Black Water Lilies

 
Black Water Lilies
by Frederick Duval
art by Didier Cassegrain
translated by Edward Gauvin

adapted from the novel by Michel Bussi
Magnetic Press
2011, adapted 2022

 

 

Black Water Lilies is a graphic novel retelling of a 2011 novel by the same name. Bussi wrote the original, Duval adapted the text, Cassegrain supplied the beautiful watercolor imagery that makes the whole book look like a Monet painting come to life.

 
Black Water Lilies is also a murder mystery that takes place in Giverny, the village where Monet settled, built his gardens, and did a lot of his most famous paintings. The story focuses on an 11 year-old girl, the beautiful village school teacher who instructs the 11 year-olds, and an old woman in black, who narrates the story. A man has been killed inside the famous gardens, and police from Paris are called in to investigate. The woman in black begins the story by locating it very precisely in time, during an annual Monet festival in 2010, when the gardens are open to the public. She tells us from the start that the story begins with one murder and will end with another.

 
The old woman mostly wanders the village and observes. She is newly widowed, and secretly owns the 'Black Water Lilies,' the apocryphal last painting Monet made, all in black, just before he died. I spent nearly the entire book wondering if she was the murderer, and if so, why?

 
The little girl, Fannette, has a talent for painting and hopes to win an annual worldwide children's art contest, so she can go study abroad. Several of her classmates have crushes on her - one she loves back, another grows increasingly jealous. She also has a secret tutor, an old man who helps her improve her technique, until he is murdered too, and his body vanishes, with Fannette seemingly the only one who knows.

 
The teacher, Stephanie, has a jealous husband who is suspected of the murder. One of the Paris police officers is obviously smitten with her, which compromises the investigation. But Stephanie loves him back, and wants to leave her husband for him.

 
The dead man was known to have several affairs, and someone sends the police photos of him with other women, including Stephanie. Some of the photos are explicit, others seem benign except for the context. He had a note on his body that seems to imply he secretly had an 11-year old child with one of his mistresses. So who is the child, and who is the mother? Is this why he was killed? The dead man also dreamed of owning an original Monet, something he could never afford at a fair price, so could that be the reason instead?

 
For two weeks, the police bumble around without fully solving anything. In the end, the old woman explains who committed the murders, and in doing so, reveals several truths that lingered just out of focus at the periphery of the story the entire time. 

 
The whole book was excitingly tense, both because you knew another death was coming, and even moreso because you cared what would happen to the girl, the teacher, and the crone. The ending is incredibly well-executed and makes the entire book better in retrospect. I immediately began flipping back through to consider things anew. I highly recommend this one! It was an excellent choice for the last book I'll finish this year.

The Best American Comics 2012

 
The Best American Comics 2012

edited by Francoise Mouly
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2012

 

 

The 2012 edition of Best American Comics was edited by Francoise Mouly, the art director of The New Yorker. She 'decoupaged' an introduction by assembling panels from other cartoonists into a kind of sequence and then writing new text. (I believe all the panels came from works that were finalists for this book but didn't make it in.) 

 
New this year are one-page author bios to introduce each selection, and a section of kids comics, including an excerpt from Zita the Spacegirl, although the selections from 60 Ways to Leave Your Mother (Alone) were my favorite from the kids section.

 
By this point, I think Chris Ware and Love & Rockets are the only ones who've made it into every volume to date. There were a few others I recognized - Charles Burns's X'ed Out, Gary Painter's Jimbo, Jim Woodring's Frank. And I spotted Jesse Jacobs' distinctive art style on the endpapers. (I've read his Safari Honeymoon, although that's not the work included here.)

 
Almost all the graphic non-fiction was about war - the Battle of Buron, the biography of a failed Kamikaze pilot, a history of the Golan Heights. (I think some form of graphic journalism about Israel might be in every year of BAC by now too.)

 
The graphic memoirs had more variety - planning a wedding, hiring a prostitute, caring for aging parents, cheating on one's wife at a Hollywood party, attending Basic Training in one's 40s and immediately destroying one's knee, the discomforts of a long plane ride, plus quick comics of daily observations from The Believer, and excerpts from someone's watercolor-sketch-a-day diary that had been published in The New York Times.

 
My sister's favorite, Sergio Argones, had a couple one-page comics included too!

 
The new thing I found that I'd like to read more of is Dakota McFadzean's Leave Luck to Heaven. It has a lot of trade dress in the style of old Nintendo instruction manuals, and the excerpt here shows us an older nerd teaching a younger nerd how to appreciate the details of Super Mario Bros 2.

The Missing of Clairdelune

 
The Missing of Clairdelune
by Christelle Dabos
translated by Hildegard Serle
Europa Editions

2019
 

 

The Missing of Clairdelune is the second book in Christelle Dabos's Mirror Visitor quartet, following A Winter's Promise, which I read earlier in the year. I preferred reading this one right before bed to accentuate its dreamlike qualities. The combination of familiar names and tropes remixed in unexpected ways, the omnipresence of magic, and the nightmarish quality to the various tasks and deadlines the characters are given all contribute to a sense that this story emerges from the sleeping unconscious.

 
In the first book, Ophelia, who can learn the history of an object by touching it, and can travel by passing between mirrors, was put into an arranged engagement with Thorn, the austere young treasurer of a foreign land that resembles Tsarist Russia. Neither of the pair feels romantically interested in the other. Ophelia spent a lot of the last book wearing an illusion to disguise her as a mute servant, to hide her from courtly intrigue until the official announcement of the engagement. (And, if I recall, the simultaneous announcement that Thorn's aunt, Berenilde, was pregnant with a royal baby.)

 
The world in these books is broken - each country is an Ark, a walled off bit of land floating in space where the Earth used to be. Each Ark is ruled by a Family Spirit, and all the nobles are descended from their Family Spirit, and have inherited some of their magic. Thorn is from the Pole, where the spirit is Farouk, a giant with alabaster features and almost no memory.

 
So, at the start of this book, Berenilde is Farouk's favored consort, and Ophelia is the subject of intense gossip and curiosity. The illusionist child who had a crush on Berenilde, and killed her and Thorn's entire family out of spite, has been arrested. And Thorn wants to try to have a slightly less mutually-hostile relationship with Ophelia. So things are going ... okay?

 
But then! People start mysteriously disappearing. Ophelia is made a Storyteller to entertain Lord Farouk, but almost immediately angers him with her story. Ophelia learns that she and Thorn will gain each others' magic powers after marriage, and that Thorn arranged to marry her just so he could gain her power and use it to 'read' the history of Farouk's magic Book and win favor in the court, which angers her. And, like 20 of Ophelia's family members are visiting the Pole, and plan to stay for the month leading up to the wedding! In fact, Thorn invited them, and plans to send Ophelia home with them forever as soon as he has her power.

 
We decamp to a seaside resort, the warmest place in the Pole, where in the summer, it's only a little colder than the winters Ophelia's family is used to. More people disappear, including Achibald, who always flirts with Ophelia, and has a reputation as the guy women go to to cheat on their husbands with, but who is also sort of her friend. With only a couple days before the wedding, Ophelia is given a one-day deadline to solve the mystery and find the missing people, or else Archibald will be cut off from his family's psychic connection, which might kill him. (Farouk wants the other psychics in top form, not drowsy because captive Archibald is magically asleep.) The urgency feels like the dream where you're rushing to take a test in a class you never attended.

 
The disappearances are obviously magic, but what kind? And why? Without giving too much away, let me say that in rapid succession, Ophelia solves the mystery, Thorn saves Ophelia from the kidnapper, Berenilde gives birth, Thorn and Ophelia get married, Farouk's special book gets 'read' and he doesn't like what he learns, Thorn is forced to become a fugitive, and Ophelia goes back home with her family. Except none of it happens in quite the way (or the order) you'd expect, and we are drawn into a deeper mystery - who is the 'God' who blew up the world and created the Family Spirits to run what's left of it, what is 'God's' plan for everything, and who is the mysterious 'Other' that Ophelia supposedly freed the first time she traveled between mirrors as a child?

 
I'm really drawn in to this series at this point, and eager to keep going. Early on, I thought there might be a simply YA-style love triangle between Thorn, Ophelia, and Archibald, but whatever happens, nothing about Ophelia's marriage or love life will be simple. Thorn is missing, Archibald is humbled, and Ophelia officially Knows Too Much about the secret history of the world. Next book, I think, we'll be headed back to Anima, Ophelia's home Ark, and home to Athena, Farouk's childhood friend / sister? / first crush.

Field Glass

 
 
Field Glass

by Joanna Howard and Joanna Ruocco

Sidebrow Books

2017

 

 

Field Glass is a very strange, unsettling novella. It is told in the first person by an unnamed primary narrator - a soldier sheltering among civilians in a country estate that is near the front line of a war in the deep of winter. It successfully achieves the effect that I think both Kathryn Davis's Silk Road and Jeff Vandermeer's Dead Astronauts were aiming for but, in my opinion, missed.

 
The narrator is writing (or dictating?) messages to a love back home. Intermixed are much shorter dispatches by other soldiers, identified only by serial number and blood type. There is no plot really. The style is almost all description, no exposition. All sensation, no explanation. It's a style that I hardly have the vocabulary to describe, except to say that it feels very distant, the opposite of books that try to make you feel close to the characters or to imaginatively identify yourself with them.

 
We don't know where we are, or when, or what war is being fought, or what sides there might be, or which side the narrator is on. Just that it is cold, the landscape is ruined, most of the other soldiers are dead, and the narrator is trapped by an enclosing siege. I imagine a place something like the great house from Downton Abbey, and all the talk of prosthetics and artificial blood makes me think of either an alternate WWI or perhaps a not too-distant future.

 
The pleasure of reading this one comes from enjoying the use of language, which I'm tempted to call prose poetry. There's no rhyme or meter, but the sentences are dense with meaning, and the word choice is unusual enough that you have to read slowly and carefully to take it in. It's only 96 pages, but it feels like a complete experience, even though nothing is answered or resolved.

The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine

 
The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine
or The Hithering Thithering Djinn
by Donald Barthelme

Amulet Books

1971, reprinted 2006
 

 

The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine, or The Hithering Thithering Djinn is written in the form of a children's book, although I wonder how much any actual children would like it. Barthelme is somewhat famous as a postmodern author (supposedly his version of Snow White is very good), but this is the first work of his I've read.

 
The illustrations in the book are all lithographs, taken either from other books or maybe newspapers. Barthelme has done a bit of collage, by cutting out individual images from their context and placing them against blank but colorful backgrounds. By repeating some images, he creates recurring characters. So the protagonist, Mathilde, might have come from an advertisement for hoop toys. The djinn appears to be a racist caricature of a Chinese man, possibly from a political cartoon.

 
So Barthelme has a sequence of repurposed images, and he's combined them with text to create a children's story, or maybe a story for grown-ups that imitates the kid's book style.

 
Mathilde wakes up one morning wishing she could have a fire engine. Instead, there's a 'Chinese house' in her yard. At first it's too small to go in, but as soon as she notices that, it grows larger to accommodate.
 

Inside the house, Mathilde meets a couple guards, a rain dancer, a knitting pirate who tells her his story of being captured, the djinn, and an elephant who rolls down a hill. The djinn offers her lunch, or to change her into an adult with an interesting job, but all Mathilde wants is a fire engine. The djinn gets frustrated with her for asking so much, but the next day, when Mathilde goes outside, the house is gone, and there's a green-painted fire engine on her lawn.

 
The cover of the edition I read informs me that this won a National Book Award, but I don't understand why. I deliberately try to find books that are unusual or odd, and one of the most common ways books like that disappoint me is if they sort of seem to come to nothing at the end. I had a real that's it? there's nothing more? moment when I turned the last page. It was sort of fun, but clearly not what Barthelme's reputation is built on.

 
I think Dadaist Max Ernst did a similar exercise, creating a book by writing new text for collages made of cut-up lithographs and woodcuts, which I might try to read next year.

Clue: Candlestick

 
 
Clue: Candlestick

by Dash Shaw

IDW

2020

 

 

Clue: Candlestick is a graphic novels that collects the three issues of Shaw's comic miniseries. It's based on the boardgame, and Shaw incorporates imagery from the game (as well as mazes and other puzzles) throughout.

 
The first issue is told mostly from Prof Plum's perspective. Plum is very attentive to details, and so we get a lot of arrow notations pointing out little things in Shaw's drawings. Plum gets a letter from his friend Mr Boddy, saying that he wants to start giving away parts of his collection of infamous objects - a rope, a knife, a wrench, a revolver, a lead pipe, and of course, a candlestick. 

 
Plum shows up to Boddy's mansion on a dark and stormy night, along with Boddy's other friends - Col Mustard, Miss Scarlet, Mr Green, Mrs Peacock, and Boddy's maid, Miss White. Everyone is suspicious, there's a crack of thunder, and next thing you know, Col Mustard has been shot. Who could have done such a thing? Everyone splits up in pairs to go search the house.

 
The second, and I think best issue, is mostly from Miss Scarlet's perspective. Boddy has a huge collection of art depicting her. In flashback, we learn that Scarlet is an artists' muse who keeps killing her artists for vaguely feminist sounding reasons. During her search, Scarlet learns that Boddy knew what she was doing, and had been secretly helping her by partially cleaning the crime scenes.  By the end of the issue, Boddy is dead from the lead pipe, and Scarlet has been stabbed.

 
Issue three follows Mrs Peacock and Mr Green, who are secretly a couple. Peacock likes Before & After photos, so a lot of the panels in this issue come in pairs like that. Throughout the series, Shaw draws everyone except the main characters very cartoony. In flashback, we see that Peacock had a rich husband - the Monopoly man! Green killed the old guy with the candlestick, and Boddy added it to his collection. Plum and White accuse Green and Peacock of the recent murders just in time for the police to arrive and arrest them. But is that really what happened? (Spoiler - no, of course not.) We get the real solution right after, explained by the killer, while Green and Peacock are trapped in prison. But then the candlestick tips over at just the right moment, and exacts inanimate revenge.

 
This wasn't amazing, but it was kind of interesting. I liked how Shaw incorporated both bits of the original game, plus some codes, a nonogram with a clue, a memory quiz, and other fun details like that into the comic art. The mystery itself isn't all that interesting, but those metafictional art techniques make the whole enterprise more fun.

The Girl from the Other Side 6

 
 
The Girl from the Other Side 6
Siuil, a Run
by Nagabe
Seven Seas

2019

 

 

In the sixth volume of The Girl from the Other Side, we get some clarity on some issues, a new mystery, and a worrisome cliffhanger.

 
Teacher and Shiva have followed the map Shiva's aunt left them, and made it to a village that's further away and was abandoned longer ago. They think they'll be safe from human search parties there.
 

We see the two cursed soldiers searching for them, thinking they've found the pair, and preparing an ambush right outside their front door, and we see Teacher hearing a noise at the door and going to investigate. But it's kind of a trick! The cursed soldiers turn out to be at the old house Teacher and Shiva left behind. And the noise at the door is an Outsider who just wants to talk.

 
The Outsider confirms some things we sort of understood by now, but have never been laid out quite this clearly. The native Outsiders are all born from the Mother who lives in the lake who we met back in book 2. They're also cursed to lose their memories and succumb to injury, but their bodies, even just parts, can be returned to the lake, and reincorporated into the next generation of Outsiders. They all want to steal the souls of the human Insiders to take the souls to the lake, but it never works - the humans end up Cursed, looking like Outsiders, and doomed to turn into trees like Shiva's aunt did. Shiva is somehow different, a 'pure soul' who can't be cursed, and they really want to take her to Mother.

 
The visiting Outsider thinks that Teacher isn't really a Cursed human, but rather a native Outsider who has totally forgotten his origins. It points out that Teacher can't even remember his old name. Teacher thinks he remembers being Cursed, but I admit, the memory is ambiguous. Plus, as the Outsider notes, Teacher hasn't turned into a tree, for much longer than any other human lasts. Back in the old cabin, the two cursed soldiers search through what Teacher and Shiva left behind, and one thinks he knows that Teacher was the town doctor of a specific village, and thinks he therefore knows Teacher's human name. Mystery! Which theory will turn out to be right?

 
At the new cabin, Shiva accidentally falls out a window while cleaning, and Teacher catches her. So he's finally touched her, and after being confronted with so much evidence that she can't be cursed, he can't reinstate the no-contact rule. Shiva finally gets to give him a hug, and hold his hand when they walk. Shiva's just a little kid and needs human contact. She cries with happiness.

 
Then it snows, and they go for a long walk in the snow, and have a snowball fight. Teacher loses his locket, with the photo he thinks shows his human family, and Shiva insists he go look for it. He does, but then an ominous shadow looms over him... Shiva thinks he's come home, and opens the door for him, but instead it's one of the cursed soldiers, who found them after all!

 
I learned that there's an anime of this story that came out this year. (I think it's a movie or a short miniseries?) I'm going to wait until I finish reading it all before I watch though. At this rate, I'll be done by next summer!

Mushroom Rain

 
Mushroom Rain

by Laura Zimmermann
art by Jamie Green
Sleeping Bear Press

2022

 

 

Mushroom Rain is another children's picture book, this time non-fiction. I first saw it at a bookshop on a trip to Asheville, and I've been wanting to see it again ever since.

 
The majority of the book is written very simply for young readers, and serves as a showcase for Green's beautiful art. The last couple pages provide more information about every mushroom fact stated earlier, maybe for slightly older kids who want to know more, or maybe for parents, to help them answer questions that might come up along the way.

 
It rains, and mushrooms appear, painted simply, and depicted larger than life-size. We learn a bit about the staggering variety of mushrooms, about what eats them, about how the fungal mycelium works and how it persists when no part of it is visible above ground. We learn how mushrooms spread reproductive spores to spread the mycelium. We learn something I didn't know yet, that mushroom spores, lile other particulate, can help to seed clouds, and then we end where we began, the cycle complete, with a mushroom rain.

 
The primary attraction of this book is the art, but Zimmermann's writing is clear and informative, and should help kids understand the basics about an often mysterious branch on the tree of life.

Murder is Bad Manners

 
Murder is Bad Manners

by Robin Stevens
Simon & Schuster

2014, reprinted 2015

 

 

Murder is Bad Manners is a YA mystery and the first book of a series following 1930s British boarding school students Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong. It was originally published in England under the title Murder Most Unladylike.

 
Daisy is the daughter of a lord, allegedly the niece of a spy, the most popular girl in school, and someone whose public persona is very much a performance to please others. Hazel is the daughter of a businessman living in Hong Kong who gets shipped off to bolster her father's status, Daisy's more shy and less spectacular tag-along best friend, and the narrator of the book. They are secretly members of the two-person 'Wells & Wong Detective Society,' and they have an explicit Holmes and Watson style relationship, which is why Hazel keeps the case notes and tells us the story.

 
We get thrown straight into the deep end - the first chapter tells us about Hazel finding the dead body of Miss Bell, which then vanishes before she can show anyone, and introduces us to a veritable cavalcade of teachers (suspects) and fellow students (unwitting informants.) 

 
Daisy believes Hazel about the body, and the two of them are the only ones who know that Miss Bell has been murdered and that her resignation letter is a phony. A lot of the initial investigation has Daisy getting ideas for what to do next, and quite literally dragging Hazel along with her as she runs about the school - which seems to be pretty typical of their friendship generally.

 
Partway through, Daisy is convinced she knows what happened, while Hazel thinks they don't know the full story, and they fight when Hazel stands up for herself. Then their lead suspect dies too, meaning that Hazel was right ... and Daisy admits it. She still runs about tugging Hazel by her side, but also tries to be more humble about her ideas, and to treat Hazel more as a friend and less as a sidekick after that.
 

Eventually they figure out the full truth, and alert the police who are looking into the 'accidental death' of the second teacher. The police confront the killer using Daisy and Hazel's evidence while the two girls peek through a door. They get the satisfaction of being right, and justice is served.

 
This was fun and well-paced, with most chapters running only a few pages, and a division into parts providing a bit more structure. Daisy is an absolute dynamo, like Finny or Gatsby, while Hazel is someone I suspect more readers can see a bit of themselves in. I liked how much of the investigation happened via Daisy questioning her classmates under the guise of various popular girl activities. And I liked that 'Holmes' isn't right initially, and 'Watson' saves the day by finding the strength to stand up to her friend as an equal.

 
I also like that Hazel doesn't really romanticize the British boarding school life. Like the reader, she's an outsider to it, and is both appalled by some aspects and maybe more sympathetic to other parts than the girls who are 'from' that world. One suspect is an unfashionable short-haired woman who used to be roommates with Miss Bell until Miss Bell started dating the handsome new male teacher - I think Hazel understands what's up there and doesn't judge. 

 
Hazel also observes how many girls have 'pashes' (TOTALLY platonic, no-homo friend crushes) on Daisy, and again, I think Hazel gets that at least sometimes, a pash involves feelings that are only socially acceptable because everyone involved treats those feelings as less than serious and less than real.

The Little Wooden Robot and the Log Princess

 
 
The Little Wooden Robot and the Log Princess

by Tom Gauld

Neal Porter Books

2021
 

 

There was a time when I only saw either of their comics occasionally, and I couldn't distinguish between Grant Snider and Tom Gauld, especially since they both often write about books. But after reading a couple of each of their books last year, I've realized I like Gauld much better. He's witty, and his art is a bit more precise and stylized. Snider is more sentimental, and at times I find him saccharine or maudlin.

 
So I was excited to see Gauld's new children's book, The Little Wooden Robot and the Log Princess.
 

The King and Queen want children but are infertile. On the same night, they both sneak off to find help. One goes to the Inventor, who builds them a little Wooden Robot, and one goes to the Witch who enchants a log to become a little Log Princess. She turns back into a log when she sleeps, and so can't wake up on her own. The two children are siblings and best friends, and the Wooden Robot wakes up his sister every morning.

One morning, the Log Princess accidentally gets mixed up with some other logs and shipped off to be sold in the Frozen North. The Wooden Robot follows along and finds her, but decides not to wake her up yet so she won't be scared. He starts carrying her back home in a wagon, but eventually gets tired out. He wakes her up and explains, then shuts down. Now the Log Princess carries her brother partway home in a wagon, but eventually she gets tired too and falls asleep.

 
Disaster? No, because they're pretty close to their home, and also this is a fairy tale, so some friendly forest animals find them and bring them to the Witch. The Witch restores them, and they are happily reunited with their worried parents.

 
It's a cute story, and I like that Gauld wove a whole story around the idea of 'sleeping like a log' (a phrase he has the good sense to never include anywhere in the book!)

 
The standout art pieces are the detailed interiors of the Inventor's and Witch's houses, the landscape views of the boat trip north and the two kids asleep in the forest, and a couple of montage sequences. Both the Robot and the Princess get a page during their respective travels where they 'have too many adventures to recount here,' and we get a page of panels showing snapshots of their little side adventures, like getting kidnapped by Mischievous Pixies or meeting The Queen of the Mushrooms. These pages are inventive, and let Gauld hint at a typical fairy tale structure without losing momentum on his main narrative.