Last Kiss: Casual Fridays by John Lustig

I felt lazy yesterday, and wanted a book I could read quickly and then write something quickly here. I may have been too lazy, if that's possible. (I have my doubts.)

So I read John Lustig's Last Kiss: Casual Fridays. It's a short, digital-only collection of that strip from 2013 - much like Sex Day, which I read a couple of months ago. In fact, go see that earlier post for all the details of what Last Kiss is and how it works, if you're interested. The short version is: Lustig takes panels from mostly '50s romance comics, cleans them up and has them recolored in a modern style (I think by someone else), then adds snarky new captions. So it's a single-panel comic but entirely out of repurposed artwork, a quirky hybrid of Roy Lichtenstein and Wondermark.

As you can guess from the title of the other book and the cover of this one, the jokes are often directly sexual, but Lustig leans into other clichés as well - there's a big cluster of "women hate cooking" jokes in this book, for example. Since these are all single panels, the jokes need to be quick and tight - not a lot of room for nuance or wordplay.

I got this book - and the previous one before it - from my library app, which is how I'd recommend reading them; they may also be available from the subscription end of Kindle or other similar outlets. There is a retail price, if you're thinking about "owning" it, but, as a 68-page book, it's a higher per-page cost than I'd be comfortable with.

Bech: A Book by John Updike

This is the first John Updike book I've ever read. (I'm mildly surprised: I would have expected I'd grab a random book of his essays first instead.) I also have the big fat Rabbit omnibus on my shelf, but, instead, I pulled down the slimmer omnibus of novels about a very different main character.

Bech: A Book was published in 1970; it collects seven stories [1] about the literary (and fictional) writer Henry Bech, in his forties and the world's Sixties, the first three of those stories concerned with an extended government-sponsored trip behind the Iron Curtain. Bech is a Jewish writer, more Bellow than Roth but somewhere in that vague territory, with a big famous first novel (Travel Light), a disappointing short second one, an attempted epic third that landed oddly at best, and close to a decade of silence at the time these stories are set.

I'm pretty sure Updike knew in 1970 that would not be enough to sustain an income and a "grim if roomy Riverside Drive apartment," but the Bech stories are closer to satire than to realism, so readers have to assume that writing a few books that are lightly taught and generally well regarded from the '50s are enough to sustain life for a grumpy man and his succession of mistresses in the late '60s.

And, yes, I said mistresses - that's the word Updike (or perhaps I mean Bech) uses. He's not married and has never been married, so it's not the world I'd use, but I suppose in 1970 "mistress" clearly implied that he fucks them in ways that "girlfriend" might not have.

Bech is not a particularly admirable person, in that traditional literary-novel way: he's self-obsessed and windy when talking about literature, treats women in ways that were reasonably enlightened for his day but come across as deeply sexist now, and has trouble getting out of his own way (or his own head) most of the time. He's not bad, though - or, at least, I didn't find him so. Bech is not a "look at this horrible person" book; it's more "it's this kind of guy, you know the type, and let's see what amusing things he'll get up to this time."

So Bech visits Russia and "Rumania" (it was 1970) and Bulgaria; summers on an unnamed "Massachusetts island" with his current mistress and her younger sister, his next-in-line mistress; spends a few days at a Virginia all-female college as a feted visiting writer; goes to London for a launch of a new collection of his work and takes up with a woman who turns out to be a newspaper columnist; and, finally, is invited to join an august body of litterateurs that he had respected and worshipped in his teen years.

Updike's prose is amusing and fun - he tends to write in long, convoluted sentences and paragraphs for this project (I don't think he did that generally, but, again, this is my first Updike) that struck me as appropriate for Bech and probably a light parody of specific real writers of that kind. Bech is not so horrible that the reader doesn't like him - at least, I should say, a male reader who is old enough to remember the world Bech lived in, which may be an important caveat - and the things he gets up to are all literary-world interesting, if from a very different era.

[1] The introduction by Malcolm Bradbury has a lot of words, but nowhere does he talk about where or if the stories were originally published separately. My guess is not; that this was created as a novel in stories. But Updike did write short fiction, and there was a thriving market for it in the '60s, so maybe these were in Playboy or Esquire or places like that.

Drinky Crow Drinks Again by Tony Millionaire

I've apparently never read a collection of Tony Millionare's Maakies comics. (Back in the early days of this blog, I posted about The Adventures of Sock Monkey and Billy Hazelnuts, but never the main stream of Millionaire's work.) I know I read Maakies in the New York Press during the years when alt-weeklies were a thing and I was regularly in Manhattan every week, but that was also a while ago.

But Drinky Crow Drinks Again, his 2016 collection, was available in my library app, and I thought it had been too long since I looked at his amazingly detailed, filth-filled, neo-Victorian, pseudo-classic-Sunday-comics art. (Millionaire is yet another artist whose work should be presented on larger pages than my tablet can handle - the modern digital world is convenient, but at the cost of being just that bit shittier and less pleasant than it used to be. That's not far from a Millionaire idea, actually.)

Drinks Again collects what seems to be the previous three or four years of Maakies - it's a horizontally-formatted book, with two strips to each page most of the time, but a few pages with single strips. There's also a lot of related illustrations presented full-page - roughly one after every six pages of strips - which could be new to this book or could have been various editorial, website, or other illustrations during the same period.

Maakies is not a strip concerned with continuities, so it doesn't really matter where everything appeared or what order they are in the book. This is probably roughly the end of print Maakies - Millionaire pulled the plug in 2016, as the last few alt-weeklies were dying slowly and painfully, though he later revived the strip online.

The main characters are a drunken monkey (Uncle Gabby) and a drunken crow (Drinky Crow), who are intermittently 19th century sailors of some kind and intermittently in the modern world, more or less. Each strip or drawing is a moment, a tiny story of its own - there are a few places in this book with a very light continuity from one strip to the next, but mostly in the occasional stories Millionaire tells of his younger days (generally the 1970s). There's a lot of scatology, which tends to follow from the massive amounts of drinking, and also a lot of violence and death (aimed outward or self-inflicted), also usually following from massive alcohol intake.

(I am not surprised to learn that Millionaire now is in recovery as an alcoholic; that was something of a gimmie.)

As always, Millionaire's style and substance are often jarringly incongruent: lovingly detailed depictions of landscapes and wooden ships filled with grotesque characters shitting themselves. That's the point, though: that's what Millionaire is doing. If you can enjoy that - preferably both sides, but at least one - you'll find things to love in Maakies.

Smoking Kills by Thijs Desmet

Comedy duos have to be contrasts - the wacky one and the one that tries to keep it together, for example. The optimist and the pessimist. It doesn't have to be a gag man and a straight man, but that's pretty common.

Thijs Desmet's collection of linked comics stories Smoking Kills is about two characters in some kind of afterlife. Ghost is depressive, grumpy, dismissive - spending his time smoking and drinking. Skeleton is lighter, happier, questioning everything and looking for a way out or something new to do. This isn't a straight comedy, but they fall into those patterns - these are stories about two characters, so it's how they bounce off each other, annoy each other, contrast with each other.

Skeleton seems new to this environment - they meet when he walks up to Ghost on a train platform, sits down, and starts talking. Ghost tells him that both of them are dead: Skeleton either actually doesn't believe it or really strongly pretends not to. That sets the pattern for most of their interactions: Skeleton is active, interested, inquisitive, looking to know why and to do things, to find a way out of this world or more people or just explanations.

Ghost wants to be left alone to drink and smoke.

They wander through this mostly empty world, doing what they can where they are in their own ways. The landscape is lightly urban or near-suburban, with playgrounds and woods and standalone houses - Skeleton and Ghost live together in a small house later in the book - all empty of real people, because, as Ghost says, they're dead and in the afterlife.

It's not quite that simple, though. When Ghost smashes a bunch of bottles in a grocery store, there's a commotion nearby, and they run away. They interact with a group of children telling stories around a midnight fire towards the end of the book. So Desmet is presenting this in a somewhat traditional way: they are haunting the real world, on the same streets and buildings as living people, but are separated, in a different version of that world, most of the time.

It's not laugh-out-loud funny; it's not aiming to be. It is amusing and light, most of the time, though Desmet's usually straightforward, jammed-together panels (with only thin black ruled lines separating them) occasionally iris out to larger visions, especially in a tour de force section where Ghost talks about how the universe works. It raises more questions than it answers - I don't know if that means Desmet is planning more stories with these characters (this book was originally published in Dutch in 2018; this English edition, translated by the author and Ria Schulpen, came out last year), but I hope so. Or that Desmet does something else that gets translated into English: this is interesting and distinctive and specific, and I want to see more comics like that.

Better Things: Mercy

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

I'm a child of the '80s - those were my formative, teen years. So a lot of the random odd music I love and remember comes from that decade; it's only natural.

This song is pretty random: the title song from an ex-Sex Pistol's first solo record, a decade later and miles away from punk. It's sweet and tender and true and yearning, in that hard-rock-ballad '80s style that can be a cliché but is lovely when it works.

This is Mercy by Steve Jones.

What I love most about it is the sound: that distinctive guitar line that launches us right in and continues throughout, the muted background chiming in the chorus, Jones's world-weary, growling voice attempting a croon throughout.

Where is the love I've lost
Where is the mercy and trust?

It's not a complicated message, it's not told in a complicated way. But Jones's voice and guitar work embody the weariness - you can feel all of the miles that led up to this, even if it's all packaged in a very radio-friendly '80s idiom.

I think this was Jones's biggest single, which means it charted a bit, somewhere, briefly. That's another thing in its favor, oddly, all these years later: this song questioning the point of the world, in a style that Jones hoped would be huge, turned out to fizzle itself...just like the world itself.

Quote of the Week: Household Dangers

[My mother's] greatest dread, however, was the Victrola - we had a very early one, back in the "Come Josephine in My Flying Machine" days. She had an idea that the Victrola might blow up,. It alarmed her, rather than reassured her, to explain that the phonograph was run neither by gasoline nor by electricity,. She could only suppose that it was propelled by some newfangled and untested apparatus which was likely to let go at any minute, making us all the victims and martyrs of the wild-eyed Edison's dangerous experiments.

 - James Thurber, "The Car We Had to Push," My Life and Hard Times, p.151 in Writings and Drawings

The Seal in the Bedroom & My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber

I've got the big Library of America Thurber volume, Writings and Drawings - I find the way LoA books have such obvious, bread-and-butter titles endearing - and want to read it. But it's a thousand pages, and it includes some complete books but a lot more excerpts, both of which aspects don't line up well with the way I read and write about books these days.

(First: I like relatively short things, so I can actually finish them. Second: I like to read actual books, not bits and pieces of different books.)

So what I'm going to do is read a wodge in Writings and Drawings, a wodge that includes at least one actual full book, and use the full book as my post title, and then just hit any other random material along the way. It's my blog, I can do it however I want.

Also, a note - I'm pretty sure I read this big Thurber omnibus once, back in the late '90s when it was published. But I lost my first copy in my 2011 flood, and it's been nearly thirty years, so I have no solid memory of any of it.

Writings and Drawings is in chronological order, which is standard for books like this. So it starts out with two chapters from Is Sex Necessary?, which Thurber wrote with E.B. White. (As I understand it, they wrote discrete chapters separately, and pulled them all together.) I reviewed the whole book back in 2018, so I'll just direct any interested parties there.

Next up is two pieces from the 1931 book The Owl in the Attic. "Mr. Monroe Holds the Fort" is an amusing story of a man left in an isolated country house and overrun by nerves when his wife has to run back to the city. Even more Thurberesque, and magnificently so, is "The Pet Department," a question-and-answer column (both sides written by Thurber) about various animals, all illustrated with his drawings. It is goofy and quirky and a lot of fun.

The Seal in the Bedroom was Thurber's first book of drawings and cartoons - most reprinted from The New Yorker, where he was a fixture - and it appeared in 1932. It's got a lot of funny stuff in it, but I was most struck by its organizational structure: this short book is broken into eight sections, a few of which (especially "The Race of Life") are sequences of drawings that function something like strip comics. The rest are thematic sections, from "Women and Men" (obvious) to "Miscellany" (very honest) to "Tennis" (well, it was the Thirties).

Thurber was nearly blind, which makes the fact that he was a popular cartoonist amusing in an odd way. His line is shaky and all the same weight but very distinctive - he's a major example of the cartoonist who is technically weak but works within his abilities to do great work.

And then My Life and Hard Times was Thurber's autobiography, written when he was just under forty and two decades before he died. It has ten chapters, each telling a separate, distinct story - not unlike his other pieces, in fact - from his youth, and ends, as Thurber explains, with him as a young man, because everything after that is too new. Each chapter is a gem, and, if it doesn't really add up to a full autobio, well, we should have expected that from Thurber, shouldn't we?

I like this LoA package so far, and think another 3-4 chunks about this size will see me through it. With luck, I can take a run at it every few months, and look back in amazement at '90s Andy, who just read the damn thing straight through in a few days. I miss being that guy, more than a little.

The Heavy Bright by Cathy Malkasian

I'll confess up front: I really don't like it when a work of fiction has a glorious past Golden Age, and explicitly says the point of the world is to get back to that Garden of Eden-ish state. Some creators try to do that in a way that doesn't immediately push all of the reactionary buttons, and Cathy Malkasian certainly tried here, but it inherently reinforces that old sour human sense that everything always gets worse, so there's no point in ever changing or trying to make anything better.

Cathy Malkasian specializes in long, fabulistic comics stories, set in quirky, unrealistic worlds, full of Improving Lessons and buffoonish, obvious villains. She also has a weird aversion to writing about adults, people in the middle of their lives: her protagonists often skip from young to old, and that's very obvious here.

The Heavy Bright was her 2023 book; like all the Malkasian books I've seen, it's not quite a formal allegory but tends in that direction. In the Glorious Before Times, all people lived in peace and harmony and talked with their dead relatives so much that they hadn't even invented writing. (Everyone also, apparently, had perfect memories and the dead are explicitly said to be unable to lie, because we're doing the fuzzy origin myth thing.)

But then a bunch of glowing eggs fell from the sky, amplifying everyone's emotions, but then turned black and fell to the ground, which brought evil into the world. Malkasian never gives a reason or source or point to this: it's a thing that happened, and it ruined the world. Presumably, other equally bad things could also happen at any time - maybe next time there's a rain of tetrahedrons that make everyone greedy.

A group of people who come to be called the Commanders witnessed this, and grabbed the eggs, which allowed them to wipe out entire villages with the power of aggression and anger - the mechanism isn't the same as in Temperance, but it's a very similar thing. These men - they're all men, and I'll get into the sexual politics later - use their power to foment chaos and death to gather political power, which goes on through an unknown number of generations.

We get this story from the dead Commanders, who lose their gender - this is a big deal for Malkasian in this book; there's a lot of talk about "groins" not being important at the same time her main character is explicitly a lesbian in a world hostile to them - after they die, and also, maybe, come to see that the system they devoted their lives to is horrible and evil. There's one woman in this afterlife - Old Bird, who discovered the first egg, way back when, and is on the one hand the keeper of all of the things the Commanders forgot or destroyed and on the other hand the main driver of the plot. Old Bird has realized that the "heavy" black eggs can be converted back into "bright" glowing ones by being whacked with objects with emotionally resonant memories tied to one's ancestors (or something like that), and she recruits a living human to do this.

Arna is the main character, though we don't meet her until after a long introductory Old Bird section. She's the tween daughter of an itinerant puppeteer; they travel around, tell stories to get some coin, and move on. She's not exactly pretending to be a boy now, but as she grows up she's going to have to - girls are commodities in this world, sold cheaply. But then they next place they come to has a Commander lurking about, which means random pointless violence and death. Arna survives; her father does not. And, almost randomly, she finds an egg and tries to eat it with a spoon she keeps on a chain around her neck, an old thing with a long history. This transforms the egg back to brightness - it doesn't seem as if anything can subsequently change it back to dark again, for no stated reason - and also seems to make it go away, out of the world or at least the narrative.

Old Bird has a long conversation with Arna in the afterlife, saying it's now Arna's mission to transform all 100 eggs - whack them all with her spoon, which each time makes her fly into the air briefly and kills the Commander associated with that egg.

Arna sets off to do this, and soon meets another young woman she falls in love with, Sela. Old Bird tells her not to reveal any secrets to Sela, but Arna wants to include her. Now I need to get back into the very particular sexual politics - and the way that Malkasian very deliberately excludes adults from this book.

Arna and Sela are on the verge of adulthood - Arna "buds" (has her first menstruation) when she meets Sela; that hasn't happened to Sela yet. As often with women in oppressive male-dominated societies, Sela dreams of never "budding," of staying just as she is. We don't see men that are young and strong - no obvious warrior types. The Commanders are older, and the trading of women is explicitly by "old men" - both in this section and later in the book. Women in their fertile years are talked about, but don't really enter the narrative.

To be blunt, Heavy Bright is a book about controlling women's fertility that fanatically avoids showing any women in their fertile years, and also has a mania in its afterlife scenes (and elsewhere) about insisting that "groins" - the difference between sexes - are utterly unimportant. It comes across almost as if there's something icky about sexuality - maybe just heterosexuality - and that everyone would be better off either as pre-sexual children or post-sexual menopausal women.

Anyway, what happens is that Sela "buds," which sweeps her up into the sky with a gigantic clamor and Close Encounters-esque light. This ends a section; the action shifts to several decades later.

Arna is now menopausal - again, we don't see her as an adult in the book. First she's a child, and then has her first period just a short time before the end of that section. Then we return to her after her menses have ended, thirty or so years later. Again, for a book about controlling women's sexuality, the women who are actually controlled are never present in their own story - our heroines are all children or post-fertile women.

Anyway, Arna is now chasing the last few eggs. Society has changed somewhat, though it's still lousy and sexist. All women now disappear, like Sela did, at their first period. Girl children are sold like animals, I suppose because everyone knows they'll disappear before long. Violence is much less common - in this world, the eggs initiate violence, and it might not be possible without them. But there's a sexist philosophy that's popular among men, and adult women divided into fertile (good "vessels") and infertile (bad). Although, after thirty years with no young women, I find it hard to believe there's been much fertility recently.

Arna does destroy the last eggs, after some more quirky scenes, and the world is then perfect and special - people can laugh (apparently they couldn't before? Malkasian didn't mention that earlier in the book) and talk with their ancestors again, and Arna is reunited with Sela and her dead father.

Heavy Bright is a positive, mostly uplifting story about fighting evil by whacking it with a spoon. It has goofy, broadly-drawn characters, as might be expected from a creator who spent decades making children's animation. Its allegory is at least muddied, but it has its heart in the right place, more or less. (Though it does seem to have an bone-deep aversion to sex and sexuality that is also somewhat congruent with children's animation.) And Malkasian's pages are lovely and organic, with her usual soft watercolors.

I can't tell you it means anything coherent, but even a vague message of "be nice to other people" and "women are also people" and "remember your past" and "violence is bad" is worth hearing.

The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett

This is the story of Ned Beaumont, a gambler and mob fixer in an unnamed small American city around 1930. Ned Beaumont is always called Ned Beaumont, except in dialogue, even in places where the reader knows it's Ned Beaumont and does not need to be reminded that he is Ned Beaumont, to the point where the reader may get tired of just hearing the name Ned Beaumont.

The fact that Ned Beaumont has no interiority at all - we never learn anything about his motivations or goals, other than some facile dialogue Ned Beaumont gives early in the novel about being a gambler and so Ned Beaumont must always push his luck at all times, to prove that Ned Beaumont still has it - makes Ned Beaumont even more of a cypher and less interesting than Ned Beaumont could have been, in this probably least of Dashiell Hammett's five novels.

Even the title is a letdown. It's explained at the very end: it's from a dream by what I think of as a minor character, though - since she's the prize Ned Beaumont gets to ride away with in the end - perhaps Hammett would disagree. But The Glass Key as a title has very little to do, even metaphorically, with Ned Beaumont and his struggles in wherever this is.

Ned - I'm going to stop the Hammett-parodying full-name thing now - is some kind of vague lieutenant or fixer of Paul Madvig, the boss of this unnamed town. For a long time, I thought Paul was the mayor - no mayor is ever named, and Paul is clearly in charge of the city and is working on an upcoming re-election for his slate, which seems like it would include him - but the end of the book seems to put the kibosh on that. So I suppose there is a mayor, but, like the name of the city, he's not important enough to be mentioned.

Paul is firming up plans for that upcoming election by aligning with one of this state's Senators, Ralph Bancroft Henry. Paul intends to marry the Senator's gorgeous daughter, Janet, but has been quarreling with the Senator's son, Taylor, who has in turn been carrying on an affair (rented apartment and everything - Hammett makes it clear as 1930 allowed that they were definitely fucking) with Paul's daughter Opal.

Now, Paul clearly was married before, and is clearly a generation older than his would-be wife (though not quite as old as the Senator), but his previous wife is one of the many, many things Hammett doesn't bother to mention or explain in The Glass Key, because he spent too many of his words typing Ned Beaumont one more time.

Also, Janet doesn't seem to like Paul in the slightest even before the events of the novel. She seems to be being given, almost as a bribe, to Paul for his support in the election, which is odd - when Paul and Ned talk, it sounds like the Senator Henry-Paul connection will help them both and be roughly a partnership of equals. So I had big questions about why any of this was happening in the first place, other than Janet is a hot patootie and Paul wants to jump her bones and her father's willing to let him as long as he marries her first. (Or maybe it's revenge for Taylor screwing his daughter? There's no hint of that in the book at all, but it's vaguely plausible. Paul does seem to be actually "in love" - in the hardboiled-novel way, which may just mean lust - with Janet.)

Anyway, Paul's re-election campaign is already having some hiccups because one of their gangsters is currently in jail for what sounds like vehicular homicide. Since Paul's voters are mostly respectable and honest, he can't just release the guy before the election, which is making the mugs think he's gone soft. This is a bit of a tricky thing, but it can be handled, and Ned is handling it.

But then Taylor Henry, the Senator's son, turns up dead just a couple of blocks from Paul's club. Ned chases after a bookie who fled the same night - who also, coincidentally, owed Ned a big payout from a horse-race that day - but the bookie is definitely not the murderer, and, even worse, it doesn't look like he would fit into a frame, either.

The rest of the novel wanders around that murder, as a mysterious person sends "questioning" letters - mostly implying Paul killed Taylor and that Ned is covering it up - to various people in this city, and the rival gang boss, Shad O'Rory, puts up a rival slate in the election and seems to be connected to the anti-Paul whisper campaign.

Ned gets captured and tortured by Shad's men, but it doesn't take. He runs around town, and back and forth to New York, doing various things that Hammett will show but never step back and let a narrative voice explain. He eventually finds out the truth of Taylor's death - it's not exactly a murder, and it's all a bit disappointing, but Ned Beaumont does get to leave town in the end with a hot dame on his arm, which has to count as a happy ending for him.

I was not terribly impressed with The Glass Key. I remember liking Hammett's books better the last time I read them, thirty or so years ago - this time around, I seem to like them each less and less. Only one to go, though - and The Thin Man, as I recall, is very different in tone and style.

(Note: I read this in the Library of America Complete Novels. I don't know if I actually recommend reading all of Hammett's novels - see immediately above - but, if you do, this is the best package for it.)

Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse and the Amazing Lost Ocean by Denis-Pierre Filippi and Silvio Camboni

I don't know that I'm actually looking to seriously read the "Disney Masters" series - see my post on Trapped in the Shadow Dimension for more background, if you want it - but I suppose I'm going to read at least some of them, here and there, as I feel in the mood.

This one - the title is the jaw-breaking Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse and the Amazing Lost Ocean - popped out at me from its gorgeous art. (I thought it might be painted, but the book credits a colorist.) As with all of the books in this series, as far as I know, it reprints a big story from the European Disney publishing operations - this one seems to have been an original album from Éditions Glénat in France in 2018, translated into English (by Jonathan H. Gray) for a 2025 publication over here.

As usual with Euro Disney stuff, the creators are people I'm not familiar with - bande dessinée is a huge field, with hundreds of creators working in their specific niches, and only bits and pieces of that ever make their way across the Atlantic. It was written by Denis-Pierre Filippi, drawn by Silvio Camboni, and colored by Gaspard Yvan (assisted by Jessica Bodart - possibly just for touch-up or similar on this US edition).

It's a steampunky near-future setting - one major peg-legged character is named Steampunk Pete here, to underscore that - which has had some sort of minor or not entirely equally distributed apocalypse. There are, of course, large airships, as well as boats, some computer tech and just a bit of mysterious super-science. Our heroes - Mickey, Minnie, and Goofy - work as scavengers, searching out underwater wrecks from before the apocalypse and mostly retrieving their valuable corallite fuel. Their great rival is the already mentioned Steampunk Pete, who is at least a sharp-elbowed competitor given to jumping his rivals' claims, if not actually a pure villain here as he usually is.

One discovery leads inventor Goofy to improve a telepresence suit he's been working on, getting to the point where Mickey can pilot it to do jobs deep underwater. They use that to win a contest to salvage supposedly inaccessible treasure, which leads them to be hired by Dr. Einmug, the standard Disney super-scientist.

Einmug's team brings in Mickey's team to do a dive, supposedly to find and disable a superweapon from that old apocalypse. But, actually, Einmug was seeking a massive deposit of corallite on the ocean floor there, and planned to secretly have Steampunk Pete take over the telepresence suit to release a Polarity Inversion Gas - "an Einmug invention that causes water to lose its gravity!"

(Are you buying this? That is one of the goofiest macguffins I've ever seen, and I edited SFF for more than a decade.)

The gas works better than expected, turning all of the water on earth into floating, storm-wracked oceans in the sky. Meanwhile, Einmug's assistant Prof. Portis, who is the actual villain, pushed out his boss, took over what seems like the whole world using his new massive energy source, and created an army of robo-drones to do his bidding.

Oh, and Mickey gets knocked out during the turmoil. He wakes up five years later after a chapter transition, to learn all of the above. Pete is now on their team - he's been loyal and helpful for the past five years - and they're almost ready to fight back against Portis, using an antidote to the gas that will put the oceans back on the ground where they belong. (I can't now find any reason why this group would be able to do that, but it's the story, so just go with it.)

Mickey and team sneak around, battle Portis's drones with their own tech, and send the telepresence suit on one last mission to the deepest depths of the sky-ocean, in a desperate bid to put the world back the way it was. Do they succeed? Well, it's a Disney story, which is a big hint.

The art is absolutely spectacular here. I think the print version is oversized - I read it digitally - and it's probably better read on those big pieces of paper. The story has a lot of "can you believe this happened?" and "no, really, this is how it works" elements that I didn't quite believe, and it's got a lurching rhythm - I think because Filippi organized his story into chapters and is trying to keep them distinct, like an old-time serial. On the other hand, any Mickey Mouse story requires a certain amount of suspension of disbelief anyway, and Filippi does good character work here and keeps the goofy super-science explanations on this side of plausibility.

Better Things: This Is Old

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

Every song means something slightly different to different people. And, sometimes, a song has a very specific resonance for you that's so distinct it's hard to explain.

This is one of those for me - This Is Old by State Shirt, a propulsive 2008 song from a band where I own this one record (this is the title song) and know basically nothing else about them.

I play video games a lot, and I like games where I can change or add to the soundtrack. This song is one of a couple dozen I added to the in-game "radio" in Grand Theft Auto IV - so I've heard it a lot, over the years, while pretending to steal cars and drive recklessly around a fictional version of NYC.

And, without intending it, I came to think of this song as about the protagonist of that game. (I know, I know: this is purely in my head, and entirely random. But the point of good art is that it makes connections, and these two pieces of art connected, at least in me.) So, oddly, idiosyncratically, I think of this as Niko Bellic's theme song.

Beaten down for so many years
It's just a job that never finds an end
Drained and drunk
Can never give it up
Sell off your friends
Wake up and do it all again

I hate all that I've become
And I hate every part of you
I've tried to drop out of this life
And abandon this divide
This is old, this is getting old

If you don't know the game or the character, it's just words - just some guy in a bad situation. But it's a compelling song even so - a strong, driving song. And the ending is just killer, just perfect. Over and over, the singer repeats:

The finest things in life I will always refuse
The worst things in life I will always abuse

Quote of the Week: A Detective Ponders

All I had to go on was a description of the murder weapon, the project he'd been working on all the time we'd spoken, and the possibility he'd put Joey Ballista in a frame all those years ago based on information he'd gotten from Joey's teenage mistress that might not hold up if she were brought in and questioned now that the case was under review. It would mean the loss of his pension and probable jail time, but it was all guesswork on my part. I hadn't liked him. Most of the people I didn't like didn't turn out to be murderers.

 - Loren D. Estleman, The Left-Handed Dollar, pp.120

Everything Sucks: Kings of Nothing by Michael Sweater

Michael Sweater makes comics about stoners and losers, in an art style inspired or influenced by graffiti and tattoos. His work is funny and appealing - I don't know if I should say more so the further you are from that kind of life, since that feels like piling on (onto Sweater or his characters, not sure which).

Everything Sucks: Kings of Nothing collects the first six issues of his recent Everything Sucks series; it was published earlier this year by Silver Sprocket and is probably still the most recent Sweater thing available in the market. I've previously looked at his books Please Destroy the Internet, Please Destroy My Enemies, and This Must Be the Place; Sweater has been making comics for about a decade and has an established style and tone, even if the characters have different names and specific relationships in each project.

Everything Sucks is vaguely anthropomorphic: Sweater draws his characters as animal-people, more-or-less, purely visually as far as I can tell. They don't talk about the issues between the dog-people and the cat-people or anything like that: it's just how he draws characters.

Noah is the main character, the young man who wants to be an artist but spends too much of his time watching movies and smoking. (He's also got a lousy job at a sandwich shop; it's lousy in part because he makes it lousy - and we get the sense that he likes having a lousy job to complain about.) His best friend is Calla, who doesn't quite live with him but is often there - he seems to rent a small house, which seems beyond the means of a part-time sandwich-shop loser, but we'll allow it for dramatic license - who is not an artist, as far as we see, but is even lazier and less motivated than Noah is. They have a friend Brad, who they don't seem to like, who lives in a van and wanders through the sewers looking for stuff to reclaim.

And the six issues collected here have stories about the three of them, in whatever small city or large town they live in, wherever it is. They hang out, complain, bicker, go out for food, get locked in a bathroom, argue, mostly avoid doing anything constructive, and squabble.

There have been a lot of comics about lovable, funny losers over the years, often in this kind of mode: a small group of young people, sometimes inspired by the creator and their friends, who hang out and do goofy stuff because they are young and aimless and unhappy with the world. It's a kind of story I tend to think a creator can do for about a decade or so: after that, it's just sad and not funny anymore. Michael Sweater works in that mode, and he's good at it - his art is gnarly and fun in that tattoo-ish way, giving it some visual pizzazz - but I wonder if the window for this kind of project might be starting to close. The characters in Everything Sucks talk more than a bit about being thirty, which is a big milestone for aimless young people. You can stay aimless your whole life, but you're really not young and full of potential past thirty. Then you're just aimless and slowly turning into a permanent loser.

I'd like to see what Sweater does next; I'm seeing small indications here that he might need or want to shift to something slightly different, as he and his characters age, and I'd like to see what comes next. For now, though, Everything Sucks is a fine look at three low-lives, doing what they can and getting by in amusing ways.

The Left-Handed Dollar by Loren D. Estleman

Way back in the early days of this blog, I caught up on Loren D. Estleman's private-eye novels - his main character is Amos Walker, of Detroit - in a big batch of posts in August of 2007.

Well, time flows on, and Estleman kept writing about Walker, and I put those books on a shelf, perhaps hoping to do the same thing again. But it's now been more than fifteen years, and there were nine books on that shelf - not everything in the series since 2007; I missed a few - so I figured, let's try to read one book; surely I can do that?

The Left-Handed Dollar was the new Amos Walker book for 2010, and the next book in the series after I caught up in 2007; my copy still had a publicity letter in it. (I've already dropped it into the recycling bin, to stop myself from profusely apologizing to whatever publicist sent it to me those fifteen years ago with the vain hope I would publicize the thing at a time when it would have been helpful.)

Walker is a little bit of a clichéd old-fashioned male gumshoe - Estleman doesn't give him a specific age, but the novels started in 1980 and Walker is a veteran of Vietnam, so in 2010 he had to be at least mid-fifties, and possibly a decade older - with an aversion to cellphones and computers, a network of now-aging (and often getting pretty senior) contacts in various law-enforcement forces, and, in best Detroit style, a car that looks battered and old but is actually powerful and responsive.

This time out, he's hired by a lawyer, Lucille Lettermore, a defense attorney often in the news for high-profile cases (as Walker puts it on the first page, she defends "Communists, terrorists, Democrats, and other enemies of the social order"). Her client is an ill, aging mobster, Joseph Michael Ballista aka "Joey Ballistic," who's facing a third-time-unlucky rap - but "Lefty Lucy" thinks she can unravel some of his priors and put the kibosh on the worst of the current prosecution.

(Lucy also complains a lot about RICO, although nothing Walker investigates in this book or that Joey Ballistic is accused of doing seems to fall into things that are only illegal because of RICO. As often happens with detective novels, there's an element of editorializing from the narrative voice about what is Good and Right in society and how to get rid of the Scum that Pollute Our Precious Bodily Fluids. Since most of the characters are white this time out - there's some gratuitous Orientalism around a couple of secondary characters, for spice, but it's quick and easy to skim over - it doesn't get into anything particularly racist, but it does make me wonder what's coming up in later novels.)

Anyway, Joey was convicted, around twenty years before, of planting a bomb that nearly killed Walker's best friend, the investigative reporter Barry Stackpole. Lettermore wants to hire Walker to shake that tree - to find the police informant who fingered Joey, to see if he can poke any holes in the official story. Walker agrees once he has a meeting with Joey himself - Walker has a massive confidence in his ability to tell if people are telling the truth to him - and gets himself punched in the face by his old buddy Stackpole for being involved.

Walker chases down the detective who did the arrest, now retired and running a bait shop out in the sticks. From a chance phrase in that conversation, he thinks the informant was a woman, and so chases after Joey's ex-wife, two mistresses from that era (one of whom is now the receptionist in the ex-wife's interior decorating business), and, somewhat later, a dragon-lady type who ran the Chinese heroin connection in those days.

But, in the middle of that legwork, the bodies start popping up: first one of those old mistresses, then an ex-cop, whose body is discovered by Walker himself. The Detroit cops, in the person of Inspector John Alderdyce, an old acquaintance of Walker's, pull him in for questioning and put him on the usual short leash.

There's more complications and running about, but Walker does solve the case - there's a shootout at the end with the current perp, and Walker also learns the truth about the old case. Walker's voice has a lot of potshots at the then-current Mayor and administration - mostly for being lazy, vain, and useless, not for actual malfeasance; I have no idea if it's related to a real person but it feels like a fairly standard list of complaints from the right to balance Lettermore's even more obvious lefty complaints.

This is a solid mystery, only slightly creaky with the weight of accumulated genre expectations and told well in a distinctive voice. I don't know that I trust Walker quite as much as he trusts himself, and I'd need to read a few more recent books to get a good sense of how much Estleman trusts him, but I still like the way these stories are told, and Estleman keeps it all modern enough and full of telling details. 

Bad Break, Chapter #2 by Philippe Riche

I still don't know what "Bad Break" means, exactly. At times in this book, it seems to be the name of a person, in flashbacks. It's also the last word spoken in the story, in the metaphoric sense, as a zinger that demands to be punctuated by a David Caruso CSI: Miami meme. I suspect creator Philippe Riche doesn't care all that much: he's going for style and energy and vibes here, not so much a story that's completely coherent, consistent, and satisfying.

(See the cover? Notice how all three main characters are naked? You probably wonder why. They spend most of the middle of this book naked, actually. It's not a good reason, but I won't spoil it here. But, if you are putting naked + French + adult + comics together and getting anything that = sex, I sadly inform you that you are completely wrong.)

On the positive side, Bad Break, Chapter #2 [1] is actually stylish and energetic. It adds more depth and detail to the three characters we met in the first book - they even get names, Ernst-Lazare and Simon and Rebecca X - as they chase three old tattoos that will, we learn here, lead them to something vague and secret from the god Patakyuku. Patakuyuku was the creator-god of wherever the antagonist gang of head choppers are from: somewhere tropical and fairly "savage" fifty or so years ago, probably in the French sphere of influence. Mythologically, Patakuyuku bequeathed his seven major powers to his sons, but then took those powers back, and his sons' heads, when they fought each other. Those seven actual heads - whether divine or just dead-human is never clear - are the McGuffin that Ernst-Lazare is looking for, or rather the biggest piece of the Patakuyuku legacy that he thinks he'll find all in one place.

Riche keeps a lot of this vague, so we don't know what Ernst-Lazare thinks he can do with the heads. He may think those supernatural powers will be available to him, and, within the story, may even be right - even though, if his story is correct, those heads sat in a random tribal village for thousands of years without giving anyone any superpowers. Or, since he's a dealer in "antiquities," which seems to be mostly human remains, he may just think he can display and/or sell them.

Anyway, our three main characters chase up the third tattoo, get naked for an insufficient reason, have to flee the head choppers naked, and come back to where the story started for the big ending, all the while Ernst-Lazare tells stories of Patakuyu and flashbacks about the three old men that had the tattoos. They do steal clothes, among other things, along the way. And they do find what they were looking for, more or less...but it's a "bad break."

YEAAAAHHHHHH!

Bad Break is yet another object lesson that it's much easier to start a noirish, stylish story than to finish one successfully. It's not bad - don't get me wrong - but it's a bit unsatisfying, vague, and confused by the time it's done. The fact that Riche draws two of the characters in the flashbacks to look exactly like Simon and Rebecca X never becomes important, either - are they reincarnations? Does that matter, in some way? (There's no other hint of reincarnation anywhere in the story.) Or is it just the way Riche draws that kind of character?

We also seem to quietly forget in this book that Ernst-Lazare is immortal, and don't learn any explanation for that. Are we mean to assume he is Patakuyuku, who lost his powers to his sons and is questing through the ages to get their heads and retrieve his godhood? Again, Riche will give a lot of style and a lot of vibes, but somewhat less in the way of detailed explanations of what happened and what it all means. But, if you want a twisty, flashback-filled French crime story drawn in moody tones and featuring three people who spend a lot of time naked, go check out Bad Break.

[1] Online catalogs tend to name this book as Vol. 2, but the cover clearly says it is "Chapter 2."