Impulse by Steven Gould

Please do not judge this book by its cover, which is dour and subdued and drab. (Only one cover in a thousand ever quite looks like anyone involved really wanted it to look, anyway -- most of the time, it just hints at what it could have been.) Impulse is the third novel in a loose series about teleporters in the modern world -- following Gould's excellent first novel Jumper, nearly twenty years old now, and Reflex, but not the side-novel Jumper: Griffin's Story, which was related to the movie made from Jumper rather than the very separate world of the novels -- and Gould is just as colloquially readable a writer and engagingly compelling a plotter as he has ever been.

(The way I'd describe Gould to someone my age or older: remember how it was easier to just keep reading a Heinlein juvenile novel than to stop and do anything else? Gould has that same matter-of-fact, unflashy ability to roll out a story where putting it down is harder than reading just one more page.)

As Jumper was the story of Davey Rice, abused teen of an alcoholic father (and inadvertent discoverer of a very Bester-esque form of teleportation), and Reflex was the story of Davey's love Millie and how she saved him from the shadowy organization that wanted to break him to serve them, Impulse is the story of their daughter Milicent "Cent" Rice, born in hiding and kept secret from the world her entire life.

But Cent is fifteen when Impulse begins and even the best-behaved, most parents-loving teenager is going to want some space from her parents -- and some friends outside of them. So, once Cent learns how to "jump" herself -- as in Bester's Stars My Destination, at least some subset of humanity can learn to teleport, given the right life-or-death situation -- her parents eventually give in to her pleas and move from their secret isolated Arctic lodge to a typical house in a typical American suburb to give Cent the chance to live a typical life as a highschooler.

It doesn't work out that simply, of course -- that suburb has its own problems, and Cent isn't the type not to stick her nose in and try to make things better -- but Impulse never descends into melodrama. Gould instead manages the tricky feat of telling a story that includes dramatic events but isn't defined by them, and, which is possibly even trickier, creates real tension in a story about a family of teleporters without resorting to the usual genre trappings.

So: look past that drab cover, and this is a swell book -- suitable for older teens, as well as most skiffy-friendly readers above those years -- that has a certain flavor of Classic SF while still being modern and telling a great story mostly from the point of view of an up-to-date, contemporary young woman. I can't say that Gould did Cent's voice "right" -- I'm not a girl, and haven't been a teenager for two decades -- but he gave her a great voice, and a great story to tell in that voice, so I'm pretty confident that even readers with a much more immediate knowledge of the inside of teenage girls' heads would really enjoy it.

"Who Could That Be at This Hour?" by Lemony Snicket

"Lemony Snicket" -- both the pseudonym Daniel Handler has used when writing for pre-adults and the narrator of the thirteen-book "Series of Unfortunate Events" series -- has been mostly missing since that series ended in 2006, with only a few minor picture books and similar ephemera in the six years following. But Snicket came back in late 2012 with "Who Could That Be at This Hour?", the first in a series of four telling the story of the young Snicket and his first mission for a mysterious organization, at the age of not-quite-thirteen, in the broken-down town of Stain'd-by-the-Sea.

The four books collectively will be called "All the Wrong Questions," and they take their tone and style from Raymond Chandler and classic hardboiled fiction as "Unfortunate Events" took its cues from penny dreadfuls and The Perils of Pauline. The narrative voice, though, is very similar -- Handler, once again speaking as Snicket, here looking back on Snicket's life and failures from a viewpoint much farther in the future.

I can't detail the intricacies of the plot to you now; I read it too long ago. But I can remember the tone and the style and the amazingly assured voice -- and, in case I'm making it sound too dour and dull, also the humor and sheer reading pleasure of At This Hour. Handler has been a compellingly readable writer since The Basic Eight, his first novel, and no matter what else he does, he never loses track of the power of his writing to grab a reader and compel her to just keep reading. At This Hour is smart and melancholy and funny and wry and masterful, and I'm thrilled to know that there will be four more books to follow it.

(It's also well illustrated by Seth, cartoonist of It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, and his cartoony and cleanly illustrative style is perfect for Snicket.)

Several Books of Genre Interest Reviewed Haphazardly, But Mostly Positively, Several Months Late: A Preview

It's no secret that my book-reviewing here has been in an extended slump for the last six months or so. (Though the amusing thing to me is, as I poke through my archives, is that the one consistent theme of this blog is that I'm always behind in writing about the books I've read and that I'm never happy with what I write about books I like. So this is an extreme case, but it's also the standard.)

Since I'm on vacation this week, I'm going to try to clean up the backlog, which will solve one problem. The other one -- motivation -- is trickier; as my job has gotten more difficult and complicated and taken more of my attention and mental energy, I don't want to spend a lot of time thinking deeply about things I've read. (And then I read less, and drift farther away from the SFF world, and feel worse about that, and start moaning that I'll die still selling crap to accountants.)

There's no reason any of you should care about any of that.

For that matter, there's no reason why I should bother to keep typing things like that; I know what the problems are, and my complaints don't help. But whining is one of the great human pastimes, and I'm not immune to its charms.

Anyway: I've written a couple of reviews already (they originally were all going to go into this post, until I thought better of it), and I hope to do more. Right now, I'm planning to space them out once a day. We'll see what actually happens, as it happens.

More Graphic Novels I Read Three Months Ago

I've still got a stack of prose books (mostly novels) after this, and they might get the same treatment tomorrow, if BEA doesn't completely exhaust me. I don't know why it surprises me every time I get behind, since it happens over and over again....

I'm not going to be able to do justice to Matt Kindt's Red Handed: The Fine Art of Strange Crimes here -- it's a gnarly, twisted crime story, told from several points of view that loop around and presented in a style derived from both classic newspaper comics and noir illustrations -- so maybe I should just say that it's another incredibly smart, engrossing story from the creator of Revolver, 3 Story, 2 Sisters, and Super Spy. Of course, even saying that is misrepresenting Red Handed -- it's not really a "crime story" in the way that phrase is usually meant, since most of the "crimes" in Red Handed are bizarre and random -- stymieing the previously-perfect (and very specifically named) Detective Gould in the quite distinct city of Red Wheelbarrow. It's a fascinating, precisely constructed and deeply felt mediation on responsibility and control. And it's also just been published, so I'm, for once, in time to recommend it when that might do some good.

Grandville Bete Noire by Bryan Talbot is the third in the steampunk anthropmorphic adventure series (after Grandville and Grandville Mon Amour), and it runs closely following the pattern established by the first two books: big, world-shaking plots from sinister villains in high places, foiled at the last minute by the calmly competent and unshakably heroic Detective-Inspector LeBrock of Scotland Yard. The fact that a world with such a bewildering array of equally-sized and equally intelligent animals seems to have no concept of an interracial relationship is still odd, but it's Talbot's world, so he's allowed his quirks. I don't think swashbuckling needs to be explained or excused -- though I wrote quite a bit about the first two books; see the links above if you want more details -- so I'll just point at this, say it's jolly good fun in the old style, and move on.

The Battle of Blood and Ink is a steampunky book set in a flying city, written by Jared Axelrod and drawn by Steve Walker, which is as adventury and swashbuckling as Bete Noire but not quite as successful. The world is equally thought-through -- it is even sillier, but that really doesn't matter for that kind of story -- but the art looks to be drawn for color but presented in black and white, and the cliches are all presented straight, without the knowing nod that a more mature cartoonist like Talbot provides to the Grandville world. So Blood and Ink features a crusading journalist -- a young woman whose boundless enthusiasms are tiring rather than enthralling -- going up against the much-too-evil-to-be-believed masters of her city, to learn the shocking secret of everything, through lots and lots of bad-movie dialogue.

The Shark King is a newish book for younger readers by R. Kikuo Johnson, whose previous book was the adult graphic novel Night Fisher. This is clearly for young readers -- it's a levelled reader, actually, with a vocabulary pitched at the level of a 2nd or 3rd grader -- and it has little of the nuance and deep insighht of Night Fisher. Instead, it retells a Hawaiian legend, about a young woman who falls in love with a mysterious man and has a mysterious son by him. Johnson's art is bright and direct, with stark black outlines, like a mid-century picture book, and it's the art that gives Shark King its energy and forward momentum.

Level Up is, I suppose, Gene Luen Yang's major follow-up to American Born Chinese, if you count Prime Baby as an interesting side-piece. But he's just the writer here; he's gotten Thien Pham (who comes from a similar cultural background -- important for this particular story. Level Up is another immigrant's story, another story about the conflict between the pull of ancestral culture (and its demands for self-sacrifice) on the one hand and the seductive modern world, focused on individual happiness on the other. This time, Dennis Ouyang's father insists that he become a doctor -- that he spend his every waking moment working towards becoming a doctor -- but his own talents and desires are to play video games. And then four cherubic figures show up to push him to fulfill his father's wishes -- which isn't the first sign that Dennis is teetering on the edge of a psychotic break, actually -- and things get even weirder. Level Up has a moral, which is usually not good for a book, and it doesn't take its imaginative elements seriously, but uses them entirely on the level of metaphor and plot device. It's pleasant and tells a nice story, but it ends up being much too much of a Aesop's Fable for my taste.

A Pile of Manga I Should Have Reviewed Three Months Ago

I read all of these books in mid-February, expecting to dive back into regularly reviewing my review copies -- if any publicists are lurking out there, it annoys me nearly as much as it does you how little of that I've done recently -- but we all know where good intentions lead.

They're all manga; all interesting, to one degree or another; and all from Yen, save one book in the middle. And here's a quick look at them, in case anything turns out to be of interest to you:

Kaoru Mori: Anything and Something is the obligatory "odds and sods" collection from the popular manga-ka behind Emma, Shirley, and the current A Bride's Story, collecting just about every bit of her other art from the first decade of her career. There are a dozen short stories -- all about women, and several of them about maids, unsurprisingly -- and then a lot of more ephemeral stuff, like comics essays on aspects of Agatha Christie and corsets, signing sheets, concept drawings, and several "hey, here's the artist talking directly to the reader" pieces from the backs of collected volumes and other places. It's very, very miscellaneous, but Mori's art is precise and engaging, and several of the short stories  (especially the longest, last one, "Sumire's Flowers") are strong and striking. It's probably not the best introduction to Mori's work, but it does show a smart, hard-working creator trying different things and engaging directly with her audience.

BTOOOM!, Vol. 1 is from Junya Inoue, and it's a very shonen story: a young slacker, only good at an online multi-player combat game that uses only explosives, finds himself kidnapped to an isolated island where he has to play that game in real life! This volume is mostly set-up: we meet Ryouta Sakamoto and then see him danging from a parachute in a tree on the island, and then dive right into combat and the details of the different "BIMs." If you thought the big problem with Battle Royale was that all of the kids already knew each other, then you'll be crazy about Btooom! (And, yes, the exclamation point is part of the title, as it must be.)

Knights of Sidonia, Vol. 1 begins a melancholy giant-mecha series by Tsutomu Nihei. Mankind was nearly wiped out centuries ago by giant, hideous barely-sentient space monsters, and perhaps only one starship, Sidonia, escaped. Sidonia defends itself against those space monsters by sending out pilots in giant robots, but it's been a long time since the last battle -- so there are no veterans, only new recruits. One of those is Nagate Tanikaze, who grew up secretly in the bowels of the ship with his grandfather and knows nothing of the new post-human society, where everyone can photosynthesize, new genders are common, and the dorm matron has a bear head. But, even with all of the weirdness and culture shock, one thing must be as expected: Tanikaze turns out to be an awesome pilot. Knights is surprisingly understated and quiet for a manga -- or maybe it's just a kind of manga that doesn't make it across the Pacific all that often -- with the depth of a novel and a willingness to be obscure and indirect for as long as it takes.

Aron's Absurd Armada, Vol. 1 is something else again, a wacky 4-koma series about incompetent pirates by MiSun Kim. There's the distracted, dim captain -- from a rich family, and sent away by his scheming mother for inadequate reasons. And his minder, the devastatingly handsome and deadly family retainer, who cares only about money and has his own gaping holes where social graces should be. And there's the Royal crew chasing them, with their own tangled connections. And a young woman picked up from a shipwreck, who immediately falls in (silly, manga) love with the minder. It's all broader than the side of a barn, and written with very different cultural norms than Americans would expect, which makes parts of it funnier and parts of it just surreal. But the title says that it's Absurd, so we all should have expected that.

Blood Lad, Vol. 1 is a big, fat (360+ pages, around the length of two average manga volumes) series-beginner from Yuuki Kodama about Staz, a vampire and district boss in the demon world. Of course, Staz is also obsessed with all things from Japanese culture -- because this is a manga -- and so he does nuts when a real, live (well, at least briefly) Japanese schoolgirl appears mysteriously in his district. After a misadventure, the girl is left as a ghost, so Staz vows to return her to life (and then drink her blood) -- and that sets in motion what I expect the series will mostly be, a sequence of odd characters and events that might (or might not) add up to anything particular. So far, Blood Lad is the kind of shonen story that has more energy than sense, but it does have a lot of energy, plus amusing art and quirky characters.

And speaking of quirky, Thermae Romae, Vol. 1 takes the cake in that area; Mari Yamizaki's story follows Lucius, a Roman bath designer from Augustus's time who time-travels (through various kinds of plumbing) to modern-day Japan, to see and be amazed by their bath culture and technology. Lucius then returns to his own time -- not by his own control, but inevitably -- to incorporate what he's learned into his own designs and to become ever more popular and acclaimed. There's a whole lot of panels of Lucius making a stunned face and proclaiming (in a language the Japanese can't understand, of course) how wonderful every last detail of their lives is. Luckily, Yamizaki appears to be playing it all for laughs, because this would be difficult to take seriously. Thermae Romae is very silly, and somewhat weird for an audience that is neither ancient Romans nor modern Japanese, but it has enthusiasm in spades -- maybe too much enthusiasm on Lucius's part -- and it's definitely not a story you've ever read before.

Graphic Novels I Read Three Months Ago and Want to Put Away Now

As the post title says, I read these three books in December/January and still have them stacked up on top of the printer. Time to make 'em go away!

Fables: Werewolves of the Heartland by Bill Willingham, four artists, and at least one full year

I'm not as connected to Corporate Comics as I used to be, but even I noticed that this book was supposed to come out a good year before it actually did. The creative credits hint at possible reasons -- layouts are by Jim Fern, pencils by Craig Hamilton and Fern, and inks by Hamilton, Ray Snyder, Mark Farmer, and Fern -- but I don't know what happened, and frankly I don't care: I paid for a book, and it's that book that matters.

Too many cooks did not add up to a great stew here: much of the book is fussy and over-rendered (particularly the mania -- I couldn't trace it to any of the four inkers, so it may be a collective mania -- for drawing each individual body hair on werewolves and hairy men alike), and even the panel-to-panel storytelling is clunky and obvious. After the usually sinuous, casually beautiful art on the main Fables book (which, of course, took massive work by main series artist Mark Buckingham to accomplish), Werewolves of the Heartland looks a day late and a dollar short.

Willingham's story gives up with the art, as well -- he must have planned this to be something special, but it's just dull. Bigby Wolf -- one of the main characters of Fables, the wolf from fairy tales and also a son of the North Wind -- is wandering across America, and comes across Story City, an isolated town with an usual relationship to him and a uniquely unified population. (I'll avoid spoiling the whole point of the book, in case any of you still want to read it.) Stuff happens, things blow up real good, and Bigby walks out alone again in the end, just like an old episode of The Incredible Hulk -- though Bigby has more control of his alter ego than Bixby did.

If you've read the whole main Fables series and all of the better spin-offs, this will be an only slightly disappointing trip to the same well. If not, go do that other stuff first.

Spleenal by Nigel Auchterlounie

Auchterlounie cartoons for several British outlets (mostly for kids, from what I've seen, in a very boyish, potty-humor style), and also at Where I Vent My Spleen, which I've been recommending ever since I found it.

This is his first book -- I think his only book so far, though I'd be happy to find out I'm wrong -- and it collects a number of longer comics from his blog (plus a few new things created for the book). Much of it is rude -- there's a "18+ only" notice on the cover for a reason, and all of it is funny, and much of it is oddly true in a way you don't expect from quick comics about a thinly-veiled version of the cartoonist retelling versions of stories from his own life and his fantasies (or, again, versions of those fantasies).

Auchterlounie also has a quirky, idiosyncratic cartoony style -- all of the characters look like Weebles more than anything else, no one has feet, some characters don't even have legs, and women have floating hands without arms -- that gives his work energy and visual pizazz; he's otherwise a very conventional cartoonist, with a lot of nine-panel grids and standard transitions.

If any of that sounds at all enticing, check out the blog -- Auchterlounie looks like a laddish British cartoonist, but there's a lot of thought and drawing chops going into his stories, which go interesting places and say unexpected things.

The Infinite Wait and Other Stories by Julia Wertz

Wertz is a young autobiographical cartoonist who used to use "The Fart Party" as an overarching title for her work -- but that clearly palls with time (even though Wertz is still only in her twenties), and so she's been distancing herself from that. (Still, you know that in 2050 or so, she'll be a Guest of Honor at whatever the intergalactic version of Comic-Con is by then, and she'll still get people snickering as they ask her about her favorite farts.) Infinite Wait contains three long stories, breaking with Wertz's prior style: lots of little pieces that add up to a mosaic of her life.

I reviewed the first Fart Party collection for Comic Mix, noted that I read the second one without saying much else, and then reviewed her big major publisher book, Drinking at the Movies, here. (Though Drinking had the same format and style as the first two collections; Infinity Wait is actually a bigger break from Wertz's previous work than Drinking was.) I won't claim any augural powers from my saying that Wertz, at that point, "still wants to tell lots of stories about all of the different aspects of her life, instead of telling one long story about one piece of her life." Wertz is ambitious about her work -- her art may look crude, but that's on purpose, and her storytelling is smooth and assured and much more sophisticated than that art style makes it appear.

Two of the stories in Infinite Wait are long looks at one aspect of Wertz's life -- the title story covers her diagnosis with lupus at the age of twenty, and how she's lived with it since then, while "Industry" runs through all of the jobs she's had since age six, which is an interesting catalog of youthful energy and then a succession of colorful food-service job before she went full-time with her comics a few years ago. Those both clearly derive from her earlier work, though it's more unified, with a clear single voice and through-line in each pushing the narrative forward.

The third and shortest story is the one that most readers will love best, for obvious reasons: "A Strange and Curious Place" is a sweet story of Wertz's love of reading, and specifically of libraries -- and I've yet to find a serious reader that doesn't have a soft spot for large collections of books.

I do wonder if autobiography is a deep enough row for any creative person to stick to for a whole career, but Wertz is still young; she has plenty of time to find other things to cartoon about, or to start doing exciting things just to cartoon about them afterward. And I expect her snotty, post-punk attitude -- even if it, like the focus on farts, is waning -- will keep whatever stories she creates vital and energetic and real for many years to come.

(Infinite Wait is, shockingly, not available from That Voracious Bookstore Named After a River; you might have to get it in a real bookstore, like I did -- at the Strand, signed, plug plug -- or buy it directly from the cartoonist in the new 20st century web stylee. I also see that Drinking is called "a full-length graphic memoir" on the page for the new book, which doesn't match my memory or what I wrote about it. Sadly, my copy perished in my flood in 2011, so I can't check -- so we'll have to agree to disagree.)

Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone

Note: I read this about four months ago, so you may notice a certain lack of specificity below. In case it doesn't come through, I really enjoyed this book when I read it, and put it aside to "do it right." And we all know which road good intentions lead to, right?

The fantasy genre is not generally known as being friendly to legal thrillers, but Three Parts Dead has as much Scott Turow in its DNA as it does J.R.R. Tolkien -- and that's much to its advantage. Max Gladstone's heroine Tara isn't a lawyer, exactly -- she's a very young necromancer, just expelled precipitously from the Hidden Schools and newly installed at the internationally renowned firm of Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao -- but she's thrown into the deep end of complicated deals and maneuverings just as quickly as her legal equivalent.

The god Kos has just died, and his city of Alt Coulumb doesn't know yet -- and it's up to Tara (and even more so her boss Elayne Kevarian) to untangle the power transfers and contracts that led to his death and to bring him back before Alt Coulumb falls apart without him. But they certainly don't work for free -- internationally renowned firms never do. And there are forces that don't want to see Kos resurrected -- the ones who forced him into the divine equivalent of bankruptcy in the first place, ready to continue their assault through methods legal, necromantic and even more direct. As it happens, the opposing counsel -- or the closest equivalent in Three Parts Dead -- is Professor Denovo of the Hidden Schools, who had a very direct hand in Tara's so-abrupt end of her studies there.

The only real ally Tara has in Alt Coulumb is Abelard, the chain-smoking priest who witnessed Kos's death (and is consequently having his own crisis of faith). And magic has real consequences and dangers in Gladstone's intricately-invented world; failing to resurrect Kos would have severe consequences for both of them -- fatal, or worse.

Three Parts Dead is a quick-moving, smart fantasy novel with a tough, believable heroine -- it sets out to do a lot, and does all of it well. I hope to see more stories of Tara's necromantic engagements, and to learn more about this world -- or just to see what Gladstone writes next.

Quick Comics Round-Up: Lemire, Dahl, Petty & Florido

My hope is that by putting "quick" in the title, I actually will be quick. Wish me luck.

The Underwater Welder by Jeff Lemire

Is underwater welding the most melancholy and depressive of all occupations? In just the last month, I've come across two creative works -- Jeff Lemire's melancholy graphic novel The Underwater Welder and Elizabeth Cook's sad song "Heroin Addict Sister" -- and I'm just waiting for the inevitable third to confirm it. I don't expect any real-world underwater welders to chime in with an explanation, but I expect what creative people find evocative about that job is the combination of skilled blue-collar work -- something not easy, painstaking, and done with your own hands -- and the quiet, lonely depths of the ocean.

And Jeff Lemire certainly knows from quiet and lonely; his solo graphic novels are so far all stories of quiet and lonely people, usually in similarly quiet and lonely parts of Canada. (I know he also writes punchfests for corporate comicdom; I have no knowledge of those and no plans to find out.)

Jack Joseph is an underwater welder, as his father was before him, and his wife is very pregnant as the book opens -- so it's clearly a story about fathers and their children, on the one hand, as it's about silence and depth and compression and leaving the world to do something and then coming back to it, on the other. In Jack's case, he leaves the world and comes back to someplace else -- very similar, perhaps even the same, but as empty and quiet as the deep seafloor.

Underwater Welder mixes thrills psychological and physical, as it bounces between Jack's present-day and his childhood, between his own impending fatherhood and the day his own father died. It's a dark, brooding mix, told through Lemire's scratchy art, all big dark eyes and battered faces, in an equally foreboding landscape on the bleak sea-coast of Nova Scotia. And it won't be for everyone, but it's a well-told story of real people and the things their expectations and reflections lead them into.

monsters by Ken Dahl

Ken Dahl is a sick man. (He's also really, or perhaps also, a man named Gabby Schulz, but leave that aside for now.) And Monsters is the story of that sickness.

Back in 2003, Dahl/Schulz was diagnosed with herpes simplex, type 1, after his then-partner went to a free clinic after several days of very painful genital sores. That relationship fell apart quickly, in the expected ways, and Ken (I'll call him Ken) was left, infected, to make his way through the world of low-paying-service jobs, cross-country moves, and, most importantly, long-term incurable medical conditions.

Monsters is drawn with verve and energy and an amazing visual ingenuity -- you could call it beautiful if not that so much of it was showing Ken's rampant imaginings of infections, disfigurations, and shame. (There's a fair amount of drawn genitalia here -- mostly disembodied, mostly infected, and mostly unpleasant.) This is, without a doubt, the best graphic novel about chronic venereal disease that the world has ever seen, and probably the best it ever will see. Some readers will find it far too icky, but it's a fascinating, compelling character study -- and easily the most interesting educational pamphlet you'll ever see -- with a solid story embedded in it.

Bloody Chester by JT Petty & Hilary Florido

Western heroes, these days, have mostly simplified down to laconic, powerful men, who can just about do anything they set their minds to. Chester Kates -- aka Bloody Chester, aka Lady Kate -- is nothing like that: he's as tough as a small young man can be in a rough town, but that's not nearly tough enough. But he's strong enough to grab an opportunity to clean up and get out of town: the railroad is coming through, and Chester is hired to burn down the supposedly-haunted ghost town of Whale that it needs to go through, so the work gangs will get back to work.

Whale isn't completely empty, though -- there's a pretty girl, and her father (a miner holed up in his mine with secrets and possibly a treasure), and a boy younger, smaller, and possibly even more sensitive about it than Chester -- and also his step-father, the dying pastor of Whale. Whale emptied out because it was hit by a native plague called Coyote Waits, a wasting disease that killed dozens.

(And, of course, those natives -- Sioux Indians -- are out there as well, with their own problems.)

So burning down Whale isn't as easy as it looks, particularly since Chester wants to get those few inhabitants out first -- he's no murderer, he thinks. Bloody Chester is the story of how wrong or right he was about that, and about what Coyote Waits really is, and what treasure there might be in the mountain next door. It's clearly a Western, both in milieu and in style: the story of people on the edge of their civilization, pushed by expanding technology and the desire for wealth, some wanting to live alone and others wanting to make that big strike and show everyone else.  It's told in a crisp historical-comic style, mostly tight on figures rather than expanses of Western landscape, which suits this story about a few small people in one dead town.

Single Panels from Wheeler and Gross

No, I'm not the Wheeler in question -- my lack of drawing skill nearly flunked me in a theater arts course back in college (and was one of the things that put the kibosh on my vague plans in that area). But here are two books of cartoons by men who can draw -- and be funny at the same time -- which I read in the not-too-distant past.

I Thought You Would Be Funnier by Shannon Wheeler

Wheeler is best known as the creator of Too Much Coffee Man -- one of those brilliant ideas that someone would have come up with eventually, but so intensely itself that afterward you can't imagine it in anyone else's hands -- but he's been trying to sell single-panel cartoons to The New Yorker for some time. (And with some success; I've seen his stuff there a few times.) This may in part be because New Yorker is almost the only market standing for single-panel cartoons -- I'll come back to that later -- but it's a damn good market, too.

(By the way, Shannon Wheeler is no relation to me, as far as I know -- Wheeler is a pretty common name. But I'm willing to pretend to some vague connection, since he's good at what he does, and even vaguely reflected glory is pretty nice. Also, I was somewhat grumpy about Wheeler's 2007 collection Screw Haven, When I Die I'm Going To Mars at ComicMix, and I note approvingly that he doesn't seem to have taken any of my advice, but is still advancing in his career and work while trying new things. Also also, what I read was is the first book of its name -- in true comic-shop-publisher style, there are already at least two subsequent volumes with exactly the same title.)

These are all intensely New Yorker cartoons -- moment of urban ennui, with lots of talking animals, couples in bed, men talking from behind desks, and all of the other usual furniture. If you don't like that sort of thing, you will not enjoy this book. Wheeler also uses a somewhat different art style here than the TMCM strips -- all black and white and looking like it was drawn with various markers, quite a bit like Matt Diffee's work in the New Yorker.

So these are all pure single-panels: one image, one line of caption. Cartoons like that have to work instantly -- show a scene and twist it, at the same moment; they're either funny right away or not at all. And they're all in a particular fairly narrow niche of that world; the New Yorker doesn't take cartoons too explicitly about sex, or with gross-out humor, or anything too corny, or representative of myriad other kinds of human behavior too far from their remit. Wheeler works in that milieu pretty darn well, running down the middle of the style -- not sarcastically commenting on it like Bruce Eric Kaplan or obfuscating it like Roz Chast -- and so this is a solid collection, full of funny stuff in that style.

So, again: if you like that style, this is a swell book. Since it was published by a comics-industry house (BOOM!), it might not reach the hardcore New Yorker-lovers as well as it should, but it's worth seeking out.

Your Mother Is a Remarkable Woman by S. Gross

This book, on the other hand, is from 1992, and shows the cartoon ecosystem we used to have, since it reprints cartoons from a period of more than a decade prior to that date. (The New Yorker cartoons here are dated, since that magazine buys copyright, and wants notice -- and some of those are back to the early '70s.) The front matter gives a long, fascinating list of places the cartoons originally appeared -- I won't list them all, but they include Science Digest and Psychology Today, Harvard Business Review and Good Housekeeping, Audubon and Teenage besides the usual suspects like New Yorker, Playboy, and National Lampoon. That meant that more cartoonists were able to make at least some money from the single-panel form, and that cartoons on a wider variety of topics were being created regularly.

On the other hand, for a cartoonist usually seen as being cutting and vicious (famously the author of I Am Blind and My Dog Is Dead), these are almost all sweet, inoffensive cartoons -- not bland, precisely, but pretty, and nice, and almost entirely suitable for your maiden aunt.

If you happen to be a maiden aunt, and are looking for amusing cartoons, I can highly recommend this collection. If not, it's still amusing, but it might feel a bit old-fashioned and same-y if you read it all through too quickly. In that case, I recommend putting it somewhere -- perhaps the smallest room in your house -- where you can read one or five cartoons at a time, be amused by them, and then continue on with your day.

(Of course, this book has probably been out of print for close to twenty years now, so the specific recommendation isn't all that useful. That's what you get for getting literary opinions off the Internet!)

Death and Death: Two Graphic Novels

These two books are both death, in very different ways. So I thought they could share a post.

Lovers' Lane by Rick Geary
Old murder cases have a complicated fascination: the usual surprise and apprehension at lives being cut short, mixed in with our own incomplete understanding of the time and place and a sense that all of those people are dead now, anyway, making the "cutting life short" argument at least very ironic. Rick Geary has been working that angle for over twenty years now, with a series of small graphic novels, each about one murder case -- first as "A Treasury of Victorian Murder," and more recently moving slightly forward in time with "A Treasury of XXth Century Murder."

(I've reviewed a number of those books over the past few years: The Case of Madeleine Smith, The Saga of the Blood Benders (here), The Saga of the Bloody Benders (ComicMix), The Lindbergh Child, Famous Players, The Terrible Axe-Man of New Orleans, The Lives of Sacco and Vanzetti (at the end of a round-up).)

Geary's approach is as painstaking as his precisely parallel shading lines: the facts of a case, meticulously researched (with a bibliography of sources) and laid out systematically, as far as anyone knows them, and the mysteries presented equally carefully, with just a hint of which explanations Geary finds more plausible. He has an eye for faces and for the details of dress -- both useful in stories about people a hundred or more years in the past who are usually depicted as either stunned or stoic.

Lovers' Lane is the story of a double murder in 1922: the Rev. Edward Hall and his equally married lover, Eleanor Mills, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Their bodies were found one morning, posed under a tree in farmland on the outskirts of town, with their love letters scattered all around them. The obvious first suspects were the wronged families: Hall's wife, Johnson & Johnson heiress Frances (and her brother, Willie Stevens, who lives with them and has an unspecified mental disorder), and Mills's husband, the meek janitor James. Both acted suspiciously the day or the murders, but both had alibis, and both had no obvious reason to suddenly break, after months of the affair.

The bulk of Lovers' Lane covers the investigation and eventual trial, with a large cast of characters -- not just the families but the witnesses or potential witnesses, including a colorful local "Pig Woman," the police and prosecutors and coroners, all involved in a complicated case right on a country border and connected to a prominent family (and, of course, one victim was prominent himself as the minister of a major Episcopal church). There are many details, and many contradictions -- plus the usual routine ruining of evidence that always happened in those days -- but Geary skillfully presents all of this material cleanly and compellingly; he has a good story to tell, and he's going to do it right.

This is not one of the most famous cases Geary has retold -- it's from my home state, and even I hadn't heard of it before this book -- but one of the great strengths of this series is that everydayness of it. All of these murders were sensations in their days, as there's a sensational murder, somewhere, every day of this year. But sensations die in time, and what's left is the facts -- and that's what Geary will show you, with a face almost completely straight and a twinkle in his eye as he runs through the suspects and witnesses, the weapons and wounds, the alibis and lies and confusions left to history. It's a magnificent achievement, all the more because Geary makes it all seem both easy and routine.

The Song of Roland by Michel Rabagliati

Everyone dies. Every single person: the good and the bad, the ones you can't live without and the ones you can't believe are still around. Even the people that are absolutely central to your life, even the ones who leave holes that can't be filled. One of those people is Roland Beaulieu, the stepfather of "Paul," Michel Rabagliati's self-insert character in the series of graphic novels based on his life.

All of the other books have been titled around Paul -- see my reviews of Paul Has a Summer Job, Paul Moves Out, and Paul Goes Fishing -- but this one is The Song of Roland; it's the story of an older man and his big family. (Three daughters, three sons-in-law, five grandkids.) He's a particular man in a particular place -- a retired supermarket executive and Quebecois who loves his province and country but complains when his children are too loudly in favor of independence. When Song of Roland begins, he has the traditional house in the country, where the whole family gathers for summers and holidays, but it's turning into suburb and Roland is feeling too far from his family (his "rabbits," as he calls them), so he moves to a condo in the middle of this story.

Song of Roland isn't a plot-driven story; it's about the times spent with family over the course of a few specific years -- and the memories and stories told at those times of older holidays and summers, of childhoods and early lives and other people who aren't there this year, or at all. Like the other Paul books, it's from Paul's point-of-view, but it's less focused on his life and graphic-arts career: this is Roland's story.

Song focuses down as it goes, beginning with one summer, moving on to the next year, and then tightening the pace of events, first to months and then, near the end, to days. And everyone knows how it must end; Roland is terminally ill with pancreatic cancer, and he goes from being strong and central to first a complaining, crabby patient, then a man at peace with his fate, and, finally, just a body in a bed, working his way out of the world heartbreakingly slowly.

Rabagliati takes a leap with Song of Roland, in telling a story that isn't about him (or his fictional stand-in), but that widens out that fictional world. His UPA-ish clean lines and minimalist but expressive faces move the story along, with humor (even slapstick) where appropriate but a growing deep sadness and acceptance as the book rolls towards its end. His prior books were lovely, sweet stories, but Song of Roland is something more resonant and wide, the story of one man's death and all of the lives he touched and made and enriched.

The Complete Peanuts, 1983 to 1984 by Charles M. Schulz

It's pointless to wish for things to always stay the same, since they never have and never will. And the early '80s Peanuts cartoons are not the same as the the punchier strips of the '60s and early '70s, just as those high points were very different from the early days of Peanuts in the '50s. I've lamented that change in the past -- see my slew of posts about the previous dozen-plus books in this series -- but perhaps I've learned better, or just gotten used to the change.

There also was a shock-of-the-new effect going on, I expect: I was born in 1969, so my own Peanuts-reading days mostly started in the mid to late '70s, corresponding very closely with Schulz's gradual shift from sadness to sun during that period. Oh, Peanuts always had a lot of sadness to it -- more than anything else on the comics page -- but in the '70s, it changed fundamentally from being primarily a strip about a boy tormented by his failures to being mostly a strip about a dog's flights of fancy.

These are still good cartoons, here in The Complete Peanuts 1983-1984, this dispatch from the early '80s -- maybe not as good as the cartoons from fifteen years earlier, and certainly not good in the same way -- but they're reliably funny and occasionally moving. The deep sadness that used to manifest in Charlie Brown now comes up, less rawly, in Peppermint Patty's school troubles, which are usually just for laughs but sometimes still bring up that old sense of existential failure that was Peanuts's go-to emotion in those bleak late-60s days.

But who wants bleak all the time? Peanuts was never that; the difference between 1968 and 1983 is really the question of the emotional center of the strip. In the '60s and early '70s, Charlie Brown -- battered by baseball failure, his own kid sister, his bad penmanship, and Lucy in the days when she was a real force -- was that core, standing in for everything Schulz felt as a failure in his own life. By 1983, Snoopy (and his growing family) was that center, and Snoopy, for all of his occasional moments of worry, is the omnicompetent one of Peanuts, secure in his own ability to redefine himself for whatever he needs to be.

So these two years see a lot of Snoopy and Spike, a lot of Rerun (who is nearly impossible to tell apart from Linus, other than the situations he's in), and a lot of Charlie Brown being a straight man. They were the best thing on a whole lot of comics pages some of the days of those two years -- depending on what else a particular paper was carrying -- and they were good and entertaining comics then, and are still that now. For work done by the same one man, day after day, more than thirty years after he started that project, that's not just impressive, it's amazing.