Raven Girl

 
 
Raven Girl

by Audrey Niffenegger

Harry N Abrams

2013

 

 

Although she's best known for The Time Traveler's Wife, most of Audrey Niffenegger's books are more like Raven Girl - shorter illustrated books, that tell strange fairytale-like stories, blending hope and sadness, supernatural romance with realistic concerns.
 
Raven Girl is about the daughter of a postman and a raven who fell in love. She's born from an egg and has hollow bones, but otherwise looks human. She can read and write, but can't speak, and she longs to fly, she feels there's an innate wrongness with her body because she can't.
 
The raven girl grows up and goes to college. She catches the attention of a boy - I wouldn't go so far as to say she actually meets him, at least not for awhile - who has a crush on her from afar, who thinks he knows what's best for her, and who, like so many boys, is willing to commit acts of violence that he tells himself are for her benefit, although I'm getting ahead of myself.
 
At college, the raven girl also meets a biology professor, a plastic surgeon who performs rather outré surgeries for people who want them. He listens when she tells her about her body dysmorphia, and he's willing to try to replace her arms with giant raven wings if she thinks that will reduce her discomfort in her own skin, although he warns her, they might not be fully functional, and she might never fly.
 
Yes, that means Raven Girl is kind of a fantastical transgender allegory - something I had no idea of when I picked it up, solely on the basis of the author's other works and the cover art - and a shockingly good one at that.
 
Often, when scifi or fantasy stories include trans-like characters, they can use technology or magic to fully and completely become a cis-gender person in a way that avoids the way that real-world bodily changes are slow, partial, incomplete, painful, the way that you can change your body's future but not its past, that you can become a palimpsest but never a blank page. The surgical intervention in Raven Girl is much more like reality than it is like magic.
 
I'm also usually very hesitant about metaphors that relate being transgender to feeling like another animal species. I think these comparisons are often made in bad faith, and are used to belittle the transgender experience by making it sound akin to young children being unable to distinguish their imaginative dress-up play from adult decision-making. (The kids' book Fox the Tiger for example, reads to me like it's trying to convince trans kids that it's okay to play at being another gender as a game, but that after the costumes come off, Fox will always still be a fox and will never really be a tiger.)
 
I worry that even good-faith animal metaphors might be written from a place of ignorance, or might be too easily taken up and re-used in bad faith. But again, Raven Girl is thoughtful an emotionally realistic in a way that lets its metaphor capture something real.
 
So - the raven girl sets to work with the surgeon. The boy who likes her from afar tries to stop her, because he refuses to distinguish what he wants for her and what she wants for herself, and he manages to cause some harm. The raven girl's parents are surprised, but still love and accept her. And other ravens, now that her wings help them to see what's inside her, accept her too.

I'm very impressed with what Niffenegger has managed to create here!

Paintings of Japan Autumn & Paintings of Japan Spring

 
Paintings of Japan - Autumn

by Angela Pan

self-published

adapted from the zine 21 Days in Japan by Angela Pan 

2019, reprinted 2023

 

Paintings of Japan - Spring

by Angela Pan

self-published

2023

 

 

Paintings of Japan - Autumn and Paintings of Japan - Spring are a pair of art books by Angela Pan about two trips she took to Japan in 2019 and 2022. Autumn is an expanded reprinting of Pan's earlier art zine 21 Days in Japan, and Spring is wholly new. On both trips, she was based in Tokyo, and took additional day-trips by train.
 
In each book, Pan pairs essays about each site with a series of paintings she made there. Mount Fuji and historic Kyoto get plenty of space in both. Spring also features a lot of cherry blossoms. Each book is only about 40 pages long, so while these are bigger than zines, they're still quick reads.

Pan paints in acrylics. Her art is bright and colorful with lots of pinks and oranges, blues and purples. I felt like I noticed some improvement over the two books. The images in Spring seem a both tighter and more detailed than the ones in Autumn.

On the other hand, the art in Autumn seems a bit more varied and experimental. Pan includes images of food, people and cats she saw, and even inserts herself into some scenes. In Spring she focuses exclusively on cityscapes and broader landscapes. Those are the most common images in Autumn too, but not the only ones. Perhaps Pan's refinement of her technique has included a conscious decision to restrict her subject matter and focus on the larger scale. Or perhaps her goal of viewing the cherry blossoms on that trip made her want to give all her attention to the landscapes.

City of Folding Faces

 
 

City of Folding Faces

by Jayinee Basu

Lanternfish Press

2019

 

 

City of Folding Faces is a literary scifi novel set in the near future. It introduces us to kind of a shocking new technology, one that seemingly redefines what it means to be human, and shows us, on an intimate scale, a microcosm of how that technology affects society. Author Jayinee Basu starts with a very high-concept premise, but then allows its consequences to play out in the everyday lives of a dating couple.
 
The future tech that drives the action in City is known colloquially as Roulette, a machine and a process housed in a building called the Casino. We do eventually learn was Roulette was intended to be, but initially, it seems like a technology without a purpose, its capital-D Disruptive effects foisted off on society without regard for its consequences basically just because it exists, and having invented it, the corporation that owns it can't just not release it. (Or rather, they could, but they're not willing to, because the profits go to them, and the problems go to everyone else.)
 
So, Roulette is described as a game. You wager money, you step in the booth, some time later you emerge and collect your winnings. We're told that the larger the wager, the bigger the payout, and the shorter your time inside. We're told that the median time within is 3 weeks, but it can be months, possibly years. Roulette works like a Star Trek transporter, but with a shocking lag time between when you dematerialize and when you reappear. In between, something happens to your consciousness, although no one seems to be able to say what. When people reappear, they're physically the same but mentally and emotionally transformed.
 
This isn't really gambling, not in any traditional sense. It's like a carnival ride that maims its riders, a virtual reality game that inflicts disabling brain damage on everyone who plays it. By all rights, the Casino should be seen as a disreputable menace; Roulette held on par with commercial suicide booths.
 
The people who emerge are called 'Ruga,' and they're a new breed of humanity. They struggle to resume their former lives, many unable to relate to their friends and loved ones, or unable to hold jobs, or both. Ruga people experience their senses and emotions heightened to an overwhelming, almost unbearable degree, they lose some or all of their memories, and to form new memories, they have to discover a new way to encode information for themselves.
 
Many Ruga feel an unbearable bodily dysphoria related to their new emotions, an inability to express themselves with their old faces and voices. Fortunately, the Casino also sells a surgery that allows the facial and vocal muscles to wrinkle and fold in a much more finely-controlled way. 'Ruga,' I assume, comes from the word 'rugose,' which means wrinkly.
 
Roulette is a technology that it's easy to imagine appearing in one of Iain M Banks's Culture novels, or maybe on an episode of Star Trek. But it would be used very differently in those stories than it is here. Basu uses Roulette as a kind of inciting incident for her domestic drama, then drops us into it halfway through, when everything is falling apart.
 
Mara is one of the Ruga, and the book opens with her receiving the surgery that will let her face express her new emotions. What happened before the beginning is that Mara and her long term boyfriend Arlo moved cross-country for Arlo's work as a biologist. While Arlo spent all his time in the lab, Mara decompensated. She never made new friends, never found a new job, never got used to the new city. She and Arlo fought often. Eventually, Mara gave up on her life and played Roulette in the Casino, though afterward she can no longer remember exactly why. Instead of solving her problems, becoming Ruga initially worsens them. She stops dressing or feeding herself, and spends all day trying to relearn how to form memories and endure her emotions. The surgery is kind of a last resort.
 
So the novel starts with Mara finally able to crumple and wrinkle her face in ways that only other Ruga can understand. From Mara's perspective, it's a success. Able to express her emotions again, she no longer feels so overwhelmed by them, and by building nests and cages out of wires and found objects, she's able to create a model of her own mind that functions as a diary, so she finally has a some help holding onto her memories. From Arlo's perspective, it's a failure, because his girlfriend still can't leave the house or function socially, and he can't interpret her new expressions.
 
Mara spends the book working on her healing process, including, at one point, moving into a group home with other Ruga, helpfully sponsored by the Casino. Arlo spends the book deciding if he wants to stay with Mara, or if the grass might be greener with his attractive coworker Hanne. I don't know if he could've hidden his cheating from anyone; but he certainly can't hide it from an emotionally hyper-aware Ruga woman. Mara is partially motivated by her desire to repair her relationship. She wants to win Arlo back, and never considers breaking up with him, even when she moves out, although I sort of think she should.
 
Interwoven through Mara and Arlo's story are various media accounts of the effects of Roulette on society - commercials, news reports, daytime talk shows, press releases by scientists. We also check in on some workers for the Casino corporation, including the person who runs the group home. A lot of what we learn about Roulette comes through these interludes, including the story of how it was invented. And if you thought it sounded like irresponsible capitalism run amok in its present form, wait til you learn what it was supposed to do, and how they hoped to make money from it! This part reminded me of a similar revelation about the planetary AI in the show Mrs Davis.
 
These events of City of Folding Faces are mundane, basically ordinary, but they're consequential for the people involved. In Roulette, Basu has a powerful metaphor, and one that's flexible enough to remind you of many possible technological innovations. The relationship problems Mara and Arlo face are highly specific, but also recognizable as similar to a number of real-world difficulties couples might have.

Witch Hat Atelier 8

 
 
Witch Hat Atelier 8

by Kamome Shirahama

Kodansha

2021

 

 

Last time on Witch Hat Atelier, the girls and their teachers returned home from the Great Tower, and Tartah, the wand maker's grandson, invited them to help him run a stall at the upcoming festival. We also learned that Coco has been struggling with her feelings about forbidden magic. Any spells cast directly on the body are forbidden - so there might not be a way to rescue her mother from being turned to stone without breaking witch law.
 
Now in volume 8, the girls talk Master Qifrey and Olruggio into letting them help out. Agott's the only one who's not excited - I think because she's not looking forward to seeing her family at the festival, and Tartah's prominent booth makes a run in that much more likely. Tartah was planning to assist his grandfather in running the booth like usual, but his grandfather took a fall and is healing up in the hospital. Tartah isn't an apprentice yet, so Coco and the others are the only other witches he knows to ask.
 
Also, I was right, this is a date. Or at least, kind of. Tartah clearly does like Coco, and she likes him too. They're both like 10 or 12 though, so these feelings are new and unfamiliar to both of them.
 
Tartah and the girls will need to work together to prepare for the festival. Coco goes back to the wand shop with him, and they stop by the hospital to visit his grandfather. (There's no mention of it here, but I wonder if Qifrey erasing a bit of the wand maker's memory might be part of why he got dizzy and fell...)
 
In the hospital, they also see Custas, the boy who was injured when the bridge washed out back in volume 2. He's got a walking chair now, like Master Bel, and without realizing what it means, he mentions to Coco that Tartah's been teaching him to read and helping him learn about medicine. Because they're forbidden to use magic on the body, witches are also forbidden to learn medicine. Tartah confesses to Coco that he has been studying, and he has serious doubts about the laws that forbid, for example, magical healing. Coco doesn't confide her own doubts back (yet?) but she does help Tartah keep his secret.
 
Coco and Tartah work together to make an alternative to the walking chair for Tartah. He and his adopted father are traveling entertainers, and the terrain they cover is simply too rugged for him to return to that life with the walking chair as his only mobility aid. They make him a cloak that lets him hover off the ground, and has built-in crutches for when he wants to stand. Custas really wishes he could be healed, but Coco and Tartah lie and assure him that it's impossible, that magic only works on objects and not on living things.
 
I find the representation of disability in this comic interesting. We've now seen three people with physical disabilities - Tartah is profoundly colorblind, and Master Bel and now Custas need walking chairs to get around. In most other stories, magic healing means that we don't usually see lifelong injuries or assistive technology.
 
I'm not sure if Coco and Tartah are going to date or be friends, but I suspect they're going to become a conspiracy of two. They're both thinking about breaking the rules, and witch society is draconian, so much so that they could be punished just for speaking their doubts aloud, let alone acting on them. It's a place where they might only be able to rely on each other.
 
Throughout the series so far, we've seen that forbidden magic cause terrible individual harm and wreak destruction on a geographic scale. So there's a reason witches have their rules, and a reason they keep it a secret that anyone could do magic ... with the right tools and the right techniques. But the rules are enforced with violence - by erasing people's memories to censor any forbidden knowledge. The memory erasure spell isn't just used on witches who cast forbidden magic, it's used on non-witches who learn the secret, and on anyone who's been a victim of it. (The memory spell should, by all rights, be forbidden too.) Potentially helpful forms of magic are forbidden alongside the obviously dangerous stuff. It's no wonder Coco and Tartah have doubts. I have them too.
 
At the end of the volume, Custas reunites with his dad and they get ready to resume their traveling show. They're attacked by bandits, and the father left for dead. Afterward, a young witch, a girl who might be Coco's age, finds Custas and his dying father, and offers them true magical healing. She's one of the witches who uses forbidden magic...

EarthBound

 

EarthBound

by Ken Baumann

Boss Fight Books

2014 

 

 

When I was a kid, in the 90s, I had a Super Nintendo, and for awhile, a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine. Games had basically the same price back then that they do today, usually $50 new, which is sort of incredible when you consider how much inflation has happened since then, and the general purchasing power of 1990s dollars. Even more incredible, a lot of the SNES games I owned, I got by saving up my allowance, $5 a week, for like 2½ months per game. Because of Nintendo Power, there were a lot of games I knew about and was fascinated by that I never had the opportunity to purchase. One of those was the game EarthBound, a weirdly postmodern rpg about modern American kids who awaken psychic powers, and travel the country saving it from aliens.
 
EarthBound the book is the first in the Boss Fight Books series, and the author, Ken Baumann, is the graphic designer for the whole series. I read another of these last year, for the game Spelunky, that was written by the game's creator, Derek Yu. The Spelunky book was excellent, combining insight about the game and the decisions that went into making it with biographical details about was going on in Yu's life at the time, and how that impacted the game too. EarthBound also blends writing about the game with the author's memoir, but the problem here is that Baumann isn't the game's designer, he's just some guy.
 
Technically, Ken Baumann is a very minor celebrity. He was an actor on the show The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and when the show ended, he helped found this book series, and created Sator Press, which has since been acquired as an imprint of my favorite Ohio indie press, Two Dollar Radio. In his early 20s, he had a major health scare that almost killed him. His life story is moderately interesting, moreso than mine. But with respect to EarthBound the game, he's just some guy, and all the pages he spends talking about his biography are pages he doesn't spend talking about the game, its influences, its cultural impact, etc.
 
Some of it seems relevant! Baumann is about a decade younger than me, a Young Millennial instead of an Old Millennial, but he was also a 90s kid, and he did buy a copy of EarthBound and play it back then. He bought it again and played it again when, after about 20 years out of circulation, Nintendo re-released EarthBound as a downloadable game for the WiiU, which gave the game a new and much larger audience, including a lot of people like me and Baumann, who remembered our childhood fascination with it. So the parts about Baumann's life when he first got the game do help to inform his reactions to it, especially things like his engagement with things like horror movies and 90s gross-out humor that were part of the same cultural milieu that gave rise to EarthBound. But a lot of this felt like Baumann used the existence of the book as an opportunity to write about himself in a way that only occasionally contributed to the ostensible purpose of the project.
 
EarthBound is a game about kids on a journey. The hero, Ness, discovers he has psychic powers the same night a meteor crash lands in his town, and aliens kidnap some of his neighbors. Ness uses baseball bats and yo-yos as weapons. He stays in hotels, calling home when he needs money, or feels lonely or homesick. He joins up with a psychic girl who he rescues after she was kidnapped for her powers, and later with a child prodigy and a young Tibetian monk-in-training. The mechanics of the game are similar to the Final Fantasy series, but the visuals are a distorted 1950s Americana (50s revival was an important element of 80s culture), and the style is surreal and parodic, closer to Thomas Pynchon or Philip K Dick than to Tolkein or D&D. And at several key points, the game breaks its own rules to create unique, patience-testing challenges, like a door that can only be opened by not touching the controller for several minutes, a special item you can only receive as a random drop by defeating hundreds of extra enemies, or a boss fight that's won not by fighting, but by prayer.
 
Baumann structures the book around a walkthrough of the game, and his dual experiences playing it as a kid and an adult. He does talk about cultural influences on the game, and its tepid reception in the American market in 1994. I would have liked more of that, honestly, especially since he had no real access to information about how the game was made, or any way to interview anyone involved with making it. (Though both would've been nice, if he could've managed it!) And while I found the amount of autobiography to be excessive and distracting, he did at least manage a close parallelism between the events of the game and the way he ordered telling the events of his own life. Someone a little more interested in the author than I was might read this and see a real achievement. It's definitely a better book about Ken Baumann than it is a book about EarthBound. I'm left wondering if Yu's was the best book in the series, and if all of them lean so heavily into memoir, or if others more closely resemble the journalism of the 33⅓ series.

Aquaman: Andromeda

 
Aquaman: Andromeda

by Ram V
art by Christian Ward

DC Comics

2023

 

 

Aquaman: Andromeda collects a 3-issue standalone miniseries from DC's Black Label line of mature comics. Based on the title, I was kind of expecting this comic to be Aquaman ... in spaaace!, but instead we get a mix of horror and scifi in the deep ocean.
 
Aquaman as he's depicted here seems kind of old and tired, and his armor looks encrusted like metal from a long-ago shipwreck. There's no overt tie to other DC continuity; Aquaman is more like a myth than a celebrity. What makes this one mature, I think, is the backstory of one character who committed a realistic war crime during the Bosnian War. There are also a few present day killings that might be too graphic for a regular comic, although 'regular' comics are plenty violent, the causes of death tend to be more fantastical than getting stabbed by a coworker you trusted.
 
So, the setup here is that a team of scientists has been dispatched on the Andromeda - an advanced, futuristic submarine - to go to Point Nemo - the spot on the Pacific furthest from land, where all space programs try to send their returning spacecrafts - to investigate the seafall of an extraterrestrial craft. They're hoping to make first contact with any intelligence onboard, and maybe learn from the alien technology. The supervillian pirate Black Manta wants to steal from both ships. And Aquaman is there to investigate the mystery as well. Almost immediately, a Kraken appears and wrecks the Andromeda's support ship on the surface, before being defeated by Aquaman.
 
After that, the pace slows down as the scientists start to investigate the mysterious, and seemingly empty spacecraft. We get flashbacks from several of them, including the woman who knows of Aquaman as 'the King Under the Sea' from folktales she heard as a child, and the Bosnian War veteran I mentioned earlier. The ship is not empty, of course. I won't spoil what's on it except to say it's something scifi authors have done before, but not often, and Ram V handles it compellingly and well.
 
As crew members start dying, the survivors make desperate plans to save themselves and keep what's on the alien ship from escaping any further. Black Manta is undeterred and wants to steal anyway. Aquaman acts to protect the people still alive and helps with their plan to deal with the threat posed by the ship. I almost think Black Manta was superfluous to this story, although I guess his presence adds even more pressure to an already tense, volatile situation.
 
Ram V's writing is very good. These are competent adult characters dealing with something that overwhelms them, not because they're foolish, but because it's so far outside what they've prepared for. Christian Ward's art is excellent and beautiful. His 'old man Aquaman' looks ancient and alien himself. The contrast between the futuristic submarine, the alien vessel, and the organic, oceanic visuals are great. The fight between Aquaman and the kraken, only a few pages long, is particularly well-done.

Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea

 
 

Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea

by CD Rose

Melville House

2024

 

 

Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea is a recent collection of literary short stories by CD Rose. Overall this collection was fine. Rose is clearly trying to push on the boundaries of the short story form, sometimes in ways that employ an identifiable gimmick, sometimes just by working against established expectations. The first story in the collection, "Ognosia," named for an essay by Olga Tokarczuk seems to take, in turn, the perspectives of almost a dozen different people in a bar one evening, a kaleidoscopic effect I don't think I've ever seen before. In several other stories Rose tries alternating paragraphs of two very different plots or styles, but I never found this braiding or interlacing very successful any of the times he tried it.

The best story was "Proud Woman, Pearl Necklace, Twenty Years," which shows us a single class session from the perspective of the teacher of a class for adult English as a Foreign Language students. He writes the title phrases on the board, asks the students to play 20 Questions about Guy de Maupassant's story "The Necklace", then retells it to them and helps them express their reactions.

Most of my other favorites were probably mostly the gimmick stories. "I'm in Love with a German Film Star" is a list of songs that the narrator associates with a specific actress, possibly fictional, identified only as 'Magda,' whom he has a crush on, and a vignette about each song explaining the association.

"What Remains of Claire Blanck" is a series of mostly empty pages, with the notations for footnotes placed as though at the end of specific sentences, and the notes themselves at the foot of each page. The notes are a mix of identifying the role of a sentence in the non-existent story, explaining some of the supposed imagery (always something white or blank), and playful touches like praising the way something is written.

"A Brief History of the Short Story" is actually three very short stories. In the first, an old French man spends his morning in a cafe and reads a newspaper story about America. In the second, a minor Soviet bureaucrat goes to buy vodka before some friends come over, and happens to read a story about the old Frenchman. In the third, a young American author reads the Russian story while hanging out in a coffee shop, then sees a newspaper with the story the Frenchman read. I liked this one, but thought it would've been more successful if the third part reenacted the newspaper story instead of just featuring it as a prop.

Near the beginning, there are three stories in a row that supposedly give non-fictional accounts of minor figures involved in the early days of photography. Near the end, there's a trio of stories, including the collection title, about famous people having a day off. "St Augustine Checks His Twitter Feed" is the best of these three.