My Dear Pierrot

 
 
My Dear Pierrot

by Jim Bishop

translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger
Magnetic Press

2024
 

 

As near as I can tell, Jim Bishop's career as a comic artist is making dark variations on themes from Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. My Dear Pierrot is absolutely a more adult, more erotic, more sinister take on Howl's Moving Castle, and the character of Pierrot is very recognizably a riff on the wizard Howl.
 
Clea is the daughter of a wealthy family. She loves to dance, but in her social class, that can only be a hobby, not a career, not something she can perform for others. She has an arranged engagement to Berthier, the son of the local baron. She'll become his wife, and then a mother. The city follows the Church, artists and dancers are suspected of being pagans, and the nearby forest is off-limits and supposedly full of witches.
 
Clea meets Pierrot, a magician who can do real magic, and flies away with him to his house inside a giant oak tree in the forest. Pierrot begins teaching Clea magic, and she quickly falls in love with him. Everything seems perfect and they sleep together ... and then he vanishes for three days.
 
When Pierrot gets back, the mood has changed somehow. Every time Clea tries to talk about her feelings, he scolds her for feeling them wrong. A lot of what he says is sound relationship advice, except that it's self-serving coming from him, and in context, he's only saying it to dismiss her valid complaints. He's gaslighting her.
 
Clea continues learning magic and practicing dance and starts to get to know some of the other witches in the forest. She realizes Pierrot's had a lot of girlfriends, and she might not even be his only one right now. One forgetful witch keeps calling her by someone else's name, and there's a mysterious ghost of a young woman haunting nearby the treehouse...
 
If any of this is starting to make you nervous, you have good instincts. Pierrot has a secret (very similar to Howl's), and a plan for Clea that relies on her falling into suicidal despair. But despite Pierrot's attempts to undermine her self-confidence, Clea has good instincts too, and while she's nowhere near as strong a magician as Pierrot, she's strong enough to get away.
 
While all this was happening, Berthier was humiliated that his fiancee left him for another man (a pagan, no less!) and went into the forest, ostensibly to rescue Clea, but mostly to restore his own honor. A witch plucks out one of Berthier's eyes to punish him for not being able to understand his own motives, and he spends the rest of his time in the woods feeling sorry for himself, until he runs into her as she's running away from Pierrot, and they get married after all. 
 
Clea gives up magic and dance to become a wife and mother, and it seems her fire has gone out. In the end though, she rekindles it, and abandons her family to go live as a witch in the forest.
 

Clea and Pierrot hide from the ghost in the forest.

  
 
I like Bishop's art. Pierrot is otherwordly and good-looking enough to make his role in the story believable. When we see magic, it really comes alive. It reminds me a bit of Ghibli, but it's definitely his own style, not a pastiche. It's very clear and colorful, and Bishop really has an eye for movement and composition. The layout of the panels matches the pacing of the scene. Characters sometimes extend beyond the boundaries of their panel when they're being especially active or expressive. Important moments are drawn oversized and practically leap off the page.
 
I liked Pierrot more than Bishop's Lost Letters, which I read over the summer. In general, I think this one is even darker, and both comics show a young woman's life falling apart to the point she becomes suicidal. But Clea is at the center of My Dear Pierrot, and it's clear Bishop knows that Pierrot is mistreating her. The fact of his intent, and not just the mistreatment itself, is central to the plot. 
 
In Lost Letters, Iode completely wrecks Sista's life, but he does it sort of by accident, and it's actually not clear when reading if Bishop himself assigns cause and effect to that chain of events. That book is also fully Iode's story; Sista's problems are a side plot. Even her death is portrayed solely in terms of how it affects him. I'm willing to see men mistreat women in fiction, but I also want to see evidence that the author appreciates the significance of what they're showing me. 

I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up

 
 
I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up

by Kodama Naoko

translated by Amber Tamasaitis
Seven Seas

2019 

 

 

I kind of love the trend of Japanese fiction with long, descriptive titles. I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up is a standalone manga about two young women who are friends who make a marriage of convenience, and I know you're not going to believe this because such a story has never been told before, but after awhile of living together as roommates, they slowly, awkwardly start to develop romantic feelings for each other. The closest thing to a twist here is that one of them is already an out lesbian and has some feelings from the start.
 
Machi has a job in a corporate office. She works hard, has no interest in dating, and imagines herself living alone in the future. Her biggest problem is that her parents keep pressuring her to get married and have kids. She's lied to them and said she has a boyfriend, but that hasn't helped, and she doesn't want a real one. She wishes she could have a sham marriage just to stop them talking about it!
 
As luck would have it, Machi tells all these thoughts to Hana, her friend since high school. Hana is a couple years younger and wants to be an artist, and she's about to be evicted because her apartment building wants to upgrade. Hana suggests they help each other out. Machi will convince her parents to leave her alone, and Hana will have a chance to save up money and work on her freelancing by moving in. And same-sex civil partnerships are legal in their prefecture...
 
In general, I think Hana gets the better end of this bargain. She really is able to build up her artistic career, and she is very fond of her 'senpai' who she used to have a crush on back in high school. What Machi gets is an excuse for a blowout fight that lets her completely cut off contact with her parents, and to feel secretly smug when her male coworkers talk about wanting to marry their girlfriends.
 
But neither of them seems to expect how it'll affect them emotionally. Machi's spent her whole life being pressured to achieve certain visible markers of success by her parents, and meanwhile her boss assumes she'll quit when she becomes a wife or mother, so why bother promoting her? Seeing Hana do something she likes and cares about inspires Machi to try to get ahead at the office by taking on more ambitious projecs. And while Hana likes living with her friend, the marriage of convenience rekindles some rather inconvenient older feelings. It's hard being close to someone you're romantically interested in who doesn't like you back, and every time Hana expresses that interest, Machi rebuffs her and seems disgusted, which, you know, hurts. Hana doesn't like that she feels like a creep whenever she flirts, and decides that it'll be healthier for herself to try moving on.
 
Machi is our viewpoint character, and we follow her more closely. We see her warm up to Hana, and come to rely on her as a housemate. It's Hana finally saving enough money to get an apartment on her own again that forces Machi to admit what she's started to feel, and even when she does, Hana is worried that it's going to be hard to have a relationship with someone who doesn't really want to kiss or touch her. But she agrees to give it a try.
 
This is a pretty short one, told in three chapters. I'm not sure if Machi is asexual - she doesn't think of herself that way, but she also doesn't seem to be attracted to men, and her feelings for Hana are more platonic than physical. I think if I want to see a similar style of relationship, I could try reading the series How Do We Relationship? 
 
I think the thing author Kodama Naoko does best here is to use little flashbacks to show us Machi thinking about earlier incidents and gaining new perspective on them. I haven't read many fake dating romances, but the decision to have Hana know she's a lesbian, to have her attraction be part of her identity and not solely a consequence of her situation is an important part of the plot, and I think it might be a bit different from the typical. 

A Storm of Wings

 
 
A Storm of Wings

by John Harrison

Bantam Spectra

1980, reprinted 2005
 
 
A Storm of Wings is the second of John Harrison's science fantasy books centered on the far-future city of Viriconium. The first book, The Pastel City, is set on earth in the Evening, a kind of quasi-medieval period that follows after the fall of the ultra high-tech civilizations of the Afternoon. That first book reads almost like a sequel, because Harrison introduces us to a King-Arthur-like figure who ruled Viriconium and united the surrounding lands, but then the whole book is set after his death. The dead king's daughter, the young queen, calls her father's old allies out of retirement for help as Viriconium is invaded by her half-sister, leading an army of human raiders and scifi monsters left over from the Afternoon.
 
A Storm of Wings is set another 80 years later. The young queen is now a woman in middle age (human lifespans are longer in this era, it seems). Her father's equivalent of the Knights of the Round Table are all dead, except for Tomb the dwarf and the ancient, possibly immortal wizard-figure Cellur. Society is Viriconium has become less medieval and more futuristic thanks to the Reborn Men, an army of soldiers from the Afternoon who were specially trained to fight the scifi monsters, who Tomb woke up out of suspended animation for help in the war. It's not initially clear how, but the other important detail from the first book is that Tomb mentioned several times that his mentor was the first person in the Evening to travel to the moon, and that journey is the source of this book's problems. Unbeknownst to anyone, he's returned to the earth, and he's brought something with him...
  
So, A Storm of Wings leans more into the scifi half of science fantasy. It's also probably more literary, because while the first book had dense, almost poetic passages of description, and featured slightly unconventional heroes in a strange setting, its plot still followed the structure of an adventure story. 
 
This second book is more ambitious, though in my opinion not quite as good. The main protagonist of Pastel City was a reluctant hero because he was old and retired, weary and mournful, and he wanted to be a poet. In Storm, Harrison goes fully anti-heroic. We get someone who repeatedly rejects the attempts to recruit him, who was an apprentice airship pilot in the war (which destroyed all the airships), who's spent the last 80 years angry and embittered and working as an assassin. Tomb and Cellur are little more than elderly advisors at this point. Cellur's tower has collapsed and his flock of mechanical birds is all but gone. We get a witness to the alien trouble, a Reborn woman who has only a tenuous grasp to reality, and one of the queen's advisors, another Reborn Man who is in the middle of losing his grasp as well. And to guide them, the ghostly psychic projection of Tomb's mentor, a babbling, farting, levitating sphere of ectoplasm, who sometimes warns of danger or leads the way, but is otherwise incapable of coherent thought.
 
What especially makes Storm different though, is that while nominally the monsters this group has set off to find and defeat are alien insects, originally from deep space, more recently from the moon, the actual problem they have to solve is a kind of epistemic crisis, a fundamental disagreement about the nature of reality itself. 
 
I mentioned that both the Reborn protagonists experience something like delusions; Harrison tells us this problem is ubiquitous among the Reborn Men. Some part of their minds still wants to live in the Afternoon. This is presented like a kind of degenerative schizophrenia. They suffer hallucinations and fugue states and lose the ability to care for themselves or to live among anyone but their own kind.
 
The citizens of Viriconium increasingly join the Sign of the Locust, a cult that preaches that the world is an illusion, it isn't real. By the start of the book they've become violent. By the end they are all partially turning into insects, growing new limbs and other bodyparts as though they're cancerous tumors.
 
When our protagonists, a mix of reluctant and incapable, finally learn the truth, the problem isn't just that alien insects have landed on the earth. It's almost metaphysical. Harrison claims the earth looks the way it does not just because of its physical matter, because of how we, collectively, because of how our minds interpret that arrangement of matter. But the insects have alien minds, different needs, a new psychology, and the world responds by becoming what they need it to be. 
 
The insects are like the angels from Neon Genesis Evangelion or the hronir from Tlon from Borges's story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". Their presence is an incursion of a competing idea that strives to overwrite the world as we know it, a dream trying to become real. The changing landscape, the toxic yellow mist, the mutating cultists, the city of Viriconium overlaid with another version of itself made of spiderwebs and wasps' nests, the insects themselves growing human limbs and organs in a process that mirrors the cultists - the apocalypse is here, and it is the physical manifestation of a disagreement about meaning. You can't fault Harrison for trying something daring.
 
That said, I think I prefer The Pastel City. Harrison leans so hard into making his characters unlikable that I didn't especially enjoy reading them, even as they opposed an end of the world scenario that's more like a nightmare or horror film than like a disaster movie. I liked his prose better before too. In Storm he repeatedly describes scenes as though we are watching them on a screen, including people walking onto, then across, the out of our unmoving field of vision. It felt like reading a description of a comic or movie, it's not an effect I enjoy in literature. If other critics are to be believed, both these two are just warm-ups, and it's the next couple books where Harrison will really impress me. It's an open question though, whether what is mostly widely praised about his writing will be something I enjoy more than a clear story, told well. 

Mute (2018)

 

  
Mute
directed by Duncan Jones

written by Michael Robert Johnson and Duncan Jones

Netflix

2018
 

 
Mute is a neon-drench noir investigation set in a cyberpunk near future. It starts well, but as a 'missing girl' story, suffers from the early loss of its most engaging character, and goes wildly off the rails by the end. It's disappointing, because you could easily imagine a better script resulting in a top-notch experience.

 

Leo is an Amish man living in Berlin. He can't speak because of a childhood injury and his mother's opposition to medical technology. He swims underwater, draws, and works as a bartender at a mob-owned speakeasy. He's clearly a man out of place, and seemingly out of time. His girlfriend Naadirah is a waitress at the same place, and has a secret she wants to tell Leo soon. Then mysteriously - after Leo gets fired for beating up a sexually-harrassing patron - she vanishes.

 

The first act, the one good act, sets all this up. The second act is Leo's search, which is mostly good, but involves an implausible, manual reverse phone number search through paper phone books Leo checks out from the Berlin public library in order to find Naadirah's mother and the final clue. (The scene of a stolen luxury ground car tailing a flying-car taxi was pretty good.) The third act is garbage as all the clues are resolved and Leo seeks two-fisted justice in a city where apparently no one has a gun, so no one can do the easy thing and just shoot him already.

 

Also wandering around Berlin are Paul Rudd in a giant mustache and Justin Theroux playing an even creepier doctor than he did in Maniac. Rudd is AWOL from the US Army, and the pair work for the mobster who owns the bar while Rudd waits for forged papers that will let him get himself and his daughter out of the country before the MPs catch him. One of the dawning realizations of the film is that despite his demeanor, Rudd is not playing one of his usual nice-guy characters, but it's interesting how long he can keep you on his side before you start to hate him. This plotline initially seems almost entirely disconnected from Leo and his search, but they merge disastrously in the final act.

 

I will applaud Mute for being willing to show us what the bleakest possible ending might look like before allowing Leo to very slightly save the day. I don't mind that we don't get a fully nihilistic ending, but I do mind the implausible and heavy-handed machinations needed to bring us to this point.

 

Rudd and Theroux salvage what ought to be embarrassingly bad dialogue with the strength of their commitment to their roles, and as Leo, Alexander Skarsgard is incredibly expressive despite never making a sound. The quality of the acting saves the film from total ruin, but I still wouldn't recommend it unless you're a noir completist.

 

  

Originally watched in January 2023.

Sabine's Notebook

 
 
Sabine's Notebook

In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin and Sabine Continues
by Nick Bantock

Chronicle Books

1992

 

 

Sabine's Notebook is the second book in Nick Bantock's trilogy of novels about a pair of artists who are separated across the globe, but share a kind of psychic connection, and communicate in letters and postcards. Bantock's work blends the epistolary novel with the art book, as each postcard and envelope are illustrated, each letter has an actual envelope it can be removed from, and everything is written in the specific handwriting of the artists, Griffin and Sabine.
 
In the first book, Sabine reached out to Griffin because she'd finally learned who he was and how to reach him, after a lifetime of being able to (sometimes?) see through his eyes. Griffin is an illustrator living in London; Sabine lives on a small island in the South Pacific and designs the island's stamps. For Sabine, the chance to talk to Griffin is the fulfillment of a dream. Griffin is intrigued by Sabine but also fears her, and fears that he's imagining her or going insane. The first book ended with Sabine announcing she was coming to visit Griffin, but then arriving to find his apartment empty.
 
Now in Sabine's Notebook, we learn that Griffin has essentially fled in terror, afraid to actually meet the dream girl who, he's afraid, might really be just a dream. Sabine seems awfully understanding as he writes to her (at his own home address) from Italy, Greece, Japan, Australia. She's enjoying the city and its museums, though she'll eventually have to go back home. 
 
Griffin is clearly going through some sort of spiritual or psychological crisis, though I found myself thinking that world travel wouldn't really solve anything, and that he ought to see a therapist, and especially that he ought to face his fears and just go meet Sabine already. I can understand building something up in your mind so that you fear disappointment if you actually do it, but he's not even really choosing the idea of Sabine over actually meeting her. He must understand that if he keeps avoiding her, he could lose her as a pen pal too.
  
The pair repeatedly affirm that they are in love with one another, and Sabine in particular has the patience of a saint. When Griffin finally returns home, near Sabine's deadline for leaving, he finds her already gone ... but then the last postcard in the book is from her, from his address, asking why he never made it back like he said he would!
 
I'm curious to see how this situation will be resolved. I wonder if we'll learn that the pair are somehow separated in time as well as space. I don't really know, but that's my guess. Poor Sabine! Regardless of whatever supernatural is going on, she's in love with a man who prefers to keep her at a distance and to communicate in the slowest, most attenuated way possible. Bantock's artwork is again evocative - suggestive and dream-like - which fits the mood of the book and the personality of the two artists well. 

Paper Girls 2

 
 
Paper Girls 2

by Brian Vaughan

art by Cliff Chiang

Image Comics

2016 

 

 

In the first volume of Paper Girls, four girls on their paper routes the morning after Halloween joined together, initially for self-defense against older teen boys out looking for trouble, and then to try to figure out and stay away from a whole host of weird things happening in their neighborhood.
 
For reasons unknown, the 'Old Timers' came to that morning in the late 1980s and imposed an electronic and communications blackout, kidnapping almost everyone except our four young heroines. Some far future teen boys with a stolen time machine arrived at the same time to steal useful tech. It's not clear if the Old Timers are there to catch the teens, or if the teens are there to take advantage of the blackout.
 
But when Chinese American new girl Erin got injured, it was one of the mystery teens who got her medical care. Shortly afterward, their time machine exploded! Erin, Mac, and Tiffany were sent to 2016 where they ran into Erin's adult self. KJ went somewhere else.
 
Now in volume 2, adult Erin brings her younger self and two friends home. We learn she has the scar from the injury, but no memory of how she got it. It seems the Old Timers eventually put everything back and erase everyone's memories after doing ... whatever it is they're up to. Separately, another future teen who speaks an alien language arrives in 2016. This one is also Erin? It turns out she's a clone, grown from Erin's blood after she got medical care, and she's the niece of the teen boys from the first volume.
 
Young Erin and Old Erin go to the abandoned shopping mall to look for KJ. They find her field hockey stick with a message carved in it - a warning not to trust 'the other Erin', and directions for where to go next. But which one is 'other'? Mac and Tiffany go looking for their own older selves, and Mac learns she died of leukemia in the early 90s. Meanwhile, Clone Erin is also on her way to the mall, and manages to run into Mac and Tiffany on the way. 

Clone Erin's trip somehow brought a pair of hundred foot tall tardigrades with her, and they immediately start wrecking downtown Cleveland, which attracts the attention of the Old Timers again. They arrive in a combination zeppelin-cathedral and unleash another squadron of knights riding pteradons. 
 
From Clone Erin and the leader of the Old Timers, we learn that there is only one timeline, no branching or parallel worlds, and there are at least two factions with access to time travel, although their goals, and what rules they might follow, remain unknown. Both factions seem to want the paper girls, although we don't understand why yet. The leader of the Old Timers mentions that his mother was born in 2016, and worries that he and his airship are 'breaking curfew' in order to address the tardigrades, so there might be another faction we haven't met yet that will show up soon.
 
Eventually Clone Erin tries to kidnap the girls to her far future home, but they manage to send her back alone. With Old Erin's help, they dodge the Old Timers, and follow the directions from the hockey stick, arriving at a different future where their friend KJ is waiting for them.
 
Some time travel ideas are easier to understand than others. You have to be pretty far in the weeds, for example, to understand how the most shocking scene in the film Looper is supposed to work. The idea of a single timeline, and a group somehow outside it who repeatedly writes over parts of it to preserve their preferred version of human history benefits a bit from familiarity. Isaac Asimov introduced this version of time travel, along with a bureacratic agency that monitors changes in The End of Eternity. John Crowley and Charles Stross have both told their own versions, in Great Work of Time and Palimpsest, and anyone who's watched the Loki tv show has seen Marvel's version of time travel law enforcement. Visually, the Old Timers in Paper Girls look nothing like the 'man in a gray suit' bureaucrats that usually show up in these stories, but I think the idea about time travel is the same.
 
Volume 1 introduced the girls and the mysteries and set things in motion. Now in volume 2, we learn a lot more about Erin, and a fair bit about what's going on, and the action definitely ramps up. I'm excited to see what's next!

The Nude

 

The Nude

by Michelle Lindley

Atria Books

2024 

 

  

The Nude is a literary novel about an American curator going to Greece to acquire a newly discovered statue of a nude woman for her museum. I perhaps should've given more thought to what it meant that I saw it on a list of the best book covers for the month it was released, but not on any of the lists of the best reviewed books for that month.

 

Most of The Nude is intended to be slow-burning tension and mounting internal turmoil as Dr Elizabeth Clark becomes more and more anxious from the heat, the jet lag, her migraine headaches, her pill addictions, her increasingly erotic fascination with her translator Niko and his artist wife Theo, haunting childhood memories of her dead sister; with the Greek museum's slow-walking the acquisition, protests against the expatriation of ancient art, vandals attempting to sabotage the statue to send a message; her failing marriage back home, pressure and doubt about her abilities from her museum director back home, competition from her rival over who will take over as director after this buy... It all accumulates and Elizabeth's behavior becomes more erratic until the vandals succeed in damaging the statue and Elizabeth reaches a breaking point of her own.

 

There are two problems though, and I think they're kind of related. There's not enough tension, and not enough payoff. Although things keep happening, and it seems clear that eventually Elizabeth will become overwhelmed and act out in some way, author Michelle Lindley blends the anxious with the ordinary in a way that probably makes the book more realistic, but also seems to rob it of some of its potential power. Elizabeth belongs in a thriller, the plot structure wants to be a thriller, but it's not, you know, thrilling enough.

 

In Elizabeth, Lindley has created a protagonist who belongs in transgressive fiction. She's someone who feels fundamentally unable to fit into society, who constantly strives to appear perfect and succeed at work, but who's so tortured by her own psyche that she seems always on the brink of disaster. Elizabeth is ultra-controlled, always anxious, always unhappy. She hates her body, starves herself and recoils from casual touch, but also loves her painkillers and tranquilizers, loves to binge eat as a treat, and sleeps with men in a mercenary way to advance her career. Her migraines are debilitating and make her see hallucinatory auras; she's gone hysterically blind twice in her life and fears it'll happen again, maybe even on this trip, especially since she's taking her pills too quickly and they might not last.

 

There's all the ingredients for steadily ratcheting tension, perhaps with minor outbursts building toward a major eruption. But Lindley continually undercuts the anxiety with normality. There are too many possible sources of stress, but none of them get enough attention. Nothing can really build up, because it all keeps alternating. Every unsettling thought or moment is counteracted with something prosaic. Even the suspicion that Elizabeth slept with a major donor to the Greek museum, or perhaps was assaulted by him, while she was awake and ambulatory, but not conscious or forming memories, just goes nowhere and ultimately comes to nothing, dropped and forgotten.

  

None of the stress keeps Elizabeth from keeping up appearances and going through the motions; and all the other characters seem perpetually relaxed, unbothered, unhurried. It should create more frisson! Elizabeth is not fun or normal! But she's desperate to be liked, desperate for others to think she's fun and chill, and determined that no one should suspect her of being uncool enough to care what they think of her. 

 

She acts out some, but not in ways that are truly satisfying or cathartic. The migraine imagery is too brief before the pills kick in; we never get a full phantasmagoria. She's obsessed with sexy free-spirited Theo, her first time being attracted to a woman, possibly her first time actually desiring a person and not just the social advantage she can gain from them, and Theo is interested back, so when Elizabeth eventually stops trying to please everyone else and gives in to her own desires and urges, you might expect the two women to do more than kiss a couple times. But no.

 

It's incredibly anticlimactic. And I think kind of emblematic of the way that Lindley's efforts to make her book literary and realistic prevent it from delivering the pleasure that we'd get from watching real chaos. At one point near the end, Elizabeth tells us she feels feral, feels unhinged. That is what I'd spent the whole book up to that point waiting for! But even though she says it, she doesn't really do it. Instead of fireworks, everything mostly fizzles.