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.