Soft

 
  
Soft

by Jane Mai

adapted from the novel by Sheridan Le Fanu 

Peow

1872, adapted 2015, reprinted 2024 
 
 
Jane Mai's Soft is a graphic novel adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, set in Hong Kong in the 1990s. Carmilla was one of the early vampire stories, and maybe the first to feature a lesbian vampire. Mai first published Soft as a zine in 2014; the edition I read is an expanded reprint from a decade later. Whatever Mai added is integrated seamlessly, I really can't imagine what wasn't in the first version. Mai's art is pencil on graph paper, and it's been riso printed in purple. The negative space is mostly white, but some of the graph lines remain faintly visible, in a way that seems intentional and contributes to an overall effect that the comic might've been drawn by its narrator, 15 year-old Laura.
 
Laura lives in an apartment with her dad, who runs a popular Chinese restaurant. She likes riding her bike and phys ed class, but also making precise architectural drawings of the apartment and her bedroom. She's close friends with her classmate June. She's only barely a teen, still practically a kid. Lara is also secretly a lesbian, and ashamed of herself for it. 
 
One night, Laura crashes her bike after nearly hitting a black cat with fascinating eyes. When Laura tries to look for the cat, she meets a girl her own age instead - Carmilla. Lara and Carmilla quickly become close friends, then lovers. Carmilla is the perfect girlfriend, able to sneak in Lara's bedroom window at night despite the height of the building, always gone before sunrise, never getting caught by Laura's dad. 
 
Laura starts off naive, but she let's us know that she quickly comes to understand what's going on. She and Carmilla never speak of it, but she's aware. She knows what will eventually happen if they keep dating, what eventually happens to every girl Carmilla likes. Laura wants us to know - she's choosing this.
 
The news reports that other girls Laura's age around the city have started turning up dead mysteriously. Her dad wants her to stay home and stop riding her bike, for safety, and Laura is happy to stay in her room, with Carmilla. We can track a change in Laura by her reaction to each new death. At first she's horrified and sad, but she's being degraded her relationship with a vampire. We see her grow indifferent, even contemptuous of the victims.
 
Laura becomes withdrawn at school, distant from June. Her attention and focus are on Carmilla. She's tired from staying up late every night, pale from blood loss. She becomes surly, misses class, keeps needing to see the school nurse.
 
A lot of the Soft is drawn in a relatively simplified style, but in places, Mai gives us a large panel with more realism, more detail and shading. There's a scene in the nurse's office where the nurse asks Lara if her boyfriend is hurting her. Up until now, we've seen her look 'tired' with cartoon squinty eyes and a single line frown. But then we get a realistic close-up, seeing Laura as the nurse might, with dark circles under her eyes, bruises and bandages on her neck, blood spots on her blouse. It's like the vaseline has been wiped off the lens, like the difference between remembering what someone looks like and suddenly seeing them in person. It's like studiously ignoring something right in front of you, and then being forced to pay attention to it.
 
The moment of realization comes later for Laura than for the audience. She's confronted by how much she's changed when her estranged friend June is injured after being attacked by a black cat with fascinating eyes. Visiting June in the hospital, Laura remembers what she used to be like before Carmilla, and decides she can't continue on as she has been...
 
Mai's comic is surprisingly moving, and I think a large part of its success is how well both the text and the art match the voice of a teen girl. It's easy to see why Laura is attracted to mysterious, sophisticated Carmilla, and painful but believable to watch how their relationship not only hurts her, but transforms her. Carmilla's vampirism is literal within the story, but it's also an effective metaphor for the way a bad relationship can drain the life out of you.

Tower Dungeon 4

 
 
Tower Dungeon 4

by Tsutomu Nihei
translated by Sam Malissa

Kodansha

2026 

 

 

The fourth volume of Tsutomu Nihei's Tower Dungeon is kind of an interlude from the rest of the story so far. We follow an all-new party of adventurers into the Dragon Tower, and only at the very end do they intersect with Yuva, Lilisen, and Enriquo.
 
The group comes together around Iscale, a scholar sent by the head of the royal guard, Minsabelle, who is the aunt of the kidnapped princess and is likely to be coronated by parliament if the rescue isn't successful soon. Minsabelle also sent the regular army, and Iscale's small group will meet up with them partway through the volume. His small band of adventurers self-selects on the boat ride over - they're all the people with unbearable sea-sickness, and Iscale has anti-nausea medicine.
 
Earlier in the series, we met a cat-woman, and now we meet a mouse-woman, the warrior Chufaree and her mouse-man bodyguard. Sargan is dwarf and a pyromancer like Lilicen. (Seeing Sargan's fire magic makes me think that Lilisen is unusually powerful.) Aridelia is a young woman in antique plate armor, and seems like she's anxious and in over her head most of the time. Iscale has a mute bodyguard and a magic diary that lets him communicate instantly with Minsabelle, and she keeps scolding him for treating it like an actual diary rather than as a way to send important memos. Iscale is also a member of the royal family, and thus has the ability to turn into a dragon... although he's physically very weak compared to the others we've seen.
 
Sargan actually came to the tower to kill Carache, the evil nobleman who previously attacked Yuva's little sister, but he agrees to travel with the others, who are all there to rescue the princess. They enter the tower and advance up the levels, then see the army arriving and wait for the soldiers to get up to them. But alas, the army is ambushed, and Iscale's group is helpless to save them!
 
The adventurers witness the entire army turned to stone and then broken to pieces by thee giant basilisk moths. The moths' coordinated attack could only happen if they were being remotely controlled by another intelligence, which means these are undead basilisks. After breaking the statues, the moths tear themselves apart, which returns stone to flesh. Then maggots rain down from the ceiling. We're told this is how necromancers, like the giant tentacled man who kidnapped the princess, create their undead servants. The maggots crawl into the massacre and turn the entire army into zombie soldiers.
 
This is really bad! Worse, as Iscale's group continues upstairs, they run into the evil dracomorph Carache, and he's a zombie too! We're told that undead dracomorphs become very strange, and he looks it - half man, half dragon, and it looks like his parts are just being held loosely in place by tentacles. Iscale's group is no match for this horror, but fortunately, this is when they cross paths with Yuva and his friends, who defeat the undead Carache and agree to work together with the new adventurers.
 
One thing we learn along the way, which only makes sense in light of the scene of the maggots animating the zombie soldiers (and even still has some implications I don't fully understand) is that Aridelia is some kind of sentient zombie. She's insistent that no one see her without her armor, but the mouse-lady Chufaree sees her bathing from a distance while the others are sleeping. Aridelia somehow lays her own maggots and then swallows them, which I guess is why she's self-aware and not being controlled by a necromancer? Chufaree misunderstands the glimpse she saw and believes that Aridelia is trans, but she supports her friend living as a woman. That's nice! But I wonder how Chufaree and the others will react if they realize Aridelia is undead? 

Tom Lake

 
 
Tom Lake

by Ann Patchett

Harper

2023 

 

 

One of my library coworkers recommended Tom Lake to me. (In fact, she liked it so much, she gave away a copy at last year's staff book exchange!) I often read books about artists at the start of their careers, or young women coming-of-age, but the framing of Ann Patchett's version is new to me. The present-day of Tom Lake is the summer of 2020, when three adult daughters in their mid-20s return home to the family cherry farm to help with the harvest, and their mother, the book's narrator, a woman in her mid-50s, tells her girls about how she used to be an actress, and dated a man who later became a famous movie star.
 

The text of the book is how Lara tells this story to herself, both the flashbacks to her own early-20s when she thought she was at the beginning of one sort of life, and the present-day interludes, when she is in the middle of a very different way of living, when she thinks about the summer harvest and describes how her girls are reacting to the tale. We hear the story as she knows it, but we're also periodically informed that she has chosen not to tell her daughters something. For example, she leaves out all the sex in the version they hear (but not the one we read), and at the end, she recalls a final meeting between herself and the star that only she and we get to know about.
 
In the summer of 2020, Lara and her husband own a cherry farm in Michigan. Most of the seasonal workers aren't there this year because of the pandemic, and the girls are home instead of at school for the same reason. The story is partly just to pass the time, and partly to satisfy the girls' curiosity about an early chapter of their mother's life that they've long been vaguely aware of but never known the details of. The eldest daughter is the only one with a green thumb. She's been dating the neighbor boy since they were kids, she'll take over the farm when her parents retire. As a teen, she was convinced that the movie star, Peter Duke, was her real father. The middle girl is in veterinary school, and the youngest wants to be an actress - she's at least as interested in her mom's early career as in her famous fling. Throughout most of the book, I wanted to applaud Lara's husband for being so secure in their marriage and never seeming threatened or jealous of his wife's old flame, though by the end I thought, since he knows how this story goes, of course he doesn't feel insecure!
 
Lara got into acting as a high school senior, in the play Our Town. Until then she expected to take over her grandmother's sewing store. She got discovered by a talent scout who was there to see his own niece, got an audition for a movie, got the part, moved to LA. The movie was filmed but got delayed coming out. Lara did a couple seasons of a tv show, and tried out for Our Town on Broadway. She didn't get it, but was offered a last-minute replacement spot in a prestigious summer theater troupe, Tom Lake up in Michigan.
 
At Tom Lake, Lara meets Duke and they're instantly smitten with each other. Duke is affable and charismatic, but also troubled. (In the present day, the girls tell their mom it's not okay to call someone 'crazy.') He has boundless, sometimes manic energy, he obsesses over his roles, he drinks far too much. Soon Lara is also friends with Duke's brother Sebastian, and with her own understudy, Pallas. The summer seems magical and endless. I remember times in my own life that were like that. That enchanted feeling that accompanies falling in love contributes to the timeless quality, I think. 
 
But we know, we've known from the start, that it falls apart. Lara doesn't stay with Duke, doesn't keep acting. When the end comes, it's sad, and feels inevitable. Eventually Lara marries a farmer and happily raises three daughters with him.
 
In the present day, they pick cherries, discuss the story, talk about their fears for the future, how climate change will affect the farm, whether or not to have children of their own, they worry how the enforced pause of the pandemic will affect their own career trajectories, especially the youngest girl, who's aching to get started.
 
One recurring theme of the book is the loss of that youthful sense of invulnerability and special destiny. Everything goes right for Lara until it doesn't, until it briefly all goes wrong. Even before that, she realizes the limits of her range as an actress, and struggles to perform something new. Pallas is at least as good as Lara is, and she can sing and dance too. Sebastian is an incredible tennis player, but he's not quite good enough to go pro. There's always someone better, and for the most competitive jobs, the line ahead of you might simply be too long.
 
But another theme is second chances, and the way earlier events that may not have seemed important at the time can become the building blocks for a new life after the old one falls apart. Lara met her eventual husband at Tom Lake, although they didn't fall in love until meeting again by chance, years later. After she stops acting, Lara starts sewing again. (This is more or less how I became a librarian after my first-choice career didn't work out.)
 
There are some books that probably aren't good picks for high school reading, not because they're too hard, but because they're about events and emotions that happen later in life, that teenagers can't understand because they're not ready to yet. At the time in your life when you feel invincible and like you'll change the world and be famous and beloved when you grow up, the last thing you want to read is a book that tells you 'no you won't', and that needs you to believe it in order to understand. Lara's daughters, in the midst of their own quarter-life crises, are perfectly positions to appreciate their mom's.
 
I enjoyed this one, especially the way it's told. Patchett's plot and characters feel very natural and realistic. It's easy to believe this could've really happened to someone, and that she would've felt this way about it afterward. 

Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (1989)

 
Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland
directed by Masami Hata and William Hurtz
written by Chris Columbus, Richard Outten, and Moebius

TMS Entertainment
1989
 

 
Watching Little Nemo, I had the strange experience of realizing that if I'd seen it when it first came out, I probably would have loved it, but today, I merely appreciate its aesthetics. It's the sort of movie my family might easily have owned on VHS, the sort my sister and I would've watched over and over, like we did with Bedknobs and Broomsticks. What I felt, I guess, was a kind of disappointment, the loss of the experience I could have had, but didn't.

 

The opening credits list Moebius as one of the screenwriters, and Ray Bradbury in some sort of consultant role. The animation is good. The look is roughly ⅔ Don Bluth and ⅓ Studio Ghibli. The residents of Slumberland all dress in colorful costumes, many of them circus-inspired, and the landscapes are gorgeous. There are some action sequences, inspired by nightmares, that are genuinely frightening even to adults, because they tap into some sort of primal fear, of being chased, of going too fast, of not being in control, of being trapped, of drowning.

 

The story itself is fairly standard. Nemo, who has vivid dreams, receives an invitation from the King of Slumberland to come to his kingdom and become his chosen heir. He gives Nemo a special key and tells him to never open one specific door...

 

Nemo meets the princess, but has no interest in hanging out with girls. Then he meets a disreputable frog / hobo / clown fellow who promises to show him some off-limits points of interest. Naturally they end up at the forbidden door, and naturally the disreputable fellow convinces Nemo that it couldn't hurt to open it just enough to take a peek...

 

The king holds a coronation ceremony for Nemo, shows off the power of his scepter, then lays it on thick about how much trust he's putting in Nemo to bequeath him this power. Just then, a cloud of nightmares escapes the door and kidnaps the king.

 

Nemo feels guilty and confesses. Nemo, the princess, and the clown guy go to the Nightmare Kingdom to rescue the king. They succeed! And we all learn an important lesson about keeping our promises, and telling the truth about our mistakes.

 

One complaint I have is that, because this was the 80s, no one ever considers the possibility that the princess, the king's actual daughter, might be an appropriate heir for his power ad responsibility. The idea simply never occurs to anyone at any point. By the mid-90s, I suspect you'd have the princess herself saying it, and perhaps even Nemo giving her either the key or the scepter in the very last scene of the film. These days, I sort of hope she might be the heir from the start. Nemo could still be there as her friend and companion.

 

Flip, the hobo / frog / clown character, feels like maybe he was a stock figure in Depression era fiction, but is the sort of guy who rarely gets written these days. And I can't say I exactly mourn the loss. Because while he's constantly breaking the rules and making trouble for everyone, he's mostly treated as a lovable annoyance. 

  

He's like, a 50 year old man, who convinces a little boy to go off and do things he knows he's not supposed to, things Nemo feels guilty about even though Flip doesn't, and the film seems to accept the framing of this as Nemo's mistake. The other characters are annoyed at Flip for being a bad influence, but he's not banished or anything. He goes on the rescue mission and still gets to loiter around the royal court at the end, a privilege few law-abiding Slumerlandians seem to enjoy.

 

Maybe it's good, actually that "unemployed bachelor uncle with criminal record who's not supposed to be alone with the children, but who all the adults tolerate and indulge" isn't a common character type anymore!

 

My final complaint is that the final battle against the Night on Bald Mountain-looking, satanic King of Nightmare mostly hinges on Nemo repeatedly struggling to recite the lengthy string of nonsense words that make up the incantation that activates the scepter.

 

I thought Bedknobs and Broomsticks had the same problem at a few points, but at least there it's not the whole pivotal climax! (Jim Henson's The Frog Prince gets a bit of a pass, because the princess's curse makes her switch the starting consonants of words, not speak pure gibberish. The other characters can't understand her, but the audience can.) Some could probably compare the few successful and many failed examples to explain why "Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo" is a bop and Nemo babbling just felt like it went on way too long, but suffice it to say that heroes struggling to remember and recite magic words rarely makes for the compelling viewing that filmmakers seem to want them to.

 

Despite those flaws, I enjoyed the visual spectacle, and if the plot wasn't particularly special, it did at least serve its purpose of carrying us from one beautiful vista to the next at a good pace, and without creating any undue confusion.
 
 
Originally watched March 2023.

Justice League vs Godzilla vs Kong

 
 
Justice League vs Godzilla vs Kong

by Brian Buccellato

art by Christian Duce and Tom Derenick

DC Comics

2024

 

 

Increasingly, I think that as a reader of comics, I'm more interested in well-done miniseries than in trying to follow an ongoing storyline. So DC Comics' Justice League vs Godzilla vs Kong seemed like a safe bet for me. Superheroes fighting giant monsters! Heroes acting, you know, heroic, saving the day, protecting the city and the people who live there! That sort of thing. And we do get that, but it's awfully busy, with what feels like way too many characters and too much interpersonal drama.
 
I will grant two good reasons to have such an overstuffed cast list. The first is that when giant monsters attack, having literally dozens of superheroes fighting them does help sell that these things are dangerous and hard to defeat, so it's all hands on deck. Also I guess one fun thing about giant crossovers is maybe getting to see your niche favorite character, even if it's only as an extra in a few panels. But my counterpoint to that would be that with so many heroes and so many supervillains in the mix too, the pacing is quite slow, and few characters actually have anything going on for you to care about. A more focused cast list would've let a clearer story with stronger stakes progress more quickly.
 
The Legion of Doom, which seemingly includes every supervillain of note except the Joker, or at the very least a few per hero, breaks into Superman's Fortress of Solitude as part of Lex Luthor's latest scheme. Whatever they had planned doesn't actually happen though, because Toy Man finds a ruby that grants wishes among Superman's things, which transports them all to Skull Island and transports Skull Island to whatever version of Earth this is supposed to be. 
 
The result is King Kong, Godzilla, and four other giant monster I don't recognize getting unleashed on the cities of DC comics. I would've enjoyed Mothra or another really famous monster; these kind of felt like filler to pad out the story. Kong stays on the island, where both Green Arrow and Gorilla Grodd will try to recruit him. Godzilla attacks Metropolis, a giant bat goes to Gotham, a crab monster attacks the Flash's home, a creature that looks like a woolly mammoth without a trunk (like the pokemon Mamoswine, kind of) attacks the Amazons on Paradise Island, and some big sea monster goes after Atlantis (and has to do battle with a kraken defending the underwater city).
 
Godzilla seemingly kills Superman with its fire breath, but teams of other heroes temporarily hold back the other monsters, who mysteriously retreat before finishing their attacks. Then there's kind of a long lull. The heroes try to revive Superman, the villains try to find Toy Man, and the monsters spend a long time converging on a spot for a final battle.
 
The big fight has a bunch of moments that seem like they're supposed to be Crowning Moments of Awesome (as the TV Tropes website would call them), but they get rushed through so quickly, they seem anticlimactic rather than cool. Lex Luthor builds a Mecha-Godzilla! The League of Assassins resurrects an undead Necro-Godzilla! Five Green Lanterns team up to make a multi-part Voltron-like mecha! King Kong gets recruited to wear a Green Lantern Ring! It should be exciting and fun and badass! But the pacing is wrong, and as I said, there are just too many people on every page.
 
I also disliked how much of what happened is driven by what TV Tropes would call Idiot Plots, where the action is caused by people making shockingly stupid decisions. Toy Man hijacks Luthor's presumably superior plan and then dies immediately from being stepped on by Godzilla (which we don't learn until tge very end, making the other villains' search for him into a pointless shaggy dog story). Superman nearly dies because Shazam shows up midway through his Godzilla fight and summons magic lightning despite Superman telling him not to, which enrages Godzilla and distracts Superman at a crucial moment, then spends the rest of the series moping about his fuck-up. Red Hood shoots the giant bat against Batman's instructions, angering it, and Bat Girl beats him up, much to the other bat heroes' amusement. Gorilla Grodd kills Guy Gardner and all the other Lanterns are just like "oh well, never liked the guy." It's not like, good storytelling, just supposedly capable people behaving incompetently, creating unnecessary problems, and then acting callously toward each other about it. It's annoying. It makes the plot feel pointless and the characters unsympathetic.
 
I still think there could be fun to be had with just King Kong and Godzilla and a core Justice League, telling a more compact story, but boy, this sure isn't it. 

Bathe the Cat

 
Bathe the Cat

by Alice McGinty

art by David Roberts

Chronicle Books
2022

 

 

One of my coworkers has an interest in children's lit, and the other day she basically put Bathe the Cat into my hands and told me to read it. This is a cute rhyming story about a family trying to clean the house before Grandma comes, only to be repeatedly thwarted by the cat rearranging the chore list to avoid a bath, creating chaos as the family attempts to faithfully follow the now nonsensical instructions.
 
As my coworker observed, this is a book with a queer family, but it isn't about them being queer. I think the playful spirit of the book is a pretty good personality match for some gay men I've known, but really David Roberts could probably have drawn any family to go along with Alice McGinty's words, and the story still would've worked. We have two dads, both Black, with the narrator doling out instructions a bit fatter, possibly more femme, and more into African fashions, and the other dad a bit slimmer and more clean cut. There's an older White daughter who wears a dinosaur costume throughout the entire book, a younger Black son, and a Black baby, who gets to be the beneficiary of the chores, rather than having to chip in.
 
The structure of the book is built on playful repetitions. First one dad doles out 8 sensible rhyming chores to himself the others by making a list on the fridge using alphabet magnets.The cat doesn't want to be bathed, so we get a closeup of a paw rearranging letters. We go through the list again, but everything's wrong, suddenly we're mopping the dog and feeding the lawn. But the cat doesn't want to get vacuumed or mowed either, so... We get another variation of equal silliness, and then one very mixed-up one where we need to like, bathe the mop and Dad the Sarah. Finally the narrator realizes what's been happening, reasserts control, and since the cat likes this new chore list, everything gets done in time for Grandma's visit.
 
Mixed-up chores are a real kid's book classic, at least since the Amelia Bedelia stories and maybe longer, but Bathe the Cat puts a fun twist on an old theme. The rhymes are fun, as are the illustrations of everyone diligently attempting their nonsense tasks. I think kids might think a bit about grammar and how word-order can change the meaning of a sentence, especially after the last, silliest rearrangement. And if you know a kid who'd like to see a queer or blended family, in a setting where their identity is incidental to the story rather than central, this could be a good pick. 

The Strange Tales of Oscar Zahn 1

 
 
The Strange Tales of Oscar Zahn

by Tri Vuong

Ten Speed Books

2024 

 

  

The first volume of The Strange Tales of Oscar Zahn collects eight chapters of Tri Vuong's webcomic. Like the green yuri, Strange Tales was originally published online a few pages at a time, giving Vuong a bit more flexibility with chapter length than he'd've gotten with a print comic. The first and last chapters are stand alone stories, the rest are divided into a pair of three-part narratives.
 
Oscar is a ghost. He looks like a person with a skull floating where his head should be. He investigates other ghosts, and tries to help them achieve peace. He's quite chipper and amiable! Also, there's a giant ghostly octopus that lives shrunk down inside his skull that emerges at full size at inopportune moments to wreak chaos.
 
In the first story, Oscar helps an old woman living in a haunted house. In the second tale, he finds a ghost soldier still reliving WWI. In the third, rather complex story, Oscar tries to help an old sailor deal with his guilt for a shipwrecked crew he was unable to rescue, personified by a radio that continuously plays their final distress call. He gets help from a crew of ghosts that inhabit diving suits and try to preserve abandoned treasure, like a trove of Betamax tapes. The octopus really gets out of hand in this one. The final story is even shorter than the first; the old woman has trouble with her house again and moves into Oscar's apartment.
 
The structure of these stories is a quite similar to a lot of the Hellboy comics, where the title character mostly serves as an observer, giving the ghosts the audience they need for their dramas to finally finish playing out and achieve resolution. Vuong's art is sometimes pretty similar to Mike Mignola's, and the color pallet is a close match. Oscar has a different personality than Hellboy, but his adventures aren't that different; he even holds a cursed entity inside him. 
 
The similarities are enough to invite comparison. You might see more of what you already like here, but unless you are invested in the mystery of where the octopus came from, why it's haunting Oscar, and why he keeps trying to solve mysteries when the creature comes out every time and endangers everyone he interacts with, I think the individual stories themselves are not quite as strong as Mignola's.