The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All 1

 
 
The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All 1
by Sumiko Arai

translated by Ajani Oloye

Yen Press

2024
 
 
The cover of The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All stands out for its eye-catching electric green background, and while most manga are black and white inside, cartoonist Sumiko Arai deploys the same neon green in the interior, often in the background or between panels, but also to highlight moments of emotional intensity, like when one if the teen characters speaks from the heart and Arai briefly colors their irises green.
 
The color-scheme, the theme of high school girls in a burgeoning but still undefined relationship, and the long title that invites some sort of shorthand has led to TGSWIIWAGAA getting nicknamed "green yuri" online.
 

The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All is really something special. I was expecting a sitcom-like comedy of errors where circumstance and coincidence conspire to maintain a case of mistaken identity far beyond the realm of plausibility, the sort of thing you really only see in old superhero comics (or parodies of them), where a woman swoons over the handsome superhero and has no time for her boring, oft-absent coworker and never suspects the connection. 
 
Instead, The Guy She Was Interested In is much more emotionally-realistic, with its setup mostly serving to set events in motion before allowing them to unfold in a more believable way. Arai really captures the intensity of teenage feelings, the way finding a song or a musical style feels like discovering something brand new, like something could define your whole identity if you wanted it to, the way making a new friend or getting to spend time with your crush feels like the most important thing in the world, even if you don't know what to call these exciting new emotions, or how to describe the way you spend so much time thinking about them and wondering if they're thinking of you. The fact that Arai's characters are often confused or hesitant or overwhelmed makes them feel all the more like real people, especially real teens, for whom all of this is completely new.
 
Popular high school girl Aya looks and acts a lot like her popular friends, but she's got two things special in her life right now. First, she's gotten really into American rock music from the 1990s. She talks it up to her friends, but they don't really see the appeal, so she always listens privately, at home or on headphones. The second big thing in Aya's life is that she's got a huge crush on the cute, mysterious guy who works at the CD shop. The guy has a goth or emo fashion sense, wearing all black, including a hoodie and dust mask, and likes the same music Aya does, even playing Nirvana at the store the same day she listened to them at school.
 
Aya tells her friends all about the guy, not noticing that the shy, nerdy girl sitting next to her is having a panic attack hearing this, because while Mitsuki tries to go unnoticed at school, she gets to dress how she wants at her after-school job at her uncle's CD shop... Mitsuki knows she should tell Aya right away, but she's too shy to do it at school, and at the store later, when Aya comes up to flirt with her, Mitsuki can't resist flirting back. She finds that she likes Aya too, and she likes that Aya likes her. Their friendship builds naturally, chatting at the shop, exchanging phone numbers and playlists, and all the while, Mitsuki knows she needs to get up the courage to tell the truth, even as she fears losing her new friend when she does...
 
Rather than using comedic mishaps to drag things out, Arai has Aya begin to suspect, then discover the truth, and has Mitsuki confess even after she worries Aya already knows, and then allows the girls to continue their friendship once the truth is out. Aya freely calls her feelings a crush when she thinks Mitsuki is a guy; later neither one seems to know what to call what they're feeling, except that they want to spend time together, and share their love of music with each other, as much as they can. I kind of think this might still be a romance, but it could also be a passionate friendship between two unexpected kindred spirits. It's clear the girls don't know what it is yet either. It feels authentic to a high school relationship, especially if neither girl previously thought of herself as queer.
 
Arai writes in 4-page scenes, which allows her to vary her chapter length in a way that most other manga artists can't. She varies the viewpoint across the scenes, mostly showing us things from Mitsuki's and Aya's perspectives, but sometimes others as well. We see them through the eyes of Mitsuki's uncle, who's simultaneously happy for his niece and feeling very old watching her grow up, and who intially fears the playlist Aya sent Mitsuki might've come from an adult man, a realistic concern that helps establish that not every possible young crush is appropriate or safe. 
 
We see them from the perspective of a good-looking boy in their class who's shocked that neither girl seems interested in him, but who gets over himself enough to become a friend (and to "ship" the two girls once they start hanging out more). And we see them as one of Aya's popular friends would, watching her bestie spend more and more time with a nerdy girl she seemingly has nothing in common with. Aya's friend might just be jealous, or she might be homophobic, but not everyone in the story is as happy about this new relationship as we in the audience are.
 
I was very pleasantly surprised by The Guy She Was Interested In, and recommend it to anyone who likes this kind of story.

The Waste Land

 
The Waste Land

by TS Eliot

Liveright
1922, reprinted

 

 

I thought I was rereading TS Eliot's The Waste Land, but after finishing it, I'm certain of a couple things. First, I'm sure I never read it before (it must've been Four Quartets before). And second, I'm so far removed from the context Eliot wrote this in that it's nearly impossible for me to experience it the way readers in 1922 would have. The reprint edition I read was made to look as much like the original as possible, but unfortunately it takes more than the same dust jacket to recreate the original effect. I can parse the words I'm reading, and get meaning from the sentences (except the few bits that are in other languages), but I can't understand it as Eliot meant it, or as his intended audience probably received it.

 

I've seen any number of essays lauding The Waste Land as the one of the most important poem of the 20th century, as a text that perfectly captured the post-WWI zeitgeist, and that changed how poetry was written afterward. I'd hoped that reading it during a new age of warmongering and robber baronry, in the aftermath of a recent global pandemic, at a time when any sense of shared cultural referents or agreed-upon version of reality seems to be disintegrating, I'd hoped that some of it might still resonate. But I guess not. 

 

Apparently, one thing that was radical about the poem in 1922 is that it has no single narrator - the text is fragmented, with many speakers from many stations of life, making references both high and low, with allusions to classical poetry, but also Buddhism and popular children's rhymes. I suppose this must've seemed extraordinary the first time people encountered it, but by now, the technique is so common across every possible storytelling medium, that it might still impress when used well, but it no longer shocks.

 

One of the first audiences to watch the ballet The Rites of Spring rioted after seeing it because it was such a departure from what they expected or thought was permissible. I'm not saying audiences now are more tolerant or sophisticated - there are riots all the time because fans are very happy or very angry after an important sports match. But it's really difficult today to think of ballet or poetry, no matter how novel or strange, as being capable of inspiring violence or unrest.

 

Another thing that was apparently scandalous was that Eliot included end-notes to cite his allusions to the classics. Apparently, at the time, the suggestion that the highly educated audience of poetry readers might not share enough unity of culture and education that they would, that they might not all know all the references the poet was making, was either insulting or a further elaboration of the poem's themes of the old world falling to pieces. (If so, Eliot's audience may have inferred some authorial intent that wasn't really there. Because according to the reprint's introduction, he only added the end notes after the publisher demanded something, anything to pad out the page count before going to press.)

 

By contrast, I know I haven't been schooled on a single timeless canon of classics; I have no expectation that I'll recognize every allusion. For me, end notes like "V. Spencer, Prothalamion" or whole paragraphs of untranslated Greek or German or Latin are essentially useless, even as starting points; I'd need annotations just to understand the citations! (Another tidbit from the intro is that Eliot originally wanted to title the poem He Do the Policemen in Different Voices as both an allusion to Charles Dickens and an instruction about how to understand its polyphony of speakers. I can't help but think we wouldn't still be quite so enamored with the poem if it had a silly title instead of a harsh one.)

 

In trying to make sense of The Waste Land, I found that cartoonist Julian Peters has made an illustrated version of the first section of it. I have to say, it helped me enormously, because the visuals help provide the missing context that the intervening century between Eliot's time and today has deprived me of. Peters keeps sight of the fact that this is about the aftermath of WWI, and either on his own or by consulting the appropriate literary analyses, has given a new face to each voice, which also clarifies to edges of each fragment. If I do re-read The Waste Land again sometime, I'd probably be wise to seek out an edition that provides more context somehow, either with illustrations or annotations or companion essays.

Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre

 
Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre

by Tom Scioli

IDW

2025 
 
 
Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre collects a 3-issue comic miniseries by Tom Scioli. Taking advantage of some very recent additions to the public domain to unleash the city-destroying might of Godzilla on the unsuspecting party-goers of Long Island during the Jazz Age. That's right, Godzilla wrecks West Egg and makes an implacable enemy of the wealthy and obsessive Jay Gatsby.
 
The first issue is the best, because Scioli has Nick Caraway narrate that issue, mostly using text directly from The Great Gatsby juxtaposed against illustrations of Godzilla causing mayhem, first in the suburbs, and then in downtown Manhattan. There's a great scene of Gatsby rushing across the bay to rescue Daisy in a speedboat, paired with the famous last lines of the book. Daisy is injured (although she'll eventually recover), and Gatsby swears eternal revenge for the insult.
 
In the second issue, Gatsby assembles an international team to help - an elderly Sherlock Holmes, the time traveler from HG Wells's The Time Machine, a Jules Verne who actually built all his fabulous devices instead of only writing about them, and Dracula. It reminds me of Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, although Moore chose slightly less prominent characters, while Scioli recruits the stars. Moore also writes more text and imbues his characters with more complexity. Scioli doesn't write all that much dialogue, and his characters seem flatter and more one-note, with just a single defining trait they repeat again and again.
 
In the final issue, in a surprise betrayal that no one could've seen coming, Dracula attacks his teammates with the goal of dominating Godzilla and ruling the world. A werewolf, a mummy, and an enlarging ray show up too. The climactic showdown is exciting, but also a bit silly, in its sheer over-the-topness. Godzilla isn't so much defeated as simply driven away, and by then, Gatsby might still be determined, but he no longer has any resources left to keep fighting.
 
This wasn't as good as I'd hoped, but Scioli does capture the feeling of dumping out a boxful of toys from different makers and playing with all of them together, telling a new story that's only slightly connected to the tales they originally came from.

Anya's Ghost

 
 
Anya's Ghost

by Vera Brosgol

First Second

2011

 

 

Anya's Ghost is a YA graphic novel about a high school girl who meets a ghost who offers to help her get ahead, which forces her to reevaluate what kind of person she really wants to be. Vera Brosgol writes convincingly about the experience of feeling like a outsider and wanting to fit in. At first, the ghost seems like a shortcut to success, but of course, it's not really going to be that easy.
 
Anya is a Russian immigrant in her first year at a fancy private high school. After being bullied in middle school, for having an accent, for being fat, she's remade herself as someone who seems more like the other kids. She's still on the periphery - her only friend seems to be a tomboy who likes to sneak out of class to smoke - and she's afraid of being 'found out' and getting bullied again. She's ashamed of her mom, and desperate to not be seen with the nerdy Russian boy in her grade who still has his accent and tries too hard in class. She has a crush on an athletic boy, but his girlfriend is one of the popular girls, and neither of them seems to know she exists.
 
Then, in the park, Anya accidentally falls down an old well. She's trapped, and no one will even hear her yell for help unless they're right at the top. She could easily die down there, which is driven home by the presence of the skeleton of someone who actually did. The skeleton is haunted by a ghost who can't travel far from her bones. At first, Anya's frightened, then glad for the company, and then the ghost helps her get rescued by spotting someone close by and encouraging Anya to yell at just the right time.
 
Somehow, a finger bone from the skeleton makes it into Anya's school bag, allowing the ghost to follow her home. Since she died a hundred years earlier, the ghost seems pretty nerdy by modern standards, but she's curious about Anya's life and the world today. Anya's near-fatal accident gets her attention and sympathy at school, including from her crush and his girlfriend. The ghost starts helping Anya, giving her answers on quizzes, playing look-out so she can sneak off for a cigarette, and encouraging her to get an invite to the big weekend party all the popular kids will be at. The ghost even advises her how to dress to get attention from boys at the party...
 
The party doesn't go well. Anya learns some unflattering things about her crush that pretty much kill her attraction to him. The ghost, who's restyled herself to look like a popular girl, is angry that Anya's no longer willing to follow her advice or let her vicariously pursue a teen romance. At the library, with the help of the Russian boy she's always scorned, Anya finds an old newspaper and learns more about how the ghost died, which makes her realize she really doesn't want to take advice from this person...
 
At this point, Anya starts to reevaluate herself and how she's been acting. She's finally been getting what she thought she wanted - a taste of popularity. But she's been acting like a jerk, and she realizes, she was before too, especially to her mom and the nerdy boy. Meanwhile the ghost is getting stronger and more ambitious. She wants Anya to be popular so she can live out her own fantasy, and she doesn't care what Anya wants for herself. A confrontation is inevitable.
 
As I said, I like how Brosgol writes Anya, and how she sort of universalizes the immigrant experience in a way that almost anyone who was bullied when they were young, and who made a conscious effort to become less nerdy, should be able to relate to. Brosgol's black and white art expresses emotion really well, which is important for this story. Making the ghost pure white with grey outlines also helps her stand out as otherworldly amidst the darker lines and shading of the living world. 

Twisty Little Passages

 
 

Twisty Little Passages 
An Approach to Interactive Fiction

by Nick Montfort

MIT Press

2003 

 

 

Twisty Little Passages is an academic history of interactive fiction from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. The title is a pun, referring to the passages of text that make up interactive fiction and the maze-like underground passages that the fiction frequently describes. Interactive fiction is abbreviated IF in the same way that roleplaying games are abbreviated RPGs. Nick Monfort explains what interactive fiction is, gives a history of its origins and rise to commercial success in the 1980s, and discusses how independent implementers - the people who write interactive fiction - took over the form once again in the 90s when it was no longer especially commercially successful.
 
What we today call interactive fiction was originally known as text-based adventure games. The name change reflects a certain amount of legitimacy seeking by its creators, but it also reflects the growing complexity and maturity of their literary efforts. The basis of interactive fiction is a kind of turn-taking between text displayed by the computer and text entered by the interactor - the reader or player of the fiction. The simplest commands are just two words, things like 'go north' or 'take key'. Unlike the Choose Your Own Adventure books, where the reader can only choose from 2-3 options at each decision point, interactive fiction is more open-ended. You can try more things, especially moving and interacting with objects, though you're still limited by the parser, the part of the software that interprets and responds to commands. The setting of the fiction, the setting the interactor moves their character through is called its world.
 
When I was a kid, my family had a Commodore 64, and among our game collection we had some text-based adventure games of the type Montfort is describing, and some kid-friendly graphic adventure games that had a single still image for each location in addition to the descriptive text, and sometimes had an on-screen menu of command words to choose from. (When there was no menu, I recall sometimes being frustrated by the parser's limited vocabulary, like if it only knew 'go' but not 'walk', or 'take' but not 'pick up'.) Monfort focuses on the purely textual games. Commercially, I suspect there was a 'video killed the radio star' situation where graphics and point-and-click interfaces supplanted text, even as the basic type of game remained the same. I think Myst is a lot like some of the games in this book, for example, except that it's puzzles and world are all image-based rather than text-based.
 
Monfort identifies several lenses for understanding interactive fiction. They can be understood as literature, as games, as procedures for producing narratives (like the I Ching or some of the experimental writing of the Ouilipo authors), as software, and as riddles. He spends a whole chapter very early on belaboring the comparison to riddles, which nearly exhausted my patience, but I found each of the other lenses more useful.
 
Probably the first interactive fiction was Adventure (sometimes called Colossal Cave). It inspired a number of similar adventure games, including Zork (sometimes called Dungeon), which in turn inspired the first flowering of commercially successful interactive fiction. Adventure and Zork both take place in cave systems and involve exploration; Zork also incorporates a mix of fantasy and technology. Both have maze-like areas and other navigational challenges, and puzzles that require using items found in the caves. They both came out a few years after Dungeons & Dragons, and were somewhat influenced by it (the back-and-forth conversation between interactor and parser resembles the dialogue between player and Dungeon Master, for example), but they're definitely not direct copies. These early games were written on mainframe computers, accessed on terminals, and shared over the internet at a time when you mostly had to be a university or on a military base to access it. 
 
The creators of Zork were based at MIT, and they formed the company Infocom to sell copies of their games to the owners of then-new personal computers. Montfort describes several. The two that interested me most are kind of about the relationship between people and technology, and both add an extra layer of metafictional distance between the player and the game. In Suspended, the interactor takes on the role of a human in a cryogenic hibernation chamber, who must in turn telepathically command several robots to explore the moon base and repair problems. Each robot has different senses and tools, so each describes the rooms differently and contribute in different ways to puzzle-solving. You can even tell a robot to break your cryo-chamber, killing you instantly! 
 
In A Mind Forever Voyaging, you take on the role of a sentient computer who's been assigned to simulate a small town and itself as a resident of the town, so the main character is essentially playing its own interactive fiction. The simulation is repeated several times, showing the increasingly dire effects of right-wing policies on the townspeople over several decades. According to Montfort, this setup humanizes the computer, who can sometimes help simulated people in the game-within-the-game, but is helpless to convince its programmers not to go forward with the policy changes.
 
Montfort gives us a quicker tour of the other interactive fiction companies of the 80s. In Britain, they seem to have been especially fond of literary adaptations, including Gateway and Rendezvous with Rama, getting Douglas Adams to help adapt The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and bringing in Daniel Pinsky and Thomas Disch to work with programmers on unique new works. 
 
By the 1990s, these companies could no longer really profitably sell text adventures to mass audiences; they either moved on to graphical adventure games or closed. But since then, Montfort notes that a dedicated audience of implementers and interactors continue to make and play interactive fiction purely for love of the genre. Monfort compares this to poetry, which is too niche for anyone to make a living writing poetry alone, but which also continues to have enough interest from both writers and readers to persist as a living scene and medium. I'm a little curious about what's new in interactive fiction since Montfort wrote this ... and also a bit interested in revisiting some of the text and graphic adventure games I played as a kid. 

World Heist

 
 
World Heist

by Linnea Sterte

Peow 

2024

 

 

World Heist is a fantasy graphic novel about two thieves stealing a treasure from a long-ruined palace and then learning the history of their prize. It's quite short, and doesn't so much end as set up more to come, so that it feels like a single chapter plucked from a longer work.
 
I hope there will be more, because I can hardly describe how much I like artist Linnea Sterte's work. I'm enthralled by it. She works in flowing lines that look like they poured from a fountain pen, just black and a couple tones of grey. Her work reminds me some of Mobius and of Yoshitaka Amano because of how fluid it is, how pretty, how detailed and decorated, how strange.
 
The thieves go by the noms de guerre of Tiger and Task. We see them in action before we really understand what they're doing. Tiger has a cat's face and can turn into a cat, and he can see the past, useful when the palace you're robbing is so swallowed up by the desert it seems to belong in the Ozymandias poem. Task is a living spell, drawn onto the skin of a dead child, a ghost animating a corpse, and she seems to be able to open anything, which is useful when you're stealing, full stop.
 

  
What they steal is, as the title of the book suggests, a miniature world inside a magic egg. The world was a wedding present from a king to his young bride (or possibly to himself), or rather it's the dwelling place of the real present, a trapped god, a divine androgyne, who has remained alive inside the world in the egg across the vast expanse of time since. In the end, Tiger and Task free the god, who agrees to accompany them ... and you can see why I'd like to know what happens next. 
 
What's the next score? What's the bigger job they can complete now that there's a third thief in the crew? What do such fantastical beings even desire that the human world can offer them, and what trials and guardians would they have to overcome to get it? I hope we will get another chapter sometime, and I'll definitely be looking for more of Sterte's work now that she's drawn me in.

Destiny

 
 
Destiny

by Otto Nuckel

Farrar & Rinehart

1930 

 

 

Destiny is one of the wordless novels of the early 20th century, an early kind of graphic novel with a single illustration on each page that tells a narrative without words. Last year I read The Sun by Frans Masereel,which depicts a man repeatedly trying to touch the sun in the sky, I think as an allegory for artistic ambition. Masereel seems to have pioneered this style of sequential art, with Otto Nuckel, the artist who wrote Destiny inspired by Masereel, and Lynd Ward, the most famous American to work in this style, apparently inspired by both Masereel and Nuckel.
 

Destiny is a social-realist story about the hard life of a woman born into poverty, who is repeatedly mistreated by men and punished by the legal system. Nuckel used leadcuts instead of the woodcuts favored by Masereel and Ward - as a result, his images are much smaller and finely detailed, with lots of halftones produced by crosshatching. The result is a narrative that falls somewhere between William Hogarth's A Harlot's Progress prints and something like Diary of a Lost Girl or Tess of the d'Urbervilles, somewhere between a morality play and a realistic account of a single life.
 
We follow our protagonist across 17 chapters, depicting her life from childhood to her violent death. In between, she'll just about every kind of harm that could befall a woman in her position. As a child, she is neglected by patents who are too tired and distracted to show her love. Her father, a drunk, is killed by a trolley. Her exhausted and overworked mother has a heart attack and drops her lantern, burning their room down, and half the rooming house with it. 
 
Our protagonist moves from the city to the countryside, where she becomes a servant on a farm. She's courted by a traveling salesman, and when she agrees to a picnic with him, he rapes her and then travels on his way. We see our protagonist continue working throughout her pregnancy. She gives birth by the river, maybe to a stillborn child, or maybe she immediately commits infantacide. Downriver, in the city, the police find the body, and in time she is arrested, but on trial, set to prison, and eventually released. 
 

The traveling salesman pursues the young woman as she works on the farm.

 
After she gets out of prison, a procurer spots her a brings her to a brothel. She lives and works there as a prostitute. After some time in that life, she strikes up a friendship, and maybe a mutual attraction, with the brothel's handyman. He helps her leave, and she moves in with him, enjoying an idyllic period as his girlfriend, both of them working, keeping house, visiting a summer fair and spending time in the park. But the brothel's procurer doesn't tolerate defections, apparently, and he murders the handyman, leaving our protagonist bereft again.
 
Depressed, she goes to the riverside and jumps in, but an older man sees her and calls for help, allowing her to be saved in time. He visits her during her convalescence, then proposes, and they get married. He's a tailor, and as his wife, she has a home and work helping with the sewing, though maybe less romance than with the handyman. Then into their lives comes a fabric salesman, who seems young and better-looking than the tailor... (I'm not sure if Nuckel had an unusually low opinion of salesmen, or if it was like, common at the time to be so anxious about their sexuality.) 
 
The fabric salesman befriends the tailor, socializes with the couple at home, and the three attend the circus together. Afterward, the protagonist and the salesman start a daytime love affair while the tailor is at work. One of the husband's friends spies on the lovers though, and the protagonist flees with the salesman.
 
Sadly, what she gets is not more romance, but more work. The salesman seems to laze about most of the day, forcing her to do all the housework and make an income working in a restaurant kitchen. In the evenings, he likes to go out drinking and gambling. One night, when the protagonist and salesman are out at a bar together, he picks a fight with another guy, who beats him badly, and seems like he might kill him. The protagonist protects her boyfriend by hitting the other guy with an axe, killing him. The police are called, and she goes on the run, holing up in a boarding house like the one she grew up in. The police break down the door to her room, and when she tries to flee out the window, they shoot her in the back, killing her.
 
To Nuckel's credit, all this is rendered in fine detail across over 200 leadcut prints. I think the story goes on a little long, it could've maybe used like one fewer section, both for the sake of narrative coherence, and to avoid the feeling of going overboard with hardship after hardship. Overall, it's an impressive piece of storytelling, and I can see why other artists were inspired to try out this style.