The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Glorious Summers, Vol.2: The Calanque by Zidrou and Jordi Lafebre

2026-06-18T08:30:00.158-04:00

As Spring in my area has been chilly and damp, and I had an official company-wide Mental Health day, I indulged myself with a nostalgic book about a long, wonderful summer vacation - warm and relaxing and seemingly endless. (All of of those aspects were a nice contrast.)

Glorious Summers is a six-book series by writer Zidrou (Belgian) and artist Jordi Lafebre (Spanish), originally published fairly quickly in French during the teens. The first five books were translated into English - this one by Lara Vergnaud - soon afterward, but they're all from Europe Comics, which is more of a proof-of-concept than a major publisher, so you can only find them digitally.

Each one, I think, is about one year - one long summer vacation in the life of the Belgian Faldérault family. The first book was set in 1973, and had a light frame story in the modern day. This second one, The Calanque, is set in 1969 and wastes no time in other frames.

I have two thoughts before I dive into how wonderful and lovely this book is - and it is wonderful and lovely, the best kind of nostalgia.

First is informative: a calanque is what you call a fjord in French, or maybe what looks something like a fjord when it's on France's Mediterranean coast. It's a narrow, steep-walled inlet of the sea - you've probably seen them, looking untouched and beautiful, in a dozen comics and movies and other visual media, without knowing it had a French name. (I did.)

Second is more ruminative, or predictive. Each book is about one year, and they might cluster in this time-frame. Pierre and Maddie Faldérault were young in 1973, and they're four years younger here - with three children under the age of about seven and a fourth on the way. I think that's the premise of the series: this era in their lives. But I'm hoping for something to break the mold, later on. Maybe a book set in 1962 or 3, with Maddie pregnant with their first child or the two of them trying to get away with a new baby. Maybe a book set in 1982, with the older girls coming back from university or école, maybe jetting in to join the rest. I'd like to see nostalgia for other phases of life: the thing about kids is that they're always changing, and when you look back, you realize every year is a completely different era. I don't know if the series went that way, but I can hope.

In this book, BD artist Pierre is working full-out to finish his latest assignment so his family can go on vacation - just as we saw in the first book, running over their supposed departure date by three days. He's delivering the first installment of a new series he created, Four, about a four-armed sheriff in the American West. (Westerns were popular in Eurocomics, then and to some degree even now.)

He does finish; they do set off. And, in what I think is characteristic of this family, they don't have a specific destination in mind. They're going to camp anyway, so they don't need hotel reservations, and they're going to be gone for a month or two, so they're in no hurry. [1] The point is to go south - toward the Mediterranean, into the sunshine, down into France - for this family, to go to the land of summer.

The first night, they find a place to camp after dark - and it turns out to be the front yard of an older French couple. Luckily, they're happy to see a boisterous Belgian family camping on their lawn, and give the Faldéraults both a place to stay for a day (feeding them very well) and a tip on a place to spend the rest of the summer: a cabin in a calanque, on the sunny southern coast.

The rest of the book is set in that calanque, as they snorkel and fish and sunbathe and loaf and sing random songs and reenact the moon landing they just saw on TV. The brother of "Old Man Rufus" - half of the friendly French couple - lives nearby and also befriends the family, taking them to the local town in his boat for supplies.

Zidrou shows a real knack in this series for the small rhythms of life, of the running jokes a family creates and the quirks individual kids have at particular times in their lives. The Faldéraults are specific and quirky - maybe a bit weird, which the French always attribute to their being Belgian. They enjoy life, and are getting the most out of this vacation: memories to hold onto for the next long year and cold winter.

And Lafebre's art continues to be a delight, with expressive animation-inspired character design and poses on cleanly laid-out pages mostly drenched in that French sunlight. Glorious Summers is a series that makes you wish you grew up somewhere in driving distance of France in summer, and had two months a year to enjoy it.

[1] I don't know if the camping thing is a generational marker. In a US context, it might be - my own grandparents, both schoolteachers, headed off into the woods every summer for much of the summer for decades (the late '40s through at least the early '80s), though they stayed much closer to their home (Albany, NY) than the adventurous Faldéraults. My sense is that my mother and her sisters were not as fond of this as their parents, so it was not repeated with my generation. I think that kind of roughing-it camping is much rarer, at least in US culture, in the 21st century than it was in the mid-20th.

Charlie: Charles Chaplin: The Funniest Man in the World by Seymour Chwast and Steven Brower

2026-06-17T08:30:00.086-04:00

I grabbed this from my library app for one simple reason: it was a new book (copyright 2025) by Seymour Chwast, who I am happy to note Wikipedia says is a famous American graphic designer and illustrator. (They swing immediately into the past tense when required.) Chwast is not just a designer: he's one of the titans of mid-20th century design, influential in massive ways.

Implied by what I just said is that Chwast is not young: he was born in 1931. Apparently he's still doing design work through his Push Pin Studios, and he turned to adapting classic literature into comics earlier this century, with Dante's Divine Comedy, The Canterbury Tales, The Odyssey, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court over roughly a decade, over a decade ago. I hadn't seen anything new in that vein for a while, and, given that Chwast is now in his mid-nineties, wasn't holding out lots of hope.

Charlie is not like those prior books, in a bunch of ways. Chwast only drew it; Steven Brower (another renowned ad man, a generation or two younger than Chwast) here provides the words. And, in keeping with the old maxim that the longer the title, the shorter the book, Charlie comes with the double-barreled subtitle Charles Chaplin: The Funniest Man in the World and a slim 32-page package.

Brower's text is in the first person, from the point of view of Chaplin, and tells a short, very focused version of his life story. After a page of Chaplin's childhood (mostly miserable and poverty-stricken), it dives directly into filmography, and stays in that mode to the end. Charlie covers Chaplin's major movies, on a mostly-superficial plot and audience-reaction level, but doesn't get into Chaplin's personal life at all. It doesn't mention any of his wives or children, and leaves a reader with the impression that 1952's Limelight was his last movie. (It wasn't; he directed two more after that and lived for another quarter-century.)

Chwast provides the pictures here, with various spot illos on every page. Given that he's credited first, it's possible that the illustrations existed - maybe even culled from a longer stretch of Chwast's long career? - and Brower wrote around them. They're mostly pen-and-ink, with a few full-page colored-pencils pieces, and mostly in Chwast's Push Pin style. It's not comics format; the style is closer to a picture-book, especially given the length.

So this is a small thing, and somewhat of an odd thing - likely why it was published by Fantagraphics Underground, their oddball short-book imprint, rather than by some larger entity in a larger way. But it does have some new (?) Chwast drawings of Chaplin, many of them charming and evocative, and it does provide a not-horrible potted look at Chaplin's major work.

Your Behavior Will Be Monitored by Justin Feinstein

2026-06-16T08:30:00.275-04:00

Not to blow my own horn, but I'm close to the perfect person to review this book. Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is a brand-new SF novel, the debut from adman and writer Justin Feinstein, about a new breakthrough in AI, specifically a Adtech agent in a B2B space, and the launch plan for that new product.

And I'm pretty sure I'm the only former SF editor who has been working in marketing for the past two decades and currently creates content about AI for a major tech company that is one of the leaders in its space. (OK, I work in legaltech rather than adtech, but I use adtech as a marketer every day, and I have been involved in multiple major product launches, including an upcoming one I can't talk about.) I will try not to nitpick too much, but I did have a lot of internal questions about this company's launch plan, among other things, while reading the book.

Actually, let me ground it all first: Monitored tries to do something impossible. Feinstein started writing it in late '22, and it's a near-future novel about a technology that is changing almost daily, and has been transforming entire industries over the past four years. I enjoyed it, and thought Feinstein did an awesome job, while still deeply believing he was writing about a 2022 tech world and tech capabilities, when those already look very different just a short time later.

If you work in AI at all, read this book quickly. Near future dates the fastest of all SF, and this is an area that is dating like fresh-baked bread. No offense to Feinstein about any of that: it's just the nature of the field right now.

That said: Monitored is an epistolary novel, in a zippy style. It's told through chat logs, surveillance videos, meeting transcripts, email exchanges, and similar media. It reads quickly, and focuses on the people (and bots) and what they say to each other.

UniView is a newish company, apparently already public, headquartered in Manhattan. They create sophisticated AI bots - their Sam is the basis of what's said to be all self-driving cars, though he was at least partially open-sourced, so UniView is not making as much money as it might.

(Actually, maybe I will nitpick. UniView has three active models at the beginning of the book - three products. Unlike the real-world frontier-model makers, each UniView model is discrete; they don't do new versions of old models, a la ChatGPT 5.5-Pro.

Those three models are:

Sam is presumably the one bringing in revenue, either partially through licensing to other companies or entirely through running the UniView proprietary version.
Lex runs the internal UniView HR function, and there's no indication it has been licensed - though it could be.
The third model, Casey, has no specific purpose Feinstein mentions, and is deleted very early in the book, so it clearly is not bringing in revenue.

I had a very hard time understanding UniView's business model and figuring out how they actually make any money. Plot elements later in the book further deepen my confusion.

Frankly, they act like a pre-IPO company most of the time, which could either be Feinstein doing it deliberately or something he didn't think of. And we don't see any of the UniView functions that would actually bring in revenue - marketing, sales, partnerships - which is either a bug or a feature, depending on how you look at it.)

UniView has a fourth bot in development: Quinn. Quinn will be an adtech engine, designed to create broadcast-quality video ads in real time, individualized for particular viewers. (I did wonder how Quinn would do this all that quickly from the server side, without any lag, and how it would get that data on all of the viewers, but those are minor quibbles.)

So, my marketing brain thinks: OK, so UniView will need to have an alpha customer or two - probably some big ad agency, but maybe a media outlet - to vet Quinn's output, provide glowing quotes, and work with the Quinn dev team under an NDA. Nope, not at all. Nothing like that. In fact, Feinstein has UniView fire its entire salesforce midway through the novel, right before the launch, and seems to be expecting customers to come to them after launch. This is a vaguely plausible motion in a consumer space - though you still need to have distribution at scale ready - but makes no sense for B2B. The customers for a ad-creation engine are ad agencies (at least in the short term, until they're actively routed around and marginalized) and large, mostly consumer-facing companies. Those companies are not going to come up to your door.

There's also no mention of metrics to feed back to customers, and I really wanted to know the pricing model for this thing, but now I'm getting on my hobbyhorses, so I should get back to the plot.

(Well, except for a quick second nitpick. UniView's AIs are presumably agents, but Feinstein doesn't use the word "agentic" at any time in this novel. I think this is on purpose; he also doesn't use "GenAI." Since AI is moving so quickly, Feinstein did what he could to future-proof the novel, and uses mostly base-level, long-term terminology. Readers may think of them as LLMs, but be aware that Feinstein is not being that specific - so the ways his characters interact with his bots are not "wrong" because they don't match current practice.)

UniView needs to train Quinn how to target individuals - teach it the basics of advertising. Training bots at UniView mostly happens through text-based chat - occasionally voice, but not much - which is slightly quaint. They decide to hire an advertising expert to do this, and grab Noah Ross, a fortyish veteran looking for work after a vaguely-mentioned (and somewhat clichéd) personal and professional breakdown.

Noah goes to work on the Quinn team, under project leader Simon Chung and working closely with ethicist Haley Ellis. (Feinstein sets up for a potential romance between Noah and Haley, but the format of the novel - also some plot elements - leaves that mostly as potential rather than actuality.) He chats with Quinn about how advertising works, how to target individuals, what people care about - all of the emotional grounding of the ad biz. Quinn generates ads for particular profiles, which are gauged on a standard scale; in the best Silicon Valley fashion, Noah's sole purpose is to make Number Go Up, as quickly as possible for the upcoming launch.

All that is pretty straightforward, even if the bot training is a bit more touchy-feely and less tinkering-with-weights than I expected. As is usual with SF novels about AI, the bots are supposedly non-sentient...but they act like people and talk like people and the other characters interact with them like people, which leads to the Big Ending.

But, meanwhile, the CEO and founder of UniView, Ian Lindell, is coming up on a milestone birthday. He had promised himself that he would do a whole bunch of things by that birthday, and the one missing thing on that list is "become a billionaire." So this launch has to make him a fortune.

Again, that feels very pre-IPO, and is a level of ambition and arrogance that would be unremarkable for any founder/CEO. Since UniView is already public, and Ian doesn't seem to have Musk-level abilities to cloud the minds of his board [1] to vote him massive unearned bonuses, he has to go in a somewhat different direction than the usual "launch product, disrupt everything, get all the money" playbook.

Ian's choice is frankly that of a cartoon villain; it happens very early in the novel and I found it weird, unlikely, and bizarre. It's not that I don't think CEOs aren't sociopaths who would take any action that benefited themselves; it's just that it's so criminal, and would be massively obvious in retrospect, that I don't believe he would be stupid enough to believe he could get away with it as depicted.

But he does the stupid illegal thing, and he covers over it, and he is mildly paranoid that a competitor will beat them to market, so he both makes things more difficult for the Quinn team (mostly inadvertently) and speeds up the launch radically.

Are these bots people? Do they have free will? Will they make choices?

This is a SF novel, not the real world, so the answers should be obvious. Also, though nobody actually says so during the novel, Feinstein clearly expects we will all think of Quinn's outputs (ultra-targeted video ads that know everything about you, manipulate your desires, and are really great at getting you to buy things you don't need) as horrible.

It does end well, and the speed imparted by Feinstein's epistolary style is a real strength - as I said up top, this novel is zippy and modern-feeling, which goes a long way to making it work well. I do have a lot of nitpicks - perhaps my background does not actually make me the perfect reviewer for this book, but instead a guy who knows too much for his own good - but they're mostly on the worldbuilding end, and mostly (I expect) artifacts of what changed in the world between when Feinstein started writing this book and I started reading it.

I do think this will date quickly; it's already dating quickly. But that just means it's of a particular time, and that can be a great advantage in SF.

[1] He presumably has a board, but they don't figure in the novel at all. UniView is stated to be a public company, but there's nothing about governance or financial reporting in the novel. As far as we can tell, by the end of the book UniView consists of a CEO, an automated HR bot, and a few product teams - no one else.

All of This and Nothing: I Can't Stand Still

2026-06-15T08:30:00.057-04:00

"All of This and Nothing" 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, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

Any indy cred I might have ever had is out the window: I'm writing about a Don Henley song.

I Can't Stand Still was the opener and the title track for his debut solo record, way back in 1982. The Eagles had broken up; he'd had a random song or two in the year or so in between, including a single with then-girlfriend Stevie Nicks; Stand Still was his big launch as himself and not one guy in a band. This song was never a single. But, if you bought the record, as a lot of us did in those days, this is what you heard first: Henley's disciplined drumming and a wailing keyboard line to launch right into yet another story of bad love.

You say you haven't got another lover
You say you only want to make the scene
Then you try to keep it under cover
What does that mean?

It's all in the voice of Henley's character; we don't know what "she" would say about any of this. But the singer is jealous, and suspicious, and worried. When I listened to this song in 1982, I was thirteen - I believed him entirely.

Now...well, I'm not so sure. There's more than a little control in the way he talks about the relationship.

I can take it if you need some freedom
Understand it if you miss your friends
Don't you ever try to think of me some
You never tell me where you've been

The refrain is all about that other guy - the one the singer assumes or knows or suspects is seeing "his" girl when she goes off - maybe assumes he's always there whenever she's anywhere else.

I love that energy in Henley's singing, and especially the keyboard, which is dominant throughout the song, in a clear '80s style that sounds nothing like a real physical piano or organ. And, most of all, that restlessness, fed by that unspecified, sourceless dread of what he's sure is happening when he's not around.

But baby, I can't stand still (while he's holding you)
I can't stand still (while he's touching you)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of June 13, 2026

2026-06-14T08:30:00.000-04:00

It was my birthday last week, and I got a couple of book-shaped things as presents - one from myself (who knows me better?) and one from my older child.

I also got two books from Tachyon during the week since that momentous birthday party, and, given the title of this post series, they need to come first.

Meg Elison has a new short novel, Foundling Fathers, officially publishing later this month. (Though what I have in my hands is a final book, so you may be able to get one, too.) It's a SF novel, in which some shadowy right-wing billionaires are raising clones of "Thomas, John, George, and Ben" - exactly the ones you think, from the title - as part of their usual schemes. Apparently a modern smartphone falls into their hands, which leads to various funny complications.

(I am exactly the kind of person who immediately thinks, "wait, isn't Franklin a good thirty years older than the others? How does that work?" But the whole raised-in-secret, isolated-island-plantation thing is so vastly different from their original lives that this is a really silly, minor quibble at best.)

Also from Tachyon (published last month): Ignore all Previous Instructions by Ada Hoffmann. I should note that I've never been fond of the "this one company owns everything, and they are Evil and Oppressive, and Our Hero will smash them in the course of the book" kind of story, which this seems to be. (Companies that big and evil and oppressive don't get smashed that way; they wither away when something else crops up or change over time.) It's set on Callisto, where the evil oppressive company is Inspiration, which uses GenAI to something something "own everything and [determine] which stories can be told." Have I mentioned that, after my time in the book-mines, I also have a mild allergy to stories about story-tellers, particularly when that story-telling is Important and Foundational to their Very Identities and the Source of All Good Things in the Known Universe? Also that I think most discourse around AI - especially things that use "GenAI" as the stake in the ground, three years later - is stupid and confused and wrong, on both sides?

So I'm afraid I am very unlikely to enjoy this book, or be able to read it without flames on the side of my face, so I will point you to it, note that you are not me and probably have completely different hobby-horses, and say that Ignore has a bunch of glowing quotes and is notably queer-positive.

Bought for myself: Platform Decay by Martha Wells, the most recent novel in the "Murderbot" series. You probably don't need me to tell you about the series, but I will if you're interested. I don't really know what happens in this book, and I don't much care: I'll read it fairly quickly no matter what.

And last is the big present from my child: a big slipcased thing called The Skyrim Library. There are three books in a very handsome case, each collecting a lot of short material and a lot of art that I think was mostly from in-game materials (the game being Skyrim, of course). It is a cool-looking object that I now need to find an appropriate place on a shelf - and, I hope, also find time to read at least parts of the thing.

Quote of the Week: Has the Look of a Publisher

2026-06-13T08:30:00.013-04:00

Unlike most publishers, who tend to become lean and haggard from mixing with authors, he [Russell Clutterbuck] bulged opulently in all directions and with his round face, round eyes and round spectacles, looked like an owl which has been doing itself too well on the field-mice.

- P.G. Wodehouse, French Leave, pp.129-30

Black Hammer: Spiral City by Jeff Lemire and Teddy Kristiansen

2026-06-12T08:30:00.144-04:00

I think this is still the most recent Black Hammer collection; it came out last November. It's set in the modern day, and does not feature the series main characters - the group of five Bronze Age heroes stuck on an extradimensional farm, like that dog you had as a child that had to go away, who I've come to call the Moping Crew because their super-team was never named.

Like most Black Hammer stories, it tells superhero stories that the reader will find at least faintly familiar, using its own invented world and characters that are different enough from Marvel and DC so as not to excite the vicious IP lawyers. I wonder if anyone has traced those familiarities: my sense is that some of them are obvious, but I also think there have been many more iterations of these stories since the '70s-80s versions I only vaguely remember.

Anyway, Black Hammer: Spiral City is potentially a new beginning for the series. It's written by series creator Jeff Lemire, with atmospheric, organic art in a variety of styles by Teddy Kristiansen. I have a hard time taking anything Black Hammer seriously, for the above second-hand story reasons, but maybe you feel differently.

It is soon after the Second ~~Crisis~~ Cataclysm. The techno-powered semi-fascist governmental/military group known as ~~Cadmus~~ ~~AIM~~ TRIDENT maintains the peace in ~~Metropolis~~ ~~New York~~ Spiral City. This city is presumably somewhere in the USA, but Lemire has never said where, or referred to any larger government of any kind. Black Hammer stories tend to use "Spiral City" as shorthand to mean "the real world" or "where we live" - Lemire's city has the usual streets and neighborhoods named after dead superhero artists, but there's never been a sense of larger geography, of suburbs and bridges and commuters and airports and so on.

That lack of specificity is used as if it were a strength in the storytelling here: one strand is in a storybook style, about a "kingdom" in which we follow a few iconic characters: a fool and a princess and a knight and a king. The kingdom, of course, is Spiral City itself, which has a mayor but apparently is not subject to any other level of government.

Malcolm Gold is the villain, the "king." He runs TRIDENT, and we know from the first page he's the Luthor-esque manipulator gathering power for his own nefarious aims. (Primarily outlawing superheroes, since that's the most important issue in a superhero story.) Aside from being evil and personally corrupt, he might be a reasonably effective technocratic manager, but superhero stories are never happy with "reasonably effective." He is running for mayor, and we expect he will win.

The fool is Inspector Insector, a bug-headed private detective who is a bit of metafiction - a "forgotten character" from a land of others like him, who never appeared in a "real story" in the "real world" until he bumbled his way into the Second Cataclysm and became part of a story - the Black Hammer story. He could be a fun character in the right kind of story, but his strengths and style are at odds with most of the core elements of the series: he has no powers, is no good as smashing Anti-Gods, and isn't even much good at moping. He wanders through this story as something like comic relief - though his story is sadder than that.

The princess is Helle's Bell, a superpowered pop star at a cusp in her career. She's trying to expand her work into movies, but she's also a young, hot-headed - literally, as with everything in superhero comics: she has fire-based powers triggered by her anger - prima donna who will sabotage her own best chance and be forced to run back to her Spiral City home from the vague land of Hollywood we first see her in.

And the knight is Concretestador, a former guard at the ~~Akrham~~ Spiral Asylum, which Malcolm just shut down with much grinning and twirling of mustache, because we all know comic-book asylums and prisons are just revolving doors to hold antagonists until they're needed for the next story, at which point they will escape easily. Concretestador needs to get a new job, but his skills are particular and the obvious outlets (TRIDENT and its ilk) are run by Malcolm and so don't want anyone good-coded. So he goes back to fighting other supers at the usual underground high-stakes fighting ring.

Meanwhile, behind all this, the general public - as always in superhero comics, a stupid mass of sheep-like morons who can't understand that superpowered people are better and special and their rightful masters - has responded to the Second Cataclysm by turning against all superheroes, on the grounds that alien gods never seem to try to eat planets that don't have superheroes on them.

(The Spiral City centrality issue also means that people talk as if Anti-God was trying to destroy Spiral City specifically, and not the entire universe it was part of - which is how it appeared in the actual story, too, so I can't fault them for that. Come to think of it, perhaps Spiral City is a small, flat, compact universe - that would explain how the evil forces could appear in the sky above during the various ~~Crises~~ Cataclysms at a 1-to-1 mapping; that would never work on any normal round planet.)

Anyway, everyone hates superheroes now: it's that kind of story. The bad guy is about to win a landslide election, take over everything, and outlaw Our Heroes. The plucky Good Guys are outnumbered, overwhelmed, and seemingly have no options left.

Of course they win in the end. Of course Malcolm wins the election but is forced to leave Spiral City, the only real place in the universe, with his tail between his legs. Along the way, nearly every friend Inspector Insector has is murdered by a serial killer, but I guess you can't make a superhero story without breaking eggs.

This is a second-hand story told well. If you've read superhero comics, of almost any kind, any time in the past fifty years, it will all rhyme with things already in your head. I think that's the point. I personally prefer stories that at least attempt to do something new, but I may be in the minority.

French Leave by P.G. Wodehouse

2026-06-11T08:30:00.120-04:00

As I continue my saunter through the odder ends of P.G. Wodehouse's oeuvre - I've already read the famous novels at least once - I'm testing my assumption that the early obscure books (pre-war) are generally better than the late obscure books (post-war).

Wodehouse was born in 1881. His first novel was published in 1902 and his last in 1874, just before his death at age 93. There were nearly a hundred different books in between, so there are a lot of datapoints and a lot of potential arguments to be made about that assumption of mine. The best thing is that, to make those arguments well, you need to read Wodehouse books, which are always fun, even if one wants to argue this particular one under the microscope is slightly lesser than some other Wodehouse novel.

French Leave is a short 1956 novel, somewhat out of character for Wodehouse in its setting. The main characters are three sisters from Long Island - two fairly standard romantic-comedy protagonists and one slightly older budding Forbidding Aunt - and the action takes place mostly in two French resorts, Roville and St. Rocque.

Kate, Josephine, and Teresa Trent run a farm, mostly of bees, and are not too unhappy there. But, when a play their late father wrote is sold to television, they each get a windfall about about two thousand dollars. And the two younger sisters, Jo and Terry, want to go to France to waste that money and, just maybe, find some millionaires to marry. Kate disapproves, but will go with them as a chaperone and to disapprove at close range.

Since their money is slim, to make it go farther they will alternately pose as each other's maid. First, in St. Rocque, Jo is "Miss Trent" and Terry is her maid "Fellowes." Jo has some dates with a man she thinks is suitable - but it turns out he's already married, so she flies back to America, alone, to marry the lawyer she was dating there.

Terry and Kate move on to Roville, setting up in the big fancy hotel there. Terry falls in love with Jefferson, Comte d'Escrignon - the half-American son of a penniless Marquis who writes for a living and is called "Jeff." French Leave is most Wodehousian in the way in which nearly every major character has an official name and then the name that people actually call them, most notably in Jeff's father, alternately Nicolas Jules St. Xavier Auguste, Marquis de Maufringneuse et Valerie-Moberanne and "Old Nick."

There are some ex-wives - of the Marquis in particular - and a parallel young couple of fairly dim but rich heirs to sparkling-water fortunes, who Jeff and Terry get somewhat entangled with. There's also an officious and somewhat corrupt local police Commissaire, who is aimed at Terry by that formidable ex-wife.

Of course, there are misunderstandings, primary among them about who is actually rich and who is not. (Terry is definitely not, though she's posing as an American heiress. Jeff has good prospects from his writing, but his father is penniless and their titles are very impressive but come with not a single sou.)

As any good Wodehouse book must, it ends with the young people getting married in the right permutations and the forces of repression and unhappiness (the Commissaire and the ex-wife primary among them) foiled.

Along the way, it's a bit more cumbersome than Wodehouse's better books - the whole deal with Jo feels extraneous to the central plot, which means the real complications don't start up until about 75% of the way into the book. But there's good material, especially about a publisher, Russell Clutterbuck, who is both a neighbor of the Trent sisters on Long Island and Jeff's great hope for fame and fortune. In the end, it's a slightly lumpy, not entirely well-shaped novel in the Wodehouse manner, quintessentially a book one can call minor but still enjoy reading.

The Complete Peanuts, 1957 to 1958 by Charles M. Schulz

2026-06-10T08:30:00.108-04:00

I reviewed a lot of the Complete Peanuts series when they were coming out - I bought them all, and read them contemporaneously, but the blog started up in the middle of that timeframe - so there's already a lot of words on this blog about Charles M. Schulz and his comics. This one, back in the day, was the first volume in the series covered here, in a quick round-up post of the kind I used to do. [1]

I used to throw in a big block of links to all of the books in the series in my Peanuts posts; I'm not doing that this time. Let me instead link the first and last books; you can go forward and backward from there if you have the time and inclination.

When I buy new books, they sit on dedicated shelves, and have to run under my eyes to win their places on the "real" shelves. (Do other people do that, too?) I even do that if I'm buying a new copy or edition of a book I read before - if I like it enough to pay for it again, I must like it enough to read it again, right? So I've had a new copy of this book for a few years, and finally re-read it. I'll try to be more concise than I was for a lot of the books in this series, since I've already written so much about Schulz and Peanuts.

The Complete Peanuts, 1957 to 1958 collects, like most of the books in the series, two full years of the Peanuts comic strips, daily and Sunday, in order. The whole fifty-year (with an asterisk; it's actually 49-years-and-four-and-a-half-months) run was written and drawn by Schulz, with no assists from anyone else.

The first time around, I was struck by the energy and novelty of Schulz's early work, all of these still moderately realistic kids in a suburban setting that was empty of anything but them, most of the time. Parents and other adults are occasionally offstage voices, in a way Schulz would reduce and eliminate over the next few years. The personalities are still shifting - Violet is still prominent here, mostly as a foil for Charlie Brown, but in ways that are more generic and less specific than the foil Lucy was turning into.

This time, I found it more transitional: not the shock of the first couple of years, when the kids were as close to feral as 1950s newspaper-comics kids could be, and not the full emotionally-resonant world that Schulz built out, starting in the early 1960s. Charlie Brown has completely transitioned into a sad sack; we see him failing to kick the football and managing his baseball team (as well as he can, which is not well). Lucy is somewhere in the middle, still half fussbudget but getting closer to the force of nature - loosely based on Schulz's first wife in later years, many commentators believe - that she became. Linus is continuing on his own path, still very much "the little kid" for jokes about his security blanket but more philosophical more of the time.

And Snoopy, as called out by the cover and the introduction by Jonathan Franzen, hasn't gotten into any of the manias he would embody in future decades - he's not "Joe" anybody yet, and his doghouse is still conventional and static - but he's clearly not a real dog, or a normal one, and his personality is getting bigger and brighter and more expressive. I still think the real era of Snoopy doesn't start until after the big continuity sequences of the '60s and early '70s - the cult of Snoopy started about the time of the bicentennial - but Schulz was already heading in that direction almost twenty years earlier, and Snoopy was clearly the same character he would be in those later strips.

There are some short sequences here - one week, maybe two - but this is mostly gag-a-day work. The sequences are often just five or six similar gags, with Snoopy impersonating a vulture or Beethoven's birthday or Linus' blanket jokes.

Schulz got more sophisticated and deeper than this, but you can see the seeds of his peak from here - he was building up to it, adding characters and shifting the characters he already had. And his drawing was up to its peak already: that can be hard to realize until you see someone else trying to draw Schulz's characters, and you realize how precise his poses and lines are, how few details he actually draws to make his whole world.

[1] At some point - much later than it should have been - I realized that a working editor should not be posting quick thoughts in public about books he was considering for his publishing program. I was remarkably dumb in public for a remarkably long time; I hope I'm at least making different mistakes now.

Wild That We're Alive by Lauren Haldeman

2026-06-09T08:30:00.108-04:00

Every book is from a particular person, with a distinctive point of view. The best authors realize that, and are as deeply themselves as they can be, to emphasize the things only they would say, in the ways only they would say it.

Wild That We're Alive is a collection of diary comics, from one woman, mostly about her family life. It's not anything at all like that description would make you think it is - some hybrid of Erma Bombeck and James Kochalka - because that's not who Lauren Haldeman is.

Haldeman is a poet - with several awards and a pedigree from the University of Iowa, so I don't just mean "someone who has written some poetry" - a web designer, editor, painter, and obviously a maker of comics. But what I think is the key fact is that she's the kind of person who has one child, and that child is named Magnus.

There's a kind of mom who has five or more kids, all named things like Jacob and Hannah. There's a kind of mom who has two or three kids, with names you can't predict. And there's a kind of mom who has just one, with a name like Magnus or Tinkerbell.

Magnus is a character here, appearing in a number of comics. Haldeman's husband, Ben, is mentioned but less present. But they're all about her: these are diary comics. Each one is generally a single image, captioned or with dialogue - one image for a single moment, a single thought. Haldeman works in big blocks of generally light, soothing colors, and a bold, expressive, individualistic line.

She draws people somewhat anthropomorphically - maybe dogs, maybe bipedal kangaroos? - with herself central in most of these comics. They're about what's it's like to be Lauren Haldeman in the world, sometimes the physical world but even more often her mental world. I think Haldeman is the kind of person who never stops thinking about things, even when she wants to be quieter and just present. (Ask me why I recognize that.) She doesn't always provide context: there are a number of comics about grief, but we never learn who Haldeman is grieving, how recent the loss was, or anything like that. They're all from her point of view, so things she already knows likely won't be mentioned.

Wild That We're Alive is organized as a year. After a brief introductory section about her family and animals, Haldeman mentions she thinks of years as beginning in the fall - she seems to still be embedded in the academic year, from her work with the University of Iowa and maybe other academic-related web-design work. So the book follows that flow, with full-page paintings for half-titles (and occasionally elsewhere) leading into sections of comics from that time of year.

I think this was a project, a daily comic Haldeman did. Maybe for one particular year, maybe off and on for several years. I don't see it on her website, so maybe it was mostly on social media, in the way a lot of comics-makers do these days. (If the eyeballs are on Instagram, it only makes sense to post there first.)

I'm not the first person to point out that poets and comic-writers need to have a similar level of concision, of using exactly the right word in a space where there's only room for a few words. Haldeman is a great example of that; her language is precise and thoughtful, but also conversational and playful - not "poetry" in the old academic "study-this" sense, but poetic in the allusive, connected, word-besotted sense.

At times, Haldeman feels like a higher-brow version of Grant Snider - similar concerns about internal emotional states and the purpose of life, but pitched in a mindset informed by more of the academic world and with some weltschmerz behind it. I like Snider, and I like a more rigorous thought-pattern, so both of those things are good.

To close as I started, Haldeman is particular and distinctive: that's good in and of itself, even more so because she has interesting thoughts and makes striking pictures about them.

All of This and Nothing: Jackson Leftfield

2026-06-08T08:56:00.058-04:00

OK, I've finally hit the point where my "Obscure" songs are so obscure that I can't even find a version of them online to embed here. Which somewhat ruins the point of the post, I guess, but let me do what I can in the circumstances.

Boxer the Horse is [1] a band from the Canadian Maritimes; their debut EP was The Late Show in 2008. The music website Fingertips featured a song from that record; I downloaded it, liked it, and ended up buying the band's full-length French Residency when it came out a couple of years later. (They seem to have had another full-length in the middle, which I missed.)

That first song, the one I heard in 2008, is Jackson Leftfield, which has very little trace on these here Interwebs. YouTube has a live version, but the album version doesn't even seem to be on Spotify anymore. The Fingertips link is long-dead. No lyrics exist anywhere I can find.

It's a loose-limbed, harmonica-fueled, electronic-organ-infused romp - Jackson is a girl the singer is talking to, though I think she's a friend or acquaintance rather than the object of his affections. Whoever is after her, though, she's not having it:

She said get your damn hands off me man
Do you have any idea who I am?

It's an energetic, fun song from a band that seemingly has been forgotten even by the people who knew they existed in the first place. The world is full of songs like that, unfortunately - or fortunately; it means the world is full of great stuff - and this is one I really liked and wanted to remember...if only I could find it to share it.

[1] Probably "was," I don't see any activity post-2014. But let me be optimistic.

Books Read: May 2026

2026-06-07T12:00:00.000-04:00

So, yeah, another month down. We're all that much closer to death, I suppose. But, while we're waiting to die, we can at least read good books, right? Here are the ones I finished this past month.

I'm not claiming they're all "good," though maybe they were. You always hope they will be when you pick them up.

Links will be added sometime later, once the posts go live.

Charles M. Schulz, The Complete Peanuts, 1957 to 1958 (5/2)

P.G. Wodehouse, French Leave (5/2)

Jeff Lemire &Teddy Kristiansen, Black Hammer: Spiral City )digital, 5/3)

Justin Feinstein, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored (ARC, 5/3)

Seymour Chwast & Steven Brower, Charlie: Charles Chaplin: The Funniest Man in the World (digital, 5/8)

Zidrou & Jordi Lefebre, Glorious Summers, Vol. 2: The Calanque (digital, 5/9)

Geof Darrow, Shaolin Cowboy: Start Trek (digital, 5/10)

Catana Chetwynd, Still Smitten (digital, 5/16)

Ellin Stein, That's Not Funny, That's Sick (5/16)

Lewis Trondheim & Manu Larcenet, Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol. 2: The Return (digital, 5/17)

Peter Bagge, The Complete Hate, Vol. 1(digital, 5/22)

John Updike, Bech Is Back (in The Complete Henry Bech, 5/22)

Evelyn Waugh, The Holy Places (in Waugh Abroad, 5/22)

Peter & Maria Hoey, The Shadower (digital, 5/23)

Evelyn Waugh, A Tourist in Africa (in Waugh Abroad, 5/23)

Mathieu Sapin, Gérard: Five Years with Depardieu (digital, 5/24)

Joshua Slocum & Jon Buller, Sailing Alone Around the World (digital, 5/25)

David Kantrowitz, Rats, Demons & Dayjobs (digital, 5/30)

Benjamin Black, Christine Falls (5/30)

Xavier Dorison & Ralph Meyer, The Undertaker, 1: The Gold Eater & Dance of the Vultures (digital, 5/31)

In the coming month (which is already this month, since time never stops), I will continue to read books, and probably to blather about them here. If you keep coming back, I don't know what to tell you.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of June 6, 2026

2026-06-07T08:30:00.000-04:00

I had my annual visit to the eye doctor this week, which means - since she's in Manhattan near Union Square - taking a whole day off work and using that opportunity to do some shopping at the Strand. I still miss the review-copy bonanza that store used to be, but all things decline into the West, I suppose, and it's a big, pretty-good standard indy book store these days.

Here's what I found on this trip:

I am about three decades late starting to read Christopher Brookmyre - is he even still writing these days? - but I've vaguely thought about his stuff pretty much all that time. This trip, I found a copy of his first novel Quite Ugly One Morning, which is a short humorous thriller, and I figured I will have a better chance of reading it if it's on the shelf.

Tom Gauld had a new book of science cartoons late last year: Physics for Cats. I'm a big fan of Gauld; he's one of the few cartoonists whose books I still buy in actual physical form and keep, so take that as a glowing recommendation.

I'm still a couple of books behind on Nick Hornby, but I seem to be catching up: I grabbed a copy of Just Like You, his 2020 novel. I'm pretty sure it's a story about middle-class English people with love trouble: this one is about a fortyish woman who becomes the December in a May-December relationship - I think, from hints in the back-cover copy, that the chap she picks up to be May is also Black, or similarly "clearly unsuitable" for her.

Somehow I also got behind on Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins mysteries, which I was reading consistently for twenty-plus years. I think Blonde Faith is the first one I missed - there are several more, including one more I already have - so I may be able to catch up.

I saw the movie made of Jon Ronson's The Men Who Stare at Goats, way back near when it came out., And I've read several of his other books of reportage. But I never read this one - now I can.

And last is a collection of miscellaneous travel pieces by Paul Theroux: Sunrise with Seamonsters. As far as I can tell, he's had a book like this for roughly each decade of his career - this was the first one, starting with short pieces from the late '60s.

Quote of the Week: Fairy Stories

2026-06-06T08:30:00.002-04:00

The peasants of early Modern France inhabited a world of step-mothers and orphans, of inexorable, unending toil, and of brutal emotions, both raw and repressed. The human condition has changed so much since then that we can hardly imagine the way it appeared to people whose lives really were nasty, brutish, and short. That is why we need to reread Mother Goose.

- Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, p.29

Be That Way by Hope Larson

2026-06-05T08:30:00.108-04:00

First off, this book is not autobiographical, as creator Hope Larson says on the first page of Be That Way. She's about two years younger than her heroine, for one thing. But it is a book about a young woman with artistic talent, growing up in the same town Larson did (Asheville, North Carolina) at about the same time, and apparently includes a lot of the real-world locations young Larson knew herself. So it's memoir-adjacent, at least.

Second: it's not "comics," exactly, as you might expect from Larson's prior work. It's a mixture of prose and illustration, with some comics sections. That's a format that has become pretty common - and very popular! - for younger readers, with Captain Underpants, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and so on. But I don't think there have been many books for teens in this format, so Larson is staking out new ground that way. It's an interesting, flexible format - good for both introspection and imagistic moments - and it works well here, where Larson is presenting the story as the diary kept by her main character over one tumultuous year.

Christine is our narrator: that's her on the cover. After a brief intro at age 13 in late 1993, the book settles into her 1996 diary: she wants to be more "shiny," now that she's sixteen - she recently broke up with her first boyfriend Dave, and wants to basically do all the high school things: get a serious boyfriend, do well in school, have great friends, be part of something fun.

The last is already mostly there: Christine has been writing for the school paper, the Cougar Chronicle, since freshman year, and one of her two best friends, Paul, is also an editor there. Paul is dating Jennifer and has been for a long time; Christine resolutely declares she has no romantic interest in Paul and never will; he's just a great friend. Readers can decide for themselves where and how they've seen that before.

Christine's other best friend is Landry, who is the outgoing, gorgeous, more-than-a-little-wild counterpoint to Christine's mostly quiet and contained nature. This is another major thread of the novel, the push-pull of this friendship, with Landry always being big and dragging Christine along with her on her escapades, especially in the middle of the book, where's she's dating a college boy, Jason.

Another, more buried thread, is Christine's home life. She doesn't focus on it - what sixteen-year-old would? - but she's clearly living in a fancy neighborhood of rich people, like Landry and her next-door-neighbor Whit, and her family isn't rich.

Or isn't rich anymore. Her doctor father died in what seems to be early 1993, six months or so before the introduction. Her mother went back to work as a nurse, and the family doesn't seem to be doing badly - they just don't really fit into the neighborhood anymore, and their old friends seem to have quietly fallen away. Christine, as the oldest, has to take on some caring for her younger siblings, Brandon (about 12) and April (probably 2-4 years younger than that). We don't really see her younger siblings, because this is Christine's story, but they - and her mostly-at-work mother - influence how she lives and the space she has available for that life on every page.

Larson tells this story naturalistically, through Christine's diary entries. First the end of her junior year, then the summer, and then into the first half of senior year. She fights with Landry, deals with her relationship with Paul, gets her first job, has another boyfriend for a few months, and just goes through life: working on the school newspaper, doing assignments for art class, seeing movies, hanging out with the friends I've mentioned and others that I haven't.

In the end, Christine is in a good place, and we're happy for her - not just on the relationship side, which will be a big draw for the teen readers of this book, but also in thinking about what she wants to do with her life, where she can take her desire to draw and write things, what will come next as she looks on towards college.

I suspect there will be two main audiences for this book: first, the obvious one, teens, especially girls, especially girls who are interested in art and writing, who are in a spot like this right now or see it coming in a year or two. The other is women who were teens in the mid-90s, who can look back to this time in their lives, and feel the parallels strongly - Larson has a lot of emotionally resonant details here, some of which are Asheville-specific but most of which are just teenagery. I think this book will be familiar to a lot of people - a lot of it was resonant with me, and I'm a decade older than Larson, the opposite gender, and grew up a few thousand miles away.

If either of those things describe you, or describe someone you know well, you might want to take a look at Be That Way. Larson has been making excellent comics for a couple of decades now; this is something bigger, quirkier, and more interesting, but just as excellent.

The Incal, Vol.4: What Is Above by Alexandro Jodorowsky and Mœbius

2026-06-04T08:30:00.171-04:00

The influential and stylish French six-book space opera bande dessinée series named after its McGuffin, the Incal, moves into its second half with this book. By this point, series hero John DiFool still has some distinctive characterization - mostly of his negative traits, but we'll take what we can get - while most of the people around him have been smoothed out and perfected by the ongoing fate-of-the-universe plot. As always, it's written by moviemaker and international goofball Alexandro Jodorowsky and drawn by French master cartoonist Mœbius; the whole series originally appeared in Metal Hurlant in the '80s, with the current edition having gone back to the French original to strip out some emendations made by Marvel in their earlier English-language reprinting. This volume was translated by Justin Kelly and Sasha Watson, who do the best they can do with Jodorowsky's bombastic, silly dialogue.

To catch up on the background quickly: in the previous three books (The Black Incal, The Luminous Incal, and What Lies Beneath) John found that Incal, a sentient, glowing super-powerful thingy destined to bring balance to the galaxy in much the same way that Anakin Skywalker would in his own universe a couple of decades later. In typical mystical-space-opera fashion, everything was a duality: there were dark and light Incals, which needed to merge; two women who are sisters and guardians of the two Incals; a Great Darkness threatening the human empire that is opposed to the combined Incals; and so forth. John did the hero's-journey thing, turning enemies into allies, going on a dangerous journey to the heart of his world, where the Incals merged and turned into a super-cool spaceship - this is an '80s space opera - and one of the minor characters was subsumed into the Incal gestalt.

John and his allies are in that spaceship as The Incal, Vol.4: What Is Above begins. The evil Techno organization - I'm not sure what the overall name is; the Technopope is dead and their headquarters habitat of Technogea is run by the Techno-Centreur and the Cyclic Council, so they're the Techno-somebodies - has taken over human space and is proceeding with their evil plans to seed the universe with Shadow Eggs, semi-living manifestations of the evil Great Darkness. Those shadow eggs will eat all of the stars and then...I'm not really sure. Probably kill everyone; it's that kind of ha-ha-ha evil plot. It's not clear why the Technodudes want to do that; I suspect it's mostly that Jodorowsky assumes techno-anything is evil, and is attributing to them everything he doesn't like in life.

The Incal-starship has powerful weapons, but they can only break shadow eggs into pieces, which then re-form. They need a more organic solution to defeat Techno-ness and Darkness.

So they fly off to the prison planet Aquaend, where the minor character Raimo of Kamar and his crew have already been exiled, discovering a hidden undersea city Vitavil H2O where the locals live in harmony with the native gigantic medusas. (Medusa in the French-language sense of a jellyfish rather than a lady with a stunning gaze.) Those medusa somehow have the power to envelop and destroy shadow eggs, because gigantic sea-dwelling semi-sentients clearly have the power of space-travel, and so the giant wave of Techno shadow eggs is met by and destroyed by a wave of human-guided space-traveling medusas.

Vitavil H2O is also the current home of the human empire's semi-deposed Emperoress, thought dead. But no, he/she fled and is ready to re-take control of the human worlds once the little matter of the Technofellas is resolved.

That gets us about halfway through the book, so it's time to switch gears. The alien Berg race - from the next galaxy over, and invading human space intermittently over the past three books - is about to have its Five Thousand Year Games, in which a few hundred members of some alien race are gathered to fight to the death in the inevitable sandy arena. The single winner of the Five Thousand Year Games gets the honor of impregnating the Berg's Protoqueen - who may be immortal; this isn't clear - and then being disintegrated. After 24,000 such games, legend says, the Bergs will "enter the golden age of eternal prosperity."

This is, of course, the twenty-four-thousandth Games. The competitors this time are all humans. And John must compete - and win! - the game to fulfil the Incal's plans, fucking the giant bowl of goop that is the Protoqueen. (She first extrudes a body that closely resembles John's love Animah, to make the fucking somewhat more palatable.)

In the end, John does not avoid his inevitable post-coital disintegration, but he gets better with the help of his friends. Technogea is attacked and conquered by the forces of righteousness and Incal-hood. Our heroes seem to be entirely triumphant, with two books left to fill, but - shock! horror! - they learn that the Emperoress has been infected by the Great Darkness through a "psycho virus" and is now the new focus of its aims. This is our ending cliffhanger.

Mœbius's art is lovely and muscular; I still have the lurking suspicion that the people who really love this series first saw it before it was translated and don't read French. Jodorowsky's writing is full of super-science and mysticism in almost equal proportions, any distinctive characterization has mostly retreated by this point so his characters can explain the convoluted plot to the reader. I may seem dismisive, but it is definitely fun on a space opera level, full of bizarre ideas, weird technology, and shocking reversals. And there's still two books to go, as it gets bigger and crazier in the usual space-opera way.

The Great Cat Massacre by Robert Darnton

2026-06-03T08:30:00.122-04:00

The full title of this book, I should note quickly, is The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. It's by the historian Robert Darnton, originally published in 1984, and I am surprised to find that Darnton is both an even bigger deal than I expected (Philips, Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, National Book Critics Circle Award, Harvard Librarian) and is still alive.

And here I will point out that no one who reads this blog will care what I say about this book, and few (any?) even care about its subject. But this blog is a weird, capricious thing - basically a reading notebook I keep in public for odd, contingent, it-just-happened-that-way reasons - so I read whatever I want to read anyway, and then try to write something about it. I do appreciate you, dear readers - both of you - but I don't essentially care that you're out there.

The Great Cat Massacre is an early work in cultural history, which at the time was a somewhat established stream in French historical thought, but was less well-known in the English-speaking world. Darnton's specialty was then, and has been throughout his career, 18th century France. He's also done a lot of work on the history of the book, and seems to be a deeply textual historian - some are more data-focused, some have other interests, but Darnton's core analytical process stems from close reading of particular texts, which I appreciate.

This book presents six loosely related essays, or chapters. Each one looks at a specific text, and digs into the question of what that text tells us about the world it came from - how is that world different from our own, what is strange or surprising, what is distinctive and particular in that text and how that compares to other things we know or read. A long time ago, my own college thesis was vaguely in the same tradition - titled "Infratextual Structures in Poe, Bierce, and Lovecraft" when published in Lovecraft Studies #21; I think my original title didn't have the author names - so this is something I am inclined to be interested in (and, likely, boring about).

So Darnton first looks at fairy tales - in a very structured, research-driven way, comparing versions collected from the oral tradition with the more literary versions from particularly Perrault (since Darnton's focus is on France) but also the Grimms and other retellers across Europe - to, at first, debunk some very Freudian fairy-tale interpretations that were popular in the 1970s. The fairy-tale essay is the longest, and extends much farther than that initial focus; its goal, which Darnton admits is ambitious and declares can never be entirely complete, is to understand the cultural context of these stories. Who told them, to whom, and how were they understood at the time? If they are cautionary tales, what were they cautioning 18th century children against?

Darnton moves on from there to a printers-apprentice's account of that titular cat massacre, which, in his compelling telling, was mostly a sideways attack on the power and prestige of his master and especially his master's wife. Let me quote from his conclusion (on p.262) a passage that helps explain the mindset and point of the entire exercise of these essays:

As I tried to illustrate in explicating the cat massacre of the rue Saint-Séverin, the most promising moment in research can be the most puzzling. When we run into something that seems unthinkable to us, we may have hit upon a valid point of entry to an alien mentality, And once we have puzzled through to the native's point of view, we should be able to roam about in his symbolic world. To get the joke in the case of something as unfunny as a ritual slaughter of cats is a first step towards "getting" the culture.

Darnton is an academic, but writes in a reasonably clear style within that form. He does hedge his points, always being clear what he's willing to claim and what is speculation, and has a massive number of endnotes giving further reading, which I mostly skimmed.

The later chapters include one about the Encyclopedia, one on Rousseau, one on the reading life of a somewhat typical small-city bourgeois, and one on what looks like a fascinating treasure-trove of dossiers and documents from a police inspector tasked around 1750 with keeping track of the literary world of France, mostly because many of them were considered subversive. Darnton's methods are serious and, again, inherently academic, but he does seem to be one of the first to think about doing such close reading and implication-hunting in documents like these for an English-language audience.

And, of course, Darnton's topics are mostly about the world of books and reading - who read what, what lessons they took from it, how writers were seen by the authorities, what folktales "meant" to the people who retold them, and similar things. So those of us inclined to geek out on bookish topics are more likely to enjoy a book of Darnton's than one by another historian who concentrates, for example, on the lives of flax-weavers.

(Note: I have no clear idea of what flax is, nor whether it is possible to weave it.)

This is a forty-plus-year-old book; I found a used copy randomly a decade ago, and it's probably only vaguely in print, if that. I have no illusions many other people will want this particular book. But I do hope the kind of people who would read this blog are interested in the intellectual history of reading, in the question of how people in different times understood the world, and how we can understand people who are very different from us. In all those areas, Darnton has much to say.

Goes Like This by Jordan Crane

2026-06-02T08:30:00.078-04:00

I like reading short stories much more than I like writing about them. And I don't read short fiction all that much, so maybe I don't even enjoy even reading them as much as I think I do. That's complicated math, so I'll leave it there.

Jordan Crane has been making comics for thirty years, but I only noticed him with his magnificent graphic novel Keeping Two a few years ago. (Insert the usual disclaimer about the world being huge and full of interesting things, so no one can see all of it they want to.) Since making comics is time-consuming, his next book was Goes Like This, a collection of shorter works - and a lot of prints, actually - originally published from 2002 to 2022.

It is visually inventive, especially the prints, which are eye-popping and stunning. The stories are varied, from wordless one-pagers to longer dialogue-filled full stories. They tend to be sad or depressive at their core, with a surprising amount of death piling up, especially early in the book. (The first two long comics stories, if I remember correctly, sandwich a bunch of prints that all seem to be people falling to their deaths with their mouths open, so I wonder if Crane had a period in his work that was particularly doomy.)

His art style is somewhat malleable - this collection does span twenty years - but it's all in a crisp, indy-comics storytelling mode, his people just a little soft and rubber-hose, their faces expressive with their usually-narrow eyes and other features defined with a few bold lines.

Without diving into individual stories, there's not that much more to say: it's a compelling collection of strong work. The stories stand alone, aside from the first two numbered chapters from a project that I suspect might have been an early attempt at what became Keeping Two. Those stories also tend to have simpler palettes - usually black and white or a few tones - while the prints are often overlaid with bright, jangling patterns. They almost seem to come out of completely different creative impulses in Crane, though you can see some continuity in his people and the situation they're in: the prints are occasionally static, but, especially early in the book, they depict moments, out of context, where something is happening that would not be out of place in his stories.

There is a lot of death in it. Even the stories that don't have on-panel deaths tend to be thematically about things dying or sickly, a relationship or a way of living. Crane does not seem to be a cartoonist of happiness: this is what I'm saying. That's somewhat expected in indy-comics circles, admittedly, but know that Crane goes deeply to that well, both in narrative and in imagery, in this collection.

All of This and Nothing: Under Pressure

2026-06-01T08:30:00.045-04:00

It's a two-fer this week - maybe even a three-fer. Two famous artists, with one song that you probably already know.

"How well do you perform under pressure?" they ask.

"Well, I'm OK with the David Bowie part if you can do Freddie Mercury." is what you're required to answer.

Under Pressure was a one-off song, with David Bowie joining Queen - apparently because he lived nearby the studio in Montreux where they were recording - and almost being part of multiple songs on what eventually became the 1982 Queen album Hot Space.

Almost being the important word there.

This one song came together, credited to the four members of Queen and Bowie equally.

And it's been a cultural touchstone every since, a unique amalgam that fits into the work of both artists while having its own quirky specificity.

(It's also one of the great videos from its early era - odd images, smash-cuts, synchronized to the music, with no sign of any of the people who made the music.)

The lyrics are banal and general - this is a song driven by the voices and the sound rather than what they say.

Under pressure that burns a building down
Splits a family in two
Puts people on streets

Yeah, pressure is tough, isn't it?

People on streets
Ee da de da de
People on streets
Ee da de da de da de da

This song is a major example of how the best songs can have the silliest-looking lyrics, when you write them out. Songs are gestalts, combinations of sound and emotion, and the words are only one small part of it. This is a wonderful one, and I probably don't have to tell you that.

But I do have to ask: How well do you perform under pressure?

Quote of the Week: Facts and Facts

2026-05-30T08:30:00.003-04:00

I knew - and I was pretty damn sure that Captain Alessandro knew too - that Mitchell wasn't alive, that he hadn't driven his car to Los Peñasquitos Canyon, but somebody had driven him there, with Mitchell lying dead on the floor of the back seat.
There was no other possible way to look at it. There are things that are facts, in a statistical sense, on paper, on a tape recorder, in evidence. And there are things that are facts because they have to be facts, because nothing makes any sense otherwise.

- Raymond Chandler, Playback, p.847-48 in Later Novels & Other Writings

Young Shadow & the Watchdogs by Ben Sears

2026-05-29T08:30:00.123-04:00

I'm still not sure if Ben Sears intends his comics to be all-ages (or, more specifically, most-ages, for tweens and up), or if it's a by-product of the stories that he tells. Either way, I'd say his books are OK for tweens, mostly, if that's something you care about.

Young Shadow & the Watchdogs is Sears' new book this year; it follows 2021's Young Shadow and can be considered a sequel to that book. I say "can be considered," because it doesn't reference the plot of the first book in any way, and Spiral Scratch isn't in this book - so maybe it's a prequel, instead. Or just another book in the same world, with no clear time sequence.

In the first book, Young Shadow was an urban vigilante, of the kind renowned in comics since the 1930s, though he was somewhat more lefty - mostly beating up polluters and corrupt cops - than the typical Big Two character. And he's still doing some of that here: the story starts with Shadow and a group of kids - a distributed group of sidekicks, I suppose, or something like the Shadow's organization, or a anarcho-syndicalist collective, if we think he's leaning more heavily into the lefty thing - follow a truck with two bearded guys, stop them from dumping large barrels of something toxic in a place they shouldn't, and turn them those bearded guys to the authorities of Soil & Water.

So we think "Young Shadow & the Watchdogs" is this vigilante group, probably. The title at first made me think it was a band, but sadly it's definitely not that. But it's not exactly a superteam, either: The Watchdogs are actually a baseball team, and Shadow is their coach. There's only eight of them other than Shadow, which means, including him, they only just barely have enough players to field a team, and can never change pitchers - but it's comics, and I suppose Sears wants to avoid having a too-large cast.

Anyway, the Shadows have a game coming up, with the requisite snooty rich kids - the term of art used in the book is "prep school jerks" - in two days. So the day after the vigilante action, they're going to have a big practice to make sure they're ready.

Parenthetically, these seem to be school-age kids - maybe middle school, maybe late elementary - but no one even mentions school. They're out late at night stopping polluters who threaten them with guns, and parents don't seem to bat an eye. And they spend the whole next day playing baseball. I assume that Bolt City has public schools and that these kids are enrolled, but the book itself provides no evidence to support that.

The reader thinks that the book will be about that big game with the snooty rich kids, and this old Meatballs fan was up for that. Or, possibly, that the polluters would come back and interfere with the game: some kind of intersection of the vigilante plot and the baseball plot. Neither of those two things are true.

Instead, Watchdogs takes a turn into the supernatural - signposted by a cold-open sequence about a nasty pro baseball player, in some earlier time and place - and the Watchdogs instead play a very different baseball game, against an unexpected opposing team. I don't want to be coy about it; you can see them on the cover: the Watchdogs need to battle a team of skeletons because of the usual haunted-artifact-makes-them reasons. If they lose, they all die.

To immediately defuse all tension, they do not get eaten by the eels at this time. Sears works in a combination of the traditions of the superhero comic and the It-was-Old-Man-Jenkins! kid-friendly mystery, both of which require that the hero win in the end and everything be put right with the world. So they play fair, they play well, and they win in the end. The haunted artifact is returned to its proper custodian, and even the grumpy old supernatural baseball player has a change of heart, maybe, we think.

Sears tells all of this in a fun cartoony line, softly rounded and full of amusing visual interest in every panel. He tells it all straight, but his art subtly tells the reader not to worry; nothing too scary will happen from these skeletons and other monsters. That's another reason I think his books are OK for younger readers: they fit well in that tradition, and tell stories in ways that audience will both enjoy and be familiar with.

I'd still like to see a proper sequel to Young Shadow, to see what happens next and what's the deal with Bolt City, but this was an amusing diversion from that plot, with an appealing cast and a lot of pages with great bits on them.

The Alliance of the Curious, #2: Neandertalensis by Philippe Riche

2026-05-28T08:30:00.107-04:00

I can't tell if Philippe Riche made any comics after this one. He did the two Bad Break books about 2003, this two-book series in 2006, and nothing since. But he also seems to be the same Philippe Riche who works in animation, and that Riche is credited with directing a movie released this year - so he might have just gotten busy with other things.

(This might be a quirk of mine, but I always want to find that creators I know - not even that I like, just anyone whose work I'm even aware of - continued their careers and did interesting or great or exciting things. I worked in publishing for more than a decade, and saw how many creative careers fizzle out after a couple of projects or a short decade. I hate that; I hate living in a world where that's the norm. So I'm always hoping for the opposite, for everyone.)

Be that as it may, this is the back half of the story. The Alliance of the Curious, #2: Neandertalensis continues and completes the story started in the first book, Sapiens, still focusing on the three main characters from Bad Break. Their roles shifted a bit from Bad Break to Alliance - Ernst-Lazare no longer seems to be immortal, or quite as unknowable; Rebecca X is not mentioned as working in porn; and Simon, well, Simon, in this book, seems to have become much dumber and less focused.

We do get a bit more explanation of the backstory, though that mostly fills out the outlines of what we knew or guessed from the first book. The three heroes have that jeweled Neanderthal skull, and are still looking for an old man, a possibly mentally-ill tramp named Griffon De Martel.

Griffon is both the heir apparent to the (vacant, of course) throne of France, from the medieval Carolingian dynasty, and the last living Neanderthal, the final product of a millennia-long secret society living among modern humans and interbreeding - presumably, exclusively among themselves.

Because of the first aspect of his lineage, he will disinherit Louis, the dissolute Bourbon pretender, due to some complicated hugger-mugger involving something called the Order of Saint Louis. And, because of that, three young blonde women called the Cocaine Sisters - Louis's lovers or friends or enablers or all three - are on a rampage to find and kill Griffon, with high-powered automatic weapons.

Because of the second aspect, as we eventually learn near the end of this book, Griffon is trying to get back to the secret crypt of his people - which is, of course, beneath Paris - where he will reunite that jeweled skull with its body. They both belong to the legendary first leader of his people, forty thousand or so years ago, who made them go underground in human society when the mammoths got hunted to extinction. (I swear I am not making any of this up.) And, legendarily, if the skull is placed on its body by the last Neanderthal, all of the dead Neanderthals will rise and take back the world that is rightfully theirs.

Simon and Rebecca and Ernst-Lazare are mostly bystanders or witnesses to this plot; they're trying to figure out if the skull is valuable, and, if so, to whom. They get shot at by the three women, try to find Griffon to talk to him about this whole bizarre situation, and come out of it all basically the same way they did in Bad Break. They do manage to keep their clothes on this time, which I suppose is an improvement.

It is all very Dan Brown, in that are-you-willing-to-believe-this? style. Riche has nice atmospheric storytelling art here; his people are angular, like a world full of high-fashion models, and his colors are moody. He has a lot of dialogue, to explain this oddball story, and it it all basically makes sense and is believable in the reading, which is all one can expect for a conspiracy-theory book like this one.

I don't think we got, or probably will get, any more comics from Riche, since he's spent the last twenty years in the animation mines. But who knows? Doing animation means he's probably still drawing regularly, so maybe he'll come back - with another tale of these three or something else. I'd like to think so. These books are just weird and specific enough that I feel like the world should have more of them.

Playback by Raymond Chandler

2026-05-27T08:30:00.080-04:00

This is the last and least of Raymond Chandler's novels, written after the death of his wife Cissy and published the year before his own death. It's also, uneasily, a sequel to Chandler's previous (longest, best) novel, The Long Goodbye, which can make Playback feel even smaller and less impressive by comparison.

So Chandler didn't do himself any favors with this book. It's still Chandler: there's plenty of strong moments and descriptions and ideas in it, and the detective-plot, though not as robust or resonant as his better books, still works and is at the center of the novel. Playback is not a bad PI novel; it's just disappointing, since we know how much better Chandler could be.

It's about eighteen months after The Long Goodbye. Philip Marlowe, Chandler's series hero, is still mooning over Linda Loring, the rich heiress who got away in that book. Mooning more obviously here than he was in the previous novel, actually, which I (and many other critics before me) attribute more to Chandler's loss of Cissy.

Marlowe is hired by "Claude Umney, the lawyer" - that's how he inevitably answers his phone, and Marlowe does make a smart remark about it, but it doesn't take - to follow a certain person and report back. Umney is working, he says, on orders from unnamed but powerful forces "back East." The person to be tailed is, of course, a gorgeous blonde woman: Betty Mayfield, traveling under an alias. Marlowe watches her arrive on the Super Chief train, hang about in the train station for a few hours, and then continue on to San Diego. He follows her there, and to the small community of Esmeralda.

Marlowe finds Mayfield attractive, and thinks she's being blackmailed - she was clearly confronted by a man in the LA train station - so he doesn't just report her location to Umney and finish up the job. Instead, he snoops about, pretending to be her jilted husband to the desk staff at the motel where she's staying, and eventually meets and talks to Mayfield.

Things get a bit more complicated from there, with some femme fatale business from Mayfield, a potential murder or death by misadventure but no corpse, the question of the whereabouts of that blackmailer, another PI sent by possibly the same "back East" people, and Mayfield's growing connection to the ex-gangster who owns half of Esmeralda. There's also some mostly-honest cops, and a tough hotel detective, who wander through near the end.

All the materials are there, but Chandler doesn't use them as effectively in 1958 as he did earlier in his career - the Kansas City connection between the second PI and the ex-gangster, for example, is mostly just shrugged aside as coincidence. In the end, Marlowe lets a murderer get away with a stern talking-to, and is rewarded for his bravery by a phone call out of the blue by Linda Loring, the One True Love of his life, who will come back to LA for him if he wants her to.

It's an incongruous ending that feels more like undoing and redoing Long Goodbye than doing up Playback. It might have worked if Chandler had done some work in the middle of the book to contrast Mayfield and Loring - though, frankly, they both seem to be to be cut from the same standard Chandler blonde-dame cloth.

Readers will likely take Chandler's novels in order - there's only seven of them to begin with. You can stop after Long Goodbye is you want to; it's enough of an ending for Marlowe anyway. Playback doesn't retroactively ruin anything, but it is a smaller and lesser thing to come at the end.

Brain Drain, Part 1 by Pierre-Henry Gomont

2026-05-26T08:00:00.125-04:00

This much is true: when Albert Einstein died in 1955, his brain was removed by the pathologist, divided into 240 sections, and, over the next couple of decades, somewhat divvied out to researchers. This only became widely known in 1978. There is, inevitably, a Wikipedia article about it.

Pierre-Henry Gomont's bande dessinée series Brain Drain tells a fictional version of that story. The first half of the story - published as Brain Drain, Part 1 by Dargaud in 2020 and apparently translated into English the same year by Edward Gauvin - sees Gomont getting a little cutesy with those facts. He changes the names slightly - the dead luminary is only called "Professor Albert" and the pathologist, actually Dr. Thomas Stolz Harvey, is here called "Stolz." And the ghost - or something - of Einstein is a major character. Gomont also diverges from the true history - more so than just having Einstein "alive" and commenting on the action - by making Stolz a horndog for a cute blonde neurologist and introducing rather more drama and running-about than I think the real Dr. Harvey saw.

Well, let me just point to that cover, which seems slightly (and oddly) a Fabulous Freak Brothers homage - that sets the tone for the whole exercise. Gomont has a aggressive line with a lot of mid-century influence in it, matching cleanly-drawn but lumpy people with slashing but precise backgrounds and objects. He also has an equally aggressive narrative tone: this is a story, and he's going to tell it to us, in a clear, detached, omniscient voice.

So "Professor Albert" dies, and "Stolz" performs the autopsy and announces the results to the assembled media. So far, so normal - but Stolz also, on what Gomont presents as a whim or a mania - or a way to get into the pants of that blonde neurologist - removes the brain and hides it, just before the body goes to be cremated.

(The real Dr. Harvey also removed Einstein's eyeballs and gave them to the dead professor's ophthalmologist. Stolz in this book does nothing similar. The historical Dr. Harvey also seems to have been substantially less secretive, making the whole thing more of a conspiracy among doctors, or just a "we doctors know best how to handle these things; we don't need to consider the patient's wishes" attitude.)

After the cremation, an older man shows up at Stolz's house, with the top of his head missing. It is, of course "Professor Albert." He seems to be physical and real in every way - he takes up space, drives cars, is seen by other people, and so on. He's also something like Stolz's Jiminy Cricket, and something like a canary in a coal mine about the state of the removed brain (which, in this book, is sitting in a glass jar, in some kind of liquid - formaldehyde, maybe? purified water? some manner of alcohol? - inside a box, in Stolz's basement).

Anyway, It Is Wacky. Stolz tries to connect with the executor of Professor Albert's estate - it seems to be widely known, or suspected, that Professor Albert's brain is still floating around - but has no luck there. Then large men in suits, who claim to be some kind of government investigators, come nosing around, and Stolz has to flee with the brain and Professor Albert.

This book is only part 1, so it ends with them on the run. Presumably, the second half will wrap up the story, though I don't see how it can reconnect with the actual historical record at this point. (The actual historical record is mostly "Dr, Harvey gave out pieces of the brain to his colleagues, and nothing much happened for twenty years," which is pretty boring in a BD.)

I would not read this hoping it will tell you the real history; it will not. But it is an energetic, goofy story told with a clear voice in a distinctive tone, with wonderful art, and I think Gomont has a point that he's driving the story to. So if the story of the removed brain of a famous historical figure doesn't squick you out, you might want to take a look.

All of This and Nothing: The Hurting Heart

2026-05-25T08:30:00.052-04:00

We're back to Obscure this week, with The Hurting Heart, my favorite song from singer-songwriter Richard McGraw, off his 2009 record Burying the Dead.

This is another artist I know basically nothing about. Somehow, I got on publicity lists for some small record labels in the early days of this blog - I know; I'm not sure why or how myself - and have gotten a stream of review material that way. Because of that, I think I got Burying the Dead via email: it was coming out, and a publicity person at the label had me on the big list of "media" - or, probably more likely, and sadly for me, "influencers" - so I got it, and listened to it.

I don't know how many other people did. It's a fine record, with a bunch of excellent songs. But there are dozens of fine records every year; I don't myself listen to most of them, and I'm sure you're the same. The world is big and full of wonders, which can be sad if you're someone who just made something wonderful and the world isn't interested.

But maybe I can cast a little bit of light on this raw, bad-love song, a decade and a half later.

This is another "you broke up with me; you're going on with life and I'm not" kind of song, with McGraw's immediate, tormented voice to make it real.

And you're not even a ghost
since you moved back home.

She's doing well; the singer is not - and knows it. He wants to get over this, but he's not there - I hope there's a "yet" implied, but you never know with bad-love songs.

And if I could set aside this hurting heart.
I'd bear your ring at your wedding.
'Cause I don't want to own it
and I don't want to show it.

That refrain is strong and true, and gives the song real power - it's a song that shows rather than tells. McGraw says "hurting heart," but doesn't describe it, or talk about his pain, just what his ex-lover is doing and what he insists he is or will or should be doing.

But he's not doing it yet. That's the point of a song like this, and McGraw has crafted a great one here.