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.