The Best American Comics 2010

 
The Best American Comics 2010
edited by Neil Gaiman
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2010
 

 

The Best American Comics 2010 is probably the last book I'll finish in April. 

 
Two things are notable by this point in the series. First, we're reaching a point where I remember noticing some of the featured comics prior to seeing them in here. This one has Asterios Polyp, Scott Pilgrim, R Crumb's Book of Genesis, and Trinity, which is about the history of the atomic bomb.

 
Second, I'm starting to recognize a few recurring artists. If I didn't already know who Chris Ware was, I would by now, since he's been in every volume. Ben Katchor is someone I can genuinely say I learned of from the BAC series though, and I like him enough to try finding one of his collections sometime.

 
As the editor, Neil Gaiman seems to have picked slightly fewer comics and included longer excerpts. In previous editions, an excerpt would usually only last for a single plot point or so - here they're roughly twice as long. The one exception is the bit of Scott Pilgrim that Gaiman chose, poorly IMO, which is short, makes very little sense without more context, and doesn't seem particularly interesting.

Frog and Toad are Friends

 
 
Frog and Toad are Friends

by Arthur Lobel
Harper Collins
1970, reprinted 2003
 

 

I read Frog and Toad are Friends as a follow-up to The Wind in the Willows, but aside from having animal protagonists, they're quite different books.

 
Toad is a bit of an introvert. He wants to stay inside, preferably in bed. He's embarrassed for others to see his swimsuit, he gets upset when he loses a button and can't find it.

 
Frog gently encourages his friend to get up and go outside. He gives Toad space to feel negative emotions without being judged for it, but also tries to cheer him up.

 
These stories are sweet and gentle, and very short. Frog and Toad go for a walk, go for a swim, look for a lost button, tell each other stories, wait for the mail.

 
I read recently that Arthur Lobel and several other beloved children's authors were gay, and that this probably informed their writing. These authors told stories about characters who felt different from their peers and struggled with difficult emotions, and told their readers that that was okay. Instead of plots about heterosexual romance, they told stories that celebrated platonic friendship. And in doing so, they told stories that might help future queer kids, but that also spoke to more universal feelings that aren't always represented in other books.

A Good Book, In Theory

 
A Good Book, In Theory
A Guide to Theoretical Thinking

by Alan Sears

University of Toronto Press

2005
 

 

A Good Book, In Theory is another book that I borrowed from a friend and took waaay too long to read before returning it.

 
Sears is writing for undergraduate sociological theory students, hoping to convince them that social theory can be interesting and relevant. I'm not sure his writing is as engaging as he wants it to be, and I think it might be a bit dense for undergrads, but it is an introduction to several aspects of social thought.

 
Sears wants a running theme of his book to be the debate between theories of order, which generally have a negative view of human nature and assume that power and hierarchy are good for preventing anarchy, and theories of conflict, which have a more positive view of human nature and assume that hierarchy benefits the powerful at the expense of the subordinated - but it's not really a running thread, just something he brings up a few times.

 
Sears introduces the two perspectives, then, uses the two perspectives to talk about formal education, then talks about a few applications of the social construction of reality, and ends by talking about theory-making.

One critique I have of Sears is that I think he creates 'themes' for his chapters by grouping not-necessarily related topics that share a word or phrase in everyday English. So for example, he ends his first chapter on the social construction of reality by talking about debates around globalization that are framed in terms of who has a more 'realistic' view of the world.

 
I feel like one of the hardest challenges of teaching any theory is getting students to understand that within the theory, some words are used in very specific ways, and shouldn't be read as having the full range of meanings and connotations they carry in everyday speech. Like how being able to 'rationalize' a decision psychologically is not the same thing as making a formally 'rational choice.' So Sears committing similar linguistic slippage in his text seems not ideal to me.

 
I would never assign A Good Book, In Theory, but I wouldn't have regretted reading it back when I was a student. My undergrad criminology theory class actually was organized around order versus conflict, and in sociology, I've always found social construction to be one of the most important ideas.

Teen Titans 4

 

Teen Titans 4

When Titans Fall

DC Comics

2017

 

 

When Titans Fall is the final post-New 52 / pre-Rebirth Teen Titans collection. This one continues to flirt with some ideas about contemporary digital celebrity and social media, but still doesn't seem to have much to say about them.

 
Red Robin is worried about the Titans' reputation and public image, and then discovers they're being mocked on a website that posts memes making fun of super-villains. He hacks the site, finds the owner, and goes to confront him. What he's hoping for is unclear, but possibly just to get the Titans content migrated to a site that makes fun of super heroes.
 

When they get to the site owners' apartment, they discover he's being held hostage by The Brain and Monsieur Mallah, who are mad that the villain site posted a meme about them too. The evil brain-in-a-jar and super-intelligent French gorilla escape to a nearby zoo, the Titans chase them, and Brain uses tiny robots that stick to people's skulls to mind-control all the zoo-goers and animals. Raven makes the robots fall off, and the Titans get good press by putting the escaped animals back in their cages.

 
During the zoo fight, Red Robin is kidnapped by Amanda Waller's security team. She wants to recruit him and/or the Titans into her Suicide Squad. The other Titans break into Waller's secret prison and rescue Red Robin.

 
Afterward, the psychic Hive Queen uses mind control to take over everyone in whatever city the Titans are in at the time. Red Robin's strategy and Raven's own psychic powers defeat her.

 
To relax afterward, the team goes to a nightclub, but the party drugs at this club cause people to turn into green animals. Uh oh! This is the work of Sister Blood, whose hideout is in the basement. She made the drugs using Beast Boy's blood that Professor Pyg sold to her. It turns out the animals turn back into people if you punch them enough, so the team does that, and also beats up Sister Blood.

 
Then Red Robin dies in between issues, which might be shown in a different comic, but wasn't included in this collection. In the final issue, the other Titans attend his wake, trade Red Robin stories, and decide to break up the team. It's implied that Damien Wayne Robin will try re-forming the Teen Titans in the future.
 

A pretty anti-climactic and out of nowhere ending. In this run, the Teen Titans started out popular, got more so, then became notorious, and now maybe went back to being beloved. A lot of ideas were introduced and then dropped unresolved. I would not point to this as a particularly successful run of Teen Titans stories.

 
In this volume specifically, Red Robin worried that the team couldn't function without him, saw that it could, thought about leaving the team to let them continue without him, then died off-camera, and the team immediately dissolved, showing that his emotional journey on that topic was just wishful thinking. Cool.

The Clockwork Rocket

 
 
The Clockwork Rocket
by Greg Egan

Night Shade Books

2011

 

 

Greg Egan has a reputation for writing some pretty high-concept hard science fiction. But even for Egan, Clockwork Rocket has a challenging premise. Egan imagines a universe where, among other differences, time is literally a fourth dimension of space and light of different colors travels at different speeds.

 
Yalda is a farmer's daughter who becomes something like her world's Einstein, discovering major properties of how space and time are related. Her discovery explains the mysterious rainbow streaks that've become common in the sky overhead during her lifetime, and predicts a coming danger - the streaks are bits of matter turned 90 degrees, so their 'time' is one of Yalda's world's spatial dimensions. This means that from the world's perspective, these 'Hurtlers' are moving infinitely fast, and might destroy the world unless someone can find a solution. Another planet in the same solar system is destroyed, making the threat seem all the more ominous.

 
With the help of a former student turned wealthy financier, Yalda develops a plan to turn a mountain into a generation ship. It will accelerate until it's moving at the speed of blue light (our light speed), traveling through space and toward tomorrow at the same rate, then keep accelerating until they've also turned 90 degrees to the world. No time at all will pass at home while they travel this way, meaning they can spend generations developing new science, then turn around, and come back. From the world's perspective, this journey will only take the four years needed to accelerate out, turn around, and decelerate on return.

 
Yalda and the other characters have recognizably human emotions and concerns, but biologically, they're totally different. Think of them as human-sized amoebas. They can make new limbs as needed and retract them at will, and the only way to reproduce is for a woman to divide her body into four. She ceases to exist and her children are raised by their father or a trusted friend. Yalda and the other women she hang out with all take a kind of birth control that prevents them from reproducing, letting them live to maturity and accomplish their goals.

 
Egan includes numerous lessons in the weird alternate physics of his universe, as Yalda and the others discover and explain how things work. The main plot is about the discovery of the danger, the race to build the ship, and then the challenges of bringing it up to full speed (including food crops that won't grow in zero gravity and the danger of space dust damaging the mountain). 

 
But the main obstacles aren't scientific or technological, they're political and cultural. Birth control is illegal in Yalda's home city, and women who want to delay reproduction are stigmatized and ostracized. The financier has a rich enemy who makes trouble for the project just to spite his rival. And there are the expected difficulties convincing the public of the danger from the Hurtlers and the need for their project. Rich as the financier is, the project needs workers to turn the mountain into a ship, and join the generations-long mission to save the planet. 

 
The reproductive rights of women are a major and recurring theme throughout the book, which ends when Yalda finally gives up her life to have children. Egan really humanizes his aliens, and shows great empathy for Yalda and the other women. There are two sequels, which I imagine will cover the trip out and the turn-around (2), and the trip back plus whatever they need to do to save the planet (3). This novel stands alone well enough, and the next two books are sure to get deeper into Egan's invented physics that I'm in no hurry to read them, if I ever do. But I am glad I read this one.

Teen Titans 3

 
Teen Titans 3

The Sum of its Parts
DC Comics

2016

 

 

After finishing the third post-New 52 Teen Titans collection, I'm convinced that this would work better if it was episodic instead of serialized. The attempts to tell a truly ongoing story mostly seem to have resulted in a lot of foreshadowing that turns into dropped plot threads and storylines that make no sense.

 
So this time around, we start out with the Titans under arrest by someone named Alpha Centaurian. They inevitably escape, Kid Flash decides to go have his own adventures, and Chimera goes back to her home planet. Also Power Girl can turn giant now for some reason. Manchester Black and Superboy are entirely absent. I still don't really understand who was supposedly responsible for the various double-crosses at the end of the last volume.

 
Anyway, Superboy being framed for a massacre and the Teen Titans breaking into a supervillain prison have turned the public against them and against teenage vigilantes in general. This spells trouble for ... no, not the Wonder Girl gang we met before ... but instead 'the Robins' a different vigilante fan club that has never previously been mentioned. Red Robin runs off to help the Robins escape from the police and go into hiding at a posh boarding school, where apparently either all of them are students or else no one will mind a dozen strange boys showing up to live in the dorms suddenly.

 
While Red Robin is busy with that, the others get bored, and Raven receives some kind of psychic distress signal. They find Professor Pyg turning a bunch of people into zombie slaves. The zombies beat up the Titans and Professor Pyg steals several bags of blood from each of the Teens. Then they escape, but can't free the zombies, and also Professor Pyg escapes and gives the blood to Brother Blood who has plans for it. So like, was his brilliant plan to steal the Teen Titans' blood to commit a crime in an isolated lair without leaving any external clues and just wait for them to show up ???

 
Finally, in the most sensible story so far, Wonder Girl gets curious about her unknown father and is maybe receiving some kind of psychic or magical messages either from him or about him. She finds his severed, turned-to-stone head, gets ambushed by hyena men, and meets her Aunt Cassandra, who used to have the ability to command people with her voice, until Wonder Girl's dad wrecked her throat and she killed him.
 

Auntie claims to regret her actions and says she wants to find the Staff of Hermes to resurrect dad. Wonder Woman shows up and uses her Lasso of Truth and seemingly discovers that the aunt is telling the truth. Of course she is not, and there's some very ridiculous explanation for how she could lie despite Wonder Woman's magic. She uses the Staff to restore her magic voice that lets her command people, but then Wonder Girl wrecks her throat again, just like her dad did before.

Teen Titans 2

 
 
Teen Titans 2
Rogue Targets
DC Comics
2016

 

 

The second post-New 52 Teen Titans volume involves a lot of interpersonal drama, but I'm not sure it all actually makes sense by the end.
 

Initially, the Titans are enjoying their fame after saving New York from STAR Labs' stolen doomsday weapon. Wonder Girl meets with the vigilante girl gang operating in her name, Raven continues hanging out with the band using her name and trying to copy her magic in their songs, and Red Robin confronts Manchester Black about his claim that the stolen weapon was only the second worst thing STAR ever built.

 
And then all those plot threads get dropped and are never picked up again, because Kon-El Superboy is accused of murdering 20 people, triggering national outrage and a national manhunt. The one survivor claims he's innocent. Also she turns out to be an alien, and all the dead people are supposed to have been aliens of the same species in disguise. She doesn't seem to know who did commit the murders or why they've framed Superboy though.

 
Martian Manhunter tries to arrest Superboy, but the Titans help him escape. Wonder Girl and Power Girl become disillusioned and go join the new team Manchester Black has secretly been training even longer than he's been working with the Teen Titans. The new team tries to capture Superboy, but again, the remaining Teen Titans prevent the capture. Raven reads Manchester Black's mind, and comes away believing that the alien conqueror Despero somehow framed Superboy from inside prison, so Red Robin decides that the Titans will go break into the prison.

 
Inside the prison, Beast Boy, Bunker, Raven, and the alien witness, Chimera, deal with an apparent riot, while Red Robin, Superboy, Wonder Girl, and Kid Flash from MB's other team head down to the secure basement to confront Despero. They end up trapped in some kind of psychic vision that they believe is caused by some other villain named Harvest, who seemingly kidnaps Superboy and vanishes.

Upstairs they realize the entire riot is a fake psychic vision caused by Doctor Psycho, who was attempting to steal Raven's powers by entering her mind. The moment he does, he gets knocked out by a vision of her demon father Trigon, making his whole plan come to naught.

 
Manchester and the rest of his team arrive. He orders them all to stop the riot and arrest the Titans while he goes to the basement to confront Red Robin and Superboy. Instead he goes to meet with Despero, and confesses that he deliberately let Raven read his mind so he could deliver the Titans to Despero. Except then it turns out that this Despero was an illusion created by Chimera (who was copying Doctor Psycho's powers), and Power Girl beats him up.

 
Then on the last page, some other hero I've never heard of shows up and knocks all the Teen Titans unconscious and announces to their uncomprehending, unconscious bodies that he's arresting them.

 
Unanswered questions at this point - did Manchester Black ever meet with Despero, or was that first meeting an illusion created by Psycho to lure Raven to him? Was this other psychic criminal, Harvest, actually in prison (and responsible for framing Superboy), or was that also Doctor Psycho? And if so, why? Did Manchester Black only recruit the Titans so he could deliver them to Despero? And if so, did he fake the whole STAR Labs' break-in and doomsday weapon disaster from last volume, or just take advantage of a real crime because it gave him a good opportunity? And what's going on with the Wonder Girls Gang and the Raven Band?
 
And the biggest question of all, are the writers even aware of all the plot holes and unexplained, seemingly unmotivated events they've set in motion?

Discarded Science

 
Discarded Science
Ideas that Seemed Good at the Time...
by John Grant
Facts, Figures & Fun
2006

 

 

This is a bit of a cheat, since I checked this one out last year, finished most of it, ran out of time and returned it, and recently got it back out.

 

Discarded Science gives a brief overview of a lot of different hypotheses and beliefs that we no longer accept as true. 

 
Or at least, that scientists working within their field of expertise no longer regard as true. One surprise from reading this was just how many scientists are responsible for these ideas - usually either theorizing outside their field or unwilling to reject their pet theory even after experimental evidence has shown that it's false.

 
The second surprise is that what we might call 'woo' has a long history that parallels science, a history of ideas that are kept around because people want to believe them, even though the evidence shows they're not true, and even though, when applied to medicine, they're often dangerous or fatal.

 
Which kind of leads into my third surprise, which is just how boring this turned out to be. I was hoping for ideas that were fascinatingly wacky, and instead it's mostly just Biblical inerrancy, reincarnation, gold, vibes, and life force energy over and over again.

 
Grant compounds this problem by giving interesting wrong ideas like phlogiston and luminiferous ether pretty short shrift, while going on and on about Creationism and Intelligent Design. The book is organized by broad subject, but has no real throughline within chapters, and sometimes Grant just fires off trivia a sentence at a time. He also has a bad habit of repeatedly referencing an influential idea but not describing it in detail until after all the things it inspired.

 
My one cool discovery was the so-called 'Axial Theory,' which claims that the Earth used to have water-ice rings like Saturn, but in a great disaster, they fell down and melted, causing the Biblical flood. There are countless versions of 'the Bible is literally true, the Earth is 6000ish years old, and the flood really happened' in the book - this was the one that was genuinely fascinating in its strangeness.

Teen Titans 1

 
 
Teen Titans 1
Blinded by the Light
DC Comics

2015
 

 

I have a friend who I read Teen Titans comics with, and she recently bought a new batch and reactivated her public library card, so expect to see more posts like this in the near future.

 

Blinded by the Light is the first volume of a Teen Titans run from an unnamed period in between DC's New 52 and Rebirth initiatives. The Titans this time around are Tim Drake Robin, Beast Boy, Raven, Cassanda Sandsmark Wonder Girl, and someone named Bunker who I haven't see before. They're also joined by a new Power Girl about halfway through.

 
In this storyline, Manchester Black works for STAR Labs' internal security. He secretly sets up a fake terrorist attack on the Labs that the Titans thwart, which lets him offer them a team-up between the Titans and the Lab. 

 
While they're considering the offer, some bored rich kids get ahold of science drugs that basically turn them into an evil Fantastic Four. Somehow this convinces them to accept Manchester Black's offer.

 
MB reveals that he wanted the team-up because he thinks someone is going to try to steal STAR Labs' cache of doomsday devices. This immediately happens, and the bad guys use a device to stop time while they do some set-up, MB explains what this means, then they stop time again, and for some reason Raven isn't affected this second time, so she defeats them.

 
The pacing is pretty weird, since there are 6 issues of build-up and then the whole giant heist and all the extended exposition needed to make sense of it happend in one issue. I also can't tell if Manchester Black tricked the Titans to stop a real heist, or if he set this up too, and it's all part of his plan. That seems more likely, but I guess we'll see.

 
This volume also introduces the Titans grappling with their fame. Wonder Girl has inspired a mob of teen girl vigilantes, and Raven has a goth singer immitating her style and trying to incorporate her spells into her music. Neither of those plots are resolved. Also the Teens are semi-obsessed with their coverage on Twitter. I'm not sure if this is going to be a realistic look at contemporary fame, or if they'll 'learn a lesson' about the dangers of social media eventually.

Capital without Borders

 
Capital without Borders
Wealth Managers and the One Percent
by Brooke Harrington
Harvard University Press

2016
 

 

Capital without Borders is a sociological study of the profession of wealth management. Harrington spent two years earning the STEP certificate to qualify as a trained wealth manager and interviewed working wealth managers in 18 countries, mostly 'offshore' locales like the British Virgin Islands, the Caymans, etc. 

 
Wealth management apparently arose from the volunteer trustees that crusading knights nominated to hold their lands in trust so that they could evade England's various laws around inheritance, to avoid, for example, the 'Pride and Prejudice problem' of the family's women being thrown off their land when the father dies. As England industrialized, trusts went from just holding land to holding financial assets as well, and the custom was exported to all the various British colonies.

 
Today, the purpose of wealth management is still to evade laws and allow wealthy men to save and move around their money as they wish. This includes evading estate taxes, but more routinely, it involves evading every other kind of tax as well, especially taxes on income and capital gains. The most common way of doing this involves holding all the money offshore in some complex combination of trusts, corporations, and family foundations. The goal is protecting the fortune rather than growing it. These arrangements hide who actually owns the money, and protects it from being taxed, used to pay debts or creditors, or divided between family members differently than the wealthy man prefers. It would be difficult to overstate how much the world's billionaires resent the idea of being obligated to pay any money to anyone.

 
The wealth managers Harrington interviews like the intellectual challenge of their work (obeying the letter of the law while defying its spirit), and feel good about helping the families of the wealthy. They also sometimes worry about their clients' amorality, and feel conflicted about what they see their work doing to both their home countries (deprived of tax revenue and harmed by the existence of a class of people who are above the law) and to the offshore island nations where their businesses are housed (since these countries' governments function to serve the billionaire clients rather than their own citizens).

This was a fascinating read for me, because of how well Harrington explains the processes that let wealth managers hide their clients' fortunes. I'm aware that the world's elite evade their local taxes, but didn't always know how, or how common the practice was - seemingly ubiquitous for anyone with over $50 million to protect. 

 
I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to some of the motivations when the governments being evaded seem unjust to me too, like the Middle Eastern fathers who want to leave their daughters an equal share of their estate, or the residents of Russia, China, and certain South American nations, who fear having their fortunes seized by the current strongman. Avoiding the local laws seems less sympathetic closer to home though, and everywhere it happens, wealth management seems to weaken the local rule of law and function of democracy.

The Wind in the Willows

 
 
The Wind in the Willows

by Kenneth Grahame
art by Don Daily
Applesauce Press

1908, reprinted 2014
 

I'm sure I read The Wind in the Willows at some point as a kid, although I could hardly remember it, and I think it might have been mixed up with the Frog and Toad stories. Maybe I'll reread those soon too!
 

We start off following Mole as he skips out on spring cleaning to go enjoy a lovely spring day, then meets up with Rat, who's out boating. Mole joins Rat for boating and a picnic, and then seems to just move into Rat's house. They remain the characters we follow most closely, but what they're really interested in is their friend Toad.

 
Toad sees a couple human men driving a car, and decides he wants to take up this fascinating new hobby. He's a terrible driver, but very rich, so he keeps buying and crashing cars. Badger, Mole, and Rat basically put Toad on house arrest to stop him from wasting so much money on cars, but he escapes, steals someone else's car and wrecks it, and gets thrown in jail. Toad later escapes jail by disguising himself as a laundry woman, and somehow manages to hitchhike, take over driving, and crash again on his way back to his friends.

 
While Toad was in prison, some weasels moved into Toad Hall and took it over, so the four friends load up on pistols and sabers and burst into Toad's house, scaring all the weasels away, and they celebrate with a black tie ball, as one does, I suppose. 

 
Honestly, aside from the fact that they're all animals, these stories are all really reminiscent of the antics of Jeeves and Wooster. I like J&W though, so I certainly see the appeal of the genre!