The Sun

 
The Sun

by Frans Masereel

The Frans Masereel Group

1919, reprinted 2020
 

 

The Sun is a wordless graphic novel, part of a tradition from the early 20th century of books made up entirely of woodblock prints. Lynd Ward is probably the most famous artist in this tradition, but instead, I'm starting with one of the works of Frans Maesreel. Unlike later sequential art, there are no panels here. Each page is a single black-and-white image, although they do clearly tell a linear story.
 

The Sun is framed as being a dream. It begins with a man asleep at his desk, then his avatar appears, goes on an adventure and returns, and then the man wakes up. The avatar looks maybe like a younger, fitter version of the man. His adventure shows him looking at, and repeatedly trying to reach out and grab, the sun. I understand Masereel to mean this metaphorically, rather than literally. The sun, I think, represents some kind of idea or ideal that the man wants to achieve, something that guides him, obsesses him, but also remains ever out of reach. Beyond just the setting, in Europe immediately after WWI, the spirit of The Sun reminds me of the film Metropolis, with its hope that if you could just find the right idea, that idea would solve class conflict.
 
The man climbs to the top of buildings several times, each one higher than before. He climbs a tree, he catches a flock of birds to carry him, he rides in an airplane, he is held aloft by a kite, he jumps really high. The sun is omnipresent in the sky. Each time, he loses his grip or footing while reaching out for the sun, or his support fails, or he gets too close and catches fire. The sun is on almost every page, except in some of the city scenes. The man points out the sun to others. Some try to join him, some seem to laugh, some offer him distraction or try to defeat him, but he's indefatigable. No matter how many times he falls, or how far, he continues. He looks behind library books, he looks behind the crucifix in a church, he looks at the lamplight on the wall of a brothel, but he's not fooled for long by other kinds of light. Eventually he leaves the city and continues his search out in nature. When the dream ends and he wakes up, he laughs at himself, but I don't think he's really given up.
 
Masereel's prints are dominated by black, with white providing the outlines and highlights. The black is really the negative space here, with white creating all the details. You really get a sense of being immersed in a city - the buildings, the monuments, the transportation, the crowds of onlookers. For all that the prints are iconic and simplified, you get a surprisingly detailed look at early 20th century life! 

 

Heavenly Bodies

 
Heavenly Bodies

Cult Treasures and Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs

by Paul Koudounaris

Thames & Hudson

2013

 

 

Heavenly Bodies is a nonfiction history of an all-but-forgotten Catholic tradition from the Counter Reformation, the exhuming, decorating, and displaying of 'catacomb saints' - skeletons from the Roman catacombs, elaborately decorated with precious metals and gemstones, housed as relics in churches and monasteries, primarily in Germany and Austria. Author and photographer Paul Koudounaris visited a number that once housed catacomb saints, and a few that still do, to learn their history, see them in their present condition, and document them with photographs. There are so many photos, this is practically an art book! The text too, could stand alone, but benefits greatly from being able to see the relics.
 
Catacomb saints are an invented tradition, an innovation by the Catholic Church in the late 1500s, a response to the Protestant Reformation generally, and more specifically, to the looting and destruction of relics from some Catholic churches that some Protestants carried out in the name of reform. If the early Protestants were iconoclasts, Catholic leaders hoped to win back lapsed believers and strengthen the resolve of their faithful by leaning into this contrast, and decorating their churches with impressive new icons. New catacomb saints were delivered to German churches mostly during the 1600s, but new deliveries continued into the 1800s, albeit at a slower pace.
 
Producing a mass supply of revered dead, all at once, a millennium and a half after the founding of their religion, confronted Catholic leaders with an interesting manufacturing problem. Plenty of new saints had been canonized over time, but they (and their remains) were all already accounted for. But the Roman catacombs might hold an untold number of early Christian corpses, and before the religion was legalized by Constantine in the early 300s, many of them might be martyrs. The catacombs would also contain the remains of Roman pagans and Jews, plus non-martyred Christians. So how could you tell which entombed remains were martyrs? And how could you be sure of finding enough martyrs to supply all the parishes in Germany that you wanted to decorate?
 
The answer of course is to use sloppy, ambiguous criteria that produce a lot of false positives, and to insist that every positive you produce is authentic and legitimate. You need both methods that lie, and to convince yourself that really, they're producing the truth. Sociologist Kai Erikson wrote about this in Wayward Puritans, how the early American religious communities kept counting more and more frivolous offenses as 'crimes' in order to continue punishing a consistent number of community members for misbehavior. But you see it wherever leaders set a quota and authorize those below them to meet it in whatever way they can justify. So you'll see it in police forces that use traffic tickets and civil asset forfeiture to collect revenue, in corporations that set profit targets that can't be met legally. You see it in the software Republican officials use to find voters to disenfranchise, in the guidelines Trump's immigration enforcers use to identify people with no criminal records as gang members who can be arrested and deported, in the AI software Netenyahu's army uses to label Palestinians as members of Hamas who can be targeted for execution by drone strike. You see it in the buggy equipment ghost hunters use to generate proof of hauntings, and the statistical tricks scientists can deploy to produce a significant but irreplicable finding. Anyway, with their process in place, Catholic relic-hunters in Rome found enough skeletons to meet the demand, and felt confident in labeling each of them as martyrs, calling them saints, assigning them names, even if the burial markers were unreadable. Insisting on better, more truthful criteria, even at the cost of not having enough, tends to be the domain of critics. In the case of the catacomb saints, the critics were easy to ignore at first, but were eventually persuasive enough to halt the practice.
 

 
Skeletons from Rome were 'articulated,' or wired into a posed whole, and decorated with embroidered cloth, beads and buttons, strings of pearls, mounted gemstones, and wires and settings of gold. They were shipped to the heart of Protestant country and seen as weapons for Catholicism. They're supposed to symbolize God's power and generosity, and the luxurious conditions that await all believers in heaven. To modern eyes, they look quite strange. They are at once macabre, morbid, shocking in the amount of wealth each one displays, and also almost unbelievably gaudy and tacky. This is the Catholic faith at its most glamorous, it's most goth. It's not surprising worshipers felt awed by them. There is one contemporary motif I'm aware of that resembles catacomb saints though - the flower bedecked skull illustrations associated with the Mexican Day of the Dead. The idea of claiming dead people, who possibly belonged to other faiths, and recruiting them into present-day religious practice also reminds me a bit of the posthumous baptisms carried out by the Mormon Church.
 
Once decorated, the skeletons would be displayed in churches across Germany, usually very prominently, and it seems they were successful in invigorating worshipers, including attracting pilgrims and inspiring cash donations. Many congregations devoted a special day to their saint once a year, when the body in its protective glass case might even be removed from the church and sent on parade before returning to its place of honor.
 
Catholicism is rare among religions for displaying a revering relics. The Protestant criticisms (eventually taken up by Catholic leaders during the Enlightenment in the 1800s) were both religious and aesthetic. The religious complaint is that the public doesn't understand sophisticated theological arguments about how the visible relic is the symbol of a saint who intercedes between God and the congregation to amplify their prayers - the complaint is that people worship the bones directly, and attribute miracles to the physical object, not the soul of the saint, or to god. And indeed, each relic accumulated a growing list of supposed miracles over the years, most often injuries healed and illnesses cured. The aesthetic argument is that they're silly and ugly and old fashioned. And of course, the gold and jewels are attractive targets for both criminal theft and legal confiscation.
 
Very few churches that received catacomb saints still have them, and many that remain are hidden away in storage, in attics and closets. Most of the disposals took place during the Enlightenment, when secular German leaders and Catholic authorities alike decided to hide or dispose of what they'd come to see as an embarrassing legacy, often despite the wishes and objections of everyday churchgoers who still valued the relics. That was one thing that struck me, throughout Koudounaris's account of history - how often leaders of all kinds made unilateral decisions about how the people under them ought to believe and worship, and how often those decisions were premised on the idea that the common people were stupid and must be doing it wrong.

Paper Girls 1

 
 
Paper Girls 1

by Brian Vaughan
art by Cliff Chiang
Image Comics
2016

 

 

Paper Girls 1 collects the first few issues of a comic series in the 'kids on bikes' subgenre about teenagers in the 1980s discovering scifi weirdness in their suburban cul-de-sac, as popularized by Stranger Things. It's a style of story that relies on our nostalgic memory of the 80s, that somewhat resembles a subset of stories that were popular then, but that also relies on us today having enough distance to have formed a simplified, stylized consensus image of the decade. In the same way that no one would've actually made Grease or Happy Days or Bye Bye Birdie in the 1950s, 'kids on bikes' plots needed that 30 years of distance to become viable.
 
Anyway, our heroes here are four newspaper delivery girls, out on their usual morning routes at 5am the day after Halloween in 1988. Our viewpoint character is Erin, the new girl, who the others recruit for mutual protection against the older boys in Halloween costumes who think it's fun to harass preteen girls when there are no adults around. Erin is enamored with group leader Mac, the first girl in town to get a paper route, who made it okay for the others to get one too.
 
Erin is Chinese American and goes to Catholic school, Tiffany is Black and goes to a different private Christian school, KJ is Jewish, and Mac is White, goes to public school, and comes from the poorest family in the group. Mac uses anti-gay slurs against anyone who threaten the girls, which strikes me as pretty accurate for the time period, while the others appreciate her defending them but wish she'd use different words, which seems like a more contemporary touch.
 
It's fortunate they team up, because they quickly find themselves in danger from a lot more than rude kids. First, the power goes out, almost everyone else in the neighborhood vanishes, and the sky fills up with stars and constellations they've never seen before. The girls get accosted by some creepy-looking guys who speak an alien language dressed all in black. And a flock of pterandons descends on the neighborhood, some ridden by knights in white armor. Things are getting weird!
 
The girls are mostly trying to keep away from anything strange, especially after Erin gets injured, but they (and we, the audience) soon realize that the dinosaur riders are somehow responsible for all this, that the black-clad teens are mostly there to steal local tech while whatever's going on is happening, and that the girls themselves were supposed to have vanished along with everyone else. Also, all of this has something to do with some catastrophe in the future, something bad enough to justify sending people back to pilfer from the past. It helps that a translator device eventually helps the girls understand the future-teens.
 
Eventually, the girls get medical help for Erin, and ditch the knights in white armor, although the boys who helped them aren't so lucky. At the very end, the think they've found another ally ... an older, adult version of Erin!
 
This first volume is very heavy on mystery and set-up, light on explanation. It's probably the kind of introduction that repays you for rereading it once you understand more about how things work. The art is bold and graphic, with an emphasis on showing the emotions on people's faces, and a mix of pastel and neon colors to reflect the palette of the idealized 80s.
 
The 'alien language' spoken by the older boys is a simple substitution code, with a unique symbol taking the place of each letter. Other readers solved it and posted a key online, which I appreciate. We only see the symbols when the boys don't have access to a translator, but I think it enriches the story if you go back and see what they were actually saying the rest of the time after your initial readthrough.

 

Gretel and the Great War

 
 
Gretel and the Great War

by Adam Erlich Sachs

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2024 

 

 

Gretel and the Great War is a mosaic novel, a series of tales that are halfway between chapters and short stories. The conceit is that a mute young woman was found wandering the streets of Vienna in 1919, in the aftermath of the war and the flu, that she was checked into an asylum, and that soon afterward, letters started arriving for her from a different asylum, letters from her father, telling her bedtime stories.
 
Each story tells the tale of a different person, identified only by their profession. There are 26 stories, each associated with a letter of the alphabet, which matches the name of the job, and each is written so that that letter or sound will show up much more than normal. At first, it doesn't seem like the stories have any connection, but soon the characters start to reappear and intersect. It becomes clear they're all part of the same social world, and the stories are being told in roughly chronological order. Almost every story involves someone getting sent to the Sanitarium of Dr Krakauer, where they presumably meet Gretel's father and relate their tale to him.
 
In true fairy tale fashion, the stories are dark but often funny, told in a manner that's playful and irreverent, but that also references any crude subject matter using polite terminology. Most of the stories involve adults caring for children - or rather, adults who have responsibility for children. They are often, in fact, quite un-caring, or else worse, they are too interested, in ways that seem sinister no matter how obliquely Gretel's father describes the nature of their interest. And as is so often the case with fairy tales, there's a moral here. The Vienna described in these tales is a sick society, where people hold outrageous, inflexible ideals, and are eager to commit acts of cruelty to achieve them. It's no wonder they go to war, and after the war, they seem even harsher and more cruel, xenophobic and antisemitic.

 
An architect aspires to design the simplest possible building facade, one that somehow traumatizes the viewer. A ballet choreographer invents a new dance step he claims is more natural than any other, and his wife dies trying to dance it. A choir master performs surgeries on the boys in his choir in his quest for the purest possible sound. He's inspired (rather than warned off) by a woman who tells him about the 'bad things' her own choir master father used to do to her and her brothers. A playwright demands such intense lighting for his play that it burns the theater down. A Serbian man wants revenge for feeling snubbed and disrespected by the ethnically German majority. Over and over people's obsessions cross paths with the theater, the concert hall, the Duke and Duchess, and their beloved youngest daughter. (Also, just about every adult in the book wants to fuck, and only rarely with their actual spouse.)
 
Gretel's mother first appears in the M story, and like many of the people we meet, she reappears later. She's a singer and aspiring actress who abandons her husband and daughter in favor of her art. Gretel herself appears in a few of the later stories too, although I don't think we find out quite why she can no longer speak. Several of the characters seem to similar to each other, and since none of them have names, it can be a little hard to keep track of them, to tell who's the same person back again, and who merely has a backstory that mirrors some of the details of somebody else's. A good portion of the book consists of stories within stories as well, tales told by character in a chapter that might be as important, or even more so, than the main story of the chapter.
 
The silly, obsessive behavior of the characters, the playful sing-song narrative voice, the word games being played with letters and sounds, all of it acts like the spoonful of sugar to help wash down the realization that these people are insane, that their society, Europe generally, but also Austria-Hungary specifically, had gone mad, that they prioritized ideas over people, that their determination to implement forms of radical simplicity and purity regardless of who got trampled or smashed to achieve it was bound to lead to disaster. Such, at least, is author Adam Erlich Sachs's diagnosis. Nothing quite covers up the underlying bitterness though, especially when I read this while watching my own country succumb to leaders who seem gleeful to inflict human suffering, which they claim will make America 'simpler' or 'purer,' but which will probably only make us smaller, meaner, poorer, with a government that's unable to help anyone who needs it, that functions solely to persecute. In the book, the Great War, when it arrives, seems almost like just another cockamamie scheme writ large, only different because this time it entangles absolutely everyone instead of just a few.
 
In setting, Gretel and the Great War is like a neighbor to Berlin or Children are Civilians Too, although it's organized quite differently than either of them. The playful language in "Gretel," the use of the alphabet and bedtime story as structuring devices makes it unlike other mosaic novels, but oddly similar to Rebecca Brown's The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary, which also uses those devices to leaven some very dark subject matter.

7th Time Loop 3

 
 
7th Time Loop 3

The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy!

by Touko Amekawa

art by Hinoki Kino

Seven Seas

2023

 

  

7th Time Loop follows the adventures of Rishe, a girl who has repeatedly died at 20 and then returned to a pivotal moment at age 15. In her first six lives, she's become a merchant, an apothecary, a maid, and a soldier, and each time she's died in a war started by the tyrant Arnold Hein. Now in her seventh life, Rishe has become Arnold's fiance, years before he starts his deadly war, and to her surprise, he seems like a compassionate leader, not a brutal conqueror. She hopes that by marrying him, she can intervene to prevent him from starting the war.
 
In the previous volume, Rishe briefly met Arnold's scheming younger brother, and decided to try to reconnect with the merchant company she traveled with in her first life. She wants them as allies, but they've never met her, so she has to convince them.
 
Now, at the start of volume 3, Rishe studies some of the details of how Arnold has ruled, and plots to impress her old boss. She thinks the easiest way would be to provide luxuries for him to sell to aristocrats, but reading some recent history convinces her to try something else. It seems Arnold's been building a welfare state! After the last war, the hinterlands were depopulated, food was expensive, and the country had too many unemployed former soldiers. Arnold bought food at a premium and sold it at a loss - the farm subsidies attracted veterans to farming and supported the rural population, and the food aid helped the kingdom's poor get enough to eat. It's kind of shocking to me to see an extended example and defense of social democracy in a fantasy comic!
 
Rishe's plan involves more welfare capitalism. Basically she wants to implement the post-WWII consensus on corporate governance (prior to the rise of leveraged buyouts in the 1980s) - sell an affordable product, pay a living wage, and your own business practices will grow your customer base. Rishe recreates a nail polish she previously invented as an apothecary. She offers it to the merchants on the condition they sell it cheap and hire currently-unemployed people to make it. The merchant captain starts out all swaggering bravado, but eventually sees the profit potential in Rishe's proposal, and anachronistic welfare politics prevail.
 
The rest of the volume involves a lengthy plot about Arnold's younger brother kidnapping Rishe. Rishe is waaay more competent than he was prepared for though. She easily escapes and trounces his many guards. She also realizes he was trying to provoke a fight with Arnold. Rishe hopes that by repairing the brothers' relationship, she can help prevent a future where Arnold becomes a tyrant.

The Best American Comics 2017

 
 
The Best American Comics 2017

edited by Ben Katchor

Mariner Books

2017 

 

 

The 2017 edition of The Best American Comics series was edited by Ben Katchor, who I only know about because of seeing him in previous years. Katchor's comics are about city life, and are written in a style that appears to be non-fiction. He adopts the tone and style of journalism, anthropology, and nature documentaries to write about entirely fictional fads, trends, local cultural traditions, etc. I feel like, more than any other editor so far, I'm aware of Katchor's own style, and how that must affect his preferences for what he considers 'best' when evaluating other comics.
 
I'm pretty sure there's more graphic nonfiction this year than in the past - both journalism and history, as well as graphic memoir. We get an excerpt from Ed Piskor's Hip Hop Family Tree, and Joe Sacco has a comic he made to support someone's city council campaign, that the campaign then mailed out to potential voters. Sacco spent some time shadowing the candidate while she met with locals to talk about how they're affected by rising rents, and reports the experience faithfully. Gabrielle Bell, who I've enjoyed here before, has some diary entries. And Ethan Persoff and Scott Marshall have part of a biographical comic about John Wilcox, one of the founders of the Village Voice newspaper.
 
In the fictional comics, there are several that initially look like nonfiction. Kim Dieth's "The Shrine of the Monkey God" is a wild shaggy dog story and the longest piece in here, and it has two frame stories trying to present it as truth. At the monkey diorama at a museum, an old man tells his adult daughter thestory of how, when he was in grade school, he got accosted by a man at the same exhibit, and the man told him the story of how when HE was young, he got lost in the jungle and raised by monkeys, until his human parents found him again, shot all the monkeys, and taxidermied them into this exhibit. Deb Sokolow has a comic of absurdist claims about Willem de Kooning, drawn in a style similar to de Kooning's art. It reminded me of Tommaso Landofli's short story "Gogol's Wife," which purports to be a true account of the famous Russian author's 'marriage' to an inflatable rubber sex doll.
 
There are a couple very colorful weird comics by Ben Duncan and Michael DeForge, who both write very strange psychedelic comics, but do so in a way that's still very legible, and thus reasonably commercial.
 
And then there's even more esoteric stuff. Some seem like comics that insiders might be familiar with - works whose art style and narrative are rather far from clear black-and-white illustrations telling a comprehensible, sequential story - but that seem to still be produced and distributed within the same industry and art world as the stuff that amateurs and dilettantes like me would be familiar with. Some of this kind of thing has been in each previous year, but I think Katchor liked more of it.
 
Moving further afield still, Katchor includes some works that originally appeared in art galleries, probably on panels much larger than the pages here, but that still can be counted as 'comics' based on their appearance, even though they're distributed through an entirely different system, the one that connects buyers to fine art, such as Dapper Brue Lafitte's panels about Muhammad Ali.
 
And, through search methods unknown to me, Katchor also found what I'd consider true outsider art - comics produced by people who never went to art school, who aren't part of the contemporary comics scene, who aren't aware of the trends and wouldn't have the experience or technical skill to follow then even if they knew, but who nevertheless have stories to tell and were willing to put ink to paper to tell them, that seem to have been published in community center newsletters.
 
One challenge with all three of those last kinds of comics is that they can be quite challenging to understand or even read. The rendering of figures and division of story beats into panels can be unfamiliar, and because it's deeply specific to the author, unlike the conventions a reader might be used to. And the text in particular might be semi-illegible due to combination of unusual syntax, idiosyncratic handwriting, and simply due to its extremely small size.

The West Passage

 
 
The West Passage

by Jared Pechacek

Tor

2024

 

 

The West Passage is a very weird, very medieval fantasy novel. Jared Pechacek has written something bizarre and fascinating, and I'd recommend it to almost anyone who likes adventure stories. Our viewpoint characters are a pair of young people, entrusted with adult responsibility to soon, who are sent on different errands following the death of the old Guardian of the West Passage. To these two, the palace is their whole world, but they've never really seen it before, except for their own little section. As they travel, the see the sights, meet people, learn history, and accidentally become involved in the machinations of the palace rulers, and as they do, we learn things too. Almost all the worldbuilding in the book is accomplished via sight-seeing, which allows the palace and its utter strangeness to emerge at a manageable pace.

 

As a book, The West Passage is structured and decorated like a much older story. It's divided into eight parts and many chapters. Each part is named for the primary character we're following and has an illustrated frontispiece that depicts part of the palace or one of its Ladies; each chapter has a title that lists the events that will happen during it and has an illustrated header showing some characters or a scene. Pechacek's illustrations look a lot like the art from medieval illuminated manuscripts, especially the weird little guys that show up in the doodles monks used to draw in the margins of their very serious books. These illustrations are one of first clues we get to the strangeness of the world. Yes, the Ladies really are as tall as towers; yes, they have too many limbs; yes, one has the head of a bird, another has a stone building for a head. Yes, some people have spines, others rabbit ears, others various animal parts.
 
The world of West Passage is medieval in other ways as well. Not just because it's set entirely inside a city-sized palace, or because its godlike rulers are called Ladies, or because of the style of clothes or level of technology, although all those things are indeed like the Middle Ages. But what truly feels pre-modern is the crushing, stultifying weight of history and tradition, that bears down on everything, smothers everything. The palace was founded during the Rose Age, which lasted hundreds of years, as did each subsequent dynasty, for over a millennium, each Age ended by the appearance of the Beast.

Every task is performed by a guild, and adults have a Name, a title that's determined by the office the hold. (Even their adult gender is determined by their Name; a more strict and severe version of the sort of rule that made Christina the king of Sweden, rather than its queen. The palace is matriarchal, so most Names are women's.) Every little task throughout the day is performed according to tradition, there are songs and litanies to help remember them all. Certain offices receive wine or honey or other gifts from the Ladies, rewards for the deeds of office-holders generations ago. There is, seemingly, no room for self or individuality, only duty and tradition, only doing the same things as they've always been done.
 
At the start of the book, the Guardian dies, and the Women in Grey perform her funeral. We follow Pell and Kew. Pell is an apprentice to the women, who will become Yarrow, the mother of the women, when the old mother dies. Kew is the sole apprentice guardian, who wants to become the next Hawthorne now that his master is dead, but cannot, because she died without elevating him, and because old Yarrow refuses. Grey House is severely depopulated, nearly empty; the farms and villages of Grey are nearly as sparse. For generations now, there have been no doctors or tutors, for example, because the last ones died with no replacement, their tasks simply never performed again. It's a place of loss, a place that seems almost dead. All of this is contained within the palace - the gardens and orchards are courtyards, all the housing and other structures built within the circumscribing walls.
 
Kew sets off to warn Black Tower that the Beast is rising again, and to ask for his adult Name. Soon Pell will become Yarrow and set off to petition Black too, to tell them that an early winter sits over Grey, freezing their crops and risking starvation, to beg them to turn the Great Wheel that controls the seasons, and bring back the spring and summer they're owed. The simplicity of their quests, and the obvious, understandable urgency of their needs help to ground the book in reality. The palace may be a place where building-sized Ladies exude holiness that compels worship and obedience, where a lost panacea of human flesh in honey can cure any wound, where lanterns filled with liquid light travel overhead on rails, propelled by gears and the sound of whistling - it is still also a place where people grow weak and feel pain from hunger, where they faint from lack of water on long walks, where they need chamberpots because there's no plumbing.
 
A pivotal scene for me involved seeing one of the kitchens of Black Tower, seeing how much wealth could be concentrated in one place, how much waste that entails, and how that must be the cause of privation elsewhere. Pell and Kew aren't unusual within the palace for being devoted to their duty, even for risking their lives for it. But they are unusual for being kind, for being willing to defer their missions to be nice to someone else, rather than pointing to tradition as an excuse to enjoy being cruel. The pair's quests send them across the palace where they intersect with revolutionary changes afoot at the end of the Age. But Pell and Kew each change the palace, change the world, not by siding with one coup or usurpation over another, but by showing human kindness to someone in need. From those small seeds, world-changing consequences bloom.
 

The West Passage is one of the most D&D-like fantasy books I've read. The palace is like a megadungeon, complete with color-coded regions, and aside from the four great Passages between levels, it can only be navigated like a maze, detouring around locked doors and crumbled ceilings, cutting through abandoned and repurposed rooms and hallways. We learn the history of the palace much as D&D players do, finding paintings and murals, hearing several versions of the same stories, trying to piece together the truth in the overlap. The people have unusual bodies, obsessive interests, and eccentric mannerisms. Much of the magic in the place resides in ancient items whose original purpose is now obscure, like the legless automaton who walks on his hands and carries deliveries on the platform of his back. More than anything else they do, Pell and Kew explore and learn, and eventually get the chance to exercise a bit of outsized agency by being in the right place during unsettled times and making educated, unexpected actions that defy tradition. I don't mean to suggest that this is a good book because it reminds me of D&D, but it is a very good book, and also, it reminds me of D&D.

Glass Onion (2022)

 
 

Glass Onion

directed by Rian Johnson

written by Rian Johnson

Netflix

2022

 

Glass Onion opens in the midst of early 2020 pandemic doldrums, and almost immediately travels to an isolated dreamland on an island of the ultra-rich. The transition is a little rocky, but I applaud anyone willing to acknowledge the existence of the Covid pandemic in fiction. It seems most writers prefer to pretend that it never happened.

 

The first half of Glass Onion is just okay, but the real fun begins in the second half, when Janelle Monae emerges as a force of nature in flashbacks that recontextualize everything we've seen so far. There's something amusingly meta-textual about an actual murder happening at one of those murder mystery dinner parties, although that premise doesn't mesh very neatly with all the characters being easy-to-hate right-wing celebrity grifters.

 

The solution to the mystery is an enjoyable expansion on the old Purloined Letter idea of truth hiding in plain sight, and the conclusion to the film is a satisfying explosion of unleashed resentments, plus one of the best Chekov's Gun payoffs I've ever seen. If the actual Mona Lisa, on loan from the Louvre, is introduced in the first act...

 

Overall though, I liked Knives Out better. I thought the way it played with time and the tropes of cozy mystery were more interesting. And I found the conceit - that all the characters in this one had been friends since the old days when only one of them was rich, and none were yet famous - implausible based on what I think I know about celebrity friendships.

 

The fact that this is a sequel also robs it of some of its dramatic tension. Knives Out is structured as much like a monster movie as it is like a mystery, and Benoit Blanc is the monster stalking poor Marta. Most of the suspense and a lot of the humor in that film comes from the open question of what kind of detective Blanc really is. Is he actually good at solving mysteries, or is he a bumbling incompetent? Is he a letter-of-the-law sort of man, or does he work toward some larger vision of justice? But the nature of a sequel is that those questions are already resolved before Glass Onion even starts. It's entertaining to watch Blanc do what he does, but half the fun of the original was wondering what does he do?

 

I'll also applaud Rian Johnson for anticipating the real Elon Musk's declining public reputation. Iron Man 2 and Star Trek: Discovery both reference Musk positively, even fawningly. Rian Johnson bet (correctly) that he's no longer as beloved as he once was, and fortunately for Johnson, the actual Musk has spent the last few months before the premier proving correct the film's thesis about what kind of man 'Miles Bron' is, and making his character even more unsympathetic and enjoyable to watch suffer.

 

 

Originally watched December 2022.