Hypericum is one of two graphic novels by Italian authors that I picked up in my recent library excursion. Both involve Italians traveling overseas in the ’90s. Obviously Italy has artistic traditions spanning millennia, but Italian comics are a complete blind spot for me. After these two examples, I’m inclined to seek out more.
Manuele Fior tells the story of Teresa Guerrero, an Italian student who has come to Berlin in the late ’90s to intern as a scientific assistant preparing an exhibit on king tut’s treasure. Teresa leads a charmed life, one where each event seems inevitable, running, as she says, in “a straight line.”
A chance meeting with fellow Italian expat Ruben breaks that straight line. Teresa thinks a day of exploring the sights of the city is just a dalliance, but she soon discovers that a mix-up has left her without living arrangements. With no other place to turn, she calls Ruben.
Ruben turns out to be a carefree punk, squatting in a building with other like-minded young people. Teresa moves in, thinking it will only be temporary. Instead, things get physical, and they enter a relationship that Teresa finds exhilarating and frustrating in turns.
Teresa has a dark side. She suffers from chronic insomnia. By day, she walks through life like a waking dream, working on Egyptology and her exhibit. At night, awake and exhausted while everyone else is recuperating and peaceful, she becomes depressed and miserable.
Ruben’s glib attitude frustrates her, especially when she discovers that his counterculture lifestyle is actually funded by the family he is constantly complaining about.
The story culminates in a reckoning over their relationship and Teresa’s successful exhibit, which comes with a full-time job offer and a choice about whether to stay in Berlin or to abandon her life in Germany and go home.
Hypericum is informed by Fior’s own time in Berlin, and the backdrop of a freshly reintegrated Germany is rendered as drab and dark or bright and sexy in turns. The characters are slightly stylized, skewing ever so slightly toward cartoony, but never childish.
Alternating chapters follow Howard Carter and the original excavation of Tutankhamen’s tomb, desert scenes blown out with bright sun, underground scenes saturated in darkness.
Teresa’s connection to the excavation goes beyond the exhibit. Within the tomb, Carter finds traces of small yellow flowers that once adorned the king. Called Hypericum by the ancient Greeks and St. John’s Wort in modern day, they turn out to be the one form of medication that may actually help Teresa’s insomnia.
Hypericum is a little bit of history, a little romance, and not quite a fictionalized travelogue. It makes great use of the medium of comics for a story that feels like it wouldn’t be quite the same as a traditional novel or something made for the screen. It’s a great showcase of what modern comics can be.
Trouble! At Coal Creek is a historical fiction graphic novel that tells the story of the 1891 “Coal Creek War” through the eyes of a mining family. It follows in the tradition of books like Maus and They Called Us Enemy.
At this point, I would almost classify this style of book as its own sub-genre, fairly distinct from both mainstream graphic novels and traditional historical fiction, with its own style and tropes. Weirdly, after decades of comics being snubbed by the mainstream as childish, the books that managed to cross over have lent a patina of prestige to this particular combination of format and subject matter.
Trouble! was published with grants from no less than three art and education foundations and funds. The author, Austin Saurbrei’s bio describes him as a community organizer with strong union ties. My own political leanings are pretty pro-labor, but I think it’s fair to say that the book is happy to take sides and isn’t trying for a neutral viewpoint. On the other hand, the maltreatment of coal miners in the 1800s was so incredibly nasty that I hope most people with modern sensibilities would find it hard to side with the coal barons.
The story is told by an unnamed narrator whose parents emigrated from Wales to eastern Tennessee, hoping to use Pa’s experience as a miner to build a better life. Ma, Pa, narrator and Sis are sucked into the biscuits cycle of work and debt that mining towns and “the company store” have become synonymous with.
When Ma and a third child die in childbirth, Pa gives up hope of a better life, spending his paltry pocket money and free hours drinking. Sis escapes via marriage into another mining family. The narrator—forbidden from the mines by Pa—gets a job at a local general store. The store happens to be run by a local member of the Knights of Labor, one of the earliest precursors to modern labor unions in America.
The rest of the book chronicles the escalating dispute between coal miners and mine owners. A labor strike is countered by bringing in (largely black, questionably prosecuted) prisoner labor. Miners riot and force out prison labor, only for the Tennessee government to bring it back it through new laws and militia protection. The conflict is shown through the narrator’s family as he and his sister fight for the miners, while their father, oddly, stays loyal to the company.
The book ends on a positive note, the rebellious miners using dynamite to crack open the stockade and free the prisoner-laborers. But the page-long afterword makes it ring hollow, describing how the fights of 1891-1892 weren’t enough to stop convict labor, which continued in some form for another 75 years.
The black and white art is often moody, alternating white and black framing. Recreations of maps, telegrams, posters and newspapers are interspersed with the illustrations to lend verisimilitude. However, despite the often violent subject matter, the book shies away from grit and gore. I suspect it was kept in the PG range to make it an easier sell for classrooms and school libraries.
There is little dialogue in the book. Most of the story is told through voice-over narration, even when the narrator is in the illustrated scene. This, along with the minimal characterization (none of the family have names), gives the story a little too much distance from the fictional characters.
They are there to add some pathos and personal stakes to the historical story. However, that distance makes it hard to be too invested in their plight. Since the rebellion is largely successful in the time period covered, it never really feels like they are in life-threatening danger.
Still, the book is a very easy way into an interesting period of American history; events that I didn’t know in detail, and I expect most Americans aren’t familiar with. The topic is especially salient now, when wealth disparities and the rights of labor are once again a major issue in our politics.
Then again, maybe that could be said for every decade between the Coal Creek War and today.
I recently went to the DMV near my house, which happens to be in the same government center as a big library. My government-mandated waiting room time was relatively quick, so I walked across the building to browse.
It’s been a while since I’ve been to the library, so I decided to wade into the comics section and see what was on offer. I’m still surprised by the sheer variety in graphic formats these days. There are now shelves and shelves of non-superhero comics. (Not that I’m opposed to superhero comics, but it’s nice to have variety.)
I decided to pick out a few things I might normally skip over, and the first of these was Hogbook and Lazer Eyes by Maria Bamford and Scott Marvel Cassidy.
I recognized Bamford as a stand-up comedian, but I don’t really know her work or Cassidy, her husband. The book bills itself as the story of their relationship, as seen through they eyes of their pet pugs.
Their connection via online dating app and subsequent relationship are the topic of the first third of the book. After that, it’s…stuff that happens to them. Their habit of adopting elderly pugs results in at least half a dozen being introduced through the story.
The story is autobiographical, but unfocused. It doesn’t center on a particular aspect of their lives; just a series of largely unrelated vignettes. It reads a bit like the authors were asked to summarize their lives in a set number of pages.
Most of the problem for me was the narration. The dogs aren’t really given distinct personalities, so it’s hard to say if they’re narrating or not. The narration is largely clinical: what happened and when.
For example, when the pair briefly break up and get back together, the entire explanation reads: “Maria and Scott reunite with help from Sheryl Hirsham, the excellent therapist with silver hair. Communications and emotions resume. Dogs, cats, and other creatures are on board.” It’s accompanied by an abstract illustration of a space council of dogs.
It sounds like there might be an interesting story in there somewhere. I have to assume it was a rougher patch than this glib paragraph suggests, but there’s no detail to be found. Two pages later, they’re engaged.
Perhaps Maria and Scott were uncomfortable airing their dirty laundry in comic form. That’s totally understandable. I certainly would be. But if that’s the case, I would have advised them not to try to write and publish a comic about their relationship.
The art is a ink-heavy, realistic style with muted colors—a bit like early DC Vertigo, minus the horror sensibilities. Half of it is pugs, very faithfully rendered in all their puggish glory. The humans all have a melancholy, slightly pained look to them, regardless of what’s happening in the story.
I’m not sure what to make of this book. I expected comedy, and there was surprisingly little. I expected relationship drama, and there was surprisingly little. The amount of pug content was high, as advertised. If you love pugs or Maria Bamford, you may get more out of this book than I did.
The version from my local library is the Deluxe Edition, containing all 12 original issues from the 2002-2004 run. As an early 2000s title, I’d say this is on the tail end of non-superhero books working their way into mainstream culture. So there is no spandex and no superpowers (at least by that parlance), but Global Frequency does dabble in super-villain sci-fi and supernatural stuff on roughly the believability level of The X-Files.
The Global Frequency is a semi-secret, global and unaffiliated spy organization, 1001 specialized experts recruited by a woman who calls herself Miranda Zero. They live in a heightened version of the real world at the turn of the millennium, and they find solutions for crises big and small.
Each issue is a self-contained story, “monster of the week” style. There is no broader arc or big bad pulling all the strings, and no significant final wrap-up for the series. Miranda Zero and her central radio operator Aleph are the only recurring characters. Everyone else is a day player, and therefore sometimes expendable.
Each issue sets up a high stakes problem with many lives on the line, then places Global Frequency members with interesting skills nearby to solve that problem. Sometimes “interesting skills” means hacking into anything and everything. Sometimes it just means a lot of punching and shooting. Sometimes it’s being a super-detective or having a bionic arm or being a magician or building your own civilian space agency.
Some of the impending catastrophes are varied, like a memetic alien mind virus or an apparent angelic visitation that drives a whole town insane. Unfortunately, about half of them boil down to a big bomb. And by big, I mean at least three separate instances of nuclear weapons, and one orbital railgun that would only be similar in effect to an atomic bomb.
2000s Edgy
The series is very of-its-time, on the bleeding edge of what was cool in 2002: parkour and UAVs and satellite imagery. The Matrix was only a couple years earlier, and the Internet still felt new. I don’t begrudge the high tech that seems mundane from a 2020s perspective, or the hackers that get into any computer in five seconds flat. Some of the early web slang, spoken aloud by serious characters, is a little harder to forgive.
The biggest problem, however, is classic Warren Ellis: the series seems to want to play with the literary big boys, but it comes off as adolescent a little too often. It’s William Gibson by way of Hot Topic.
Oh, there are cultists with a bomb and hostages? And the bomb is connected to their heart rate monitors? And they took a slow-acting poison? It’s a delicate situation. Better send in a pair of action heroes to shoot them all, and shoot the remote before the leader can push the button. Good thing the heart monitor bit was a bluff.
Then, of course, the action heroes who have been at each others’ throats the whole time can immediately go offscreen to get it on. Its violent and sexy and there are naughty words, and that makes it adult.
I don’t mind these kinds of shenanigans. They’re why people still love over-the-top 90s action flicks. Heck, Netflix is still making a few of those movies per year, with big actors and eye-watering budgets. It works when the story doesn’t take itself too seriously. But Global Frequency sometimes feels like it’s trying a little too hard to be cool.
Missed Opportunities
That said, the series could have really benefitted from another 12 issues, and I would have been happy to read them. The run is short and it sticks to the anthology- style disconnected stories a little too much for my tastes. There are two things that more issues could have given breathing room for: a multi-issue arc, and an opportunity for failure.
The Global Frequency is a sort of an organizational Mary Sue. Their funding and equipment is never really explained. All their members are experts in their field, and everyone is fully aligned with the mission, whatever that might be. There are no moles and no traitors, despite their many enemies. In a spy series!
I would love to have gotten a little more background, and that could have very easily played into some kind of SPECTRE counter-spy organization or villain with a bone to pick. It would also have allowed for the Global Frequency to fail. Because they never really do. Individual members may die in the line of duty, but they always save the day.
Art and Extras
The art is solid and varied. Each issue has a different artist, so there’s always something new to look at. The angles, panels, and framing are occasionally unexpected, but there’s nothing especially crazy or unusual going on for this era of DC. There were a few places where the action was muddied, mostly in a specific issue that is almost entirely taken up by a big one-on-one brawl.
The book ends with two Deluxe Edition extra features: the original proposal for the series as submitted to DC, and a script for one issue. These are interesting for those who want to work in comics, and those who just like to see how the sausage gets made.
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.
