This is the monthly post where I talk about what I’ve been reading. The end of the year really snuck up on me. I didn’t have a lot of time to read in November due to NaNoWriMo, and I was busy with holidays in December, so I decided to roll them together into a single blog post.
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.
Monster (Vol. 1 – 18)
By Naoki Urasawa
My interest in this series stems from watching an episode or two of the anime based on these books several years ago. Conveniently, one of my co-workers is an avid collector, so I was able to borrow the whole series over my Christmas vacation.
What s stands out about Monster is the subject matter and setting. So much anime and manga follows familiar formulas, and this one is refreshingly different.
Dr. Kenzo Tenma is a Japanese immigrant in west Germany, shortly before reunification. He is a brilliant neurosurgeon with a promising future at a prestigious hospital. He’s a favorite of the hospital’s director, and engaged to the director’s daughter.
However, Tenma has a crisis of conscience after he’s ordered to save the life of a famous performer instead of the poor immigrant worker who arrived first. The next time he has to make a similar choice, he rejects hospital politics, saving the life of a boy shot in the head, while less skilled surgeons are unable to save an important donor who came in shortly after.
Overnight, Tenma’s life begins to collapse. The director refuses to talk to him, his engagement is broken off, and he’s overlooked for promotion. His fortunes turn yet again when the director and two of his allies are found poisoned, and the remaining hospital leadership puts him in charge.
A decade later, Tenma comes across the boy he saved, now an adult. To his horror, the boy seems to be tied up in a string of serial murders, and kills a man in front of the doctor. He reveals that he was the one who poisoned Tenma’s co-workers.
With Tenma once again close to a murder, a federal investigator takes an interest in him, trying to pin all the murders on the doctor. Tenma is wracked with guilt for saving the boy who has turned out to be a monster, but he has no evidence, and only he knows the truth. When the police attempt to arrest Tenma, he decides to flee and chase down the boy he saved, to kill him and stop him from harming anyone else.
The series follows Tenma as he evades the authorities and slowly uncovers the mysterious and disturbing origins of the monster, Johan, while helping people along the way. He uncovers the history of secret psychological experiments on children, and the legacy of the people who once ran those experiments, as well as the damaged children that came out of them.
Set in 1990s Germany and Czechoslovakia, the setting is phenomenally well-executed. The characters are excellent, and the mystery is compelling. Unfortunately, I felt like the story was treading water in some of the later volumes, and the conclusion wasn’t as satisfying as the opening. Regardless, this is still a fantastic manga, and a great story for anyone who is turned off by the usual anime/manga tropes and settings.
The Department of Truth (Vol. 1)
By James Tynion IV and Martin Symmonds
Every conspiracy theory is true. Sort of.
The Department of Truth is a comic built on the well-worn fantasy premise that peoples’ collective belief can physically change the world. It feels especially relevant in our current moment, when it sometimes feels like our different political and cultural factions are living in entirely different universes.
Cole Turner is a teacher at Quantico specializing in home-grown American extremism. In the course of his research, he attends a flat-earther convention, where he attends a showing of Stanley Kubric’s fake moon landing tapes before being whisked off with a select group on a private jet to see something even more impossible: the literal edge of the world. The trip is cut short when the group is unceremoniously gunned-down, and Cole is taken in for questioning by a group calling themselves The Department of Truth.
The Department of Truth is the secret government agency responsible for monitoring the effects that collective beliefs have on the fabric of reality, and keeping them in check. What exactly does that entail? Well, that’s the complicated part. They cut down conspiracy theories, killing and ruining lives when they deem it necessary for the greater good. It’s a messy job. The agency’s leader, none other than Lee Harvey Oswald, recruits Cole as a new member.
This first volume does a good job laying the groundwork of setting and characters, and brewing up a big fight. There’s an enemy organization called Black Hat working against the Department of Truth. They are trying to change the narrative, to put real evidence of the conspiracy theories out into the world. They want to reveal and destroy the Department of Truth, and it turns out they’ve been watching Cole for a long time.
Unlike similar stories, this doesn’t shy away from real, modern conspiracies. In this first volume it touches on classics like the Kennedy assassination and the satanic panic, but it also hits Obama’s birth certificate, “pizzagate,” Epstein’s suicide, flat earth, school shooting “crisis actors,” 9/11 as an inside job, and the whole QAnon/deep-state mish-mash. There’s effectively infinite material for them to riff on, since conspiracy theories are practically mainstream these days.
The book also features a gay main character, without making a big fuss about it. Unfortunately, Cole’s personal life with his husband is hardly touched on. Between the conference and his recruitment, he goes missing for a couple of days, and it results in a mildly heated argument. The relationship boils down to one face-to-face scene and a phone call in this first volume. I would have liked to have gotten more, and it would help to flesh out Cole as a character. However, there’s a lot of hinting that his background will tie into the story more and more as we go deeper, so I’m hopeful that there will be more in future volumes.
The art style is grimy, dark, and impressionistic. It’s more about conveying mood than the literal scenery, and the moods are not generally happy ones. Characters’ inner thoughts are expressed as shadowy images lurking behind them. Almost every image is filtered through TV scan lines, ink splatters, deep chiaroscuro shadows, and scribbled linework. This intense abstraction is appropriate for a story where there’s a blurring between truth and fiction, and dark things really are lurking in the shadows.
Unfortunately, the darkness and the abstraction sometimes make it hard to tell what is actually happening. On more than one occasion, I found myself having to re-read a two-page spread because the panel order wasn’t clear from the layout. I don’t mind unusual layouts (Sandman Overture is still my favorite art in any comic, and it almost never uses “normal” layouts), but there’s a real difficulty in not confusing the reader. The Department of Truth doesn’t always quite hit that mark.
Overall, I really enjoyed the Department of Truth, Vol. 1, and I’ll definitely be picking up more of the series.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
By J.K. Rowling
The Potter read-through with kids continues. This is the middle book of the series, and it feels like a middle book. There are still a few of the kid-centric tropes and patterns that have repeated through the earlier volumes, like a red-herring bad guy and a mystery to be solved. It’s also doing a lot of work to set up everything that’s going to happen in the next three books.
This book clearly signals darker stuff to come, with the main villain finally arriving, and a death near the end of the book. Still, I couldn’t help feel that the dead character wasn’t actually all that important in the grand scheme of the story. There is a broad cast of side characters that have been built up across the first few books, and any one of them dying would have had more impact.
Once again, the biggest lesson this series teaches is that adults are all useless. They’re either outright evil, incompetent, or just don’t trust the kids enough to inform or direct them in any useful way. Of course, this is a theme that’s pretty common in kids’ books. It wouldn’t be fun if the adults took care of everything.
What I’m Reading in January
Harry Potter continues, I dig into more of the comics I got for Christmas, and I’ll definitely (probably) finally return to the Witcher series. See you then.
Words Deferred 