Reviewing the Mail: Week of March 4, 2023

One book, another one from the library - I've been digging through their lists recently, finding graphic novels (mostly new ones) that are available. I guess I've gotten old enough that I don't feel like I need to buy everything - or maybe one flood that destroyed a few thousand books is enough for one life, and if I mostly borrow books they won't build up to that again.

The Last Mechanical Monster is a 2022 graphic novel from Brian Fies, author of Mom's Cancer and A Fire Story. (And Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, somewhat more relevantly - his big projects so far have alternated serious-thing-that-happened-to-me and then a lighter, more SFnal story with more fictional depths.)

This is explicitly, and oddly, a direct sequel to the 1941 cartoon "The Mechanical Monsters," set I think some decades later but not quite as many decades as have passed in the real world. And I'm pretty sure Superman does not appear in any form in this book, for fear of lawyers. But the cartoon is in the public domain, so the robots can be the same, and I guess some or all of the other original elements of the cartoon's story also appear here.

So: giant robot, of a group originally used for evil, now reappearing many years later, without a Superman to smash it. Maybe not evil this time? I guess I'll see.

Books Read: February 2023

Blah blah standard disclaimer blah blah index blah blah mostly for me blah.

Here's what I just read:

Steve Martin and Harry Bliss, Number One Is Walking (2/4)

Ryan North and Erica Henderson, Danger and Other Unknown Risks (2/5, digital)

Harry Bliss and Steve Martin, A Wealth of Pigeons (2/11)

Kate Beaton, Ducks (2/12)

Jeff Vandermeer, Finch (2/12, bound galleys)

Liz Montague, Maybe an Artist (2/17)

Peter and Maria Hoey, Animal Stories (2/18)

Stephen Clarke, A Year in the Merde (2/18)

John Porcellino, From Lone Mountain (2/19)

Zidrou and Arno Monin, The Adoption (2/20)

Joan Didion, After Henry (2/20, in We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live)

Neil Gaiman and Colleen Doran, Chivalry (2/25)

Nathan W. Pyle, Strange Planet (2/26)

P.G. Wodehouse, Sam the Sudden (2/26)

I will likely read more books later on, and continue listing them here.

Quote of the Week: Everybody Comes to Big Bat's

No other small-town place I know of has such a plentiful and varied clientele. There are Indians, of course, of all blood degrees, full-blood as well as almost blonde. Employees of the tribe and of the BIA and tribal politicos come in for breakfast and for coffee afterward, prolonging conversations that are elliptical and hard to eavesdrop on. Drunks who have been up all night nurse cups of coffee they have bought with change and use the john. There are truck drivers running overweight and avoiding the weight station on the main roads, Oglala teenagers in groups of four or five wearing the colors of Denver street gangs, Methodist ministers on their way to local volunteer jobs, college professors leading tours of historical sites, TV crews shooting documentary footage, Mormon missionary ladies in polyester raincoats and with scarves tied around their heads. In the summer, tourists multiply - mid-Americans wearing clothes so casual they might as well be pajamas and toting large video cameras, and fiftyish English couples having one of those bitter, silent arguments travelers have, and long-hared New Age people smelling of patchouli oil, and Australian guys with leather Aussie hats and lissome girlfriends, and college kids from Massachusetts singing in a fake-corny way songs they just heard on the radio in their van, and black families in bright sportswear, and strangely dressed people speaking Hungarian, and ash-blonde German woman backpackers in their early twenties effortlessly deflecting the attention of various guys trying to talk to them, and once in a while a celebrity with an entourage. Observers who noted about a hundred years ago the disappearance of the American frontier have turned out to be wrong: American will always have its frontier places, and they will always look like Big Bat's.

 - Ian Frazier, On the Rez, p.52

If I Were You by P.G. Wodehouse

Before I look, I will make a prediction: If I Were You was originally a play, before P.G. Wodehouse turned it into this 1931 novel. It is clearly broken into a three-act structure, taking place in two locations - the first returning for what I assume is Act Three - and has a smallish cast that comes in and out accompanied with what almost look like stage directions.

I'm not complaining, mind you: this is a quick, fun novel by a master. But the bones of a play are clearly evident within it.

<fx: sound of Googling>

Aha! I am correct - it was a play first, of the same name, by Wodehouse and Guy Bolton. That play was never produced, but later incarnations of the same idea did reach the stage, as I learned from the useful Wikipedia page.

But what is that story, you may ask?

It's a switched-at-birth tale: Anthony, the Fifth Earl of Droitwitch, was born in India and shipped home to be raised by a nurse, who had married into London's Price family of renowned barbers. It's now almost thirty years later, and the often-sozzled former nurse now occasionally claims that she switched Anthony for her son, now the rising Cockney barber Syd Price.

Anthony is the usual Wodehouse hero: strong and true and tall and manly and utterly incapable of any sort of deception or unsportsmanlike behavior. So of course he agrees immediately to switch places with Syd, and let his overbearing relatives mold the Londoner into a proper gentleman while he takes over the thriving barbershop.

There also are a couple of girls involved, of course - the American heiress who has just maneuvered Anthony into making a proposal, and a much better London girl who works in the barbershop.

Oh, and Anthony's younger brother - well, the younger brother of whichever one of them is actually the rightful Earl - has been actively trying to promote a hair-restorer invented by one of the Price ancestors, and this will circle the main plot and add some complications along the way, as well as helping to facilitate the eventual happy ending.

And, yes, of course there is a happy ending, with everyone rich and/or engaged to the right person and/or noble and/or entirely satisfied with their lots. It's a Wodehouse book; that's only to be expected.

This is a short Wodehouse novel - barely two hundred pages - and not generally listed among his best, but it's funny and entertaining and the staginess is not a detriment to it. (Or I didn't find it so: I can never tell what will annoy other people.) And Wodehouse was one of the greats, so not-quite-his-best is still pretty high praise.

Upside Dawn by Jason

I always focus on the wrong things, I know. Years in the book-mines left me fascinated with the minutia of behind-the-scenes, when that doesn't actually matter.

Upside Dawn is a new collection of comics stories by Jason, a Norwegian cartoonist resident in France and, I think, working originally in French for that vast, complex comics market. This English translation was published in late November of 2022, and, if I'm reading the copyright page correctly, the author did the translation himself. (Or else he's just claiming the copyright and denying credit to the person who actually did the work; I'd prefer not to believe that.)

There are sixteen longish stories here - a dozen or twenty pages each - plus an "Etc." section at the end, with another dozen-ish mostly single-page stories, all dated 2020 or 2021. They're all also very much Jason stories - colliding high and low culture, philosophy and werewolves, with a cast of blank-faced anthropomorphic people who have much deeper emotions than they show. Also very Jason: the relentless four-panel grid he's simplified to in this era of his career, after denser grids for his earlier work.

See O Josephine! for the last time I wrote about Jason's shorter works - that was a collection of four roughly album-sized stories two years ago. Or Low Moon, a similarly large collection of stories from a decade ago. Jason's concerns and style have been stable for quite a while: this is how he works, and these are the stories he tells. Some books shift a bit in one direction or another, maybe a little more philosophy or a little more pulp-fiction, but the stew stays roughly consistent. So most of what I can say about Upside Dawn is: Jason is back, and (maybe) here are some tidbits from my favorite pieces in the book.

I've been poking around, trying to figure out if this was a book in France first, with no luck. (Fantagraphics regularly either builds new books for the US audience or ignores previous publications - I don't know which, or if they do both.) My assumption is that it was: that's where he lives and works, so a local publication would usually be first. But I can't find any evidence of it.

Maybe I'm focused on the wrong things because miscellaneous collections are tough to write about. There are sixteen stories here - more if you count the single-pagers - and most of them have clever, complex premises that the reader discovers by reading them. Explicating all of that would take a lot of time and page-space - and spoil the enjoyment of a lot of the book for anyone reading this post.

Let me give one example, without, I hope, spoiling anything. The second story here, "Perec, PI," is particularly inventive - it is a detective story, in which the narration cuts off in every single caption for every single panel. The reader can still figure out the general outline, but the precise secrets of this mystery stay mysterious. It goes further than that by the end, too - Jason's stories often start with one idea and then keep going farther, which is thrilling.

These are strange stories: stories about strange people and things (vampires, Death, famous writers and their characters, monsters of all kinds), stories told strangely, stories that get stranger as they go. I think it is all serious, though a lot of the elements could be hard to take seriously for some readers - there are two EC-style stories, near the end, which are super-obvious on purpose, as if to make it even harder to accept their surfaces.

It's a Jason book. I've been circling that, since it's a cliché, and not terribly useful to new readers. But he is deeply distinctive, and short work shows off his strengths and idiosyncrasies even more so than his book-length stories. Laconic, allusive, mysterious, playful, uneasy. Those are some of the touchstones of Jason stories; those are some the things to look for here. I recommend you do - even or should I say especially if you've never read Jason before.

On the Rez by Ian Frazier

I was going to open here by saying I'm now, finally, caught up with Ian Frazier's books, but I see he had a new book of humorous essays last year that I managed to miss. And that's great news: who could be unhappy to hear that a writer they like has another book, in a style unlike the one they just read? Not me.

Frazier, as I've said here a few times, has two modes, both very much in the New Yorker tradition. He's both a go-there-and-talk-to-people reporter and a sit-down-and-write-something-goofy writer, semi-alternating the two modes throughout his career. For me, his best book of reportage is Family, from the mid-90s, and the best book of humor is the slightly earlier Coyote V. Acme, mostly for the sublime title piece. But those are only the highest peaks in a mountain range; the rest of his stuff is almost equally good, from Gone to New York to The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days.

On the Rez is a book of reportage - the work of the first Frazier - and a sequel, in a weird way. Frazier had written a book called Great Plains a decade before - published in 1989 - which was a loosely-organized collection of writings about and travels through that part of the US. During the writing of that book, Frazier met Le War Lance, an Oglala Sioux Indian - met him on the street in Manhattan - and the two became friends. So, when Frazier didn't move to Moscow (the one in Russia) [1], he instead moved to Montana for the second time, and ended up close [2] to the Pine Ridge Reservation where Le was born and where he'd moved back to after some legal trouble in New York.

You know, Frazier explains the book from the very first, so I should just quote him:

This book is about Indians, particularly the Oglala Sioux who live on the Pine Ridge Reservation in southwestern South Dakota, in the plains and badlands in the middle of the United States. People want to know what a book is about right up front, I have found. They feel this way even if the book does not yet exist, if it is only planned.

(p.3)

Frazier came to Pine Ridge (which is a large expanse, with multiple towns within it), and the "white" towns and cities surrounding it, multiple times over the next few years - he doesn't give a clear timeline, but this seems to be roughly the mid to late '90s, starting maybe 1994 and ending maybe 1999 - to visit with Le, to meet members of Le's extended family, to poke around and see what was interesting, and to just, I think, gather material for this book. Frazier is clear that he considers Le his friend, but it was the kind of friendship where the two sides bring different things: Le brought his knowledge and experience, of a long complicated life and of Oglala Sioux ways and of the people and communities of Pine Ridge, and Frazier brought money and a working car and a willingness to use both for Le's random errands and to listen to Le's stories, even the ones that don't seem to be actually true.

Anyway, On the Rez is made up, once Frazier actually ups sticks and moves to Missoula - which I should point out is two long chapters in; On the Rez is not a tightly focused book in any way - of roughly one part "so I drove several hundred miles over to the Pine Ridge Reservation and hung around there for a few days, and here's what I saw and was told by people there" and one part "in my reading about Indians, this stuff pops out, so let me go through some interesting history and statistics." Frazier goes back and forth between the two modes quickly and easily, generally giving a section break to mark the change but not always. This is not a book with a strong structure; it's loose and rambling and winding, like a road through badlands.

I probably should mention that Frazier uses the term "Indians" almost exclusively, because the people he met and talked to - pretty much entirely Oglala Sioux - used that term exclusively. Other tribes and groups and societies, then or now, may have different preferred terms.

Frazier is a fancier writer here than he usually is for his books of reportage, engaging in rhetorical flourishes and obvious story-telling techniques. My theory is that listening to a lot of Le's stories over the years wore off on him, and so he was telling the story of this people as close to their style as he could.

Let me give an example, from p.125, after at least twice refusing to describe this town:

I will now describe the town of White Clay, Nebraska. One morning when I had nothing else planned I walked around the town. White Clay, White Clay! Site of so many fistfights, and of shootings and beatings and stabbings! Next-to-last stop of so many cars whose final stop was a crash! Junkyard, dusty setting for sprawled bodies, vortex consuming the Oglala Sioux! Sad name to be coupled with the pretty name of Nebraska! White Clay, White Clay!

That's a high point, but On the Rez switches up its tone and style a lot as it goes, from serious retellings of late-19th century battles with the US Army to descriptions of the TV shows that Le and his brothers and cousins would be watching when Frazier arrived, or the endless number of cans of Budweiser they drank.

I don't think this book can be called definitive, and it doesn't aim to be. It's the story of one white guy as much as it is the story of the Oglala Sioux, and, even more so, it's the story of how and why that white guy came to meet a bunch of Oglala Sioux, to respect and care for them, and to want to tell their stories. It's also twenty years old at this point: things can change a lot in a generation. But it is a true book about true people in a true place, told by a master as well as he could. It is thoughtful and well-informed and deep and never settles for easy answers. And it has the story of a real-life hero in it, towards the end...but I'll let you discover that yourself, if you read it.

[1] A lot of the motivation and details behind what Frazier does in On the Rez is left vague, whether because it's not relevant, he doesn't want to explain himself, or some other reason. He's more than just an impersonal reporter, but reticent about his own life as he talks at length about the lives of the people he meets. I suspect a lot of the background is the prosaic "he was a reporter, snooping around for the next thing to write about," which sounds dull and mercenary when the reporter himself talks about it.

[2] This is close in the sense that people in the US West mean it: able to get there in less than a day. It seems to have been four or five hundred miles away, and Frazier's visits were multi-day events involving him staying at a local motel outside the rez.

Nayra and the Djinn by Iasmin Omar Ata

My problem is that I'm always comparing books with other books, or just wanting things out of them that they never promised. This is, of course, a Me Problem, and I try to tamp it down when it hits.

I have a major case today, but I'm going to try to be fair to Nayra and the Djinn, a fine new graphic novel by Iasmin Omar Ata with lovely colors, a positive story, and a message that will resonate with a whole lot of readers younger than I am. Nayra is officially published today; you should be able to find it in all the usual ways and places you find books.

You see, I recently read another book about wishes, Djinni-adjacent, connected to Egyptian culture and Islam - Deena Mohamed's Shubeik Lubeik - and anything I say about Ata's YA book could well be me wanting it to be more like Mohamed's book for adults. That's a bad impulse! I want to make that clear. Each book, each story should be precise and particular - even things I might think of as flaws [1] can be important and specific to that book.

I'm saying all this to stop myself from doing it. Let's see if I succeed.

Nayra Mansour is a younger child in a high-pressure Arab-American immigrant family. She also has only one close friend at school, Rami, and is being bullied - in the mostly psychological, nasty-names way that young women are most likely to attack each other. She's feeling overwhelmed and increasingly unhappy, especially since it's Ramadan.

She's fasting all day, since that's important to her, but that makes her hungry and cranky and tired - and also gives her bullies more things to use to attack her. It's a vicious circle that only gets tighter, especially when her parents refuse to listen to her complaints - admittedly, she mostly does the nonspecific teenager-y "you don't understand me!" yell rather than trying to explain in depth, and they are equally loud and stereotypically tigerish immigrant shouty parents - and just point to her high-achieving, seemingly perfect older siblings.

In case I buried the lede above: this is very much a YA book. Nayra continually fumes and runs away and has titanic, massive emotional swings. I don't know exactly how old she is, but she is about as sixteen as it is possible to be. Readers who are many decades past their own equivalent life-stage may find they have less patience for that kind of drama, and may wish that Nayra was somewhat more constructive in her problem-solving.

But, instead, she meets a djinn, which the cover and title gives away. Marjan has their own issues and has fled the djinn world for reasons that won't be explained for a while, but that stays secondary to Nayra's problems. (Again: YA story. Big, overwhelming, all-encompassing drama.)

Nayra's new friendship with the djinn supplants her previous friendship with Rami - parenthetically, I kept getting the vibe that the relationship was hugely more important to Rami than it was to Nayra, and wasn't sure if that was supposed to be a romantic thing, but the relentless focus on Nayra and her emotions leaves that unclear - but having Marjan in her corner generally does make things better for Nayra, as the month of Ramadan rolls on.

On the other hand, Nayra has also secretly applied to transfer to another school, to get away from the bullying. Her parents don't know this, and would probably not be in favor: they don't seem to be in favor of anything other than "shut up and be a perfect student." And the bullying troubles are getting worse. And her schoolwork is taking a hit - from spending time with Marjan, from the bullying, from stress and anxiousness, from spending too much time reading about Arab folklore online, and from the physical stress of Ramadan.

So everything blows up, as it must in a YA story. It does end mostly happily, though Nayra still doesn't explain things to other people in the ways I hoped she would. Still, she's young: she has a long time to learn that skill, which will be hugely valuable. I hope she does.

As I said up top, Ata has a colorful art style that pops particularly well when showing the djinn world. The publisher compares their style to Stephen Universe, which I've never seen - it looks like plain 'ol manga-inspired western comics to me, all big eyes and huge gestures, but I am One of the Olds. Nayra is a positive, energetic, very teen-aimed book where problems are resolved non-violently and people do eventually learn to understand each other's differences, which are all good things. I found it a little too teenager for my personal taste, but I did stop being a teenager in 1989, so that's only to be expected.

[1] I'm not the authority on flaws. Other people have different opinions.

This Year: 1978

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

Here's another one I know I loved at the time - maybe even the very same year, if not really soon afterward.

This also may be the song that reinforces just how quirky I am. This is my favorite song by this band: it's not even close. Nothing else is even in the running, all of those arena-filling anthems and rock-opera masterpieces - which I like, don't get me wrong, and even feel what I think other people feel when they hear them. But this song is something else, something more, and I feel it in my bones when that intro starts up with all its beeps and boops.

For 1978, the one song above all for me is from The Who. And it's 905.

(If ever anything prefigured that I was meant to edit SF, it would be this.)

It's a chilly song, one that tells a SFnal story that is also deeply metaphorical, if not allegorical. It's a song for anyone who ever felt like a cog in the machine, who ever thought "everything I do's been done before." I don't know why nine-year-old me imprinted so strongly on that - I think the sound of the song, that oddly syncopated electronic drone that starts it and continues throughout, was what grabbed me first, and the lyrics made a slightly later impression.

I don't know how to take that last line of the refrain: "each end of my life is an open door." It seems more positive than everything else in the song, on its face, which probably means I'm reading it wrong. Open doors usually mean possibilities and choices. But here, maybe, it just means that nothing will ever end - that there's no way out. It's not the kind of open door you walk through; it's the kind of open door that means you can see everything, and know it's all the same, forever.

And yet: it's not a depressing song. It's not happy; I won't claim that. There's a quiet power to it, a sense of acceptance, a deep understanding, maybe. 905's life is what it is; the world is the way it is. There's no room for anger or sadness when everything is completely known - it's almost Buddhist in that kind of radical acceptance.

Well, almost. 905 does have one wish, one missing piece - "that feeling deep inside that somethin' is missing." And, maybe, he will be the one "to tell the whole world the reason why." We all wish that, don't we? And if we all wish something, it has to come true, somehow, someway...right?

Reviewing the Mail: Week of February 25, 2023

One book this week - a debut novel from Tachyon, hitting in paperback on March 14. I haven't said this explicitly in a while, so maybe I should: a "Reviewing the Mail" post is about books I haven't read yet, and, particularly when they do come in the mail, about books I know very little about.

Mia Tsai's Bitter Medicine is a contemporary fantasy with at least a strong romance strand, set in what seems to be a somewhat more magical version of our world - I'm not sure if this is openly more magical, or more of a secret history. (The latter is more traditional and common, but every writer gets to pick whether and how to follow tradition.)

Our two main characters are Elle, descended from the Chinese god of medicine but working as a magical calligrapher for a temp agency, and Luc, a half-elf security expert. From the description on the back, their interactions with each other and their complicated families are the story - not to say that Tsai doesn't weave in anything else, but there's no sign of saving the world or anything like that. And I am 100% on board with more fantasy books that don't require the world to be saved, so that makes this immediately more intriguing.

Quote of the Week: It is Too Much; Let Me Sum Up

"So you sat up all night with one of your all-time favorite writers and you can't remember a single thing he said?"

"There was one thing."

"Oh."

"he stopped in mid-sentence, " I remembered, "and took hold of my shoulder. He was this meek-looking little guy, but his eyes were very intense, and they bored into mine, And he said, 'There's just one thing I have to tell you, and if you forget everything else, make damn sure you remember this."

"And?"

"And then he just sighed, and shook his head, and moved his hand as if to wave the world away. 'Never mind,' he told me. 'It's not important.'"

 - Lawrence Block, The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown, p.261

The Old Geezers, Vol. 1 by Wilfrid Lupano and Paul Cauuet

First off, I have to tell you that this is a whole thing: the book I'm writing about today contains the first two (of five to date) albums in the series, the series has been a big bestseller in France, and there even has been a movie (which looks to stick really closely to the first album, in both casting and plot), Les vieux fourneaux, a few years ago. (Oh, wait! There was a second movie in early 2022, too.)

If The Old Geezers doesn't look like the kind of thing that would be a big deal in your nation, you may be American like me, or you may just be Not French. (No shame there, most of the world is Not French, and what it would be like if the world were entirely made of French people?) But know that it is, and that creators Wilfrid Lupano and Paul Cauuet appear to be riding that train gleefully as far as it will take them.

The cover shows the three title characters: Pierrot (right), Emile (center), and Antoine (left), three retired men, probably in their mid-70s, who have known each other since they were boys. It is roughly the mid-teens; their peak young-and-crazy years coincide almost exactly with the 1960s. And all three of them were young and crazy in their own ways - in fact, Pierrot is clearly still crazy, and the other two not that far behind him. Antoine was a union organizer and leader, Pierrot a less-definable rebel and anarchist (this does not seem to be a career path, but we don't see much else about his younger life), and Emile traveled the world by sea doing what seems to have been various things for decades.

Oddly, both of these albums have roughly the same plot: one of the men learns a Shocking Fact from the past (or thinks he has) and sets off to kill someone. I'll just focus on the first album, where the man is Antoine, and what he learns is that his wife Lucette (whose funeral forms the beginning of the book) had a torrid affair, very long ago, with the hated Garan-Servier, owner of the local factory and Antoine's nemesis. Garan-Sevier is now living in a rest home in Tuscany, deep in the throes of Alzheimer's, but Antoine immediately sets out alone to get his revenge.

Pierrot enlists Emile to help him chase and stop Antoine, and also Antoine's very pregnant granddaughter Sophie (who looks almost exactly like Lucette did in her youth, for plot-necessary reasons), to have someone who can actually drive somewhat safely. These three chase Antoine, and all arrive for a confrontation with Garan-Servier.

This is all told in a semi-slapstick style; Lupano maintains an interesting tone throughout - not entirely serious, but committed. There's a lot of humor, and at the expense of the characters, but they are not caricatures. They are real, loud, grumpy people, deeply committed to their causes and crotchets and having worn deep grooves in the fabric of their lives over the decades. We worry about them in a way that might seem odd for a book this humor-filled and slapstick-y; the slapstick is real, in a way - we know they could easily get hurt or die, and not just because they're old and getting fragile.

The second book is more of the same, but more focused on Pierrot. It also gets more deeply into their politics: Antoine and Pierrot were very activist in their youth (and since then), though Emile's politics are less clear. Pierrot still works closely with an anarchist collective in Paris, where he lives, and their various activities - all mostly focused on the troubles old people can create - are central to the second album and a lot of gleeful anarchic fun.

What strikes me as particularly French here is the politics - not just its existence, but how it plays out, how it has been important to their lives - and the way they express themselves as old men. An American version of this story would be sillier, and not take the men seriously; a British version would be more serious, I think.

Cauuet embeds that story and that committedness, in a real world - his backgrounds are detailed, his camera always in motion, and his people heavily caricatured, just this side of cartoony. Especially the older ones, and especially men - young women are specific, but more obviously "attractive woman," while all elders and most of the men are "this weird, specific person." This is yet another book I read digitally that I wish I had seen at full album size; Cauuet's art, I imagine, is even more fun seen as large as possible.

In Shadows, Book One by Mallie and Hubert

I may be spoiled. It's been a while since I hit the end of a graphic novel (or bande dessinee, in this case), realized it was the kind of "Part One" that doesn't have a real ending, and couldn't get the next book immediately.

But In Shadows, Book One, by Mallié and Hubert - in best French-comics fashion, each only uses one name - is a 2022 publication - even in its original French, it was a 2021 publication - and the second volume was only published in English nine days ago as I write this. That second volume is not yet available in the app where I read the first book (Hoopla; ask if your library uses it because it is The Bomb), but I'm hoping it will turn up eventually.

For now, though, what I have is the beginning of a story that is not complete yet. It's an epic fantasy, so that's appropriate: no matter what the medium, stories of knights and magic always seem to break into multiple volumes that end on cliffhangers.

This is a generic medieval world: we see one kingdom, which seems small, and a lot of mostly empty countryside. (Tolkien knew that medieval life required a lot of peasants doing agriculture all over the place, but rarely mentioned it; his followers have mostly ignored those peasants for atmosphere.) The disgraced knight Arzhur, now working as a mercenary, is given a chance at redemption by three creepy old women: if he rescues the princess Islen from the monsters holding her captive at the remote Black Castle and returns her to her father, King Goulven, he will be returned to the status of knight and his disgrace wiped out.

Arzhur does not stop to think that "the crones" are unlikely to be able to bind a King, and even less likely to be his official envoys. He accepts a locket with a picture of the princess, and a sword "for slaying monsters," and does what they ask.

They of course have ulterior motives. The princess is not actually a captive, and the "monsters" may be dark and creepy, but they are friendly to her. The three crones actually want to take Islen to her mother - they declare themselves to be Mae, Nae, and Tae, her "dear old nannies." Islen seems to be even more opposed to that than she was to the killing of her monstrous companions, so Arzhur drives off the old women. He decides he might as well stick to the original plan and deliver her to her father, since he doesn't really have any other options.

Arzhur perhaps does not have much experience with magic: it's unclear how common it is in this world. We learn that Islen's mother, Meliren, is some sort of magical being (a naga, maybe), that she married King Goulven somehow (I would be very interested in knowing how; it seems unlikely), and that they were deliriously happy up until the point Meliren turned super-evil for no obvious reason.

Islen, also, is expected to turn super-evil at some point, which is why she self-exiled to the Black Castle.

After his first wife turned super-evil and was also banished far away, Goulven remarried - I guess you can remarry without a divorce in this world, if your first wife is a super-evil monster; that's handy - to a normal woman whose name I can't find poking through the book. She now has an infant son, and in the ways of all medieval courts is at least mildly intriguing to make sure her son will be the heir, not Islen.

You can imagine things do not go well when Islen returns to her father's court. Arzhur is not immediately reinstated as a knight, to begin with. The crones are sneaking around the periphery - they've already driven off Arzhur's squire Youenn by this point - whispering to various people to shape events the way they want.

I won't detail all of the events of the back half of the book, but suffice it to say that things are not going at all in Arzhur's favor and Islen is not doing much better. And, in the end, there is a big climax and a fight, leading to the (lack of an) ending.

In Shadows is creepy and atmospheric. It moves quickly, and mostly answers its own questions. There is some generic-fantasy stuff cluttering up the background, and I suspect not all of it was entirely thought through, but it's all things you would expect in any medieval fantasy, in prose or comics. There are secrets still untold, but that's what a Book Two is for - we can start with what, exactly, caused Arzhur's disgrace, which is clearly A Story and we have not learned it yet. It also looks great: I believe Mallié is the artist, and Mallié does excellent work here.

For anyone looking for a relatively dark epic fantasy story in comics form, this is a good one: check it out. But know that it is not complete; I'm not sure if Book Two is the end, but I strongly suspect it will be.

The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown by Lawrence Block

I think Lawrence Block has a contrary streak, and I love that about him. His previous book about gentleman burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, The Burglar in Short Order, collected all of the Rhodenbarr short stories in early 2020, ending with a new metafictional piece in which Block talked with Rhodenbarr, basically saying that there would be no more Rhodenbarr novels. [1]

I assume Block meant it at the time. But, barely eighteen months later, he'd finished a new Rhodenbarr novel, The Burglar Who Met Frederic Brown, and published it himself not long after that. Is that protesting too much, or a writer's subconscious sending him unexpected Messages from Fred? Either way, I am definitely not complaining - and digging into anyone's creative wellsprings is tricky at the best of times. The point is: we all got a new book about Bernie, when we had no reason to expect one.

It's been nearly a decade since the last Rhodenbarr novel, The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons, but Bernie is the hero of a series of light mysteries, so time does not hang heavy on him. He might be slightly older than he was when we first met him in 1977's Burglars Can't Be Choosers, but not by all that much: he's still in the same phase of life, with all of the standard accouterments of the series that have grown up around him in the meantime: running the antiquarian store Barnegat Books; hanging out with his best friend, lesbian dog-groomer Carolyn Kaiser; feeding the store cat Raffles.

(See that post on Counted the Spoons for more: I covered the series set-up and the pleasures of the Burglar books there. This book is very much the same sort of thing, and I'll try not to repeat myself.)

Frederic Brown, though, is not quite in the same genre as the previous books in the series. There are two main clues in the book about this slight genre-shift: the title, since Brown was famed for a series of mystery novels and also for science fiction; and the dedication, to Robert Silverberg.

I probably shouldn't go into any more detail; the joy of a genre-shift is watching it happen, and seeing what comes next. But Bernie is reading Brown's What Mad Universe as this novel opens, and that is important.

Otherwise...this is a Bernie novel. It's got lots of sparkling dialogue between mostly Bernie and Carolyn, sneaky entrances to places where Bernie should not be and nearly as sneaky exits carrying valuable items that do not belong to him, appearances by the rumpled and not overly honest cop Ray Kirchmann, unexpected dead bodies, and a "you're probably wondering why I've called you all here" scene near the end. Some of those things happen in ways you would expect, some of them do not - Block, as always, is either fond of ringing changes on standard motifs or opposed to doing anything the same way twice.

There are other elements of this book that will surprise long-term readers; they surprise Bernie, too. I thought it all worked well, and was amusing and zippy, but I am a fan of both SF and light mysteries - people allergic to one or the other may not be as fond of this book.

Most importantly, this is a book that the author himself said, barely two years ago, probably would never exist. That it does is at least a minor triumph; that it's just as funny and entertaining as the previous books is even better. I probably wouldn't start the Burglar series here, but you've got eleven other novels to choose from - just pick one.

[1] As I recall, the reasons were one part "Block is now in his eighties and isn't promising anything" and one part "Rhodenbarr's skills are with mechanical locks and similar devices; CCTV cameras and electronics make those largely obsolete or insufficient."

Barbalien: Red Planet by Lemire, Brombal, Walta & Bellaire

It's oddly characteristic for the Black Hammer universe that the character with the stupidest name is the one whose miniseries actually does something new and distinctive. I mean, "Barbalien?" What does that even mean? Is it supposed to imply "barbarian?" Because I get much more of an echo of "barber."

Series creator Jeff Lemire has already doubled down on the dumb Martian names by this point - the hero code-named Barbalien has the real name Mark Markz, there's been a Barbaliteen, and we've seen that everyone on Mars is named something like Guy Guyz, because that is totally a reasonable cultural thing - so I'm complaining pointlessly here. But I do want it noted: the Martian names are all deeply silly.

<clears throat> Boa Boaz, Barbounty Hunter

I am not joking. That is the actual on-panel name of the main antagonist in a book that wants to be a serious, sensitive look at homophobia, the early AIDS years, coming out, repressive policing, and, oh yeah, a whole lot of superhero punching, too. Even when it's mostly being smart and adult, the Black Hammer stories just can't avoid tripping over their own feet with the silly superhero-universe stuff.

So this is Barbalien: Red Planet. (It's also not about Mars more than glancingly - a title connecting red to blood or referencing rainbow flags or even, given the era, "silence = death," would have been much better.) It was scripted by Tate Brombal from a story by Lemire and Brombal, drawn by Gabriel Hernandez Walta, and colored by Jordie Bellaire.

We have a frame story that turns out to be just from a later part of the main story, so I'll avoid any spoilers. This is a Barbalien solo story; the other Black Hammer-ites do not appear, and are only mentioned once or twice. It's set in 1986, in Spiral City, which I suppose means we're getting more datapoints to tell us exactly when the not-Crisis was, if we care. (This is pre-not-Crisis, for anyone taking notes.)

As we know from earlier Black Hammer stories (here's a link to what I've written about the series), Mark/Barbalien is gay, and was exiled from Mars partially for that. (Also partially because his father was the previous King and his uncle took over in a violent coup when he was a child: superhero stories are overdetermined down to their fingernails.) Mars is super homophobic, even more so than the cop culture in Spiral City, which is already pretty homophobic. But the cops are mostly just doing their jobs when they raid gay clubs and break up protests - we don't see them actively bashing gay men, as some groups of cops actually did in the day - and Mark's partner seems to be OK with his being gay as long as Mark stops making passes at that straight partner and never talks about it ever again. (So, yes: solidly homophobic, definitely. But not as horrible as one might expect from a Message Story set in the '80s.)

I may not have mentioned that Mark is a cop: he's a cop. This is because he's a Martian Manhunter rip-off, and being gay is just about the only new thing the rip-off brought. (Or maybe J'onn is gay? I don't really know if his sexuality has ever been a thing in the comics.) Mark starts out, as in the cliché, as a Good Cop, but learns things about this cop culture, and about wider social homophobia, as the book goes on and he actually meets other gay men.

Anyway, this is the story about how Mark comes out, discovers gay culture, learns that the AIDS crisis is happening, and does something about it. Also how the aforementioned "Barbounty Hunter" flies over from Mars to beat him up and take him back to be punished for being gay, in case the subtext got too subtle for any of you in the back.

Mark finds a gay club, then (sort-of) a boyfriend, meets the superpowered doctor who treats AIDS patients, and is involved in several major protests, sometimes in police uniform, sometimes in flannel as "Luke" (his new identity as a gay man), and sometimes as the red flying shirtless Barbalien. (Luckily, he can shapeshift - because Martian Manhunter can! - so all of those clothes are actually part of his body and he can swap from one to another pretty much instantly.)

He also fights Boa Boaz a few times, has a dramatic turning-in-his-badge moment, and an even more dramatic sad ending. All of the events are believable, within this fictional context, and they make a solid story.

Red Planet means well. It's mostly thoughtful and reasonable, honest about what the world was like and what gay men faced in 1986. There's no super-science cure for AIDS or anything like that; we see sick and dying patients, and know, if we didn't before, that it was a death sentence in those days.

But it's also a superhero book, which means the solution to most of the immediate problems is "Barbalien punches it until it stops." That sits uneasily with the AIDS material, since that cannot be punched. There's a bit of implied politics - Mark learns some things from his new boyfriend and other gay men - but it's mostly abstracted. And the cops are simultaneously not as horrible as they could be, to justify Mark walking away, and not as reformable as they could be, to give him any other choice.

I guess I'm saying that Red Planet is a book about problems that require collective action by the masses, and solves them by having one guy punch things. It's a palmed card - Brombal tries to square the circle of activism and superheroing -  but I noticed it. It means well, and it does pretty well, but some flaws are baked in too deeply to be worked around.

This Year: 1977

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

1977's song made the list for a moment. There's only a few times in my life I can remember listening to a specific song at a specific time, and this might be the only one that felt important.

It's deeply silly, though: I warn you ahead of time.

I'm heading to college, before my freshman year. All my stuff - too much stuff, frankly; that's been the story of my life - crammed into my mother's several-years old Dodge Omni, as we made our way up the New York Thruway. It's some day in late August, 1986. Probably a Tuesday or Thursday, some nondescript day. I know I'm going to unpack in some strange dorm room, meet some strange new roommate, and then spend the next three or five days engaged in mandatory fun for Freshman Orientation.

Even then, I wasn't much for mandatory fun.

I was apprehensive and excited and worried and thrilled and a thousand other things. I couldn't describe then how I felt, and I'm not going to do a much better job now.

My mother had to stop at a rest stop, about halfway up. (That's the story of her life.) For whatever reason, I stayed in the car, with the engine still running, the radio on.

I can't tell you what station we were listening to.

But, after she left, while I was sitting there trying to decide if I was more worried or excited, a song came on. And it felt like a message from the universe: don't overthink this. Just go and do it. It'll be fun. No matter what, it will be fun.

The song was Rockaway Beach by Ramones. And it still makes me smile, and remember that moment, every time I hear it, even to this day.

"It's not hard, not far to reach." No. No: it really isn't. Thanks so much for making sure I knew that, random 1986-era DJ. I needed it, at that moment.