Ascender, Vol. 1: The Haunted Galaxy by Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen

So I was, to put it mildly, not happy with the way Descender ended. I knew that there was a sequel to that series -- this is it, Ascender -- but I figured I would not be coming back after writer Jeff Lemire set up a Backswing Fantasy larger than any seen previously. (Larger both in the backswinginess and the fantasy: this is full-bore dragon-starship goofiness here.)

But the local library had a copy of Ascender, Vol. 1: The Haunted Galaxy, and that last Descender volume was literally the only time I'd read a Jeff Lemire comic and not really enjoyed it, so I thought I should give it a chance.

I tend to suspect the Descender/Ascender transition was the plan all along, since Ascender is not so much a thematic riff on Descender, or another story set in the "same" (vastly changed) universe, but a flat-out pure sequel. The main character of Ascender is Mila, the roughly nine-year-old daughter of Andy and Effie from Descender, and the main action of this volume is Andy and Mila running away from danger to get to another character we recognize from the previous volumes.

That is to say: you could start here, but starting here is not the point, and not the expectation. This is for people who read Descender. (And that makes me think, with my old fantasy-editor hat on, that this will want to be a trilogy eventually -- what would that make the merged science/fantasy galaxy's story? Leveler?)

You may have also noticed that Bandit, the robot dog, is on the cover along with Mila, so mentioning it shouldn't be a spoiler. His arrival sets in motion the plot, which so far is running on the same kind of rails as Descender, with two cases of "that person has got to be dead" already showed prominently, one immediately subverted and the other obviously going in a very specific direction. It's all a bit lazy and obvious, I'm sorry to say.

In related news, the Big Bad is a vampire queen named Mother - I guess it's positive that she's of the old and morbidly fat style of evil vampires, not the slim and seductive type? - who is the latest in a centuries-long series of vampire queens who apparently immigrated in from some other universe between the end of Descender and this book. (Seriously, there's nowhere in the universe shown in Descender they could have been. I'll buy "the universe flipped to magic, and now we have vampires!" but not "oh, and they're centuries old, because they were actually <indistinct mumbling, trails off>.") She is casually cruel to her underlings and rules the galaxy with a bloated fist, because of course she does, and she somehow did all this in less than a decade.

There are Rebels, because any Star Wars-inspired story worth its salt has to have them, and they are obviously the good guys. Mila will join them, eventually, but probably not until book three - my guess is that she meets them in passing in book two, maybe with her keepers at the time getting into a violent disagreement with the Rebels, and then that has to be papered over later. The Rebels have a secret Sorcerer leader, whom the evil vampire queen is of course insane to find and kill, but said sorcerer does not seem to be actually good enough at the sorcery thing to make the Rebels any kind of match for the Forces of Evil.

(Oh, and the sorcerer is almost certainly a robot. My money is on Tim-21, but it's definitely not going to be a new character. I expect his big reveal will be at the end of one of the volumes: maybe two, more likely three.)

Ascender looks wonderful, moves quickly, and is full of action, adventure, and vigor. It's also hugely derivative and barely exists as a thing of its own, being a Descender remix by DJ Star Wars using beats from several hundred years of generic horror. I may read more of it, if I can keep getting it from the library, but I'll be damned if I'll spend money on this.

Ascender, Vol. 3: The Digital Mage by Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen

The formula is still strong with this one, but I guess that's OK: it's an old formula, but one that a lot of people like and that still has some juice to it. Just because I can see every plot development coming a parsec away isn't necessarily a reason to say it's bad, I guess.

But seeing plot developments coming that far away does give a reader a lot of time to scrutinize them as they approach, and Ascender does not have enough story detail to give a lot of depth to reward such scrutiny. So, as before, my advice is to read the Ascender books as quickly as possible and try not to let any extraneous thinking enter your brain during the process. The more you can concentrate on Dustin Nguyen's lovely painted art, the better.

Here in Ascender, Vol. 3: The Digital Mage, writer Jeff Lemire has exactly the big reveal that I expected when I wrote about the first volume, at exactly the moment I thought. I'm not claiming any particular prescience; a monkey with bifocals could have seen it coming, and it's on the frigging cover of this book, too. The the surviving cast of Descender continues to gather for the eventual big showdown with Mother and the Vampires Who Were Always There But No One Knew They Were Because It Used to Be a Science Universe And Now It's a Magic Universe, Look Just Trust Us On This, Okay?

Speaking of the vampires, a character in the first issue collected here bluntly states the vampires were "underground" for "eons" in this volume - yeah, sure, just keep saying that and maybe it will make sense. Frankly, "the rules of the world changed and now there have always been vampires" would have been more elegant and a better fit for a magical universe to begin with: magic is about transformation and paradox. But no one asked me.

The party is still split for this volume, with Mila and Telsa zipping across space, Andy and {SPOILER} trying to survive on Sampson, and our two vampire Mothers (old fat previous model and her sister the slim gorgeous redhead current titleholder) wandering around plotting and scheming, mostly against each other. They will all come together for the big fight, obviously.

By the way, time for another obvious prediction: the ending of Ascender will feature a sudden but inevitable betrayal by old Mother of new Mother, which will save the day for Our Heroes. I'm mostly sure it will be purely out of spite and hatred, but old Mother might also have a moment of "Oh, gosh, The Source of All Magic is so Wicked Kewl I cannot let my evil sister get it."

Anyway, it's all zippy and exciting. There's very little time for real character work, so it's a good thing we're nine volumes in and everyone is pretty well established. (Sucks for Mila, who gets to be "spunky kid with Secret Powers," and no space for anything else, but them's are the breaks.)

I still cannot take this seriously in any way, in any universe with laws based on magic or science. I see a fourth volume will be published in October: if my library system gets it, or if a copy mysteriously has been "underground" for "eons" near me and spontaneously erupts, I expect I will read it. But probably not otherwise.

Ascender, Vol. 2: The Dead Sea by Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen

It doesn't count, since this book came out a year ago and I could easily have heard some facts about it and forgotten. But the two random predictions I made about this book both came true: the two "you think they're dead!" characters at the end of Vol. 1 were totally not dead, and even meet in this book. And the "Dead Sea" of the title is deeply literal.

I quote myself: "the deadness of the sea will definitely turn out to be vampires, or zombies, or something similar."

Werewhales.

I don't think it's meant to be a joke, but I chuckled.

One last point: I also gave the first book partial credit for, well, "the Big Bad is a vampire queen named Mother - I guess it's positive that she's of the old and morbidly fat style of evil vampires, not the slim and seductive type?"

I regret to inform you that "the slim and seductive type" of evil vampire does make an appearance here, as I must have subconsciously known she would. And she does pretty much exactly what one would expect.

So this is Ascender, Vol. 2: The Dead Sea, written by Jeff Lemire and drawn by Dustin Nguyen, the same creative team as the first volume and the preceding series, Descender. I thought Descender had serious ending problems, but was a relatively sturdy post-Star Wars space opera with some actual ideas and character development in it. Ascender, on the other hand, is a silly guilty pleasure.

Lemire is good at running adventure characters through travails and throwing in all of the generic plot furniture a story like this could need. Nguyen is game enough to draw it all, including werewhales that actually look creepy, and crafts strong action sequences. But I can't take more than one page of this seriously at a time, and often not even that much.

I don't know how long this series will run. It's so silly and kitchen-sinky that I can't imagine it can go that far, but on the other hand I bet Lemire wants to explore as much of this transformed universe as he can. (And the heroes haven't even gotten off their first planet yet.) Four volumes, maybe? Or six to be just as long as the first series? We'll see.

For me, the library has the third volume, and I want to see if it continues to be exactly this obvious and generically crowd-pleasing, and if the robots from Descender actually do ever show up and/or do anything. (Bandit, the robot dog, barely counts at this point: he's there and makes noise, but nothing else.) I don't recommend this series unless your criteria for reading are vastly different from mine, though.

Descender, Vol. 6: The Machine War by Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen

I don't think I can avoid spoiling this book entirely, so leave now if you care. Know that I am very much not recommending it.

The Machine War collects the end of  the space opera comics series Descender: the big finale in which several space fleets and a scattering of giant anthropomorphic robots meet, the main characters yell and run around for a couple of hundred pages, and it all gets tied up in a bow. (For the story of how we got here, see my posts on volumes one, two, three, four, and five.)

And, on a single two-page spread at almost the very end, creators Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen blithely list the deaths of twenty billion sentient beings. In context, it seems to be primarily to clean things up so they can do a different story for the follow-up, Ascender.

But fuck that.

You do not make a story that just includes the deaths of billions of people as an afterthought. ("So I survived, which is nice, but everybody else died -- sucks for them.") There is nothing in your story that could be more important than those deaths; you've framed your story horribly from the beginning and focused on the entirely wrong thing. This is not a background detail. It is not a sad moment. It is not a failure on the part of our heroes. This mega-death is the most important moment in the entire history of this civilization, the moment of the end of that civilization: the only way to tell that story, especially in a popular-fiction context where the expectation is that the heroes will save the world at the last minute, is to announce it from the start.

You don't get to fucking back into a tragedy after six hundred pages and say, "Oh, well. It's so, so sad. Come back next month for the thrilling adventures of a girl in a eerily depopulated universe of magic!"

Descender was a strong story up to this point, with good characters and interesting moral dilemmas and thorny conflicts and striking art from Nguyen. But this is bullshit, and it does not work at all.

I may have been the person who coined the phrase "Backswing Fantasy," [1] about post-apocalyptic stories where the authors kill off the vast majority of humanity so that the mightily-thewed hero will have a little more room for the backswing of his sword, so that his struggles are more meaningful.

I hate those fucking stories. I waste a lot of energy hating those fucking stories. This turned into one of those fucking stories at the last minute. Again: fuck that. Fuck all of that right down to the ground.

You can kill all of your characters: that's not a problem. You can even blow up all of the military ships they're on (OK, I did have some good friends on that Death Star), and it'll only be a minor reader quibble. But when you oops! an entire civilization as a thrilling plot twist five pages from the end and have your protagonist survive but be very, very sad... Fuck. That.

[1] It was more likely James Nicoll, though. He's both more quotable and more prolific.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/7/21

It's a good-sized list this week: one book I bought and a bunch from the library, since my stock of books-to-read-quickly is at low ebb, and my life isn't such as to give it the flood it had in Elder Days. (Not complaining: I still have more books than I can read, and getting more is not in any way difficult. The problem, as always, is choice.)

The book I bought is Afterthoughts, Version 2.0, an updated and revised collection of new introductions and afterwords to his old books by Lawrence Block. I say "new," but the first edition is a decade old, so much of the material is at least that "new," which may seem less than "new" to some readers. But when Block is writing about books from 1958 or 1963, even 2010 is pretty new. I read the first edition nearly a decade ago, soon after it was published, and wanted to see what was different this time. (Also: the cover of the real book has covers of actual Block books on those stacks of generic books you see on this preliminary cover image, so he either learned Photoshop himself or paid someone who's pretty good at it.)

Everything else, from this point down, is from the library, so I'll only say that once. OK, maybe twice: these are from the mighty Emmanuel Einstein Library of Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, though all of them originated from other nearby towns (Passaic! Verona! Woodland Park! Wayne!)

The Midwinter Witch is the third book in the series by Molly Knox Ostertag that began with The Witch Boy. I may have thought it was the second one, since I don't think I've read the actual #2, The Hidden Witch. I'm going to write about this book in about twenty minutes, since I read it yesterday, so I'll leave it at that here. See my post on the first book for more details.

PTSD is a graphic novel by Guillaume Singelin, from the small list of books for adults from First Second. (They publish a lot more for younger readers of various ages, and I've generally found all of their books are strong.) I know I've seen good reviews of it, but that was probably two years ago when it was published in English, so I don't recall exactly where at this point. It is some manner of post-apocalyptic SF in comics form, by a creator I don't think I've ever read.

I'm not sure if I should read Minecraft: Wither Without You, Vol. 2 by Kristen Gudsnuk. I got it because I've liked all of Gudsnuk's books I've seen so far, and know enough about Minecraft (not much, but I did play it very briefly in the very early days) to be willing to see what she does here. I also vaguely thought that the first Wither Without You either was not by Gudsnuk or was not available in my library system...but neither of those things are true.

The problem is that Wither One is not available for hold, and there's only one copy in the system. So I'd have to drive to the library in West Milford (and I have no idea where that is, though I could obviously find out easily), during a time when it is open, find that book on the shelf (assuming no one else has done so in the meantime), and get it that way. I don't think I have the time for any of that in my life currently, so I might just read this one and see how much sense it makes.

Ascender, Vol. 3: The Digital Mage continues the series by Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen that I have been making mild fun of the last few months. The series as a whole is also a sequel to their earlier Descender. And this one looks just as gorgeous and silly as the first two.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 10: Life Is Too Short, Squirrel is another one of the books collecting that popular and now-ended series. This one was written by longtime series mainstay Ryan North, drawn by then-new artist Derek Charm (with one issue by Naomi Franquiz), and colored by Rico Renzi, also a long-timer. The first issue here is the obligatory Death of Squirrel Girl! fake-out, which every superhero must do roughly once a decade. (Both Marvel and DC have big charts on prominent walls in their offices, I am morally sure, to keep track of who is dead at the moment and who is in which costume. Or maybe it's a private app, these days.) I've read the series up to this point, and it looks like I'm going to finish it up.

And last is Sherlock Frankenstein and the Legion of Evil, which the "read this next" page insists is the third collection of the Black Hammer series written by Jeff Lemire. (I am more than a little dubious, as you may guess, but this is certainly in the same universe. And I'm willing to believe this story doesn't so much move forward as proliferate.) This one is drawn by David Rubin, who also did one issue in the second collection of the main Black Hammer series. I expect I will find this much less impressive than the longjohns fans do, but the library still has another couple Black Hammer-verse books, so I'm hoping it will be good enough that I can keep reading and actually get the end of the story Lemire started in the main series. (This assumes there is an end to that story, which may be an unwarranted assumption, given it's a superhero comic.)

Books Read: June 2021

I could pretend that I waited a week-plus to type & post this because I wanted the last of the books I read in June to have their posts published, so I could do this all in a neat and tidy fashion. But the last post on a June-read book won't publish until the 22nd, so that would be a lie.

No, I just forgot that I usually do this. But I remembered now, and so I'm doing it now. And it's almost entirely for me, anyway. But here's what I read in June of 2021, the month where I passed the full-year total for 2020:

Kristen Gudsnuk, Making Friends: Back to the Drawing Board (6/5)

Jeff Lemire, Dean Omston, and Dave Stewart, Black Hammer, Vol. 1: Secret Origins (6/6)

Matthew Hughes, Barbarians of the Beyond (6/11)

Mademoiselle Caroline and Julie Dachez, Invisible Differences (6/12)

Rick Geary, Stories from the '90s (6/13)

Sara Barron, People Are Unappealing: Even Me (6/13)

Charles M. Schulz, The Complete Peanuts, 1955-1956 (6/13)

Borja Gonzalez, A Gift for a Ghost (6/19)

Lawrence Block, A Writer Prepares (6/19)

Jeff Lemire and Dunstin Nguyen, Ascender, Vol. 2: The Dead Sea (6/20)

Matt Kindt, Matt Smith, and Chris O'Halloran, Folklords (6/25)

Jeff Lemire, Dean Omston, David Rubin, and Dave Stewart, Black Hammer, Vol. 2: The Event (6/26)

Lawrence Block, The Burglar in Short Order (6/26)

Donald E. Westlake, Comfort Station (6/26)

Ryan North, Derek Charm, and Rico Renzi, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 9: Squirrels Fall Like Dominos (6/27)

One last note: I actually read three prose books digitally this month, and started a fourth. That, I think, is more than all of the prose books I've read in digital form in all of my previous life put together. So my adjustments to my reading life seem to be working.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 6/19/21

This week I have seven books from the library that I'd reserved knowing I was taking time around the 4th of July holiday and would have more physical-book-reading time than usual. (We'll see if this is what I end up reading on those days.) This is what I got:

A Gift for a Ghost by Borja Gonzalez -- this is a graphic novel from a Spanish creator that came out last year. It got some good reviews, it's one of those two-intertwined-stories-in-different-time-period things, and my library had it: that's about the sum total of my knowledge.

Folklords is, I think, a full story - at least, I'm not seeing a "volume one" on it anywhere - that collects a five-issue series written by Matt Kindt with art by Matt Smith and Chris O'Halloran. And it seems to be about a kid in a suit in a fantasy world, and where he really fits in. That looks quirky, and I generally like quirky.

Ascender, Vol. 2 - as I said when I wrote about the first one, I think I'll keep reading these as long as I can get them free at the library; this one and the next are currently available. The series is written by Jeff Lemire and drawn by Dustin Nguyen, and this one is subtitled "The Dead Sea." Given how non-subtle the series is turning out to be, the deadness of the sea will definitely turn out to be vampires, or zombies, or something similar.

Black Hammer, Vol. 2: The Event is the second collection of the collection about the superhero team written by Jeff Lemire, drawn by Dean Ormston, and colored by Dave Stewart. (This time, it looks like some of the art is by David Rubin; I'm not sure if he does some of the pages or works with Ormston.) I've already read the first book and written up a post, but it hasn't quite gone live as I type this, so I can't link to it. In short: this is a well-written but vastly more conventional (DC-style) superhero series than I expected, so I find the gushing praise from the usual nerd-lebrities a little much. But I'll keep reading it, since apparently we can never get away from superheroes no matter how much we try.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 9: Squirrels Fall Like Dominos - this the the transition book, the point where co-creator Erica Henderson stepped down and a new artist took over. So this volume has a team of writer Ryan North, new artist Derek Charm, and continuing colorist Rico Renzi. And it looks like the story is pretty much the same thing as before.

Cave Carson Has an Interstellar Eye - pretty clearly, this was the follow-up to Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye, part of the hip "Young Animal" line at DC a few years back that was pretty transparently an attempt to re-do Vertigo all at once without Karen Berger but with a minor rock star. (Narrator: it did not work as they hoped.) I read Cybernetic earlier this year, and saw my library had the follow-up too, so I figured, what the heck? This is once again by Jon Rivera, Michael Avon Oeming, and Nick Filardi, without the minor rock star even getting a "kibitzing" credit the way he did the first time.

And last is The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, Vol. One, the American collection of the stories Don Rosa created almost thirty years ago for the vast Disney comics universe worldwide. I'd thought this was the whole thing, but I see by looking for closely that this book only has the first half, and none of the libraries around here have seen fit to get the second book. I don't think that will matter much, but it's what I've got.

Books Read: May 2021

This is what I read in the merry month of May:

Greg Rucka and various artists, Elektra by Greg Rucka Ultimate Collection (5/1)

Eric Reynolds, editor, Love and Rockets: The Covers (5/7)

Charles M. Schulz, The Complete Peanuts, 1950-1952 (5/7)

Martha Wells, Fugitive Telemetry (5/7)

Ted Rall, editor, Attitude 3: The New Subversive Online Cartoonists (5/9)

Adam Huber, Born a Doofus (5/15)

Charles M. Schulz, The Complete Peanuts, 1953-1954 (5/21)

Adrian Tomine, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist (5/22)

Catherynne M. Valente, Space Opera (5/22)

Hope Larson, All Together Now (5/23)

Sophie Yanow, The Contradictions (5/28)

Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen, Ascender, Vol. 1: The Haunted Galaxy (5/29)

Yoshiharu Tsuge, The Man Without Talent (5/30)

Derf Backderf, Kent State (5/31)

Jincy Willett, Winner of the National Book Award (5/31)

Links for the last few will follow - I still have to write about Kent State and Winner; that's on the docket for today - and next month will, I hope, see a similar list.

Fishflies by Jeff Lemire

It still surprises me when I lose track of a "favorite" creator's work - in my head, I'm still the guy who spent sixteen years diligently tracking every last thing being published in my areas of concern, so that feels impossible to me. But I haven't tracked like that for two decades now, and I don't even see the trade publications I used to use as initial sources. Even if I wanted to, both PREVIEWS and Publishers Weekly are gone or vastly diminished from what they were when I relied on them.

But when I recently read 10,000 Ink Stains, Jeff Lemire's recent memoir of his career in comics, some of those old habits came back - I took notes. (I keep a small google doc with mostly series I want to keep reading in the library app - keeping them more-or-less in the same order, so I rotate through and remember to keep going with the ones I want to continue with. On the other side, I just removed my entry for Asterix as I was updating it based on reading this book.) So I now have a list of things I missed by Jeff Lemire.

Some of them are his Big Two superhero work - those have question marks after them, and I'm not sure if or when I'll get to them. But I also missed some of his more "indy" work, which I've consistently (well, mostly, with a big asterisk for Ascender/Descender, where the worldbuilding triggered a strong reaction) enjoyed - so I have a list of those books, and plan to get to them in '26.

First, though, he had a major series recently that I missed - seven issues of sixty-ish pages each, collected as a single book this past March. Written and drawn by Lemire, with one flashback section drawn by Sean Kuruneru. That was Fishflies, another story of rural Ontario and the hardscrabble lives of the damaged people who live there, like a lot of his solo work going back all the way to Essex County.

Fishflies is the story of two people - that's them on the cover. She's Francis "Franny" Fox, an elementary-schooler in Belle River, a small town in Southern Ontario, near the water. He's Lee Simard, a minor criminal, probably in his late twenties, who held up the Belle River Mini-Mart one night, shot a kid coming there to buy popsicles, and then...something happened to him.

It's the height of summer, the few weeks around a full moon when the local mayflies - called fishflies here, because they come from the water and smell like fish - swarm over everything. Some of you may have similar insect infestations where you live: I've seen cicadas here in New Jersey and "love bugs" down in Florida. This is a big, annoying, unpleasant one - the fishflies gather in huge masses for a few days, and then die. They don't bite or sting; they're purely a nuisance - the worst thing is their vast number and the unpleasant crunch underfoot.

There's a supernatural element to this book, which isn't explained until much later. 

Lee flees the botched robbery and his shooting of the kid, Paul Dupuis. He seems to be shot himself, in exactly the same place as the kid. He's also tormented by the fishflies, which seem to be biting him. He runs through the fields, and ends up on the farm where Franny lives with her sour, abusive father. She takes him in, making him a place to stay in an unused silo. She knows he "did something bad," but insists God can forgive him if he changes.

And he does change - but not the way she means. See that thing on the cover? That's Bug, which Simard transforms into by the next day. He can't talk, but is strong and can jump really far. Franny still wants him to be her friend. She still wants to protect him, and vice versa.

Meanwhile, the local head of police Danny Laraque is looking for Simard. We also follow Dupuis's mother Helen, first watching over her comatose son in the hospital. And there's an old couple, brother and sister, who have seen "bugs" like Simard emerge before - and devoted their lives to killing those bugs.

Franny and Bug flee - and the police realize that she's missing and think Simard has kidnapped her. Things escalate. We learn the secret of the supernatural element: why Simard became a bug, and how it's happened before. All of those characters circle the story, and circles always lead back to where they began.

Fishflies is somewhat horror-tinged and somewhat crime-story-plotted, but it's still very much in the mainstream of Lemire's solo work: damaged people, in poor circumstances, in small Ontario towns, in stories that are, to quote myself, "literary explorations of death and regret and loss." His scratchy art is perfect for those kind of stories, those hardscrabble people, and it works really well for a giant anthropomorphic bug, too. Lemire gives this story the page-space it needs to breathe, including sidebars about fishflies from secondary characters in this town at the end of most of the original issues. It's creepy and sad and dark, but does give a glimmer of hope for some people, especially Franny - who needs it most.

Books Read: August 2021

I'm actually writing this early the morning of the 1st, since I'm on vacation this week and I try to write two blog posts early in the morning on days I'm not working. (And I only finished reading one book yesterday.) So this is as fresh as it could possibly be, for all that I'm setting it to post four days later.

(I don't know why I bother to type things like that, unless it's just to have some kind of introduction here. Even looking back, months or years later, I doubt I'd care.)

Anyway, here's what I read this past month:

Richard Sala, Phantoms in the Attic (digital, 8/1)

Richard Thompson, Beeswing (digital, 8/5)

Molly Knox Ostertag, The Midwinter Witch (8/7)

Jeff Lemire and David Rubin, Sherlock Frankenstein and the Legion of Evil (8/8)

Ryan North, Derek Charm, Naomi Franquiz, and Rico Renzi, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 10: Life Is Too Short, Squirrel (8/14)

Guillaume Singelin, PTSD (8/15)

Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen, Ascender, Vol. 3: The Digital Mage (8/20)

Mitch Moxley, Apologies to My Censor (8/21)

Kristen Gudsnuk, Minecraft: Wither Without You, Vol. 1 (digital, 8/21)

Kristen Gudsnuk, Minecraft: Wither Without You, Vol. 2 (8/21)

Jeff Lemire and Max Fuimara, Doctor Andromeda and the Kingdom of Lost Tomorrows (digital, 8/22)

Herge, The Adventures of Tintin, Vol. 6 (8/28)

Kat Leyh, Thirsty Mermaids (8/29)

Nate Powell, Save It For Later (8/30)

Isabel Greenberg, Glass Town (8/31)

No links yet: my current reading regime is now at a point where I'm setting new posts about five weeks in the future. I may need to adjust things slightly....

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/22/21

Have I mentioned how annoying Blogger's current interface is? There are no keyboard shortcuts for labels or publication time - arrows, tabs, whatever; none of it does anything, so you have to click your mouse like a monkey - and it inserts a space at the beginning of every single post for no damn good reason.

It is horrible, and I suspect it's to do with responsive design somehow: Blogger provides a horrible experience on desktop for a text-based long-form content-creation platform so that it can also provide an inevitably horrible, in different ways, experience on mobile. This is me shaking my fist at the clouds, and insisting that tools should be designed to do specific things in specific ways, not to be loose collections of stuff that works everywhere, sort-of, maybe, kind of.

Anyway, I have some new books this week. I actually have more than this already, but I'm rationing so I have stuff to write about next week and to keep from spending too much time in a basement on a sunny Saturday morning. So I will tell you about one book I bought and six more that came from the library.

The book I bought is Stories from the '90s by Rick Geary, which explains itself very well in its title. It contains stories by Rick Geary, which were written and drawn and published in the 1990s. There's no table of contents, but the credits at the end list twenty-seven issues or publications, so I'm going to guess it has at least twenty-seven stories in its hundred-and-twenty pages. Geary is a fun, quirky comics creator, and his short stuff has always been his quirkiest. This is the period when I think he transitioned from doing a lot of short strips for various outlets (in this case: Heavy Metal, Dark Horse's Cheval Noir anthology series, Dark Horse Presents, a few Geary one-shots and odder places) into doing the book-length explorations of historical murders, which I have to assume paid better and was more dependable. So there may never be a similar book for the Aughts - even if so, this one exists, which is great. The only way to get it is right from Geary himself; he published it and sells it in his webstore. He's been Kickstarting books for about a decade now, and the package is entirely professional  - my only quibble is that the spine has no words on it.

And the rest are books from the library:

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist is a major memoir from Adrian Tomine, who previously mostly told stories about people like him. (Though I should mention Scenes from an Impending Marriage from a decade ago, which was an expanded version of the comics-format favor from Tomine's own wedding.) I think Tomine himself is as conflicted and confused by his life as his characters are about theirs, so I'm not expecting vast changes in style - though the tone looks to be more conversational and the style more personal.

All Together Now is a YA graphic novel by Hope Larson and the sequel to All Summer Long; it came out last year and I realized it existed while poking through some library lists recently. The first one, as I recall, was very clearly not about romance - thirteen-year-old Bina wasn't interested, wasn't ready, and had better things to do - but this one looks to be set during the school year and to see that romantic world affect Bina, whether she wants it to or not. (I'll have to see whether she wants it to when I read it.)

The Man Without Talent is a single-volume manga by Yoshiharu Tsuge, originally published around forty years ago. It's on the literary side - this edition is published by New York Review Comics - and it looks like Tsuge basically stopped making comics soon after this one. I've heard about this for a while, and it sounds like my kind of thing, so a library copy is exactly perfect.

The Contradictions is a graphic novel by Sophie Yanow, about a young American woman in Europe, ostensibly to study but really looking for herself - for the person she wants to be, was meant to be, wants to become, yearns to turn into. I believe it's already won an Eisner award, so I'm expecting something good.

Ascender, Vol. 1 begins a new series by Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen which some people, having seen my post on Descender, Vol. 6 a couple of months ago, will be surprised to see me read. Well, I do have to admit I have the usual human moth/flame attraction, and that I am not above hate-reading something if it turns out that way. To be more positive about it: I've liked literally every other thing I've read that Lemire wrote, and Nguyen is a talented artist. I'm willing to give them another chance after the "let me just murder 99.9% of all sentients in this universe, just to do a fun different story next!" bullshit ending of Descender. One chance.

And last is Derf Backderf's doorstop Kent State, a major non-fictional comics look at the famous massacre. This book has had lousy luck: it was scheduled to come out on the fiftieth anniversary, which was May 4 of last year, and a certain health crisis meant the book was delayed and the publicity tour was (as far as I can tell) entirely cancelled. I hope it's still doing well; Backderf has matured from an interesting alt-cartoonist (The City, which ran in alt-weeklies for a long time) to a solid graphic novelist with an engagingly lumpy drawing style and a working-man viewpoint rare in comics.