Reviewing the Mail: Week of 2/10/18

This week I have books in two categories to mention to you, which means the less mentally agile of you might get confused. (And that I'm turning to insulting my audience in this thirteenth year of my blog -- hey, it's something to do.)

First up is an epic fantasy novel that came from the publisher, and which is brand-spanking new. Then I'll get into some recent graphic novels that I got from my local library to feed the Book-A-Day maw.

So: direct from the fine folks at Pyr is Jon Sprunk's Blade and Bone, the third book in his series "The Book of the Black Earth." (Raising once again that old epic-fantasy question: how can a series be "The Book" when it takes three or four or twelve books to get through it?) It hits stores on February 27th, and does not promise to be the last in the series. This time out, our hero Horace -- Horace? that's an interesting name for a hero in a book at least somewhat inspired by ancient Egypt -- is still in charge of the slave rebellion and leveling up as a magician, but there's now also "an unstoppable army of undead creatures under the control of a mysterious sorcerer," so his dance card is getting pretty full.

Everything else is from the library -- I think these are all 2017 books, since I'm plundering some "best of the year" lists, but no promises.

Everything is Flammable by Gabrielle Bell -- If I haven't lost track of things (which is a big "if"), this was Bell's first big comics collection since 2012's The Voyeurs. If I did lose track of things, then I have no idea.

Poppies of Iraq by Brigette Fidakly and Lewis Trondheim -- As I remember it, Findakly is Trondheim's wife, and this is her memoir of growing up in Iraq, which he drew. (Looking at the book itself, that's all true, but Trondheim is also credited as co-writer, possibly because he has more experience putting things into comics form.)

Lucky Penny by Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Ota -- This is some manner of contemporary comedic romance fiction, and I have no idea how I heard of it. Somebody recommended it, I guess, and now I'll read it.

And last is Tillie Walden's Spinning, a memoir of figure skating and coming out and the other things that happen along the way. I've never read any of Walden's work -- I think this is her first big book, but I could be wrong -- and this has gotten a lot of praise.

Book-A-Day 2018 #42: Howard Chaykin's American Flagg!

Sometimes, with comics, we forget the value of density. Particularly these days, when the needle has swung far in the direction of deconstruction and the popular models are from manga, with endless pages of the wind blowing evocatively over some landscape or other, we forget the power of a page full of things happening and messages assaulting our eyeballs.

Well, we live in a world like that now, so maybe we don't want it in our comics all that often. But there are comics that told us this world was coming, that said that random ethnic violence and lowest-common-denominator reality TV would numb our viewing eyes, that media barons would take over politics and make a profit off of it, that we can and will be seduced by bread and circuses.

They also said we'd get to Mars by then, but that's the besetting sin of SF, isn't it? Assuming that some big impressive things will happen to offset or backdrop the day-to-day shittiness. The real future is always more banal than the SF version, with all of the kipple and none of the electric sheep.

One of the densest, and most horribly prescient, SF comics of all time is Howard Chaykin's American Flagg! It wasn't all consistent -- in those days, comics came out regularly, so when Chaykin needed a rest, other people sharecropped his fields to much less effect, including a shockingly horrible Alan Moore story about sex cops -- but the best of it, meaning the all-Chaykin storylines, was electric and real in a way little in the comics was when it came out and still shockingly powerful today.

The first three storylines (each three jam-packed issues long) of Chaykin's masterwork were collected in the 2008 hardcover Howard Chaykin's American Flagg!, Vol. 1, along with the next two semi-fill-in issues -- done-in-one stories with other artists -- and an all-Chaykin short story that I think originally appeared in an earlier collection of the first story, Hard Times. This isn't the whole of the pure Chaykin product -- as I recall, all of his multi-part stories from the original 1983 run were strong, and the rest of those would fill up another book about this size.

That book doesn't exist: the 2008 reprinting project got as far as two paperbacks, each with one half of this hardcover, and this book itself, and then petered out. That's unfortunate: American Flagg! does have dated elements (the clothes, the hair, the timeline), but Chaykin was never better than in this series. There's a hair-on-fire energy on every page, a damn-the-torpedoes headlong power to his plotting, and his art was super-detailed in a way then entirely futuristic and now still pretty damn impressive.

This book, though, is out there, if you can find it. It's set in 2031, in a US that collapsed in the mid-90s and has never come back. But the big corporations and rich folks got off-planet to the Moon and then Mars -- this is the most SFnal and unrealistic piece of the set-up, and not really necessary -- and a police-force-cum-broadcaster, the Plex, runs what's left of North America. What's left of the bourgeoisie live in giant "malls" near the old cities, and the rest of the country is a rabble of ethnic gangs, whose economic activity, as far as we see it, is entirely of the illegal kind. Thrown into this corrupt and profoundly cynical snakepit is Reuben Flagg, who recently was the lead actor in a Plex-promoting soft-core-porn TV show until technology advanced enough to eliminate actors entirely. (And, to be honest, as far as we can tell, all entertainment is at least soft-core porn in this future -- it's bread and circuses all the way down.)

Flagg is honest, as such things go. And, even more, he's got a great survival instinct and a desire to fix whatever is in front of him and broken. This world has a lot that's broken, so Flagg has his work cut out for him. It's still a thrill to experience this world along with him, to see one of the two great comics dystopias of the '80s (along with Tim Truman's Scout) again, and to wish there was more of it, or a decent collection or what else is already out there.

Book-A-Day 2018 #41: Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee

It's a joy to pick up a book knowing almost nothing about it or the author -- and to find that book excellent. (If the book is lousy, you always wish you knew more up front.) I've never read J.M. Coetzee before, and barely know who he is -- when I picked up this book to read it, I had to check to make sure "he" was the appropriate pronoun.

This 2010 Penguin Ink edition of Waiting for the Barbarians presents the 1980 novel with tattoo-inspired art by C.C. Askew on the front, back, and French flaps, where a description of the book or author would usually be. Instead, there's a single paragraph on the first page to describe it as a "modern classic," characterize Coetzee as a Nobel Laureate, and and provide two sentences about the story. That's it -- but how much more does a 180-page book about a nameless man need? It's almost as easy to just read it.

If you want to repeat my experience, stop here, and add Waiting for the Barbarians to your to-be-read list. If not, let me tell you more...

Somewhere at the edge of an Empire, down a long and lonely road, a small dusty town sits next to a small dusty fort, with a small garrison of men stationed there so long they're practically locals. Nearby is a lake that's slowly drying up and turning to salt, and between there and the distant mountains are scrublands and desert -- hard, bleak lands with little life or water and no permanent settlements. Roaming through the scrub and the desert and the mountains are the barbarians. Presumably the barbarians are made up of different tribes,  but to the Empire they are all just "barbarians." In that fort sits a magistrate. He's been in that town for decades, doing a decent enough job and administering the region reasonably well. He's old and fat and devoted to small pleasures, hoping to just live out the rest of his days in this sleepy town in a sleepy time.

But there's a rumor in the Empire: the barbarians are gathering. They're preparing for war. They will sweep across the entire frontier and threaten the heartlands. And so Colonel Joll, from the Third Bureau, comes to this small nameless town, a quiet and cold functionary in black-smoked glasses, to question the barbarians and find out their plans. Men like him are investigating all along the borders, each one with a squad of soldiers, outsiders loyal only to their Third Bureau commander, ready to do what needs to be done to save the Empire.

The Colonel starts with two men, one old and one young, found near the site of a raid. They claim to have nothing to do with the raid, to have been coming to town to see a doctor for the young man's wound, but the Colonel will not believe any story he hears before the questioning starts. Eventually, the questioning end, one of the two men leaves, and the Colonel is ready to continue.

The townsfolk wouldn't consider the fishing people on the lake to be barbarians. But Colonel Joll is from far away, and the fishing people are not townsfolk. So he and his soldiers drag back many of them, to fill up a makeshift prison and start a more intensive round of questioning. The Colonel's questions must go on, and they demand many bodies and much blood.

And then, one day, the Colonel is satisfied. He will head back to the center of the Empire, to consult with the other men like himself, to pool their knowledge and piece together what can be know of the plot for barbarian attack. And the magistrate wants to make things back to the way they were, to turn his little town sleepy again, to forget the torturers and the bodies they worked on.

He, unlike we readers, doesn't know he's still at the beginning of the story. Much more will happen from there, and Joll will inevitably return.

Waiting for the Barbarians is obviously a novel about imperialism, but it's about no particular Empire or time. This Empire has guns but, at least on this frontier, no cars. They ride horses through the dust. It could be any time in the last two or three hundred years, almost anywhere. The Empire and the barbarians could be of any mixture of skin color.

In 1980 in Coetzee's native South Africa, there was an obvious allegorical parallel.

In 2018, in the USA, after almost two decades of pointless imperial adventures and black sites and our own round of questions of clearly guilty barbarians, it has at least one more.

Every reader could find a different parallel, another atrocity to be reminded of. This is one of those horribly repeated human stories. Coetzee's version is taut and precise and devastating, true in its universality to evoke whichever imperial power a reader brings to mind first.

I'd like to say that reading Waiting for the Barbarians will help stop it from happening again. But reading doesn't have that power. This story will repeat as long as we're humans, as long as we're barbarians. Read it anyway.

Book-A-Day 2018 #40: No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!, Vols. 8 & 9 by Nico Tanigawa

It's been two and a half years since I last checked in with Tomoko Kuroki, world-class otaku and eternal contender for Most Awkward Person in The World. The last time I read a couple of manga volumes about her, I found the jokes were getting too "in" and the cultural references too decidedly Japanese for me to enjoy it the way I did the first few. (For more, check out my previous posts on volumes  1 and 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6-7.)

But I'm back for No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!'s eighth and ninth volumes, which were sitting gathering dust on my shelf. (Two more volumes have since emerged, and I'm not sure the series is done even now.)

These two volumes see Tomoko go on a class trip and compete in her school's bi-annual sports festival. The cynic in me takes that as an indication that the series has run longer than creator Nico Tanigawa expected or planned, and so she's now running Tomoko through standard Japanese high school events to see how Tomoko reacts. Even if that's the case, it's not a bad idea -- Tomoko is still so thoroughly living in her own world that she inevitably brings confusion and awkwardness everywhere she goes.

(And the target audience -- both in Japan and slightly less so over on my side of the Pacific -- will be very familiar with the cultural/social references that just whiz past me.)

I guess I'm still in basically the same position I was when I read the last couple of volumes: this is fun and entertaining, but it feels like this series should have been over by now. Tomoko is not going to change or learn, which limits the stories you can tell about her. A character like that is not built to sustain continuing, ongoing stories -- she's a caricature, so you want to show her from her best side, do the best stories right, and get out. I'm thinking two thousand plus pages of stories about Tomoko is probably too many, but I suppose there are people who want four or five thousand -- and capitalism means that if there's enough of them, they get their way.

In any case, don't start here. Starting any manga series at volume eight is a bad idea, but especially so with a one-joke character. Try the first book, see if you like it, and keep going as long as you do. (Not bad advice for anything, I suppose.)

Book-A-Day 2018 #39: Sh*t My President Says by Shannon Wheeler

Sh*t My President Says has an uncredited co-author, but I'm going to try not to mention his name at all here. (It's probably visible on the book jacket anyway, in case the title didn't clue you in.)

Shannon Wheeler has taken a number of Tweets from a very prominent celebrity author -- one very fond of using that platform to insult others and declare himself such superlatives as "a very stable genius" -- and has illustrated them, puckishly or directly, to show what the author might have meant, or what he's implying. There's generally one Tweet to a page, with only an occasional string -- this author is not known for sustained, careful thought -- accompanied by Wheeler's drawing.

It's to Wheeler's credit that Sh*t My President Says isn't as soul-destroying and horrible as just reading the man's words directly: it proves that, sometimes, context really can make things that little bit better. Oh, they're still badly-informed, wrong-headed, self-aggrandizing and regularly disconnected from consensus reality -- nothing can change that. But Wheeler finds ways to make those flaws funny, as if Our Author is just some grumpy old grampa, hanging an onion on his belt and yelling at clouds.

Wheeler's buried lesson is that the old adage is exactly backwards: the universe starts with farce (like Shit My Dad Says) and then repeats as tragedy. Because this is nothing else. But a tragedy in real life can't be avoided -- so we might as well laugh at it, while we still can.

This book exists because this person is saying shit. Over and over and over again. Vile, factually-wrong shit that shows what a horrible human being he is. The very least we can do is be honest about that shit. Wheeler does us the service of that honesty, and wraps it in a little funny bow, to make some of that shit slightly less horrible.

I wish this book wasn't necessary. But it was, because shitty people decided they really wanted a massively shitty leader. Perhaps they will choke on that shit and die. Perhaps they will realize the error of their ways and turn from shittiness. Perhaps the rest of us will find a way to encapsulate their shittiness, like some kind of metaphorical septic tank, so it doesn't spew over the rest of the neighborhood. Any of those would be fine -- the shitty people can decide which they want. But we can't live with this shit forever.

(I note that Wheeler, unlike his model, is reticent to actually use the word "shit" in his title. If that gets this book shown and sold in more places, that's a reasonable trade-off. You don't need to say the word to recognize the stench.)

Book-A-Day 2018 #38: Brave by Svetlana Chmakova

I am so glad middle school is far behind me. I even gladder my two sons are past those years as well, and that I don't expect to have any other kids to shepherd through those years. And I don't think it's purely Schadenfreude when I read a story about middle-schoolers -- but there might be an element of "thank ghod that's long over."

Brave is a middle-school story -- about and mostly for middle-schoolers, though pitched so even adults (even us poor benighted adults) can enjoy it. It's from Svetlana Chmakova, and is set in the same school as her previous graphic novel Awkward. It struck me as stronger and more emotionally resonant than Awkward was, but maybe that's just me: I was a large, bullied middle-school boy who spent his time thinking about other things, so Jensen Graham's story strikes a chord and reminds me of things I'd rather not remember.

(And I still think this school's mania about clubs is a lot more from the Japanese manga school-story tradition -- and maybe from actual Japanese school life, as far as I know -- than it is from the way kids operate in the US today. But maybe there are a lot of super-club-centric middle schools out there that I'm not aware of?)

Jensen is the fictional version of that kid: too big, too distracted, too uninterested in what most kids care about, too easy to pick on. (A little more so than the real version of that kid, and a bit cartoony to make it funny as well as sad.) You might have been that kid at ten or twelve -- I was, pretty much.

He doesn't have any real friends as the book opens, but doesn't really realize it -- he's part of the art club, and thinks of those kids as his friends even though they make fun of him and don't include him in their activities. But, again, he's distracted and unconnected, so he doesn't notice that a lot of the time. Maybe it's just him, maybe it's a deeply-buried coping mechanism: it's harder for people to hurt you if you don't notice they're trying to hurt you.

Jensen thinks of his school life as a video game -- get through the level, avoid the monsters, and reach the treasure at the end (art club). But the monsters keep getting tougher, and he's fallen behind in math, so he needs to get tutoring...in a group with one of his main bullies. (Unlike a lot of popular fiction, Chmakova doesn't present Jensen's school as having one big bully who eternally schemes to make his life hell -- instead, like the real world, he has a lot of people who make fun of him a little and a few who get more nasty joy out of tormenting him whenever they have a chance. Nobody's obsessed with Jensen; he's just a convenient target.)

But, at the same time, he may be finding some people who could be real friends -- or, at least, friendly. Like the taciturn athlete he's been partnered with on a project in English. Or the students on the newspaper, who may be interested in Jensen as a subject for their bullying study, but also think of him as a real person and try to help him. As someone who was a geeky boy -- and now has a couple of geeky sons his own -- I wish that he found people who share some of his real interests, but he's at least on the right path.

Brave is a more realistic bullying story than most: there's no horribly nasty kid who can be easily defeated in the end, and the adult leadership of the school is often capricious and wrong from the kids' point of view. But it shows people -- kids, in particular -- seeing things that are wrong and working together to make them better. Jensen's new newspaper friends call out bad actors and publicize explanations of bad behavior, giving the less-engaged mass of kids tools to make their own lives better and to treat each other more fairly. It's not just a good book on its own, but one that can do good in the world, if put in the hands of the right kids -- I hope it will be.

Book-A-Day 2018 #37: National Lampoon's Big Book of Love

I've been using the tongue-in-cheek tag "The War Between Men and Women" (note the Thurber reference) here for a few years now, calling out posts about love and gender roles and related odd things. But it has never been so appropriate as today.

According to the powers of Google, I've used variations of the word "misogyny" only twice before in the history of this blog -- once to talk about an undercurrent in Howard Chaykin's comics, and once about H.P. Lovecraft. This post, I'm afraid, will probably shatter that record.

You can't talk about National Lampoon's Big Book of Love without talking about misogyny -- you probably can't talk about the classic National Lampoon without at least mentioning misogyny, frankly, but this book is a collection of the most blatantly misogynistic pieces from that magazine, as if its purpose was to distill the brandy of misogyny from the thinner wine of general NatLamp content.

(See: I told you. That's 5 in just three paragraphs. It can be horrible to go back to things you liked in your youth and see just how problematic they really were. For example: I'm not going to even mention a single one of the many, many rape jokes.)

Big Book of Love was assembled in 2004, during one of the periodic Frankenstinian attempts to jolt life back into NatLamp's corpse and extract some more value out of its intellectual assets for whichever hedge fund or group of shadowy investors owned it at the time. The book was edited by Scott Rubin, Sean Crespo and Mason Brown, who also provided a few new pieces to add contemporary spice to the collection. But 90+% of the material here appears to be shot from the original magazine film -- wasn't there a big digitized collection of the whole run of the magazine around that time? this looks very much like a brand extension from that work -- and the book itself does not have page numbers at all.

The positive spin is that all of the pieces in here are parodies of the depicted misogynistic attitudes, and that is basically true. That can help to explain, but it doesn't excuse: nearly all of this is by men, nearly all of it takes those attitudes as being as natural as air, and nearly all of it is trapped in a hellish Platonic version of the '50s, where the boys have D.A. haircuts and raging libidos, while the girls are virginal creatures who have to be coerced or tricked into sex. (Well, a very few of them enjoy sex, because they're whores -- we all know the drill. And by "whores," I mean, tautologically, the standard '50s definition of "women who enjoy sex.")

It should be said here that NatLamp was always juvenile in its enthusiasms and very energetic in pursuit of those -- it was deliberately loud, raucous, taboo-breaking, and obnoxious. That was the point. It was very, very juvenile about sex, because that's what it did. But, even given that the writers were primarily Boomers in the twenties and early thirties looking back at their own teen years, it's remarkable how much of a '50s artifact this book is. None of the pieces feel like they were about the '70s, even though that's when they were written and originally published.

Obviously, it isn't the '70s anymore -- hell, it's not even 2004 anymore, when this book was assembled. And Big Book of Love reads quite differently after #MeToo than it did at the time.

Well, it does for me. And, I hope, for many other men. But I'm sure a lot of this was ugly for a lot of women longer ago than I realized.

So Big Book of Love has a lot of forty-year-old humor that has aged really badly, with attitudes towards women that range from fart-at-the-dinner-table unfortunate to avert-your-eyes horrific. It includes several pieces by John Hughes (yes, later the director of Breakfast Club), including the famous "My Penis," which must be read to be believed. Other famous names from that era of NatLamp, like P.J. O'Rourke, Doug Kenney, Michael O'Donoghue, Henry Beard, Ed Subitzky, Tony Hendra, and Michael Reiss are also represented. As far as I can tell, there are only two women (aside from the naked ones in the "Foto Funnies" and on a couple of old covers): Shary Flenniken ends the book with a four-page "History of Sex" in comics form, and Anne Beatts wrote a four-page piece purporting to be the world's first "stroke book for women." Both of those are better than the average here, which isn't difficult.

I have several other NatLamp books sitting on my shelf, and I hope to get to them during this Book-A-Day year. So I'll make a prediction here, and see if it turns out to be true. I think -- or maybe I'd like to think -- that the political humor in NatLamp, or the general social humor, was stronger than these lazy (and, yes, often misogynistic) war-of-the-sexes pieces. I want to believe that this book was put together quickly out of the most obvious pieces to fit the pre-chosen title, and that there is stronger NatLamp work, which will not read as horribly out-of-date in 2018.

But I'll have to see about that. This book, though, I can only recommend to those who were teenage boys in the mid-70s and have remained so since then.

Book-A-Day 2018 #36: Underwire by Jennifer Hayden

Jennifer Hayden is a middle-aged New Jerseyan, telling stories here about her growing kids and family life -- so why did it take me so long to get to a 2011 book so close to my own life and experience? (I'm generally all over that stuff: don't we all love to be validated by art that reflects the way we see the world?)

Well, I did see her big graphic novel The Story of My Tits (spoiler alert: the story is cancer) a few years back, and I've had Underwire on my shelf at least since then. This book-a-day run gave me a good excuse to pull it down, and I realized this was a compilation -- it collects a strip she did for Dean Haspiel's ACT-I-VATE collective, strips done around the same time she was working on the big book.

So this book has thirty pieces -- a few of them are full-page illustrations (generally of what I'd call "goddessy stuff," which may be a consumer warning for some), but most are comics. The stories are mostly two or three pages long -- a vignette or moment of her life, or a whimsical dream -- but there's also a ten-pager, "Girls' Club," about a Christmas party and a night staying at the title club, where her grandmother made posters years ago.

Each story is a little slice of life -- Hayden focuses on domesticity, so it's about moments with her two teen kids and husband, rather than work or the wider world. These are about what it's like to be Jennifer Hayden, in the years 2008-2010, with a daughter who got amazingly sophisticated overnight and a son who's ready to go off on his own. A few are flights of fancy, but still rooted in that normal life. Not big things, no. But the stuff that good lives, and good people, are made of.

Hayden has a heavily-detailed, ornate style with a cartoony edge -- not a million miles away from Lynda Barry, but entirely its own thing. This is a small, quirky book of small, quirky stories -- but all lives are small and quirky when you look at them close up. It's just that most of us aren't as good at Hayden at really looking at them.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 2/3

I feel guilty about being happy about not having any books to write about here -- and if that's not a stupidly complex emotion, I don't know what is.

But it's true: one, I have no books to write about this week.

Two, I'm moderately happy, since it means this post can be short, and I can get to other things.

Three, I feel guilty that I'm happy about not having to spend much time doing something that I supposedly enjoy.

Oh, well -- if humans were simple creatures I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have the Internet to begin with! See you next week for more books, or possibly not.

Book-A-Day 2018 #35: Stumptown Vol. 1 by Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth

There are creators I feel guilty about not reading more often. I don't know if that's an emotion most readers have -- it's weird and counter-productive and based entirely in my own head, so I hope it's not widespread -- but I look at shelves and book lists and new publications all the time and think "Oh no, I am so far behind on {Creator X}."

Greg Rucka is one of them. I don't mind missing most of his superhero-universe comics, since I've mostly avoided those worlds for the last twenty-some years -- when superhero stories just annoy you instead of pleasing you, that's the sign to stop reading about superheroes. (This rule is applicable to many other things, of course.) But I read his novels avidly for a decade or so, I really liked Whiteout like so many other people, and I was fond of Queen and Country until it went too far down the rabbit hole for me. And I actually knew Rucka in person, once upon a time, half a million years ago in college.

So I have the weird sense that I ought to read his books. Since I've liked them, that shouldn't be too difficult, right? Well, the world is big and the flow of books is huge and endless. Sometimes just keeping track of the things you want to get to someday is too much work.

Anyway, something like a decade late -- this was published as comics in 2009 and in this snazzy book form in 2011 -- I finally got to Stumptown, Vol. 1: The Case of the Girl Who Took Her Shampoo (But Left Her Mini). It's drawn by Matthew Southworth, whose work I don't otherwise know, in a muddy dark palette that works very well for this moody dark crime story. Southworth is credited as the only artist and one of three colorists, so I'm simplifying to his name to talk about the art -- but the other colorists, Lee Loughridge and Rico Renzi, are probably responsible for a good part of the tone and feel of this book.

Rucka specializes in muddy dark crime stories, in case you didn't know, even when there are superheroes lurking around the edges. I hope you'd have know that by this point, if you read any of the same kind of things I do, but, again, the world is big.

There are further Stumptown stories -- I think three more hardcovers like this one, and maybe more -- all about the same flawed heroine and her city. And I might keep going now that I've started.

But I find I'm really not convinced by the kind of stories in which PIs get regularly beaten up anymore. Sure, someone does try to kill our heroine, Dex Parios, once or twice, but she also gets beaten with some regularity in these four issues, repeatedly by the same people to make her give up. Admittedly, it's fair to assume crooks are stupid, but they're smart enough to know that bullets are cheap.

I have a hard time believing Dex survived to the end of her first story, frankly. And the "getting roughed up by the bad guy's hoods" trope now feels like a creaky genre trapping to me, which I didn't expect. Or maybe I'm coming to think that folks willing to break skin and bones are just as likely to break skulls or other parts in a more permanent manner.

Look: there's great noir atmosphere here, with a runaway teen girl, the down-on-her-luck detective coerced into a job by her own debts and demons, up-to-date ethnicity for our gangsters, local color for Portland, the Ross Macdonald-esque family at odds with itself, cool cars, taut dialogue and occasional gunplay. That atmosphere is equally from Rucka's scenario and words and Southworth's inks and colors. It's a well-done detective story and a smart genre exercise.

I'm just saying I'm finding it harder and harder to believe in those genre trappings -- which is all on me and none on Rucka and Southworth. If you like PI stories, particularly tough female ones (think V.I. Warshawski, for example), Stumptown is something you should check out.

Book-A-Day 2018 #34: 5 Centimeters per Second by Makoto Shinkai and Yukiko Seike

I am the kind of person who reads a book based on a movie before seeing the movie. Perhaps even instead of seeing the movie. Sometimes without even realizing there was a movie until after finishing the book and looking to research it for a blog post such as this one.

I say all that to set expectations: I'm not going to compare books to movies very often, and definitely not today.

Today I'm writing about the manga volume 5 Centimeters per Second, written by Makoto Shinkai and drawn by Yukiko Seike. Unlike some similar projects, I get the sense Shinkai did translate his movie of the same name into a comics script -- this book (I found out after reading it) expands on the movie substantially.

Again, I can't speak for the movie. But the book has a strength and a crisp shape unusual for a work adapted from another medium, and it subverts expectations at every turn. It opens as a cute love-story between two kids -- she's Akari Shinohara, who just moved to this small town, and he's Takaki Tono, who moved there a year ago. They're maybe ten or eleven when the story begins, and about a year older when Akari moves away again, leaving them to write to each other to keep their connection. But then Takaki's family is going to move even further away, so they try to meet, for one last time, in the middle of a late-winter snowstorm that slows everything down.

Next we see Takaki in high school, friendly with everyone but not close to anyone. Another girl, Kanae Sumida, is painfully in love with him. He befriends her, but he doesn't have anything more to offer her -- we think, because we know stories like this, that it's because he'll get back together with Akari in the end. But if we look closer, we see that this section is Kanae's story: it's all about her feelings, and how Takaki doesn't, or can't, reciprocate.

And then the action jumps forward again, to the then-present day: Takaki is in his mid-twenties, working as a programmer. He has a steady girlfriend, Risa Mizuno, but he's no closer to her than anyone else. We realize the story is not about long-lost love, but about waiting for something that isn't real, or about letting past expectations define you, or about the ways life isn't like a romantic story.

I think Takaki learns that lesson, in the end. But this is a literary story, about internal states and emotions. And it ends, as it must, before we can see Takaki move on to something new in his life. So each reader has to decide individually what it means, and what will happen next.

This was a pleasant surprise: I thought I was getting a kid-love-reunited story, and I got something deeper and more resonant. (I'd say that I'll try to watch the movie, but there are several hundred movies ahead of it I could try to watch.) I should have realized it: 5 Centimeters was published by Vertical, who specialize in manga that is smart and real, created for grownups by grownups and not extruded to fill a slot in a marketing category. This is a real gem.

Book-A-Day 2018 #33: The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes by Lawrence Block

Noir doesn't have to be about sex. But it's usually a strong part of the mix -- violence and corruption and moral weakness need to have something to give them spark, and noir traditionally uses the femme fatale for that.

(Utterly parenthetically: I'd love to see more female-focused noir, with women main characters drawn into trouble by irresistible men -- or women, I guess, but that would tend to fall into the same woman-as-temptress channels as the traditional male-oriented noir. I bet books like that already exist, but I don't know them.)

When you can't show sex directly, that can make it hotter, if the creator is any good. Movies still get the benefit of this, since major actors are generally unwilling to engage in explicit on-screen sex with their co-stars, but written noir can be as explicit as it wants to be these days, for good or bad.

The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes is a noir novel. It has a lot of sex in it. The sex is described, but not pornographically. (Like Whizzer White, I don't have a hard-and-fast rule for what counts as porn, but the rule of thumb I'm using here is that it's not porn if the scene is over too quickly to be rhythmically admired to completion. There are body parts in this book, and they do bump up against each other, but the point isn't to loving describe every moment of that bumping, but instead to use the sex to show us who these people are, how they interact, what they do.)

Lawrence Block began his career with sex novels, back in the late '50s, when he was a college student. He moved on from there to a long career in the various fields of mysteries and thrillers -- with excursions elsewhere -- with books that generally avoided detail about his main characters' genitalia. But for this 2015 novel -- packaged just like the same publisher's long-running reissues of Block's early work, as if deliberately to confuse his fans [1] -- Block reached back to those early-career noir plots, and, I can only guess, decided to take a run at it again with a modern attitude towards writing about sex. (Perhaps the most obvious comparison is to Block's Grifter's Game, originally published in 1961 and reprinted by Deep Blue Eyes's publisher as their very first book in 2004.)

Doak Miller is an ex-NYPD cop, divorced from his wife and living somewhere in central Florida, mostly on his pension and somewhat on bits of work he picks up with his new PI license. The local sheriff has thrown him some work before, and throws him some more: an informant says that Lisa Otterbein, the younger wife of a local minor real-estate magnate, is shopping around for a hit man. Doak's willing to pretend to be that hit man for a few bucks, and so he gets a wire and sets up the meeting.

Of course this is noir, so he falls for Lisa. And, at first, he's fine with just having talked her out of having her husband killed. But, before long, they both have good and sufficient reasons why the bastard needs to die. Only thing is, if a husband dies, the wife is the first suspect, no matter how he dies. And if she was publicly thinking about killing him recently, well, nobody can stand that level of police scrutiny.

But maybe Doak can figure out a way. And maybe he'll decide he really likes killing.....

Again, this is noir, though it's Block-style noir -- his characters are always a bit talky and his books driven by dialogue as much as action. And his people are more genre-savvy at this far end of his career: they're smart and sneaky and cunning and informed. And Block has written so many plots that he's not interested in doing the standard one, with the obvious ending. Which makes this really good noir, rich and taut and soaked in sex. I didn't realize it was a brand-new book by one of my favorite writers: if you made the same error, you're in for a treat.


[1] There is a "First Publication Anywhere!" line on the cover. But Hard Case, the publisher in question, has published a large number of rediscovered books -- ones written decades ago and left unpublished for whatever reason -- using that same language. If I had been the marketer, I would have suggested wording like "His Brand-New Novel."

Book-A-Day 2018 #32: Bluesy Lucy by Catel and Veronique Grisseaux

I know cliches only get to be that way because they're durable and common, but, boy howdy! does this book rely heavily on a very cliched cliche for its premise. On the first page, we're at a 30th birthday party for Lucy, a professional woman somewhere in France. (I'm going to assume Paris, for reasons of either laziness or cultural weight -- and you can attribute that laziness to either me or the creators, on your whim.)

She is single, and so of course, within a few pages, breaks down because of that single status. And the rest of the book flows out from there: she's presented like a standard rom-com heroine: a career woman but drifting in her personal life, with a few super-close friends who add their own drama, and, more than anything, mildly obsessed with getting a relationship with her imagined perfect man.

So that all is Bluesy Lucy: this edition was published in English by Humanoids, the Anglo extension of the venerable French publisher Les Humanoides Associes, and created by the two French women creators Catel (just Catel) and Veronique Grisseaux (who mostly just uses her last name). I think this is a translation of the first Lucy book from 2000 (Lucie s’en soucie), from cultural markers, from the fact that Humanoids published that book in France, and just because it feels like one set of stories and not a compilation. But there are three later French albums from 2003-06, so I could be wrong.

I went into Bluesy Lucy hoping it would be something like the distaff version of Monsieur Jean: not autobiographical but informed by the creator's real working lives, honest and real about modern life, including love plots but not defined by them. This book is a little more generic than I was hoping for, telling a story that I've already seen too many times in only slightly different Gallic dress. I'm not seeing much evidence that Catel or Grisseaux saw this as a way to write about their own lives: Lucy is a stock character, familiar from many such stories before. She's fun to spend time with, and her exploits are entertaining -- and probably more so the more you can empathize with her. (And I can't, all that much, being American and male and boringly married for the long term.)

The art, though, is full of energy: spiky and bouncy and crackling like a live wire. It gets to the heart of Lucy's character, and makes her that much more lovable -- she may be a cliche, but she's this specific version of the cliche, alive there on the page.

Bluesy Lucy might not have been all I was hoping from it, but it's a pleasant romantic comedy in comics form, with extra French elan. And I do suspect female readers will react to it better than I did.

Read in January 2018

I started another Book-A-Day run this year, so below there should be at least thirty-one books, or else my plans are in deep trouble. There also should be links to about twenty-five of them, or ditto. So let's see where I am as the month ends....

Tom Gauld, Baking With Kafka (1/2)

Richard Sala, The Bloody Cardinal (1/3)

Ben Blatt, Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve (1/3)

Michel Choquette, editor, The Someday Funnies (1/5)

Frank Thorne, The Complete Iron Devil (1/6)

Rick Geary, The Secret Room at the White House (1/7)

Velhmann and Kerascoet, Satania (1/8)

Peter Bagge, Fire!! (1/9)

Mawil, Home and Away (1/10)

Randall Munroe, Thing Explainer (1/11)

Chris Achilleos, Amazona (1/11)

Roger Langridge, Fred the Clown in "The Iron Duchess" (1/12)

Cyril Pedrosa, Equinoxes (1/13)

James Vance and Dan E. Burr, On the Ropes (1/14)

Jonathan Barli, Vip: The Mad World of Virgil Partch (1/14)

Steven Brust, Vallista (1/15)

Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky, Sex Criminals, Vol. 4: Fourgy! (1/16)

Jeff Lemire, Royal City, Vol. 1: Next of Kin (1/17)

Kevin Underhill, The Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance (1/17)

Mimi Pond, The Customer Is Always Wrong (1/18)

Sarah Glidden, Rolling Blackouts (1/19)

Teri S. Wood, Wandering Star (1/20)

Stephen J. Sansweet and Peter Vilmur, The Star Wars Poster Book (1/20)

Mike Mignola and Warwick Johnson-Cadwell, Mr. Higgins Comes Home (1/21)

Michel Rabagliati, Paul Has a Summer Job (1/22)

Colleen Frakes, Prison Island (1/23)

Catel and Veronique Grisseaux, Bluesy Lucy (1/24)

Lawrence Block, The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes (1/24)

Makoto Shinkai and Yukiko Seike, 5 Centimenters per Second (1/25)

Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth, Stumptown, Vol. 1: The Case of the Girl Who Took Her Shampoo (But Left Her Mini) (1/26)

Jennifer Hayden, Underwire (1/27)

Scott Rubin, Sean Crespo, and Mason Brown, editors, National Lampoon's Big Book of Love (1/27)

Svetlana Chmakova, Brave (1/28)

Shannon Wheeler, Sh*t My President Says (1/29)

Nico Tanigawa, No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!, Vol. 8 (1/30)

Nico Tanigawa, No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!, Vol. 9 (1/31)

J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (1/31)


...and that was thirty-seven books for the month, which is a great start for Book-A-Day. From here on, there are two possible problems: laziness and running out of books I can read quickly. Let's see which hits first!

Book-A-Day 2018 #31: Prison Island by Colleen Frakes

Colleen Frakes grew up in a prison. Well, next to a prison, to be exact, on an island that contained just the prison and some houses for guards' families. That seems close enough to me, frankly.

In fact, you could even call it a Prison Island, and Frakes did, for this graphic memoir. (I was going to call it her first, but I'm not sure -- it looks like she's had a book-format collection of her Tragic Relief stories, and something called Woman King which might have been in book format as well. It's the first book of hers I saw, which means precisely nothing.)

Frakes uses a quick, modern, almost sketchbook-like style here, mostly crisp black lines and occasional tones for texture. It feels informal, which matches the tone of the book: conversational, discursive, as if Frakes herself was telling the story to you directly.

That story is one part her life during those ten years she lived on McNeil Island, next to that state prison, out in Puget Sound -- it seems to be almost-but-not-quite the same as her teen years, which is a rough time to live on an isolated island next to a prison. And the other half of Prison Island is the story of the island's closing: she flew back to be there with her family for the ceremony, on one of the very last days the public was allowed on the island at all, and they drove around to see the sights one more time while they could.

The modern story is the frame: Frakes drops into flashbacks to tell the story of the McNeil Island years repeatedly before coming back to the present day. And that life was tough in odd, unusual ways: the island was basically a company town, with only fifty families living there and no amenities besides a ferry to the mainland. (No grocery, no movies, no shopping, no restaurants, no candy shop or convenience store closer than a scheduled ferry ride away, and getting back always meant racing to catch that ferry again.) And convicts do try to escape, now and then, and when they do, the whole island goes into lockdown -- including teenage Frakes, wanting to have a normal sixteenth birthday party.

Add all that to the usual issues of living in a small town and having a long commute to school every day: that was her life growing up. On the positive side, it sounds like the island was mostly unspoiled, with a lot of wilderness and nature to enjoy. And, after a childhood spent moving all the time, as her parents got jobs in different prisons across the state of Washington, McNeil Island was the home she had.

Home doesn't have to be perfect: it just has to be home. And McNeil Island was, for a while. Prison Island celebrates that sense of home: the places with memories, that annoyed you at the time but that you miss afterwards, the places that you'll always remember if only to tell the stories about how much trouble it was. And Frakes makes that real; reading this book is a lot like listening to a good storyteller talk about her life and adventures.