Read in May 2018

There's nothing particularly special about May. And it's over now. So, without further ado, here are the books I read this month:

H.P. Lovecraft and I.N.J. Culbard, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (5/1)

Howard Chaykin and Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, Twilight (5/2)

Richard Gehr, I Only Read It for the Cartoons (5/2)

Joe R. Landsale, Tim Truman, and Sam Glanzman, Jonah Hex: Shadows West (5/3)

John Allison, Lissa Treiman, and Max Sarin, Giant Days: Not On the Test Edition, Vol. 1 (5/4)

John Allison, Max Sarin, and Liz Fleming, Giant Days: Not On the Test Edition, Vol. 2 (5/5)

Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 1910 (5/6)

Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 1969 (5/6)

Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 2009 (5/6)

Berkeley Breathed, The Bloom County Library, Vol. 4: 1986-1987 (5/7)

Jane Yolen and Rebecca Guay, The Last Dragon (5/8)

Kate Leth, Brittney L. Williams, and Natasha Allegri, Patsy Walker A.K.A. Hellcat!, Vol. 1: Hooked On a Feline (5/9)

Jackson Landers, Eating Aliens (bound galleys) (5/9)

Edward Lucie-Smith, Erotica: The Fine Art of Sex (5/10)

Andi Watson, Skeleton Key, Vol. 1: Beyond the Threshold (5/11)

Andi Watson, Skeleton Key, Vol. 2: The Celestial Calendar (5/11)

Andi Watson, Skeleton Key, Vol. 3: Telling Tales (5/11)

Andi Watson, Skeleton Key, Vol. 4: Cats & Dogs (5/12)

Andi Watson, Skeleton Key, Vol. 5: Roots (5/12)

The New Yorker Book of Mom Cartoons (5/13)

Dennis O'Neil, Denys Cowan, and Rick Magyar, The Question, Vol. 2: Poisoned Ground (5/14)

John Layman and Rob Guillory, Chew: The Omnivore Edition, Vol. 4 (5/15)

James Morrow, The Asylum of Dr. Caligari (5/16)

Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, and Christophe Blain, Dungeon: The Early Years, Vol. 1: The Night Shirt (5/16)

Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, and Christophe Blain, Dungeon: The Early Years, Vol. 2: Innocence Lost (5/17)

Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar, Dungeon: Zenith, Vol. 1: Duck Heart (5/18)

Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar, Dungeon: Zenith, Vol. 2: The Barbarian Princess (5/19)

Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, and Boulet, Dungeon: Zenith, Vol. 3: Back in Style (5/20)

Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, and Manu Larcenet, Dungeon: Parade, Vol. 1: A Dungeon Too Many (5/21)

Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, and Manu Larcenet, Dungeon: Parade, Vol. 2: Day of the Toads (5/22)

Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, Mazan and Jean-Christophe Menu, Dungeon: Monstres, Vol. 1: The Crying Giant (5/23)

Chris Offutt, My Father, The Pornographer (5/23)

Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, Stephane Blancquet and Andreas, Dungeon: Monstres, Vol. 2: The Dark Lord (5/24)

Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, Carlos Nine and Killoffer, Dungeon: Monstres, Vol. 3: Heartbreaker (5/25)

Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, Jean-Emmanuel Vermot-Desroches and Yoann, Dungeon: Monstres, Vol. 4: Night of the Ladykiller (5/26)

Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, Blutch and Bezian, Dungeon: Monstres, Vol. 5: My Son the Killer (5/27)

Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, Stanislas and Keramidas, Dungeon: Monstres, Vol. 6: The Great Animator (5/28)

Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim, Dungeon: Twilight, Vol. 1: Dragon Cemetery (5/29)

Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, and Kerascoet, Dungeon: Twilight, Vol. 2: Armageddon (5/30)

Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, Kerascoet, and Obion, Dungeon: Twilight, Vol. 3: The New Centurions (5/31)

And that was May. 

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 6/18

Hey! It's Monday again. As usual, I list the books that arrived in the prior week from the hard-working publicists of Big Book, in hopes some of you will love some of them and take them to your bosoms forever.

(I also have a few things I bought this past week, which I'm shoving in here because I'm already writing about books. There will be a clear separator, for those of you who are persnickety about such things.)

Wolf's Empire: Gladiator is what looks to be the first in an oddball soft-SF series by actress Claudia Christian and a guy whose name sounds like a law firm, Morgan Grant Buchanan. (I'm trying not to assume that Buchanan did all of the hard work, but that tends to be the assumption when a celebrity emits a book-shaped object written with a co-author.) It's set in one of those utterly implausible universes -- the Roman Empire never fell! it now rules a Galactic Empire! a plucky noblewoman (who could potentially be played by Claudia Christian in the TV version) has to become a gladiator to avenge the wrongs done to her family! she's cast into slavery and forced to fight alongside the men she wants to kill! -- that I'm afraid I just can't take seriously at this point in my life. If you can, this is a Tor hardcover that will be officially published on June 28.

The other review copy I have this week is a manga volume from Kaori Yuki: Alice in Murderland, Vol. 4. It's another of the inexplicable rush of manga loosely -- generally very loosely -- based on Lewis Carroll that have been making their way across the Pacific lately. (I have no idea if this is an actual manga trend, or if US editors are cherry-picking the few Alice-based manga because US audiences love them -- either would be weird, and either is possible.) As I understand it, the nine children of a powerful and rich family must battle each other to the death before the eldest turns twenty, for no immediately plausible reason. Our heroine is the youngest daughter, aided by a murderous alternate personality. One suspects this family could do with a lot of intensive therapy, in some very well-guarded and secure facility far away from collateral casualties. But they'll probably just slaughter each other in inventive ways instead.

Clear Separator

Love Fights, Vol. 1 is the first half of a 2003 story by Andi Watson about superheroes in love. Andi Watson had a great stretch of really wonderful comics from the mid-90s through very recently -- I'm waffling only because I haven't seen as much of his stuff recently, though I don't expect he suddenly turned into Frank Miller -- all humanist and lovely and full of real people with real lives and relationships. I had a big shelf of Watson before the flood, and I'm building it back up as I can.

Sunny, Vol. 4 is the most recent (I think) book in the slice-of-life manga series by Taiyo Matsumoto. (See my reviews of volumes one and two.) This series is deep and real and full of very closely observed damaged kids; it's a masterpiece of world comics.

Little Star is another Andi Watson book; this one complete in one volume. Blah blah blah Andi Watson is awesome. Like I said before.

The 4-Fisted Misadventures of TUG & buster, Vol. 1 is a Marc Hempel book from the dark (or maybe light; depends on your point of view) days of the late '90s, and was his creator-owned follow-up to the Gregory books, which I recently re-read. The book has a big "1" on the spine, but I don't think there were any more TUG & buster stories...though I'd be happy to find out I'm wrong.

And then there's B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth, Vol. 12, from Mike Mignola and his crew. I don't have volume 11 yet, but that's OK: I tend to read these Hellboy-universe books in a big clump over a week or two, so I'll probably wait to have another two or three of these, maybe an Abe Sapien, and probably the back half of Hellboy in Hell. So I'm in no hurry.

Book-A-Day 2018 #147: Skeleton Key (5 vols) by Andi Watson

I have a weakness for stories that don't go the way the creator expects them to. It's not always easy to tell -- you generally only get to experience something when it's been finalized and all of the rough edges and false starts sanded off -- but sometimes the bones of the original plan can be seen. It's more common in serialized stories, obviously -- TV or comics or similar things, where episodes have to be released before the whole thing is done.

Andi Watson's early series Skeleton Key, I think, went in a very different direction than he expected. And it's fun because of that, on top of the usual joys of seeing a young creator get better and smarter on almost every single page and just telling good stories along the way.

Skeleton Key ran monthly for thirty issues from 1995 through 1998, and then came back for a four-issue miniseries, Skeleton Key: Roots, in 1999. The whole series was collected in five volumes -- Beyond the Threshold, The Celestial Calendar, Telling Tales, Cats & Dogs, and Roots. (Watson has since come back to the same world for a few short stories, but even that was close to a decade ago.) I think I discovered the series somewhere in the middle, and had all of the collections before my 2011 flood. And, since I've been re-buying and re-reading Andi Watson books for the last few years, eventually I got all five collections and re-read the whole thing.

Watson was clearly finding his way in the early pages -- this was only his second big comics work, after Samurai Jam. In fact, he radically changes his lettering style in the middle of the fourth story page, which I find endearing: not bothering to re-do anything, just changing and doing full steam ahead.

Beyond the Threshold opens with Tamsin Mary Cates, a grumpy teen goth stuck in the dull provincial town of Garfield, Alberta, Canada, among jocks and snow and not much else. Preparing for the town's Day of the Dead parade -- do Canadian prairie towns have Mexican celebrations that much? never mind; Watson needs it for the premise -- she wanders into the kind of strange little shop that we all know from a million other stories. It has unique and odd things, and she finds just what she needs: a skeleton costume and matching large ornate key. And when she returns later, the shop was never there in the first place.

She goes to the parade, though not necessarily the one in Garfield, and gets back safely. But she also brought someone back from what she thought was a dream later that night: the young fox spirit Kitsune, on the run from magicians who want her liver. It turns out the key can open doorways to other worlds -- out of any door, anywhere -- but only by some people, and only when they're wearing the suit. By the end of the first book, three nasty magicians have teamed up to get the key away from them and kidnapped a school friend of Tamsin's as a first step. And so the two girls set off to rescue him, through one of those doors.

Celestial Calendar follows immediately from that moment: it's a twelve-part story themed to the Chinese calendar. But each installment doesn't take a month, and the girls make it back to their own world at about the mid-point. In retrospect, here's where we really see Watson's plans being abandoned and a more organic idea for Skeleton Key coming forward. The first half of Celestial Calendar is a view of what Skeleton Key might have been: adventures across strange worlds with quirky characters, serious enough to have real danger but essentially light-hearted.

Instead, Tamsin and Kitsune rescue their friend, defuse the conflict with the magicians, and get back to Garfield. They won't leave the mundane world again, and the key itself basically disappears from the story at that point. From here on out, Skeleton Key is the story of two friends, mixed in with a measure of high school drama. There are still some minor supernatural elements, but they tend to be humorous, like Tamsin's raccoon backpack, which a magician brought to life.

The aftermath of rescuing that boy in Celestial Calendar becomes important later: he finds out about it and is mad that they didn't tell him he was kidnapped into a fantasy world. And that speaks to the core of the back half of Skeleton Key, focused on personal relationships: tentative romances for both Tamsin and Kitsune, Tamsin's protectiveness of Kitsune, Tamsin's parents growing annoyance with the girl who is living in their house and eating all their food, and the question of Tamsin's plans after she graduates high school.

Skeleton Key is one of the very rare cases of a story that radically de-escalated as it went on. It would have been very easy to have the girls get into supernatural scrapes on one world after another -- maybe returning home in between adventures, maybe not -- learning more, getting paraphernalia and allies and friends and a complicated history. But Watson instead pulled them back to the real world, using Kitsune's magical origins as just another way a new friend can appear suddenly in a life and transform it.

That's the opposite of the usual choice, and it's worth celebrating: serialized stories don't have to keep getting bigger. There doesn't need to be a new Dark Lord; the world doesn't have to be saved; people are enough for a story.

Skeleton Key signposted the entirely domestic stories Watson would do in the early aughts -- a great string of individual graphic novels about people, all stories with beginnings and ends and real heart. This is where he wrote his way into that mode, and seeing again how he did it is still a lot of fun.

Breakfast After Noon by Andi Watson

We all define ourselves. By what we believe in, where we live, which sports teams we support, who our family is. What we do for a living is always a big one: I'm a doctor; I'm a lawyer; I'm a realtor; I'm a teacher. But what we do for a living is always dependent on someone paying us to do that, which is never guaranteed. Picking that as a major pillar of your self-definition is a dangerous thing.

Rob Grafton is an assembler. It's a skilled job: putting together various items in the Windsor Potteries factory in the West Midlands of England. He's been doing it since he left school. He thinks he'll do it for the rest of his life.

He's wrong.

The potteries - not just Windsor, but this whole region, largely dependent on this one industry - are in decline. The patterns are old and stuffy, younger families don't buy the fancy stuff to begin with, costs are rising, materials are getting more difficult to source and coming from further overseas. It's an industry running downhill, first slowly then quickly, in a region where that industry is a major pillar.

Rob gets laid off, along with his fiancé and live-in girlfriend Louise Bright. She works at the potteries, too, though she's not as keen to define herself by her job. Maybe because she does something more tedious and less skilled, maybe because that's more of a guy thing, maybe because she has other things that loom larger in her life, such as their impending wedding.

But Louise is keen to move on: apply for unemployment, get retraining, investigate what else she can do, jump to something else. Rob, though, is surly and grumpy: he's an assembler, he insists. That's what he does; it's what he will do. He'll just get his job back at Windsor, or get the same job somewhere else: how could he possibly do anything else?

Rob is wrong. I could type that a dozen times in this post: Breakfast After Noon is largely the story of how wrong Rob is, in many different ways. He's frankly not a very good person when we meet him: self-centered and thoughtless, the kind of guy who assumes the world will continue on exactly as it has, doing only the things he enjoys, because why won't it?

So Rob drags his feet with Louise. He doesn't do his end of the wedding planning; he doesn't take being unemployed seriously and look to move on; he's not particularly affectionate or loving to her at any point. And he's just as thoughtless with his friends: lazy and joking on their local-league football team, unpleasant at the pub, just not a pleasant person to be around in any way.

And his actions have the natural consequences. Grumpy, stubborn people don't get what they want because of their attitudes. They're often less likely to get what they want because of those attitudes, in fact. That's how it goes in Breakfast After Noon: Rob is wrong until his wrong decisions and attitudes and failures to act start driving people away, and then...well, that would be giving it away.

Breakfast After Noon was Andi Watson's first completely naturalistic comics story, the natural next step from the ebbing fantasy of Skeleton Key and the muted SF of Geisha. It was a six-issue comics series  in 2000 before becoming a book immediately afterward, but it shows the signs of being planned as a single story from the beginning: it has chapter breaks rather than issue breaks. And Watson may perhaps have made Rob a bit too stubborn and off-putting, even to a comics-shop audience of youngish men equally sure of everything important in their lives. I can also quibble a bit about the ending: I felt like there was an awful lot of "Rob is a stubborn ass who doesn't know what's good for him" and vanishingly little of "Rob realizes this and we actually see him change and make an effort."

Still, it's a great story: true to life, deeply grounded in a place and specific people, deeply meaningful. We all know Robs and Louises; we're probably both of them, in some ways, ourselves. And this is from the moment where Watson's art style had definitively shifted from manga to Euro influences: his lines are lovely and organic, always in the right place and the right weight, with warm grey washes to define spaces and moods.

My personal opinion is that Watson got even better than this quickly: Slow News Day and Love Fights and Little Star built on this naturalistic foundation and did similar things even more strongly. But this was the beginning of that period, and, for all of Rob's faults, he's a lovable lout in a relatable jam. For great comics stories about real-world people in real-world lives, it's hard to beat 2000s Andi Watson.

Paris by Andi Watson & Simon Gane

I read this for almost entirely extraneous reasons, if that matters.

I'd seen the original edition of Paris when it was first published, and wrote about it for ComicMix. (Be careful with that link; much of ComicMix's back catalog seems to have been infested with hijackers, and there may be malware lurking about.) I vaguely knew that there was a newer, slightly longer edition, and had a perhaps even more vague idea of reading it, eventually, since I've been re-reading Andi Watson's books over the last few years.

This is written by Watson, by the way, but the art is by Simon Gane. It's the only time they've collaborated so far; Watson usually draws his own books. (Though they do have a new book together, Sunburn, coming up this fall.)

None of that is why I read Paris. And, looking back, it's completely random that I did read it, only five days after this new edition was released.

I was browsing through Hoopla, the app my library uses, trying to find something to read that day. I'd just come back from a movie The Wife dragged me to. Now, it was not a bad movie, in any sense, but it was predictable and obvious and thuddingly normalizing in all sorts of ways: a well-executed thing that I didn't mind watching but cared almost exactly nothing about. So I wanted something of a palate cleanser: something like that in superficial outlines, but more subtle, with better storytelling, and maybe something subversive about it. To be blunt, something with a bit of romance, maybe set in Paris in the 1950s, maybe without a moral of "common people are magical beings who make everyone's lives better with their cheeky clear-headedness".

Thus Paris. My original review covers the story (assuming you can navigate the "click Allow now!" pop-ups to read it): young American painter Juliet is in Paris, studying at the Academie de Stael in genteel poverty. Young British heiress Deborah is also in Paris, chaperoned by her horrible Aunt Chapman and having the most boring time possible in that city.

Juliet is hired to paint Deborah; they have a spark. Circumstances intervene to snuff out that spark, possibly before many readers have realized it is a spark, and not just a friendship. Will they meet again, and re-connect?

That's the story. There's some additional complications, such as Juliet's lusty roommate Paulette and Deborah's swishy brother Billy, but it's a story about these two women, and whether they can manage to get together despite everything.

Gane has a very detailed style, that, to my eye, is influenced by both mid-century illustration and the lanky grace of high fashion. I don't know if he always draws like this, but it's a lovely choice for this story, making the City of Light a place of glamor and bustling life, real in its own way but idealized, the perfect vision of a romantic city of the past.

Like most of Watson's work, the story here is low-key; you need to pay attention. It also helps to know a little French, since some phrases are untranslated until a set of notes at the end. But they're all clear in context to readers who do pay attention.

The first time around, I thought of Paris as minor Watson, but I've revised that estimation upwards this time around. Gane's art adds something unique and wonderful, and Watson is at his most subtle and allusive here, trusting his readers to see this story and not need to be told everything. You may need to read Paris twice to properly love it, but you don't need to wait fifteen years between readings as I did.

The Book Tour by Andi Watson

Any author would agree that a book tour has the potential for horror. It could be wonderful, of course -- but what in human life is ever purely wonderful? There's going to be something that goes bad. And there's always the chance it could all go bad.

Which brings us to Andi Watson's graphic novel The Book Tour, in which things go wrong, first very quietly and subtly then more and more obviously, for journeyman author G.H. Fretwell as he sets off on a tour for his new novel Without K [1] of what seem to be minor cities in some unnamed European country. It could be today, it could be the late 19th century. Fretwell takes steam trains, he stays in hotels - shabbier and shabbier, dodgier and dodgier as the tour goes on. And the tour does go on - that's  one of the things that goes wrong, from Fretwell's point of view.

He sets off with high hopes, a nice suit, and a suitcase full of books. He comes to the first stop on his tour, a cozy and quaint bookshop, sets up at a table in a corner with a stack of books and a good pen, and waits for readers.

It's only the first of many bad experiences when he doesn't sell a single book that day, or interact with a single person who cares about his work. The hotel that night is good, but things don't go as well as he hopes. This is as good as its going to get for Fretwell.

There are shocking stories in the newspaper, which Fretwell does not read: he focuses only on the literary pages. There are dangers and surprises and troubles which he barely notices, even as they get closer and closer to him.

He meets with an editor: not his editor, who is unavoidably detained somewhere else. He is invited to a literary event verbally, but is unable to enter without a printed invitation. He finds the shops and hotels getting less appealing, and his itinerary getting longer and more onerous.

And then it gets much worse.

This is a different kind of book for Andi Watson: he's spent most of the past decade and a half making fun, light adventure stories for younger readers, and close to a decade before that making resonant stories for adults that were not necessarily romances but centered on personal and family relationships. This is a more literary book, a book of quiet depths, where he implies much more than he shows, and shows vastly more than he tells.

The art is quicker-looking as well, with rough panel borders and lines that have a feeling of speed. Watson's mid-century character designs - I always see a lot of UPA in his people's faces - are precise and expressive while still being deeply caricatured, always in a style that fits the look of the book. The panels are tight, mostly in a grid - he does open up, here and there, but the overall feeling is tightness, closeness, with a lot of vertical lines for looming buildings and rain and grim functionaries and towering stacks of books and other ominous things.

The Book Tour can read quickly, but there's a lot that happens in the gutters between panels and a lot that is implied by what people mention to Fretwell. So don't read it quickly: this is a book to linger over, to think about, to enjoy the drawings and think about what may really be happening while poor Fretwell is distracted with his ever-worsening book tour.

[1] In-universe, this is a reference to Fretwell's wife's name, Rebecca (without a 'k'). Doylistically, it could also be a subtle Kafka reference.

Love Fights by Andi Watson

Andi Watson had a phenomenal run of comics stories about a decade ago -- the stars aligned for both his work and the commercial environment, I guess -- with a string of great books (with actual stories that begin and end) from Breakfast After Noon to Little Star, from Slow News Day to Dumped. The longest story from that period is Love Fights, which was reprinted in two volumes.

It's probably no coincidence that Love Fights is the one of those books that has superheroes in it. I think Watson planned all of these stories out before drawing them, so it's not a case of popularity driving more issues, but it could be a case of expected popularity driving a contract up front for more issues. Whatever the reason, Love Fights was first twelve issues and then two books, and those books can still be found, if you're motivated.

And I was motivated, so I found them again and read them again.

This is one of those more-or-less realistic worlds with superheroes in, and Watson, as he often does, focuses on the media landscape around something more than the thing itself. So Jack is the penciller of the regular comic book about actual real-world superhero The Flamer, while Nora is a very junior but very ambitious staffer on the vaguely exploitative superhero-news magazine Expose who has a lead on a story about that very same hero. They meet cute -- on a subway train delayed by a superhero fight involving The Flamer, as it happens -- and bump into each other a few times over the next day or so until Jack finally summons enough courage to ask Nora out.

Meanwhile -- there always has to be a subplot in a superhero story -- Jack's cat Guthrie has had a secret origin of his own, becoming the talking, flying super-cat Future Feline. And that story Nora is chasing -- that The Flamer has a love child with some random woman -- is heating up, causing friction between the devoted-to-the-Flamer Jack and the devoted-to-getting-a-byline Nora.

All of this is closely related, of course. Their love story, such as it is -- they're somewhere between broken up and just stopped dating after a few fizzles for most of the story -- takes place against the backdrop of a fiendish plot against The Flamer, as of course it must. That does tend to make the Jack-and-Nora story almost a sidebar in its own story, so this isn't my favorite Watson book of this era -- he's so good with people and their relationships that I want to see him do more of that, and less superhero-intrigue.

But I am not most people, and Love Fights is probably the Watson book best suited for getting most comics-readers interested in his excellent work. So, if you like stories about superheroes, and think you might like reading about a penciller and a journalist finding each other against a backdrop of capes and fights, you should definitely pick this book up.

Book-A-Day 2018 #308: The Complete Geisha by Andi Watson

Andi Watson, I think, started off expecting to tell stories of action and adventure in comics, with a fantastic flair, but kept finding those stories turning more personal and character-focused as he told them. (I could say "more mundane," but that sounds like an insult. It isn't: life itself is mundane. But it sounds that way.)

That happened on a large scale with his first major series, Skeleton Key, which I re-read earlier this year. And it happened on a smaller canvas with Geisha, the four-issue series that he created in between the main run of Skeleton Key and the four-part "Roots" coda in 1999.

The Complete Geisha is the 2003 book that collects all of the Geisha work up to that point -- I think there might be some later short stories, but this could be it. It collects the main four-part story from the fall of 1998, a one-shot follow-up from 2000, and a few short related stories.

There's no geisha in the book -- at least, not any obvious one. Jomi Sohodo is an android raised in a human family -- this seems to be rare, if not unique -- who wants to be an artist, even though it's heavily hinted that her line was designed as sexbots. She doesn't want to work in the family bodyguard business, as her three human brothers do, but it's paying work, and she has a hard time selling her paintings, so she ends up, over the course of the original story, in the family business. And that leads to drama and complications, as the body she guards is a top model with an angry ex-manager/boyfriend and her new art patron is a nasty gangster.

I don't know if Watson expected to tell a story of androids in human society, or if the sexbot thing was ever supposed to pay off. But Jomi is the only android we see, in a society that I think is supposed to be full of them, and he seems less interested in the running around and bodyguarding than he is with Jomi's struggles to get into the art world and the compromises she has to do along the way.

The one-shot, two years later, is in Watson's softer mature style -- and I could mean both the art and the story. There's more shading in the art, rounder edges , and very little "action" in the usual comics sense. And it's about Jomi as a person, particularly her relationship with one brother starting a new band, rather than anything plottier.

So this is transitional Watson, starting from the story he thought he wanted to tell (or that he thought the market wanted, or someone told him to make for that market) towards more individual stories like Love Fights or Little Star. Transitions are quirky, individual things, and Geisha shows some of that in its shape, but it's still a good Watson comic about art and family and finding your place in the world.

Sunburn by Andi Watson and Simon Gane

Andi Watson is a criminally underrated maker of comics. He's done great work for almost three decades now, but I never see him included on the list of greats. Maybe it's because he never dabbled in the core Wednesday Crowd (is it still Wednesdays? I lose track, and the big day was Friday way back when I cared) comics - the closest he's ever come is Love Fights, a relationship story set in a superhero universe.

I don't know Simon Gane's work as well, but what I've seen has been impressive - lush, illustrative pages with style and energy and a clear viewpoint. His Paris, with Watson, is particularly impressive.

So I don't know how many people were eagerly awaiting their second collaboration, Sunburn, but I was definitely one of them. And the book does not disappoint.

It's another historical, like Paris. To my eye, it's set at the beginning of the '60s, but it could be slightly earlier - there are mostly '50s cars on the streets, but two-piece bathing suits are generally accepted. (The very first panel is a view of the main character's room, with a lot of little signifiers - James Dean, some group with guitars I'm not 100% sure of, a record player - to help immerse the reader. Watson and Gane work a lot like that: unobtrusively but clearly showing rather than telling.)

Rachel is sixteen, the only child of a suburban British couple. Her parents seem to be perfectly nice people, a little staid but loving and happy. She unexpectedly gets an invitation, from a business acquaintance of her father's, to spend the summer in Greece - and that's the story here, so she accepts.

Close readers will wonder at this to begin with: the connection is very thin, and the invitation is out of the blue: who is this couple, and why are they inviting a sixteen-year-old girl they really don't know along on vacation with them? Sunburn will explain this all, eventually.

But Rachel does not question her good fortune. She arrives quickly in sunny Greece - exact island and location left unspecified; this is a story about people and maybe the contrast between England and Greece, not about a specific place or historical time - and settles in with Diane and Peter, who are more stylish and young-appearing and sophisticated than she expected. They are friendly, they treat her like their daughter - or maybe a younger sister - and they introduce her to the life of this island, giving her fancy clothes to wear to the regular cocktail parties of their (seemingly quite affluent) set.

Among those introductions - well, central to those introductions - is a young man named Benjamin, whom Diane not-all-that-subtly puts together with Rachel. Again, a perceptive reader will start to think something is going on, and will learn more later.

Sunburn is the story of that place, that summer, and those four characters: Rachel at the center, her relationships with especially Diane and Ben, and Peter in a more distant orbit. I won't tell you what happens, or why Rachel was invited, but I will say this is a subtle story rather than a brash one, a story about people and relationships.

Watson and Gane tell that story quietly, through gesture and glances as much as anything else. The style is somewhat cinematic; Sunburn is the kind of graphic novel that could be adapted into film without too many changes. And they tell a deep, resonant, grounded story: I didn't see this until the new year, but it was clearly one of the best books of '22.

Little Star by Andi Watson

In the aughts, cartoonist Andi Watson had a string of really wonderful books, mostly from Oni Press --  Breakfast After Noon and Slow News Day and Dumped and Love Fights -- which culminated in this book: Little Star. I don't want to claim it's even better than the rest, but it's a grounded, real-world story about the lives people really live, told beautifully in words and pictures by a creator at the top of his game and (apparently) editorial freedom to tell a story far from the usual expectations of the comic-book world.

Simon is still pretty young, maybe just in his early thirties. He's happily married to Meg and has a lovely daughter Cassie. But just having a little girl deforms a life -- little kids need so much, so often, and are so demanding. Simon's working part-time at a job that isn't quite right for him -- but it's perfect for the family, right now. He wants to try out for a better job, one that will use more of his creative talents -- but that would mean full-time, and would smash their careful child-care structure. And even though Simon is the one caring for Cassie half of the time, she wants her mother more than him far too often -- and says so, in the blunt way only little kids can pull off.

I can't say every family goes through something like this -- some have it much worse, and some have enough money and privilege that hard choices never come into the picture. But it's the world of a lot of us do live in, and have lived in -- where what is best for you isn't what would be best for the family. Everyone has to make those decisions, and Simon makes them here.

Watson brings us into Simon's head, through visual metaphors and lovely stylized art, all angular faces and grey washes. We're there with him the whole time: a man who loves his family but feels stifled, feels unappreciated, feels like he can and should be doing more...if he can only figure which more is the right one.

Little Star is a gem of comics; it tells a story that could live in many media, but tells in a way that's intrinsically comics, and uses the strengths of this medium brilliantly. I keep hoping Watson can get back to doing this kind of book: he's so good at it, and surely the world needs comics for adults who aren't obsessed with characters in tights, right?

Incoming Books: July 22

These are all comics -- bought by mail from one of this nation's finer such sellers (and, as usual, packed to within an inch of their lives, because comics shops are hardcore about that shit), and mostly to replace books I had before the flood.

So these are pretty much all things I think worthy buying at least twice, which is a pretty good recommendation, I think.

(And they did arrive on Monday, but it took me until tonight to write about them, due to a big semi-off-site meeting at work Tuesday-Wednesday. Life is too damn busy, and it's too damn busy with the wrong things.)

It's Science with Dr. Radium, Vol. 3 by Scott Saavedra -- Saavedra doesn't seem to have done much cartooning over the past decade or so, or, at least, not things I've noticed. (Please tip me off if there's some great body of recent Saavedra stuff.) But his '80s and '90s work on Dr. Radium was inspired nuttiness, the kind of thing I'm surprised in retrospect didn't become a short-lived cartoon around about 1994. With this book, I've re-acquired the whole series, such as it is. It's not high art, but it is high fun, and mad science, and a lot of other wonderful things.

Paris by Andi Watson and Simon Gane -- see my review of it back in 2008. Rebuilding the Andi Watson shelf, even if this is pretty minor Watson.

The Legend of Grimjack, Vol. 1 by John Ostrander and Tim Truman -- here we see my comics OCD in full force; I do have most of the books in this series (re-acquired post-flood), but I have the later omnibus instead of volumes 1 & 2, and so I'm fixing that, so all of the books line up nicely in the shelf.

Flaming Carrot's Greatest Hits: Collected Album No. 3 by Bob Burden -- My sons have never read Flaming Carrot comics. Do you believe that? I have to fix this.

Thor Visionaries: Walt Simonson, Vol. 1 -- I lost the first three of these to the flood, and am re-acquiring. Again, I think both my boys will love these stories, so I can count this as a cultural enrichment process for my family.

Two Love & Rockets collections -- Heartbreak Soup and Amor Y Cohetes-- by Los Bros Hernandez, as I inch closer to getting the whole thing again for a massive re-read. (Not as big an inch as hoped, since my long-delayed and half-forgotten Fantagraphics order, which arrived last week, also had Heartbreak Soup in it. I'll have to figure out how to deal with that.)

And last is Skin Deep, a collection of Charles Burns's "Dog Boy" stories from the '80s. In this case, I didn't have a copy of this book before the flood, though I think I had all of the stories in other things (probably comic-shaped stapled collections of paper) that were drowned.

Glister by Andi Watson

The fields of Young Adult have been calling to comics-makers for the past decade or so: a seductive song of a market with a large, appreciative audience, a deep love for comics, a tropism for evergreen books rather than ephemeral pamphlets, and the chance to actually make some money telling stories pretty close to (or, sometimes, exactly like) the ones those cartoonists are already doing. All of that is hugely positive for a creative person, so it's easy to see why so many have fled the Wednesday Crowd for the Scholastic Book Fair Mob.

But it does mean those of us who aren't as plugged into the YA/kid-comics world often don't even see those works, which is a shame.

Luckily, sometimes comics-world publishers will realize this and repackage YA comics in a way that makes them pop up on our radar.

Case in point: Andi Watson's Glister, a series of four small books from Walker, clearly aimed at that Scholastic Book Fair audience (its bullseye would be smart, thoughtful girls in late elementary school, but those of us who fit the profile less well -- meaning not at all -- can enjoy them just as much) that came out in 2010 and 2011. Dark Horse collected those four books into one comics-shop-friendly trade paperback, called simply Glister, in July of this year. (I think it's actually more complicated than that: the first Glister book was a slightly reworked version of Watson's first Glister story, which came out as three small comics from Image in 2007. So everything goes around in circles if you wait long enough.)

Glister Butterworth is a smart young girl living with her father in the family's deeply eccentric ancestral hall, somewhere in the kind of rural England that only exists in books for young people. She's a magnet for the weird and peculiar, according to the blurb, but I'd say it's more that she lives in a world stuffed full with the weird and peculiar -- it's not attracted to her in particular, but is just lying about the countryside in vast heaps, ready to fall over and cause trouble at any moment.

Again, Glister collects four separate stories (plus activity pages and other sidebar stuff). Glister deals with a haunted teapot, the unexpected (and extended) absence of her family home on a world tour, the search for her mother in the land of Faerie, and her attempt to grow an extended family tree (this is both a metaphor and the absolute truth) to have more family members to spend time with. None of those things turn out as she expects, or as the reader entirely anticipates, but they do all turn out for the best, in the end. It's that kind of book: the one about how much fun it would be to grow up weird, somewhere unique with unusual things happening all around all the time.

If you were a bookish kid, you probably had at least one favorite book like that. And Glister will be that for at least several thousand newer readers, which is a good thing. And even if you're no longer a kid, as long as you remember that kid you once were, you can enjoy the stories of Glister Butterworth just as much now.

Read in February

As usual, here I'm listing the books I've read this past month. If all goes according to plan -- said every super-villain, the moment before it didn't -- this will post a moment into March and contain links to my posts about those books.

If not, well, blame those meddling do-gooders.

Craig Yoe, editor, Arf Forum (2/6)

Hugo Pratt, Corto Maltese: Celtic Tales (2/7)

Taiyo Matsumoto, Tekkon Kinkreet: Black & White (2/8)

Bobby London, Popeye, Vol. 1: 1986-1989 (2/9)

Neil Gaiman and various artists, Neil Gaiman's Midnight Days (2/14)

Neil Gaiman and others, The DC Universe by Neil Gaiman (2/15)

Andi Watson, Love Fights, Vol. 1 (2/21)

Andi Watson, Love Fights, Vol. 2 (2/22)

Grant Morrison, Chas Truog, and Doug Hazlewood, Animal Man, Vol. 1 (2/27)

Tom Devlin, editor, Drawn & Quarterly (2/27)

Grant Morrison, Chas Truog, and Doug Hazlewood, Animal Man, Vol. 2: Origin of the Species (2/28)


...as it happened, I was a few days late, because I forgot to update this during the week when the month actually ended. Oops. But here it is now.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/31

The mail was light this week, probably because all of trade publishing was obsessing about, preparing for, and traveling to BEA out in Los Angeles. (Except me -- that's the benefit of marketing a line of professional books; my bookbuyers aren't going to be concentrated at book-industry gatherings.)

Here's what did come in, all from the good folks at Random House:

Tigerheart by Peter David, a new retelling of the story of Peter Pan by a guy who's written a lot of stuff. I haven't been thrilled by recent reinterpretations of Barrie's creation -- the Dave Barry/Ridley Pearson books in particular seem to have completely lost sight of everything that made Peter Pan a specific character -- so I expect I'll have to read this to see if I can approve of it or not. Well, it looks like it's not all too long, and David is usually very readable -- though sometimes that shades over into glib and superficial. (We'll see.) Ballantine will publish Tigerheart on June 17.

The Essential Batman Encyclopedia is a new reference book by Robert Greenberger, a very nice guy who worked for me on a freelance basis for about ten seconds many years ago (before I really met him, I think). There may be two or three people in the world slightly more qualified to write this book than him, but Bob Kane is already dead. Given comics fans' mania for minutiae, I expect this will be a popular book, useful for solving arguments, or starting them. It's a Del Rey book, coming as a gigantic oversized paperback on June 20th.

Out of Picture Volume 2: Art from the Outside Looking In has no credited editor; it says it's by the "Out of Picture Artists," which is like measuring a piece of string by saying it's just as long as itself. It's the "sequel" to last year's Out of Picture, and, like the first book, it collects short comics stories by animators, storyboard artists, and other artsy people who are now or were once associated with Blue Sky Studios (home of the Ice Age movies, among other things). It will be published on June 3rd.

Since that list is so short, here's what I grabbed on my most recent trip to the comics shop:

Princess At Midnight is a very short book by Andi Watson, which I'd entirely missed before. (I don't remember it at all, though I suppose I must have seen it in Previews at some point.) It's from Image, copyright 2008, and is about a schoolgirl who's a princess by night, battling the Horrible Horde. It's clearly meant for much younger people than myself (and probably those with a somewhat different anatomical configuration), but Andi Watson's work is always fun.

Grendel: Devil Quest by Matt Wagner was the first of two Grendel-related books I picked up this week, both of them slim hardcovers reprinting short tales that fill in little chinks of Wagner's convoluted future history. This one is set at the very end of the Grendel timeline, about the search for the cyborg Grendel-Prime hundreds of years after War Child, and it ties into the Grendel-Prime story of Batman Grendel. (That will be enough to get all of the continuity addicts salivating.) This was published by Dark Horse in May.

And then there's Grendel: Devil Child by Diana Schutz, Tim Sale & Teddy Kristiansen, which is the second of the two Grendel small hardcovers. It's the story of Stacy Palumbo, who was Grendel's daughter and mother -- and it's full of happiness, gumdrops, and lollipops! (No, sorry -- it's a Grendel story, so everyone is miserable and evil and dies horribly in the end. I'm glad Wagner does other kinds of books; we'd all really wonder about him if his only work were the gloom of Grendel.) This one came out at the very end of April.

Hellboy Vol. 8: Darkness Calls by Mike Mignola and Duncan Fegredo was shot out into stores ahead of the movie (as was the eighth B.P.R.D. collection; the folks at Dark Horse are no fools). It's the first major Hellboy story not illustrated by creator Mignola, who probably was too busy with that aforementioned movie over the past year or two.

And I also picked up some stuff at the library this week; mostly comics-related books that I'd put on hold:

The Best of the Spirit by Will Eisner was published by DC in November of 2005. It has an introduction/appreciation by Neil Gaiman, and no sign of who actually selected these stories. (I guess Eisner himself probably had a hand in it, since he was around at the time, but saying so would have been nice.) I've only read one or two Spirit stories, so I figured it was time to dive in (and this is much easier to dive into than the giant, expensive Archive Editions).

Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea by Guy Delisle is the story of one animator's two-month stay in the capital of North Korea, the world's most isolated country. (He was overseeing production of a French TV show there.) Drawn & Quarterly published it in September of 2005.

And last was Popeye Vol. 1: "I Yam What I Yam", the first book reprinting the E.C. Segar "Thimble Theatre" comic strip (from the story in which Popeye appeared, because even in this age of massive strip-cartoon reprinting, nobody wants to read the adventures of Castor Oyl). Fantagraphics published this in November of 2006.