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

Seven Places Without You by Juan Berrio

2026-10-06T08:30:00.000-04:00

Just reading two books by a creator doesn't make you an expert: let me say that up front. I read Juan Berrio's lovely wordless Kiosco earlier this year, and was happy to see his name again when browsing through my library's app. (Either the app itself or the publishers putting work into it are not the best at metadata, so one book has the author "Juan Berrio" and the other "Berrio Juan," so they are not linked in any clear way.)

Seven Places Without You was a 2018 graphic novel, originally published in Spanish because Berrio is Spanish (living in Madrid) and translated by Fiona Marshall for a 2019 English-language Europe Comics edition. [1]

The main character is Elena. She's young, living in a city - probably Madrid. Over the course of the book, we come to think that she's still a student. She's been living with Jorge, in his family's home, for some time, and it was good - at first. But Jorge is spending less and less time at home, ignoring Elena more and more. She doesn't know why, and he's been evasive when she tries to ask.

It has seven chapters, each set in a different place - hence the title. It starts in Jorge's family house, right at the moment when Elena decides she has to leave, and calls friends to see if she can stay there for a while. Those friends - Maria and Nacho - turn up in several chapters, as does Mario, another friend who has been pining for some time for Elena and awkwardly says so midway through the book. The second chapter is set in Maria and Nacho's apartment, before and during a party, and later chapters are set during a family dinner at Elena's parents' house, at Mario's apartment, in a park, at an evening out in a bar, and, finally, in Elena's new solo apartment.

It's mostly quiet and observational. Berrio focuses on Elena but we see her from outside. We know her thoughts - like anyone in the world - only from what she tells other people, and we're pretty sure she's not saying everything she feels. Berrio has a soft earth-toned palette, with squared-off panels not bordered by lines.

And, given the title, we assume, as the book goes on and there's no word from Jorge, that he will not be a character in the book. My just raising the question is possibly a spoiler, so I'll leave it at that. Seven Places Without You is a book about the Jorge-shaped hole in Elena's life, how she realized that it was already there and the ways that she began to fill that space in the early days after the break.

It's just as lovely, if a lot more melancholy, than Kiosco was. Berrio is incisive and thoughtful; his people are real and understandable and likable - even Jorge running away, even Mario clinging too close - and we see all of them through the lens of how they interact with Elena.

[1] I've praised Europe Comics multiple times before: they're digital-only and don't really promote much, since they're primarily a marketing effort from continental-European publishers towards English-language publishers, but they do - or did - a large volume of excellent books far outside the usual standard North American comics genres.

All of This and Nothing: Tuesday's Gone

2026-10-05T08:30:00.000-04:00

"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.

As I noted a few weeks ago, this series moves back in time - two parallel tracks of Famous and Obscure. The famous track has now gotten deep into my childhood: I tend to think the hugely popular songs we still listen to will tend to be from our childhoods, but there may be different opinions on the matter.

This week, it is actually a Lynyrd Skynyrd song, which It embarrasses me to type. ('70s kids loved the Skynyrd at the time, but often don't like to talk about it later.) For the tiniest bit of hipster cred I might have, though, my favorite Skynyrd song is Tuesday's Gone.

(Yes, another sad love song - I do have a type.)

The lyrics aren't complex: the singer is taking a train away from his woman, for what sounds like forever, even though he seems to still love her.

Train roll on, on down the line,
Won't you please take me far away?

Reading between the lines, the singer might be heading out because she already left. Or left in spirit - however you want to take it. It's definitely a song about something that's over.

Tuesday's gone with the wind.
My woman's gone with the wind.

Because this was the '70s, Tuesday's Gone is a whole epic thing: seven and a half minutes of twanging guitars and honkytonk piano and a string section - but that lead guitar line is amazing, and the singer has a great world-weary tone, and the whole thing earns its length.

Books Read: September 2026

2026-10-04T12:00:00.000-04:00

As I always say: this is mostly an index, and mostly for me. But here's what I read last month:

Ben Passmore, Black Arms to Hold You Up (9/1)

Grégory Mardon, Incognito, Book 1: Perfect Victims (digital, 9/2)

Gary Groth & Eric Reynolds, editor, MOME, Vol. 1 (digital, 9/3)

Martha Wells, Queen Demon (9/3)

Faith Erin Hicks, The Adventures of Superhero Girl (Expanded Edition) (digital, 9/4)

Liniers, Night Stories: Folktales from Latin America (9/5)

Ross Macdonald, The Drowning Pool (9/5)

Peter Bagge, The Complete Hate, Vol. 2 (digital, 9/6)

Chris Roberson, Michael Avon Oeming, & Chris O'Halloran, Shadow of the Golden Crane (digital, 9/7)

Ian Frazier, Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody (digital, 9/7)

Juan Diaz Canales & Junajo Guarnido, Blacksad, Vol. 3: Red Soul (digital, 9/12)

Charles M. Schulz, The Complete Peanuts, 1959 to 1960 (9/13)

Hayao Miyazaki, Starting Point: 1979-1996 (9/17)

Roy Thomas & Jan Duursema, Elric: The Vanishing Tower (digital, 9/19)

Ray Davies, Waterloo Sunset (9/19)

Steve Cuzor, The Red Badge of Courage (digital, 9/20)

P.G. Wodehouse, Ring for Reeves (9/20)

Jeff Lemire, Matt Kindt, & David Rubín, Cosmic Detective (digital, 9/26)

Nancy Peña, Madame Cat (digital, 9/27)

Loren D. Estleman, Don't Look for Me (9/27)

Next month I will read some more books, you betcha.

Antick Musings Is Old Enough to Drink Today!

2026-10-04T08:30:00.000-04:00

As of today, Antick Musings is twenty-one years old. That may seem impressive, but I have two children older than that. I also tend to see only the things that annoy me about the blog (my own badly-worded or trite thoughts, this horrible layout that I don't know if I even could change at this point).

But: yay! I suppose.

Every year on this day, I intend to post about the glorious holiday, and have succeeded most years. (I missed most of the big round numbers, due to a flaw in my character.) Since I'm starting to type this post almost a month ahead of time, it might actually happen this year.

(If you're reading this, and there's just some vague apology below, and it's late November: oops, I didn't.)

History of the Blog: Links to Links

For me, blogging often devolves into links to links that in turn link to other things. The Glorious Anniversary is no exception, so here's the history: first, second, third, fourth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth (published two months late and substantially shorter than the others), eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth (much shorter than usual, but on time), seventeenth, nineteenth and twentieth.

You may note that several years are missing in that list.

Yes. Yes, they are.

And let me quote a lightly edited version of what I wrote last year about what I grandly call The Myth of Antick Musings, because it's still as true as it was then:

I started this blog as practice, since the book-club company I worked for at the time was going to start up a bunch of blogs, and I would be tasked to write the one for the Science Fiction Book Club (SFBC). That corporate blog was scrubbed from the Internet long ago, and the company has changed hands several times. It may well be entirely out of business now; I see that Columbia House just died. So the fact that my half-assed practice blog is still running while the SFBC itself seems to be gone, well, that's a sign of something in the world, I guess, though I don't count it as a win.
After I was cast out of the SFBC (and, though I didn't realize it at the time, editorial work and the SFF field in general), this blog turned into exactly what I thought it never could, should, or would be: a book blog. Oh, well.

I used to watch moves and write about them here. I used to post notes and links to random things actually happening in the real world, too! We truly are living in the worst possible timeline.

History of the Blog: Easily Manipulated Metrics

At this point in the annual post, I traditionally throw in a table of the number of blog posts each year. Why? Would any reader care? I doubt it, but, somewhere deep in my psyche, I suppose I see it as the Blogging KPI, and so I must track it.

2025-2026 -- 406 posts
2024-2025 -- 407 posts
2023-2024 -- 405 posts
2022-2023 -- 410 posts
2021-2022 -- 279 posts
2020-2021 -- 265 posts
2019-2020 -- 55 posts
2018-2019 -- 178 posts
2017-2018 -- 368 posts
2016-2017 -- 263 posts
2015-2016 -- 144 posts
2014-2015 -- 258 posts
2013-2014 -- 434 posts
2012-2013 -- 285 posts
2011-2012 -- 332 posts
2010-2011 -- 445 posts
2009-2010 -- 711 posts
2008-2009 -- 880 posts
2007-2008 -- 834 posts
2006-2007 -- 841 posts
2005-2006 -- 809 posts

Anyone who cared could track my level of ennui, at least on a yearly level, from the above. I will note a remarkable consistency over the past four years: I've figured out a habit that works, and I am a creature of habit, so...let's see how long it can last.

I had a second blog - I know, but that's just the way we lived then - for a few years in the teens. It was called Editorial Explanations, and was snarky comments about editorial cartoons. I included those in my Post-Count KPI for while, but now I don't.

The Inevitable Links: Posts About Books

Antick Musings did turn into a book blog, first gradually (when I thought I still had a chance to get another editorial job) and then all at once (when I realized that would never happen).

Most of the posts here, for the last decade or more, are about books. So the bulk of this anniversary post, every year, is links to those posts, using sentences I wrote that I'm still inordinately fond of. Yes, this is a hugely self-indulgent thing - I do it every year, and I'm going to do it again.

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

It's my blog, I can do it however I want.

Heavy Bright is a positive, mostly uplifting story about fighting evil by whacking it with a spoon.

But the thing about life is that you can always do something today, even if you haven't done it for twenty years.

It isn't, in any appreciable way, the end of a trilogy, mind you. But you can definitely think of it like that.

We are all prisoners of the people we actually are, as we keep trying to be the people we want to be.

As I said, this is a horror story, so our main characters don't gather their forces and battle the monsters to save the world - that would be fantasy. They also don't find out exactly how it works, figure out how to counter it, and do so - that would be a thriller. And they don't gather evidence and present it to some authority who can shut down Home - that would be a mystery.

The promiscuous must always want to have sex with us, right? Since we are clearly wonderful and special, since we are us.

Some SF novels seem to predict the world we actually got, and are brought back out of the depths and lauded for that, as if being right was the point of fiction.

Digital books have a lot of advantages - they can be cheaper, they're definitely lighter, you can fit many more of them in the same space, they can be accessed almost immediately from almost anywhere, and so forth. But they can also mysteriously disappear in a way that never happens with physical books.

Prime has become a legend, off doing whatever in the hinterlands, but the Last Good Ruler calls him, using the Secret Codes of Yore, and tasks Prime with finding a new home for humanity among the stars, because that's exactly the kind of job where you want a murderous and unimaginative centuries-old cyborg inculcated with a toxic mindset.

That could be one marker of liberal vs. conservative, I suppose: the cartoon version is that liberals bend over backwards to "include" others, no matter what convolutions they have to go through from moment to moment in doing so, while conservatives refuse to change anything about themselves ever, gleefully doubling-down on their worst aspects and making those the core of their personalities.

Sorry, just a little joke there. Of course they beat the old man who is an alternate-world version of their father and grandfather to death. That's much better.

With translations, there's a lot of "I think" and "here's what has made it to my side of the ocean" - it's a big world, and how someone looks at home is not always the same as how he dresses up to go visiting.

If your world has dozens of races, all hugely distinctive from each other, the fact that some of them have darker skin than others will tend to seem somewhat less important than the fact that, for example, some of them are mammals and some are herptiles, or the whole predator/prey thing.

There's one exceptionally circumlocutious section almost smack-dab in the middle about the word "queer" and whether or not it applies to Gorey, which I take to mean that Gorey was probably gay but either led a mostly celibate life as an adult or that his affairs were so scandalous and so well-hidden that they can't be discussed in public even fifty years later.

In her wanderings, she needs to do quite a bit of bending and stretching, squeezing through tight spaces, lying languidly reading or tossing restlessly while asleep, standing thinking with hands on hips or reaching over her head to get something. Did I mention she does all of those things naked? She does them naked.

As long as we can understand how this world works, it can still be funny: we don't need to live in that world ourselves, or, frankly, for that world to have ever existed.

Sometimes you just want to be convinced that the old verities are still true. The sun rises in the east, robins nest in the early spring, and Andrews McMeel publishes cute little books of relationship cartoons for impulse purchases.

If you have the visual tastes of a hyperactive fifteen-year-old-boy, this will be the greatest comic in the history of everything. For anyone else, adjust your expectations accordingly.

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.

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.

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.

But that is their plan, and they insist that it requires a giant robot crab, and, like all fiendish plans hatched by secret societies of multiple villains, it works pretty well for a while.

As often with Hernandez, his pages are interesting and his artistic choices bold - sometimes bold in the "that is great" sense; sometimes in the "why on earth would he expect that to work?" sense - and I do believe that he thinks these pieces come together to form an overall narrative.

As my old boss would say, why spend a year writing a novel when a really good one only costs a few dollars?

The world is big and full of things, some of which are vaguely familiar even if you've never seen them before - I guess I find that weirdly comforting.

Stories don't have to be true to be good stories - frankly, it's more often the opposite.

Supremacists who make up lies about a minority to foment anger and try to get them thrown out of the country are common in many places.

Then again, I could be wrong. Perhaps the children yearn for stories of old werewolves and ominous tigers. Stranger things have happened.

And, lastly, I occasionally give up on a book mid-stream: I don't have to love a book to finish it, but I think if I find myself talking to the author, in my head: "Jesus Christ, Hughes, read the fucking room," then the book has lost an essential connection to me as a reader and I shouldn't try to make larger statements about it.

The Inevitable Links: Everything Else

I have posts about other things - not as many, and not as much as in the early days of the blog. In 2026, for the fourth year in a row, I had a series of posts about songs on Mondays. I think I'm not as good at writing about music as I am about books - some of you may have unkind thoughts, wondering if that is even possible, but I will ignore you - but I do it because I like these songs and I want to surface things I like here.

I post lists of new books - only physical books, but however and whenever I get them - here, under the overall title Reviewing the Mail (which I stole from Chuck Klosterman, who doesn't seem to be using it anymore). I've called those posts different things occasionally, too, mostly by mistake.

I also do quotes from the books I read - every Saturday as Quote of the Week, and twice a year in a closet-cleaning exercise. (Also available from that link, in big clumps on New Year's Eve and the Sunday closest to Independence Day.)

As The Blog Lurches Into a Twenty-Second Year

I gave up on big pronouncements and predictions long ago. Given my druthers, I'd be coming up on my fifteenth year or so as Editor-in-Chief of the SFBC. But they never were my druthers: that's the lesson life teaches us all.

I do expect to keep doing whatever you call what I do here. I am massively a creature of habit, and this blog is about five of those habits at this point. Take that as a promise, or a threat.

But it's good that the blog is old enough to drink, now: it takes pressure off me. I've been on a blood thinner - for six or seven years, I think? I can't even remember; I've been on various heart meds since '02 - which has meant that I can't drink. But, maybe, in some odd way, I can think that Antick Musings is doing it for me.

May your own creative endeavors similarly take over aspects of your own life, like kudzu in the summertime: that's my valediction this year.

Quote of the Week: Another Morning

2026-10-03T08:30:00.000-04:00

I thought about sitting up. The various governing bodies in my mind all agreed that this would be a good thing, but there were disputes over the timetable.

- Walter Mosely, Blonde Faith, p.174

Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography by Joshua Kendall

2026-10-02T08:30:00.000-04:00

I was an avid Doonesbury reader in my youth; I assembled all of the books eventually (up to about 2009, though I might have missed the rare one about the TV special) and read it daily in the paper. But I lost all those books in my 2011 flood, and never felt the need to either re-buy the old ones or get any of the new ones since then. G.B. Trudeau, the strip's creator, went to Sunday-only not too long after that, too, which killed one of the best aspects of the strip: its density and the way it told extended stories among a large cast, intersecting with the issues of the day. Doonesbury as a Sunday-only isn't the same thing at all; in a very real sense, the strip ended a decade ago.

But a decade after something ended is a good time for a retrospective, isn't it?

Joshua Kendall, a Yalie like Trudeau who has been a noted reporter and the author of several previous biographies, tells the story of Doonesbury the strip here, along with some biographical material about Trudeau. The book is called Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography, but it's not that much of a biography and it's much more Doonesbury than Trudeau.

On the other hand, Kendall actually got what seem to be extensive interviews with the famously reclusive and press-shy Trudeau - who famously went seventeen years at the height of the strip without speaking to a single reporter - and got him on the record at least a little bit about his personal life. So I'm not exactly complaining: Kendall probably delivered as much of a biography as the reclusive Trudeau would allow.

Also, Trudeau has had a frankly boring life, in the best WASP preppy manner. A WASP's name famously should appear in the paper only three times: birth, marriage, and death. Trudeau is already way over-exposed by the standard of his people. He had a big success right out of college with his first major project, and stuck mostly with permutations of that project for fifty years. He married another media figure (TV host Jane Pauley), which sounds like it could lead to drama, but they have had a quiet, apparently entirely happily life together, with three kids and no scandals, from all accounts. Add to that the fact that Doonesbury is an outward-facing strip, about things in the real (political, social, entertainment) world, not about anything personal, and Kendall had a much harder job than someone like David Michaelis, who wrote about Charles Schulz and his strip full of personal psychological insights.

Kendall does have the usual initial couple of chapters to cover Trudeau's ancestors and young life (through college and the proto-Doonesbury Bull Tales); it's the most interesting, new, and fresh material in the book, telling us the things we don't already know. (Trudeau had an ulcer in middle school! That was actually the reason he was classified 4-F in the draft! He also wrote and staged plays for years as a kid - which is interesting and new but deeply unsurprising once you learn about it.) After that, the book's chapters mostly align to eras of Doonesbury: Watergate, the rest of the '70s, Trudeau's first hiatus and the Reagan years, the big shift to post-college life, B.D. and the focus on wars and warriors, and one last chapter on Trudeau's long history mocking Our Current President.

It is not quite a critical reappraisal of Doonesbury; Kendall stays primarily on the reporting side. But he does map out the eras and major concerns of the strip, so this is a valuable book for anyone who might want to do that critical reappraisal.

Kendall also takes advantage of being an official biography to use a lot of Trudeau materials: there's a relevant Doonesbury strip on about half of the pages, including a lot of Sundays at full-page size. He also reprints other letters and ephemera throughout, since the book was already being designed that way - it's a much more intensely designed and carefully laid-out book than the standard biography, and a fine model for anyone doing a biography of a visual artist or cartoonist. (That old standard, the insert section, is nice as far as it goes, but having the art actually on the same pages as the relevant text is vastly superior.)

So Trudeau & Doonesbury is perhaps not as surprising or informative as one might hope: Trudeau is still private, and more than a little boring. Kendall does a good job with the materials he has, and the access Trudeau gave him, but the back half of the book does somewhat turn into "and then there was a two-week sequence about Dan Quayle, who Trudeau depicted as a feather." It's worth it for fans of the strip and political junkies of the last few decades, and those who still get a frisson from the iconic strips like "Guilty! Guilty! GUILTY!"

Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol. 3: Resurrection by Lewis Trondheim & Manu Larcenet

2026-10-01T08:30:00.000-04:00

On this side of the Atlantic, they all hit at once: in 2018, Europe Comics published (digitally) translations of the three Cosmonauts of the Future books, all turned into English by Mercedes Claire Gilliom.

But, in their original life, the first two both came out in 2000 and this third and final book - Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol. 3: Resurrection - was four years later. So that original audience might have expected, or at least have a reasonable suspicion, that the characters were a few years older this time.

A reader who pays really close attention and has the details of the first two books at his fingertips could have figured that out from the early pages of the book, too - our heroes, Gildas and Martina, are taller, and there's a reference to something "eight months ago" on the first page, an event that didn't happen in the previous books. They also think it's 2033, which would place it more precisely in time if I remembered what year they thought it was in the previous books.

(They are not quite correct, for reasons which become clear as the book goes on.)

They're not on the planet Mawis anymore; they're traveling around in a spaceship, along with two aliens (one in a human suit, their former teacher for killing stinky aliens). They don't say why, but we assume they're looking for the rest of humanity: Gildas and Martina are clones of space explorers who died in a crash on Mawis, and, now that they're growing up, it makes sense that they'd want to find their own people.

They do find a human-crewed space station, which confusingly (for them) seems to be a museum of their lives, exactly like the Mawis-created replica of their childhood that they grew up in. And that's somewhat how this book goes: it's simulacra and clones all the way down.

Gildas and Martina don't learn this for a while - they are very confused, and running about at high speed, often chased by clones of themselves using dangerous weaponry - but they have found human civilization, and it is not at peace. There's a faction run by their daughter Celta and a faction run by Gildas's sister Gaelle, and both use clones of the two of them - the obviously perfect human beings - as soldiers. Both sides are heavily armed; each is dedicated to the extermination of the other; neither is particularly amenable to persuasion or anything more peaceful than a ray-gun.

Do Gildas and Martina manage to bring peace to human civilization, leaning somewhat heavily on the fact that they are "the originals"? (I don't see why their clone-ness is terribly different from the hordes of clone soldiers, but it works, so I won't sweat it.) Yes, they do.

The story is a bit more confused than the first two books, and ramps up the slapstick running-and-fighting material from the second book as well. It does feel a bit like writer Lewis Trondheim and artist Manu Larcenet were escalating with each book, and hit their limit quickly with this third one. It is still fun, zippy adventure, but a reader can definitely see why they would think they'd exhausted the premise by this point.

The Kingdom, Vol.1: Anne by Benoit Feroumont

2026-09-30T08:30:00.000-04:00

I was sure this book was different, but I didn't know how much or in what ways. It looked like it might be for younger readers, which was hugely different from the first book I read by its creator, Benoit Feroumont: Gisèle & Bèatrice.

After a bit of research - mostly trying to navigate a computer-translated version of Feroumont's detailed Wikipedia page - I believe that The Kingdom series is more typical of Feroumont's work than Gisèle & Bèatrice was, but there's a certain sharp wit and love for antic mischief that I suspect is common in his work. After reading this one, I don't think The Kingdom series is specifically for young readers, but it's all-ages in a European sense: full of things certain American readers (you know the kind) would be shocked to give to their little darlings, but pitched to be understandable to an audience roughly ten and up and reasonable for that audience for most normal human beings.

The full title is The Kingdom, Vol. 1: Anne; it was originally published in 2009, has colors by Feroumont's wife Christelle Coopman, and was translated by Mercedes Claire Gilliom for this 2017 Europe Comics edition. (There are ten books in the series; the six that existed before 2015 were translated in the years of Europe Comics' flourishing and the rest seem to be sitting in limbo for now.)

It's one of those lightly fantasy stories set in a pocket kingdom - small enough to be just the unnamed capital city and as much countryside as needed for stories, small enough that the King can be a local figure, and specifically with no neighbors that impinge on the story. This one, I think, sets up a lot of the characters and situations for later in the series. In particular, this one is about the title character, Anne, the friendly, happy, ultra-competent maid who has been taking care of the King - this isn't the kind of book with a deep sense of the organizational structure of a big house - who loses her job and has to move on.

You see, she's been frightened by owls hooting in the night, and so has been sleeping in the King's bed to avoid them. (He's the usual good-natured-but-ineffectual doddering old guy, along Lord Emsworth lines, so there's no thought or possibility of hanky-panky.) But a flock of little yellow (talking) birds have just arrived in town: this is annoying and disruptive, but not seen as particularly weird or unnatural. They're gossip-mongers - I might say "shit-stirrers," to be more precise - who delight in telling people things that will annoy, anger, or frustrate them, and particularly things that will cause them to fight with each other.

Anyway, the birds told the mean Queen about Anne and the King, so she fired Anne. The King gives Anne an old house down in the city, which she is to turn into a tavern. On the way there, she has some slapstick adventures, attempting to attack the birds and running into the large blacksmith's apprentice François, who immediately falls madly in love with her. (This, I gather, will be a major plot engine for later in the series.)

Anne does find her new home, which is a dump. But the birds more-or-less befriend her - they're still jerks - and help to clean it up. And she does turn it into a tavern. The climax of the story is the opening night of that tavern, when the King's children - two goofy sons and a more sensible daughter - come in disguise to patronize that tavern, plus a large contingent of the palace guards, sent by the Queen to give the impression that the tavern is raucous and unpleasant, so it will fail.

Does the character whose name is in the title of a the first book in a comic adventure series succeed despite all odds? Of course she does.

Feroumont tells this story in a broad way, full of jokes and big body language - it's a funny book that makes very little attempt to be subtle. And it's mostly tween-friendly, assuming your tweens aren't shocked by the "sleeping"-with-the-King plot-starter.

Blonde Faith by Walter Mosley

2026-09-29T08:30:00.000-04:00

I used to read Walter Mosley books regularly - at least the Easy Rawlins series, which I devoured in the '90s. But first kids, then my exile from editorial work slowed down my reading - and mysteries took the first and most severe hit in that slowdown.

So I now realize that 2007's Blonde Faith - the tenth book in the series, of sixteen novels and some short fiction so far - is the first book in this series that I've read in probably twenty years and only the third Mosley book I've read at all this century.

Add to that the fact that I'm a white East Coast guy reading a mystery series about a Black detective in historical LA and points nearby, and I might need to warn you that you have no reason to take my opinion as having any weight whatsoever.

With that said: this book is set in early 1967. As usual, the series hero is Easy Rawlins, a man originally from Houston, a WWII veteran, and a guy who's tangled in his own head all of the time. (That's been true throughout the series: Easy is a smart man who is good at the private-detecting work he does, off and on, but not as good at getting through the interpersonal stuff in his own life.) He's forty-seven at this point, though still, as seen in this book, chasing women that are literally younger than his own stepson. (Catching them, too: it's that kind of book.)

That also means that this series, since it's in the first person from Easy's POV, gets stuck in his head. It's been a long time since I read the earlier books, so I can't make a comparison, but this one doesn't have as much plot as you might expect from its three hundred pages. It's basically: Easy looks for two guys, both old friends, and eventually finds them together. Some other things happen along the way, but not a whole lot of complications or sideplots.

Meanwhile, Easy is tormented because the great love of his life - or at least his recent life; he has capacity to chase women in bulk and has for decades at this point - Bonnie Shay, is getting married to her other boyfriend, an African prince. There's some complicated backstory there that might have come up in previous books or might have been between books: Easy's daughter Feather needed some tricky medical treatment, and the prince paid for it, but his price was Bonnie, who he took from Easy at that point. (But he's supposedly a good guy, so this might be somewhat colored by Easy's memory and prejudices.)

The two missing men are Christmas Black, a former Green Beret caught up somehow (on the "trying to stop them" end) with a nasty ring smuggling drugs via Vietnam, and Easy's old best friend Raymond "Mouse" Alexander, a gangster who is accused of killing Pericles Tarr. Easy tracks down Tarr, who turns out to not be dead, and meets the smugglers, who are posing as Army officers. As required by a mystery novel, the two plots somewhat intersect, because Black and Mouse know each other.

Easy's voice is compelling and believable, but I found him more than a bit whiny here, especially for a guy who bags one hottie (the woman of the title), is well on his way to a relationship with a college-aged additional hottie, and flirts very successfully with one or two others I can think of - all while being despondent because he lost Bonita entirely because he didn't bother to get in touch with her for an extended period of time. A man can definitely protest too much.

And the mystery is a bit thin here. Easy is just trying to find two men, who he's pretty sure will be not that far away and who are both so good at violence that it's unlikely they'll be in any serious trouble. And that turns out to be the case. The tension is mostly about Bonnie, and about Easy's own internal demons - this is closer to a literary novel than a mystery. I do like literary novels, admittedly, but I prefer their heroes not be utterly obnoxious twerps, and Easy is really close to that line here.

All of This and Nothing: Songs That No One Will Hear

2026-09-28T08:30:00.000-04:00

This is possibly the most Obscure of my obscure songs: a single from one of those bands that is basically one person: the Swedish indypop "band" we are soldiers we have guns. (Stylized in all-lower case, for maximum indy cred, I guess.)

we are soldiers we have guns ran for the back half of the Aughts, roughly, with a few EPs and at least one full-length (get up, get out, - still on Bandcamp for anyone interested to look for more). The one person in this case was Malin Dahlberg; no idea what she's doing these days but I hope it's creative and fulfilling and wonderful.

Songs That No One Will Hear is the first we are soldiers we have guns song I ever heard; I think it was featured on Fingertips (which has been the way I discovered a lot of bands over the years - might be good for you, too. If not, my general advice is to find some outlet that is similar enough to your tastes that you always find what they feature interesting).

The lyrics don't exist anywhere online, and we are soldiers (I'll stay lower-case, but I have to abbreviate it somehow) has a lo-fi sound - so untangling exactly what Dahlberg is singing might not be worth the effort.

But, for a lovely mostly-quiet song from an obscure band from an obscure part of the world, Songs That No One Will Hear is almost a platonically perfect title, and the song itself lives up to it. Just listen.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 26, 2026

2026-09-27T08:30:00.000-04:00

Three books for this week - one I bought myself (trying to use an old gift card that didn't go through in the end, curse the luck) and two new books from Tachyon. The Tachyon books will be first, according to my usual rules.

Mary G. Thompson has written short fiction and novels for younger readers, but I think Precious Children is her first novel for adults. It's a SFnal horror novel about cloning, of the replacing-loved-ones style, focused on one family who seem to have awful luck in the mortality of their children but luckily are rich enough that those children can be replaced and their existence continued - the question being how closely that existence continues, and what happens to the person previously using the brain that becomes the newest version of their beloved son. It's just been published by Tachyon.

Also from Tachyon, even more recently published if I can trust the metadata, is a new collection of short fiction by the least positive man in Hard SF, Peter Watts. Fold Catastrophes collects eleven stories originally in various anthologies, websites, and magazines, going back to 2013. There's also a new original story at the end.

And last of the three is the book I bought myself. I've gotten behind on Charles Stross's Laundry-verse novels, possibly because they do try to be substantially more depressing and gloom-soaked than the real world, which has been a tricky thing this past decade. I believe Quantum of Nightmares is the second of the "New Management" series, set officially after the apocalypse, and following Dead Lies Dreaming, which I wasn't super-fond of. This one seems to be less "Peter Pan-inspired goofy young people putting on a show," though, so I hope to give it a try. I also already have the sequel to this on the shelf, and want to get to the supposed final actual Laundry novel The Regicide Report. (Which, come to think of it, I could probably just read without hitting the others first - but it looks even gloomier than Standard Stross, which is incredibly gloomy indeed.)

Quote of the Week: A Relapse of Poetry

2026-09-26T08:30:00.000-04:00

I have generally found, as I have gone around the world, that people are tolerant and ready to forgive, and in our little community it was never held against Rodney Spelvin that he had once been a poet and a very virulent one, too; the sort of man who would produce a slim volume of verse bound in squashy mauve leather at the drop of a hat, mostly on the subject of sunsets and pixies.

- P.G. Wodehouse, "Rodney Has a Relapse," p.131 in Nothing Serious

Leonardo the Genius (Vol. 1) by Bob De Groot & Turk

2026-09-25T08:30:00.000-04:00

The credit on the book just says "De Groot and Turk," but other official descriptions include De Groot's first name. I'd have to go to a secondary source to learn that Turk is actually an artist named Philippe Liégeois. Similarly, this material looks to be forty or fifty years old, but the book itself gives a 2002 publication date in French and a 2016 date for this translation by Montana Kane.

The same secondary source notes that the Léonard comics - the terminal "o" pops up in Dutch and English translations, and possibly elsewhere, but the original French and Belgian editions don't have it - began in 1974. I think this book collects '70s stories in a package - possibly the start of an entire repackaged series - from the early days of this century.

This is one of those works of humor that seem to be very popular in their home culture - there have been fifty-seven volumes in French, continuing to the present day - but have not travelled as well. At least, it's barely traveled into English, which is the only bit I can really evaluate.

The premise is simple: there's this genius, living in a small town in a vaguely Renaissance world (but with some Renaissance-versions of modern things when the jokes require them), who invents crazy things. He looks a lot like Leonardo Da Vinci. This is the first book of his adventures: Leonardo the Genius.

It starts out with single-pagers, and even the longer stories only last four or five pages. I see that this series originated in magazines, and might still appear in magazines today, which explains that.

The jokes are silly and broad, which makes me wonder why it hasn't traveled into English more successfully. There is something vaguely European about it: like Asterix, there's an underlying sense that you have to have at least a little bit of cultural/historical grounding to get the jokes, and maybe general American audiences react badly to that.

Over the course of this book, Leonard hires an assistant - just called "Disciple" here, though I gather he gets a name in some later stories. This allows even more slapstick, and for the inevitable "guy wrapped up in bandages in a hospital bed" results of some less-successful experiments.

As I said, it's all just a bit old-fashioned - big squared panels with tightly ruled lines, squared-off dialogue balloons, that mid-century style of humor, a big-nose cartooning style from Turk - but that's just a sign of the era it came from. A few of the jokes are unfortunate now - there's one in which Leonardo invents the first airplane, and then a swarthy guy tries to hijack it to Cuba, ha ha ha - but most of it is durable all-ages humor that still basically works.

I find this kind of series fascinating, because it's so obviously A Big Deal in the land of its birth, probably hyped every year when a new volume comes out and the big birthday/Christmas wish for thousands of kids, and yet it's totally unknown in my country. The world is big and full of things, some of which are vaguely familiar even if you've never seen them before - I guess I find that weirdly comforting. The book itself...ehhh, it was OK. I think it's a lot more resonant if you grew up with it.

Glorious Summers, Vol. 3: Little Miss Esterel by Zidrou & Jordi Lafebre

2026-09-24T08:30:00.000-04:00

This is not my nostalgia. But, reading this book, I was reminded that the whole series is about the nostalgia of people around my age and their parents, remembering the era when the parents were young and energetic and the children were young and free.

Glorious Summers is a six-book series, written by Belgian Zidrou and drawn by Spaniard Jordi Lafebre. They were published in French quickly in the teens, and the first five translated into English - this third volume by Laura Vergnaud - for publication in 2018 by Europe Comics. They're digital-only; Europe is not quite a full-line publisher, and acts mostly as a proof-of-concept and an engine for licensing material to American/British publishers who would then bring out their own editions. Each one is set in a particular year, and tells the story of one summer vacation of the Faldérault family.

So Southbound! began with a frame story in what seemed to be roughly the present day, with an aged Pierre Faldérault and his wife Maddie, before flashing back to 1973, when they had four young and rambunctious children. The Calanque dove right into 1969, without a frame story, when the Faldérault family had slightly younger children and only three of them.

This third book is Little Miss Esterel - that's the model of car they drove in those first two books, and this is her story, in a way. The frame story isn't dated, but it's probably the mid-Nineties: the youngest child "Peaches" (Paulette) is still at home, in her early twenties (wearing a Nirvana T-shirt), and the other three are out, with their own lives. But the bulk of this book, like the others, is about one summer - in this case 1962, the year the Faldérault family got that Esterel and went on a two-week long vacation (minus four days; as always Pierre overruns the beginning of the holidays finishing up his comics-making work).

The family is obviously even smaller in 1962 than it was in 1969: Peaches and her older brother Louis aren't even born yet. Julie is a toddler and Nicole is a baby, still breast-feeding. But the traveling crew - in that brand-new Esterel - will include Maddie's parents as well.

She's an only child - we learn some details of why late in the book - and her parents seem old in 1962, while the Faldéraults are in their energetic mid-twenties. Maddie's father Henry - lovingly called "Fat Pop-Pop" by Julie - had a heart attack the year before, and around the same time sold his hat store and retired. He's a genial, happy man. His wife Yvette is tighter-wound and massively more controlled - we think she's been managing her husband's health (and maybe his store, and her family, and whatever else) for a long time, back to the War which still looms in their history.

Pierre thinks it will be fun to have Henry and Yvette along; that they'll drive down to the coast and camp out and Julie will love having "Fat Pop-Pop" to play with. The last of those things is true, at least.

Yvette is an inveterate organizer, with a Michelin guide in her hands, and she takes over entirely - they only make it as far as Saint-Etienne (which is reasonably far South, but not "The South" and certainly not on the Mediterranean), and settle into a hotel there. Yvette leads them around to see all the cathedrals and churches, in strict Michelin-star order.

Worse, the hotel has a Belgian-style restaurant, so they end up eating as if they were at home instead of French cuisine - but not even that, since Yvette browbeats the staff into taking frites off the menu for their entire visit, to protect Henry's heart. (And what is more Belgian than frites?)

Julie has a fine time, of course - she's a toddler. And Nicole is a baby. Yvette is having the vacation she wants, mostly - as much as she can be happy about anything. Henry is thrilled to still be alive and spending time with his family. Pierre and Maddie push back in some ways - they commandeer a wheelbarrow to act as a stroller for the girls - but the tension between Maddie and her mother simmers, until it breaks out into a full-fledged argument in the (slow, stuck-in-traffic) drive back home.

But Maddie learns things about her mother she didn't know, and Yvette learns to unbend a bit. We see the whole Faldérault family making a stop at a frites stand just over the border, the beginning of a tradition that was called out in the previous books. And the core family does have a quick camp-out, in their own backyard, back at home - we are convinced they will find ways to be happy and to do the things that strengthen their family, no matter what.

That's the nostalgia, or the story-telling aspect of it - the haze of memory that turns it all to something good in retrospect. Even a vacation you didn't love at the time becomes a good story years later.

As always with this series, the story is true and realistic, with interesting characters we care about - even Yvette, in the end. And Lafebre's art is magnificent in a clean, crisp story-telling style, with great faces in particular. Glorious Summers is a marvelous example of what comics can be: this series tells stories almost entirely outside any of the mainstreams of North American (or British, or even Japanese) comics - domestic, evocative of specific moments in the past, family-centered, lovely, small, perfectly formed.

Into the Bewilderness by Gus Gordon

2026-09-23T08:30:00.000-04:00

There are some signals that a book is actually for kids. Sometimes they're obvious: the shelf it sits on in a store or library, a big sticker on the spine, quotes from "little Jimmy, age 10."

Sometimes, though, you find a book in a library app, and think it could be a fable or something else quirky like that. And then you realize it's one of those stories about two people who live together Ernie-and-Bert-style, and that snaps a lot of other vague or goofy things into perspective. "This is a book for ten-year-olds," you realize, "I might enjoy it but it's not for me."

I hit that point about halfway through Gus Gordon's Into the Bewilderness, which sent me to his bio at the back of the book. He is known for writing and illustrated books for "small people," as he puts it. I think Harper Alley, the publisher here, might also be at least in part an outfit aimed at small people, though the copyright page doesn't have the age guidance I usually look for as my dead giveaway.

Anyway, this is nice and pleasant and a bit cozy, largely because it's a book for younger readers. Keep that in mind, and it's quite enjoyable.

Luis and Pablo live together in a cabin out in the middle of nowhere. We know this from the beginning of the book: it starts with a map that includes their "Bewilderness" as well as other places including "The Really Pointy Mountains" and "Grumpy Toad Valley" and "Weird rock place."

Luis is a bear who wears a sweater and a tuque; Pablo is a mole who wears overalls and glasses. Luis is the Ernie-coded one: he carries a guitar, makes up songs, and has silly ideas. Pablo is Bert-coded: always reading books, more knowledgeable, deeply grumpy.

Luis yearns for culture: shows, arts, musicals. There are none such in the middle of nowhere. Pablo notes that his people never leave this area, since his great-great-great grandfather ran off and...he leaves this story vague for a long time.

But Luis wins two tickets to a musical in the Big City, and - after some mostly-friendly banter, Pablo eventually decides to go with him. They go wait at the bus stop, finally get a bus, and take the long, circuitous (we've seen the map) ride to the Big City.

It is, indeed, Big - very different in every way from what they're used to. In interesting ways, surprising ways, fascinating ways. They go to find the theater where the musical is playing, and things don't go like they or the reader expects.

Of course, the end of the story sees them back in their cabin in the Bewilderness; books for small people must always renormalize. And we get the inevitable pitch for friendship: books for small people sometimes are about family, but most of the time - especially with a set-up like this - they lean heavily into the "friends are the best darn thing in the world" framing.

Gordon has a nice cartoony style - his self-portrait looks a bit Quentin Blake-y - and he does the vaguely-smartass dialogue and narration on a kid-appropriate level. This is a renormalizing book about the importance of friendship for ten-year-olds, but it's quite entertaining on that level.

Nothing Serious by P.G. Wodehouse

2026-09-22T08:30:00.000-04:00

I am on a multi-year, vaguely serious plan to read "all" of P.G. Wodehouse, in the lovely little Overlook hardcovers. He wrote around a hundred books, so it'll take a while, but I've got fifty-two down now (counting this one) and eight more sitting on the shelf to be read. So I do need to track down some of the more obscure and rare books - which might mean shelling out more money than I feel like spending at the moment - but it's all doable.

(I had a somewhat different shelf of Overlook Wodehouse before my flood in 2011 - probably forty or so; no idea how distributed between read and unread - but I'm taking the current shelf as the master record, so I'll be done when I have all of them and have read them, whether that's for the first time or not.)

Some of those books spark interesting posts on this blog, since Wodehouse was a deeply entertaining and fun writer for around seventy years.

But some of them are collections of short stories, largely about golf, originally published in 1950, and my options are to give potted plot synopses of each story (boring for both of us) or a general airy overview (quick and easy for me; possibly dull and vague for you). I hope you realize which way I'm going, and will forgive me if it is dull and vague.

Nothing Serious collects ten stories originally published, if I can trust the dates on the copyright page, between 1939 and 1948. Some may also have been original to the book. It leads off with two stories of the Drones Club, follows that with five about golf narrated by the Oldest Member, and then ends with three odd stories, including one very odd one featuring Lord Emsworth selling encyclopedias in a Long Island suburb.

Wodehouse in short form tends to be concentrated: there's not as much room for complication, so it's mostly the pure young-love-thwarted plots, with one major obstacle thwarting that love which is then cleared by the end of the story. There's occasionally other plots - Emsworth sells encyclopedias, as I mentioned above, to help a young woman who is already married (and pregnant) build a nest egg - but assuming each story is going to be about this guy and the lady he loves is a solid strategy.

And these are good stories, with some fine Wodehouse prose, from the prime period of his career. There is rather a lot of golf in it; short Wodehouse seems to be about golf more often than most readers expect. (Did he write short stories for a golfing magazine? I've never dug into the question.) It's not part of any of his major series, and not famous: if you read Nothing Serious, you're, like me, deep into the Wodehouse Cult and looking for more to keep going. Luckily, as I noted, he did write about a hundred books, so you can keep going for quite a while.

All of This and Nothing: I Can See Clearly Now

2026-09-21T08:30:00.000-04:00

This week swings back to Famous, with Johnny Nash's 1972 song I Can See Clearly Now.

(Speaking of seeing clearly, I wonder if it's at all clear what my organizational structure was for this year? I don't think I ever actually said it. Both Obscure and Famous songs are running in reverse chronological order, though the two streams are entirely uncoupled, to keep them alternating. And they would have to be, since, in a weird bit of symmetry I didn't plan, only five of the Obscure ones are from before this century and only five of the Famous ones are from the current century. There's a reason for this structure, a deeply silly one which I'll explain when we hit the relevant song.)

As with all of the Famous songs, I'm assuming you know it by this point. Even if you weren't around in 1975, it's been in plenty of media; the copy I have is from the Grosse Pointe Blank soundtrack, where it runs under the opening credits in that traditional movie undercut-the-mood-with-a-poppy-song way.

The song itself is happy - purely so. There's few enough of those.

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind

There's no subtext, no hidden darkness. I was going to spin a whole theory here about how it reflected the post-Watergate mood when I realized I had the date as 1975 in error - it's actually from 1972. So I don't even have that. Just a happy song about things finally going right, after a long time when they weren't. That's plenty.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 19, 2026

2026-09-20T08:30:00.000-04:00

I'm stacking these posts off into the future again; I'm writing this the morning of Saturday, September 5. Why? Because I already have a "Reviewing the Mail" post for tomorrow and one for next week. And the exact timing of my mail really doesn't matter to anyone.

This time I have one book, from the library; it came in much later than the others I requested at the same time. It didn't come from any farther away; the library system is basically just this one county, anyway. Maybe someone already had it checked out. Anyway, it's here now, and I'll probably read it "today" (two weeks ago as you read this.)

Night Stories is a comics-format collection of "Folktales from Latin America," as the subtitle puts it - Latin America is a huge, diverse region, so I'll have to see if it's one tale from here and one from there or a more focused look at a particular area. It was written and drawn by the Argentine cartoonist Liniers, best-known for his daily strip Macanudo. There also seem to be extensive text features, since this is a book aimed at younger readers (and, more so, at their librarians and teachers, as the ones who will spend the money to buy it).

I suppose it's something of a companion to the earlier book The Dragon Slayer by Jaime Hernandez from the same publisher, which also collected folktales in a comics format. I would be somewhat surprised if any of the stories repeated, but I suppose I'll see.

Quote of the Week: A NYC Magazine Party in 1946

2026-09-19T08:30:00.000-04:00

...and next I met a small legal cog in a major political engine. And next Janoth's latest invention in the way of social commentators. And others, all of them pretty damned important people, had they only known it. Some of them unaware they were gentlemen and scholars. Some of them tomorrow's famous fugitives from justice. A sizable sprinkling of lunatics, so plausible they had never been suspected and never would be. Memorable bankrupts of the future, the obscure suicides of ten or twenty years from now. Potentially fabulous murderers. The mothers or fathers of truly great people I would never know.

- Kenneth Fearing, The Big Clock, pp.384-5 in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s

The Incal, Vol. 5: The Fifth Essence - The Dreaming Galaxy by Alejandro Jodorowski & Mœbius

2026-09-18T08:30:00.000-04:00

The Incal series is both a continuous narrative - individual volumes stop rather than ending; the primary conflict just keeps building over the whole series - and explicitly set up as a series of three sets of diptych titles. It begins with The Black Incal and runs into The Luminous Incal, most obviously. Then came What Lies Beneath and What Is Above.

But this fifth book has the more-complicated title The Fifth Essence, Part One: The Dreaming Galaxy. It will all end with the second Fifth Essence book, with a similarly parallel title, Planet DiFool, but it indicates, possibly, that writer Alejandro Jodorowski's metaphysical musings are starting to overwhelm the skiffy adventure here.

(Or that they did so some time back, and the titles are just catching up now.)

The Incal books started as medium-future, vaguely space-operatic adventure: the main character is a somewhat sleazy, low-level private investigator, John DiFool, who gets dragged into events of cosmic significance when he finds the title McGuffin, one of two sentient items of untold and fundamental power. By this point, the antagonists of the first couple of books have all become allies, the two Incals have merged with a minor character, and the team has been battling the real enemy, the Great Darkness, for a book or two. In this book, they mop up the last bits of conventional conflict, the Techno-Centreur - who I gather is a person rather than a group; it was less clear in the previous book - and the remnant bits of government of this human-dominated galaxy that they hadn't already co-opted.

But The Great Darkness is the usual overwhelmingly powerful outside-context force of destruction, manifesting as spiky black goo that envelops and transforms/destroys everything it can, and that is prone to the sort of loud histrionic bwha-ha-ha speeches that we always expect from our cosmic villains.

The plot of this book starts off with that mopping up - DiFool and his allies must attack the War Star, the final stronghold of the Techno-Centreur and his forces, so they can consolidate control of the human worlds and tackle the Great Darkness. There's a lot of impressive pages from artist Mœbius - I still insist the biggest fans of this series saw this before it was translated from French (this edition is translated by Justin Kelly and Sasha Watson) and are mostly reacting to the magnificent visual storytelling and not the dull repetitive Jodorowski dialogue.

There's some fighting with the Great Darkness as well, mostly by the personification of the Incal, which - for a reason Jodorowski doesn't make entirely clear - means the Great Darkness was pushed away now but is now able to completely conquer the entire universe twenty-one days later. (It seemed entirely capable of conquering right now if not stopped; I don't quite get the distinction here, or what the twenty-one-day delay means.)

Anyway, the only way to save all life everywhere is for every last human being - I don't think Jodorowki means "sapient being," because the alien Bergs don't seem to be included - to go into a special sleep called the Theta Dream. If any single human doesn't, every last person will die.

(I am constitutionally opposed to mystical skiffy stories that center on "give up all of your individuality to The Great Mind and everything will be Special and Wonderful," but there's no hive-mind yet, so I'm withholding judgment for now.)

Anyway, at the very end of this book, that's mostly happened in the human galaxy, surprisingly. But, there are also multiple billion humans over in the Berg galaxy, after DiFool fucked their queen a few books back - I swear I am not joking, though either they're all babies or the timeline is weirder than I thought - so he has to zoom off over there to convince all of his offspring to fall asleep to save all life everywhere.

Meanwhile, DiFool has to be dragged kicking and screaming through every last plot point: he doesn't want to do any of this. He's somewhat annoying, but also the only character with any individual personality left and the only real source of human conflict in the series, so it's not too bad. And we know that he'll give in every time: he's a weak-willed loser being led by his impressive nose through the whole thing, a convenient hook for plot and action.

As always, these books are visually sumptuous and impressive. The dialogue cluttering up those pages is somewhat sillier and repetitive, but space opera is not known for deep characterization and Algonquin Round Table-esque conversations anyway. You come to The Incal for magnificent Mœbius pages, and suffer through the goofy Jodorowski plot to get them.

The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing

2026-09-17T08:30:00.000-04:00

I've been reading random noir novels in various Library of America omnibuses over the past couple of years: this one is smack in the middle of the Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s book. It's by Kenneth Fearing, who was a poet before turning to writing crime novels, and this is his most famous book.

The Big Clock is from 1946, and is modernist enough that it feels - well, not exactly contemporary, but like it takes place in a world close enough to our own that we can still feel the texture of it and understand how it works. Fearing tells it in chapters from multiple points of view, but the main character, and viewpoint for about two-thirds of the book, is George Stroud.

Stroud is head editor of Crimeways, one of a group of sophisticated, strong-selling magazines from Janoth Publications in New York on various aspects of modern life. The whole group has a consistent style and method; they're not necessarily the very biggest magazines - they have notable competitors mentioned in the book - but they sell a lot of copies, pay exceptionally well, and pride themselves on having the best talent. (Think Time-Life of about the same era and you'll be close.)

Stroud is happily married, but...he's the main character of a mid-century noir novel, almost as smart as he thinks he is, and drinks about as much as any similar character. He falls into a brief affair with Pauline, the girlfriend of Earl Janoth, head of the whole operation - very brief, one overnight and then a weekend in Albany a few days later. On that Sunday afternoon, he drops her off at her apartment, watching her walk up to the building from across the street - and be met by Janoth, who came back from a trip to Washington, D.C. earlier than expected.

Janoth fights with Pauline up in her apartment, gets angry, and kills her semi-accidentally. He gets out of the building quietly and goes to see his second-in-command/fixer Steve Hagen. Janoth knows he saw someone drop off Pauline, but isn't sure who it was. That man could unroll his otherwise-solid alibi. Steve hints that he will have the man killed, if only they can find him.

So they set the entire apparatus of Janoth Publications to work to find this mysterious man, with a thin cover story about the man being the central figure in some bribery scheme. And the whole project is given to one of Janoth's most trusted and seasoned editors to run: Stroud.

Stroud knows the threads that could lead to him - a painting he bought with Pauline that morning, his physical description, a low-life bar the two visited, that trip to Albany - and does all he can to seem to be pursuing the investigation zealously while putting subtly wrong people on particular aspects of it and letting the results point as much away from him as possible. After all, no one expects that the clues will lead to him in the first place - he's potentially safe unless there's something really obvious.

But Janoth Publications is good at this, and they find multiple people who could identify the mysterious man - including the eccentric fine artist Louise Patterson, who painted and (coincidentally) competed with Stroud to buy the very painting he'd bought the morning of the murder. Stroud's long interest in her work - he has a Patterson on the wall of his office, and several at home - could potentially blow up the whole thing. And his wife Georgette is already worried that he's become distant, as he did once before during an affair.

This is a noir, so someone has to die. The last line of the novel explains who and how - I won't explain further. (It's a short book; just reading it would be quick enough.)

Fearing tells this, as I said above, in a modernist way, with multiple first-person viewpoints, though Stroud is the dominant voice. Each of them have their own quirks and foibles; they're distinct people, though we only spend a lot of time in Stroud's head. The only other repeat narrator is Janoth himself.

Fearing is also witty and interesting on the workings of Janoth Publications itself, including how big media operations will mold public conversation in specific ways - not the usual thing a reader would expect in a noir novel, particularly a short zippy one like this, but it's authoritative and interesting.

Even further afield, there's a sub-plot about a scheme called Funded Individuals - in which some group of young people would be given support and roughly a million dollars to get started in life, something like a vague early sketch of a venture capital fund but much more general, official, and personal - which I don't think would work at all like Fearing's characters assume it would, but is interestingly quirky and turns up more in the book than I expected. It's the kind of book that feels like it has everything relevant that ran through the author's head while writing it: full of quirky sidebars and precise moments and arch opinions.

Ew, It's Beautiful by Joshua Barkman

2026-09-16T08:30:00.000-04:00

Did you know there are at least two comics about animals that talk? (Random animals, out in the world, and not talking to humans, but to each other.) I say "at least" because if there's two, there's probably more than that.

The one I was vaguely aware of is called (unsurprisingly) They Can Talk, and has been running for more than ten years. But I ran across a book in my library app from a different comic, False Knees, and decided in my whimsical way to read that one.

For a reductive comparison, Talk has a lot of domestic animals (dogs, cats, and so on) who live around people, and occasionally goes wider. Knees is mostly about birds - lots of different kinds of birds, depicted as far as I can tell exceptionally accurately - with occasional cats. So choose your talking-animal strip appropriately.

Ew, It's Beautiful is the second False Knees collection; it was published in July of 2025. The cartoonist is Joshua Barkman, who lives in Southern Ontario and who I suspect sees a lot of the same birds that I do here a few hundred miles south in Northern New Jersey.

What I mean by that is that I can't necessarily identify all of these birds - I do see jays and crows and cardinals and pigeons and a whole lot of those small nut-eating birds of various kinds - but I do recognize most of them, thinking "I've seen dudes like that at the birdbath out the back window." Barkman gives them body language and speech - obviously - but he mostly keeps them birds; they're all recognizable, and, more subtly, the things they care about and the topics of the comics are very bird-centric.

Ew, It's Beautiful is funny, but not Borscht Belt funny - not funny like so many daily-style strips. The strips are deeply about how these birds (and others, poking through while writing this I saw a strip about a beaver and one with an ant) actually live and behave, slightly exaggerated for humor but not all that far. I don't think I laughed out loud, but I appreciated all of the strips: they're thoughtful and interesting and smart in subtle ways.

The art is ink and gouache, for a soft organic look and bright natural colors. It might not need saying, but Barkman is very good at depicting specific birds; it's kind of his thing here.

Barkman has arranged this book in four sections according to the seasons, starting with Winter; there's about 130 comics here, so roughly one for every three days of a whole year. And you can go through it with these loud, demanding, millet-loving little fellas, if you like. They're not overly fond of humans, but I think you'll come to like them.

Brain Drain, Part 2 by Pierre-Henry Gomont

2026-09-15T08:30:00.000-04:00

Stories don't have to be true to be good stories - frankly, it's more often the opposite. So it's no surprise that French bande dessinée creator Pierre-Henry Gomont took a lot of liberties when telling the posthumous adventures of Albert Einstein's brain.

As I pointed out when I wrote about the first half of the graphic version, Brain Drain Part 1, the real story was boring: a pathologist removed Einstein's brain and eyes after death - and against the physicist's wishes - and gave out brain segments to his colleagues what seemed like willy-nilly for the next twenty years until the public finally learned about it. No important research resulted.

Gomont seems to want to follow the general outlines of that story in this second volume, Brain Drain Part 2, without actually saying the dénouement takes place in 1978, as it did in the real world, or tying himself to that sad "no important research." It makes this second book expansive in odd ways, as readers who know the timeline start wondering if decades are passing between pages. In his fictional version, there's also a major scientific finding - somewhat parallel to the real-world research of Marian Diamond in the 1980s - by his fictional neurologist Marianne Ruby.

But let me start at the beginning. Pathologist "Stolz" is on the run with "Professor Albert," who appears as an older man with the top of his head missing and an empty cranium (he wears hats a lot, so people don't notice that), and with the brain of Einstein in a jar. The independent existence of the Professor - zombie? ghost? avatar? - is the central motif of the series and its defining fantasy element; Gomont never explains it: it just is. It is presumably 1955, the year Einstein died. The FBI is chasing them, for never-fully-defined hugger-mugger reasons - the Professor does not want them to get their hands on him, nor does Stolz.

Stolz is said to be married with children; they appeared only briefly in the first book and he has fully abandoned them in this one. He apparently never contacts them again after running away with the Professor. The narrative also blithely says that a doctor can always find work, given his skills - presumably to explain how Stolz has funds for this life. But a doctor can find work as a doctor because he is officially licensed, under his name, on large, maintained lists that detail his training and expertise. This seems implausible for a man officially on the run from the FBI.

Anyway, after hiding out for some indeterminate time, Stolz tries to broker a deal with the head of the Institute where the Professor worked, a man called only Otto. Gomont doesn't give all the details - and the Professor assumes the unqualified Stolz will be in charge of the overall project - but it seems that there could be a research project, blessed by the Professor's family and the Institute, under Stolz as a figurehead and with Ruby as the primary expert.

The Professor and Stolz do enlist Ruby, but the FBI is not a part of (or amenable to) this deal, and capture the Professor and his brain for presumably-unpleasant researches of their own. (This is the MK-Ultra era, though that was the CIA.) Stolz somehow rams the FBI agent's car to retrieve the two remnants of Einstein, and the three (or four, counting the brain separately) flee (in what must be another car but isn't explained), more deeply Most Wanted than before.

Up to this point, the Brain Drain story seems to be taking place basically in 1955 - possibly a few months have passed, but no substantial amount of time. From here, though, the calendar becomes much more flexible.

Ruby demands to begin the research, so Stolz looks up an old professor, Dr. Seward, who now runs an odd, out-of-the-way asylum in Kansas. There are a lot of brains there for Ruby's comparative anatomy studies, and Seward does his own LSD-based researches on the Professor, escalating to cloning the brain (!!!) multiple times and doing surgery on the original that leaves the Professor unable to speak. Stolz is sidelined this whole time, but finally breaks free with the Professor after Ruby finishes her research and heads out of the plot almost for good.

Some years seem to have passed, during which Stolz has not worked as a doctor. But he goes back to hiding out with the now-silent Professor for what may be another decade or so. And he eventually sends part of one of the cloned brains to Ruby, which allows her to expand her research and finally make solid, groundbreaking findings, which she releases in the standard scientific manner.

…which tells the public that Einstein's brain was preserved, and causes a media frenzy. This leads to the actual ending, which I think is meant to be in roughly 1978, as in real life. Stolz finally does what he should have done, back at the beginning, and Gomont's narration nods towards the outlines of real history.

That narration, by the way, is assured and supple and smart: Gomont is very much telling this story, and makes it clear several times he's diverging from history to do so. His art is equally enticing, with realistically lumpy people, sometimes impressionistic vistas, and detailed mid-century objects to ground it all.

I don't think Gomont's themes entirely line up with what actually happened in the real world, and I find his timeline a bit odd. He also seems to want this to be, in the end, the story of the posthumous friendship of Stolz and the Professor, which is entirely fictional - and, for the bulk of those years, the Professor was incapable of speech after the events of this book. It is a very odd and quirky thing. But I do appreciate that about it, and I think it's almost exactly what Gomont wanted it to be. And that's a great thing to be.

All of This and Nothing: Down in the Valley

2026-09-14T08:30:00.000-04:00

I think this is another case where the song I really like is from a side band or otherwise quirky project. Which is why I count it on the Obscure side.

But, this week, the song is Down in the Valley by a band called The Broken West.

(Some light Googling later: looks like this was the frontman's first band - he's a guy named Ross Flournoy - and the one that brought him and the rest of the group some attention, but they broke up fairly quickly. Flournoy formed another band, which also doesn't seem to have gone very far, and no one's bothered to update Wikipedia for more than a decade. As always, I hope he's out there making music and living off it, and no one around him has had the free time to update some random website.)

And I have no idea what this song is really about.

Sun down, blood horizon, now it feels alright
No one feels the darkness down in the valley tonight

It's all evocative, allusive - it sounds like a Western of some kind (or I may be latching on too hard to the band's name), but there's none of the usual Western trappings: guns, cowpokes, cattle, shootouts, Indians.

But, as I've said more than once in doing these song-based posts, you don't need to understand a song to like a song. A song is about listening, and feeling. This one has a great feeling, and sounds big and impressive: take it on that level.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 12, 2026

2026-09-13T08:30:00.000-04:00

Hey, remember last week? This is the the rest of that stuff: books from a few authors that I ordered via Alibris, from a whole bunch of used-book stores, for various reading projects. I'll get to all of these over the next year or three, I expect.

So first I have three books from Donald E. Westlake's Dortmunder series:

The second in the series, Bank Shot, in which Dormunder and his crew steal (not rob) a bank.

The one that was my favorite the first time through, Drowned Hopes, a big book from 1990 about trying to retrieve a huge cache of valuables left buried thirty years ago - in a town that has since been abandoned, at the bottom of a reservoir.

Third from Westlake is Bad News, the 2001 novel about a casino heist.

I also have two more serious detective novels from Ross Macdonald:

What seems to be a brand-new, printed-on-demand edition of his 1956 novel, The Barbarous Coast, which isn't what I'd expected from a used-book dealer but I'll definitely take it.

The other one is The Blue Hammer, the last book in the series, from 1976. As I recall, the last two in the series are a bit thinner than the rest, but we'll see if I agree this time through.

And last are two books in the "Collector's Wodehouse" series - all of P.G. Wodehouse's roughly one hundred books, in a uniform trade dress, published in the early years of this century, which I half-collected once and lost thirty or forty of them to a flood.

First up is Kid Brady Stories and A Man of Means collects two story-series from very early in Wodehouse's career. I've never read them, and don't expect much, but the point of a complete library is to include weird little-known things like these.

And then last in this batch of books is Wodehouse's 1921 humorous novel A Gentleman of Leisure, which I also don't think I've ever read.