The Case of the Missing Men

 
The Case of the Missing Men
Hobtown Mystery Stories 1

by Kris Bertin
art by Alexander Forbes

Conundrum Press

2017 

 

 

The Case of the Missing Men is the first of what promises to be a series of Hobtown Mystery Stories, set in a very small fictional town in Nova Scotia. This is a graphic novel with black and white pen drawings. The backgrounds and scenery are quite detailed and realistic. The people are drawn in a way that shows all their human imperfections, especially on people who are dirty, injured, or have been shaped by a harsh life. The mystery here starts out like a typical case for teen sleuths, but very quickly becomes stranger and darker, so that by the end it feels more like a horror story.
 
The book's trade dress is clearly a homage to the Nancy Drew books, and the leader of Hobtown's after-school mystery solving club is a logical, confident blond girl named Dana Nance, who I think is supposed to remind us of Nancy Drew, even if she's not a direct stand-in. The other club members are non-identical twin brothers Denny and Brennan, who might be reminiscent of the Hardy Boys, and Pauline, who is intuitive, maybe psychic, and who doesn't seem to have a direct teen detective inspiration that I'm aware of. The case starts because new kid in town Sam is looking for his missing father. Sam and his dad look a lot like Johnny Quest and Mr Quest. I could be wrong though - the twins also remind me of the twin brothers in A Wrinkle in Time, Sam might be meant to evoke Tom Swift, or each could combine several inspirations, or what I think is a pattern might be a coincidence.
 
Dana and her friends meet Sam when she's assigned to be his study partner at school. Sam's been skipping class and acting out because he's stuck in a town he doesn't live in, his dad's been missing for weeks, and the local police don't seem to care. Dana and the others do care, especially when they learn that several other men have gone missing, though the others are from the margins of society, and Sam's dad is the wealthy owner of an aviation company. They check around town, looking into the last places the men were seen, while repeatedly being warned off by the police and Dana's dad. Then a teacher is murdered at school in the middle of the day, and the search uncovers the hidden corpse of a town councilwoman.
 
What started out seemingly straight forward keeps getting weirder and weirder. The teens spot some of the missing men, but their behavior is feral, inhuman. The solution to the mystery turns out to involve two separate groups committing murders, for reasons that reach deep into the town's history, with a number of prominent people implicated. The pace of revelation is good - the things we learn are strange, some are even supernatural, but each discovery helps things make more sense instead of becoming more confusing. What we learn is really dark, involving not only kidnapping and murder but also torture and brainwashing. By the end, the teens have learned some very heavy, adult stuff. This is not the sort of story where everything is okay at the end.
 
One story-telling device I'd like to note is that at a couple key points in the book, we switch from closely following the teens in linear time to a more distant perspective, with events related in flashback and under police questioning. The discovery of the hidden body, and later catching one murderer in the act are both depicted this way. The effect is like a chorus of narrators, with these important moments shown through a kaleidoscope of viewpoints - in fragments, from many angles. 

Two Serious Ladies

 
Two Serious Ladies

by Jane Bowles

Ecco

1943, reprinted 2014 
 
 
Two Serious Ladies was originally published in the 1940s, and has been kept alive since then by what appears to be a mix of historical curiosity and truly passionate fandom. From a historical standpoint, author Jane Bowles' husband Paul was an author and composer. I'd never heard of him, but apparently he's moderately famous in the literary world - he was friends with Gertrude Stein and her circle, one of his novels has been made into a movie, etc. So for someone interested in Paul Bowles specifically, or that literary milieu more generally, reading Two Serious Ladies could provide some extra context.
 
I don't remember exactly how I found the book, but it must've been a tip from a true fan. If you go looking for Two Serious Ladies online, you won't find a lot of stand alone reviews, but it shows up over and over in lists of recommended titles. Its cult following seems to be large enough that if you go looking for someone to tell you about their lesser-known faves, you're sure to find somebody trying to press a copy into your hand - especially if you're interested in "forgotten" women authors or books about women living unconventional lives. It was an interesting read for me, but I won't be counting myself among its evangels.
 
Two Serious Ladies follows two middle-aged women, Miss Goering and Mrs Copperfield, who are acquaintances but not friends in the same set of New York WASPs, as they each spontaneously and independently embark on a personal experiment to live differently, no longer bound by tradition or the norms for women of their social class. 
 
The first chapter introduces us to Miss Goering, who lives alone in a big Victorian mansion. The sister of her childhood nanny shows up one day, they get along well, and Miss Goering invites her to move in. Later she goes to a party, briefly chats with Mrs Copperfield, and allows herself to get picked up by a guy who still lives with his elderly parents.

In chapter 2, we follow Mrs Copperfield on vacation to Panama with her husband. (I'll admit this caught me by surprise; I'd presumed the new housemate was the second serious lady, and that we'd continue following the characters we'd been properly introduced to.) Mrs Copperfield is very anxious, and doesn't seem to enjoy going outside or being on vacation, while her husband is very energetic, wants to walk the whole city and then hike the jungles, and basically ignores his wife's discomfort. While he's out exploring, she ends up in a hotel in the red light district, where she befriends the elderly madame and one of the young prostitutes. She keep staying there even after her husband comes back, and tells him to leave without her at the end of the trip.
 
In chapter 3, we return to Miss Goering. She's abandoned her big house in the city and moved into a shack outside a small town on one of the islands near New York. Her housemate and the guy she met at the party live with her, though they both seem unhappy about it. The guy's dad abandons the city to move in with them too. Miss Goering takes a ferry to a slightly larger town, meets a guy loitering on the street, goes drinking with him, and then comes back the next day to move in with him. Her other housemates are pretty shocked that she's leaving them. She lives with the guy for a week, then dumps him in favor of a gangster, who presumes she's a prostitute. The gangster takes her home with him, then out to a nice restaurant where he has a business meeting.
 
While Miss Goering is bored at the restaurant, she calls Mrs Copperfield, who is coincidentally back from her trip for a few days, with her new prostitute friend tagging along, before moving back to Panama permanently. Mrs Copperfield shows up at the restaurant wildly drunk with her friend in tow. Miss Goering is appalled by her, and then the gangster leaves to go do business, abandoning her. The end.
 
The plot of the book is very odd, because neither Miss Goering nor Mrs Copperfield seem to be acting on any kind of plan or ideology. They each have an inchoate sense of wanting to do something different, and enough money to basically do whatever they want, and so they both advance toward their unseen goals over the objections of the people around them. 
 
Most of what happens is just people talking, just chitchatting, or talking about how they live or what they want to do, or trying to convince someone to go into business or on a date. It all seems pretty prosaic, not like anyone is the embodiment of any particular viewpoint. Our two serious ladies listen, then say vague things about how they think it's nice to do this, or they don't want to do that. They're impervious to persuasion or browbeating. But they don't really espouse any viewpoint of their own. If there's a genuine philosophical argument about how to live hidden in this dialogue, it's couched in terms we might think of as vaguebooking or subtweeting. I'm not sure it's there at all. Also everyone in the book drinks heavily, pretty much constantly. A lot of the dialogue sounds like what you'd hear a bar.
 
Bowles's writing deals almost exclusively with what people say and do. There's almost no interiority, no mention of what anyone thinks or feels, beyond someone occasionally saying something to themselves, like an aside to the audience during a play. It makes the women's already sort of mysterious actions seem even more opaque. I say sort of mysterious because what they're doing doesn't especially seem to make them happy, and we don't really learn any other motive or goal.
 
Another thing I read in this style was the short story "An Hour of Last Things" by George P Elliott, who is best known for having almost the same name as a much more famous author. In that, a woman's husband dies, she goes out to buy an expensive stereo system, and throws herself a big party, and like Mrs Copperfield, it's implied but not stated that the widow is attracted to a younger woman. Barbara Comyns' book Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead is similarly almost Behaviorist in its refusal to depict interiority, but is a much stronger book overall, in my opinion. I'd happily swap it for Two Serious Ladies on any list recommending short, strange midcentury novels by overlooked women writers.
 
Just because it's not for me though, doesn't mean it's not for anyone, and women breaking with convention in pursuit of their own pleasure are certainly having a literary moment right now. There's even another new reprint of Two Serious Ladies, with a new intro and new cover art, out just last year. I'm certain the cult following will continue. If you're in the mood, I'd suggest sipping gin during Mrs Copperfield's chapter and whiskey for Miss Goering, perhaps starting off listening to Helen Kane sing "I Want to be Bad" to set the mood.

DIE 3

 
 
DIE 3

The Great Game

by Kiren Gillen

art by Stephanie Hans

Image Comics

2020 

 

 

In the first volume of DIE, six teenagers in England in 1990 found six magic dice, and disappeared into the fantasy world of Die, an Earth-sized planet shaped like an icosahedron, a d20. They were trapped their for years, living out fantasy adventures in their roles as the mind-controlling Dictator, the lucky Fool, the emotion-powered Grief Knight, the cyberpunk Neo, the God Binder, who trades favors with supernatural entities, and the Master, who runs the game. Eventually the group learned a magic ritual that would let them leave and return home, but when they left, Solomon, their friend who'd first found the dice and acted as the Master, was seized by the evil Grandmaster who ruled the whole world of Die.
 
25 years after they returned, the now middle-aged friends got pulled back into Die. In the intervening years, Solomon had killed the old Grandmaster and become the new one. He wanted the game to resume, and the others couldn't leave without changing his mind or killing him. He holed up inside his fortress in Glass Town, protected by the armies of Little England and besieged by the armies of Eternal Prussia. The group has long since decided that although strange, the planet Die is real, and its inhabitants have the same moral worth as people living on Earth. Despite this, they also agreed to help Eternal Prussia break the siege and crack the giant bell jar protecting Glass Town so they could kill Sol and go home. The plan succeeded, but then not everyone was ready to leave yet...
 
So then in volume 2, the group split, then recombined, and split again. Initially, two members wanted to stay for awhile to avoid their problems back on Earth, while the others wanted to return immediately. With time to settle in though, everyone starts to feel guilty about what they did to Glass Town and worried about what Eternal Prussia might be doing in there. When they split up again, it's basically a disagreement about tactics instead of goals.
 
Now in volume 3, Dictator Ash and God Binder Izzy are co-ruling the nation of Angria, which is based on the fantasy world the Bronte siblings created together as children. The WWI-era hobbit army of Little England arrives at Angria's capital to demand Ash's surrender for her role in the fall of Glass Town. She arranges to meet with the Master of Little England, who turns out to be HG Wells. He explains that the German inventor of the original military wargame, Kriegspiel was drawn to Die, and his game formed the basis of Eternal Prussia. Wells blamed Kriegspiel for emboldening Germany's military, and wrote his own Little Wars game to try to discourage actual warfare. Ash disillusions him by revealing that WWI happened anyway, and Wells sets off in his time machine to do ... something. But the meeting succeeds in forging an alliance between Little England and Angria.
 
The others are all headed for Glass Town directly. Along the way, they meet a Fallen version of Neo Angela's daughter. The Fallen are like zombie orcs. When Sol became one after they killed him, they realized all the Fallen are former players who died on Die. They wonder how any Fallen could've already been there in 1990, if they were really the first players to arrive. (HG Wells and Charlotte Bronte are Masters, not players.) They also wonder how Angela's daughter could be there, and why she's years older than when Angela left. 
 
They learn from some helpful dwarves that Sol actually created the 12 toy soldiers that inspired the Brontes to write their Angria stories. Eventually the meet some Fair (robot elves from the future) who reveal that Die itself is from the future, but that it draws in people from the past to help ensure its own existence. It sent the toy soldiers back to recruit the Brontes, and the magic dice back to recruit Ash, Angela, and the others. What Eternal Prussia is making in Glass Town now, almost 30 years after their first visit, are the dice that will bring them here. If the dice are made and sent, the Die will merge with Earth in 2020. So Angela's daughter, and the other Fallen, are like the ghosts of people who haven't died yet, but will. Or they could all be saved, if the group can interrupt the creation of the magic dice...
 
Because Gillen is giving us a close-up view of these characters, we really only see three faces of Die - Angria, Little England, and Eternal Prussia, plus the Grandmaster's Realm on face 20. I can't help but wonder what would be on the other sixteen sides! 
 
Planet Die is an interesting villain. Like Roko's Basilisk, it's a malign intelligence from the future that's manipulating the past in order to ensure its own creation. Normally I wouldn't think if a planet as being a villain, but several characters who would know have suggested that Die either has or is being controlled by some sort of evil mind. I'm not totally sure how the Fair fit into this; maybe they're from further in the future, after Die merges with Earth. Ordinarily, in comics, I'd expect the good guys to win, but this is a dark enough fantasy that a downer ending seems possible. 

Physics for Cats

 
 
Physics for Cats

by Tom Gauld

Drawn & Quarterly
2025
 

  

Physics for Cats is the most recent collection of Tom Gauld's comics. All of these were originally printed in New Scientist magazine, and basically all of them are about academia or scientific research. Gauld draws comics to about the same dimensions as classic newspaper cartoon strips, although he usually draws them as just one big panel, only sometimes splitting them up smaller.

 

Gauld's humor tends to be gentle and absurd. We get jokes about competition among scientists, like a researcher who's jealous that his rival's failed experiment exploded more spectacularly than his own, or a lab that can't do any research because they spent all their grant funding on really cool looking scifi doors. There are other jokes about failed research, the risk that you might devote years to studying something that turns out to be less impressive than you hoped, or to trying to accomplish a task that proves to be impossible. Gauld's humor doesn't mock so much as it commiserates.

 

We get comics where the humor comes from applying scientific language or attitudes to another context, like when a scientist details their method of study before revealing that yes, they do know what they want to order, or when we experimentally vary the length of Rapunzel's hair and the height of her tower to observe the effect on the outcome of the fairy tale. There are also several comics where characters realize they're in a drawing.

 

Because they were all originally published in one place, and had a consistent topic to fit that publication, the comics here have more thematic unity than you usually get from Gauld. He's always had recurring subject matter - often about books, authors, and tropes of fiction - but this ends up being a more cohesive collection than previously.

The Rider, the Ride, the Rich Man's Wife

 
The Rider, the Ride, the Rich Man's Wife

by Premee Mohamed

PS Publishing

2024

 

 
The Rider, the Ride, the Rich Man's Wife is a novella that blends science fiction and horror to tell a new version of a classic tale about human sacrifice meant to bring good weather. But unlike in "The Lottery", for example, there is a true supernatural threat here, not solely the indifference and cruelty of one's mortal neighbors.

 

In the post-apocalyptic future, twin brothers Lucas and Kit live in a farming village that ekes a living from the parched landscape. Once every seven years, the town gets absolutely deluged with rain, which heralds the arrival of a pair of hungry ghosts, the Rider and the Wife. Each time the heavy rains come, the ghosts appear and place a mark on their prey. The next morning the hunt begins. If the prey can survive until sunset, supposedly they'll be free, but if not they'll become the next Rider. No one is allowed to help; anyone who interferes will be killed immediately.

 

When Kit is chosen though, Lucas isn't willing to let his brother die without trying to help. They make a plan. Instead of running toward the river as people usually do, Kit will run to the distant city, abandoned when civilization fell. And Lucas will meet him there.Together, perhaps the can out-run, out-hide, out-think, and maybe even out-fight the Rider and the Wife. Of course it's not really that easy, and what they find in the city is much stranger and much older than they possibly could've prepared for. Almost the whole book is devoted to the chase, with only a little scene setting before it starts, and a glimpse of the aftermath after it ends at sunset.

 

Author Premee Mohamed maintains a frantic pace as the brothers try to keep ahead of undead hunters on horseback and their horrible, monstrous hounds. Just as she did in The Butcher of the Forest, she describes the otherworldly in language that's visceral and immediate, making her ghostly creatures feel disturbingly lively. If I have one complaint, it's that the worldbuilding is so expansive that the tale seems dwarfed by the world it's set in. There might even be a connection to the otherworld of The Butcher. That's much better than the author having too little imagination though, and the unexpected sprawl of the scenery never detracts from the urgency of the pursuit. 

A Fantastic Woman (2017)

  

A Fantastic Woman

directed by Sebastian Lelio
written by Sebastian Lelio, Gonazlo Maza, and Eliseo Altunaga
Sony Pictures Classics
2017
 

 
In the early 2000s, I read a law review article where my takeaway was that the main reason trans rights varied so much from state to state in the US didn't have much to do with local politics. Instead, it was because trans rights were decided by court cases brought by the other surviving relatives of a dead person, trying to stop the transgender spouse (nearly always a trans woman) from inheriting anything.

 
In one state, the first case like this might be a about a trans woman who was married to another woman, perhaps someone she married before her transition. In that state, trans women will be legally considered women, and because both spouses are women, their marriage will be nullified. In another state, the spouse who died might be a man who married a trans woman after she transitioned. In that state, trans women will legally be counted as men, the marriage will again be classified as being between two people of the same sex, and again, it won't count. The article's claim seemed to be that what decides the rights of trans people in each US state is which family got to the courts first, and set a precedent that affects everyone who comes after, in order to leave their particular widow with nothing.

 

The US legal landscape is completely different by now, partly because of the Supreme Court case legalizing same-sex marriage, and partly because state legislatures have deliberated and passed laws instead of leaving it to probate courts to set policy. But I thought of that article while watching A Fantastic Woman because, while there are no courts involved, it's all about a rich Chilean family trying to box out dead Orlando's new girlfriend Marina, taking back, within days, the car she drove, the apartment she lived in, her dog, all the while never giving her a chance to grieve, and telling her that she's a monster for interfering with their grief.

 

(I recognize that this can happen to cisgender women too, whenever a young woman befriends or cares for an older man, whenever she doesn't have the protection of a legal marriage and a new will, as in Knives Out. But Marina has no Benoit Blanc, nor anyone else to advocate for her. And there's a larger critique of transphobia and homophobia at work here.)

 

A Fantastic Woman is a film of cruel ironies. When Orlando has an aneurysm in the night, Marina drives him to the hospital, but the police treat her first as a suspect, then as a potential victim who might've killed in self defense (though even this seems more like a pretext for the detective to force Marina through a physical examination to look for nonexistent injuries). They can't imagine her as an equal partner in her relationship, rather than as someone hired just for sex. Orlando's family takes everything from Marina, while accusing her of being a thief. She's assaulted by Orlando's son and his friends while they call her gay slurs. When she tries to sneak into the funeral, she's thrown out, and told she's ruining the others' ability to grieve for their loved one.

 

The only thing Marina has left from Orlando is the key to his locker in local sauna. To find his last, accidental gift, she makes a visual descent into hell, entering on the women's side, sneaking through the staff areas, then passing through the men's baths to their lockers. What do you think she finds inside? There's nothing that could make up for everything she suffers leading up to this moment, and the film doesn't pretend there is.

 

Although the story is realistic, the visuals are tinged with expressionism. There are maybe more mirrors and reflective surfaces in this film than in any other I've seen, and they're always used to emotional effect. The lighting is moody. And Orlando reappears many times after his death, like a ghost accompanying Marina, until he finally leads her to privately watch his cremation after the funeral.
 
 

Originally watched February 2023. 

The Best American Comics 2019

 
 
The Best American Comics 2019

edited by Jillian Tamaki

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2019

 

  

The Best American Comics 2019 ended up being the last one in the series. I sort of assume it was cancelled for reasons nebulously related to the Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing economic turmoil, but that's really only a guess on my part. The series editor announced the publisher's decision in late 2020, but he didn't give any reason. He might not know it, or might not be allowed to say.

 

Jilian Tamaki picked 2019's comics. I think she chose fewer short comics than in the past. There are only a couple 1-2 pagers. Her excerpts from longer works feel particularly well-chosen to tell a complete sub-part of the larger story, which is something I've been critical of other editors about. I haven't been systematically counting, but I think Tamaki may have chosen a few more women artists than in the past, and I think the majority of her picks are nonfiction, mostly memoir.

 

Among the graphic nonfiction, we get Joe Sacco reporting on the petroleum industry at the oil sands in Alberta, Canada (the same region Kate Beaton wrote about in Ducks). Sophia Foster-Dimino has a harrowing account of her accidental pregnancy and abortion when she was in college and in an abusive relationship. There's an excerpt from Vera Brogsol's memoir Be Prepared about attending a Russian culture summer camp in America when she was a kid. And one of my favorite pieces in the book, Angie Wang writes about trying to find her favorite Chinese food in American restaurants, prepared the way she remembers it. Wang's piece was drawn for the cellphone, intended to be viewed by scrolling down and downward.

 

There were fewer fictional pieces. We get an excerpt from Nick Drsano's Sabrina about two strangers who are drawn together after both witnessing a murder, while omnipresent right-wing radio casts doubt on what happened in the background. I especially liked Unihabitable by Jed McGowan, a complete comic told from the perspective of a swarm of billions of nano robots attempting to terraform an alien world, then making peace with their failure. Like Angie Wang, McGowan (digitally?) painted his comic, making it look very different from the many black-and-white pen drawings that were the most common style earlier in the series.

 

I'll miss the BAC books. I've found a number of artists I like by reading them. There are a couple other comics anthologies I want to read, although they actually precede the Best American series.