is that when I look forward, I seem to dimly see another sequence of Vaughan stories, each slightly less fun than the one before, until the whole thing ends in a muffled thump.


[1] Or, more pointedly, because Vaughan himself was 12 years old that year, and solipsism is a terrible thing to waste.

Street Gang by Michael Davis

Don't ask me why I read this book. I was looking for something to read on a recent business trip, and grabbed the now-not-all-that-new translation of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, which I really do expect to read one of these days. But I never want to have only one book for a trip -- what if I'm not in the right mood? -- so I also grabbed a battered nonfiction paperback for contrast. And that's the one I picked up on that plane flight, and ended up reading over the next two weeks.

The book was Street Gang, a history of the TV show Sesame Street by longtime writer-about-TV Michael Davis, which I found in a library sale for a quarter sometime last year. It's meat-and-potatoes nonfiction, with a chapter about the life of each of the major people who launched Sesame and potted bios of a number of other people who aren't quite as important. Davis doesn't transcend his material here, but he does give a good account of early TV for kids -- Beany & Cecil, Captain Kangaroo, and so forth -- as he gets to the launch of Sesame in 1969 at about the halfway point of the book.

From there it gets vaguer and looser: Davis mostly follows the major players forward, or at least does so when they (like Northern Calloway) had a tragic ending. He doesn't attempt to chronicle the show season-by-season, or even divide it into eras any more specific than decades. So each decade -- '70s, '80s, and '90s/aughts -- gets a scattershot chapter covering some of the many things that were happening then. (And somewhere along the lines I realized I really wanted to read a book about Jim Henson, who isn't actually in this book all that much -- the prologue is set at his 1990 funeral, though, and I think that's what dragged me in.)

Street Gang came out in 2008, just shy of Sesame's fortieth anniversary. That's a lot of ground to cover, particularly in a book that wants to explain the industry as it existed pre-Sesame and show where the major figures of Children's Television Workshop came from. (The answer, more often than not, was Captain Kangaroo.) It suffers somewhat from wanting to tell and show everything about everything -- everyone's lives before Sesame, all of the conflicts as the show went on, the professional lives of all of the main cast, and how Sesame affected the world as well -- because it really doesn't have enough space, nor any reader enough patience, to do all of that. Readers more attuned to the world of TV than me will probably enjoy this more, but Street Gang is honestly a pretty good book about a great show that really did change the world for the better.

Rules for Dating My Daughter by Mike Dawson

I'm lucky, personally: I have only sons. So I can sit on the sidelines of the feminist-parenting debate, and pretend that I would have all of the perfect answers if things had gone otherwise. What are the rules for dating my sons? Well, first you have to like one of them, and want to date them -- I'm assuming that will happen at some point, though it hasn't yet. I'll work out any other rules at that point, I guess. (Probably won't need to.)

Mike Dawson, on the other hand, has a young daughter. And the title story of this collection of short comics is about the wonders and terrors of parenting a daughter as a 21st century man. (There are plenty of men out there who are still stuck in prior centuries -- a majority of them just elected a President.) He's seen the usual fake-redneck rules, and reacted strongly against them -- he's modern enough to realize the goal there is the control of women's sexuality, and not want to buy into that. And he's seen a feminist version -- "her body, her rules," that kind of thing -- which is also uneasy-making, because it still implies he gets to make rules, and, also, his particular daughter is young enough that he doesn't want to think about it. So "Rules for Dating My Daughter" ends up not having any; he's not the one who will make those rules, and she's too young to think about it.

But what about the rest of Rules for Dating My Daughter? The book contains more stories than the title track. The remainder, though, aren't there to provide  guidance for young people in 2025 looking to woo Miss Dawson. (Which is definitely a good thing: 2025 will come soon enough, so we don't have to hurry it.) But all of the stories are political in the way the title story is -- maybe more the-personal-is-political, but that certainly counts -- worries about role models and masculinity and which lives matter and climate change and violence and apocalypse.

Many of them are about that daughter, directly or as part of the family, but I think I can say that all of them are about the fears that come with having a child. Suddenly, you're not looking just at your own life, just at the next day or year -- you wonder what the world will be like after you're gone, what kind of a society you're bringing a new life into. Dawson isn't thrilled by the world and society we have, but, like so many of us, doesn't know exactly what to do.

He shows us that uncertainty and thought process, in the short comics collected here. Dawson uses captions a lot more than the mainstream standard now -- maybe because he's an '80s kid like me, maybe because it really does illuminate his stream of consciousness really well, to tease out nuances and doubts and the back-and-forth of internal debate. Rules is not a book to tell us what Mike Dawson thinks the answers are: it's a book of his questions and worries and thoughts as he tries to figure out for himself what an answer might look like. That's vastly more honest and appealing than a I-know-best style, and Dawson is thoughtful and interesting as he works through these concerns and ideas.

Multiple Nights in a Not-All-That-Lonely October

Hey! I've just finally posted the list of books I read in October, since I've just now finished up posts for all of those books. (I have a system going, I guess -- it's a weird system, and one I don't want to talk about, but it still counts as a system.)

If you want to go to that list of links, here is the path. But do remember: it's dangerous to go alone.

Someone Please Have Sex With Me by Gina Wynbrandt

There's a standard for autobiographical comics: they have to be about "you," obviously, but that "you" must be larger than life. Whatever your actual flaws are, make them bigger and funnier -- your cartoon avatar must be a cartoon, in all of the senses of that word that you can manage.

Gina Wyndrandt understands this instinctively -- or maybe from her art-school background in Chicago -- and so her first collection of comics, Someone Please Have Sex With Me, features a hot mess central character exaggerated from what the real Wynbrandt must think are the most interesting (or most easily parodied) aspects of herself. Someone Please collects five minicomics -- one for each of the last five years -- which are essentially all of her work to date. (I found another one-pager on her website, but otherwise this is pretty much it; she's right at the beginning of her career.)

So the Gina of these comics is sex-obsessed and self-deluded, a big ball of longing and wrecking-ball destructiveness, a more clueless Melissa McCarthy character. (American culture never knows what to do with oversized women, like it doesn't know what to do with loud ones, so there are few role models for a Wynbrandt character. In her lazy thoughtlessness, she's almost more like a gender-swapped Kevin James character, if that makes any sense.) Comics Gina starts out obsessed with Justin Bieber -- inappropriately, as even other characters point out -- and Wynbrandt's fantasy-tinged stories allow her avatar to meet and have a relationship with him.

It all turns out badly, of course -- autobio comics are usually about wacky people failing, and Wynbrandt is in that tradition. But it turns out badly in nutty over-the-top ways -- like the title story, which projects a sex-starved Comics Gina almost a century into the future, still begging and cajoling and maneuvering to get more nookie. Each story works that way, starting with something like reality and then steadily moving farther and farther afield as Cartoon Gina deforms reality around her with the force of her demands.

The art improves steadily over the course of the book, getting more assured and expressive with each story -- and even the first one, "One Less Lonely Girl," is just fine. The book itself is a cute little thing, drenched in a very girly pink for maximum impact.

I hope Wynbrandt finds other things to cartoon about than herself, eventually, but she's got a fun character in Cartoon Gina, and there's still plenty of life there. As a first book, this is both a hoot and a stake driven into the sand to show the direction Wynbrandt is going to be headed (away from everyone else, which is the best direction to travel for a new creator).

Invisible Ink by Bill Griffith

It takes some kind of chutzpah to write a full-length book about your own mother's infidelity. And a towering sense of equanimity to do so positively, openly wishing your mother had married the man she dallied with for sixteen years instead of the presumably lousy second husband who is barely named. But Bill Griffith has both of those things -- and, on top of that, a much better ability to control and shape a complex book-length story than one might expect from the cartoonist behind Zippy the Pinhead for the last few decades.

Invisible Ink is billed as "a graphic memoir," but it's more about Barbara Jackson Griffith -- Bill's mother -- and Lawrence Lariar, the cartoonist she had an affair with from 1957 to 1973. Bill tells the story, and organizes it -- like so many Zippy sequences, this is the story of the "Griffith character" looking at things and thinking a lot about them, though he lets himself be more grounded and less neurotic than his usual Zippy persona. (It helps that he's not trying to set up a punch line every four panels here, of course.) Bill, or his cartoon avatar, is our guide, and the one who uncovers the story -- but the core story is about Barbara and "Mr. Lariar," as she always called him.

Along the way, we learn that Bill's childhood was not all that happy -- he and his sister Nancy were both regularly beaten by their tightly-wound father (even before their mother's long affair, in case anyone suspects a cause-and-effect relationship), though Bill hit back at age eleven, and that seems to have stopped the abuse for him, at least. That father, Jim Griffith, stays a distant, cold, unpleasant figure throughout the book; he was young and happy once, but that curdled when the two children were young and didn't lift until his unlikely bike-accident death in 1972. Bill wasn't thus super-close to his mother, either -- it looks like one of those chilly WASPy mid-century families, where the kids play outside and far away as much as they can to stay away from the parents that much longer.

Barbara told Bill about her affair right after Jim died -- Bill was in his late twenties then, but, still, it's an unusual thing to tell even an adult son about a long-running affair. The affair was just about to break up then, as Griffith shows here: Lariar was married, and didn't want to break that marriage for the newly-free Barbara. But Barbara wanted a solid relationship, one that encompassed her whole life, and wasn't willing to stay the woman on the side once her own husband was gone. So Lariar broke it off, and Barbara married that barely-mentioned second husband a year later, on the rebound.

Some time after that, Barbara wrote a novel -- never published, and it's not clear if it's even finished -- about her life and centering on that affair. (Amusingly to me, to simply her life into fiction, she shrunk "her" family down to one child, leaving Bill out of the book entirely.) Invisible Ink is, in part, about what Bill learned by reading that novel -- and also, in part, what he learned while obsessively researching Lariar. (He now claims to be the preeminent expert on Lariar in the world, which is entirely plausible.)

Invisible Ink is a deeply humanist book, full of thought and wisdom: it's the book of an older man looking back at several lives (his own among them) and seeing the things that could have gone better. There's a wishful tone in places, but more often an inquisitive spirit: every life has secrets, and Invisible Ink is the story of Bill Griffith delving into the deepest secrets closest to his own life and coming to terms with what he finds out. Actually, "coming to terms" is too strong -- Griffith already accepts all of it; there's no anger or disbelief here. He just wants to understand and to know -- and, along the way, he presents it all for us, written thoughtfully and drawn compellingly.