March was my recovery month. I quit slacking off and got my writing mojo back, and I also read a few books. Some are oldies from the bookshelf, and one is a new library find.
As usual, I include Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon. If any of these books pique your interest, please use those links. I’ll get a tiny commission, and you’ll support real book stores instead of massive political spending by billionaires.
Hyperbole and a Half lives in an interesting space between web-comic and autobiographical blog. It began on Blogger at a time when blogs and web-comics were approaching their zenith of popularity, and was rocketed to fame by panels that became widespread memes, like this:
Brosh’s MSPaint-style art depicts every person and animal as wide-eyed and crazed, with mouths that span their faces. Every expression is extreme. It is as hyperbolic as the name suggests.
She mines her childhood, relationships, pets, and a wide variety of unusual life experiences for material, crafting stories in the vein of comedians like Mike Birbiglia or David Sedaris, but with a chronically online millennial perspective.
Several stories follow her family’s adventures living with a “simple” dog, and the adoption of a “helper” dog who turns out to be just as problematic. She describes her childhood determination to steal a birthday cake that belongs to someone else. And she recounts the experience of being attacked by an angry, wild goose in her own house.
Brosh also uses the same comic-story lens to examine her experiences with depression and becoming suicidal. These heavy topics are treated with vulnerable honesty while still managing to find the humor lurking in these dark corners (or under the fridge, in this case).
Solutions and Other Problems is the long-awaited sequel to Hyperbole and a Half. Seven years have passed between books. Brosh has gone through medical issues, mental health challenges, divorce and remarrying. The book still contains plenty of her trademark goofiness, but there is a notable shift in tone and perspective.
Brosh has also clearly leveled-up her art. It somehow manages to convey the same level of absurdity and retains the lo-fi MSPaint aesthetic while being far more detailed and varied.
Where many of the stories in the first book originally appeared on the Hyperbole and a Half blog, almost all of the content of this second book is new. Which probably explains the dearth of content on the blog in recent years.
If you enjoyed the blog and the first book, the second book provides more of the same, and does almost all of it even better.
This was an unexpected library find for me. The Last Hero is a lushly illustrated novella, written for the same adult audience as Pratchett’s other Discworld books. It occupies that sparse space between comics, children’s books, and novels. In fact, the only other illustrated story like this that I can think of is The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains. It’s too bad that experimentation in format like this is so rare.
Drawing from the usual massive cast of Discworld characters, this story stars Rincewind (the original inept wizard from Pratchett’s earliest books), the brilliant Da Vinci-esque inventor Leonard of Quirm, Cohen the Barbarian, and a supporting cast of wizards and barbarian heroes.
The barbarians are growing old, and they want to go out with a bang. They want to return fire to the gods. A whole lot of it. Unfortunately, exploding the magical mountain where the gods live will very likely destroy the entire Discworld, so the wizards and Leonard set out to stop them.
The storyline following Cohen and the barbarians parodies the classic D&D “murder-hobo” style of heroism, and the storyline of Leonard building a craft to fly to the highest mountain on the Disc parodies classic space-dramas and the Apollo program.
The illustrations are incredibly beautiful and detailed, in the mold of the best classic fantasy covers, so the absurdity of Discworld details (like “Wizzard” stitched onto Rincewind’s pointy hat) stand out all the more.
What I’m Reading in April
I’ve come to the realization that I often talk about reading books in this section, only for them to not appear in next month’s report.
I’m not messing with you. I promise. I just have a bad habit of reading too many things at once. And now I’ve found an exciting new way to increase my number of half-finished books, through the power of audio books!
That’s right, I’m currently listening to Fonda Lee’s Jade City on Libro.fm. And I’m still in the midst of American Gods and Ted Chiang’s short stories. And some day I’ll get beyond the first chapter of the final Witcher book. If we’re really being honest, I’ll probably pick up something else before the month is out.
What will I actually finish? Tune in next month to find out.
It’s a common misconception that a great idea makes a great story. The truth is that most great stories come down to execution. A great idea with poor execution rarely works, but a great writer can breathe new life into even the most tired tropes. Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.
Feel free to use these ideas as a weekly writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.
Super Swap
Everyone was leery of the machine at first. Superheroes and supervillains already cause an awful lot of trouble. Why would we want a machine that transfers powers from one person to another?
Sure, heroes want to retire. Isn’t it better that they pass on their powers? Otherwise they’re destined to die in battle as they age, or simply fade into obscurity, hiding in their secret bases or behind their secret identities.
We all wondered if the machine would be used on heroes against their will. Or would the rich and famous simply buy their way into heroic powers? Does anyone really want Jeff Bezos with supersonic speed, or Elon Musk with laser eyes?
Surprisingly, nobody expected the Debt Villains: the people with good intentions taking out huge loans to get their super-powers. How do you expect the super-powered to pay off their debts? It’s awfully tempting to just rob a few banks or jewelry stores. It’s not villainy really. Just a few more heists before they can fully dedicate themselves to proper heroism. Just a few more…
Where did November go? I got distracted for a minute, and the whole month was over.
Despite my best intentions, the month was light on both writing and reading. Still, I managed to sneak a few things in. I’m still working on the final volume of the main Witcher series, and still working through the last of the Dark Materials books with my kids. With some vacation time on the horizon, I have high hopes that those will be in the December report.
But, back to November…
Where possible, I’ve included Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon. If any of these books pique your interest, please use those links. I’ll get a small commission, and you’ll support real book stores instead of cocktails of longevity drugs for billionaires.
My first experience of the Umbrella Academy was being in the room while my wife watched the Netflix show. While I have arguably “seen” most of that series, my attention was not necessarily focused.
The impression I got from the show was that it was a near miss for me: lots of individual elements that I loved, but it somehow didn’t quite gel together to make something that really excited me.
So, either in spite of, or because of that, I had fairly high hopes for the comics. After all, most comic adaptations either crash and burn (cough, cough…League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, cough) or have trouble capturing the magic of their source material. However, as a power-nerd, I tend to come to those adaptations already familiar with the comics. In this case, I was starting with the show and going backward. As much as I try to remain unbiased, there’s a common tendency to appreciate the format where you first discovered the story.
My first impressions, in volume one, is that this is a setting that’s a bit whacky, without leaning especially hard into comedy. I mean, it practically starts with a cybernetic Gustav Eiffel attempting to launch the Eiffel Tower as a rocket into space.
This is very much a superhero comics world. Superhero comics are the background radiation, even if it’s not obsessed with muscle-bound men and women in incredibly resilient spandex. It’s a world where insane happenings are just a normal part of life.
These books follow the titular Umbrella Academy, seven super-powered children adopted by a cold and uncaring father and trained to save the world. Much like Disney channel actors, this thoroughly messes them up. Unlike Disney channel actors, only one in seven becomes a drug addict.
Volume one felt like a rushed introduction. Not only does it need to establish this world, but the seven super-powered children, their adoptive father, their robot mother, the chimp butler, and a handful of other miscellaneous characters. It’s a lot for six issues.
There’s a story here about the one estranged sibling turning villain against the others, but it’s so lost in the tumult. I never felt like the story had time to understand why she was angry, or so quick to “go bad.” Each character is touched on, but there’s not enough time to dig into any of them in depth. Ironically, the TV series gave me extra context that helped me understand the books. I suspect I would have had a tougher time without that.
Volume two feels like the real, proper beginning. The characters have been introduced, and we’re at least familiar with the surface-level. While this second series focuses on one particular member of the squad, we get more interaction and more background on pretty much all of the characters. We also get two completely deranged villains. I have to appreciate this, since absolute crazy people with incomprehensible motives are difficult characters to make work, and they work pretty well in this particular setting. And there are time travel shenanigans, which always makes me happy.
I think the second volume is the strongest story arc of the three. There’s a clear instigation, as the time-travel police come after a member of the Umbrella Academy, there’s a clear resolution by the end, and the story is neatly structured to build up the characters along the way.
The third volume is the longest of the three, boasting seven issues instead of six. It’s also the most ambitious in expanding the world and characters of the Umbrella Academy universe. Unfortunately, I can’t help but feel that it’s an interstitial story, setting up a Volume Four that has yet to release five years later. (Supposedly it’s in development.)
I have pretty mixed feelings about the series overall. It’s definitely unique among the series I’ve read, and I like to think I’ve covered a decent breadth of indie comics. But it has that same “not quite hitting it” feeling that I got from the TV show. Still, if Volume Four ever comes out, I’ll definitely buy it, so that says something.
Interestingly, and somewhat surprisingly in the era of Marvel ascendent, the Netflix show excised almost all of the superhero background radiation, and still made it work pretty well. For a show where the leader of the time-travel police is a robot body with a goldfish bowl for a head, it’s surprisingly grounded. If nothing else, it’s a great case study in making a comics-based show appeal to a non-comics audience. As much as such a thing even exists these days.
EVE Online “Chronicles”
I’m not generally interested in tie-in fiction. I’ve been burned too many times before.
When I was young, I read some of the early Star Wars tie-ins. I remember the novelizations of the original trilogy being pretty good. And then there was the Heir to the Empire trilogy, which was so successful as to spawn the entire Star Wars Expanded Universe. Of course, it was written by Timothy Zahn, who turned out to be decent apart from Star Wars. (I really enjoyed his Conqueror’s trilogy as a teen. Having not read it since, I assume it must still hold up…)
The Myst games were among the first games I played that felt like they had a real story (as little as you could glean from them) and I devoured the trilogy of books that expanded that universe. For my money, the first two Myst games and those three books are still probably the best example of games and books that tell a great story together.
My first real disappointment with tie-in fiction came several years later. I had discovered the relatively young and expanding world of ARGs, and found an archive of a Halo ARG now commonly known as ilovebees. It was a strange and seemingly futuristic way to deliver a story, and came in the form of a sort of radio-play pieced together from 30-second clips by a group of people discovering it as it went along.
I decided to delve into the Halo books, and quickly discovered that they were pretty much unreadable, even for a teen with possibly questionable taste.
Since then, I have steered clear of tie-in fiction. I may have dabbled here and there with some D&D-adjacent stories, but I’ve mostly turned up my nose at those shelves in the bookstore packed with D&D, Star Wars, Star Trek and myriad examples of trying to make a novel out of a hundred lines of in-game dialogue.
And now we come to the present day, where I am an old man having just turned forty, and I have begun dabbling in EVE Online.
How could this have happened? Well, there honestly aren’t that many games with spaceships. I’ve bounced off this one twice before, and for some reason, this time it stuck. I just couldn’t escape the gravity of a game that seems to be populated mostly by middle-aged dads with a high propensity for programming.
EVE is one of those incredibly rare MMOs that isn’t World of Warcraft, and yet keeps puttering along, staying alive for over twenty years. Throughout all that time, they’ve been releasing fiction in this world.
Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t read any of their books yet. There are a few of them, but I’m not that far gone. Instead, I’ve been perusing the “Chronicles,” which encompass a bunch of dry descriptive reads about particular factions or technologies, and a slightly shocking number of short stories.
It’s now been a couple of years since I’ve participated in a long-running TTRPG group, and I find that this really scratches that itch. It’s the same satisfying combination of playing in a world, and then really digging into the setting. The only difference is that this one is online. (Well, okay, I guess my last D&D group met online too, thanks to the pandemic.)
What I’m Reading in December
Yes, I’m still reading the last Witcher book. Yes, I’m a little worried that the whole story is going to fall apart in the final volume. I’ll also be trying to wrap up the Dark Materials series, and I’ve still got a few more comics trade paperbacks waiting in the wings.
It’s August! Or at least it was when I read these books! Summer isn’t quite gone yet, but it’s fading fast. School is back in session, the first leaves are beginning to fall, and the most deranged of the yard decorators are already getting their Halloween decorations out.
It was a relatively light reading month for me, but that’s fine. Soon enough we’ll be huddled inside for a long Minnesota winter. I’ve got to enjoy the outdoors while I can.
Where possible, I’ve included Bookshop and Thriftbooks affiliate links instead of Amazon. If any of these books pique your interest, please use those links. I’ll get a small commission, and you’ll support real book stores instead of a fifth vacation house for a billionaire.
In the process of moving to the new house, I came across a box of old superhero comics that I had completely forgotten about. These Ultimate X-Men books harken back to a time when I wasn’t quite so jaded about reboots (and superhero comics in general).
My first thought was that these are some ugly covers—heavily photoshopped Wolverine, looking like a 20-year-old nu-metal singer. I don’t know what style they were shooting for, but it ended up somewhere between CGI and anime.
Thankfully, the covers don’t tell the whole story. The art within the books is solid, but not life-changing. There is talent on display, and a ton of detail and creative layouts. There are interesting angles, some non-obvious choices (like flashbacks and TV broadcasts done in sketchy pencils), and proper backgrounds. As much as I love indie comics, they’re often missing a lot of this complexity. That Marvel money does buy a certain base level of quality that I appreciate.
The Ultimate series were a collection of reboots, probably more notable these days as the origin of Miles Morales in Ultimate Spiderman, although I believe Ultimate X-Men was popular when it first came out. The characters are all redesigned (although there are some nods to older costumes) with the entire team remade as teenagers this time around. The first book really wants to call attention to this, repeatedly bringing up how young everyone is in a way that felt forced at times.
The point of a reboot is often to retell the classic stories, and these issues feel like a speedrun of X-Men classics, starting with the formation of the core team and quickly burning through arcs about the Sentinel program, Magneto, and Weapon X.
While the original Weapon X program was run by those dastardly Canadians, this version of the X-verse collects most of the nasty government programs under the good ol’ U.S. of A. There are some interesting undercurrents of mid-2000s distrust in government that feel very post-Iraq-invasion to me, which is interesting considering the series actually kicked off a good half year before 9/11.
I don’t think revisiting these books will inspire me to go subscribing to all the modern X-books or anything like that, but it was a fun trip down memory lane.
I acquired very cheap copies of the Dark Materials books years ago, and they’ve sat on the shelf, waiting to be read. I knew almost nothing about them going in, except that there was a big-budget movie of the first book that must have done badly, because they never bothered to finish the series.
It turns out that Phillip Pullman has built the kind of world I like. It’s fantasy, but it’s not just aping Tolkien. It’s a strange alternate history with a mildly steampunky anachronistic mix of technologies, and one where every single person has a slightly magical animal familiar called a daemon.
Lyra Belacqua (with her daemon, Pantalaimon) is the plucky child protagonist, growing up as a semi-orphan at an alternate Oxford, where she is loosely taken care of by the scholars. Thanks to their lack of parenting skills and her rebellious disposition, she spends most of her time running across the rooftops, sneaking through the catacombs, and picking fights with other urchins, rather than learning.
The plot kicks in when one of her friends goes missing during a rash of local kidnappings. Word on the street is that the “Gobblers” have taken these children for some unknown, nefarious purpose, and Lyra sets out to get them back. Along the way, she discovers the truth about her parents, who both turn out to be terrible people in their own special way. She gets the titular golden compass, a device that is essentially a very accurate (but difficult to read) oujia board. And she makes friends with an intelligent polar bear warrior king, a hot-air-balloon-flying Texan, and a witch.
In my opinion, the world-building is really the star of these books. The alternate world that Pullman has created is just different enough from ours to be incredibly mysterious. Each new discovery changes the rules, just a little bit. Oh, everyone has an animal companion who is bound to them? Oh, there are polar bears that can talk? Oh, there are witches that can fly? Some actual, visible spirits that everyone just accepts as a somewhat normal thing? Certain kinds of science-esque alchemy that the all-powerful-Church controls?
Lyra is defined mainly by her general defiance of authority, her ability to accomplish pretty much anything, and her high levels of sass. She is, of course, the chosen one that the prophecies foretold. Some fantasy tropes are apparently inescapable. Still, as a book geared toward children, I won’t complain too much. The protagonist is meant to be a reader-insert and a fantasy fulfiller.
Overall, the story does a good job constantly throwing obstacles in Lyra’s way, although there were a couple times where my suspension of disbelief was strained or some difficulties were elided without a satisfactory explanation.
What I’m Reading in September
Looking to September, I’m already reading the second book with my daughter, and it introduces a completely new protagonist from an entirely different world. I’m curious to see where this leads, and I suspect there are plenty of big secrets about what’s actually going on that are yet to be revealed.
I also have the next Witcher book 80% complete, and by golly, I’m going to finish it or die trying.
And of course, I’ll probably have at least have some graphic novels or comics thrown in the mix as well. What’s the difference, you ask? Only how pretentious you’re feeling while you read them.
Since I took a month away from blogging in June (and I was so busy that I only read one book), this will include my June reading as well.
Where possible, I’ve included Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon. If any of these books pique your interest, please use those links. I’ll get a small commission, and you’ll support real book stores instead of a fifth vacation house for a billionaire.
This is my favorite Discworld book, and Pratchett is at the top of his game. There are a couple of additional books that came after this, but sadly he was likely fighting dementia at that point, and I think later books like Unseen Academicals suffered for it.
Moist von Lipwig is a confidence man who starts the book by getting hanged. He’s given a reprieve by Vetinari, ruler of the city, and given the job of postmaster. The Ankh-Morpork post office is a dilapidated disaster, but he’s aided by Mr. Pump, a golem bodyguard/probation officer, the elderly “junior” postman Groat (who attributes his health to horrifying homemade herbal remedies), and the young postman apprentice Stanley, a boy who isn’t quite all there and has an abiding obsession with collecting pins.
Moist spends the first half of the story looking for ways out of his forced government service. However, he’s a showman at heart, and he soon discovers that his brand of hype and hyperbole is well-suited to getting people excited about sending mail. Unfortunately, the post has largely been replaced by Clacks—a network of semaphore towers that act as a fantasy telegraph system.
The Clacks were built by high-minded engineers, but the original owners have all been ousted or murdered by clever corporate raiders, who are doing their best to extract as much value as possible while running the whole company into the ground. By delivering the mail once again, Moist finds himself in their crosshairs, and it doesn’t help that he’s falling in love with Adora Bell Dearheart, the disaffected, chain-smoking daughter of the Clacks’ dead founder.
Pratchett is a fantastic comedy writer, but he doesn’t get praised enough for his intricate plots or his characters that make you care, even if they’re all rather silly. This book is filled to the brim with all of that. If you’re only going to read one Discworld book, it should be Going Postal.
Another re-read with my kids. This was a formative sci-fi book for me when I was young, and it holds up fairly well.
This is one of those books with some content that some adults probably wouldn’t want their kids reading, like children murdering other children. And yet, my children really enjoyed it, and didn’t seem especially traumatized. I guess we’ll see how they turn out.
I appreciate that Ender’s Game is populated by many characters who do terrible things, but the narrative is not judgmental. As a reader, you’re free to form your own opinions about whether each character’s actions are justified or reasonable, without feeling like the book is trying to steer you to a particular conclusion.
It’s a book about growing up, and war, and the terrible things people do to one another, often for reasons that seem justifiable or even absolutely necessary at the time. It is also about the way that history often judges those actions in its own context, ignoring those justifications.
As I was getting back into Go, I re-read this excellent beginner’s guide in the SmartGo app. Cho Chikun is one of the most famous professional players in modern times, and the Japanese player with the most titles.
This book deftly introduces all the important aspects of Go rules and basic strategy, while alternating chapters about the history and cultural significance of Go. It’s a perfect introduction to the game (or re-introduction, in my case).
In amateur Go, players start at a rank of 30 kyu. As they improve, their rank decreases down to 1 kyu, then to 1 dan, and up to 7 dan. As you might expect, players with double digit kyu ranks are beginners and casual players.
While most books about Go are written by pro players for obvious reasons, Moffatt wrote this as a moderately high (1 kyu-ish) amateur. He’s close enough to still remember and understand why the players of these games make the mistakes they do.
Moffatt also goes into more detail than usual in explaining the merits and disadvantages of each move, often exploring various alternatives. They result is a set of thorough game deconstructions that are very useful aids for an amateur player to recognize their own shortcomings.
I bought this on a whim while on vacation, mostly on the authority of a positive blurb by Kieran Gillian (of Die and other comics), and a brief skimming of the art. Unfortunately, this book was not for me.
I don’t read a lot of romance, but I’m not strictly opposed to the genre. This, however, was just too much irritating teenage angst and not enough mythology for my tastes. When the romance hinges on everybody being afraid to voice how they feel, and the conflict stems from people hating each other for basically no reason, I get bored.
As far as the art goes, the character work is nice, but these characters live in a world composed of colored smears. This lack of any background detail is something that seems to be more and more common in indie comics, and while I understand it, I do miss the crispness that you see more in high budget superhero comics.
Hellblazer: The Red Right Hand
By Denise Mina and Mike Carey
Illustrated by Leonardo Manco, Cristiano Cucina, John Paul Leon
I do love me some John Constantine, but this collection wasn’t my favorite. There are two story arcs here: one where Constantine enters into a trap, and one where he gets out of it.
The typical Constantine story usually has a mystery twist, and this is no exception. Unfortunately, the twist didn’t shock me, it just made me shrug. Maybe if I were reading the series in sequence I would be better prepped as a reader.
It’s also not uncommon for Constantine to have some plan that only gets revealed when everything seems hopeless. Here, he doesn’t have much of a plan at all.
A collection of Constantine’s friends show up midway through, and it feels like deus ex machina, but even they don’t actually do very much. They muddle through, and the eventual resolution to the situation hardly feels like any of the characters had agency.
The last issue in this volume is a stand-alone one-off story, and it’s a classic, solid Hellblazer story. It made me a little sad that the rest of the book didn’t hold up as well.
Well, we’re halfway through April, but I’m just getting around to my monthly reading recap. This month was mostly continuing series: The Witcher, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and finally finishing Harry Potter with my kids.
Where possible, I’ve included Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon. If any of these book pique your interest, please use those links. I’ll get a small commission, and you’ll support real book stores instead of mega-yachts for billionaires.
Hemingway is often cited as the pinnacle of American short fiction, and I haven’t read any of his work since college. Perfect for my year of short stories. However, this particular collection is 650 pages, and I only managed about half of that in March, so I’ll be continuing in April.
If you’ve heard anything about Hemingway, it was probably that he’s known for his short, terse sentences. While those sentences are certainly present, he actually mixes up his sentence styles quite a bit. I feel like this description of him has been cargo-culted through undergrad English programs for decades. Possibly unpopular opinion: many of his best sentences are quite long.
While the majority of Hemingway stories are quite short and straightforward, the language is sometimes a little bit of a slog. We’re far enough removed from the times and places in these stories that it’s like visiting another land. The style and word choice is old fashioned enough that it’s sometimes like translating a different dialect. It’s not like parsing Shakespeare or anything, but I’m probably getting less out of it than a contemporary reader would.
None of these stories are particularly plot-heavy, and many are vignettes with scarcely any plot at all. They capture a feeling and a place and time, but I find myself wishing that more would happen.
If you’re a modern reader who is acclimated to fast-paced, plot-heavy stories, and you’re not interested in the historical value or the literary prose, I can’t really recommend reading all of the Complete Hemingway. However, I think anyone with an interest in short fiction should read at least a few of his more famous stories.
War is raging between the kingdoms of the north and Nilfgard. The Witcher is recovering from a near-fatal beating at the hands of the traitorous sorcerer, Vigilfortz. Ciri has become a bandit in Nilfgard, (though Nilfgard claims she is safe under the protection of the Emperor). Yennefer is gone, missing after the battle at the sorcerer’s conclave.
We appear to have reached the section of the fantasy series where the main characters are all split up and must fend for themselves. For Ciri, this means having to survive for the first time without the protection of Geralt or Yennefer, and falling in with a very bad crowd.
For Geralt, the Witcher, this means coming to grips with the possibility that he is not strong enough to protect the people he loves without some help. Despite himself, he collects a motly crew that includes his longtime bard friend, Dandelion; Regis, the old alchemist with a dark secret; Milva, the human archer allied with the non-human scoi’atel rebellion; and a caravan of kind-hearted dwarves scavenging and collecting refugees in the wake of battle.
Yennefer’s absence remains a mystery for most of the book, but she comes back into the story with a meeting of a new alliance of sorceresses from the north and Nilfgard. As usual, the wizards are always plotting ways to control the events of the world. Unfortunately, those plans still involve Ciri.
The strength of the Witcher books thus far is the way the story integrates the large-scale political machinations and battles with the personal connections between characters.
Written by Alan Moore, Illustrated by Kevin O’Neal
We begin with John Carter and Gullivar Jones as leaders in a war of many races on mars. One alien race, holed up in a fortress, escapes in rockets headed for earth. Thus begins the Martian invasion of tripods, a la War of the Worlds.
The first volume of League was so short and introduced so many characters that there was limited opportunity to delve into each one. It worked, partly, because the source material was already familiar. In Volume 2, there is space for more characterization: romance, betrayal, and plenty of fractures and disagreements between the League’s members (as well as Bond, M, and the British government).
If Volume 1 was the origin story, Volume 2 feels like an abrupt finale. Two members of the League end up dead and the rest are estranged by the time the story is over.
The weakness of the series so far is that all these exciting characters have so little control of their own lives. The violent and self-centered Hyde and Griffin act on their own impulses, mostly to their detriment. Mina and Quatermain, and to some extent Nemo, are the “good kids” of the group, who actually follow orders, and are once again used to carry out actions they don’t understand or necessarily agree with. While the League plays a major role in the fight against the martians, I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were side characters in their own story.
Volume 2 concludes with a thirty-page illustrated travelogue that hints at several earlier iterations of the League, composed of literary characters from previous eras. It also hints at the future.
Like the Quatermain story at the end of the first volume, this was too tedious for me, and I ended up skimming by the end. There are tantalizing references to the previous Leagues and the adventures of Allan and Mina will have after the Martian invasion. But much like Calvino’s Invisible Cities, endless descriptions of fantastic places become dull when they have no characters or plot to anchor them.
Written by Alan Moore, Illustrated by Kevin O’Neal
Set in the same alternate universe as the first two volumes, we’ve jumped to 1958. The totalitarian post-war Big Brother government has just fallen in England, and Mina Harker and Allan Quatermain are back after years abroad.
Black Dossier expects the reader to have slogged through the travelogue at the end of Volume 2, which contains a lot of mostly elided story. It explains where the pair have been all these years, why they are young-bodied and effectively immortal, who the heck this Orlando character is, and what exactly is up with the Blazing World.
Black Dossier is a very strange comic, a time-jumping multimedia extravaganza. It begins as an ordinary comic, as Mina and Quatermain trick a rather nasty version of James Bond into gaining them access to military intelligence records. They proceed to find the black dossier of information about all the different incarnations of the League, and make their escape.
Safely back at their boarding house lodgings, they begin to read the dossier. Then the narrative pauses to show the contents of the files.
The rest of the books shifts back and forth between Mina and Quatermain in ’58, fleeing military intelligence, and the dossier’s files, which range from lost Shakespearean folios to memoirs and maps, to borderline erotica/porn.
This book is incredibly horny. It makes some sense, with the pulp fiction roots that the series embraces wholeheartedly, but at a certain point it just comes across as a little juvenile, especially when some sections have no purpose in the story and exist just to be sexy.
The book ends with a 3D glasses chapter, and a play on the end of midsummer night’s dream — instead of comparing stories to dreams, it plays on the way science fiction has shaped the world over the years.
The League books have always been a mix of high-brow and pulpy. Unfortunately, the whole experience is pretty uneven. Some sections are dull and self-indulgent, feeling more like a collection of backstory notes than proper story, and it’s frustrating that you need to cross-reference everything to get a sense of exactly what’s going on.
This final book of the series eschews the structures that have held fast through the previous books. Harry isn’t going to school. He’s on the run, searching for the immortal lich villain’s phylacteries horcruxes. The story alternates between a series of narrow escapes and heists.
The death of a secondary character at the end of the fourth book was fairly shocking compared to the surrounding material, but the tone is so much darker by this final book that major characters are dying every few chapters.
The biggest problem I have with this book is how much time the three protagonists spend wandering, with no idea what to do. They fight, separate, come back together. They argue and complain. The middle of the story gets bogged down and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. It’s too bad, because the first third and last third of the book are packed with good action.
Right in the center of this soggy middle is a sequence where the main characters acquire an important macguffin without any effort on their part. This is all explained much later, but it still feels like a major success falling into their laps almost accidentally.
Finally, I have to complain at least a little bit about the amount of info-dumping that occurs in the last couple chapters of the book. The biggest info-dump comes through the pensieve, a magical device that allows Harry to view other people’s memories. This device is Rowling’s exposition machine in the latter half of the series, but it is exercised to such an extent in this book that we effectively get a whole chapter of wading through memories. I can’t help but feel that this was a bit of a cop-out, allowing Rowling an easy way to reveal all the important secrets of a major character right at the end, without any of the messy difficulties of figuring out how the characters could discover that information.
With all that said, and the occasional other complaints I’ve lodged in earlier Read Reports, the series holds up pretty well. It feels relatively unique in the way its voice changes so significantly from the beginning of the series to the end. It also creates a huge cast of interesting characters. So even if I may be irritated by the inconsistencies of the magic or the incredible dysfunctionality of wizard society and government, the story still gets me to care about what’s happening to Harry and his friends.
What I’m Reading in April
I’m going to be finishing off the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with Volumes three and four. I’ll be reading the fourth novel in the Witcher Saga, Tower of Swallows. I’ll also be doing my best to finish The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.
This is the monthly post where I talk about what I’ve been reading. As usual, if you’re interested in any of these books, please use the included Bookshop.org links instead of Amazon. It helps independent bookstores, and I get a small affiliate commission.
Written By Warren Ellis, Illustrated by Derick Robertson
Transmetropolitan has been on my radar for some time, even though I knew almost nothing about it. It was lodged in my brain alongside a bunch of other 90s-2000s non-superhero comics. I’ve recently discovered just how cheaply you can snag slightly beat-up trade paperbacks of old series at places like ThriftBooks, so I went ahead and purchased the first two volumes of the series just to see if I had any interest.
My feeling coming away from the first volume is that Transmetropolitan is weird for the sake of weird, and that particular brand of “edgy” that was popular in this era, but a little silly in retrospect. It is a depiction of the kind of cultural and technological singularity where almost everything is possible and is probably happening just down the street, but the absolutely schizophrenic nature of that kind of chaos doesn’t really jive with telling a deep or particularly coherent story.
The book begins with former journalist Spider Jerusalem living like a wild-man in a mountain-top cabin surrounded by booby-traps. He is naked, heavily tattooed, and clearly hasn’t gotten a shave or a haircut in a few years. We learn that he was the most famous journalist in a nearby city (simply known as The City), and he gave it all up to move out here. Unfortunately, he signed a contract for a book deal, overdue by five years, and now his publisher is threatening to take the money back. So off he goes, back to The City.
Spider breaks into the offices of his old newsfeed, secures a job and an apartment, removes all his hair with a chemical shower, and gets his trademark glasses out of the totally-not-a-Star-Trek-replicator in his kitchen. Then he turns on the news. There are cryogenic defrostees, people uploaded into nanite clouds, and humans surgically turning themselves into aliens and trying to succeed from The City and create their own colony. As it turns out, these will all be plots for subsequent issues.
The first volume didn’t wow me as an introduction. The chaos of The City struck me as an excuse to just throw any sort of futuristic spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. The characters all range from unpleasant to outright awful, and I have a hard time taking it seriously when the city is called The City and the protagonist has a name like Spider Jerusalem. But hey, it’s the first volume, and a lot of series don’t find their feet right away, so I started in on the next one…
Transmetropolitan (vol. 2)
Written By Warren Ellis, Illustrated by Derick Robertson
I realized partway through this volume that the post-facts world of Transmetropolitan probably seemed more science-fictiony around the year 2000. Nowadays, it’s hardly any different than world outside my window. This certainly isn’t the first piece of sci-fi to satirize politics and religion, only to find that the future went and outdid them. Being subversive and edgy is not a good way to last—yesterday’s shocks are boring to tomorrow’s audience.
I also came to the conclusion that a lot of what rubs me the wrong way about the series is that it’s packed with big, obnoxious allegory. It’s constantly winking and nudging you.
Transmetropolitan doesn’t have an ongoing arc in these first couple volumes. It’s just a series of unrelated stories. This time, we get one about Spider’s assistant’s boyfriend, who decides to download himself into a cloud of nanites. After that, it’s a cryogenically frozen woman who wakes up and discovers that the future is impossible to acclimate to, and that nobody much cares to try and help her. Then there’s Spider’s tour of the “reservations,” hermetically sealed places throughout The City that are built to preserve different cultures and ways of life. Each of these works pretty well as a stand-alone short story, but it didn’t feel like it was building to anything bigger.
Ultimately, I found that Spider Jerusalem was one of the least interesting characters in his own book. It’s possible that some of these disparate threads will eventually weave back together into a larger story, but I wasn’t feeling it after two volumes. I don’t think I’ll be continuing this series.
This is the second Witcher book that’s billed as a short story collection. And it is, but they end up feeling like more than the sum of their parts. There are bigger arcs happening across these stories, continuing the events from the first book.
In addition to the titular Witcher, Dandelion the bard and the sorceress Yennifer are the other main characters. If there is an overall theme across the book, it’s the angst between Geralt and Yennefer, who are both outcasts and troublemakers in their own ways. They each think they can’t make the other person happy, while also being unable to permanently break things off.
There is also a great deal more world-building happening here, including the first mentions of the Wild Hunt, a mysterious recurring event where ghostly warriors cross the sky and portend disaster and war. These stories are still “low to the ground,” but they incorporate a bit more about the nations and politics of the northern kingdoms.
Of course, it wouldn’t be the Witcher without stories about the interactions between humans and magical creatures, whether that be a shapeshifter stealing friends’ identities or a pompous town mayor in love with a mermaid. It also sets up the series of books to follow, as Geralt meets Ciri, the kid princess whose destiny he inadvertently entwined with his own.
Written By Neil Gaiman, Illustrated by P. Craig Russell
Much like Volume 3, Dream Country, this is a set of mostly stand-alone tales where Dream takes on a minor role. There’s a story about Emperor Norton, the real person who declared himself Emperor of the United States of America, a fable about a clan of eastern European werewolves, a tale of young Marco Polo getting lost (and eventually found) in the desert, and story of a spectacular Baghdad, greater than we ever knew it because it was traded into dreams so it might stay perfect forever.
Unlike Dream Country, there are a few things of note that tie back into the broader ongoing plot. For the first time in the series, we actually see “the prodigal,” Destruction, the one member of the Endless who has abdicated his position. We witness a retelling of the ancient Greek tragedy of Orpheus, who is an oracle, and Dream’s son. We see why Orpheus lives eternally as a severed head, and the cause of the rift between him and his father.
These events lead directly into Volume 7, and it really feels like the meandering main story is picking up steam.
The Sandman: Brief Lives (Vol. 7)
Written by Neil Gaiman, Illustrated by Jill Thompson
The issues of this arc are labeled as “chapters,” and this is probably the most linear and focused volume since the first. The beginning pulls together several threads from earlier stories, and the end implies a whole lot of bad things are in store for Dream.
Each chapter begins with a sequence of cryptic phrases, like this for chapter one:
Blossom for a lady
Want/not want
The view from the backs of mirrors
Not her sister
Rain in the doorway
The number you have dialed…
They turn out to be little landmarks in the story, a game where the reader can try to guess what might happen from these tidbits, and then check items off the list as they come to pass. It got me thinking how excellent the whole series is at these little things. From the surreal Dave McKean covers and interstitial art to the introductory quotes to the entertainingly themed credits, the Sandman books feel like absolutely every single element was labored over more than was really reasonable. All the little things add up.
The story of this volume centers around the duo of Dream and his youngest sister, Delirium (who used to be Delight). Delirium’s personality is somewhere between a young child and a lunatic, and you get the feeling that the rest of the oh-so-serious Endless family is perpetually humoring her. She decides to go looking for Destruction, the brother that abandoned the rest of the Endless and made it clear that he doesn’t want to be found. Delirium asks her siblings to help her, but one by one they brush her off. When she comes to Dream, the most serious of them all, it’s a surprise that he agrees to go with her. So the pair set off to find Destruction.
Eventually, we learn that Dream had ulterior motives, and never really expected to find Destruction. But he takes his responsibilities seriously, and since he promised to help Delirium, he turns to the one person who has the power to find the Endless, even when they do not want to be found: his own son, Orpheus. For this favor, Orpheus (a severed head who cannot die) asks his father to end his suffering.
The book ends with foreboding. They find Destruction, only to have him leave again. Morpheus returns to his realm, everything neatly wrapped up, and then reveals his chalk-white hands stained with his son’s blood. It’s made clear that there are consequences for the Endless when they spill family blood. The only question is what those consequences will be…
Sometimes I look at the Hitchhikers’ Guide omnibus on my shelf and I think sadly about how I’ll never be able to read another Douglas Adams story for the first time. But if there’s anyone who can compare to Adams, it has to be Terry Pratchett. I’m grateful that unlike Adams, he wrote so prolifically.
There are 41 books in the Discworld series, and I’ve been slowly going through them, picking up new ones at Half Price Books whenever I see them. I’m savoring them, because I know eventually I’ll run out.
Small Gods is about an accidental prophet named Brutha, in the desert land of Omnia, where the people worship the god Om. Omnia is a strict theocracy where the church is the central pillar of life, and it’s not uncommon for supposed sinners to have the badness tortured out of them. Faith is of the utmost importance in Omnia, so it’s especially awkward when Brutha discovers that Om is trapped in the form of a turtle with hardly any godlike powers at all, and this is because nobody besides Brutha actually believes in him anymore.
Brutha goes on a hero’s journey, and despite his best efforts he manages to overthrow the Omnian order, restore (real) belief in Om, and generally start making the country a place where people can live their lives without worrying about being randomly tortured.
Small Gods isn’t my favorite Discworld book, but it’s a parody with plenty of laughs and a few sideways glances toward our world. As usual, an average book by Terry Pratchett is quite good by anyone else’s standards.
One of the joys of being a parent is getting to share things you enjoy with your kids. One of the strange things about being a parent of several children (with a few years in-between) is that I’ve shared a bunch of those things with my eldest kids, and my youngest knows nothing about them. So, although I read the Harry Potter books to my eldest son—and my daughter was sometimes in the general vicinity of the reading—I was told that we should read them again. And now we are.
I’ll say here that I don’t agree with Rowling and the garbage she is now known for spewing on social media. I also think it’s fashionable to criticize books by authors who are deemed terrible people. Despite Rowling acting out, I think the Harry Potter books are perfectly enjoyable.
A lot of the complaints about this series are about all the unbelievable aspects of the world-building. There are a lot of problems with the Wizarding World and its interactions with the regular world that just aren’t addressed. And that’s completely true. But I also think it doesn’t really matter.
The odd thing about this series is that it grew up along with its readership. The first book is very much a children’s story, in its form and in the language it uses. It’s not worried about perfectly consistent world-building, any more than Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks is, because the shape of the story still works. Part of that is because it borrows from fairy tales, starting with the classic evil step parents (or in this case, aunt and uncle), and the orphan boy who is destined to save the world.
So shockingly, my takeaway is that a super-bestselling book that started a huge pop-culture craze and made more money than some small countries does, in fact, do a lot of things well.
What I’m Reading in September
I’ll continue working my way through the Sandman and Witcher series. I might go for a couple brand-new books about writing that I just got. I also recently compiled a list of highly-rated comics from the last 20 years, and I might start working through some of those.
I would describe myself as a mid-level comics nerd. I’ve subscribed to comics. I worked at a comics store in high school. I still read comics in trade paperbacks, but rarely the ones with superheroes. I’ve seen at least half of the Marvel movies, although I’ve really cut back in recent years. The last DC movies I saw were the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy. (But honestly, I’ve never been that into classic DC characters.)
In short, I come at this topic as someone at least reasonably informed, but not quite a super-fan. Unfortunately, from this point of view, I think superhero movies as they currently exist are doomed.
The Structures of Comics
For many years, comics have been primarily periodicals. They exist somewhere in the universe of magazines and newspapers, traditionally printed on cheap paper and published in monthly 30-page installments. You can find many examples of other form factors, but this is the standard, and this has had a strong influence on the structures of the comics industry and the stories comics tell.
Comics follow a structure I call “endless episodic.” There may be arcs to the story, but the overall goal is to keep publishing issues, month after month, year after year. If the story ends, it stops making money. “Endless episodic” naturally trends toward a steady state, a cartoon-like existence where the world and the characters are more or less the same at the end of the story as they were at the beginning.
This steady state is death for good storytelling. If nothing changes, there are no stakes. There is no satisfying resolution. The ending is what provides meaning.
This is one of the reasons why origin stories are so important to superheroes. Often, they are the best story about that character, the only one a non-comics-nerd is likely to know. If the average normie knows anything about Superman, it’s probably that he comes from the planet Krypton, that it blew up, and he was adopted by farmers. If they know anything about Spiderman, it’s probably that he was bitten by a radioactive spider, and that “with great power comes great responsibility.” That’s because the origin story is allowed to have an actual character arc. At the beginning, the hero is just some person, and by the end, they are a superhero. They’ve changed. They’ve learned things. They’ve experienced loss.
Of course, comics writers have long understood this limitation of the form, and they’ve come up with many solutions and band-aids. They’ve ramped up the stakes in each subsequent story arc, saving the city, the country, the world and the universe. They’ve written tie-ins that pull in other, unfamiliar characters to provide novelty and sell more books. They’ve killed off the main character and put a replacement in the same old super-suit. They’ve explored alternate realities.
All of these are ways to create an arc while keeping the endless episodic story going, but you can only squeeze so much juice out of each of these techniques. Readers might get excited by the first or second jaunt into alternate realities, but eventually they’ll get bored. Everybody can only get worked up about the death of Superman so many times when you know he’ll be back in a couple months.
Comics will even go so far as to completely reboot their entire lineup and shared universe, and it’s all because they’re fighting against the intractable problem of endless episodic stories.
The State of Movies
The pandemic had a profound effect on movie theaters and theatrical releases, but the truth is that it only accelerated processes that were already in motion.
Movies today are a luxury item. Theaters have more screens, reserved seating, big fat recliner seats, restaurant food and a full bar. Taking my family of five to a movie is a significant outlay even if we only buy the tickets, and it’s very easy to spend over a hundred dollars on two hours of entertainment. Small, discount, and second-run theaters are essentially extinct.
The big studios are bigger than ever, and they’re putting more money into fewer movies. These bigger tentpole movies are designed to be as safe as possible, and are engineered by committee to appeal to a maximally broad audience.
It is in this environment that the superhero movie has ascended. I don’t necessarily think this environment boosted superheroes into pop culture. It may just be coincidence. However, superhero movies are the flavor du jour, and the current environment has resulted in maximum saturation. Disney spent billions to acquire Marvel and has continued to pour billions into it, and Disney will get its money’s worth. Same goes for DC and Warner, although they’re not quite as good at the money extraction process.
The State of Streaming
It’s easy to forget how young the streaming industry is. Netflix started streaming in 2007, and it didn’t really take off until 2010. The industry rode a decade of steady growth and market expansion into the pandemic boom, and now it’s quite possible that we have just entered the era of flat growth that will become the norm going forward. Prices are rising, everyone is adding commercials, and all of this looks awfully familiar to anyone who saw the rise of cable TV. Nobody knows yet how much people are willing to pay (in cash or commercial attention) or how many different services can coexist.
Early in Marvel’s meteoric rise, they released a few limited series on Netflix. These featured characters ranging from moderately popular (Daredevil) to almost unknown (Jessica Jones). These initial forays into superhero TV were largely self-contained, with real character arcs—although the origin story is always a bit of a freebie. The series were popular enough to warrant second seasons in a couple cases, and eventually a tie-in series that featured the whole Netflix superhero crew.
When the contracts between Disney and Netflix ran out, the new home of Marvel streaming became Disney+, and with this, they doubled-down on integrated stories. The movies told an ongoing, interwoven story, so why not include TV series in that and sell some subscriptions? Just as comics love crossovers to sell more issues across different lines, comics movies love crossovers to sell more tickets and subscriptions.
However, this also begs the question of just how many people are willing to see that many movies per year, and subscribe to the streaming service just to get the “whole story.”
The Present Moment
When the movie studios bought Marvel and DC, they bought a massive back-catalog of superhero stories. Decades of content, some of which is effectively modern mythology, it has so permeated modern society. From this huge backlog, they can pick and choose the best stories…for a while.
The studios wanted a return on their investments, and they have kept their foot on the gas for years now. They have burned through some of the biggest classic comics stories. Eventually they will have to look to more and more obscure and mediocre storylines, all that filler that kept those “endless episodic” stories going. Of course, they could take a chance on a brand new story, but big studios don’t like to take chances.
It seems inevitable that comics movies will fall into the same patterns as comics, only faster. The same forces are shaping them. The more history the movie universes accrue, the more is expected of new viewers to “catch up.” Big, integrated universes become weighed down by their history. The temptations of reboots and alternate universes grow ever stronger. Hell, we’ve already had multiple movies featuring multiple alternate-universe Spidermen.
The flavor du jour of movies will change. Just like Westerns, superhero movies will eventually discover that they can’t command the same budgets they once had. There will be less room for incredible effects and star-studded casts, and these are integral parts of the modern superhero movie formula.
There are even signs that the super-fans are tiring. I wasn’t even aware that there was a Secret War series on Disney+, until a wave of nerd-rage and complaining washed over Twitter. As someone who hasn’t watched these series, it was quite the contrast to the excitement that followed Wandavision or Loki. And even if you ignore bombs like Morbius, people just don’t seem to be talking as much about the current crop of movies as they did in the era of Endgame (or even Justice League).
The Future
People have been debating whether big-budget superhero movies have peaked for nearly the entire time studios have been making them. We could debate whether now is an inflection point, but it doesn’t really matter. It seems inevitable to me that there will be a hard turn sooner or later, followed by a significant decline. Nothing lasts forever.
As a somewhat-invested comics fan who is burnt-out on Marvel and DC, I think I’m a reasonable bellwether for the broad audience. Super-fans might stay invested longer.
On the other hand, the genre won’t go away completely, and that’s a good thing. Projects like the Spider-verse films and “off-brands” like Umbrella Academy or Sandman show the possibilities of less-integrated properties, less focus on classic superhero archetypes, and eschewing the “endless episodic” formulas.
Superhero movies are, in some ways, burdened by the need to be the 900lb. gorilla at the top of the hill. If budgets shrink and opportunities dwindle, it will force some limitations on the genre, and limitations breed creativity. If movies and shows are given smaller budgets, the people in charge of the money may be more willing to dig into the many weird and interesting corners of comics, taking on riskier projects on the chance that they hit big.
I’m hopeful that the future of comics movies will be filled with cheaper, smaller things, and more innovation. I’d love to see more exploration of less mainstream titles. I think the massive shared universes will eventually collapse, although I doubt any media based on comics can completely escape the gravity of cross-overs, alternate universes, and reboots. Even if the number of releases and the budgets decrease, the future of superhero media is bright. In fact, it’s likely to be better than an alternate universe where they remain big-budget blockbusters forever.
Last time, I took some lessons from the first four volumes of The Unwritten. This time, I’m going to look at volumes 5-8. These volumes encompass some interesting turning points in the series. The heroes seem to have defeated the “bad guys,” even if it does come at a high cost. The mysteries deepen, a few new major characters are introduced, and some old characters come back.
What really makes these volumes great is that they don’t just continue the story that was started in the first four. They take it in new and unexpected directions. Each question that gets answered introduces yet more questions. All in all, it sets up the last three volumes so that you really have no idea what to expect as the story comes to its conclusion.
Moving the Goalposts Can Be Exciting
The first few volumes set up a shadowy cabal as the villains who cause all sorts of trouble for the protagonists, especially their chief henchman, Pullman. All of the bigwigs in the cabal are largely interchangeable and never characterized in much detail. It’s Pullman who is causing trouble on the ground for the heroes while the leaders of the cabal are safely hidden, and he’s the one they have to worry about. But Pullman is also the one villain who is given a back-story, revealed in drips and drops.
When the heroes actually have some success bringing the fight to the shadowy cabal, it might seem obvious that Pullman is just a Man in Front of the Man trope. But his motives turn out to be quite different from a “standard” villain. Almost exactly halfway through the story, the entire direction of the plot turns in a new direction.
Tropes are dangerous. If the reader thinks you’re just retelling a story they’ve heard before, they’ll quickly lose interest. However, tropes can be useful building blocks if you want to subvert expectations.
Tropes are just story elements that show up over and over again. They’re the canyons gouged by the flow of stories over the centuries, the comfortable shapes that stories like to fall into. A savvy reader will see parts of a trope and anticipate that the rest is forthcoming. However, you can make them a little less certain by including some elements that break the trope. Eventually, you can tear the trope apart in some unexpected plot twist, and it can be immensely satisfying.
Sometimes these twists seem obvious in hindsight, but as a reader it’s very easy to get pulled into those deep currents that tropes provide. It’s a great way to disguise where the story is going.
Exposition Can Be a Reward
The Unwritten is great at introducing characters right in the middle of something. Tom Taylor’s dull life is turned upside down within the first few pages of the first volume. Lizzie sets those events in motion, but not in the way that she hoped. And Ritchie meets Tom in a French prison right before it explodes into chaos. The story forces the reader to hit the ground running. First, it shows you who the characters are and makes you care about them. Only then, and slowly, does it start to reveal their back-stories and the paths they took to get here.
By making you care about the characters first, the story makes exposition exciting. We want to know more about these people. How the heck did they get in these situations?
If these parts of the story were told in sequential order, they would be less interesting. They’re the lead-up to the exciting action that makes up the bulk of the story. But by withholding them for a while, they become a reward for the reader. Even better, they offer an opportunity to understand why the characters are the way they are. Learning about the events that shaped them provides new context to everything they’ve done so far in the story.
Epilogues Can Be Prologues Too
Almost every volume of The Unwritten, each major story arc, ends with a seemingly unrelated episode. After seeing the latest exploits of Tom, Lizzie and Ritchie, we might be transported to the Winnie-the-Pooh-inspired Willowbank Wood, to meet Pauly the lovable rabbit, who sounds a lot like a New Jersey mob thug and seems a bit out of place. We might be taken back a century or three to see the exploits of various famous storytellers and how they became entangled with the cabal. Or we might meet Daniel, a directionless young man with a degree in literature who finds himself taking a job that involves reading books all day with hundreds of other people in a featureless underground bunker.
Each of these little stories is an abrupt jump to a new time and place, with new characters. Each one eventually ties in to the main plot, but when the reader first encounters them, they seem like non-sequiturs. In this quiet lull at the end of an arc, when the story has just answered some questions and provided a small, satisfying conclusion, a brand-new big mystery is introduced. Namely, “who are these people and what the heck is going on?”
The next volume invariably jumps right back into the story of Tom et al., leaving these epilogues hanging unresolved for a while. Later on, when they tie back into the main story, there’s an “aha!” moment. These parts of the story are made more exciting simply by being told out of order. They’re also a great way of keeping up the tension in the parts of an episodic narrative where tension has just been relieved (at the end of an arc).
But Wait, There’s More…
The Unwritten is a big series, and I have one more post in me before we get to the end. Next time I’ll be covering the last few things I learned from the final volumes: 9-11. See you then.
The Unwritten is a Vertigo comics series published from 2009 to 2015, written by Mike Carey. I picked up the first few trade paperbacks by sheer chance, when my wife found them at a garage sale and thought they looked interesting. After devouring those four, I bought the remaining seven books in the series.
The Unwritten takes place in a world similar to ours, and follows Tom Taylor, whose father published a massively best-selling series of books starring a boy wizard named Tommy Taylor. Tom makes a meager living on the convention circuit by virtue of being the character’s namesake. Early in the story he becomes the target of a secret society that uses stories to manipulate and control the world, and finds out that his father was somehow involved with them as well.
The Unwritten is a modern comics masterpiece that intertwines its own original story with real history and dozens of famous works of fiction. It starts with the classic idea that stories have the power to change the world, and then asks what would happen if that were literally true.
This is a big series of books, so I’m going to cover it in a couple posts. First, volumes 1–4.
Everything is a Gun on the Mantle
Callbacks are powerful, and The Unwritten makes liberal use of them. Characters are often introduced in short scenes where it’s not entirely clear what’s going on. The story steps away, only to revisit them later and explore them more deeply. Scenes from the Tommy Taylor novels and from other works of fiction are shown early in an episode and become relevant later on. And some ideas keep coming back again and again, like the vampire, Ambrosio, never quite being dead for good.
These callbacks use the principle of minimum necessary information to pull the reader along without bogging down the story. But they’re not just one-and-done. In Damn Fine Story, Chuck Wendig calls this “echoing.” The gun on the mantle need not be thrown away as soon as it’s fired. It can be fired again and again. It can turn out to have historical significance and emotional significance. This layering of narrative makes the reader feel rewarded for simply paying attention, seeing these through-lines keep building and building.
The Unwritten covers a lot of history, back to the very first stories and ahead to the end of the world. But that history is doled out carefully, in small helpings. It takes most of the series for the reader to finally see the whole picture. Each new plot twist seems inevitable, because the groundwork was laid for it by the elements that came before.
Leave Breadcrumbs
I skimmed through the books again as I was writing this, and I immediately discovered several tiny references that I had missed the first time around. These were little clues about what was going on, and which mysteries would become important later. Missing them didn’t hurt my enjoyment of my first read-through, although I’m sure they’d add to the experience of a reader who caught them. Perhaps it’s even better to catch them on a re-read, and discover that I can still find new things in a story whose shape I already know.
Breadcrumbs like these also give the reader an important sense that the author knows where the story is going, which is particularly relevant in episodic media like TV and comics. Many of us have been burned by stories like Game of Thrones or LOST where the authors threw down exciting mysteries and conflicts, but couldn’t come up with commensurate payoffs because they didn’t have a clear plan for the end. Breadcrumbs and callbacks let the reader know that the author is leading them somewhere. It’s hard to enjoy a story until you trust that the author is going to bring you somewhere interesting.
Form Follows Function
The Unwritten plays with a variety of different forms. News broadcasts show up in several places as a series of small TV stills with a ticker along the bottom of the “screen” and the voice-over text just below. There are also times when the characters are browsing the web, and pages of various sizes and shapes are shown shuffled and overlapping, to give the sense of time passing in a jumble of scattered information.
Stories from ancient and recent times are interwoven into the narrative, and are illustrated in different ways. The medieval Song of Roland has washed-out colors and heavier line work. The Tommy Taylor books-within-the-book are slightly more cartoony. Dickens looks like woodcut. The Winnie-the-Pooh-inspired fictitious Willowbank Wood is all pastel watercolors. The Nazi propaganda Jud Süß is black and white, with the red of swastikas providing the only color.
Beyond the visual style, the prose itself changes between these different types of stories. Even more interesting are narrative jaunts, like the issue that reveals Lizzie Hexam’s past. Rather than give the reader a definitive version of events, we get a choose-your-own-adventure story, and different branches paint the characters as sinister or sympathetic, in their own control or manipulated by others. The result is a character whose back-story exists in a quantum superposition of different states.
Sometimes, the way the story is told is what makes the story worth listening to. Memento just isn’t a very interesting story if it’s told linearly. House of Leaves would lose its punch without the multiple frame stories and the parts where the text starts wandering around the page and turning back on itself. The ordering of the narrative and the presentation are the layers of the story that the reader directly interacts with. Even if they aren’t the “meat” of the story, they are responsible for a lot of the flavor.
Words Deferred 