Hyperbole and a Half (Allie Brosh)

Look, y'all, you're on the Internet, so you've heard of Allie Brosh. You've read the tale of the Alot, or the God of Cake, or her simple dog; you've announced your ambition to CLEAN ALL THE THINGS; you've laughed until you coughed at her turn of phrase and magical ability to make uncomplicated art so expressive.

And if you suffer from a mental illness, or you know someone who does, you've read and re-read and posted and clutched to your heart her pieces on depression, her dealing with which led to an online silence a year and a half long. The empathetic joy I felt last May when she resurfaced with that brilliant second piece still resonates with me, and I feel like she captures the experience of anhedonia--the most difficult thing for a depressed person to explain--perfectly. I'm awed and grateful.

My mother, besides dealing with her own depression, has plenty of experience with having a mentally ill child (coughs, points to self), and she feels a maternal protectiveness towards Brosh that's just beautiful--and which made Brosh's book, signed no less, the perfect Christmas gift. Nothin' wrong with giving someone a gift you really really want to read yourself, either.

Brosh reprints the hits here, but there's tons of new material: childhood stories, pieces on motivation and secret selfish thoughts, a long hilarious letter to her dogs about theirflawed approach to the world ("Misconception #4: I should eat bees.). It's terrific stuff, and I'd tell you to buy it, but chances are you already have. Good job!

Scrambling up-to-date.

I'm not gonna make you listen to my excuses, because snoozers. Let's just get to the good stuff.

First, a handful of comics:

• The second volume of Saga (Brian K. Vaughan/ Fiona Staples) is every bit as marvelous as the first, and I'm just leaving it at that. You should all be reading it.
• Superhero-wise, Chris insisted I'd like Flashpoint (Geoff Johns/ Andy Kubert), and indeed! The Flash is my favorite character in the DC Animated Universe, cause he's such a goofball--this story's quite different, but it's gritty without being too gritty for my taste (*cough Frank Miller cough*), an AU where Barry Allen (The Flash's forensic scientist alter ego) wakes up in a world consumed by the war between the Amazons and the Atlanteans, his old friends scattered and changed, many beyond recognition. There's the parallel-worlds fun of matching up the new characters with the familiar ones; my favorite of these was the reimagining of Captain Marvel as a ragtag bunch of teens, each possessing one of Shazam's powers. And I'm a sucker for time-travel narratives, the more twisty the better.
• And since I've read and loved all of Joe Hill's prose-only fiction, I wanted to add his just-completed comics series, Locke & Key, a try. I didn't dislike it--Hill continues to be my favorite modern horror writer--but I found myself wishing it was a novel; all Gabriel Rodriguez's dudes have really big chins and I found that super distracting. (I know, I'm not very good at reading comics.)

And some books without pictures!

• Jeremias Gotthelf's The Black Spider is nineteenth-century horror in microcosm: come for the deals with the Devil and some frowny-face-earning sexism and class snobbery...stay for the titular evil arachnid literally bursting out of someone's face in gloriously florid detail. So worth it.
• And for my feelings on Catherynne M. Valente's astonishing The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two, I shall refer you to my prior gushing over the series. These are seriously among the best books for children I've ever, ever read. No, scratch that, they are among the best books period I have ever read. This one ends on a cliffhanger, which usually annoys me--but in this case, it just means there's more to come. I am already breathless with anticipation.

(FTC disclaimer: I received free copies of  The Black Spider and The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two from NYRB Classics and Feiwel & Friends/Macmillan Books for Children, in exchange for honest reviews.)

Comics binge

Spent a lovely late-summer morning a few weeks ago sitting on the back deck, ignoring my constantly rearranged to-be-read shelf (publication date? alpha by author? how long I've had the book without getting around to reading it?), and enjoying a stack of comics. Ahhhhhh.

Saga, Volume 1, Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples: Sweet Jesus, is this title good. Vaughan's story, following a couple from opposite sides of a centuries-long war, searching for a safe place for themselves and their baby girl, has drive and heart and awesome cool stuff (obviously, I would love a Lying Cat). I'm totally in love in Staples's art. And in the immortal words of LeVar Burton, you don't have to take my word for it: it recently won the Hugo award for Best Graphic Story.

Tropic of the Sea, Satoshi Kon: Weird, sweet little manga about a sleepy seaside town where the Yashiro family has spent generations protecting mermaids' eggs in exchange for filled nets for the town's fisherman. The story's tension pulls between progress and tradition, the natural world and human prosperity, and keeps the central question--do the mermaids even exist? and even if they don't, is their metaphorical significance something worthy of preservation?--ambiguous for a satisfying chunk of the tale.

Criminal: The Last of the Innocents, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips: Jeez, how did I not know noir comics were a thing? This arc is (very very) loosely based on the world of Archie comics, but it's got grit to spare, murder and betrayal and corruption, all the delightful trappings of one of my favorite genres. And the art, which alternates between highly stylized, brightly colored Teen Shenanigans (rather less wholesome than their inspiration) and a muted, neutral and shadowy palette for an adult world rotten to its core, is phenomenal. I'll definitely be seeking out more installments of this title--luckily, there are plenty.

Helter Skelter, Kyoko Okazaki: Whoa nelly, this one's not for the faint of heart! Helter Skelter centers on supermodel Liliko, less woman than construct, whose full-body plastic surgery is beginning to fail in grotesque ways, her mind disintegrating in tandem. The art is purposefully ugly, erotic without being at all sexy, and never bothers with subtlety, fearless and assaultive in a way that's exceedingly rare in the work of female authors. I loved it, even as it made my skin crawl. I've never read anything like it. And I'm really looking forward to experiencing more of her work--Vertical publishes Pink, about a call girl with a pet crocodile, this November.

(FTC disclaimer: I received free copies of Tropic of the Sea and Helter Skelter from Vertical, Inc., in exchange for honest reviews.)

Briefs: The Iron Bridge (Anton Piatigorsky), Limit Vol. 6 (Keiko Suenobu), & Time Patrolman (Poul Anderson)

Anton Piatigorsky's The Iron Bridge dramatizes small incidents from the teenage years of six brutal 20th-century dictators: Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Mao Tse-Tung, Josef Stalin, Rafael Trujillo, and Adolf Hitler. It's--well, I want to call it a "fun" project, is that OK? perhaps the even less descriptive "interesting"? It's also a bit MFA thesis-y, to be honest. Perfectly competent writing, but little fervor (except in Hitler's off-the-cuff diatribes in "Incensed," but he's also the easiest subject, right?), and a certain predictability to the whole endeavor; suffice to say it didn't knock my socks off. Though I may have been spoiled by the genius of Richard Hughes' characterization of Hitler in The Human Predicament.

Limit Vol. 6 (publishes July 23) wraps up the "Mean Girls meets Lord of the Flies manga series I've been devouring since the beginning. I'd worried mid-series that the story would suffer from the marooned girls' discovery that a male classmate survived as well, cause boys ruin everything, but then there was a murder, and paranoia, and red herrings, and I was hooked again. And I found this last volume utterly satisfying and sweet--I may have even shed a few tears.

Time Patrolman came into my life as a Kickstarter reward, from Ad Astra Books and Coffee in Salina, KS. It's really two novellas rather than a single story: the first, "Ivory, Apes, and Peacocks," takes place in 950 BC in the flourishing Phoenician city of Tyre. Manse Everard has come there to investigate a bomb sent from the future by temporal terrorists unknown; as a member of the Time Patrol--an organization formed to protect the integrity of humanity's history--he must track down the perpetrators, in time as well as space, before they carry out their threat to destroy the whole city, with the millenia of repercussions such a catastrophe would create. It's a fun historical/sci-fi detective story, with a great sense of place.

Still, I liked the second tale, "The Sorrows of Odin the Goth," much better--its emotionally engaging characters and immersion in the everyday life of ordinary people insignificant to history remind me of Connie Willis's Oxford time-travel stories. Carl Farness is recruited to the Time Patrol as an academic; formerly a professor of Germanic philology, he wants to track down the truth of events among the fourth-century Ostrogoths that gave rise to legends recorded centuries later. But while there, he falls in love, and when Jorith dies in childbirth, he becomes determined to protect his offspring, born 1500 years before him. His entanglement with his own descendants gets him in trouble, of course, but it's not till the very end that he realizes how great the damage he's done, and the one agonizing choice that remains to him to fix things. Sad, beautiful, and complicated (I mean, the tenses alone!).

(FTC disclaimer: I received free copies of The Iron Bridge and Limit Vol. 6 from Steerforth and Vertical, respectively.)

Readin' across America.

On the last day of May, my husband and I packed up a van with our critters (two cats and a rabbit) and left Brooklyn for my hometown of Wichita, KS. 1400 miles later, we took up temporary residence in my parents' basement, which I'm way more excited about than y'all think (we Perlebergs are a tight-knit, loquacious, loud, weird clan). Five days later, in the wee-est of hours, we boarded the Amtrak's Southwest Chief in the nearby burg of Newton, and went another 600 miles to visit my sister and brother-in-law in Santa Fe, NM. And back, six days later.

What I'm getting at here is: Having traveled roughly 2600 miles in the past two weeks, I have read a LOT of books recently. And I know I'm never going to write them all up individually, but I don't want 'em to go entirely uncommented on, so. Comments!

I started with Jincy Willett's July release, Amy Falls Down, which I loved to pieces--but I'm reviewing it for Wichita's alt-weekly F5, so I'll link to that when it's up.

Basti, Intizar Husain: NYRB Classics sucked me in by describing this as "the great Pakistani novel." And besides, I've only ever read one book translated from Urdu (Naiyer Masud's Snake Catcher). The book follows Zakir through roughly forty years, from pre-Partition British India to the 1971 war that gained Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) its independence. There are also dreamlike, surreal flashbacks to the Delhi of 1857, convulsed by the Indian Rebellion (if you're my dad and know Indian history primarily through British eyes, you'll have known it as "the Sepoy Mutiny" until you made Pakistani friends at work and they're like, "Uhhhh, NO"). The narrative shuttles back and forth in time, space, and culture (the references, helpfully compiled in a six-page glossary, derive from Muslim, Hindu, and even Buddhist religious and folk traditions)--it can be difficult to orient oneself, although Pritchett has helped a lot by adding lacunae between sections and ellipses to indicate fantasy/flashback passages. A fascinating read--like all my favorite translated literature, it makes me want to learn the original language so I can read it again.

Once Upon a Tower, Eloisa James: The latest in James's generally brill fairytale series! This one has elements of Rapunzel (obvy). I lurved the hero, Gowan, because he is Tall and a Virgin and SCOTTISH--his height led me to just picture Sam Winchester (IN A KILT OMGGGGGG) the whole way through, endearing him further. Since I was more into him than her--Edie, a talented cellist trapped in an era when women had to play it sidesaddle if they wanted to do so in public--I thought everybody was too hard on him in the third act. YMMV, as they say.

Pigeons, Andrew D. Blechman: You know, I don't miss much about NYC qua NYC--but I sort of love pigeons. To quote myself from Facebook: "they are honestly really pretty birds, and I think it's cool how well they've adapted to this hyperurban habitat, such that they're most of the wildlife landscape of the city. Plus, during mating season, watching the dude pigeons fluff up their feathers and do their little head-bobbing HEY HEY HEY LADIEZZZZ at the females, who never look the slightest bit interested . . . free entertainment! So hilarious." This book, then, was a goodbye-Big-Apple gift to myself. It's very much in the recent tradition of One-Subject Non-Fic (e.g. Mark Kurlansky's Salt or Victoria Finlay's Color: A Natural History of the Palette), and as such is anecdotal. Blechman visits the racing lofts of Brooklyn, the Westminster Kennel Club of pigeons shows in Pennsylvania, gun clubs that indulge in live pigeon shoots, a pair of CRAZY old ladies moseying around Manhattan dumping pounds of birdseed on the ground for city pigeons...great stuff. AND he debunks the "flying disease factory" myth that has maligned the rock dove over the past few decades: yeah, pigeon poop can breed bacteria and fungi in large quantities. But that's sort of the favorite hobby of excrement in general, isn't it? Handling a pigeon won't get you sick. SO THERE.

Red Shift, Alan Garner: THIS BOOK. Guys, I don't even know what to say about this book. It threads through three different times--Roman Britain, the English Civil War, and 1970s England--connected by a place (Mow Cop, a village on the Cheshire/Staffordshire border) and an artifact (a stone axe, 3500 years old, hidden and found between the timelines). But they're also bound by madness, and mysticism, and one of the strangest narrative flows I've ever muddled through. And I don't mean "muddled through" in a bad way, somehow--and when I say "I didn't get it, but I'm not sure there's anything to get," I don't mean there's nothing there, simply that confusion and immersion and a feeling of slipping through consciousnesses that you can't quite get a hold of are absolutely what the reader's supposed to feel. What Garner wants. It's crazy good.

Guarded (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 9, Volume 3), Andrew Chambliss & George Jeanty, Jane Espenson, Drew Z. Greenberg & Karl Moline: Picked this up at Santa Fe's adorbs comics shop, Big Adventure Comics (along with the first issue of Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples' Saga, which I will be reading more of POSTHASTE). I'd previously purchased Volumes 1 & 2 (Freefall and On Your Own respectively), and I've liked this season so far; it's MUCH more grounded than the whee-no-cable-budget insanity into which Season 8 devolved--and, in fact, shows Buffy finally dealing with the fact that she's never become an adult, that despite how well she handles herself with Bad Badness (in the aftermath of magic's banishment, vampires are cut off from their demonic source, and have become feral, indiscriminate butchers), she's terrible with responsibilities like jobs and rent and all the trappings of maturity. Me too, lady, me too. (The second arc features a bait-and-switch storyline that maddeningly shies away from a serious and heartbreaking decision she's faced with--and I totally understand that it was the last straw for some fans--so be forewarned. Me, I'm sort of a helpless Whedon apologist, so I'm willing to press on.)

Back in Wichita now, I'm halfway through Elizabeth Gaskell's 1865 Wives and Daughters. More to come!

The Amazing Spider-Man, Volume 2 (Stan Lee/Steve Ditko)

My intermittent attempts to read more of the superhero-comics canon has featured some early Marvel lately. I only lasted a couple of issues into Essential Classic X-Men Volume 1, because SHEESH, Jean Grey, you have massively powerful telekinetic powers, stop putting up with these boys treating you like a rare and delicate flower. (I should read the Claremont run instead, right?)

Thoroughly enjoyed this Spider-Man collection, though, featuring issues 11-19 and Annual No. 1, all from 1964. Honestly, I feel a little silly weighing in on heavyweights like Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, dabbler that I am--but here goes anyway: Lee's writing is sooooo fun here! So blinkin' punchy and breathless, and I downright love the braggadocio of the covers. From #16's, for instance: "Warning! If you don't say this is one of the greatest issues you've ever read, we may never talk to you again!" Hyperbole at its most charming.

And I have actual things to say about Ditko's art! I mean, obviously his human figures aren't naturalistic, and everybody's heads are alarmingly rectangular. But he's great with action and acrobatics, and varies viewing angles and framing distances, so that even conversations have a cinematic sense of movement. And I generally found it easy to follow the direction to take between speech/thought balloons in a panel, not always my strong suit.

Also, who would win in a whining fight: Peter Parker or Luke Skywalker?

Look! Up in the sky!

Been trying to read more superhero comics this year--in this, I am ably aided by my husband, who's got a bit of a comics habit. It hasn't all been successful; for instance, I finally read The Dark Knight Returns, and all I could think was, "Man, that Batman is one dour SOB." And I continue to be really, really bad at evaluating the art in all but the most superficial of ways (tho the hubs, a comics artist himself, helps with that too. We're a great team!). Still and all, it smacks of genre snobbery on my part to not write about my comics reads. Thus, thoughts on four different Superman titles.

First up, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? (Alan Moore/Curt Swan). I'm gonna admit, I read this a year ago, so I had to reskim. This one came out in 1986, a response to the Crisis on Infinite Earths series, which rebooted 50 years of sprawling continuity. (I say this like I've read it. I mean, it's on the shelf in the other room . . . but I figure my audience is mostly non-initiates like myself, so apologies if this reads like DC For Total F-Bombing Idiots for some of you.) Anyway, with the character being reinvented, they had a chance to write a "last" Superman story, and even without my having much of a handle on the Silver Age cast, it's pretty satisfying. Even though Moore does kill off most everybody--but I think that's just his deal, right? The trade I read also has a Superman & Swamp Thing story that I confess to not remembering at all, and "For the Man Who Has Everything," a fantastic story addressing the central tragedy of Superman's existence: he has outlived his entire species and his very planet. (I saw a version of this on an episode of Justice League Unlimited, which show is the source of most of my DC-universe knowledge. Also sometimes Nathan Fillion does voices!)

My two favorites, Superman and Captain Marvel, meet for the first time in Superman/Shazam: First Thunder (Judd Winick/Joshua Middleton). This one's slight, but inoffensive, delivering exactly what it says on the tin: DC's two most charming, aw-shucks superheroes teaming up. The Man of Steel and the Big Red Cheese!! Loved Marvel's fanboying at getting to fight alongside Superman, and the latter's marching right down to the Rock of Eternity and asking Shazam "What is wrong with you!? He's a child!" A valid point, Supes. Oh, and there's a parallel meeting between Dr. Sivana and Lex Luthor--rife with mutual loathing--that made me smile. Not a huge fan of the way Middleton renders the title duo's faces, though--weirdly round, with a childish effect.

All Star Superman (Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely--two Scots!) is top-notch. I looooved that Quitely took the time to make Clark Kent physically different from Superman--the latter is confident in his body, the former hunched and apologetic. And the story is appropriately epic, beginning with Supes flying INTO THE SUN. The two hardest things about the character are his immense power and his unambiguous morality, but Morrison realizes that these are also the BEST and COOLEST things about him.

And then there's Red Son (Mark Millar/Dave Johnson), a delightful what-if wherein baby Kal-El crashes to Earth not in small-town Kansas, but on a collective farm in the Ukraine. He grows up to become "the Champion of the common worker who fights a never-ending battle for Stalin, socialism, and the international expansion of the Warsaw Pact." As befits alternate history, it's packed with cameos--Russian Batman in an earflap hat!!!!--and giddy, gleeful fun. Probably my favorite of the bunch.

Limit (Keiko Suenobu)

Since one of my selected post-apocalyptic reads was a bust, I decided to cheat a little and swap in something I'd read previously: the first two volumes (of 6) of Keiko Suenobu's Lord-of-the-Flies-meets-Mean-Girls manga Limit.

A bus crash on a high school class trip kills all but five girls: Konno and Haru, both acolytes of now-dead queen bee Sakura; meek, injured Usui; level-headed Kamiya, indifferent to the cliques and callousness of her peers; and outcast Moriko, whose awkwardness conceals a reservoir of rage. And she's the one who scrounged a garden scythe from the wrecked vehicle, which puts her immediately at the top of their improvised society. She won't be a benevolent ruler.

It's the tiniest of dystopias, putting the ordinary teenage cruelties into a pressure cooker. Not having read all of it, I can't judge the whole narrative, but the first two installments are fantastic, edgy and troubling, with striking art--lots of slashing diagonals in the panel layouts, the dialogue parsed out between successive bubbles in a way that really draws out the tension. I think it's my favorite manga of the year (with Flowers of Evil a close second. Teenagers messing with each other's heads = compelling drama).

P.S. Speaking of comic dystopias, Chris urged me to read Tales of the Bizarro World, a collection of Silver Age hijinx from the crazy-wacky-zany square planet Bizarro, populated with imperfect clones of Superman and Lois Lane. I would say the target audience is maybe 6 or 7, whatever age it is where Opposite Day is the height of mind-bending comic genius: people break into jail! Every woman wants to win the ugly contest! The alarm clock rings when it's time to go to sleep! It is very, very silly, in short. Helps to be drunk when you read it.

Fairy tales! My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (ed. Kate Bernheimer) & Fables (Bill Willingham) &

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father She Ate Me, edited by Kate Bernheimer: I've been dying to read this anthology for two years, being, as I'm sure I've babbled about before, a fairy tale devotee from my earliest literate years, in all their dark and bloodthirsty glory. Unfortunately, while there are some wonderful, weird, wicked stories here, the collection as a whole falls short of greatness. Some of this, I think, is the way it's structured: each story is linked to an original fairy tale (maddeningly, the latter are given in the table of contents but not in the body of the book), and they're organized by country of origin. The problem with this is that there are often multiple new stories deriving from the same old one, so the reader gets several versions of, say, "The Six Swans" in succession. It's clunky pacing, and makes the book seem far too long. Furthering this awkwardness is the author's note following each tale, in which most of them explain what they were trying to do--well, authors, if you succeeded, the note's redundant, and if you didn't, it's just embarrassing.

I also felt that many of the stories were, in fact, the opposite of fairy tales, over-grounded in the Real World and Things That Actually Happen--ignoring the fact that the original tellers of these tales knew perfectly well that they were rearranging reality, creating worlds in which the good were rewarded and the evil punished, where bleakness and misery turns to triumph, usually through the kindness and hard work of the protagonist. Stripped of their otherworldly nature, fairy tales are just depressing, and that's what, for example, John Updike does with "Bluebeard in Ireland," which is just about an unhappy couple. Really breaking new ground there, dude.

But! Those wonderful, weird, wicked stories I mentioned definitely appear. The reliably magical Kelly Link and Neil Gaiman contribute "Catskin" and "Orange," respectively. And I loved Kevin Brockmeier's "A Day in the Life of Half of Rumplestiltskin," Shelley Jackson's "The Swan Brothers," and Timothy Schaffert's "The Mermaid in the Tree." Lydia Millet's "Snow White, Rose Red" and Kate Bernheimer's "Whitework" are also standouts' both of them also appeared in the superior Tin House Fantastic Women compilation. And it was nice to see some lesser-known stories represented, particularly the couple for Italo Calvino's Italian Folktales, a loved-to-the-point-of-being-coverless edition of which looks down from the shelf as I type.

Fables: Legends in Exile, Bill Willingham (story), Lan Medina (penciller), Steve Leialoha and Craig Hamilton (inkers): Another title I've been meaning to read since I discovered it existed! Legends is the first trade collection of the ten-years-running Fables series from Vertigo, which runs with the conceit that the once-disparate kingdoms of fairy tales and nursery rhymes alike were driven from their homelands by an annihilating Adversary. A lucky few slipped through into the human world--specifically New York City, where the expats now live hiding in plain sight. It's a fun premise, well executed: Snow White as deputy mayor! The Big Bad Wolf (turned human) as sheriff! Prince Charming as a twice-divorced smarmy bastard! This initial arc is a murder mystery--who killed Rose Red?--that also smoothly introduces the setting and major characters. It feels so lovely to begin a new series and love it--with the 13th trade paperback publishing next January, I shan't run out anytime soon.

And the simple, realistic art makes me wish so badly that comic-strip syndicates would get better artists for soap opera strips--I exempt Graham Nolan (Rex Morgan, M.D.) and Mike Manley (Judge Parker) from this, as they're aces with the medium. But poor Frank Bolle (Apartment 3-G) needs to retire. Yes, my comics-nerdery area of expertise is newspaper soap opera strips. WHAT OF IT?

Vertical reads: Pro Bono (Seicho Matsumoto), Naoko (Keigo Higashino), Flowers of Evil Vol. 3 (Shuzo Oshimi)

I've mentioned before that my friend Ed at Vertical hooks me up with a steady string of awesome Japanese works in translation--the small publisher's stock in trade. I always wanna be up front with personal connections to the books I write about, back-scratchin' in book-reviewin' being what it is . . . but c'mon, I'm not gonna not write about books I like! Here are three.

Pro Bono, Seicho Matsumoto: While I think I'd shelve this 1961 novel (filmed multiple times in Japan, most recently in 2010) in Mystery, it's not a whodunit or even a procedural--the story really starts where most mysteries end, and spirals out from there into deep, dark, uncomfortable greatness. It begins when a young woman from the provinces arrives at hotshot Tokyo lawyer Keiichi Abe's office, pleading with him to take the case of her older brother, arrested for murder, whom she believes is innocent. But she can't pay his fees, and he's preoccupied anyway about meeting up with his lover for a round of golf and adultery, so he turns her down. Her brother is convicted, and dies in prison waiting for his appeal; Abe finds himself drawn back to the case after it's too late. Pro Bono is about injustice, inaction, and the uselessness of remorse--and eventually, about revenge. First-rate!

Naoko, Keigo Higashino: And then there's this novel, which I'd shelve under . . . uh, is Unsettling Body-Switching Gender-Role-Exploring Coming-of-Age a genre? No? Can we not make it one, because Naoko simultaneously creates and perfects the concept? Great! Anyway, to elaborate: after Heisuke's wife, Naoko, and 11-year-old daughter, Monami, are in a terrible bus accident, the latter wakes from a coma claiming--convincingly--to be the former. When they return home, Naoko/Monami finds herself living two lives, the junior high student and the dutiful housewife (because it doesn't even occur to Heisuke that maybe he should lend a hand with dinner while she does her homework, argh): until she realizes she wants more from her daughter's life than she achieved in her own. Heisuke, used to taking his authority as father and husband for granted, is baffled and outraged by her struggle for independence, and the conflict heightens as she matures in body as in mind. So creepy and weird in all the right ways!

Speaking of which . . . Flowers of Evil, Volume 3, Shuzo Oshimi (out October 23): OH MAN. This terrific manga series just keeps ramping up the queasy-making adolescent sexuality and psychological manipulation and small-town boredom and decadent-author-worship to new heights, and I'm totally in love with it. But I would not let it date my son.

Old-school frantic catchup post.

So sometimes, I've got seven books waiting in my to-be-reviewed pile, and they all deserve a full write-up, but I've been horribly fatigued and ache-y for weeks again (the doctor thinks it's fibromyalgia), and it's just not going to happen. So rather than skip over the books, I'm gonna give them woefully short shrift in a "HERE I READ THESE I LIKED 'EM" post.

The Ugly Duchess, Eloisa James: I'll admit, while I connected to this latest entry in Eloisa's brill fairytale series on a gut-and-heart level, I found parts of the narrative kinda silly . . . i.e., the hero becomes a pirate for a while. But y'know, I feel like romance is best measured in emotional terms, and gosh I ached for the heroine, Theo, a super-smart lady who's heard from meanies all her life that she's ugly, her breasts too small, her features too large. Specifically, they say she "looks like a boy." (Yeah, this resonates like crazy, since I weathered the same insults for a good chunk of my own experience.) Her worst fears are realized when she learns that her childhood friend, James Ryburn, has married her to cover up his wastrel father's embezzlement of Theo's fortune. She throws him out, and hears nothing from him for seven years, when he barges triumphantly into the House of Lords during the proceedings to declare him legally dead--sun-browned, scarred, and savage. He's determined to prove to her that it wasn't just mercenary motives that led to his proposal, but there's bitterness and mistrust on both sides to overcome. I do like reconciliation plots in romance, but I kinda thought it was a tragedy that young, sweet James had to become so growly and alpha-male to win back his Daisy.

The Fantasy Hall of Fame, edited Robert Silverberg: A found-on-the-street coup, this is a mammoth (500+ pages) anthology of fantastic tales, selected in 1996 by the members of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. I'd only read two of the stories before--"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (Borges) and "The Lottery" (Shirley Jackson), both of which obviously bear rereading; the rest cover fifty years of imaginative writing, wildly divergent in prose style and subject matter. A lot of the authors were new to me, particularly the early ones (H.L. Gold, L. Sprague de Camp, C.L. Moore), and many were familiar names who I shamefully haven't read but now must all the more: Poul Anderson ("Operation Afreet"), Peter S. Beagle ("Come Lady Death"), Gene Wolfe ("The Detective of Dreams"), Roger Zelazny ("Unicorn Variations"), Robert Silverberg ("Basileus"). Weirdly, it seems to be out of print, but super-easy to find used. Or waiting on the sidewalk for a sharp-eyed fiancé, a gift from the city!

A Contract with God and Dropsie Avenue: The Neighborhood, Will Eisner: Speaking of pivotal genre figures, Eisner's one of the pioneers of the modern graphic novel--heck, the biggest American comics award is named for him. Both these titles are set on a fictional Bronx street; Contract contains four related tales set in the 1930s, among the mostly Jewish, working-class denizens of a single tenement. Here I had my usual problem with sequential-art-lit, which is that I read it too dang fast, so it ends up feeling slight, which I hasten to blame on my own text bias and not the medium itself. I liked Dropsie Avenue more, finding its historical ambition and Tolstoy-numerous cast much easier to follow with the aid of art. It follows the street from 1870s farmland through urban growth and sprawl and decay and renewal, through successive waves of immigrants, each in term weathering bigotry from the established inhabitants until they become the establishment: Dutch, English, Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, Hispanic, African-American, Romani . . . the grand sweep doesn't keep him from telling tiny stories as well. It's a great work of historical fiction.

Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard, Arthur Conan Doyle: Between trying to kill off Sherlock Holmes in "The Final Problem" and resurrecting him by popular demand in "The Adventure of the Empty House," Doyle spent ten years writing these charming comic tales of by Etiénne Gerard, Napoleonic soldier of great bravery and mustache, who, like Harry Flashman's good twin, manages to meet a litany of important figures and be privy to the real stories behind what the historical record believes. Gerard is delightful, a wonderful mix of full of himself and genuinely courageous and skilled, and as Flashman's chronicler George MacDonald Fraser says in his introduction, it's subtly subversive that Doyle's hero is from the wrong side of the Channel, allowing him to satirize French and English alike--Gerard's oblivious misreadings of English sport are particularly hilarious. We've got the zillionth iteration of the Holmes-Watson pairing hitting CBS this fall; surely someone can spare the time to make a miniseries with Doyle's second greatest creation? I'd love to see Thomas from Downtown Abbey with luxuriant whiskers . . .

The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets, Kathleen Alcott: Loved the writing in this first novel! It hits my literary-fiction sweet spot where the Big Themes (family, memory, identity) don't overwhelm the relentless and ephemeral details of everyday life and personality.

Among Others, Jo Walton: This having won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards this year, I feel confident in not belaboring the praise--sci-fi/fantasy is way better than literary fiction at deserved awards. It is, as fifteen-year-old Morwenna would say, brill, both a great fantasy in its own right and a paean to dozens of the best writers (several of whom appear in The Fantasy Hall of Fame), books, and short stories of the genre. Thank Zeus for the Internet--someone with more stamina than me has already compiled a list of every book mentioned!

SHAZAM!

Look, I know it's totally square that I'm not that interested in gritty superheroes. Or at least antiquated. (And probably inconsistent, since I love me some Buffy.) But darn it, I want my tales of magic folk who fly around in tights to be FUN rather than soul-crushingly bleak--which is why I'm happy to have discovered the least gritty superhero imaginable (barring the existence of, say, Superkitten), Captain Marvel.

Captain Marvel is the alter ego of teenage orphan and newscaster Billy Batson, who acquires the powers of six ancient heroes by uttering the word SHAZAM (the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles, and the speed of Mercury). His real-world history is rife with intrigue: debuted by Fawcett Comics in the 1940s, he was the most popular superhero of the decade in terms of sales--but then DC sued, viewing the character as a rip-off of Superman. (Which is kinda fair.) Anyway, by the time DC, now the owner of the character, relaunched him in the 70s, Marvel Comics existed, and they had their own Captain Marvel, so subsequent DC comics have been titled Shazam!

The two volumes I read were a massive black-and-white compilation of the 70s reboot, Showcase Presents Shazam!, and 2007's Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil, by Bone creator Jeff Smith. (Chris has picked up the first three volumes of Bone, and they're definitely on my list.) The former is good-times 50s-style gee-whizzery through and through, with Marvel and his cohorts (sister Mary Marvel, newsboy friend Freddy Freeman as Captain Marvel, Jr.) drawn in a cartoonish style markedly different from the more realistic minor characters. It introduces his regular nemeses, the best of which is Mr. Mind, a malevolent alien supergenius who appears here as a worm wearing glasses with a radio around his neck (which allows him to convert telepathic communication into sound, or something). Mr. Mind is a great mix of totally goofy--he's a WORM WITH GLASSES--and legitimately terrifying, as he's certainly smarter than Captain Marvel (who, no offense, in this incarnation can be slow on the uptake), and near-omnipotent. I get the feeling the only thing preventing him from full-on murder sprees is that the comic's aimed at a single-digit demographic. Also loved the last few issues' bicentennial celebration, which saw Marvel etc. tracking down his rogues' gallery in different American cities, always with local flavor--in Pittsburgh, for example, the nefarious Dr. Sivana calls forth Serbo-Croatian steelworker folk hero Joe Magarac, who's AWESOME (though stupid Wikipedia says he's probably fakelore, boo). Unfortunately, the volume cuts off before they make it further west than Indianapolis; apparently the comic was overhauled in the next issue, and then went again defunct in the next, so possibly the stories where he visited Chicago and Kansas City and Texas and so on were never written. Sad face.

Monster Society of Evil retells Captain Marvel's origin story, and while it is somewhat grittier--Billy Batson's younger, and wholly homeless, before he follows a stranger into the subway and discover the ancient Egyptian wizard who gives him his powers (because of course an Egyptian has access to Hebrew, Greek, and Roman heroic archetypes, duh)--it remains long on "charm," as Alex Ross brilliantly puts it in his introduction, "a quality that few comics deliver these days." Smith brings in the expected characters, including Dr. Sivana, Mary Marvel (also younger, like five, which makes her totally adorable when she starts flying around), and Mr. Mind (more snake-y than worm-y here). And oh man, I forgot to mention Billy's friend Tawky Tawny! He's a TALKING TIGER! KITTY! I really loved Smith's art (the color helps) and his ability to tell a kid's story with scary bits that's not going to overwhelm anybody.

So Captain Marvel is totes my favorite superhero now. Of course, DC's New 52 reboot thingy has elected to mess with him by officially renaming him Shazam, making him "darker" (ARGH), and putting him in a dopey wizard's cloak. But I'm just gonna pretend that version doesn't exist, which I think is a classic comics-nerd gambit. FINALLY I'M ONE OF THEM

Angsty teens, Japanese and Nautical-American.

Two great comics, linked by high-schooler protagonists (but not much else).

First, Shuzo Oshimi's The Flowers of Evil, and Angsty Teen #1, Takao Kasuga, who spends his time reading Baudelaire and Having So Many Feelings No One Understands UGH . . . and then one day he succumbs to temptation and steals his crush Saeki's dirty gym uniform. Too late, he learns his crime was witnessed by Nakamura, the weirdest, angriest girl in his class. She's willing to keep her silence, for a price--but she prefers mind games to money. She thinks she's found a kindred spirit in perversion and contempt--and though, in this first volume, Takao vehemently denies they've anything in common, I can't wait to see whether he decides to embrace his inner Baudelaire.

This side of the Pacific--and possibly floating on it--there's Dave Roman's and John Green's Teen Boat! The comic's tagline sums it up neatly: "The angst of being a teen! The thrill of being a boat!" and takes it from there . . . our eponymous hero can, in fact, transform into a yacht. It's a great premise, done to giddy perfection, as in the first arc, where Teen Boat tries to get in good with the jocks by letting them have a party on his nautical form. Manages both to skewer superhero and teen-fiction tropes and play 'em straight. Recommended for pretty much everyone, except maybe my friend Greg, who's terrified of open water.

Fletcher Hanks: comics weirdo

I admit to being both ignorant of and fascinated by superhero comics--never read 'em as a kid, and am utterly daunted by the DC/Marvel decades of shifting mythology, but gosh they can be fun (and yeah, I prefer "fun" to "gritty." Which is why I prefer Superman to Batman. And the Flash to either). They can also be weird as all get-out, particularly in the embryonic early days (late 1930s-early 1940s). And I have it on good authority that no one was weirder than Fletcher Hanks, whose complete works can be found in the Fantagraphics volumes I Shall Destroy all the Civilized Planets! and You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation!.

Hanks wrote and drew for two years, 1939 to 1941, and then disappeared--apparently to a life of itinerant alcoholism--but he left behind comics which are stupefying in their brutal simplicity. Here's the usual plot: villain up to no good (alien, rogue scientist, fifth column) manages to put his evil plan into motion for long enough to kill quite a lot of innocent people before one of Hanks' bizarre heroes shows up and puts a poetic-justice stop to it. His two favorite good guys are Stardust, a space wizard who's also a crimefighter, and Fantomah, an ostensibly beautiful damsel and protector of the jungle who, uh, turns into a skull when she's angry. But then there's also several stories featuring Big Red McClane, who's just a logger who punches people a lot, kind of a bulkier Mark Trail without any pretense of loving nature.

The most confounding thing about Hanks' comics is how completely unappealing they are. The art is clunky, the characters deformed, the colors are garish, the writing strewn with deus ex machina (usually in the form of "rays"--disintegrating, anti-gravity, oxygen-destroying, etc.). And yet, I kept reading, and  I don't think comics historians are wrong for calling him a genius and a visionary. What's there, I think, is a mind totally uncluttered by influence--an unsophisticated, kitchen-sink kind of mind, playing with a sort of frantic delight with this new medium, just throwing things at the panels to see if they stick. Even the way he draws people--just barely recognizable as human through our brain's awesome trick of pareidolia--grows on you, especially the corrugated masks of his villains (at first, with my Old-Timey Media goggles on, I'm like, "Is this racist somehow?" but I think it's more misanthropic) and the way Stardust can grab said baddies by the shoulder and just crumple up their bodies like a coat. Essentially: Hanks' comics are fun in a pure, childlike way, like running around with your arms out pretending to be an airplane or stomping about making T-rex noises (which I certainly never do when I'm grumpy. Ask anybody!). Exactly what I look for in a superhero comic.

Small reads.

A trio of books read recently, briefly and approvingly noted:

I Am Maru: Internet cat celebrity (there is probably a portmanteau encompassing all three of those titles, but I refuse to look it up) Maru, in book form. Exactly what it says on the tin. LOOKIT THIS BIG FURRY GUY! Sometimes when I'm feeling hectic/irritable at work, I'll just go take off the cover, which features a poster on the inside, and stare at it until I feel better. Ahhhhhh. P.S. His name means "round." Of course it does!

How 2 Be Awsum: Speaking of Internet cats . . . . This is another book of LOLcats. You'll love it or you'll hate it--ain't no middle ground on these fluffy feline misspellers. GUESS WHICH SIDE I FALL ON GUYS




Runaways, Volume 2: Teenage Wasteland (Brian K. Vaughan, Adrian Alphona): Next installment (issues #7-12), in a so-far great comic book series about a bunch of kids who discover their parents are supervillains. This book was even better than the last one--exposition over, straight to action!

Comics history.

So even though I've nine self-assigned books this month (Newberys + Russian classics book club), I've found myself with spare reading time in between (mostly wonderful) obligations. Over the past couple of weeks, I diverted myself with a pair of books on the gory, over-the-top crime and horror comics of the Fifties and the outcry against them that led to the prudish Comics Code--far stricter than the Hays Code ever was. Unfortunately, both had pet-peeve flaws that kept 'em from really floating my boat.

David Hadju's The Ten-Cent Plague is a narrative history of the comic-book genre, from its origins in the newspaper comic strip to its newsstand-grabbing sensationalism to the Congressional hearing that led to its (temporary) decimation. He interviewed dozens of writers and artists who worked on the sometimes-controversial comic books, and quotes them ad infinitum (to his credit, he does note when their testimony seems more self-serving than truthful). It's an interesting story, a tale of populist culture vilified and ultimately censored by the quasi-scientific and law enforcement establishments. But I do feel that Hadju falls too easily and too often into the Those Repressed Fifties Folk trope, wherein it goes without saying that any objections on the part of parents or government at the time was witch-hunting or quashing dissident (and, it's implied, correct) viewpoints. It's true that paranoia and fear cause overreactions, and blaming comics for juvenile delinquency was objectively untrue. I think, though, that were (and are) points to be made about the appropriateness of the images churned out by EC and its multitude of imitators: they were shocking, gory, grotesque. They were meant to be, and they were not on the whole meant to subvert the dominant paradigm and to expand the minds of children, to save them from the unbearable conformity of the times. They were designed to make money; anything else was a side effect.

One of the other problems with the book is its near-total lack of images, which is why I read it in tandem with The Horror! The Horror!, a collection that includes many of the crime and horror comics referenced by Hadju. And boy, there are some doozies! Melting faces, ax murders, lots and lots of pointy breasts--fun to look at for low-culture-appropriating adults like me, but honestly? I can see what worried parents. It also can't be denied that, with a few exceptions, these comics were badly drawn, poorly plotted, and cheaply printed. Well, strike that--both Hadju and Jim Trombetta, who contributes overly academic, sneering, insufferable essays* in between the comics collected here, would deny that. I think that damages their case, honestly. Rather than arguing for the preservation of these comics on artistic grounds, couldn't they simply point out that censorship is wrong even when what's being censored is no great loss?

*If I had stopped reading these in-between bits after rolling my eyes at the first few, I would have enjoyed the book, like, 75% more. That's what I recommend for anyone not looking to relive their days in grad school lit.

Hark! A Vagrant (Kate Beaton)

The temptation is just to go KATE BEATON HAS A BOOK YOU GUYS EEEE and be done with it . . . but maybe I should try to explain why that’s so exciting? OK: Hark! A Vagrant is a collection of (mostly) comics from Beaton’s website of the same name—with value-added new stuff, of course. Even the repeats, though, are thrilling on the page—on paper! With a hardcover! And an ISBN!

Beaton’s brilliant comics—drawn in lines I can only describe as “loping,” simple and expressive—hit this sweet spot of nerdy literary and historical references with pop culture and absurdity that, to me, is some of the funniest writing happening: dude watchin’ with the Brontes (“Anne, why are you writing books about how alcoholic losers ruin people’s lives? Don’t you see that romanticizing douchey behavior is the proper literary convention in this family!”), the depressing lot of the pre-modern lady scientist (“Is it a scientific breakthrough in feelings?”), fifteenth-century peasant romance (“I’ve like, never ever brushed my teeth”). Oh yeah, and the WWII hipster battalion, and the crankiest Wonder Woman around, and the wise-ass slacker Mystery Solving Teens. And everything I know about Canadian history. All this stuff you can see for free: takes on Macbeth and Jane Eyre and Crime and Punishment are twenty bucks away. But really, the chance to enable a hilarious, smart-as-a-whip lady artist to live off her creativity? Effing priceless.

[P.S. Here endeth my Internetless backlog of posts: ten days in a row! We now return to twice-a-week-ish.]

Spending time with terrible people.

Having put Brothers Karamazov finally behind me--which I know, classic etc. Grand Inquisitor etc. "an onion" etc. but gosh, as a novel I just wanted to punch it in the face--I read two novels this weekend! Both, as it turns out, center on awful human beings, but there, as they say, the similarities end.

Bonnie Nadzam's debut, Lamb, comes out today, and There Will Be Talk. Because it's essentially the chronicle of a 54-year-old man's seduction of a freckled, friendless 11-year-old girl. For me, this elicits a basic question about my relation to art: can I say I "liked" a story that made my skin crawl from beginning to end? I don't think so, if I define "like" as synonymous with "enjoy," and consider them both contingent on pleasurable feelings...but I am well aware that these are not the only possible definitions. And conversely, I don't wish to say I "disliked" Lamb--the prose is gorgeously spare, the incidental hymn to the Rockies (almost) makes me want to go camping, the pacing is steady and assured. And Nadzam chooses to concentrate less on the physical aspects of the relationship than the emotional and material manipulation that ties predator and victim together--the interior sense of foreboding and menace is a perfect example of the novel's strengths as an art form. If you don't mind being disturbed, absolutely, go for it.

And if you have ever described your sense of humor as "sick"? You must have a go at The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, whose first-person narrator Rosa is one of the most obliviously despicable black-comic protagonists ever. I mean, in the first chapter alone, she forces her pregnant 17-year-old daughter (whom she hates anyway, because she's sullen & ugly) to undergo several attempts at a home abortion...none of which are successful. But her granddaughter, Aminat, turns out to be the apple of her eye, and she determines to win her beloved little girl the best life imaginable, no matter who she has to crush to do it. Vain, nasty, abusive, and often deluded, Rosa is also hilarious--a true feat on Bronsky's part! Yes, this one I Liked. Because of the LOLs, and then the sudden shocks as I re-remembered that I was being entertained by a monster. Also, maybe I should track down some recipes.


Oh! Also read the first volume of Brian K. Vaughan's Runaways comic, which fits in pretty well with the accidental theme, as it's about a group of kids who discover that their parents are literal supervillains. I quite liked it. I've heard there's a point where the series goes off the rails, though--can anybody head me off before I disappoint myself?

Series reads.

Gadzooks! My apologies. I have been reading at my usually furious pace over the past 19 days, but I find myself less inclined to update when I'm reading books in a series. (As usual) I'm of two minds about this: first, remorseful, since several of my favorite novels are part of a sequence; second, somewhat justified, since much of the strength of a several-book narrative is consistency. Hence if I've said "Soulless is a funny and silly little confection of a book," must I repeat myself when its sequels prove to be of a piece? (That's Changeless and Blameless I've read so far; just-released Heartless is a hold-in-progress at the library.)

Likewise: George R.R. Martin continues to enthrall. My TOTES AWESOME sister got me the box set of the first four paperbacks, so once I got caught up on Brothers Karamazov (capsule review: fistfight fistfight 30-page conversation about God. Am I getting shallow in my old age?), I blazed through the rest of A Clash of Kings and am now embroiled in A Storm of Swords. And I just dropped $35 on the weapon-grade-hefty A Dance With Dragons--at WORD, natch!

And I haven't been blogging about 'em, but my friend Ed at Vertical has kept me up to date on the Chi's Sweet Home kitten adventures manga--up to Volume 6 now! Little Miss Tabbypants is learning and making friends. :3

Finally: finished up Eloisa James's Duchesses series, and I worry that she's just ruined me for all other romances. Her books are so sharp, her heroines so lovable, her heroes' reforms so believable!!! And this sextet, with a couple of overarching narratives, is a masterpiece of small- and large-scale plotting. I kind of hate it when people say of genre books, "They're even for people who don't read X!", as if regular readers of X will just swallow anything, but: pretty much everyone who's ever enjoyed being in love should read these. ESPECIALLY (though you have to read the first four to really get the payoff) the last two, This Duchess of Mine (in which an estranged married couple falls in love again--and for the first time) and A Duke of Her Own (being the story of the sleep-aroundiest duke ever and his joyful conversion to lifelong monogamy).

The other two books I read this week.

Two days over 90° this week; naught to do but sit in front of a fan in one's undies and read. Slightly higher-impact than just watching TV, I suppose, but saves on electric bills.

Embroideries, Marjane Satrapi: Satrapi is, of course, the Iranian-born graphic memoirist responsible for Persepolis; this is a similarly illustrated minor work dealing with the sexual lives of Iranian women--naive to debauched--trading stories around a samovar.

The History of Love, Nicole Krauss: I feel like I should have loved this book? I "only" liked it. The intersecting tales of elderly Leo Gorsky and 14-year-old Alma Singer hinge on the eponymous book, written by a mysterious Polish immigrant to Chile. The writing is lovely and the final dovetailing all it should be. I couldn't shake off the specter of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close's Oskar (huh, books came out within a month of each other. Good season for precocious list-making narrators) floating around Alma's voice, which seemed awfully little-kid for a high school freshman. So: not a winner for me, though I can easily see how it would be for someone else--to that end, I'm passing it along to Housing Works Bookstore where I'll be volunteering starting Monday next.