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

Tongues, Book 1 by Anders Nilsen

2026-04-17T08:30:00.249-04:00

I don't know why Anders Nilsen is coy with some of the names in this retelling of Greek mythology in the modern day. One of his main characters is clearly Prometheus - even if there were any doubt or possible nuance, he's visited by his brother Epimetheus. Explicitly brother, explicitly named Epimetheus. There's also Gyges Hekantonchieres, here female, but clearly the hundred-handed monster of the Titans' generation from mythology and the daughter of "the Voice," which I take to be Gaia. [1]

But the Zeus figure is called The Omega, and Nilsen's explanatory text explicitly says he is "considered by some to be the return of the Roman god Jupiter" - even though, in the book, we see him millennia ago, so calling it a "return" is a bit of a red herring.

Perhaps Nilsen is trying to be pan-mythological, at least in a small way - another character is Athena-Seshat, yoking somewhat similar figures from Greek and Egyptian myth into one character. That's the only reference to non-Greek myth I noticed, though. For more of the vague names, the Omega's top lieutenants are Might (probably Typhon) and his "partner" Violence (thus maybe Echidna), who are here to be threatening, violent, powerful, and loyal, but not to actually do much.

Prometheus is called The Prisoner, which of course he is. He's chained to a mountain cliff, somewhere dusty and desert. His immediate surroundings, though, have bloomed and flowered, because spilling the blood of an immortal - The Prisoner calls himself and his family "gods," even though, in Greek myth, the generation of the Titans were distinctly a different thing from the subsequent generation, the actual gods - does have effects, over the long years.

But there are three strands to the story here. All are caught up in this ancient war of the gods and Titans (I perhaps shouldn't use that word; Nilsen never does). All are in this dusty desert landscape, which is never named explicitly but seems to be more Iraq - or perhaps I should say Mesopotamia - than the Greek mountains. And I expect they will all come together in the end.

I have to expect, because that ending is not in this book. Even at three-hundred-plus pages, Tongues, Book 1 does not come to a conclusion. It stops at a imagistic moment that could serve as an ending, if it had to, but the three plots are still separate, and the fate of humanity still in the balance.

The Prisoner is one strand. We see him chained to that cliff, in the modern day and in the distant past. He talks to the eagle who comes every day to eat his liver - mostly the current eagle, since all mortals die, and "the eagle" is a millennia-long sequence of mother and daughter eagles, generation after generation. This lineage of eagles talks, because they have been eating The Prisoner's liver for those long ages, and Nilsen shows us some of the process by which the earliest eagles learned to speak.

Tongues is about language, at its core, or at least the Prisoner's strand is. The ability of language to chain and control and define the world, maybe - the way it confers power. What the Prisoner gave humanity, in this telling, is explicitly language, not fire.

Another strand of the story is the orphan girl Astrid, found like Moses floating down a stream as a baby, raised by a middle-class family in what I think is Kenya. Nilsen heavily hints that she is the reincarnation of the first real human, who The Prisoner pulled from the mud, saving her from suffocation, millennia ago. That first human went to live in a village of hominids who looked just like her, but didn't have her facility with language - until she joined them, when her example sparked the same transformation in the children, and cascaded from there down through the ages to make our modern world.

Astrid is guided by a talking chicken that calls herself Hermaea - I think she is meant to be a female version of Hermes rather than a gastropod - as part of a vast conspiracy among the "gods" to kill The Omega. The Prisoner has predicted that death, which may have been the inciting reason for his imprisonment. And Astrid is very clearly the possible manifestation of that prophecy, though only possible: nothing is predetermined in Nilsen's telling, but some outcomes can be seen and planned for.

So Astrid - a girl, maybe ten years old - is being groomed to murder a god. A god who is also the head of an insurgent group, or possibly even quasi-ruling force, in this unsettled region. His armed forces are called the Rings; they seem to be mostly humans, though led by at least a few gods. (Again, Nilsen calls them gods, but, aside from Athena-Seshat and The Omega, they seem to be from the prior generation. We do see a background character who may be Hephaestus.)

The third strand is the least connected, and seems to be taking place slightly before the Astrid sections. An American young man with a teddy bear strapped to his backpack is wandering through this region. We don't know his real name; he gets called "Teddy Roosevelt" by two mercenaries or military contractors who pick him up. He may be a pawn on The Omega's side, part of a plan to foil the assassination attempt, or maybe something more complicated.

"Teddy" did something horrible - we think mostly accidentally, or thoughtlessly - back at home, and is traveling to atone for it, or to obliterate his memory, or hoping for a random death somewhere foreign. Teddy probably couldn't tell us which, either. He is picked up by those two violent men, on the roadside in this dangerous desert - dangerous inherently, from the heat and the lack of food, and dangerous because of the Rings and the (unnamed, unseen, implied) other forces the Rings are fighting.

There's one last major element: The Cube. Astrid has it, Teddy dreams of it. It's brightly colored, filled with something amorphous and unreal, an eruption of the numinous and godlike into everyday life. It has something to do with The Omega - embodies or contains some of his power, maybe, or possibly is the one thing that can kill him. The Omega knows it is out there, and is seeking it - as are his minions.

Nilsen bounces among those three main storylines - The Prisoner, Astrid, Teddy - and some secondary points of view, including The Omega (appearing as a Swan to a woman in the mythological past, talking to The Prisoner, working with his minions, being mysterious and knowledgeable). Again, this is Book 1 - it doesn't end, exactly.

But it is full of fascinating images and thoughts, driven by the conversations among the large cast and their various dangerous situations. Nilsen's pages, as in his previous major book, Big Questions, are laid out like no one else's, with odd-sized panels crawling across backgrounds or expanses of white, sometimes cramming together as if compacted, sometimes soaring separately across the page like eagles. Those panels are, I think, never square - his central shape is that hexagon on the cover, and his panels are hexagonal as much as anything else. They're not regular, but their sides have two or three line segments, possibly rotating or morphing under the weight of the story.

There is also a lot of philosophizing in Tongues; a reader has to be willing to take long stretches of a chained Prisoner debating the purpose and worth of humanity with his various visitors, plus more pointed, immediate conversations involving Astrid (and various gods) or Teddy (and various violence-minded men). There is a lot to think through here: Tongues is a deep and rich work, both in its story and the telling, even if it's still unfinished.

If you're in the mood for a philosophical, mythological mediation on whether the human race is salvageable or not - or is inherently twisted, so that the world is clearly better off without us - you will want to take a look at Tongues.

[1] This gender-swap somewhat sets up a battle-of-the-sexes element that stays undertone throughout this book. This is Book 1, so it may rise higher in the narrative before the end.

Blacksad, Vol. 1: Somewhere Within the Shadows by Juan Diaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido

2026-04-16T08:30:00.096-04:00

I've read parts of the Blacksad series before, and generally found it to be strong work but entirely in a derivative mode - my post about Amarillo probably has the most detail there. But I thought it might be time to go back and re-read the series from the beginning, since I'm not sure I ever did read all of it.

That's how I got to Blacksad, Vol. 1: Somewhere Within the Shadows, which has as much noir as you can take, and maybe even more than that. As is the whole series, it's written by Juan Diaz Canales and illustrated by Juanjo Guarnido, and was originally published in 2000 and then translated by Anthya Flores and Patricia Rivera for a 2010 American edition. The current editions of the whole series seem to be e-book only, from Europe Comics, which is where projects that don't have a current serious North American publisher go, so they don't entirely die.

The book itself doesn't say this, but it's set in a somewhat fictionalized 1950s USA, as seen by a couple of Spaniards two generations later. It's also an anthropomorphic story, so everyone is some variety of animal, which, as I recall, maps somewhat uneasily with the racial politics that shows up later in the series. (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. But, again, it's my sense that the Blacksad series is never subtle about anything, no matter what opportunities it has to do so.)

Anyway, this is the introduction to the series, which means it has to do a lot of heavy lifting in its forty-eight pages. It's a bit too stuffed, which leads to a sense of it being a "noir Greatest Hits." Series hero Jon Blacksad is a private detective - more implied than said; there's not much room - whose old girlfriend Natalia has just been murdered. The cop in charge of the case, Smirnov, drags Blacksad in for vague reasons - in a more grounded story, Blacksad would be warned off the case; here he's basically told "hey, you're the hero, go on and solve this, won't you?"

Blacksad has quite a bit of very noirish, derivative-Chandler musings, presented as captions, through which he narrates his investigation of Natalia's death. Since there aren't many pages, there's no room for dead ends in this case: the just-previous boyfriend he turns up is important, a thug shadowing Blacksad attacks him and then provides important backstory, and so on.

Blacksad is beaten up (check), thrown in jail (check), and confronts the smooth, corrupt rich guy who attempts to bribe him (one very big check), before providing the ending required by the form.

Somewhere Within the Shadows has nothing surprising or new in it, but I should admit that it's not trying to be new or surprising: the point here was to tell as noirish a story as Canales and Guarnido could work up, and they succeed entirely at that. It's second hand at its core, but it is gorgeous and atmospheric, and Canales handles the standard furniture of this genre confidently and consistently. I can still wish that it had a little more originality or specificity, but that's clearly not what the creators were going for here, and they solidly hit the target they were actually aiming for.

Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol. 1 by Lewis Trondheim & Manu Larcenet

2026-04-15T08:30:00.072-04:00

First of all: I'm surprised to see the "Vol. 1" after reading the book; this walks and talks like a standalone. But I suppose it was successful, because it got two sequels.

I believe Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol. 1 was the first time Lewis Trondheim (here the writer) collaborated with Manu Larcenet (here the artist) - this was originally published in France by Dargaud way back in 2000. They later (along with Joan Sfar) did a few volumes in the Dungeon series, under the Parade subseries, but I think that's been it - according to Wikipedia, they haven't done a project together in two decades.

I think Cosmonauts was aimed at kids, but I could be wrong: it's fairly sophisticated, and the kids at the center of the story are weird kids. On the other hand, it is French, where the ecosystem for comics of all types is deeper and more complex than in North America.

Martina and Gildas are elementary-schoolers, in some fairly urban place somewhere. This is French, so we could call it Paris and probably be right, or close enough. Gildas is new to the class; we see him join on his first day. Martina is already there, and Gildas is given the seat next to her.

Martina thinks everyone else but her is a robot, designed to pretend they're real and make it seem like she's living on normal Earth. Gildas thinks she's wrong: everyone but him is an alien pretending they're real and making it seem like they're living on normal Earth. Despite their differences of opinion, they become friends, tentatively each accepting that the other is real and not a robot or alien.

They then go about trying to prove their slightly competing theses, as a preparation to exterminating the aliens/robots to save Earth. This is in the humorous mode, so their attempts to confound or cause violent harm to people to reveal their robot or alien nature are played for laughs - mostly.

Martina and Gildas do learn the truth, and this is the kind of book where the truth isn't "they're just very imaginative kids, and will grow out of it." It does all work out amusingly, and the kids get to be the ones driving the plot the whole way. Larcenet's cartoony style makes the occasional violence funny, and works well with Trondheim's script, which has quite a lot of long speeches, since these are the kind of kids who don't shut up about about their crazy theories.

As usual with Trondheim, the humor gets a bit dark and existential, but he keeps the kids central and important: this really is their story, and, in the end, it's about how they were right. As I started off by saying, I'm not quite sure where Trondheim and Larcenet could go from here, so I suppose I need to read the sequels and find out. And any book that leaves the reader with a thought like that is clearly a success.

E Is for Edward by Gregory Hischak

2026-04-14T08:30:00.094-04:00

I don't read coffee-table books much. Very few people do, of course - there might be critics who do round-ups for something like the NY Times Book Review once or twice a year, but most of us read through a coffee-table book every few years at best. Assuming we read it, and not just plop it down in its natural home, to be poked through at odd moments when our phones are less compelling than usual.

(Thinking about it, the coffee-table book is yet another example of the wide array of boredom-reducing technology that was outcompeted by phones.)

But I did read this one - all the way through, beginning to end, like a "normal" book. So I suppose I might as well say something about it.

E Is for Edward is a celebration of the work of the illustrator, writer, and artist Edward Gorey. The subtitle is "A Centennial Celebration of the Mischievous Mind of Edward Gorey," and it was indeed published last year, the hundred anniversary of Gorey's 1925 birth. The author is Gregory Hischak, curator of The Edward Gorey House - the museum created from Gorey's home and full of his stuff - which means he's probably the best current person to give an overview of Gorey's work.

It is not a biography - there have been several of those. It doesn't reprint entire works by Gorey - the Amphigorey series already does that. It's also not primarily a process book, though there are some sketches and unpublished work. (That's good, because most Gorey fans will want to see the stuff they recognize.)

Instead, Hischak organizes Gorey's wide body of work into eight loosely-themed chapters, from "Hapless Children" to "He Wrote It All Down Zealously," to cover as many of the hundred-plus books Gorey published in his lifetime and the other projects (credits for PBS Mystery!, costumes and set design for a famous 1970s staging of Dracula and a few other theatrical projects, a mostly-just-mentioned vast flow of commercial illustration work that he did for decades) as possible. It's a well-designed book, with lots of Gorey artwork throughout, and Hischak is a knowledgeable guide through it all.

We do get sketches of bits of Gorey's life, mostly out of order, although the first chapter does the whole childhood 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.

(I prefer to believe the latter, but the former is more likely.)

Anyway, the book is mostly "here's a cluster of stuff by Gorey with loosely related themes," one cluster after another. Among those loose clusters are things like ballet, murder, nonsense verse, and clothing. It's informative and interesting, and does - as a coffee-table book must - include lots of Gorey's art, presented well.

My only complaint is that the book drops into reverse-type - white on a deep green - far too often. Designers used to know that knock-out type is inherently more difficult to read, and saved it for special occasions, but, like everything else, the standards of the past are no longer enforced, and children now disobey their parents.

Other than that, it's a handsome, comprehensive look at the work of an American original. And it's large and heavy enough to kill a small child if dropped on them from a height, which would probably amuse Gorey.

All of This and Nothing: In the Branches/The Coal Mine Fall

2026-04-13T08:30:00.062-04:00

"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.

This week we flip back to Obscure, with a band that I've tried to fit into this Monday series almost every year. (The band is all men, I think, so they really didn't fit with Portions for Foxes.) I finally managed to do it.

The Builders and the Butchers have a sound that I want to call unique - it's folk-based, but more in the rock vein, though nothing like the concept of "folk rock." They sound like what would have happened if rock had developed in the Appalachians, out of murder ballads, rather than the Mississippi delta.

Maybe. Something like that, anyway.

They have a lot of great songs, and they have a new record coming out this year that I haven't heard yet as I type this.

And, maybe because picking one song was tough, what I chose was a medley of two songs from their live record Where the Roots All Grow. So my favorite Builders and Butchers song is In The Branches/The Coal Mine Fall.

B&B songs are deeply atmospheric, sometimes telling semi-clear stories but more often full of apocalyptic, specific, haunting imagery, to imply and tease and suggest:

They left the angels singing
In branches of a burning tree
'Said it was all a game.
And your daddy got bent and twisted
In the bed that he made.
You'll end up the same.

Or, in one of the lines that comes to my mind most often:

A true love will leave you on your knees in the rain
A true love will leave you in the rain

This medley has the energy of a great live recording, two great songs full of atmosphere and menace to run through, and sees the band at one of their peaks. I recommend all of their stuff, for anyone who likes dark Americana music, but this is, I think, a magnificent entry point.

Quote of the Week: Handing-Over

2026-04-11T08:30:00.003-04:00

"And then when you've collared him just hand him over to me," Ricky instructed. Jackson wasn't against entrapment - it took up the bulk of his business - nor was he against clearing the streets of one more pervert, but he wasn't at all sure about the handing-over bit. He wasn't a vigilante, he really wasn't, although his idea of right and wrong didn't always conform to the accepted legal standard. Which was a nice way of saying that he had broken the law. One more than one occasion. For the right reasons.

- Kate Atkinson, Big Sky, p163

Red Ultramarine by Manuele Fior

2026-04-10T08:30:00.111-04:00

What do you get when you tell the story of Daedalus and Icarus, and combine it with a parallel story about a modern architect named Fausto? Does it matter if the architect stays resolutely a secondary character, and makes no deals with any infernal agencies? How about if the whole thing is told in slashing, imagistic hues of black and red? Or if the architect's girlfriend Silvia is the main character?

Those are some of the elements in Manuele Fior's graphic novel Red Ultramarine, which I think is his earliest work to be translated into English. The Italian original came out in 2006 - and is the earliest book listed on his website - and this translation, by Jamie Richards, is from 2019.

I don't think I entirely understood what Fior was trying to do here. Why does King Minos seem to be the same person as the esteemed doctor that Silvia consults about her boyfriend's obsession? How does that doctor's assistant, Marta, connect the two worlds - Silvia and Fausto in the modern day, Icarus and the rest in ancient Greece? And why is Marta young and gorgeous - and, notably, naked - in Greece, but older and more settled with the modern doctor?

The story, such as it is, bounces back and forth between the two timelines. Icarus works with his father near the labyrinth, both are eventually thrown into it and have to escape, and do so in the traditional way with the traditional tragic end. Meanwhile, Silvia consults the doctor - who hectors her and rants about Faust for no obvious reason - about her boyfriend's obsession with perfection and labyrinths, is given a cream by Marta that promises to make the large birthmark on her face "go away," and uses that cream, which turns her entire body the color of the birthmark and sends her back to the time of Icarus. Silvia consults the doctor - who is somehow also in ancient Greece and has the same face as Minos, but is dressed differently, so maybe they're not the same person? - and demands that he send her back to her world, and he responds in much the same confusing wordy flood as before, which makes her hysterical.

All of the dialogue in Red Ultramarine talks around things: nothing is stated clearly. No options are laid out cleanly. The connections are symbolic, imagistic, implied. And all of the talk about Faust doesn't lead anywhere cleanly - it comes across as a red herring.

Speaking of colors, the title is also a bit perplexing. The book is steeped in red - several of the characters, especially in Greece, have dark red skin tones, and red is an element on every page. Ultramarine, though, is entirely absent from the book - that slash of blue on the cover is the only blue in the entire book. The art inside uses black to complement red - black as the base, the core element, red as the embellishment, most of the time.

The art is gorgeous and striking, almost abstract at times in its stark outlines and elegant simplicity. It's not simple in a cartoony sense, but simple like design, like a mid-century poster. It's visually stunning throughout, a succession of compelling pages, even as the words confuse and obfuscate.

In the end, I took this as an early work by a creator still figuring out what he wanted to say and how to say it. Possibly also a creator more comfortable with pictures than with the words that partner them - able to make the art say what he wanted but not quite as adept yet with the words.

Big Sky by Kate Atkinson

2026-04-09T08:30:00.122-04:00

The fifth Jackson Brodie novel, Big Sky, came out in 2019, after a nearly decade-long gap since the previous book, Started Early, Took My Dog. It's structurally like the previous books: Brodie is an important viewpoint, but only one of several, and the story circles around both a group of characters, many of whose thoughts we see, and some unpleasant and illegal activity both in the present day and the past, which all comes out in the end. They're all crime novels, but I still don't think they're really mysteries - there are police, detecting things, and sometimes Brodie doing detection as well, but the detection is not the focus and the feel is much more like a literary novel.

Well, Kate Atkinson did begin as a literary novelist, winning the Whitbread for her first book Behind the Scenes at the Museum, so that's not surprising.

This time, we're on the east coast, back in Yorkshire, in a cluster of towns and hamlets and villages of which the one familiar to me is Whitby - from Dracula. Brodie is living in a rented house nearby, doing minor private-detective work, mostly watching or entrapping unfaithful husbands, and trading custody of his teenage son Nathan with his former partner, Julia, who is working as an actress on the Collier TV show nearby.

One of the other viewpoint characters returns from a previous book - Reggie Chase, a teenager in When Will There Be Good News?, is now a Detective Constable working on a cold case this time. (There's always the underlying question in a series of how swiftly time passes - I think, for the Brodie books, it passes normally, and everyone gets as many years older as the calendar indicates.)

The crime this time is sex trafficking, which causes some tonal shifts in Big Sky, and also means Atkinson is more reticent about showing the bad things underlying the plot than previously - not always to the book's benefit. We do see a few of the women trafficked, but none of them from inside their own heads, and Atkinson's politeness in skipping over all of the actual criminal activity means they stay ciphers, or plot tokens. This is clearly a post-Jimmy Savile novel; there's a (fictional) trafficking ring that was discovered and shut down a decade or two previously. The two heads of the ring were caught: one suicided and the other is now dying in prison. But there were rumors of a "third man," who was never identified - Reggie and her partner are running down leads related to that now, after a victim from those days gave a new interview and named some new names.

The other viewpoint characters are are peripherally related to the ring that is still running - the second wife of one figure, her teenage stepson, a local businessman who might be brought into the scheme by the current three conspirators, and some secondary characters.

I find that the Brodie novels, and maybe Atkinson in general, are a bit of a hill to climb starting out - Atkinson has to run through her large, disparate cast, to identify everyone, place them in the world, and explain their backstories and how they're related to each other. That takes the first fifty or seventy pages of the book: it's all compelling writing, but it can feel a bit like homework. Once the narrative gets past that point, though, her strengths shine out more clearly, as she can make connections and cut back-and-forth between strands and (several times this book) carefully give the reader the impression something particular (and generally shocking) has happened, while leaving herself room to show that impression was mistaken.

Big Sky is a bit messier, and I think not quite as successful, as the previous books: Atkinson can't show us sex trafficking the way she could murder and abduction, so it's all abstracted and on the level of tut-tutting rather than visceral. But the characters are sharply drawn, their thoughts full of insights and pointed moments, and the writing is as supple and engaging as ever. Not quite as good as the previous books is still very good.

Was That Normal? by Alex Potts

2026-04-08T08:30:00.103-04:00

Philip is about forty. He has one of those jobs you can do from anywhere, on a laptop, so he does it from his apartment, alone. He lives in a British city, probably mid-sized - not very specific, not very special. His apartment is garden-level, which means he looks out his window, while typing on that laptop, below the street. He doesn't have any long-term friends, or any connections with colleagues that we see - the closest person in his life is his landlady/roommate, an older woman who intermittently tries to engage Philip and be friendly with him.

Philip isn't all that good at being engaged and friendly. He's wrapped up too much in his own head, the kind of person who obsessively thinks about what's he's doing, what he should be doing, and if there's anything that he wants to be doing. (There usually isn't..) He goes out to the pub now and then, because he thinks he should or because he thinks he'll have a good time this time, but he inevitably ends up drinking too much to be social and pays for it later.

Was That Normal? is a graphic novel, by British creator Alex Potts. It covers a few months in Philip's life - how he starts from that point of being stuck, how he's searching for connection, what happens to him, and where he ends up. There are no major epiphanies, no huge revelations, no amazing transformations - like all of us, Philip is deeply embedded in his own life, and all changes will be gradual and incremental.

But he does want more, want something different. He does try, in his fumbling, uneasy way, to open up to experience, to look for things that would make his life brighter. He gets dragged out to a concert, and is struck by the singer, Gina. He sees her around town, and strikes up a friendship.

He obviously wants more, but things are messy - Gina has a volatile not-quite-ex and doesn't seem terribly interested in anything more serious than friendship with Alex. But she is friendly, and it looks like it's been a long time since Philip had a friend.

He's uncomfortable with a lot of the day-to-day of life, the kind of person who over-thinks everything and then has trouble just doing even the little bits of social interaction that more thoughtless people never waste a moment on. That might not change - or not entirely. He's going to stay Philip. But he might be able to be a Philip a little more comfortable in his own skin, a Philip who tries more things, a Philip who spends more time with people and gets better at it. I do say "might" - Potts, again, is not going for epiphanies or transformations here; this is a realistic, grounded story about a real person in a real world, and nothing is guaranteed.

Potts draws Was That Normal? with a slightly rumpled, indy-esque line - immediate and grounded, with his people not quite as pretty as a reader might expect. His panel borders are hand-drawn, just a bit uneven. The colors feel just a tone or two off from purely realistic - slightly more of a picture than the thing itself, usually in earthy tones, with lots of yellows/tans, browns and dull reds for backgrounds.

Was That Normal? could be a little hard to take, particularly for readers with a lot of Philip in their own makeup - but it's well-observed and thoughtfully true, and does provide some hope for this Philip...and, by extension, for all of the rest of us.

Daredevil by Frank Miller & Klaus Janson, Vol. 3

2026-04-07T08:30:00.151-04:00

Credits are always a tricky thing for assembly-line comics. Projects tend to have a particular, clear breakdown of responsibilities - this guy writes, that other guy draws, a third guy inks - but those comics tended to be monthly, and monthly deadlines lead to messiness. (Ask the guy who spent sixteen years in a business that had a minimum of seventeen "months" a year.)

And creators want to work with each other - sometimes the same crew for a while, sometimes a one-off with that idol of theirs or the new guy doing interesting stuff.

When it comes to gather all of that messiness into a book, sometimes the publishers err on the side of simplicity. The first time the "Frank Miller Daredevil" was collected, it was under roughly that title, even though Klaus Janson drew the vast majority of those stories. For the second go-round, Marvel decided they needed to add Janson to the title, which makes a lot of sense.

But it meant that there was a first book with stories mostly written by or with other people, one of them inked by Frank Springer, and most of them drawn by Miller and inked by Janson. And then a second book that really was all Miller/Janson, the core of the run.

And this third, concluding volume gets messy again, with Daredevil by Frank Miller & Klaus Janson, Vol.3 collecting not just the climax of their run together - Daredevil issues 186-191 - but several odder and quirkier things, several of which Janson had nothing to do with. So it's yes Frank Miller, as before, and some embarrassed shuffling of feet about how much Janson there is.

There are three quirkier things, so I'll take them first, in the order they appear in the book and in increasing order of importance and strength.

Miller and Janson did an issue of What If...? in 1981, with co-writer Mike W. Barr, asking the comical question "What if Matt Murdock became an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.?" It would be a very standard late-'70s, early-'80s Marvel comic, much like the stories in the first Miller/Janson volume, is what. Talky, obvious, full of cramped panels and way too much narration from that boring bald giant on the moon. This is included, I assume, for completionists.

Miller returned to Daredevil for a one-off issue, #219, in mid-'85 (about a year before the Born Again sequence with David Mazzucchelli), apparently in large part to work with John Buscema. The credits are a bit vague - the splash page credits everything to Miller (with an asterisk), Buscema, and inker Gerry Talaoc - but I assume Miller wrote this story and did layouts that Buscema finished. This is a hardboiled "crooked town" story in twenty-ish pages, with Matt Murdock (out of costume) wandering into this Jersey hellhole and incidentally (and almost accidentally) cleaning it up on his way back out. This story has many of the weaknesses of both Marvel comics of the era and Miller in particular, but it's a solid piece that works on its own level.

And the last eighty pages or so of this book incorporate the 1986 graphic novel Daredevil: Love & War, written by Miller and drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz, in what ended up being a try-out for their Elektra: Assassin project almost immediately afterward. This is very much a one-off, but it's glorious and energetic, with Sienkiewicz at the height of his '80s inventiveness and Miller's multiple-narrators captions working quite well. Daredevil himself doesn't actually do a lot in this story, actually - he is necessary to the plot, I'll admit, but he also sets off for a whole lot of derring-do that fizzles entertainingly.

I've left the meat of the book for last: issues 186-191 is the big ninja storyline, the single most important vector for their takeover of American culture (particularly comics culture) later in the '80s. But we can't blame Miller and Janson for that. The stories are muscular and taut, with Miller dialing down his wordiness and telling this story visually a lot more than was standard for Marvel at the time. It includes all the greatest hits of the Miller Daredevil: Matt's mentor Stick and the small band of good-guy ninjas he leads, his dead-but-gets-better global-assassin ex-girlfriend Elektra, the super-evil ninjas of The Hand and their world-domination plots, the Kingpin, and a cameo by currently-paralyzed assassin Bullseye.

Those issues, though, in the best Marvel Manner, actually starts with some hugger-mugger about Matt's current girlfriend, Heather Glenn, and the family company she supposedly runs that has gotten involved with...gasp! horror!...some kind of munitions work. As usual with Big Two comics of this era, both the legal and the business details are ludicrous and unbelievable to anyone who is not twelve, and all of the characters talk about it in mind-numbing detail that only proves how little any of the creative team involved understood law or business. But, eventually, the Heather subplot ends and we get to the ninjas, who are thankfully much quieter.

My takeaway from this, and the whole mass of Miller/Janson Daredevil stories, is that everything is part of its time and place. The best of this material is as good as any adventure stories in comics form anyone has made over the past century. But a lot of it is dull, cliched and obvious, rolling out wallpaper-like standard plots, themes, and concepts that are third-hand at best and threadbare if you look too closely. The three Daredevil books have nearly a thousand pages of comics: three to four hundred of that is pretty darn good. The rest you need to slog through to get to the high points.

All of This and Nothing: Wicked Game

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

We swing back to "famous" this week, with a song you'll recognize, at least if you're of my generation: Chris Isaak's Wicked Game.

I'm embedding the full-length version below; the video - which I saw on MTV at the time; yes, I am old - is for the single edit, which I don't like as much. But that's out there as well, for anyone looking for classy black-and-white people canoodling without too many clothes on.

One thing that surprised me, looking at the lyrics now: I always thought it was "this world is only gonna break your heart," but it seems to be "girl," which seems smaller and less important. Sure, any particular person could break your heart, but I prefer the version of the song in my head.

And we can all do that, if we want. No one's going to stop you from having your own version of a song in your head. (Or rotating a cow, if you want something visual that's not too abysmal.)

I usually prefer my bad-love songs to be "I am full of woe" rather than "look what you did to me," but this is of the latter type, and Isaak's mournful tone and quiet confidence sells it. This is a quintessentially sad song, something to put on late at night while you're having too much of whatever intoxicant you prefer, and just wallow.

The lyrics could easily come off as "this is all your fault, you evil witch you" in lesser hands; it's a tribute to Isaak that they don't - this is all about his pain and what-might-have-been.

What a wicked game you played to make me feel this way
What a wicked thing to do to let me dream of you
What a wicked thing to say you never felt this way
What a wicked thing to do to make me dream of you

Books Read: March 2026

2026-04-05T08:30:00.024-04:00

Is it really April of 2026? Neither of those things seems plausible. (I also had an AI tool at work confidently tell me it was 2025 several times this past week, which may be adding to my confusion. Maybe 2025 will never end.)

Anyway, assuming a month did just end, and that it was actually March of 2026, here's what I read:

Anders Nilsen, Tongues, Book 1 (3/1)

Peter Kuper, Insectopolis (3/6)

Roy Thomas and P. Craig Russell, Elric: The Dreaming City (digital, 3/7)

Jordi Lafebre, I Am Their Silence (digital, 3/8)

Ian Frazier, Paradise Bronx (3/10)

Doug Savage, Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: As the Deer Flies (digital, 3/14)

Osamu Tezuka, Tomorrow the Birds (digital, 3/15)

P.G. Wodehouse, The Girl on the Boat (3/15)

Ana Oncina, Just Friends (digital, 3/20)

Max Huffman, Dogtangle (digital, 3/21)

Lavie Tidhar, A Man Lies Dreaming (3/21)

Zabus and Hippolyte, Incredible! (digital, 3/22)

Mike Dawson, Fun Time Omnibus, Vol. One (3/28)

Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 9: Echo of the Assassin (digital, 3/29)

Michael Swanwick, The Universe Box (ARC, 3/31)

In April, if this is April, which I'm not sure I'm convinced of, I will read more books.

Quote of the Week: I Tell You This In Confidence

2026-04-04T08:30:00.001-04:00

This was a determined-looking young woman in a blue dress and a large hat of a bold and flowery species. Archie happening to attract her attention, she gave him a glance out of a pair of fine brown eyes, then, as if she did not think much of him, turned to her companion and resumed their conversation - which being of an essentially private and intimate nature, she conducted, after the manner of her kind, in a ringing soprano which penetrated into every corner of the lobby. Archie, waiting while the brigand reluctantly made change for a dollar bill, was privileged to hear every word.

- P.G. Wodehouse, Indiscretions of Archie, p. 141

Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Donald's Happiest Adventures by Lewis Trondheim and Nicolas Keramidas

2026-04-03T08:30:00.008-04:00

About a decade ago, writer Lewis Trondheim and artist Nicolas Keramidas made a bande dessinée for Éditions Glénat, the French arm of the global Disney octopus, about Mickey Mouse. It was called Mickey's Craziest Adventures and pretended to be rediscovered pages from an obscure (probably American) 1960s comic, telling a long, convoluted and all-adventure story on its big pages. It didn't entirely make sense, but that was the point: it was supposedly roughly half of the pages of a decade-long story that was all cliffhangers and hairsbreadth escapes to begin with.

A few years later, they did it again, though in a slightly less breathless register: Donald's Happiest Adventures similarly pretends to be a serial from an incredibly obscure '60s comic. But, this time, they happily state that they found the whole thing, and can present the full story of how Donald was tasked by his Uncle Scrooge with finding the secret of happiness. Happiest was published by Glénat in 2018, and an American edition followed in 2023, translated by David Gerstein.

The structure is the same as the Mickey story: Trondheim and Keramidas pretend that each page stood alone as a monthly installment of the story, so the story leaps forward regularly, with each page being a moment or a thought or a particular place. Trondheim's Donald has the standard irascibility, though he doesn't break into full-fledged tantrums here as he sometimes does in stories by other hands. He's also more philosophical than Donald often is, a lot like other bird-coded characters in other Trondheim stories, like Ralph Azham or Herbert from Dungeon or Trondheim's self-portrait in Little Nothings.

But if you're going to have a story about Donald Duck searching for the meaning of happiness, you need to have a version of Donald who is capable of finding happiness and of talking about it coherently - not always a guarantee in every version of Donald.

Like the Mickey story, this one ranges widely - Donald is summoned by Scrooge to go retrieve a fabulously valuable artifact from an obscure corner of the world, but unwisely questions Scrooge's motivations and finds himself instead sent to find the secret of happiness. In particular, the secret of making Scrooge happy, which is even more difficult than doing so for Donald. (Donald has moments of happiness throughout the book, as a careful reader will notice - but he's not happy all the time, which is what he thinks he's looking for.)

Donald meets and talks with a vast array of other characters - the fabulously lucky Gladstone Gander, the down-to-earth Grandma Duck, the genius Ludwig von Drake, and so on - as he asks each of them in turn what happiness is. Along the way, he gets into adventures that span the globe, including a stint in a nasty totalitarian country where, luckily, the shackles are all made of cardboard. He also runs across Mickey several times, helping capture Pegleg Pete each time and getting a reward from the police forces who pop up, always right after the hard work is done.

It's a fairly talky story, because it's about finding happiness, and Donald needs to talk to nearly every character about it. (He doesn't have any conversations with Pete, which is a possible miss, since Pete has always seemed quite content with his lot in life, despite having all of his schemes fail miserably.)

As he must, Donald does eventually make it back home to Duckburg, and has an answer for Scrooge that makes the old miser happy, at least for that moment. It's not the secret of happiness, but that of course is Trondheim's point: there's no such thing. Along the way, Happiest is thoughtful and adventurous in equal proportions, a good story for people who are willing to do a little thinking during their Donald Duck adventures.

As in the Mickey book, Keramidas draws it in a style that I can't quite call off-model but doesn't quite look right. (Though I mean that as a compliment: purely on-model is boring.) His characters are energetic in that cartoony way and his pages crisply laid out to accommodate all of Trondheim's long speeches - and to look as if each one could have been a full entry of this serial.

Some reviews of this book have missed the fact that the '60s origin is...how do I put this delicately?...not actually true. But you, my dear readers, are smarter and more perspicacious than that, so I'm sure the metafiction here will be no trouble for you. If you're looking for a combination of philosophy and Disney adventure - and why not? it's a fun mix - Donald's Happiest Adventures will provide a lot of enjoyment.

A Billy the Kid Alphabet by Rick Geary

2026-04-02T08:30:00.073-04:00

This was a Kickstartered project; you might not be able to get it. On the other hand, Rick Geary has been making books for decades - and comics for even longer than that - so I have to think that he'll have a way for people to buy his stuff. You don't get a career of that length and depth by making it hard for people to pay for your work. My guess is that it will show up on the Books page of his website eventually.

Geary has been doing Kickstarters for books - at this point, I think his output is about one Kickstarted book a year, and he's had probably a dozen or more going back at least a decade - for a while, and I've been backing them to get the books, since I'm a long-standing Geary fan.

The project for 2025, which got to me early in the new year, was A Billy the Kid Alphabet, an abecedary about the man known to history as William Bonney.

And you might be asking "wait, didn't Geary already do a book about Billy the Kid?" That's right: in 2015, he did a more traditional narrative version of Bonney's story, The True Death of Billy the Kid. That earlier book is longer, organized in a more familiar way, has more details, and in general is a better place to start. (Geary also did a book about the related Lincoln County War around the same time.)

But Geary is a fun, quirky creator, and I do enjoy his quirky projects. This is definitely one of them.

Alphabet more-or-less tells Bonney's story, though not in order. Geary has a reasonable word or phrase for each letter, from Alias (covering the names used by Bonney) to Zero (debunking the "he survived his death" rumors), but the stricture of the alphabet means that, for example, the Lincoln County War is referred to a few times before we get to Regulators (the group Bonney was part of during that war) and Tunstall (the landowner Bonney worked for, whose death sparked the war).

So Geary does get to the high points of Bonney's life - that war, his capture, trial, and escape, how he was killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett - but not quite in the order that they happened in life. This might confuse some readers, assuming Alphabet has readers who aren't familiar with the basic facts already.

Each letter has a left-hand page, with the letter big and the explanatory text for the chosen word, and then a right-hand page, with a Geary pen-and-ink illustration of the thing he's writing about. As always, Geary's art is detailed and particular - he's always been good at 19th century faces, clothing, and surroundings, and Alphabet shows his strengths well.

Again, this is a book that would be difficult to find at this point, though it will probably be available from the author in the near future. If you are a Geary or Bonney fanatic who didn't know about it, I wish you luck in finding it.

Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer

2026-04-01T08:30:00.110-04:00

I might have been in the wrong mood for this book, or maybe didn't read it the right way. But I found Jeff VanderMeer's Acceptance to be too full of too many things, trying to be three novels at the same time and not landing with me as any of them.

(Plenty of other people have praised this, and the trilogy it concludes, since VanderMeer published it in 2014, and I've generally liked VanderMeer's work - so it's more than likely the issue is with me.)

VanderMeer famously put out this entire trilogy in less than a year, but it took me more than a decade to get to it: first Annihilation, then Authority, and finally the conclusion. They're near-future, or maybe alternate-present, horror-tinged science fiction. Something transformed a stretch of coast - VanderMeer never says in the text precisely where it is, but it was inspired by the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge in the Florida panhandle - about thirty years before. Area X is full of strangeness, and wiped clean of nearly all signs of humanity. A government agency, "Central," established a division, the Southern Reach, to investigate Area X; it has sent expeditions through the one portal into this transformed landscape regularly over the decades, with minimal scientific results and various horrific ends to many of the people involved.

Annihilation was the story of the "twelfth" expedition - like many things about Area X and the Southern Reach, the initial story is not precisely true - told by "the biologist" through her journals. Authority was the story of a new Director of the Southern Reach, sent by Central after a failed career doing other spy things elsewhere in the world, who was generally just called Control. He spent a lot of time talking to a version of the biologist from the first book, created by Area X and called Ghost Bird for opaque reasons, and some time countering various bureaucratic maneuverings and schemes from longer-serving members of the Southern Reach, with their own agendas.

Acceptance is a direct sequel to Authority - Control and Ghost Bird went through a portal to Area X at the end of that book, and one narrative strand here follows them. It's also a prequel to the whole series, with a major thread about Saul Evans - the only major character regularly referred to by his actual name in the novel - the keeper of the lighthouse that eventually became a focal point of Area X and the only major human-made piece of infrastructure remaining there.

VanderMeer rotates viewpoints - from The Lighthouse Keeper to Ghost Bird to Control to The Director (another major character from the earlier novels, who I've neglected to mention, who also has two names) - and switches timeframes, covering the period just before the creation of Area X with Saul, various times during the Director's tenure running Southern Reach, and the journeys of Control and Ghost Bird back in Area X.

I found each of these threads to be separate from each other, part of the same overall story of Area X but not as resonant with each other as I think I was supposed to. In particular, Saul's story was just sad and pointless: he was manipulated by other people, and maybe the mysterious cosmic or alien forces behind the transformation, so he lost everything and was utterly destroyed in a horrible, unpleasant, creepy way. So, yes: he was mostly happy, and had a man he loved, but then something used him to transform the world, kill millions of people, and bring about Creepy Armageddon. I didn't find that cathartic, or inevitable - just tedious and unpleasant and utterly regrettable.

This was the kind of book where I liked the sentences and paragraphs, appreciated the character insights and wanted to know how it all worked out - but didn't care, in the end. This is a world that has had a Weird Apocalypse, and we still, after three novels, don't know how or why. There's only so much wandering around and talking about different pieces of the elephant I can stand without an actual elephant being revealed. And, I suppose, I've discovered that's two novels worth: I can take two, but three is Right Out.

You may react differently, but, if you've read the first two Southern Reach books and are hoping for a big reveal at the end...well, you may want to recalibrate your expectations.

Kiosco by Juan Berrio

2026-03-31T08:30:00.078-04:00

I didn't know this was wordless going into it. Wordless books pose a challenge to the critic, for all the usual dancing-about-architecture reasons, but this is sweet and lovely and expressive, so let's see what words I can dig up that Juan Berrio didn't need.

Kiosco is a horizontally-formatted graphic novel, generally one big wide panel to a page, originally published in Spain by DIBBUKS in 2014 and published in this edition for the US market by Europe Comics in 2017. It doesn't credit a translator; it didn't need one. Someone wrote the descriptive copy in English, but then I bet someone wrote descriptive copy for this in Spanish, French, and German earlier, and we don't credit those people, either. (No offense: I've written descriptive copy for books, back in my misspent youth. It's a skill, and a necessary function, and I didn't get credited, either.)

The main character is a young man. We see painting apparatus in his apartment, and him working at it, so we think he's an artist. But the way he makes his living, we think, is by running a little coffee-and-pastry stand in a local park, in whatever city this is he lives in. A kiosk, we might say in English. I gather "Kiosco" is the Spanish equivalent.

This is the story of one day. He gets up, gets ready, pokes at a painting briefly, and then sets off on his bicycle to work with a tray of croissants. He opens the shop, the sun rises, and he's ready to greet the day.

But though the park is full of people passing through, no one is spending money at the kiosk. Berrio shows time passing, with some wonderfully expressive pages in soft earth tones - I'm not sure if it's watercolor or colored pencils. He goes back and forth between the hubbub of the passing crowd - different every time, a fascinating array of different faces and body language and gesture, all going somewhere else to do something else - and our main character, standing and fidgeting and cleaning the stand and tables yet again to keep himself busy.

There are a few scenes of someone almost shopping at the stand, but no one actually does. It even rains, to make this a comprehensively bad day.

Eventually, though, he does have a customer. I won't spoil it. It's lovely and bright and happy, and that ends his day in the kiosk and, soon afterward, the book.

I don't know if Berrio typically works wordlessly; I found this book randomly and the only other Berrio book I see available in North America is similarly wordless, for kids. (But he has a long list of previous works on his Spanish site, and wordless comics famously travel the most easily.) This is a sweet little book in a lovely cartoony style, and I'd love to see more of Berrio's work make it over to my side of the Atlantic.

All of This and Nothing: Life Design

2026-03-30T08:30:00.039-04:00

I know this song because I stayed at a hotel. The Hard Rock Hotel in Universal Orlando used to - and might still, for all I know - give away a mixtape to guests, called Sounds of Your Stay. I think it was a roughly annual thing. It was entirely digital even then; it might just be a non-downloadable stream these days.

My family stayed at the Hard Rock, on a big theme-park vacation, back around 2010. I liked some of the music on the collection, and I guess I'm still listening to this song even now.

This is Life Design by the Parlotones. (And I see, right this moment, that the mixtape got the title slightly wrong, and I've been thinking of this song as Life's Design for a decade. But I do also have the record it came from, Stardust Galaxies, which does not have the possessive.)

This is a bombastic song, sung in a register to emphasize that. I do like rock 'n' roll with pretensions, at least some of the time, so that doesn't bother me - it may get to some listeners. But it is big, with vague words that imply a lot more than they actually say, and a theme that, as far as it can be made entirely clear - the point is to be not-quite-clear to be even bigger and more impressive - is about All Of Life.

Again: I like it. It swings for the fences, and I think gets the ball solidly out into the parking lot. I hope you agree.

This is our story, this is our life design

Reviewing the Mail: Week of March 28, 2026

2026-03-29T08:30:00.030-04:00

One book this week - it actually arrived in the mail a week ago on Saturday, but I didn't have time to post for last Sunday, and no one cares that much anyway.

The book is the recently Kickstarted collection of Mike Dawson's comics, Fun Time Omnibus, Vol. One, which - like a lot of Kickstarted projects - is probably not actually available generally right now. But I would not be surprised if Dawson has it on a webstore eventually. It collects three issues of his self-published 'zine of the same name, plus (I think) some random other comics from various places. (I've seen Dawson in the NY Times a few times over the past year or two - I think both in that page-two space in the Metropolitan section and in the Book Review - so maybe that material, or short comics from his website, or both, or other things.)

Anyway, this is now a book, I'm going to read it, and you probably can't find it right now if you wanted to - but maybe you'll have a chance later, if you want to make a note.

Also, the final cover is slightly different from the version I have here from the Kickstarter page - all the lettering is hand-drawn and new, with "Fun Time" slightly different and the 3D effect in a darker shade of the purple color.

Quote of the Week: Man's Best Friend

2026-03-28T08:30:00.021-04:00

It did not take Man long - probably not more than a hundred centuries - to discover that all the animals except the dog were impossible around the house. One has but to spend a few days with an aardvark or a llama, command a water buffalo to sit up and beg, or try to housebreak a moose, to perceive how wisely Man set about his process of elimination and selection. When the first man brought the first dog to his cave (no doubt over and above his wife's protests), there began an association by which Man has enormously profited.

- James Thurber, Thurber's Dogs: An Introduction, p.799 in Writings & Drawings

Glorious Summers, Vol.1: Southbound! by Zidrou and Jordi Lefebre

2026-03-27T08:30:00.096-04:00

This is not autobiographical. The main character is indeed a man who makes comics for a living and lives in Belgium, like Zidrou, the writer of the series. But Pierre Faldérault is a good two decades older than his creator, and is an artist - we see him laboring over his drawing board at the beginning of the story, finishing up his work so the family can go on their summer vacation.

(And it is very much a European summer vacation - they have a month, so they can go somewhat aimlessly and - even more importantly - if they get delayed three days at the start because Pierre is frantically coloring the last pages of "Daddy Clown," that's not such a big deal.)

Glorious Summers is a six-volume series - the first five of which were translated into English almost a decade ago - written by Zidrou and drawn by Jordi Lefebre. They'd done the one-off Lydie a few years before, and apparently worked well together. This first book, Southbound! was published in French by Dargaud in 2015, and this Lara Vergnaud translation came out from Europe Comics in 2018.

I suspect the whole series is told in flashbacks; this one certainly is. We start with Pierre and his wife Maddie in what is probably the modern day - older, settled, happy, as they go to a place where they vacationed many years before. They remember the year 1973, and the rest of the story is told then.

Pierre's career is not terribly stable; he's never had a big hit but does keep getting work from BD magazines. Maddie works in a store selling shoes, and hates it - she notes that she's been moved from one department to another, finding each one worse and worse. She's also on the verge of leaving Pierre, for the kind of reasons that are too big to explain. This, they think, will be the last family vacation - after the summer, she'll take the kids to her mother.

There are four children, all young - the squabbling girls Nicole and Julie, their younger brother Louis with his head always in a Lucky Luke book, and the pre-schooler Paulette. They're fun, quirky kids - each one gets some personality, from the bookish Louis with his imaginary friend Beekoo the Squirrel to each of the three girls - and Zidrou and Lefebre do a great job of showing the ways a family has rituals (we must always get fries when crossing back into Belgium!) and running jokes and just silly standard turns of phrases.

It's a happy family, mostly - the way any family is mostly happy. There is that looming possible separation. And there's also some mostly off-stage drama involving Pierre's brother Xavier, which affects this vacation a lot, in the end.

Southbound! is a story of the day-to-day, focused on the part of life when you can get away from the grind and spend time with your family, the times when memories are made and families are as strong and connected as they get. Zidrou keeps his story mostly mundane - there is the Xavier thread, and the potential breakup looming, but those aren't central. It's mostly about a few days together. And Lefebre draws it all beautifully - his people just a bit cartoony to have energy, but embedded in a realistic world we recognize.

For a lot of European readers, I expect Glorious Summers was an exercise in nostalgia - remembering their own childhood vacations, whether to rural France as here or to some Mediterranean beach or holiday camp or extended family or wherever. Remembering when they were younger, either as kids or young parents, and the memories made then. Americans could easily find similar things to love in it, even if, sadly, we don't get to go off for a month at a time.

Ordinary Victories, Vol.4: Swing That Hammer by Manu Larcenet

2026-03-26T08:30:00.112-04:00

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.

The publishing consortium Europe Comics - which, as I understand it, is somewhere between a rights clearing-house and a pan-company cooperative project - went through some upheavals three years ago. (He said, understating the case.) See their website for the confusing announcement that they would continue to release a few books a month but would stop all "consumer-facing activities." [1] At the same time, everything from Europe disappeared overnight from the app my library uses, including several dozen things I'd flagged that I wanted to read.

That was sad, but I resigned myself to it, and have been reading other things.

And then I stumbled across a book that used to be on my list, and discovered that, at some point in the past two years, the corpus of Europe Comics had miraculously reappeared on the Hoopla app. I spent some happy time re-flagging things that I probably had flagged before - who can remember, exactly? - and tried to think if I was in the middle of anything at the time.

There was one series that I'd almost finished in 2023: Ordinary Victories by Manu Larcenet, a transmuted memoir about a photographer named Marco, the shipyard where his father used to work, his newish partner and the birth and first years of their first child. It was a four-book series - originally published in French in the Aughts, translated into English once soon afterward, and then again around 2016 for this four-volume edition, in a naturalistic tone I've really liked by Mercedes Claire Gilliom.

The first three were Ordinary Victories, Trivial Quantities, and Precious Things. The fourth, final book is Swing That Hammer.

Swing has the same low-key, everyday feeling as the earlier books. It's well-observed, personal, specific - but small, in the way that any one life is small. This book sees a lot of major changes: Marco and Emily's daughter is getting big enough to talk and wander about and ask questions, the shipyard is finally closing down for good to be redeveloped, and an elderly neighbor Marco had befriended is suddenly gone. There's more than that, but those are the major points: like any life, it keeps going, and things keep changing. Swing has less to do with Marco's career than the earlier books; it's more focused on his personal life.

Larcenet's art is still wonderful here, with an ease and grace to his line and characters that are full of life. The whole series is warm and true and real - not quite autobiography, but close to it, an alternate-world version of the real Larcenet's life, told cleanly and with clear vision and a quiet sense of time and space. I recommend the whole series - especially now that they're back - to anyone who likes comics about real people living real lives.

[1] I think I've said this in the past, but, just to be clear: releasing a book is part of publishing. But it's not the most important part. Getting that book in front of an audience - all of those "consumer-facing activities" - are at least as important to the publishing process as shoving content onto pages (dead-tree or electronic). Of course, Europe Comics is not primarily an enterprise aimed at consumers to begin with - it's largely a proof-of-concept for the books it does, and its goal is for bigger companies to buy the rights, so Europe can take down their editions and someone else actually publish the book with a bigger splash. So their change wasn't strange in retrospect, but it is definitely odd if you think of them as a publisher.

Writings & Drawings by James Thurber

2026-03-25T08:30:00.100-04:00

This is the fourth of four posts on the big '90s Writings & Drawings omnibus of James Thurber's work, assembled about thirty years ago by Garrison Keillor and containing mostly excerpts from the books Thurber published during his life. Because the book is a thousand pages long, I took it in chunks: first The Seal in the Bedroom and My Life and Hard Times (plus some other material), then The Last Flower (plus other material), and then The 13 Clocks (yes, plus some other material).

This home-stretch of Writings & Drawings covers almost three hundred pages and the 1950s, the last decade of Thurber's life. It has some new pieces from the mostly-reprint collections The Thurber Album and Thurber Country, the introduction from Thurber's Dogs, five pieces from Further Fables for Our Time, one from Alarms and Diversions, six chapters from his New Yorker memoir The Years with Ross, and a small collection of uncollected work from earlier in his career.

It's more Thurber, mostly, from the era when he had become a household name - the titles of his collections show that clearly - and when his eyesight had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer draw. Like a lot of successful writers late in their careers, there's a lot of looking back in these pieces - essays about his great-aunt and his mother; one titled "The First Time I Saw Paris," in the mode that a few dozen other American writers essayed in the first half of the 20th century; the whole book about Harold Ross, creator and first editor of The New Yorker - which are pleasant but not core Thurber, to my mind.

Otherwise, it is much of the same kind of thing. The Further Fables are in the same tone and manner as the first batch of fables a decade and a half earlier. There are a handful of Thurberesque amusements, including "File and Forget," one of those sequence-of-letters pieces in which the main character can't get out of an increasingly-unpleasant situation; "Do You Want to Make Something Out of It?," about a word-game played at parties with friends; and the literary-criticism-adjacent "A Final Note on Chanda Bell."

The uncollected pieces are all fairly short, but strong - there's a reworking of the Clement-Clark Moore "A Night Before Christmas" into pseudo-Hemingway, and a kidnappee-charms-the-kidnappers story, and a couple of bits of Thurberesque "I'm no good at everyday life" pieces, with one about broadcasting and one actually titled "I Break Everything I Touch."

Looking at the book as a whole, it is still an excellent, well-rounded introduction to Thurber, even after thirty years. My sense is that it contains maybe half of his total published work, maybe slightly less. But my sense is also that there are a lot of Thurber This and Thurber That books from the second half of his career that overlap quite a bit, and no Grand Unified Thurber to seek out with everything. So my recommendation is still roughly the same. If you think you want to read all of Thurber, or want something not quite as daunting, grab, say, The Thurber Carnival or maybe My Life and Hard Times. But if you want a big book with all the Thurber most people will ever need, this is the one.

The Complete Neat Stuff by Peter Bagge

2026-03-24T08:30:00.234-04:00

I read Hate back in the '90s, like the twenty-something slacker I was then. And I've read most of what Peter Bagge has published since then, more-or-less, eventually. I don't know if you could call me a fan of his work, since I seem to always complain about the same few aspects: the oh-so-nuanced "don't let government spend any money ever" libertarianism that is ludicrous in the context of Bagge's id-driven characters, mostly. Those two elements are both interesting and particular, but they directly contradict each other: in a world of Bagge people, libertarianism is literally insane; his people require major, intrusive government programs just to keep them from blithely and randomly murdering each other on a whim.

But he's a great cartoonist with a particular point of view and usually a knack of constructing interesting stories (if, too often, ones that allow him to grind his very particular axes), so I do keep coming back to the Bagge well to see what he's done that I missed.

And I finally thought that I should go all the way back. Fantagraphics, who was Bagge's first major publisher, did a big two-volume set a decade ago to collect all fifteen issues of his debut series, Neat Stuff, from the late '80s.

The Complete Neat Stuff has almost five hundred pages of comics, featuring Bagge in some of his earliest published work, all rubber-hose arm flailing and screaming and gigantic Big Daddy Roth toothy mouths and other extreme transformations of his characters. He's gotten somewhat more realistic in his cartooning than this since - this is the early, extreme, most underground-influenced work Bagge ever did.

In the underground tradition - and something that Bagge has kept up, mostly, since then - these are regularly very wordy comics, full of people making long speeches (usually at the top of their lungs; they're Bagge characters). Those characters are, almost all of them, horrible people in different ways - this also has been central to Bagge's work from the beginning.

Neat Stuff was a single-creator anthology, with a number of different characters, each in their own distinct stories, all mixed together over the course of five years and those fifteen issues. Any particular issue had stories about multiple characters, but I'll take each strand separately, which, I think, will make it more coherent. The two volumes here, though, present the issues as they originally appeared, in the original story order, with only the covers separated out into a separate section to show them in color.

Probably the nicest character is the sad-sack Junior, a twenty-something guy who does very little but eternally dreams of getting out from under his mother's thumb. (Frankly, his mother is mostly absent in the stories, so she doesn't seem that bad, either.) He's weak-willed and feckless, mousy and unmotivated, good-hearted but utterly unable to do anything productive. And his stories mostly petered out - there was a sequence early here in which he moved out, lived in a rooming house, and started to build a separate life, but then he moved back home and his stories got shorter and rarer, entirely focused on his sad-sackness. My guess is that Bagge realized he could either change Junior into a different character - one who did get out, and what happened next - or he could keep Junior the same. And Bagge characters, in this era (and arguably throughout his career), are about staying exactly the same.

The most realistic characters are the married couple Chet and Bunny Leeway, who - if I want to be pompous - embody late-80s suburban ennui. They're about thirty, and have Bagge's own sourness about anything and everything in the real world - all friends are dumb, transparent phonies; all culture is stupid; all activity is pointless; and life is a harsh grind that they hate but can't think of any way to change or mitigate. All you can do is drink vast quantities of alcohol to numb the pain and make other people interesting enough to talk to, and then - this was the '80s - drive drunk on to your next event. There aren't a lot of these stories, which is good: the Leeways are so comprehensively sour that they work best in small doses. They are the kind of people you want to grab hold of, shake, and say "isn't there anything at all that you enjoy? Why not do more of that?"

But that's, I think, the core Bagge viewpoint. Life is horrible, full of other people who are hideous and inherently wrong, and no one with a brain can be happy for a second ever.

I mostly enjoyed the stories about Studs Kirby, the once-and-then-again right-wing talk radio host. He's in a small city somewhere, probably in the midwest - parenthetically, all of these characters seem to be in particular places, though Bagge doesn't always make that clear. (The Leeways are probably in the Pacific Northwest; the Bradley family is in New Jersey.) Studs is a jerk and a loudmouth, like so many Bagge characters, but the secondary characters in his stories actually realize that and call him out on it. It doesn't help, of course, since Bagge characters are generally incapable of growth, learning, or getting better at anything, but it does tag to the reader that Bagge knows that Studs is an obnoxious blowhard. The stories are mostly about Studs getting into various obnoxious-blowhard situations, first as a former talk-radio guy trying to get back to a regular working-guy life, and then once again on the radio, stirring up shit with hair-trigger anger and the regular Bagge-character aptitude to take everything the worst possible way and escalate massively at the drop of a hat.

Then we get into the oddball, wacko characters, like the '60s crooner turned '80s evangelist Zoove Groover. He shows up in short features, tracing his weird and goofy career, for a few issues and then disappears forever. These are fun, but mostly in flashback mode - there's one or two stories closing out the '80s Zoove, with the bulk about his teen-idol days. They're tonally different from most of this work - almost sweet, in that "look at this crazy character!" style - and don't really connect with anything else in Neat Stuff.

Then comes the big cluster of goofballs: Girly-Girl, Chuckie-Boy, and the Goon in the Moon. Girly-Girl is the usual underground chaos-generator, a supposedly elementary-school girl with an endless well of energy and an equally endless set of demands for everything in the world. Chuckie-Boy is her dumb, loving stooge, there to be abused. The Goon is a middle-aged guy who is their friend (?!) and an alcoholic, and later on becomes a bit of a horndog in stories without the kids. These are the characters who do the most "underground" stuff - murdering each other, screaming & hollering, rampaging about - that kind of thing.

And then there's the stories about the Bradley family, which were some of the longest and most involved in Neat Stuff and led directly into Bagge's follow-up series, Hate. The father Pops is thinly characterized, just a middle-aged guy who wants to be left alone and seems to hate his family. (But then everyone hates everyone in a Bagge story.) Ma is put-upon, and comes across (to me, at least, thirty-some years later) as the closest thing to a reasonable human being in any of the Neat Stuff stories - which of course means she's marginalized and mostly ignored. Babs is a dumb teen girl obsessed with dumb teen girl stuff, and Butch similarly a violent, impulsive grade-schooler - neither one has any real depth.

Buddy, the older brother, is the Bagge self-insert character, explicitly taking what I hope he realized were his worst qualities as a young man and amplifying them - lazy, self-obsessed, unmotivated, thoughtless, grumpy and crabbed and nasty. These stories mostly focus on him, as he ends his high school years and starts an aimless "adult" life - selling a little weed to his friends but not otherwise doing anything at all to further his own life and independence and aims. (Assuming he has any aims.)

I would have liked to see more of Ma, but I don't know if twenty-something Bagge could have given us much from her point of view. Buddy is an annoying twerp - he was still an annoying twerp throughout most of Hate, too, though he did at least support himself financially and become semi-responsible, which were big steps up from the way he appears here.

Neat Stuff was a lot of things, and all of them were loud and brash and in-your-face, just like their characters. I can see why Bagge decided to end it and focus on one somewhat more realistic story - this material goes off in lots of directions and expends a lot of energy in that. That energy mostly covers over the essential sourness - all of Bagge's people are horrible, to themselves and each other, and they're embedded in worlds that are equally sour and horrible. I'd say that's a young man's yawp against the world, except that Bagge's stories have been pretty consistently in that vein for the past forty years: he still is out there making stories about how the world is sour and everyone is a complete idiot. But this is where it started.

All of This and Nothing: Fade Into You

2026-03-23T08:30:00.042-04:00

I'm back to Famous this week - though you may have to be from my generation to know this song. It's not in a sound that's been popular, or major, or central any time in the past thirty years. But, then, it wasn't a lot like everything else in music at the time, either.

This week, it's time to Fade Into You, the most famous song by Mazzy Star, which came as a quiet, calming counterpoint amid a sea of grunge in 1993.

The sound of the song is quiet and contemplative - that's the way Mazzy Star was - but that doesn't mean the meaning is happy and positive.

I want to hold the hand inside you
I want to take the breath that's true
I look to you and I see nothing
I look to you to see the truth

You may notice there's a lot of "want" at the beginning of this song. As it goes on, there will not be nearly as much "is" or "going to be." This is a song about something that didn't happen, or didn't happen in the right way, that the singer is extricating herself from and looking back at. She knows what happened, even if the person she's singing to doesn't get it at all.

Fade into you
I think it's strange you never knew

This is a quiet, contemplative song - about something broken or gone or lost...or maybe never really there at all, despite what the singer wanted. You can decide which.