This Year: 1993

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

I've called this one my favorite song, in public, more than once. That's partially a pose, but there's a lot of truth to it.

My song for 1993 was on the list almost as soon as I started this project: Knowing People by Matthew Sweet.

I don't like knowing people

I don't like people knowing about me

The voice is angry, disgusted, demanding, insistent - a tangled welter of negative emotions, throughout the whole song. It's never clear if the voice is talking about himself or about other people - or both, alternately, or both, all the time.

Well. It's not clear because it can't be clear: that's the point. It's a song about disgust and nihilism, about the sense that nothing matters at all.

What is here? And who wants to stay? No lasting life. And no judgement day.

I was young when I first heard it, and that disgust at everything is often a feature of youth: the sense that the world is irreparably tainted, horrible at its core, that there's no way to possibly make things better. I'd like to think I don't believe that anymore. I'd like to think a lot of things, but I've lived in the world and see what people do. And I don't like knowing people.

Who is the singer talking to? Is it a single other person? Himself? The world as a whole? All of them? It works, all of those ways. It's just as true, for each in turn. And, some days, I have a very hard time arguing with anything Sweet spits out in this song.

Your desperate dreams. Are pathetic.

The sound is as angry as the words, loud and on the verge of turning into noise. (I've always loved music on the edge of noise - whether it's rock or classical.) It's a song that's spiky in every possible way, a song that goes out of its way to be unlikable in every way it can.

And I love it all the more for that.

Incoming Books: Week of June 10, 2023

For my birthday, which was last week, I ordered myself a big box of mostly remainders from the fine folks at Edward R. Hamilton.

Four points before I dive into the list:

Imprimus, Hamilton is a great source for people who like random books; I've been ordering from them for probably thirty years. You'll rarely get exactly the thing you want, but you can find lots of things that look vaguely enticing at great prices. 

Secundus, once you hit middle age, I strongly recommend buying yourself the presents you really want, on whatever occasions present-buying is appropriate. (Or just at random times: you're an adult, you can do what you want.) Don't wait for other people.

Tertius, I'm going to divide the box into three parts, because I got twenty-some books and I'm not going to spend all day today typing them out. (I'm going to spend some time today, and a similar amount of time over the next two Sundays doing so, because everything in moderation.)

Quartus, My links here, as always, are to that giant hegemonic retailer. But these books were all available much cheaper from Hamilton not long ago, and may be available still. I'd recommend checking there first, if anything looks enticing.

So, the first cluster of Hamilton books are Comics and Related Books, presented in roughly size order, since that's how they're currently stacked:

How to Be a Motorist is a 1939 book of humor "by" the British cartoonist Heath Robinson - I think his drawings came first, but I could be wrong - and "written by" K.R.G. Browne, who I think was a jobbing writer hired to turn a sheaf of funny Robinson drawings into a book. I've never seen much of Robinson, but he's always called the UK equivalent of Rube Goldberg, and that's enough to be worth diving into.

You Have Killed Me is some kind of noirish mystery/detective thing, by Jamie S. Rich and Joelle Jones - I think originally a miniseries and then collected in this book. I've read a bunch of things Rich wrote over the years without ever focusing on him as a writer with specific strengths and weaknesses, but I don't think I've ever read a book by Jones - which is odd, since she's been making comics for a while, and works around areas I usually enjoy. I can only shrug and point out it's a large, capacious world.

Anno Dracula: 1895: Seven Days in Mayhem is a comics extension of the novel series of the same name by Kim Newman. Newman wrote this, with art by Paul McCaffrey. I'm not sure if it adapts part of the first Anno-Dracula book, or is some kind of side-story; it seems to be set in the time period of that first book. (Later novels were set much later in time; I think Newman is commiting alternate history, though I'm a few books behind at this point.)

All's Fair in Love & War is a collection of single-panel cartoons about love, edited by Bob Eckstein. Eckstein has been doing a bunch of books like this for, oddly enough, the Princeton Architecture Press: I'd previously seen The Ultimate Cartoon Book of Book Cartoons, which was comprised of cartoons about books and the bookish. This is not officially related to The New Yorker, but it borrows a lot of design sense from that magazine and most of the contributors are closely associated with it as well. So it's not not a New Yorker book.

Love & Vermin is a collection of the cartoons of Will McPhail, who regularly appears in The New Yorker. McPhil has been busy recently: he also had the full-length graphic novel In., and it looks like both of those were published last year.

Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels is not what I thought it was. It's a study by David A. Berrona about the wordless, mostly woodcut, books made by people like Franz Masereel and Lynd Ward in the early years of the 20th century. I thought it was a collection of half-a dozen or so of those books, with annotations and commentary, but, no, it has excerpts from a couple of dozen but none in full, and it has a lot of text for a book called Wordless Books.

MacDoodle St. collects a late-70s strip by Mark Alan Stamaty (whose kids' book Who Needs Donuts? was a staple of my youth and whose long-running Washingtoon was also excellent) about, unsurprisingly, New York City. I've been vaguely looking for this book for a few years now - something about Stamaty's art imprinted on me very young - so I'm thrilled to have it in hand.

The P. Craig Russell Library of Opera Adaptations, Vol. 2 is just what the label says: adaptations of Parsifal, Ariane & Bluebeard, I Pagliacci and some Mahler songs, done in comics form by Russell. Russell has adapted a lot of operas into comics, as opposed to everyone else in the world, who have done approximately zero opera adaptations. I think I've read some parts of this, or maybe other Russell opera books, in the past, but that was a long time ago. This book is copyright 2003, but the work is mostly from the '80s, so I had a lot of opportunity to do so long enough ago that I don't remember clearly. 

Quote of the Week: Dare to Be Stupid

If you're stupid, how can you tell? He may blunder through an undergrowth of clichés, but he understands what he did and why. He'll flourish, without a backward glance, unless caught and punished, and then he'll never blame himself, only his bad luck among random events. 

 - Ian McEwan, Nutshell, p.147

Meläg: Town of Fables by Bong Redila

When we think about folklore, do we separate it into categories? Are there the things we know from our own cultures - maybe wampir, maybe chupacabra, maybe aswang - which are closer to us, and everything else, which is mysterious and new? Or do we think about the stories, to divide the helpful or at least neutral spirits from the malevolent ones?

Or are they all coming from the same stew, and we delight in finding new iterations of things vaguely familiar, new nature spirits and genus loci and lares?

Bong Redila's 2021 collection of comics Meläg: Town of Fables is somewhere in the middle of that tangle of questions, a grouping of original stories sometimes inspired by Philippine folklore, sometimes entirely original but still clearly folkloric, all positive and mostly happy, all set in the fictional town of the title - inasmuch as their specific setting matters in these stories, which it generally doesn't.

Amusing to me, it was published by Fantagraphic's smaller-press imprint F.U. Books, which usually has more boundary-pushing material - but Meläg is entirely nice, the kind of book I could see being published for younger readers by some other company or pitched as a collection of positivity-inspired stories. (I may have expected something else, given the publisher and that my familiarity with Philippine folklore has mostly come from Trese, which tends much darker.)

Redila tells these stories mostly quietly, atmospherically. Children "borrow" a witch's broomstick to make her hut fly, which we only find out on the last page. A blind girl does not lose her sandal. Two boys go to a carnival. Other children have unusual friends and playmates.

The characters aren't all children, but they tend to be child-like: not important, not central in their worlds, not doing anything big. Where they are adults, they're taking trains across the country in the middle of the night or ferrying people across a big river.

Redila's art is black and white, filled with cross-hatching, making the whole book something like a happier Edward Gorey collection.

So it's not at all what I expected, but it's a lovely, uplifting, nice book - and that's always something to celebrate.

Scrublands by Joe Daly

I'm still waiting for a fourth Dungeon Quest book. [1] I'm under no illusions that I'll ever get one - I'm also still waiting for more Stig's Inferno and The Replacement God and It's Science! with Dr. Radium stories, which are even less likely - but I am waiting for it, and would be happy if it ever appeared.

Failing that, I'm interested in other stuff by the same guy, Joe Daly. He had a big fat GN called Highbone Theater in 2016 that I keep looking at, seeing how long it is, and not quite reading it. As far as I can tell, he hasn't had a book out since then.

But I'd never read his first book, the 2006 short-story collection Scrublands, either. And that was available in the Hoopla digital app from my library, so I could read it basically immediately - and did.

It's a cliché to say that a creator's debut short-story collection will show you the germs of their later career - but it's a cliché because it's true a lot of the time. And the sixteen stories here have a lot of the same elements of Daly's later work: aimless stoners in small groups, wandering around and hanging out; surreal transformations; creepy sexualization of things that shouldn't be sexy; vaguely autobio musings on the intersection of art and life.

These stories are miscellaneous - most of them are short and relatively realistic, precursors to the stories in The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book, with South African stoners doing quirky things, including a few recurring characters (Steve, Kobosh - the guy in the middle on the cover, Dorfman, etc.). The surrealism comes out in the other stories - two about "Aqua Boy" and the long wordless "Prebaby," which takes up almost half of the book with its sequence of organic imagery of violence, flight, and transformation.

They're not obviously early stories - they're all professional and complete - and they mostly all do what they set out to do. But they are short pieces, with less ambition than Daly's later, longer works (except, maybe, for "Prebaby," which has enough ambition for the whole book all by itself). These days, this is a book for people like me - fans of Daly's work, who noticed he hasn't had a book in a while and are happy to dig backwards to find more of his stuff.

[1] It's been more than a decade since the third one. See my posts for books one and three; I covered the middle book for an actual print magazine, which may be a sign of how long ago it was.

Cheech Wizard's Book of Me by Vaughn Bode

When you get The Complete Something, you expect some kind of explanation of what Something is, maybe a potted history, maybe an appreciation by an illustrious colleague or someone famous from a younger generation. Sure, the audience mostly knows the details of Something, but there's always a host of commonly misremembered and mythologized factoids - plus makers of books do want to draw in new readers every once in a while.

Cheech Wizard's Book of Me is, I think, The Complete This. And there is a foreword by cartoonist Vaughn Bode's son Mark Bode - himself a reasonably notable cartoonist - as by "Da' Lizard" - which does, in its single page, give a few details. And there's some scattered text here and there with some other context.

But Book of Me starts out with about thirty pages of sketchbooks and similar non-story material, which admittedly does include a lot of character explanations and even a map of Cheech's world, but lacks a certain focus. (It also seems to memorialize a whole lot of material that, from the evidence here, were never actually created as stories.) Then there's some multi-page stories, I think mostly from '60s undergrounds, before we transition to the mostly single-pagers from the National Lampoon run in the early '70s, the bulk of the continuity and the pages here.

Last is a clutch of stuff that I think is all by Mark Bode, long after Vaughn's death in 1975, since all the copyright indications I can find start with "20." These are obviously different in tone and style and manner, though also clearly in the Vaughn tradition.

All in all, it comes across as a whole lot of stuff, with only a minor through-line. The NatLamp material has a continuity, with characters being added, events building from one story to the next, and so forth. But that's maybe fifty pages in the middle, roughly a third of the total. The rest is all less focused and more scattered, with festival posters, full-page illos and what might be a couple of graffiti installations in addition to the sketchbook stuff up front.

All that said: you might be asking what is the This here.

Vaughn Bode created the character of Cheech Wizard in his mid-teens, around 1957, and the character bears the usual hallmarks of an author-insert: he gets the last word all the time, he always wins, he gets all the hot babes with essentially no effort, and he's the center of everything. He also talks a lot. Well, undergrounds are relentlessly talky to begin with, but this one is mostly Cheech, using Vaughn's oddly clipped and somewhat distracting abbreviations all the time.

Cheech is a hat. We can see what seem to be legs in tights coming out of the bottom of the comically oversized be-starred wizard's hat, but he's basically a hat and a voice - no arms, no face. He claims to be the greatest wizard ever, but never does any magic. He never does much of anything - this is an underground comic, again - other than lazing around, drinking, tormenting his anthropomorphic lizard assistant, and fucking. As noted before, the women here are all gorgeous semi-nude fleshy creatures - other than a foul-mouthed four-year-old girl whose dialogue and character have not aged well - who exist pretty much just to be available for Cheech to fuck.

I should note yet one more time that this is an essentially underground comic. In my cynical opinion, undergrounds were about a cluster of a few things: drinking and drugs, free love, sophomoric philosophical musings, and agitation against anything considered "the Establishment" - sometimes vague, sometimes specific. Vaughn Bode ticks off a lot of drinking, only a bit of drugs, lots and lots of free love, fairly bland philosophy towards the end, and only some scattered anti-Establishmentism.

It is about as sexist as you would expect, from a comic that appeared in the early NatLamp. Not horribly so - the characters pretty much would all claim to love women, especially the friendly ones - but the idea that women are people is somewhat alien to all of them. It's also occasionally racist as well, with two notable "Asian" characters. The first is a one-note, one-appearance Vietnamese ninja assassin stereotype; the second is his brother, equally stereotyped but at least on the positive side, with traditional insight into The Wisdom of the East.

This is a heaping helping of You Had to Be There, aimed mostly at Boomer nostalgia, with some spillover into my generation. (I collected NatLamp not too long after this era, but never really gelled with Cheech Wizard when I saw those strips.) It is The Complete This, though, so if you're at all interested in "the hat," this is where to go.

Cugel's Saga by Jack Vance

If you've read The Eyes of the Overworld, this will be familiar. Not in any bad sense, I hasten to add, but the picaresque adventures of the same guy in the same circumstances on the same world by the same writer will tend to have a certain similarity.

Jack Vance introduced his Dying Earth in a series of loosely-related stories, very early in his career. Those were assembled in 1950 as The Dying Earth; it didn't have a single protagonist or narrative, but characters recurred and it cohered in that general fix-up way. More than a decade later, he wrote another sequence of stories, all about one of the characters in the first book, Cugel the Clever. When those appeared in book form in 1966, The Eyes of the Overworld was still clearly a fix-up, but the kind that basically becomes a novel if you squint at it slightly: Cugel started one place, with an aim in mind, and made it to the end of his journey, with adventures along the way.

Another decade-plus later, Vance did the same thing again in 1983's Cugel's Saga. The edition I just read - in the omnibus Tales of the Dying Earth - does not credit earlier magazine publications for the pieces of the Saga, but it reads in that same episodic style, so I would be surprised if none of it hadn't been published as separate stories.

And Saga, or at least a single-sentence description of it, is almost precisely the same as Eyes: the magician Iucounu dropped Cugel on the far northern beach Shanglestone Strand, there to make his way, however he can, back to his homeland of Almery.

The difference is: in one book he turns right on that beach, and goes through one series of lands, and in the other book he turns left. Saga is the story of that journey after turning left, in thirteen chapters that each are roughly standalone novelettes, with titles like "The Inn of Blue Lamps" and "The Ocean of Sighs" and "The Seventeen Virgins" and "The Bagful of Dreams." (And a number of place-names, as well.)

In each of those stories, Cugel comes to a new place, slightly closer to his destination. He has generally just tried a scheme to enrich himself, which has almost worked, but the riches he hoped for have adhered to the hands of someone else, and he has been forced to flee. Cugel is clever, and skilled, and smart - but not quite as much of any of those as he thinks he is. And so each story sees a new scheme, and new ways for circumstance to foil Cugel once again.

It's a picaresque, so the point is to enjoy the various adventures of our picaro. Cugel is a magnificent, deeply entertaining picaro, and Vance's languid, detailed, enchanting sentences are perfectly tuned to tell picaresque stories. The point is the journey rather than the destination, but I can say that Cugel does indeed make it back to Iucounu and is somewhat more successful in his revenge this time than he was in Eyes.

Vance was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, both in his uniquely poised sentences, full of obscure words always used precisely and well, and in his amused but world-weary attitude, which was far more adult and nuanced than most of what appeared in SFF during his long career. That style and attitude also means, happily, that his work does not age nearly as much as most of his contemporaries - Vance was not of his time then, and doesn't read as being of that time now.

Someone May Be Training Their AI On Me

 I happened to look at my stats this evening, and, well:

Traffic went from ~150 views a day to ~3000 views a day, without affecting the average views on my new posts, starting last Tuesday (the 30th). I have not quite eight thousand posts here. Something is hitting this blog semi-comprehensively (I assume), over the course of several days, for no good reason I can think of.

I wonder if this is happening across all of Blogger, or other social/user-generated content sites?

And I suppose I should mention that I specifically deny the right to train any large language model, or any other form of Machine Learning model, on my work. (I don't know if that has any legal force, or if it's even possible, but I do deny it.) This blog, and anything else I write anywhere, is not to be used as a training corpus absent an agreement involving payment for that use.

We All Find Out, Eventually

I've got the "This Year" series running every Monday, and I've vaguely thought that I might need to pick a song for 2023 to run on the first Monday of next year, just to finish off with a little lagniappe.

I'm not saying I'm going to do that. I'm not saying this is the song I'll pick. It's only June.

But damn if this isn't a great song, and a a great sideways jump for an interesting artist, and a song that (I think) is about that sideways jump, maybe about whatever happened with the band over the past year.

This is Fuck Around Phase by Housewife, a band that I think now is just Brighid Fry from Toronto, who's been making great music for six years and might even be old enough to drink now.

This Year: 1992

"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 band that almost fit into a dozen other years, across several decades. I don't know if I have a particularly compelling argument that this song, in 1992, is the absolute one, as opposed to the other ones I almost chose.

Those are, by the way: 

Don't Let's Start	1986
Older	2001
Withered Hope	2007
The Communists Have the Music	2018

One may detect a certain common pessimism in all those choices....

But what I landed on, for They Might Be Giants and for the year 1992, is Narrow Your Eyes, the story of a love that has unequivocally broken, but only very recently, so recently that the two people involved are only just starting to realize it.

Actually, now that I come to write about it, it's not clear that the other person has realized it yet. This is yet another song sung by one person to another - the assumption, which could be wrong, is that it's from a man to a woman - as he realizes he's not in love anymore, and what they had is irrevocably over.

TMBG always have a way with words; their lyrics are tricky and allusive and skittery, circling around big things the people in their songs can't quite say bluntly. We all have trouble saying some things bluntly, whether to avoid hurting others or to avoid saying things we don't want to admit.

They say love is blind / I don't think you're blind

Is there a more devastatingly understated way to say "you don't love me anymore, do you?"

I've said before in this series I'm inordinately fond of breakup songs - just from TMBG, I could also talk about Don't Let's Start, with that great spell-it-out chorus, or Withered Hope, the compulsive story of a circle of characters who are all in love with the wrong people, or They'll Need a Crane, a glorious, perfect metaphor for broken things.

Narrow Your Eyes (and the other songs I just mentioned, too) also has a propulsive intensity: TMBG's songs of bad love are never mopey. This is a pop gem, bright and shiny and cold like the diamond in the ring he'll never get for her.

And last - maybe best - that title metaphor, again more of an allusion. We narrow our eyes for all kinds of things - suspicion or glare or worry or concern or anger. Each chorus gives a different reason, a different moment. But it all adds up to the same thing - this is over.

Now let's toast the sad cold fact / Our love's never coming back

Books Read: May 2023

I do this every month, and it's really pointless. But here it is.

Jeff Lemire, Malachi Ward, and Matthew Sheean, Black Hammer Reborn, Part II (digital,  5/6)

Paul Buhle and Noah Van Sciver, Johnny Appleseed (digital, 5/7)

Apuleius, translated by Robert Graves, The Golden Ass (5/7)

Evan Dorkin, Sarah Dyer and Benjamin Dewey, Beasts of Burden: Occupied Territory (digital, 5/12)

Carl Speed McNeil, Finder: Dream Sequence (in The Finder Library, Vol. 2, 5/13)

Farel Dalrymple, Pop Gun War, Vol. 1: Gift (digital, 5/14)

Ray Davies, Americana (5/14)

Will Henry, Are We Lost Yet? (digital, 5/20)

Sergio Aragones with Mark Evanier, Groo: Friends and Foes, Vol. 3 (digital, 5/21)

Christian Durieaux, An Enchantment (digital, 5/27)

Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (5/27)

Jim Benton, Man, I Hate Cursive (digital, 5/28)

Julie Maroh, Blue Is the Warmest Color (digital, 5/29)

P.G. Wodehouse, Full Moon (5/29)

Next month I'll do it again!

Incoming Books: Week of June 3, 2023

I got a couple of books for my birthday! And this is what they were:

Shuna's Journey by Hayao Miyazaki - this is a 1983 story in comics format by director Miyazaki, translated by Alex Dudok De Wit. It looks like something of a Nausicaa precursor or side-story, which might be why it wasn't published in English until this 2022 edition. I don't know a whole heck of a lot more about it other than 1) it exists and 2) I'd like to read it. But, frankly, those are the two most important points about any book, so what more do any of us need?

Impossible People is the big new book from Julia Wertz, and is another autobiographical story. This one is about addiction and recovery, which I'm sure she treats with as much seriousness and gravitas as everything else. I'm also impressed that, even now when her books are coming out from "big" New York houses, her covers are as cluttered and as pure b&w line art as they ever were - this is who she works, this is what a "Julia Wertz" book looks like.

Quote of the Week: Zoom Avatar Rot

Korda had been scanned recently and looked older, a little pinker and puffier; this was how colleagues one saw only at the office aged, by concrete little bits, so that in retrospect one remembered them flickering toward death. It shocked the bureaucrat slightly to realize how long it had been since he'd seen Korda in person.

 - Michael Swanwick, Stations of the Tide, p.127

The Last Lonely Saturday by Jordan Crane

This is short, nearly wordless, and close to twenty years old. I read it because I wanted a book I could finish that day. So I think I will be brief.

The Last Lonely Saturday is the story of an unnamed older man, on a Saturday in August. He gets up, he writes a letter to someone named Elenore, he buys flowers, he remembers scenes from many years before. He's sad, melancholy - we know he's lonely from the title.

We know where this is going to go: to the cemetery. And it does.

We know he loved Elenore; we suspect - and then learn for sure - that she loved him just as much.

And we know what the title means, once we get to that cemetery. There's only one way that it can be the "last."

Jordan Crane tells this story wistfully, with two slightly taller-than-wide panels per page, a sunny yellowish color dominant to give that feel of the hot August sun. His line is rounded, somewhat cartoony, and he tells this story in pantomime, mostly - it's not about characters who can talk to each other, is it?

It is a small thing, on purpose. It tells exactly the story it wants to tell, exactly the way it wants to, in a format and style that only comics could, and its sadness is the kind we all know, eventually. It's a lovely little book.

Macanudo: Welcome to Elsewhere by Liniers

A daily strip is usually analogous to a TV show: a few are dramas, like soaps, but most are sitcoms in printed form. (And let's remember that "sitcom" is a portmanteau of "situation" and "comedy" - it's a comedic story set in a particular situation.) There are odder things, like The Far Side and its followers - my sense is that those are mostly single panels, and are closer to a dedicated slot for magazine single-panel style pieces by a single creator. Still "com," but much less "sit."

Liniers' daily strip Macanudo is somewhere in the uncharted regions between the pure single panel and the strip sitcom. He does have a situation, but it's a vague one - well, actually, he has, in this first book, at least four clearly recurrent situations, which range from almost normal strip set-up all the way to a couple of clicks above General Gag Premise. And I gather that he's got a lot of additional situations that he's used over the course of the strip as well - Macanudo is a collection of situations, I suppose.

Macanudo: Welcome to Elsewhere collects what seems to be about the first year of the Macanudo strip as it appeared in English. Liniers is Argentine, and has been making his comics in Spanish since 2002; the English-language version started to be syndicated by King Features in 2018 and this book came out in 2022. It's not clear if the English version is reprinting the Argentine strip from the beginning [1], picking bits and pieces out of the history of the strip, keeping up with Liniers' contemporary work, or some combination of all those things. (So if you read the English-language version, and become a completionist, you probably need to learn Spanish and seek out the seventeen Argentine collections up to 2017.)

And I suppose I should explain some of the situations. In rough order of frequency, we see:

• Henrietta, an imaginative girl in a blue dress who is a devoted reader. She appears along with her cat Fellini and teddy bear Mandelbaum, who do not talk to her. Mandelbaum doesn't even move in the strips I've seen, which is unusual for a strip like this.
• The furry blue monster Olga and her boy, whose name I discover from Wikipedia is Martin. (At first I thought Olga was another companion of Henrietta's, until I realized Martin and Henrietta wear completely different clothes.) They mostly romp around outside, which Henriette and crew also do, adding to my confusion. But Martin does not spend as much time sitting and reading, I suppose.
• A group of nameless penguins, doing things that are similar to but not quite identical to what human beings do, in their usually-featureless icy landscape.
• A group of "elves" (small figures with color-coded outfits including long, prehensile pompom hats - they look more like gnomes) who talk about vaguely philosophical things. There's always at least two - most often light-blue and red, if only two - and sometimes larger groups.

There's also some things that seem more like single jokes that Liniers makes in different ways: The Mysterious Man in Black, who is all of those words exactly and equally and nothing else; La Guadalupe, who seems to be the ambulatory skeleton of an older woman; and the two witches Huberta and Gudrun, who here mostly do broom-based gags. And there's also a lot of one-off strips, about John Venn and Elliott from E.T. and aliens abducting cows and random people having random conversations.

So, again: some aspects of the random single panel (though generally presented in strip format), some aspects of the sitcom strip. More random and individual than continuity; there is one two-week epic here, but it's presented in-strip as a comic that Henrietta created, so it's distanced and metafictional to begin with.

Liniers has a soft style, using what I think are watercolors over line art - the color is intrinsic to the art, not added in as an overlay like traditional dailies. In North American comics, it's probably closest in look to Patrick McDonnell's Mutts, and Mutts fans would probably also like a lot of the whimsy and philosophy of Macanudo. It's very expressive and illustrative, occasionally cartoony but more often a classic storybook look - there's echoes of Gorey, for example, in The Mysterious Man in Black.

For topics and tone, it's harder to find comparisons for Macanudo. The Far Side followers tend to be weirder and more bizarre; Liniers's strip is imaginative, bookish, and almost always optimistic. I guess it's somewhat like Grant Snider's work in that way.

I suppose that's my log-line: if you're looking for something that looks like Mutts and reads like Grant Snider, from an Argentine with a great illustrative style in the tradition of the 20th century greats, Macanudo is for you.

[1] Actually, given several references to Twitter, this is clearly not the 2002-era Macanudo, or at least not entirely.