Witch Hat Atelier 10

 
Witch Hat Atelier 10

by Kamome Shirahama

Kodansha

2022

 

 

In the last volume of Witch Hat Atelier, the girls and their teachers went to the Silver Eye festival, where ordinary people can watch demonstrations of magic and buy magical contraptions, and where witches can show off for each other.
 
Now in volume 10, cool aloof girl Richeh sells all her crystal bracelets and discovers she really enjoys helping the old wandmaker operate his booth. She's kind of shocked herself by discovering something she genuinely wants to do, which is to open her own magic shop someday.
 
Cheerful Tetia sees someone sneaking around, hiding from the royal guards, and discovers it's the young prince, a boy about her age. She helps him get away and temporarily swaps accessories with him, wearing his expensive royal cloak while he dons her witch hat and capelet. Tetia is happy to declare the two of them friends, but the way he accepts her friendship suddenly makes her uncomfortable in a way she doesn't really understand. He announces that when he's king, she'll be beside him as a friend and advisor 'like in days of yore.'
 
Tetia doesn't know it, but we've seen the witches who use forbidden magic use that 'days of yore' phrase too - and what they mean is the time before the current age, when magic was widespread and wildly destructive, used as a tool of politics and warfare. Tetia also doesn't know that the king, who last volume seemed so respectful of witches' self-imposed rules, is secretly the last person in a very long line of witches who knows how to use healing magic, which is now forbidden because it affects human bodies directly. Presumably his son will learn it too. Master Qifrey does know this secret, and tells Agott and Coco, which will be relevant later.
 
Agott, the best student in the atelier, has an emotional breakdown because Qifrey and Olruggio won't let her march in the Silver Eye parade, which would be her chance to show off a spell. She was hoping to catch the attention of her distant mother, the librarian of the Great Tower, who she hasn't seen in years. Agott is semi-estranged from her family because despite her talent and hard work, they consider her some kind of disappointment. 
 
Qifrey explains that personal glory is the wrong reason to use magic, and also, he warns her that her mom wouldn't be the only one watching, and that there are people who's attention she doesn't want to attract. Then he tells her about the king, which makes Tetia's situation seem even more ominous. Qifrey also articulates a defense of unobtrusive, utilitarian magic that's maybe the clearest we've heard so far, and that could apply to almost any technology. He notes that softly glowing lanterns that never go dark are less impressive than giant serpents made of fire streaking across the sky; the ever-refilling water jugs people use to get clean drinking water aren't as showy as a perpetual typhoon pulling water from the clouds; but the lantern and the jug help far more people in far more consistent ways than the serpent or the storm ever could. It sounds a lot like a call to use technology to provide people with basic universal services.
 
Meanwhile, Coco and Tartah have some big problems that they're keeping secret. They met Custas, the boy who was injured when he fell in the river. Now he has magical wooden leg braces, and he seems to know forbidden magic. The young witch who taught it to him shows up too, dressed more-or-less like any other young witch instead of looking obviously evil like the others we've seen. (That's her on the cover. She could easily pass for a student witch.) She demands that Coco and Tartah get themselves into the Silver Eye parade, do something so impressive it gets them an audience with the king, and then allow Custas and this forbidden witch to join them and meet the king too. That's a big, maybe impossible request! I feel like there ought to be some kind of 'or else,' but it's not explicit. Coco agrees to try anyway. We also don't know exactly why they want to meet the king, although presumably the reason is not good.
 
After getting away from that, Coco and Tartah run into Custas's father Dagdah, who's looking for his son. We saw him get attacked by bandits, but he doesn't seem to remember that. Coco realizes there's a spell drawn on his chest, which is forbidden, and when she realizes what the spell is, it completely breaks her heart. It's a counter-clock spell that can be used to temporarily mend broken things ... but it's a short spell, and when it runs out, the thing breaks again just like before. Coco realizes Custas has been reapplying this spell several times a day to keep his father alive, and she knows that if she could've, she would've done the same for her mother after accidentally turning her to stone. 
 
In fact, Dagdah was killed by the bandits, and while he was dying, the forbidden witch showed up, drew the spell on him, and taught it to Custas. But Dagdah has only a half-life. He has no memories since just before the attack, and he keeps dying painfully each time the spell runs out while Custas is redrawing it. Knowing the king's secret, Coco wonders if he could heal Dagdah, and becomes even more committed to inventing a new spell in time for the parade. (Although it's not clear to me that the king would be willing to heal an traveling musician, even if he's able.)
 
A member of the Knights Moralis shows up and tries to arrest Dagdah, but Custas arrives and attacks him with the wooden tentacles of his leg braces. Coco and Tartah run away. Then the forbidden witch uses one of the Knights' own spells against him - erasing all memory of magic from his mind, which in this case means erasing almost all his memories altogether.
 
There's one really noticeable change to Shirahama's art in this volume. They style is the same, but there are a lot more large panels showing close-ups of people's emotions at key moments. I don't know if this is easier for her because it means fewer panels, or harder because they're more detailed, but it makes this volume look different than the ones before. She uses this new approach to pretty good effect though. There's not as much action this time, but there are several moments where someone feels a powerful or complex emotion that motivates their actions going forward, and seeing those moments enlarged both emphasizes the strength of what's being felt and makes it easier to see the nuance.

I think the parade's going to be in the next volume, and thus that several of these plots will come together dramatically. Coco may really, really want to march, but I don't know how she's going to be able to invent a new spell that's worthy, and convince Master Qifrey to let her. I'm pretty sure the parade is the next day, which doesn't seem like enough time. 

Author: The JT LeRoy Story (2016)

 
 

  

Author tells the JT Leroy story entirely from the perspective of Laura Albert, the woman responsible for the hoax. In addition to casting Albert as the sole narrator and allowing her to tell the story as she sees fit (despite, by her own admission, her history of telling self-serving lies, Albert's version of events goes unchallenged), the film also incorporates Albert's recordings of seemingly every phone call she made or received throughout the affair (including her very first call to a youth suicide prevention line), and scenes from a film Albert made in college where she put animated text and voice-over atop her family's home movies.

 

Author is almost physically painful at times, because of the discomfort you feel watching Albert casually admit to (perhaps even brag about) things where you feel like she should feel some kind of shame or embarrassment. I preferred the approach taken by The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, where at least the interviewer pushes back on her justifications. Riefenstahl isn't sorry in that either, but at least she's put on the defensive, and is practically just ranting by the end.

 

In brief, the early 2000s, aspiring author Laura Albert was calling various crisis help lines, pretending to be a suicidal teenage boy, (and, I feel the need to emphasize again, recording these calls) supposedly as a way to deal with her own childhood trauma from a safe distance. Albert picks one therapist she likes, and uses the persona she adopted for that call to start writing short stories.

 

She begins calling various authors using the name 'JT LeRoy' to ask for advice. Eventually one helps her get a publishing contract. She publishes a bestselling novel, a book of short stories, and another novel. The first book is optioned to be made into a movie. All this fiction tells the story of an abused little boy with AIDS whose highest aspiration is to be a desirable adult woman prostitute, and is intended to be read as thinly veiled autobiography.

 

Along the way, Albert develops both a cult following and a circle of celebrities who are fans of LeRoy. Needing a way to get 'JT LeRoy' to make public appearances, Albert recruits her boyfriend's little sister to play the part in public. This wasn't the first time she'ddone something like this, Albert casually explains - when she was a teen, she dressed her own little sister up as a punk, cut her hair and styled her outfits, and sent her out to participate in the local punk scene with instructions about who to talk to and what to say. I believe Albert when she says that she is an abuse victim; I also think she might be a sociopath.

 

Eventually the lie collapses, not because the teenage girl pretending to be JT LeRoy (even as Albert still handled all the phone calls) made any kind of public mistake, but solely because Albert was jealous of her own creation. She couldn't stand only being the puppetmaster behind the scenes, she wanted people to see her, pay attention to her, and praise her too. She first told Billy Corrigan, who kept quiet, and then grew increasingly indiscreet until reporters caught on.

 

Albert's two key complaints at the end are (1) she is furious that people call JT LeRoy a 'hoax,' because you see, she never intended to deceive anyone, the persona was to help herself heal, she wrote the novel by accident, she wasn't trying to get famous, etc. And (2) she's mad that anyone felt deceived or angry, and that she wasn't permitted to slip into the life of fame she built for JT LeRoy. She can't believe that all her celebrity friends turned on her just because everything they thought they knew was a lie! (Except Courtney Love, who gets repaid for her loyalty with Albert sharing an audio recording of Love doing a line of coke and offering to get Albert on an apology / rehabilitation tour starting with Oprah.)

 

One of the frustrating things about this film is that Albert consistently talks about JT LeRoy in the third person as a separate entity who acts independently of her. Sometimes it's clear when she says 'JT said this' that she means she said it while playing the role. But once the sister-in-law begins portraying LeRoy in public, it's sometimes impossible to tell. Does 'JT did that' mean Albert did it, the sister did it following Albert's instructions, or the sister did it of her own initiative? Albert doesn't say, and no one asks her to clarify.

 

So, Author is a thorough, nearly 2 hour account of the JT LeRoy farrago, and the filmmakers give Laura Albert enough rope to publicly hang herself, but it also suffers from being such an exercise in self-indulgence.

 

 

Originally watched December 2022.

The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge

 
 

The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge
by MT Anderson

art by Eugene Yelchin

Candlewick Press

2018

 

 

The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge is a YA or middle-grade fantasy novel that mixes art and text in exciting ways and has a surprisingly complex critique of the way that militaristic governments misuse history to justify their wars. I was drawn to the book by the whimsical title and cover art, and by a quick flip-through that revealed that parts of the book are told in wordless sequential art. If anything, I feared it would be too twee, but while there is a certain lightheartedness to the telling, the story itself is fully aware and fully critical of how governments sometimes kill civilians, more-or-less on a whim, and call it preemptive self-defense.
 

Assassination is told with three kinds of chapters that don't alternate in any kind of strict sequence, but only according to the needs of the story. The very first chapter in the book is visual; only later do we fully understand what we've seen. The visuals are in black and white and remind me of 19th century lithographs. Each illustration is a full page, but they tell a sequential story, like the panels in a comic. These chapters depict the perspective of Brangwain Spurge, an elven historian who is conscripted as a diplomat to be launched via catapult to the goblin kingdom to deliver a present to their ruler. Many of the book's action sequences are shown this way, to good effect. To Brangwain, everything in Goblinland is giant, hideous, terrifying. It's not immediately obvious, but these visuals are more subjective and unreliable than we might expect.
 
The next kind of chapter is told in close third-person from the perspective of Werfel, a goblin academic chosen by his government to act as Brangwain's host and guide to the capital city. Where Brangwain starts out seeming like a negative stereotype of academia, vain, persnickety, overly serious, closed off, incurious, Werfel seems like more of a well-educated bon vivant, welcoming and hospitable, someone who appreciates elvish culture but really wants to show off all the charming local traditions, which Brangwain inevitably finds horrible. You begin to understand that things might look exactly as Brangwain sees them, and yet be experienced as nice - as traditional, familiar, even comforting - by the goblins, despite offending elven (and perhaps our human) sense of aesthetics. The majority of the book is told this way, and Werfel's perspective is clearly the one we're expected to feel most sympathetic to, even if we might initially expect to prefer elves over goblins.
 
The final sort of chapter takes the form of correspondence, dispatches sent from an elvish spymaster to the king of Elfland. The spymaster's voice is like an evil Bertie Wooster; he's a foppish twit who's set this whole scenario up in a misguided attempt to assassinate the goblin leader, using Brangwain as a patsy, an unwitting accomplice who thinks he's just there to report back on goblin magical infrastructure. Things don't go according to the spymaster's plan, primarily because he gave Brangwain two incompatible tasks - to snoop around suspiciously and to be a completely trustworthy courier of the elven peace offering.
 
The first half of the book is a bit of a comedy of manners, as Werfel attempts to show off all the things he's proudest of, Brangwain gets appalled and turns up his nose at everything, Brangwain courts disaster by spying ineffectually, and the spymaster brags to the king about what's going to happen when the goblin ruler receives the booby-trapped elven gift. And meanwhile Werfel and Brangwain argue about the millennium-long history of truly brutal warfare between the two sides. In Brangwain's mind, it's all very proper and justified, but Werfel's very aware of how much and how badly goblin civilians have suffered, and of how often the elves have been the belligerents. The elves are not as good as they make themselves out to be, and the goblins are not nearly as evil. Every one of these plots is careening toward disaster from the start, and they all come to a head when Brangwain finally gets to meet the goblins' ruler.
 
After that, in the second half, Werfel and Brangwain finally, haltingly work their way toward a kind of mutual respect and friendship, the spymaster scrambles to perform some damage control with the furious elven king after the first plan went awry, and the two countries find themselves on the brink of another round of mutually destructive warfare. All those plots come together in the end too, in a way that's quite satisfying, and that favors a just peace over endless bloodletting and conflict. 

The Best American Comics 2018

 
The Best American Comics 2018

edited by Phoebe Gloeckner

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

2018

 

 

The Best American Comics 2018 is the second-to-last volume in the series. I don't know why Houghton Mifflin decided to stop this series from their Best American line, although if they gave any reason in the press, I guess I should be able to find out. My tentative guess is that it was a casualty of the pandemic. Each volume so far has included a call for submissions, to be considered for two volumes into the future, and the call for BAC 2020 is in here.
 
Editor Phoebe Gloeckner decided against placing the comics into categories, and she's the first editor to organize the comics alphabetically by author's last name. I think there were fewer comics this time where I really couldn't tell why they were included, how anyone could think they were the best of anything, but I don't know if that means Gloeckner's taste is more similar to mine, or if I now find it easier to appreciate a wider range of comics. 
 
Both in her selections generally and in her choice of what to excerpt from longer works, Gloeckner seems to have an eye for comics that mix sex and nudity with ugliness and self-hatred. I think there might be more graphic memoirs in the mix this time, although they're always pretty common across BAC volumes. 
 
Childhood memories, often upsetting, are another recurring motif in the memoirs. We get an excerpt from Emil Ferris's My Favorite Thing is Monsters from right after her parents died; a truly traumatic childhood memory about pets dying from Gabrielle Bell, from whom we've seen more everyday life stuff up until now; and memoir blending with an architectural history of New York's children's spaces in Julia Jacquette's Playground of My Mind, which stands out for being about something pleasant. I really liked How to be Alive by Tara Booth and Ugly by Chloe Perkins, both of which had frank depictions of grappling with the artists' loathing of their own bodies and desires.
 
There's only a bit of non-memoirist graphic nonfiction, including Guy Delisle's Hostage, and a a couple different accounts of American and British involvement in the Middle East. I previously read Delisle's Factory Summers.

There are a number of familiar faces among the fictional comics, including Jaime Hernandez with a Love & Rockets excerpt, Simon Hanselmann with a Megg and Mogg comic, a shockingly bloody (and cartoony) excerpt from one of Ted Stearn's Fuzz and Pluck comics, and Jesse Jacobs with an even more overtly psychedelic offering than usual. My favorite was probably DJ Bryant's "Echoes into Eternity", which felt like a complete Twilight Zone story in 8 pages. 

The Lady Matador's Hotel

 
 
The Lady Matador's Hotel

by Cristina Garcia

Scribner

2010

 

 

I first noticed The Lady Matador's Hotel in grad school at the college bookstore because of its eye-catching cover, and I've kind of been meaning to read it ever since. One of the things I've been doing this year is trying to finally get around to reading things that've been on my list for forever. I'd long since forgotten whatever it was that drew me to the book, just a vague sense there was something there that intrigued me. I feel fortunate, because it's a much better than I had any reason to expect.
 

The Lady Matador's Hotel is quite structured, which immediately endears it to me. The book follows six main characters over the course of six days, from Sunday to Friday, plus an epilogue. The action is mostly contained in the Hotel Miraflor. Each chapter gives us one scene with each character over the course of one day, and each scene is labeled by the location it takes place, like the elevator, the patio restaurant, the lobby, the roof, specific rooms. The characters do have names, but Garcia usually refers to them by their occupation - the lawyer, the colonel, the waitress, the poet, the factory owner, and of course, the lady matador. The last section of each chapter is excerpts from the day's tv and radio news.
 
The characters pass each other by and occasionally intersect; the plot is like one of those movies with an ensemble cast where everyone's following their own storyline, the sort that were popular around the time Garcia wrote this. Because it takes place in a Spanish-speaking country (in this case, an unnamed Central American nation) and involves bullfighting, it reminds me of one of the first movies like that I ever saw, Carnages. I learned that in the intervening years, the book has been made into a play. On the one hand this makes sense, as Garcia has an eye for pairing dramatic moments and scenic locales; but on the other hand, an awful lot of what happens takes place inside the characters' heads, and the what action there is gains its meaning from those interior thoughts.
 
The book's cover depicts the very first scene, the lady matador admiring herself in the mirror before dressing in her costume. She's in town for a competition between matadoras, and to fight a few exhibition matches before the big event. She provides a throughline to the book. She's in the first scene and the last, in the news each day, and each of the other characters notices her and thinks about her, the celebrity in their midst. The lady matador thinks about her dead mother, contemplates her eventual retirement, psyches herself up with casual sex, preens around the hotel, and performs for an adoring press. We get to see a couple of her bullfights close-up.
 
The colonel is at Hotel Miraflor for a pan-Latin American military conference. He's a brutal man, a killer, a war criminal. The waitress is an ex-guerilla, a former leftist militant who thought she'd retired from conflict, until the man who killed her whole family, who drove her to revolution in the first place, shows up as a guest. The waitress spends the week trying to decide whether or not to assassinate the colonel, and being visited by the ghost of her brother. On the news, we see bombings nearby as other rebels attack the conference-goers at neighboring hotels.
 
The lawyer sells the infant children of local mothers to adoptive American parents. She calls the mothers she employs her 'breeders.' The national legislature is on the brink of passing a law banning international adoptions, but she's sure her political connections and her bribe money can keep her in business. The poet and his wife are here to adopt a baby. The poet is a Cuban exile, his wife an American, and being here is dredging up old feelings and new uncertainties.
 
The factory owner is a sadsack from Korean. He's depressed and suicidal. He feels endlessly sorry for himself. He's been losing money, his workers are striking, the press accuses him of underpaying and abusing his workers. His 16 year-old indigenous girlfriend is about to give birth, and she persuaded him to book them the honeymoon suite, which he can't afford, but he plans to be dead by the end of the week anyway. He doesn't seem to know or care what will happen to her if she's alone.
 
Several of these characters are unpleasant people, who have done and are still doing immoral things. The country is troubled, an ex-dictator is favored to win an upcoming presidential election, and America is implicated in many of the troubles - it's Americans who come to the hotel to buy babies, CIA agents attend the military conference. Garcia sets the characters in motion and closely observes their inner lives. Her writing is psychologically realistic, without overt moral judgment. Even as the world just off-camera is filled with big dramatic events - an election, a hurricane, a fatal nightclub fire, terrorist bombings - the characters themselves remain grounded in both their immediate concerns and their introspection about past regrets and future decisions. 

Die 2

 
 
Die 2
Split the Party

by Kieron Gillen

art by Stephanie Hans

Image Comics

2020

 

  

In the first volume of Die, we learned that on Dominic's 16th birthday, he and five of his friends gathered to play a bespoke roleplaying game. They vanished from the Earth for months, and when they came back, they were unable to speak about anything that happened there, and game master Solomon remained behind. Then, a couple decades later, as they were all staring down the disappointments of their mid-30s, they got pulled back to the game world, back to the 20-sided planet Die. 
 
When they returned to Die, each got back the supernatural powers they had the first time. Also, Dominic, who seemed happy enough to be a man on Earth, became a woman named Ash. Going back again opened up a lot of old wounds and traumas, and the group couldn't leave until everyone agreed. Ultimately, they killed Sol, but then the group fractured, with three wanting to leave, and two wanting to stay behind.
 
In volume 2, Split the Party, we return after more weeks or months have passed, and both sides are basically hopeless. Ash the Dictator, who can compel people to do things; her sister Angela, the fairy-powered cyberpunk Neo; and Matt the Grief Knight, whose powers are fueled by his own and others' sadness, are trapped in the besieged remains of Glass Town. Izzy the Godbinder, who can compel spirits to do do favors for her on the promise she'll do them a favor in return in the future, and Chuck the Fool, who can be supernaturally lucky, so long as he remains over-confident and non-self-reflective, have been transported to the far side of the planet. Everyone is starving and desperate at the start of the volume.
 
Die seems to be made up of the remains of the games others have played there before. Glass Town, and the countries Angria and Gondal, were all invented collectively by the Brontes; the conquering army from Eternal Prussia seems like it came from the war games HG Wells used to play on the living room floor with Robert Louis Stevenson. My recognizing this isn't a spoiler, but neither is it something Gillon necessarily expects his audience to already know. The characters certainly don't. An explanation of the allusions is part of the plot. Zamorna, who is as fiendish as he is handsome, is another Bronte creation; he eventually describes himself as a ravisher of 17 year-old girls, dreamed up by a 17 year-old girl who wanted to be ravished. Gillon makes him literally a vampire.
 
The last time the group was on Die, they initially treated is as just a game, the place itself and its inhabitants as unreal. They acted as though their actions had no consequences, as though they were the only people present who could be hurt or who had lives that mattered. They were also, after an unspecified period of just having fun, desperate to figure out how to escape and return home. Eventually they came to accept that Die was real, magical but real, that the people who lived there were real. We don't really know what they did before reaching that point, but we know they regret a lot of it, now.
 
And they regret all the chaos Sol caused, and that their only plan to defeat Sol involved allowing Prussia to wreck Glass Town. Sol, though dead, persists as one of the Fallen, the zombie-orcs that the group used to just think of as generic monsters to kill.
 
Ash, Angela, Matt, and their prisoner Sol go to Angria, where they are greeted by Ash's son, Augustus, who is a member of the Ruling Party here. It seems that as teenagers, Izzy dated Zamorna, then Ash dated Zamorna and got pregnant, and Izzy got a goddess to agree to take over the pregnancy when they all returned to Earth. Izzy and Zamorna arrive not long after Ash, (Chuck is off sleeping with elf queens instead, apparently,) and Izzy confesses to the group's role in the conquest of Glass Town, which gets them all locked in bell jars in prison.
 
While they're locked up, their jailer is the ghost or remnant of Charlotte Bronte, who briefly tells the story of how she and her siblings made up their parts of Die. Allegiances shift, and Ash agrees to help Izzy save the world before they leave again, which involves a complicated plan to temporarily amplify her Dictator's powers to make herself the queen of Angria and place Zamorna under her thrall. We'll have to wait to see what she'll do!
 
Meanwhile Chuck shows up, luckily at just the right time to rescue Matt and Angela, leaving the zombie of Sol in prison. They have a different plan to save the world, so they're off to the races too.
 
Gillon's use of so many literary characters and setting components here reminds me of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Fables, though I suspect the gaming history he's drawing on is much less familiar to most people than the literary heroes and fairy tale figures from those series. 
 
Portal fantasies where you change when you pass through the portal (and I guess magical girl series where you transform to activate your powers) have the potential to include magical gender changes, but I think Gillon has done more with that idea than I've seen before. My one complaint is that Ash is so reserved and taciturn that we hardly know how she feels, or how Dominic felt about briefly becoming a girl and then turning back into a boy all those years ago. Dominic was bi, and maybe the experience helped him accept his attraction to men? But in neither body does Dominic or Ash appear to experience any kind of gender dysphoria. 

 

We get one page of backstory about her relationship with Zamorna, how it intersected with her fraught friendship with Izzy, and what happened to her pregnancy. The emotion is implied amidst a spare recitation of facts, without the benefit an actual voice to lend inflection to the words. You know she's not happy, that her lack of affect is covering up some kind of pain, but all we see is the surface of the black box. We can only guess what's inside it. Maybe there's more coming, but I can't help but wish that Ash was either more expressive or that she had a foil, another character who experienced the same things but reacted differently, so we could discern more about how she felt by contrast.

Otto

 
 
Otto

A Palindrama

by Jon Agee

Rocky Pond Books

2021 

 

 

Jon Agee calls Otto a 'palindrama,' a portmanteau of his own devising that describes the fact that every bit of text in the body of the book takes the form of a palindrome, a word or phrase that reads to same forward and back, like racecar or noon. This is a children's comic rather than a picture book. Each page has multiple panels of sequential art, and the story is mostly told with pictures. 
 
The text, when it appears, is largely dialogue, but also sometimes signs and labels. An awful lot of these are longer than any of the palindromes I'm used to (which top out at like, 'Madam I am Adam,') and many of them are formed by a statement and reply, two characters working together to make one palindrome.
 
The story follows young Otto on an adventure that seemingly takes place in his own imagination, but that also involves a wider and stranger world than you'd think he could dream up alone. I've come to appreciate this as a pretty classic structure for kid's stories. In Otto's case, he's playing with his dog Pip when his mom and dad call him into the dining room to eat his wonton soup. Staring into the soup bowl, he's imaginatively transported to a beach where his parents are asleep on blankets in the sun, leaving him unsupervised. He wanders off and has his adventures before returning to the beach just as his parents are waking up, and then returning to reality as his daydream while staring into his soup comes to an end. The structure is fairly symmetrical, which suits the theme well.
 
On the beach, Otto sees a rat carrying a surf board; Pip gives chase and Otto follows. Soon he's in a desert. He briefly meets and passes by a few eccentric characters and odd food stands. He finds a doctor asleep on the railroad tracks, who's saved at the last moment by the 'Mr. Alarm' mascot from Otto's bedroom clock. He reaches a road where someone gives him a ride into the city. He sees lots of signs and advertisements, and once in town the driver points out various notable cityfolk. Otto wanders a bit, goes to the 'mueseum,' and meets more strange people, including a woman in a pink cat costume who wants his help stacking cats on a ladder. He continues wandering, through a park, a cemetery, to the lake shore and into the lake. Eventually he takes a boat ride, braves a storm, and ends up back where he started. It's fair to say Otto's dream is action packed!
 
At the end, Agee credits people who suggested a few of the palindromes to him, and of course some were simply well-known. But it seems he made up most of them himself, especially the longer and more complex ones. Whether that's something his brain was uniquely suited to, or a skill he practiced, I'm really impressed! 

Chrono Trigger

 
 
Chrono Trigger

by Michael Williams

Boss Fight Books

2014

 

 

Michael Williams' Chrono Trigger is the Boss Fight Books book about the Super Nintendo game Chrono Trigger. I previously read BFB's Spelunky and Earthbound books. Spelunky was pretty great, but it was also written by the game's designer, and so had insight into the creative process that will simply never be available in a book written by anyone else. Earthbound disappointed me because the author paired a walkthrough of the game with a roughly equal amount of narrative about his own life, which was not what I'd hoped for.
 
Chrono Trigger has a much better balance, I think. Williams describes the basic plot, the characters, and a few key moments, in the early chapters, then spends the rest of the book on actual criticism. He looks at the portrayal of gender, race, and sexuality in the game. He talks about the portrayal of social institutions like government, law, and the economy. He actually gets brief interviews with both the original translator who wrote the first English localization, and the one who retranslated the game for a rerelease. He even explores a bit the role of time travel in the game's narrative.
 
Williams does discuss his life a little bit, what it was like to first play Chrono Trigger in the 90s, and he mentions his time as an English teacher in Japan, but like, his reasons for doing so are obvious and help to advance his discussion of the topic at hand. He talks about himself about as much as I do in these reviews; he definitely does not put a whole memoir's worth of life stories into his video game review.
 

Chrono Trigger the game is one of the most highly regarded Japanese rpgs of the 16-bit era, with colorful pixel art, and a plot and cast that ranges across time to include a cave woman, a cursed medieval knight who looks like a frog, a robot from the future, all trying to save their world from the apocalyptic Lavos, who crashed into the planet in the distant past, and who will erupt to fly off to another world in their year 1999, wiping out almost all life in the process. Players travel back and forth in time to assemble their party, face off against Lavos, definitely lose their first battle against the living embodiment of mass extinction, then continue exploring the world at different times until they're finally ready to fight Lavos again.
 
I think Williams's work here probably represents a pretty good baseline of what one should reasonably be able to expect from the whole 33⅓, Pop Classics, Boss Fight Books format. There are a few more of these books that I kind of feel interested in, but I've also realized I'm more interested in histories of how things were made more than I am in commentaries about them. Williams provides a blend of both. But I may have been spoiled by the wealth of insider knowledge in Spelunky.

The Girl That Can't Get a Girlfriend

 
 
The Girl That Can't Get a Girlfriend

by Mieri Hiranishi

Viz Media

2023

 

 

The Girl that Can't Get a Girlfriend is a graphic memoir about a young woman's brief first relationship and her long mourning period after her first breakup. The Girl is presented manga style, small pages, black and white, read from right to left, but it's not a translation; Hiranishi lives in America and wrote her comic in English.
 
There's a pretty stark contrast between the very simple, stylized way Hiranishi draws Mieri (her younger self) and the comparatively realistic style she uses for everyone else. At the start of the comic, the difference seemed amusingly self-deprecating, but as the overall tone gets darker, the visual reminder of Mieri's low self-esteem began to seem increasingly sad.
 
In the first half of the comic, Hiranishi talks about her childhood sexual awakening and realizing she's attracted to butch women from watching Sailor Uranus on Sailor Moon. She shows us her awkward (and unrequited) first crush on an out lesbian high school classmate. In college, she tries online dating without much success. At this point, her foibles seem pretty relatable, and her lack of romantic confidence something I think a lot of people experience at first. In her junior year, Mieri meets Ash while spending a semester studying abroad in Japan. Ash is an English teacher from America, only a couple years older. Mieri clearly experienced their relationship as a kind of idyllic first love.
 
But Meiri has to return to America, and while they call themselves a long-distance couple for awhile, Ash eventually breaks up with Mieri on a video call. At this point, Mieri spirals into what I think is actually a pretty typical post-breakup depression. I've experienced it a few times myself. Obsessively thinking about the other person, hoping to get back together, feeling lonely, feeling like you'll never find someone who wants to date you again, grieving for the future you imagined together, being angry at them for hurting you, etc. But Mieri gets stuck like this, not just for a weeks or months, but for like four years.
 
In the meantime, she goes through the steps of young adulthood. Getting an internship and first job, graduating, attempting to take better care of herself. She tries dating guys, but has no interest in sleeping with them, or even in dating the same guy twice. But throughout all this, she remains brokenhearted and unable to emotionally move on. It seems like this was a really dark few years for her internally, even as she outwardly got her life together. Ultimately, it's writing this comic that finally gives Hiranishi closure.
 
Memoir and autobiography are tricky. On the one hand, it seems like Hiranishi needed to write this, and perhaps to write it this way as part of her healing process. Before being collected and published, The Girl that Can't Get a Girlfriend was a webcomic, almost an online diary, and clearly it attracted enough readers to earn Hiranishi a book deal. She had no editor while she was writing, and I really don't know how much she might've revised the comics before they went into print. 
 
But on the other hand, I think the book itself would've been better if she'd been able to maintain a lighter tone, if not so much of the text was seemingly a stream of consciousness substitute for therapy. Maybe that version would never have resonated with as many people, never made it off the screen and onto the page? But I think Hiranishi's observation and humor are a stronger basis for a book than an unfiltered outpouring of her pain. And I think she might not've stayed sad for quite so long if eventually, finally putting all these feelings down in drawings hadn't been her only way of resolving them instead of continuously ruminating. I hope that if Hiranishi writes another comic, she'll be able to create from a healthier place, emotionally.

The Eyre Affair

 
The Eyre Affair

by Jasper Fford

Penguin

2001, reprinted 2003

 

 

The Eyre Affair is the first in a series of mysteries involving living people who cross into, and fictional characters who cross out of, the world of books. Like the idea that our toys have secret lives that they act out when we're not looking at them, the thought that the characters in books are aware of their stories, are conscious of acting them out, even when we're not reading them, has a deep, almost primal appeal, a resonance with some of our earliest childhood imaginings. It reminds me of old Looney Tunes like "Have You Got Any Castles?" or "Book Revue" that depict everyone stepping out of their books at night to mingle and party. 

It's a scenario that makes intuitive sense, but that also doesn't fit neatly into the distinctions we usually draw between science fiction and fantasy, although in this case, Fforde fills up his world with alt history, time travel, mad science ... plus supervillains, werewolves, and vampires. His protagonist, Thursday Next, is a secret agent working for the busiest, least glamorous branch of British Intelligence, the ones who investigate book-related crimes. 
 
In Fforde's world, the Crimean War that started in the 1850s is still dragging on in the early 2000s, Britain and France use time traveling spies to sabotage each other's histories, cloned dodos are a common pet, and the general public is fanatical about classical literature and live theatrical adaptations thereof, seemingly to the exclusion of almost any other form of entertainment. Instead of football hooligans, you get crowds dressed up like Shakespeare or Milton rioting because they encountered a banned art style like Cubism or Abstract Expressionism, or they witnessed a play that illegally departs from approved interpretations. Those sorts of crimes, plus lots and lots of attempted forgeries, are the things Thursday ordinarily investigates.
 
At the start of The Eyre Affair though, Thursday gets a temporary promotion to a division that's trying to arrest super-criminal Archeron Hades, who's bulletproof, invisible on film and security footage, who can dominate men's minds, and who's just stolen the original manuscript of Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit. The attempted arrest goes badly; Hades overpowers and kills the entire team of investigators, except Thursday, whom he merely injures. 
 
The structure of the plot reminds me of a Bond film - short job, reassignment, meeting with the tech guy, long job. After the massacre, Thursday transfers from London back to her old home town to recuperate. She visits her family, and her genius uncle shows her his latest inventions, including the Prose Portal, his brand new device that will let a person travel inside a book. Later, while Thursday's at work, Hades steals the device, kidnaps her uncle, and announces his plan to extract the character of Martin Chuzzlewit from the manuscript and kill him, unless his ransom demands are met. If you use the portal to enter an ordinary book, you'll only change that one copy, but if you enter an original manuscript, any changes will affect all the other copies that are based on it.
 
Thursday's uncle manages to sabotage Hades's first plan, but that only prompts him to go after an even bigger prize, the original manuscript of Jane Eyre. Thursday is too late to prevent the theft, or the initial kidnapping, which results in half the book getting erased. But Thursday is able to go into the book to rescue Jane and thwart Hades, which accidentally results in the book getting a new ending, the one it has in reality.
 
I'm assuming that future Thursday Next mysteries will also involve the Prose Portal and travel into other books. I don't think I'll be continuing though. Fforde's worldbuilding feels like an unsuccessful collage, the smorgasbord of different genre elements never really blending into a coherent whole. I liked Shades of Grey, a later work of Fforde's which is equally wacky, a novel of manners set in a dystopian future where social status is based on the ability to see color. But Fforde's humor in this one didn't really work for me, and the plot felt too unwieldy. 
 
Thursday has a few episodic book-police adventures felt extraneous, although Fforde did give them some connection to the main plot in the end. Her dad is a rogue time traveler who repeatedly stops time to pop in and have a non sequitur chat with her before disappearing. Thursday has a lot of bad memories of her time in the army in Crimea, which relate to a present-day plot about whether Britain will escalate or finally seek peace. And she has a romance plot with her old boyfriend that I think is supposed to parallel Jane and Rochester, but that mostly ends up feeling incredibly rushed and emotionally unrealistic. It's a lot! And to me, it just doesn't work together well enough to make me want to continue.

Funny Ha Ha (2002)

 
 

Funny Ha Ha

directed by Andrew Bujalksi

written by Andrew Bujalski

Goodbye Cruel Releasing 

2002 

 

 
Funny Ha Ha is probably the first mumblecore movie (especially if you think of it as a movement rather than a genre). My introduction to mumblecore came via a New York Times article. Ever since, I've had a soft spot in my heart for these rough-around-the-edges movies about young people trying to figure out who they want to be.

 

We follow Marnie across a single summer sometime after college. As the film opens, her life is destabilized in a couple ways - she just lost her job, and Alex (who she has a crush on) has been dumped by his girlfriend. She also seems very open to influence - early on, a couple friends spot her out walking while they're driving by; they invite her to join them for dinner, and she does. Many of her other interactions have a similar chance quality.

 

Marnie's friends all push her to try to date Alex, who beats her to the punch by calling her to preemptively tell her he's not interested. But then later he also asks her out for coffee. Alex clearly has feelings for Marnie, but wants to keep stringing her along instead of dating her. Every time Marnie starts to get over him, he contacts her to build her up and then reject her again. The one part of Marnie's life she figures out by the end is realizing what he's doing and deciding to stop going along with it.

 

Outside of Alex, Marnie tries to kiss a cute guy who she's chatting with at a party, and he rejects her. Her friend Dave (who's dating her friend Rachel) kisses her, but she's really not interested. And Marnie wants to be friends with former coworker Mitchell (played by director Andrew Bujalski), but he keeps asking her out, even after she's said no, until she gets mad and throws him out of her apartment. Every crush in this movie is unrequited.

 

After losing her first off-screen job, Marnie tries temping at the same company as Mitchell, then gets a job as a research assistant for Alex's professor uncle. She tries to quit drinking, tries basketball and chess, and maybe makes a couple new women friends by the end.

 

I like Marnie as a character, but overall I think I want to like this movie more than I actually like it. The sound is rough, much too loud in parts and quiet in others, depending on where the mic was. Some of the actors are not so great at improvising dialogue. And all the guys seem kind of sexist and unlikable, none more so than Alex. It feels authentic, but also painful.

 

I was in college when Funny Ha Ha came out, and the friend-group Marnie is sort-of a part of looks and sounds like friend-groups I saw back then because I knew one member and attended the occasional group event. I think the film captures that time and social position very well.

 

One kind of fun thing about re-watching it now is the technology. Marnie has an answering machine, and at one point uses a pay phone. Only one character in the whole thing has a cell.

 

 

Originally watched December 2022. 

Playing with Books

 
Playing with Books
The Art of Upcycling, Deconstructing, and Reimagining the Book

by Jason Thompson

Quarry Books

2010

 
 
Playing with Books is a craft book about art projects created using printed books as a raw material. Thompson showcases about 30 projects, mostly of his own design, that the reader could attempt. He also showcases about 30 professional artists who create using books.
 
Reading through Thompson's suggested projects, I was struck by the fact that book crafts are mostly just paper crafts, using a specific source of paper. Thompson suggests making envelopes and origami, beads made of rolled-up pages, and various items of jewelry or decor from shapes cut out of the paper, usually circles or butterflies. For a few projects, Thompson leaves the spine on the book and fans it out - by combining 2 or 3 like this you can make a cylinder, which can then by modified by folding or cutting the pages to make shapes. In a couple cases, he suggests laminating paper and plastic together and using the composite to make purses or bags.
 
The projects are mostly easy enough for an adult to do together with a kid, though for any of the projects more difficult than that, I don't really think he provides enough instructions. Each project gets 2-6 pages, usually 4. The first page is always just a large photo of the finished project, the second only has the name and a list of materials. This section takes up the vast majority of the book, in a way that feels unbalanced.
 
The artist showcases mostly get only one page, very occasionally two. Each of these pages then includes several smaller photos of the artist's works, along with a very brief bio, probably written by the artists themselves. Compared to the very (overly?) spacious layouts of the crafting section, this part seems quite cramped, and for many of the artworks, I wished for a larger photo so I could see the details better. 
 
The artists often modify whole books, creating sculptural objects that are both built up and cut away. Many of the books were soaked in water so they could be reshaped, warped, wrinkled, splayed, twisted, the pages cut into strips like tentacles. I found the collages and assemblies the most interesting. I think that, ultimately, I may be more interested in seeing really skilled book artworks made by others than I am in attempting to make my own little craft projects. In retrospect, I am struck by just how exceptional Good Mail Day is among craft books - the projects are achievable, the instructions are genuinely helpful, and the authors write in a way that's conversational and that genuinely encourages you to try.

The Forest

 
The Forest

A Fable of America in the 1830s

by Alexander Nemerov

Princeton University Press

2023

 

 

The Forest is a rather unusual work of creative nonfiction. Nemerov is a professional historian, and everything he's written is supported by primary documents, very often diaries. At the same time, rather than the usual register of academic writing, Nemerov narrates in the close third person, creating an intimate sense of understanding each person's interiority in a way that's usually reserved for literature. The Forest also lacks any explicit central thesis or obvious connection between its parts. What Nemerov has written are a series of factually true vignettes that read like short stories.
 
There are themes here though, even if they don't coalesce into a clear argument about what life was like in America in the 1830s. Essentially all the vignettes are set in the forest, where people work or visit for leisure or travel through on the way to somewhere else or depict in art. Most of the vignettes include someone who is an artist or a craftsperson. Another theme is a growing sense of loss and disconnection from 'the wilderness' and 'the frontier,' from the founding ideas and myths of America in a country that is increasingly populated and settled, and especially, increasingly industrialized. You get a real sense of how wood was harvested and used at this time, a view of pretty much every stage of the process. A final theme are precursors to the Civil War, incidents that reveal a populace uncomfortable with the compromises and contradictions of allowing slavery in half the states in a country that is supposedly an embodiment of freedom. In the afterward, Nemerov explains his writing philosophy, though predictable, he does so by relating a parable.
 
Many of the vignettes are about people who are anonymous (though Nemerov may know their names and simply choose not to use them), others are about people who were famous or infamous at the time, whose names might also appear in other histories, but were unknown to me. A few of the vignettes are about incidents involving people who are still famous today - Alexis de Tocqueville, James Audubon, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Andrew Jackson. Several also include thorough descriptions of specific works of art. There's a section of color plates where all the illustrations are gathered. They're well marked, though I wished for some indication in the text that you ought to go look at the next one.
 
In most vignettes, Nemerov combines at least two, sometimes more perspectives, from people who were in about the same place at around the same time, even if they might not've known or even encountered each other. These chapters, 'fables,' as he calls them, are mostly between 3 and 10 pages long, and I think mostly on the shorter side. The chapter the includes Harriet Tubman, for example, finds her still a child, sneaking out at night to visit her mother on a different plantation, awed by the sight of the thousands of meteors in a uniquely bright Leonid shower. On the same night, nearby, a slave-owning doctor traveled to a friend's plantation to treat his friend's sick daughter and, when she died, to comfort the grieving family.
 
If I have one complaint about the book, it's that I frequently felt like Nemerov's writing was overwrought. Everything is epic, everything portends something else, every little detail and incident reveals the essential nature of humanity, etc. Axe chops echo forward through the years, the current of a river propels events forward, conversations make a cathedral of words. The latter half, at least, of every single vignette is written like the concluding sentences of The Great Gatsby. It's just too much. It's probably fine in small doses, but it's overwhelming if you read more than one or two chapters in a row with no break.This is clearly a stylistic choice Nemerov is making, but I did wonder how much it was solely his own voice coming through, and how much, perhaps, people at this time might've written their diaries full of metaphor and apocalyptic intensity about every little thing. It's possible that what, to me, seems like Nemerov overdoing it is in fact an accurate representation of how high-minded people often sounded at that time when recording their experiences.

Petra

 

Petra

by Marianna Coppo

Tundra Books

2018

 

 

Petra is a children's picture book about a little rock with a big imagination. I got it as a present for my sister, who's recommended me so many of the kids' books I've enjoyed. This one is intended for pretty young readers, and might help encourage them to dream widely about what sort of person they'd like to become.
 
When we first meet Petra, she tells us she's a mountain. She boasts about her history, her might. But then! a perspective shift. A dog fetching a stick spots Petra and picks her up instead. The human, annoyed, tosses Petra into a tree, where she lands in a bird's nest. Now Petra imagines she's an egg. She hopes to hatch into a dragon, a penguin, a platypus. (A good conversation starter, I think.) The bird returns and drops Petra in a pond. Now she imagines she's a mighty island. A different human comes by and picks Petra up again. But this time, she's brought home, painted to look like an elephant, and given a place of honor. Petra is surprised, but happy.
 
Coppo narrates the book from the little rock's perspective. We see that she really believes in each new idea she tells us. I like the detail that the rock is named Petra, like the ancient city carved directly into the stone of cliff faces, like the Greek prefix petro- for things related to stones. Coppo's illustrations are watercolor. They also center Petra's perspectives, bringing each of her imaginings to life, and showing her at a scale that matches her current role - filling the page as a mountain, tiny compared the bird or humans or dog.

Witch Hat Atelier 9

 
 
Witch Hat Atelier 9

by Kamome Shirahama

Kodansha

2022 

 

 

It's been a minute since I've read any Witch Hat Atelier. In volume 8, Master Qifrey agreed that he and his students would help run a booth at the upcoming Silver Eve festival with the wandmaker and his grandson Tartah. Coco and Tartah are clearly developing feelings for each other, but neither seems to know how to say so out loud yet. Coco and Tartah are also both harboring doubts about some of the witch laws against magical healing, and they help Custas (the son of a traveling performer who was injured in a landslide) by making him a new mobility aid he can use instead of a walking chair - a cloak that allows him to levitate.
 
At the start of this volume, one of the Knights Moralis, the special order of witches who enforce their laws about magic (mostly by erasing the memory of anyone who breaks them), learns that Custas has returned his magical walking chair to the hospital, not because he recovered, but because he got other help and no longer needs it. This is unusual, and the knight finds it suspicious. I don't think Coco or Tartah broke any rules, but it's still not great that the witch police might suspect them.
 
Qifrey and the girls are taking a horse and wagon to the festival so they can perform acts of service along the way, something that's required of full-fledged witches as a kind of noblesse oblige. In this case, they're fixing worn out magic fenceposts that help keep wild animals from venturing into settled places. When they get to the festival, they'll be selling magical devices at their booth.
 
Tetia plans to sell walking sticks that let you make a tent anywhere by pulling up the surface of the ground like it's a tarp. Riceh made paired bracelets that will shine a light between them when you push a button, which causes two half-sigils inside the bracelet to line up and activate. She also made six rings for everyone in the atelier plus Tartah; I suspect will see this emergency locator beacon get some use in a future volume. Coco made more levitating cloaks, like the one she gave to Tartah - not enough to sell, but a few so festival goers can essentially put one on to experience the power of magical flight as a carnival ride. Surprisingly, Agott hasn't made a contraption, because she wants to perform a spell in the parade, which Qifrey and Olruggio seem reluctant to allow her to do.
  
When they arrive at the festival, the kids go explore for a bit before helping set up, and we get an interlude to check on a couple other things. Our first stop is inside the royal palace, which has been enchanted so that no magic will work inside, and no magic devices can even enter. The local kingdom is on a peninsula, and has five member states. Several of the state-leaders are hassling the new witch-ambassador to request that, in addition to helping with natural disaster, the witches start helping to protect people from bandit attacks. (In fact, we saw Custas and his dad get attacked by bandits at the very end of the last volume!) The king shows up and reaffirms his commitment to the witches' independence, but it seems clear that relations between the general public and the powerful, secretive, self-governing magicians in their midst are a bit tense.
 
The old witch-ambassador is very surprised to learn he's been replaced, and the Knights Moralis arrest him for accepting bribes to do personal favors for rich patrons that go beyond the scope of what the king and new ambassador just laid out.
 
Then, separately, we see one of the knights rush off to arrest someone for selling an illegal magical device, in this case, glasses that can see through clothing. He makes excuses, but she's having none of it, and arrests him. The case causes her to think back to when she was an apprentice and her teacher lent her to a rich patron who tried to abuse her. She got in trouble with her teacher when she complained. He even tried to get the Knights Moralis to erase her memory so she'd stop protesting. But the knight who handled the case believed her and stood up for her, which I suppose is why she became a knight herself.
 
It's interesting to me that twice in this volume, we've seen the Knights Moralis portrayed fairly positively. Up until now, their inflexible moral code and incorruptible resistance to any requests for mercy have basically made them, if not exactly antagonists, then at least a looming threat to Coco, but here we see some value in those traits. Because Coco has done what no one is supposed to do - become a witch by learning the secret of magic, which is that it's not innate in the caster, it's a skill that anyone can learn to use by drawing sigils. Coco also accidentally turned her mother to stone by copying a sigil from a book of forbidden magic, and she wants to learn how to undo the process. If they knew all that, the knights would probably erase Coco's memory all the way back to before she learned the secret, and also leave her mother as stone forever. But here, we see them doing necessary self-policing of witch misconduct.
 
Tartah and Coco walk around the festival together. Coco is sad because she remembers being like so many of the non-witch kids who are attending. She loved magic and wished she could become a witch. She's not allowed to tell anyone the truth, but she can't bear lying to them either, or seeing their dreams crushed. Tartah really wants to hold hands with Coco, but instead gives her the custom wand-pen he designed for her, with a grip like the chalk stone Coco used to use to mark fabric when she worked in her mom's tailor shop, before she learned magic. Tartah doesn't know about that, but he saw how Coco wrote with her old wands, and inferred the right shape for her.
 
And because you just know that things can't remain calm all the way to the end of the volume, Custas shocks Coco and Tartah when he shows up at the festival. He's walking now, thanks to some new magical wooden leg braces, given to him after the bandit attack by a witch who uses forbidden magic, and he now seems unhinged and angry with Coco and Tartah for not healing him. The leg braces can like, grow terrifying root-tentacles, which he uses to capture his former friends, and up close, his legs now look withered and dying, which I guess is a consequence of the spell. I kind of think his wild-eyed derangement is because of the spell too, but Coco and Tartah feel guilty regardless, because they both secretly want to break witch law to heal people, although they haven't done so yet. The witch who gave Tartah the braces shows up too, so the next volume is going to be exciting! 

Lost Letters

 
Lost Letters

by Jim Bishop

translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger

Magnetic Press

2024 

 

 

 I feel quite torn about Lost Letters, because I really liked almost the entire book ... and really didn't like way it ended. Lost Letters is a French graphic novel that feels like it was inspired by manga and anime, and while this comparison gets tossed around a lot lately, I think that creator Jim Bishop has created something that's so influenced by Studio Ghibli that you could pretty easily imagine them adapting it for the screen. The book is marketed as being for a YA audience, and that's probably generally fine, but the ending is so dark, so sad, and because it's the ending and nothing comes after it, so un-processed, that I wouldn't really feel comfortable handing it to a teen unless I really trusted them to seek out someone to talk to afterward if they needed it.
 

Lost Letters takes place on a picturesque island with a Mediterranean climate and a population that is predominantly talking fish-people, with only a few humans around. From the start, we're following Iode (short for Iodine), a boy of 11 or 12 who lives alone with his pet pelican, and who's waiting for a letter from his mother. Iode's mother is a pilot, she and her husband are no longer together, and Iode is convinced that she's looking for a new island for the two of them to go live on, and that when she finds it, she'll send him a letter telling him to come move back in with her. In fact, he's really, super convinced that she already sent this letter, and that the only reason he hasn't received it yet is because it's gotten lost in the mail.
 
So let me say that it's obvious from the outset that this is going to be a sad book. No matter how lighthearted its adventures might appear, the audience knows, we know, that whatever the situation with Iode's mother is, it's definitely not what he thinks it is, and it's definitely not that the letter he's hoping for is just stuck somewhere else in the island's mail system, simply waiting for him to find it. And we may suspect that, on some level, Iode knows this too, and he's in denial. So we know that parts of this book are going to be sad, especially when Iode learns and finally confronts the truth about his mom, but we may also hope that he'll maybe make a new friend or two, or maybe reconcile with his father, in a way that lets him reach a point of acceptance. And things sort of go like you'd expect, right up until they suddenly don't.
 

A sample of Jim Bishop's art.
From the left: Sista, the goldfish cop, and Iode.

 

 
Iode takes the family car and drives into town on another part of the island, so he can go to the post office. On the way, he meets Sista, an older teen girl who's hitchhiking to get to town. Sista is involved in a bunch of hijinks, and basically all the action and excitement in the book emerges from her plotline. Sista is a courier for the mob, headed into town to deliver a mysterious briefcase. The mob boss is an octopus. Sista is also an undercover agent for the royal guard, who's infiltrating the mob by working her way up through the ranks as an errand girl. The royal guard is Sista's found family, filling a void in her life since she was abandoned as a child. Her handler's codename is Mom.
 
Iode assumes Sista will help him at the post office, which already has an hours-long line when they reach town. She immediately sneaks off to continue her covert operation. Iode, apparently unable to conceive of any other reason she wouldn't hang out with him, jumps to the conclusion that she was kidnapped, and calls the police. 
 
An incompetent goldfish cop (he has a humanoid robot body, but his head is just a goldfish swimming in a glass bowl, wearing a police cap) briefly takes on the case, but he's much too busy chasing glory to bother with kid stuff. Unfortunately, he does mention all this to a corrupt fish cop, who immediately tells the mafia that their secret courier is attracting too much attention, and just like that, Sista is burned, both from the mob and from the royal guards. 
 
There's a lot of moving parts between cause and effect here - including that the mob wouldn't have wanted Sista to hitchhike, or take the cablecar across town, she was supposed to walk the whole way - but to be clear, Iode made a silly, childish assumption and then called the police about it, which is a roll of the dice every time, and that resulted in Sista getting fired. In fact, without some timely help from Iode at the aquarium, that phone call likely would've led to Sista being shot, or drowned. Neither Iode nor Sista seems to realize the connection, and it's unclear to me how much responsibility, if any, Bishop assigns to the phone call, but there it is.
  
Anyway, there's a shoot-out, an aquarium collapse, a last minute rescue. Iode and Sista do start to become friends, and the next day, she joins him at the post office, and rides with him when he borrows a seaplane to chase down a mail flight, which circuitously leads to a final confrontation with the mob. It's all very exciting, even fun. Bishop's art is excellent, just the right blend of realistic and cartoony. His poses are dynamic, his faces expressive. You practically feel like you're already watching animation when you read it.
 
When none of Iode's attempts to find the letter go anywhere, Sista goes with him to see his estranged father, who tells her the truth his son won't accept. Iode's mom left five years earlier, because she had terminal cancer and wanted to enjoy one last flight before she died. She wrote a letter to explain all this before she left, and Iode received the letter. Sista takes Iode back to the beach house, where she finds the letter, right next to the mailbox, where he read it then refused to accept it and blocked it out. Sista gets Iode to face the truth, and he instantly ages five years, suddenly appearing 16 or 17. It's a powerful visual metaphor of how he was stuck, and how he's now achieved catharsis. It's sad, but acceptance is better, right?
 
And then there's the epilogue. It's one year later. The incompetent goldfish cop is now a janitor, and actually good at it. Iode is becoming a young man. He looks awkward, but time is passing for him again. And what about Sista? We see her commit suicide by walking into the ocean and drowning. Then Iode receives her suicide note as a letter. She explains that she's never recovered from the loss of her found family in the royal guard, and sees no future for herself without that job. 
 
And that's that, that's the end. We explicitly see the other characters able to accept things and move on. But Sista does not, and the way Bishop chooses to present it sees especially cruel. Her death is presented as a thing that happens to Iode, as one last chapter in what remains fundamentally his story. And as I said earlier, there's no more context, no more explanation. It's shocking, and then it's over. Why did her friendship save him, but his friendship didn't save her? I know that can happen in life, but this is fiction. Bishop didn't have to write it this way; he chose to. And his decision really soured me on a book that I otherwise really enjoyed up to that point, and made it hard for me to recommend despite how much there is to like in it.

The Shadow of the Torturer

 

The Shadow of the Torturer

by Gene Wolfe

Orb

1980, reprinted 1994 

 

 

The Shadow of the Torturer is the first book of a quartet, known as The Book of the New Sun, which is considered to be Gene Wolfe's masterpiece. The series is a science fantasy story, set so far in the future that the sun is dying, or at least aging to become less and less hospitable to human life. One time marker, offered late in this book, put these events at least 30 thousand years in our future. 
 
The series is narrated by Severian, who is writing it down at the end of his life. At the time of he's writing this, Sevarian has become the Autarch of the whole planet, now known as Urth. At the time depicted in the book, he's a teenage boy on the cusp of manhood. An orphan, raised by and apprentice to the Torturer's Guild in the city of Nessus. If I understand correctly, his parents must've been among the Guild's victims. Nessus is an enormous city on a southern continent, built near the coast along a great river that runs north to south, and that's south of the world's greatest rainforest ... so possibly far-future Buenos Aires.
 
Severian claims to have a perfect memory, although there's some reason to not take him entirely at his word on that. At several points he fails to recognize someone he's seen before until after it's too late for the recognition to do him any good. Once, when he brings someone a food tray, and that person asks him what's for dinner, Severian can't answer, because he can't see the tray sitting behind her, and can't remember what's on it. He doesn't point this discrepancy out himself, but I noticed it, and it sort of made me wonder whether his memory has limits he's not aware of, or if it's something he somehow acquires later on in his life.
 
Wolfe does a few things that make this a challenging, but hopefully rewarding read. One is simply to not have any character point out certain features of the tale. No one says the old name of the city, for example. And based on its description, I'm pretty sure the tower the Torturer's Guild occupies is a space shuttle, but no one says anything to hint at that. Another is the pseudo-archaic diction of the book. Rather than invent a lot of neologisms, Wolfe draws on older words, or at least older word-stems, and invests them with new meaning. The diction of the narration is formal and strange too. Not stilted, exactly, but also not conversational. There are also a number of incidents in the text whose full meaning is unclear at the time, and whose true importance is revealed only later in the book. (And, I presume in some cases, later in the series.)
 
There are also a couple things Wolfe does to help the reader out. While some features of the future world pass unremarked, others are pointed out and explained. When young Severian sees a portrait that sounds like a photo of an astronaut on the moon, the curator cleaning the old image confirms this interpretation to the boy. When Severian is tricked the most badly, and fails to heed or understand a timely warning note, others help him to explicitly figure things out, though belatedly, after he's already barely survived. 
 
And in a couple situations with the most potential to be ambiguous or confusing, the most straightforward explanation is the correct one. At a lake where preserved dead bodies are sunk in mud, we meet an old man who's spent decades trying to find his wife's bog-mummy. When a mysterious, mud-covered young woman with amnesia swims to the surface later, we may not know how or why one of the dead bodies has come back to life, but yes, that is what's happened, and yes, it is that poor old guy's wife. When Severian sleeps next to a giant and dreams of even larger alien giants who now live in Urth's oceans, we may not know the mechanism by which this information is transferred, but yes, these aliens now do live here underwater; yes, that's why Severian saw a giant woman's face when he nearly drowned as a child; and yes, the giant Baldanders is a member of this same alien species, just young and small enough that he can still survive on land. These situations are strange, and there's not initially enough information to understand them fully, but Wolfe is careful not to mislead us, and to provide a few extra, supernatural guideposts.
 
I really do like Wolfe's writing. Here's Severian in chapter 1 espousing one of the central tenets of sociology, for example: "Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things far weaker than our words for them." There's not some profound aside like that on every page, probably not in every chapter, but amid the narrative, Wolfe manages to leave us with a few observations about life and human nature of the sort that book lovers occasionally get as tattoos.
 
Severian's story seems like a dark reflection of the classic hero's journey, where every step comes out wrong. (Or perhaps, each step is doubled, with one version inverted and the other more traditional?) Rather than reluctantly but voluntarily leaving home because he's called away by a problem in the broader world, Severian is thrown out of the Torturer's Guild in disgrace for showing someone mercy. His punishment is to become an executioner. Instead of meeting a wise mentor or a friendly sidekick, he's targeted, first by the suspicious-seeming impresario of a traveling show, and then by a femme fatale. He gets a special, named sword, but Terminus Est is a tool, an executioner's beheading blade.
 
Although he doesn't admit it, Sevarian is naive and repeatedly finds himself trapped in situations he doesn't understand, doesn't even recognize as being dangerous until it's almost too late to escape. Wolfe's high diction and learned prose hides a lost teenager, playing at adulthood too soon in a cruel society, without understanding the rules or the stakes, with his life hanging in the balance.
 

The Shadow of the Torturer contains a complete chapter in Severian's life, but it's clearly not a stand-alone novel. The book literally ends with him crossing through the gate out of the city of Nessus on his way to the hinterlands town where he's been assigned to work, and I know that the next book will start with him emerging from the gate into the world beyond the city. I'll be reading the next in the series later this year.