The Polaroid Book

 
 
The Polaroid Book
Selections from the Polaroid Collections of Photography

edited by Steve Crist

Taschen

2004 

 
The Polaroid Book is a collection of Polaroid photos by professional artists, often from an early point in their career. 
 
The photos were selected from the official Polaroid company archive by Steve Crist, and there's an introduction by Barbara Hitchcock, who works as an archivist at Polaroid. She explains that early on, Polaroid founder Charles land recruited photographer Ansel Adam to help test and experiment with his company's cameras and film. Adams also convinced Land to start collecting art photos. Adams started the archive by recruiting other established professional photographers and buying up a lot of their work with the company's money. Since then Polaroid has grown the collection by recruiting young artists and getting a sample of their work. Some then go on to become well-known. (Crist didn't include any of his own photos, but he did pick a couple of Hitchcock's.) 
 
The photos in the book include examples of probably every size of film Polaroid has ever produced, not just the iconic squares with white frames (although there are plenty of those too). Some artists managed multiple exposure tricks, which I would've thought were impossible, some modified the images afterward, a few even managed to chemically remove the color layer from the rest of the physical photograph and mount it in paper. It's a reminder that photographers need to know mechanics and chemistry as well as like, composition and color theory. Most of the shots are single images, but a few created sets - a pair, a triptych, 3×3 and 4×4 grids. David Hockney made an insane panorama of a single room, overlapping the edges of over a hundred snapshots to recreate the space in large format.
 
Crist picked one or two other names I recognized. There was a photo from Ansel Adams, possibly from that initial research trip to Yosemite. Andy Warhol had two self portraits, and someone else had a shot of him too. There are landscapes, still lifes, artistic nudes, surreal juxtapositions and abstract fragments of image with no context, close-ups like you might expect and long-shots with more detail than I realized the cameras were capable of. Many are in black and white, although Polaroid returns vibrant colors and stark contrast between darks and lights.
 
The contrast between The Polaroid Book and FOUND Polaroids is, unsurprisingly, enormous - it's a contrast between skilled professionals handing over some of their best shots on purpose and a smattering of amateur and mundane photos that were either accidentally lost or intended to be thrown away. This may shock you to hear, but the art photos are much better, and honestly, make for more varied and more interesting viewing.

Viriconium Nights

 
 
Viriconium Nights 
by John Harrison

Gollancz
1985, reprinted 2005
 
 
I know there are people who love John Harrison's Viriconium series, who hold it up as an exemplar of post-modern fantasy and heap praise on the way the latter stories undermine the continuity established by the first novels. How destabilizing! How anti-canon, how avant-garde! Having now finished the series, I find myself baffled by this perspective. The Pastel City was a masterpiece, A Storm of Wings was an ambitious but flawed sequel, and as for the rest, I can't really understand why Harrison bothered to write it, and I feel deceived by the rave reviews that convinced me to read it.
 
Viriconium Nights is a collection of short stories that Harrison wrote alongside the three Viriconium novels, the earliest one published later the same year as The Pastel City, which means this wasn't even a bad idea Harrison got later, it was always a parallel project, which means I need to revise the date on which my opinion of him drops to be much earlier. These stories aren't even set in Viriconium, but rather in Uroconium, which we're told in the story "Viriconium Knights" is just one of thousands, perhaps an infinite number of alternate Viriconiums, where every possible variation on the tales told in the novels have played out.
 
The main reason to care about a story is because it's told well. Another is because, internal to itself, it appears to have stakes that matter. A story about a man catching a bus and a story where a man has a dream he caught a bus are both equally fictional, but in the second story, the bus ride isn't 'real' even within the context of the fiction, and seems to matter less. When multiple stories are told in sequence, we might care about the later stories in part (or entirely) because we care about the setting or the characters and want to find out what happens to them next. 
 
By any of these three metrics, I simply don't care about Viriconium Nights. I don't think the stories are told particularly well, they have few stakes within themselves and are deliberately placed in a context where the outcome of any of them doesn't matter, and Harrison explicitly tells us that this isn't the city and these aren't the same characters he wrote about earlier, even if they have the same names.
 
When I reviewed In Viriconium, a commenter noted that based on an interview Harrison gave, even that book might not be set on the same fictional Earth as the first two. I've been thinking about what I want to say about that, because I'm not annoyed as the commenter, but like, I am annoyed at Harrison, especially if he really tried to claim that after the fact in an interview. If you want something to be true, say it in the book, not on social media, not to the press! Because what the actual text of In Viriconium says, in many places, is that this is the same city we've been in before, that it survived the War of the Two Queens, the arrival of the Reborn Men, the invasion of the Locusts, and the emigration of the Reborn Men to the north, to the wastes where the Locusts had been. What the book says is that The Grand Cairo is the future self of Tomb the dwarf, the same Tomb who saved the city from multiple disasters and who shepherded the Reborn Men on their migration.
 
In the short story "Viriconium Knights", Harrison does say, in the text of the story, that there are many versions of the city, and many potential stories that could be told about people who look like the ones you know but definitely aren't the same people. If I understand Harrison's project, he's trying to approximate - in a short time span, alone, and on purpose - something that happens to other fictional worlds slowly and accidentally as a result of their tales being told and retold countless times by many authors. It happened to the Greek myths, and arguably to many modern superheroes. There's no one true Batman I can point to as being real all the others imposters. And if I like two different Batman stories, it can only be because I think both are told well, not because one represents the future of the other.
 
I already didn't really like In Viriconium, and if I thought it wasn't, like an epilogue, telling me the eventual fate of the city I read about before, then I wouldn't have any interest in it at all. A Grand Cairo who is the same Tomb from before is interesting (and infuriating and pathetic), but if he's not even that, if he's just some other guy, then he's only a guy I don't care about who sucks. An old man Batman who has retired from heroing and become the mayor of Gotham, only to discover he doesn't know how to help in a crisis he can't punch, and worse, that his impatience with non-violent solutions is exacerbating the city's problems, is a tragic, compelling figure. Some other Bruce Wayne, whose parents were never killed, who never became a vigilante, who just grew up as a spoiled rich kid, and then became mayor and was bad at it, is boring and frustrating, and the fact that anyone bothered to write about him feels like a disservice.
 
Viriconium Nights has a couple of stories about Lord teagus-Cromis from The Pastel City that do nothing to illuminate him as a character. The rest focus on members of Uroconium's demimonde, which seems to be where Harrison's interests truly lie. Places like the Bistro Californium and the observatory, artists like Ansel Verdigris, Ashlyme, and Audsley King get mentioned in passing again and again, often with just enough detail to make sure you know that no, these aren't the same versions you read about before, possibly not even the same versions referenced in the other stories in this book. We see a couple members of the fighting clubs (like underground boxing, but with razor blades), a couple dancers, a couple instances of Morgante the dwarf, who is extra explicitly not Tomb. We see ordinary people viewing the city with ambivalence, a mix of desire and caution. And for reasons unclear to me, we get repeated mentions of Mari Lwyd, a real-world Welsh tradition that involves parading a horse's skull through the street.
 
The best, maybe the only good story in the book in my opinion, is "A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium", in which Harrison tries his hand at writing like Borges, specifically like the story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", where the real world is assailed by the incursion of imaginary objects manifesting out of a work of fiction. In "A Young Man's Journey", our narrator believes that Viriconium is a parallel Earth where everything is better and more real, and he wishes to escape our mundane world and travel to Viriconium. It's good, but it has no connection to any of the other stories except the name. It could have as easily been about a young man's journey to Oz or Wonderland or Tlon; nothing about the story really requires it to be Viriconium.
 
I would still recommend The Pastel City to any fantasy fan, and if you simply cannot get enough, I might cautiously suggest A Storm of Wings. But then, I would recommend you stop. Truly, even if you've been left wanting more, I think you'll be happier not getting it. If you want a weird city fantasy from around the same time, try KJ Bishop's The Etched City; if you want one more recent, consider Jared Pechacek's The Weste Passage.

Chloe and the Lion

 
Chloe and the Lion

by Mac Barnett

art by Adam Rex

Disney Hyperion

2012
 

 

My coworker who's interested in children's lit is taking a class on it this semester, so her desk is pretty much covered in kids' books and she has a new suggestion any time you ask. Her latest pick for me is Chloe and the Lion by Mac Barnett and illustrated by Adam Rex, and I have to say it's good choice for me, because I generally love the kind of metafictional gimmicks that are being deployed here. I eat this kind of thing right up.
 
I don't know the name for the exact metafictional device at work here, when a work of fiction stars what is supposedly its own author as a character, when the lead character of the work is depicted as acting out the story simply as a performance, as a job like any other. The most famous example is probably the play Six Characters in Search of an Author, although it's a device I know best from the Looney Tune "Duck Amuck", where Daffy Duck is tormented by an off-screen animator who keeps redrawing the cartoon around him, supposedly forcing Daffy to improvise his performance in response to the changing costumes and scenery.
 
Chloe and the Lion stars the character Chloe, of course, and a lion, but it also stars author Mac Barnett and artist Adam Rex. Actual Rex depicts 'Adam' and 'Mac' as detailed and relatively realistic clay figures, like you'd see in stop-motion animation, and shows them in a miniature theater with stage backdrops providing the scenery. I think these are photos of actual miniatures. As wholly fictional characters, Chloe and the lion are depicted as 2D drawings, playing their parts on-stage in response to Mac's narration. The mix of art syles is visually impressive and elevates the whole endeavor.
 
We never do get very far into the supposed story because of a clash of personalities between Adam and Mac very quickly derails the intended plot. Chloe collects coins and saves them up to ride the carousel, except one day she gets lost in the woods and meets ... well, she's supposed to meet a lion, but instead Adam draws a dragon because he thinks that looks cooler! Adam and Mac argue, and after several pages of disagreement, Adam gets fed to the lion and Mac takes over drawing the illustrations himself. They are comically bad and amateurish.
 
Eventually Chloe and the lion intervene, because Chloe wants the story to continue and the lion wants to be drawn in a less embarrassing-looking way. Ultimately, Adam and Mac make up and become friends again, and Chloe gets to ride the carousel again. It's a happy ending, and a lot of fun getting there!
 
When I was a teen, I read the novel The Princess Bride by William Goldman, the one the film is based off of. In the movie adaptation, there's a bit of metafiction in that the whole story is being told as a bedtime story by a grandfather to his grandson. But the book is quite a bit more experimental. Goldman claims to be merely an editor for the 'real author' S Morgenstern, and the book itself claims to be a much abridged 'good parts' edition, with lots of footnote comments by Goldman explaining what he cut out. As a teen, I wasn't really able to understand that there was no Morgenstern, no prior, more complete version of the same story. I didn't understand that what I was holding was the real and only version of the book, that all the supposed comments and edits were actually part of the story. It was something I realized only later, when I had a little more experience with literary artifice and more time to think about it 
 
In the case of Chloe and the Lion, the artifice is more obvious, and probably young readers will have a parent or someone around to act as a sounding board if they need to talk their way through what they're seeing to fully understand it. It's a fun introduction to a literary device they'll likely see again, one that plays with the boundary between fact and fiction and shows off some of what's possible in art.

McSweeney's 13

 
 
Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern 13
An Assorted Sampler of North American Comic Drawings, Strips, and Illustrated Stories, &c
edited by Chris Ware

McSweeney's

2004 
 
 
When I first started reading The Best American Comics, the series editor mentioned a couple inspirations for the project, and on was Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, number 13, spring 2004, An Assorted Sampler of North American Comic Drawings, Strips, and Illustrated Stories, &c, known more simply as the McSweeney's comics issue. Edited by Chris Ware, the comics issue is a mix of comics and short articles about comics. 
 
The featured artists include a lot of names I recognize as recurring contributors to BAC. The comics themselves frequently seemed like Ware was picking things that resembled his own work - lots of very small panels with miniature text totally filling the page. I sometimes wished for a magnifying glass while reading this one. In addition to the hardcover 'magazine' itself, Ware drew what looks like a newspaper comics page, this is folded to create a dust jacket, the same way I used to fold brown paper grocery bags to make book covers for my textbooks in school. The folds create two pockets, which have a couple of tiny bonus zines in them.
 
Among the essays, there's an example of an early illustrated pamphlet (a precursor to modern comics) about a man repeatedly trying and failing to commit suicide, which then became a common motif for humorous illustrations, there's some preliminary Peanuts sketches and unpublished Krazy Kat strips (along with discussion of Charles Schultz's and George Herriman's art styles), there are personal essays by John Updike and Chip Kidd about the importance of comics to them, and someone else wrote a brief history of the time a teenage Michael Chabon made amateur comics with a couple friends.
 
Beyond the foldout cover and an introductory essay, Ware also includes a sample of what would eventually become Building Stories. Ware gives us an excerpt from Charles Burns' Black Hole, a bit of the very recent In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman about 9/11, and an excerpt from Joe Sacco's graphic journalism on the Bosnian War. I had a strong sense reading this that the comic scene Ware was canonizing was rooted in the 1990s. (Which in turn makes me wonder about how the BAC series continued to amplify so many of the same artists.)
 
Other graphic nonfiction includes a Lydia Barry comic about losing and then rediscovering the joy of creation, and a number of graphic diaries, often about unrequited love and other forms of sexual anxiety. Among the fiction strips, we get usual suspects like Robert Crumb, Jim Woodring, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Adrian Tomine, and Ben Katchor, who I've become quite fond of via anthologies. 
 
This is a cool artifact, and I probably still want to read more from a few of these artists, many of them now modern classics - but at the same time, I don't want to be so immersed in this specific moment in time than continuing to find and appreciate newer works.

The Girl from the Sea

 
 
The Girl from the Sea

by Lee Knox Ostertag
Scholastic
2021
 
 
The Girl from the Sea is a YA graphic novel about a human girl who has a summer romance with a selkie. Selkies, you may recall, are mythic creatures a little like mermaids, but instead of a split form, selkies alternate - sometimes taking the shape of a human, sometimes a seal. 
 
In the classic selkie stories, a selkie woman and a human man fall in love, she moves to the land to live with him, and he takes her 'seal skin', the magic cloak that is also part of her body that allows and compels her to transform. They maybe have kids. Eventually something goes wrong (possibly infidelity or abuse), the husband returns the seal skin, possibly by accident, and the wife returns to the ocean. The movie Song of the Sea is a selkie story, and of course Sofia Samatar's "Selkie Stories are for Losers", and the Decemberists' song "The Crane Wife" is a cousin to a selkie story. "The Girl from the Sea" takes this basic plot and reimagines it as a modern-day queer love story.
 
Morgan is a teen living in a small island community off the coast of Nova Scotia. Her parents are recently divorced, and she and her little brother live with mom. Her brother is especially unhappy and has been acting out. Morgan's part of a clique of four girls centered on the richest girl in their class, Serena. Serena's parents own a small cruise line, and their new, too-large boat that will be based on the island is the talk of the town. Morgan is secretly gay, but doesn't feel able to tell her friends or family. She plans to move away for college and come out then.
  

One night when she goes to the shore to get out of the house, Morgan slips on the wet rocks, falls in the ocean, and starts drowning. She sees a seal, then a girl underwater, and then the girl saves her, and Morgan (convinced this is a dream) gives her a kiss. The next day, the girl shows up again, on land this time, and introduces herself as Keltie. She's a selkie, and Morgan's kiss has let her take human form. When she puts her seal skin back on and returns to the ocean, she'll have to stay for 7 years, so would Morgan like to see if maybe there was some real feeling behind that kiss and go on a date?
 
Morgan is so surprised, anxious about anyone realizing she has a crush on a girl, and afraid of her mean-girl friends judging Keltie, that she's not very good company. Keltie says she'd rather return to the ocean than continue being treated like an embarrassment, and Morgan offers to try again, taking Keltie's seal skin so she can remain on land as long as she wants. We get a great montage sequence of Morgan's friends texting her and her ghosting them while spending all day sneaking around with Keltie, enjoying the island and kissing.
 
Then Morgan's little brother sees them making out, and, in a bid for his sister's attention (she's been ignoring him along with her friends), he tells their mom. Morgan runs away, has a huge fight with Keltie, and breaks up with her. It turns out Keltie hasn't only come to the land to date her, she also wants to find a way to sink the new cruise boat or get it to change its route to avoid disturbing her seal family - and right after Morgan was outed was probably the worst time to tell her. To top it off, Serena reaches out by text, and Morgan fights with her too.
 
After this disaster of a night, Morgan spends the rest of the book trying to repair her relationships - with her family, her friends, and with Keltie. It helps that her mom fully accepts Morgan as a lesbian! Serena invites Morgan to her upcoming birthday party on the giant new boat, and Morgan invites Keltie as her date. Will her friends accept her being gay too? Will Keltie cause a shipwreck, or can Morgan maybe just talk to her friend about it? The party is the book's climax, with all the possibilities coming together. Amidst the action, someone falls overboard, and Keltie has to don her seal skin for the rescue. This means she and Morgan will have to spend 7 years apart, but the book ends on a hopeful note that their relationship might survive the wait.
 
Osterberg's art is colorful and expressive. He devotes some pages to group chat text messages that show off the friend clique's dynamic. The montage sequence of Morgan and Keltie's summer romance are some of the best in the book. I also like how Osterberg portrays Keltie's transformation. The seal skin is like a scarf of shimmering blue-grey fabric, and when Keltie wears it, it's like she's putting on the sleek body of a harbor seal over her own. 
 
My complaint about the book would be that all the conflicts are resolved so easily that the second half of the book is not nearly as dramatic as it could be. Morgan's mom accepts her. Morgan forgives her brother, who helps her make a dress to win Keltie back. The friends and Keltie alike welcome Morgan back just because she asks, and the events of Serena's birthday party lead to reconciliation rather than any permanent rift. Seeing how well thing work out, and how effortlessly, the fear that led Morgan to keep her sexuality a secret from everyone end up seeming unfounded, and the problems caused by that secrecy unnecessary.

The Lobster Gangs of Maine

 
 
The Lobster Gangs of Maine
by James Acheson

University Press of New England

1988 
 
 

I must have bought The Lobster Gangs of Maine at a used bookstore when I was in grad school, because it surely spent a couple decades in a professor's office before that, something they were assigned in one of their own graduate classes, or an early career purchase when they wanted to fill out their shelves. I just thought it was neat. Recently I re-found it on my own shelves and decided to give it a read.
 
Published in 1988, The Lobster Gangs of Maine is a final summation of 15 years of research conducted by James Acheson and various grad students, research assistants, and collaborators. Acheson notes in the intro that his original manuscript was over 700 pages, but he managed to edit it down to a tight 150, plus references and about 20 pages of photographs from the field. As a result, while this is still an academic book, it's remarkably accessible to general readers. Acheson focuses on sharing what he learned, without drawing much on social theory. The research for Lobster Gangs was mostly ethnographic observation, mostly conducted on the boats and docks where lobster fisherman do their work.
 
Acheson walks us through the geography of the Maine coast and history of lobster fishing there, the culture of the towns and hamlets where fisherman live and the operation of the 'harbor gangs' that control access to fishing opportunities. He explains how lobster fishing actually works and the status differences that open up between the more and less skilled fishers in the same gang, the economics of fishermen selling their catches to dealers and dealers selling them on to wholesalers and retail customers, and some of the environmental and economic problems affecting the industry during the time of the study. I was most interested in the early chapters, especially chapter 2, about the social organization of rural life in coastal towns and within the gangs themselves.
 
Lobsters eat plankton that thrive near the surface of the ocean where sunlight is abundant, but they live on the ocean floor where the water is rich in nutrients and there are plenty of rocks to hide among. So the biggest concentrations of lobsters are in shallow waters, both right near the coast and further out where the geology of the sea floor brings it closer to the surface. Lobsters migrate in a large circle over the course of the year. They are most active and easiest to catch in the warmest months. They molt their shells once a year and then regrown new, larger ones, and spend this vulnerable time in hiding. Lobsters that are too small get thrown back to grow another year, as do female lobsters with visible egg sacs. 
 
Lobstermen fish by lowering traps with bait to the sea floor. Set in the right spot at the correct angle, a trap might catch a lobster a day, although usually it takes longer. The skill of lobster fishing comes in knowing the sea floor, the migration routes, the right places at the right times. This information is shared within harbor gangs and kept secret from others; even within gangs, men have secrets, but they also have friends and relatives in the gang who they owe advice and help to. Traps are tied to long ropes that are also tied to buoys which let the fishermen find them and pull them up. If the rope breaks (or is deliberately cut), the trap is lost and can't be recovered.
 
The social life of coastal Maine is divided between the old, established families who are 'insiders' and a mix of vacationers and newer arrivals who are all considered 'outsiders'. To be honest, I think this is more of less true in rural anywhere, and maybe anywhere anywhere, although as a perpetual outsider myself, it's a little hard for me to judge. The established families are all very large, though most people only recall back to their grandparents' generation with any certainty, plus a handful of locally famous ancestors. They value independence and self-sufficiency, small-business ownership, conservative politics, loyalty to the community, and belonging to multiple civic and religious groups. Education, (especially college, but also kindergarten, for some reason) and really anything that causes people to move away, is viewed with suspicion. 
 
Summer home owners are not part of the community. Newcomers aren't initially, but can integrate by sending their kids to the local schools, joining the local clubs, and showing their commitment to adopting the old ways instead of changing them. Acheson notes that only members of established families can win local political office - first of all, their relatives form a sizeable voting bloc, and also, no insider would vote for someone they don't know, either personally, or by their family's reputation. Outsiders can only join lobstering gangs if they are on the path to assimilation.
 
When Acheson calls the groups of men who all fish out of the same harbor 'gangs', he's not just speaking metaphorically. Each harbor has a single gang that controls that turf, and you either join the gang or you don't get to fish (or at least, not for long). Each gang also controls a territory of coastal waters where only they can fish, although there are occasional skirmishes along the borders between neighboring territories. 
 
Gangs mostly defend their territory with the destruction of property rather than interpersonal violence, and mostly by cutting the ropes holding lobster traps (which offers a degree of plausible deniability), although in rare cases it case escalate to breaking traps that are sitting on the docks or setting someone's boat on fire. Attacks tend to be anonymous, retaliation is easy, and the costs add up, so gangs try to avoid open conflict. But an interloper trying to fish the gang's turf will find it hard to catch much when his traps keep getting cut and other mishaps start to befall his equipment.
 
In theory, lobstermen can sell their to whoever they want to try to get the highest price, but in practice, each fisher has a long-term relationship with a specific dealer, and dealers in the same area all pay nearly the same price. By giving up in the chance to 'sell around' to different buyers, the lobstermen gain a guaranteed customer, even when there's a glut of lobsters. (In turn, the dealers get a loyal supplier who'll sell what they have, even when there's a drought.) There are a few large wholesalers operating out of Boston, but most of the lobster trade is made up of small buyers and sellers. 

Acheson thinks the nature lobster fishing makes it resistant to rationalization and vertical integration. He expects the industry structure to remain much the same, even despite problems like inflation and declining lobster stocks in the 1980s. Although there remains potential for a 'tragedy of the commons' problem with overfishing, the harbor gangs help limit the amount of fishing, and individual fishermen respect the laws against keeping too-young or egg-laying lobsters.

Soft

 
  
Soft

by Jane Mai

adapted from the novel by Sheridan Le Fanu 

Peow

1872, adapted 2015, reprinted 2024 
 
 
Jane Mai's Soft is a graphic novel adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, set in Hong Kong in the 1990s. Carmilla was one of the early vampire stories, and maybe the first to feature a lesbian vampire. Mai first published Soft as a zine in 2014; the edition I read is an expanded reprint from a decade later. Whatever Mai added is integrated seamlessly, I really can't imagine what wasn't in the first version. Mai's art is pencil on graph paper, and it's been riso printed in purple. The negative space is mostly white, but some of the graph lines remain faintly visible, in a way that seems intentional and contributes to an overall effect that the comic might've been drawn by its narrator, 15 year-old Laura.
 
Laura lives in an apartment with her dad, who runs a popular Chinese restaurant. She likes riding her bike and phys ed class, but also making precise architectural drawings of the apartment and her bedroom. She's close friends with her classmate June. She's only barely a teen, still practically a kid. Lara is also secretly a lesbian, and ashamed of herself for it. 
 
One night, Laura crashes her bike after nearly hitting a black cat with fascinating eyes. When Laura tries to look for the cat, she meets a girl her own age instead - Carmilla. Lara and Carmilla quickly become close friends, then lovers. Carmilla is the perfect girlfriend, able to sneak in Lara's bedroom window at night despite the height of the building, always gone before sunrise, never getting caught by Laura's dad. 
 
Laura starts off naive, but she let's us know that she quickly comes to understand what's going on. She and Carmilla never speak of it, but she's aware. She knows what will eventually happen if they keep dating, what eventually happens to every girl Carmilla likes. Laura wants us to know - she's choosing this.
 
The news reports that other girls Laura's age around the city have started turning up dead mysteriously. Her dad wants her to stay home and stop riding her bike, for safety, and Laura is happy to stay in her room, with Carmilla. We can track a change in Laura by her reaction to each new death. At first she's horrified and sad, but she's being degraded her relationship with a vampire. We see her grow indifferent, even contemptuous of the victims.
 
Laura becomes withdrawn at school, distant from June. Her attention and focus are on Carmilla. She's tired from staying up late every night, pale from blood loss. She becomes surly, misses class, keeps needing to see the school nurse.
 
A lot of the Soft is drawn in a relatively simplified style, but in places, Mai gives us a large panel with more realism, more detail and shading. There's a scene in the nurse's office where the nurse asks Lara if her boyfriend is hurting her. Up until now, we've seen her look 'tired' with cartoon squinty eyes and a single line frown. But then we get a realistic close-up, seeing Laura as the nurse might, with dark circles under her eyes, bruises and bandages on her neck, blood spots on her blouse. It's like the vaseline has been wiped off the lens, like the difference between remembering what someone looks like and suddenly seeing them in person. It's like studiously ignoring something right in front of you, and then being forced to pay attention to it.
 
The moment of realization comes later for Laura than for the audience. She's confronted by how much she's changed when her estranged friend June is injured after being attacked by a black cat with fascinating eyes. Visiting June in the hospital, Laura remembers what she used to be like before Carmilla, and decides she can't continue on as she has been...
 
Mai's comic is surprisingly moving, and I think a large part of its success is how well both the text and the art match the voice of a teen girl. It's easy to see why Laura is attracted to mysterious, sophisticated Carmilla, and painful but believable to watch how their relationship not only hurts her, but transforms her. Carmilla's vampirism is literal within the story, but it's also an effective metaphor for the way a bad relationship can drain the life out of you.

Tower Dungeon 4

 
 
Tower Dungeon 4

by Tsutomu Nihei
translated by Sam Malissa

Kodansha

2026 

 

 

The fourth volume of Tsutomu Nihei's Tower Dungeon is kind of an interlude from the rest of the story so far. We follow an all-new party of adventurers into the Dragon Tower, and only at the very end do they intersect with Yuva, Lilisen, and Enriquo.
 
The group comes together around Iscale, a scholar sent by the head of the royal guard, Minsabelle, who is the aunt of the kidnapped princess and is likely to be coronated by parliament if the rescue isn't successful soon. Minsabelle also sent the regular army, and Iscale's small group will meet up with them partway through the volume. His small band of adventurers self-selects on the boat ride over - they're all the people with unbearable sea-sickness, and Iscale has anti-nausea medicine.
 
Earlier in the series, we met a cat-woman, and now we meet a mouse-woman, the warrior Chufaree and her mouse-man bodyguard. Sargan is dwarf and a pyromancer like Lilicen. (Seeing Sargan's fire magic makes me think that Lilisen is unusually powerful.) Aridelia is a young woman in antique plate armor, and seems like she's anxious and in over her head most of the time. Iscale has a mute bodyguard and a magic diary that lets him communicate instantly with Minsabelle, and she keeps scolding him for treating it like an actual diary rather than as a way to send important memos. Iscale is also a member of the royal family, and thus has the ability to turn into a dragon... although he's physically very weak compared to the others we've seen.
 
Sargan actually came to the tower to kill Carache, the evil nobleman who previously attacked Yuva's little sister, but he agrees to travel with the others, who are all there to rescue the princess. They enter the tower and advance up the levels, then see the army arriving and wait for the soldiers to get up to them. But alas, the army is ambushed, and Iscale's group is helpless to save them!
 
The adventurers witness the entire army turned to stone and then broken to pieces by thee giant basilisk moths. The moths' coordinated attack could only happen if they were being remotely controlled by another intelligence, which means these are undead basilisks. After breaking the statues, the moths tear themselves apart, which returns stone to flesh. Then maggots rain down from the ceiling. We're told this is how necromancers, like the giant tentacled man who kidnapped the princess, create their undead servants. The maggots crawl into the massacre and turn the entire army into zombie soldiers.
 
This is really bad! Worse, as Iscale's group continues upstairs, they run into the evil dracomorph Carache, and he's a zombie too! We're told that undead dracomorphs become very strange, and he looks it - half man, half dragon, and it looks like his parts are just being held loosely in place by tentacles. Iscale's group is no match for this horror, but fortunately, this is when they cross paths with Yuva and his friends, who defeat the undead Carache and agree to work together with the new adventurers.
 
One thing we learn along the way, which only makes sense in light of the scene of the maggots animating the zombie soldiers (and even still has some implications I don't fully understand) is that Aridelia is some kind of sentient zombie. She's insistent that no one see her without her armor, but the mouse-lady Chufaree sees her bathing from a distance while the others are sleeping. Aridelia somehow lays her own maggots and then swallows them, which I guess is why she's self-aware and not being controlled by a necromancer? Chufaree misunderstands the glimpse she saw and believes that Aridelia is trans, but she supports her friend living as a woman. That's nice! But I wonder how Chufaree and the others will react if they realize Aridelia is undead? 

Tom Lake

 
 
Tom Lake

by Ann Patchett

Harper

2023 

 

 

One of my library coworkers recommended Tom Lake to me. (In fact, she liked it so much, she gave away a copy at last year's staff book exchange!) I often read books about artists at the start of their careers, or young women coming-of-age, but the framing of Ann Patchett's version is new to me. The present-day of Tom Lake is the summer of 2020, when three adult daughters in their mid-20s return home to the family cherry farm to help with the harvest, and their mother, the book's narrator, a woman in her mid-50s, tells her girls about how she used to be an actress, and dated a man who later became a famous movie star.
 

The text of the book is how Lara tells this story to herself, both the flashbacks to her own early-20s when she thought she was at the beginning of one sort of life, and the present-day interludes, when she is in the middle of a very different way of living, when she thinks about the summer harvest and describes how her girls are reacting to the tale. We hear the story as she knows it, but we're also periodically informed that she has chosen not to tell her daughters something. For example, she leaves out all the sex in the version they hear (but not the one we read), and at the end, she recalls a final meeting between herself and the star that only she and we get to know about.
 
In the summer of 2020, Lara and her husband own a cherry farm in Michigan. Most of the seasonal workers aren't there this year because of the pandemic, and the girls are home instead of at school for the same reason. The story is partly just to pass the time, and partly to satisfy the girls' curiosity about an early chapter of their mother's life that they've long been vaguely aware of but never known the details of. The eldest daughter is the only one with a green thumb. She's been dating the neighbor boy since they were kids, she'll take over the farm when her parents retire. As a teen, she was convinced that the movie star, Peter Duke, was her real father. The middle girl is in veterinary school, and the youngest wants to be an actress - she's at least as interested in her mom's early career as in her famous fling. Throughout most of the book, I wanted to applaud Lara's husband for being so secure in their marriage and never seeming threatened or jealous of his wife's old flame, though by the end I thought, since he knows how this story goes, of course he doesn't feel insecure!
 
Lara got into acting as a high school senior, in the play Our Town. Until then she expected to take over her grandmother's sewing store. She got discovered by a talent scout who was there to see his own niece, got an audition for a movie, got the part, moved to LA. The movie was filmed but got delayed coming out. Lara did a couple seasons of a tv show, and tried out for Our Town on Broadway. She didn't get it, but was offered a last-minute replacement spot in a prestigious summer theater troupe, Tom Lake up in Michigan.
 
At Tom Lake, Lara meets Duke and they're instantly smitten with each other. Duke is affable and charismatic, but also troubled. (In the present day, the girls tell their mom it's not okay to call someone 'crazy.') He has boundless, sometimes manic energy, he obsesses over his roles, he drinks far too much. Soon Lara is also friends with Duke's brother Sebastian, and with her own understudy, Pallas. The summer seems magical and endless. I remember times in my own life that were like that. That enchanted feeling that accompanies falling in love contributes to the timeless quality, I think. 
 
But we know, we've known from the start, that it falls apart. Lara doesn't stay with Duke, doesn't keep acting. When the end comes, it's sad, and feels inevitable. Eventually Lara marries a farmer and happily raises three daughters with him.
 
In the present day, they pick cherries, discuss the story, talk about their fears for the future, how climate change will affect the farm, whether or not to have children of their own, they worry how the enforced pause of the pandemic will affect their own career trajectories, especially the youngest girl, who's aching to get started.
 
One recurring theme of the book is the loss of that youthful sense of invulnerability and special destiny. Everything goes right for Lara until it doesn't, until it briefly all goes wrong. Even before that, she realizes the limits of her range as an actress, and struggles to perform something new. Pallas is at least as good as Lara is, and she can sing and dance too. Sebastian is an incredible tennis player, but he's not quite good enough to go pro. There's always someone better, and for the most competitive jobs, the line ahead of you might simply be too long.
 
But another theme is second chances, and the way earlier events that may not have seemed important at the time can become the building blocks for a new life after the old one falls apart. Lara met her eventual husband at Tom Lake, although they didn't fall in love until meeting again by chance, years later. After she stops acting, Lara starts sewing again. (This is more or less how I became a librarian after my first-choice career didn't work out.)
 
There are some books that probably aren't good picks for high school reading, not because they're too hard, but because they're about events and emotions that happen later in life, that teenagers can't understand because they're not ready to yet. At the time in your life when you feel invincible and like you'll change the world and be famous and beloved when you grow up, the last thing you want to read is a book that tells you 'no you won't', and that needs you to believe it in order to understand. Lara's daughters, in the midst of their own quarter-life crises, are perfectly positions to appreciate their mom's.
 
I enjoyed this one, especially the way it's told. Patchett's plot and characters feel very natural and realistic. It's easy to believe this could've really happened to someone, and that she would've felt this way about it afterward. 

Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (1989)

 
Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland
directed by Masami Hata and William Hurtz
written by Chris Columbus, Richard Outten, and Moebius

TMS Entertainment
1989
 

 
Watching Little Nemo, I had the strange experience of realizing that if I'd seen it when it first came out, I probably would have loved it, but today, I merely appreciate its aesthetics. It's the sort of movie my family might easily have owned on VHS, the sort my sister and I would've watched over and over, like we did with Bedknobs and Broomsticks. What I felt, I guess, was a kind of disappointment, the loss of the experience I could have had, but didn't.

 

The opening credits list Moebius as one of the screenwriters, and Ray Bradbury in some sort of consultant role. The animation is good. The look is roughly ⅔ Don Bluth and ⅓ Studio Ghibli. The residents of Slumberland all dress in colorful costumes, many of them circus-inspired, and the landscapes are gorgeous. There are some action sequences, inspired by nightmares, that are genuinely frightening even to adults, because they tap into some sort of primal fear, of being chased, of going too fast, of not being in control, of being trapped, of drowning.

 

The story itself is fairly standard. Nemo, who has vivid dreams, receives an invitation from the King of Slumberland to come to his kingdom and become his chosen heir. He gives Nemo a special key and tells him to never open one specific door...

 

Nemo meets the princess, but has no interest in hanging out with girls. Then he meets a disreputable frog / hobo / clown fellow who promises to show him some off-limits points of interest. Naturally they end up at the forbidden door, and naturally the disreputable fellow convinces Nemo that it couldn't hurt to open it just enough to take a peek...

 

The king holds a coronation ceremony for Nemo, shows off the power of his scepter, then lays it on thick about how much trust he's putting in Nemo to bequeath him this power. Just then, a cloud of nightmares escapes the door and kidnaps the king.

 

Nemo feels guilty and confesses. Nemo, the princess, and the clown guy go to the Nightmare Kingdom to rescue the king. They succeed! And we all learn an important lesson about keeping our promises, and telling the truth about our mistakes.

 

One complaint I have is that, because this was the 80s, no one ever considers the possibility that the princess, the king's actual daughter, might be an appropriate heir for his power ad responsibility. The idea simply never occurs to anyone at any point. By the mid-90s, I suspect you'd have the princess herself saying it, and perhaps even Nemo giving her either the key or the scepter in the very last scene of the film. These days, I sort of hope she might be the heir from the start. Nemo could still be there as her friend and companion.

 

Flip, the hobo / frog / clown character, feels like maybe he was a stock figure in Depression era fiction, but is the sort of guy who rarely gets written these days. And I can't say I exactly mourn the loss. Because while he's constantly breaking the rules and making trouble for everyone, he's mostly treated as a lovable annoyance. 

  

He's like, a 50 year old man, who convinces a little boy to go off and do things he knows he's not supposed to, things Nemo feels guilty about even though Flip doesn't, and the film seems to accept the framing of this as Nemo's mistake. The other characters are annoyed at Flip for being a bad influence, but he's not banished or anything. He goes on the rescue mission and still gets to loiter around the royal court at the end, a privilege few law-abiding Slumerlandians seem to enjoy.

 

Maybe it's good, actually that "unemployed bachelor uncle with criminal record who's not supposed to be alone with the children, but who all the adults tolerate and indulge" isn't a common character type anymore!

 

My final complaint is that the final battle against the Night on Bald Mountain-looking, satanic King of Nightmare mostly hinges on Nemo repeatedly struggling to recite the lengthy string of nonsense words that make up the incantation that activates the scepter.

 

I thought Bedknobs and Broomsticks had the same problem at a few points, but at least there it's not the whole pivotal climax! (Jim Henson's The Frog Prince gets a bit of a pass, because the princess's curse makes her switch the starting consonants of words, not speak pure gibberish. The other characters can't understand her, but the audience can.) Some could probably compare the few successful and many failed examples to explain why "Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo" is a bop and Nemo babbling just felt like it went on way too long, but suffice it to say that heroes struggling to remember and recite magic words rarely makes for the compelling viewing that filmmakers seem to want them to.

 

Despite those flaws, I enjoyed the visual spectacle, and if the plot wasn't particularly special, it did at least serve its purpose of carrying us from one beautiful vista to the next at a good pace, and without creating any undue confusion.
 
 
Originally watched March 2023.

Justice League vs Godzilla vs Kong

 
 
Justice League vs Godzilla vs Kong

by Brian Buccellato

art by Christian Duce and Tom Derenick

DC Comics

2024

 

 

Increasingly, I think that as a reader of comics, I'm more interested in well-done miniseries than in trying to follow an ongoing storyline. So DC Comics' Justice League vs Godzilla vs Kong seemed like a safe bet for me. Superheroes fighting giant monsters! Heroes acting, you know, heroic, saving the day, protecting the city and the people who live there! That sort of thing. And we do get that, but it's awfully busy, with what feels like way too many characters and too much interpersonal drama.
 
I will grant two good reasons to have such an overstuffed cast list. The first is that when giant monsters attack, having literally dozens of superheroes fighting them does help sell that these things are dangerous and hard to defeat, so it's all hands on deck. Also I guess one fun thing about giant crossovers is maybe getting to see your niche favorite character, even if it's only as an extra in a few panels. But my counterpoint to that would be that with so many heroes and so many supervillains in the mix too, the pacing is quite slow, and few characters actually have anything going on for you to care about. A more focused cast list would've let a clearer story with stronger stakes progress more quickly.
 
The Legion of Doom, which seemingly includes every supervillain of note except the Joker, or at the very least a few per hero, breaks into Superman's Fortress of Solitude as part of Lex Luthor's latest scheme. Whatever they had planned doesn't actually happen though, because Toy Man finds a ruby that grants wishes among Superman's things, which transports them all to Skull Island and transports Skull Island to whatever version of Earth this is supposed to be. 
 
The result is King Kong, Godzilla, and four other giant monster I don't recognize getting unleashed on the cities of DC comics. I would've enjoyed Mothra or another really famous monster; these kind of felt like filler to pad out the story. Kong stays on the island, where both Green Arrow and Gorilla Grodd will try to recruit him. Godzilla attacks Metropolis, a giant bat goes to Gotham, a crab monster attacks the Flash's home, a creature that looks like a woolly mammoth without a trunk (like the pokemon Mamoswine, kind of) attacks the Amazons on Paradise Island, and some big sea monster goes after Atlantis (and has to do battle with a kraken defending the underwater city).
 
Godzilla seemingly kills Superman with its fire breath, but teams of other heroes temporarily hold back the other monsters, who mysteriously retreat before finishing their attacks. Then there's kind of a long lull. The heroes try to revive Superman, the villains try to find Toy Man, and the monsters spend a long time converging on a spot for a final battle.
 
The big fight has a bunch of moments that seem like they're supposed to be Crowning Moments of Awesome (as the TV Tropes website would call them), but they get rushed through so quickly, they seem anticlimactic rather than cool. Lex Luthor builds a Mecha-Godzilla! The League of Assassins resurrects an undead Necro-Godzilla! Five Green Lanterns team up to make a multi-part Voltron-like mecha! King Kong gets recruited to wear a Green Lantern Ring! It should be exciting and fun and badass! But the pacing is wrong, and as I said, there are just too many people on every page.
 
I also disliked how much of what happened is driven by what TV Tropes would call Idiot Plots, where the action is caused by people making shockingly stupid decisions. Toy Man hijacks Luthor's presumably superior plan and then dies immediately from being stepped on by Godzilla (which we don't learn until tge very end, making the other villains' search for him into a pointless shaggy dog story). Superman nearly dies because Shazam shows up midway through his Godzilla fight and summons magic lightning despite Superman telling him not to, which enrages Godzilla and distracts Superman at a crucial moment, then spends the rest of the series moping about his fuck-up. Red Hood shoots the giant bat against Batman's instructions, angering it, and Bat Girl beats him up, much to the other bat heroes' amusement. Gorilla Grodd kills Guy Gardner and all the other Lanterns are just like "oh well, never liked the guy." It's not like, good storytelling, just supposedly capable people behaving incompetently, creating unnecessary problems, and then acting callously toward each other about it. It's annoying. It makes the plot feel pointless and the characters unsympathetic.
 
I still think there could be fun to be had with just King Kong and Godzilla and a core Justice League, telling a more compact story, but boy, this sure isn't it. 

Bathe the Cat

 
Bathe the Cat

by Alice McGinty

art by David Roberts

Chronicle Books
2022

 

 

One of my coworkers has an interest in children's lit, and the other day she basically put Bathe the Cat into my hands and told me to read it. This is a cute rhyming story about a family trying to clean the house before Grandma comes, only to be repeatedly thwarted by the cat rearranging the chore list to avoid a bath, creating chaos as the family attempts to faithfully follow the now nonsensical instructions.
 
As my coworker observed, this is a book with a queer family, but it isn't about them being queer. I think the playful spirit of the book is a pretty good personality match for some gay men I've known, but really David Roberts could probably have drawn any family to go along with Alice McGinty's words, and the story still would've worked. We have two dads, both Black, with the narrator doling out instructions a bit fatter, possibly more femme, and more into African fashions, and the other dad a bit slimmer and more clean cut. There's an older White daughter who wears a dinosaur costume throughout the entire book, a younger Black son, and a Black baby, who gets to be the beneficiary of the chores, rather than having to chip in.
 
The structure of the book is built on playful repetitions. First one dad doles out 8 sensible rhyming chores to himself the others by making a list on the fridge using alphabet magnets.The cat doesn't want to be bathed, so we get a closeup of a paw rearranging letters. We go through the list again, but everything's wrong, suddenly we're mopping the dog and feeding the lawn. But the cat doesn't want to get vacuumed or mowed either, so... We get another variation of equal silliness, and then one very mixed-up one where we need to like, bathe the mop and Dad the Sarah. Finally the narrator realizes what's been happening, reasserts control, and since the cat likes this new chore list, everything gets done in time for Grandma's visit.
 
Mixed-up chores are a real kid's book classic, at least since the Amelia Bedelia stories and maybe longer, but Bathe the Cat puts a fun twist on an old theme. The rhymes are fun, as are the illustrations of everyone diligently attempting their nonsense tasks. I think kids might think a bit about grammar and how word-order can change the meaning of a sentence, especially after the last, silliest rearrangement. And if you know a kid who'd like to see a queer or blended family, in a setting where their identity is incidental to the story rather than central, this could be a good pick. 

The Strange Tales of Oscar Zahn 1

 
 
The Strange Tales of Oscar Zahn

by Tri Vuong

Ten Speed Books

2024 

 

  

The first volume of The Strange Tales of Oscar Zahn collects eight chapters of Tri Vuong's webcomic. Like the green yuri, Strange Tales was originally published online a few pages at a time, giving Vuong a bit more flexibility with chapter length than he'd've gotten with a print comic. The first and last chapters are stand alone stories, the rest are divided into a pair of three-part narratives.
 
Oscar is a ghost. He looks like a person with a skull floating where his head should be. He investigates other ghosts, and tries to help them achieve peace. He's quite chipper and amiable! Also, there's a giant ghostly octopus that lives shrunk down inside his skull that emerges at full size at inopportune moments to wreak chaos.
 
In the first story, Oscar helps an old woman living in a haunted house. In the second tale, he finds a ghost soldier still reliving WWI. In the third, rather complex story, Oscar tries to help an old sailor deal with his guilt for a shipwrecked crew he was unable to rescue, personified by a radio that continuously plays their final distress call. He gets help from a crew of ghosts that inhabit diving suits and try to preserve abandoned treasure, like a trove of Betamax tapes. The octopus really gets out of hand in this one. The final story is even shorter than the first; the old woman has trouble with her house again and moves into Oscar's apartment.
 
The structure of these stories is a quite similar to a lot of the Hellboy comics, where the title character mostly serves as an observer, giving the ghosts the audience they need for their dramas to finally finish playing out and achieve resolution. Vuong's art is sometimes pretty similar to Mike Mignola's, and the color pallet is a close match. Oscar has a different personality than Hellboy, but his adventures aren't that different; he even holds a cursed entity inside him. 
 
The similarities are enough to invite comparison. You might see more of what you already like here, but unless you are invested in the mystery of where the octopus came from, why it's haunting Oscar, and why he keeps trying to solve mysteries when the creature comes out every time and endangers everyone he interacts with, I think the individual stories themselves are not quite as strong as Mignola's.

What We are Seeking

 
 
What We are Seeking

by Cameron Reed

Tor

2026 

 

 

What We are Seeking is a scifi novel set in a distant future when humans have colonies on a number of other planets, despite being limited to sub-light speed. The colony worlds are few, and are theoretically connected by a network of generation ships that travel between them, though in practice the visits are few, and each established world has suffered a collapse and long rebuilding, when their original Earth tech ran out, but before they could build anything comparable themselves. 
 
We follow one young man as he arrives in a new place, learns about the existing community, and tries to find a place and make a life there. Author Cameron Reed has given us an impressive feat of world-building. The young colony, Scythia, is vividly imagined, both in terms of the alien wildlife native to the planet, and in terms of the colony's culture, which is just starting to blend the traditions of the two host planets. Every other society that a character hails from is still seen in realistic glimpses when relevant, starting on the first page with the culture of the ships, which alternate between a relaxed 'summer' when coasting at near light-speed and a stricter 'winter' when accelerating or decelerating.
 
The audience viewpoint character is John Maraintha, who comes from the verdant world of Essius, a forest world full of alien plants that are by turns medicinal and deadly poisonous. Essius is matriarchal and polyamorous, with children raised by the mother and her brothers. Men 'visit' other families for sex, but remain part of their mother's family for life. John is a doctor, and was orphaned by a wildfire while he was in med school, his whole family gone, which is how he ended up on a ship, and why he was chosen when Scythia messaged the ships to ask for another doctor for the colony. John's sexuality is seen as fascinating and threatening on Scythia, where both host cultures practice monogamy and patriarchy. Because of his own home culture, John finds it easier to get along with women, but now all his new friendships are viewed as suspect because he's assumed to be trying to visit everyone he becomes close to. For his part, John struggles to see marriage as anything other than oppression.
 
The native lifeforms of the planet Scythia are called 'dryads' by the colonists, because they alternate each generation between plant and animal bodies. So a bush might bloom with flowers that, when mature, fly off like butterflies that will egg-seeds in the soil, that will grow into more bushes. Some dryads beget insects (or rather, insect-like forms), some reptiles, some mammals. On Earth, ferns, mosses, and some parasites have alternating reproductive cycles, but nothing this extreme. The dryad ecosystem is robust, hostile to Earth plants, and dangerous to humans, which is why the colony is based in the desert, where dryads are sparse, instead of the forest. One species, called 'basket-men', might be a large, curious animal, or might be fully sentient.
 
The need to find out which is the reason for the other off-world visitor who arrived the same time as John. Subharma comes from a colony world where humans have formed a peaceful relationship with intelligent natives. He's come as a translator; he'll try to communicate with the basket-men, including eventually having high-tech brain surgery to make himself into someone capable of learning their native speech. John has a crush on Subharma and enjoys having him for a roommate. Subharma is super ascetic, follows a very strict diet, spends hours a day meditating, and seemingly has no interest in making friends, only in studying the basket-men.
 
The two host cultures that are starting to blend on Scythia are the Ishnurans and the Zandeheans. Ishnurna is only habitable at its two poles. Ishnurnans are very pale, and they have a culturally-recognized third gender. 'Jesses' use they/them pronouns, and we eventually learn that people we might think of as trans men, trans women, and nonbinary people all become jesses. Iren is currently the only Jess on Scythia, although a teen Zandahean wants to take the vows, which is controversial. Zandahea was colonized by Catholics, but during their collapse, the line of apostolic succession was broken (not a big deal for Protestants, but devastating to them). None of these groups is a monolith; Reed shows that they're internally diverse. We meet people with different perspectives on the basket-men, on jesses, on religion (the Zandaheans include some Renouncers), and despite the importance of marriage, we meet people having affairs, even closeted gay people in marriages of convenience. There are a couple people who are explicitly asexual, even though that term is never used, and in the same way that the others can't fully understand visiting, John is never fully able to wrap his head around that.
 
When John first arrives, he's annoyed to be sidelined by the doctor who made the original distress call, but has plenty more trainees now. He spends his time keeping house for Sudharma, learning about dryads, and becoming part of the local community. A key turning point comes when a basket-man arrives, then leaves, and John and Subharma follow it into the desert. This becomes like a descent into Hell when their van is damaged by wild dryads and their rations and water are ruined. Later John returns to the desert with Iren to catalog new species. He learns a lot more about them, and they become a much larger part of the story after that. This is mostly not an adventure story though, just people trying to shape their society into one that matches their values.
 
There are echoes of other scifi stories here. Human civilization being split between planets and ships is part of Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. John's harrowing trip to the desert is a little similar to a trip to Mercury in Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312. But most of what's here is either a unique feat of imagination, like the dryads, or else an extrapolation of how aspects of contemporary society might change over a long future. The breadth and inventiveness of Reed's world-building is really something special here. I enjoyed Reed's previous book, a cyberpunk novel called The Fortunate Fall, and I'm glad she was able to publish this one too.

Paper Girls 5

 
 
Paper Girls 5
by Brian Vaughan
art by Cliff Chiang

Image Comics

2018 

 

 
In the fifth volume of Paper Girls, the girls have arrived in the future, to the time where the Old Timers, the older generation in a temporal conflict with their own descendants, are operating from. There's only one volume left after this, and the shape of the time war has become a knot.
 
From the girls' perspective, which is the order the comics take place in, the girls started out in the 1980s, where the Old Timers, led by the Grand Father, showed up and took over their neighborhood in the Cleveland suburbs by putting everyone else in suspended animation and erasing their memories of the intrusion. The Grand Father seems to be very long-lived; he still speaks contemporary English, while everyone below him speaks a dialect that has diverged so far it borders on gibberish. We didn't know the reason for this, but it seemed the Old Timers did it to capture a few far-future teens, who speak a language so different it's represented with alien script; they can only be understood with the help of translator machines. They also met a silent alien, a green sphere with many eyestalks that seemed to watch them.
 
Then the girls were accidentally transported to the 2010s. They met Erin's middle-aged self, and learned that she had no memory of time traveling as a teen ... and that Mac died of leukemia while she was still in high school. They found a message carved on KJ's field hockey stick that helped them navigate the invisible time portals around the city. They met another far-future teen, a clone of Erin, who accidentally brought some giant tardigrades with her. The tardigrades started wrecking up downtown, and the Old Timers showed up again en masse and middle-aged Erin risked her life (maybe even died) to help the girls escape through a time portal.
 
That portal led the girls all the way back to the Stone Age. They met the first time traveler, born in the 2010s, who was shocked to already find evidence of other time trips on her maiden voyage. They also met a cavegirl their own age, Wadi, and agreed to help her rescue her son Japoh from the three cavemen who took him. Tiffany carved the message they saw earlier into the field hockey stick, and stuck it through a fold in time for her past self to find. KJ encountered the spherical green alien again and touched it; she got fragmentary visions of future events, including her and Mac kissing. The girls helped with the rescue, but then time traveled again by accident.
 
This time they arrived on New Year's Day in the year 2000. Giant robots piloted by the Old Timers and the far-future teens were fighting openly in Cleveland, although they were invisible to almost everyone except time travelers. The girls met Tiffany's post-college self. She's a goth! The far-future mechas were clearly superior to the ones piloted by the Old Timers. The newly appointed Grand Father, a relatively young man was piloting one; a bad hit killed his girlfriend, who used her dying words to beg him to abide by their principles of preserving history, rather than using time travel to save her. He tearfully agreed, and managed to kill the other mech pilot. For safety amidst the ongoing battle, the girls and college-age Tiffany clambered up into the broken mecha shell. The young Grand Father saw them and assumed they were the ones who killed his girlfriend, and then the mech sent itself forward in time.
 
Now the girls arrive in a future Cleveland, a time when everyone talks in the near-unintelligible dialect of the other Old Timers we've met so far, and the Grand Father is the old man we first saw him as. He has the green alien in his office! We also learn something I maybe should've noticed sooner - the Grand Father is Japoh, the baby born in the Stone Age, who the girls helped to reunite with his mother. I'll talk more about what the girls get up to in the future in a moment, but first, let's review events from the Old Timers' perspective.
 
The lab that invented time travel rescued the stranded first time traveler. She brought back the cavepeople Wadi and Japoh, claiming they were her children. The Old Timer faction formed, and eventually Japoh was made its leader. Among his fights with the future teens, his girlfriend died, and he thought the paper girls were responsible. When the killer mecha finally reappeared, after years of waiting, he thought he had a chance for revenge. At the same time, reports came in of the tardigrades in the 2010s. The Grand Father decided to launch the all-out offensive we saw earlier (which his staff viewed as a major over-reaction), and then to intercept the girls in the 1980s.
 
The Old Timers say their goal is to preserve the first draft of history, as unchanged by time travel as possible, but what does that even mean here? Japoh doesn't know it, but he was only brought to the future to become a leader because the girls saved him as an infant. They were only in the Stone Age to save him because he invaded their neighborhood, which he did in response to events the girls got entangled in after they got lost in time during the invasion. Plus he only thinks he's mad at them because of mistaken identity! Cause and effect aren't just reversed here, they're completely intertwined and entangled. There doesn't seem to be any pre-intervention state! Every major event in this sequence has a cause happened after its effect, and that, in turn, could only have happened because the effect came first.
 
In the future Cleveland, KJ tries to talk to Mac about her vision of them kissing, but Mac doesn't want to hear it. KJ has been coming to accept that she might be a lesbian, while Mac seems more homophobic than ever. The two go to find a doctor, while Erin and the two Tiffanys go look for Wadi, who is an old woman despite whatever anti-aging drugs she and Japoh have been taking. The good news for Mac is that the future has a cure for leukemia; the bad news is that she doesn't really have it, she has a rare disease caused by time travel. The doctor tries to turn Mac over to the Old Timers, but KJ beats the guy up and rescues her friend. After briefly thinking she could change something, Mac accepts that she'll die, accepts that KJ's visions will come true, and kisses her, surprising them both. 
 
Wadi agrees to help the girls sneak past her son and get back to the 1980s. They get joined en route to the departure point by the future-teen clone of Erin. Once again, they're cornered and only make it out because someone sacrifices their life; this time it's college-age Tiffany. The girls are paying a terrible price for getting caught up in this mess. Mac is going to die of time travel sickness in high school, Tiffany will be killed in her mid-20s, Erin will die in her early 40s. 
 
There's one volume left, and I fear KJ win't make it out alive either. What started as a mystery and then maybe a fun adventure (even if they weren't in control of how they were time traveling) has become the reason three of the four will die young, seemingly with nothing gained, nothing to show for it. Future Erin and future Tiffany have already revealed they won't even remember all this afterward! I don't know if the last volume will salvage anything positive, or if it's going to be a total downer, but I guess I'll find out soon.

Witch Hat Atelier 13

 
 
Witch Hat Atelier 13

by Kamome Shirahama
translated by Stephen Kohler

Kodansha

2025

 

 

In Witch Hat Atelier 13, the annual Silver Eye Festival is still besieged by a monstrous leech that appears like a circulatory system, lowering over the fairgrounds like a cage. But in the previous volume, master witch Qifrey was able to defeat the disgraced former magical ambassador who created the monster, and most of the festival-goers have been evacuated to a safe distance. There's still great danger, but some of the most urgent issues have been addressed.
 
Coco was injured by the leeches, so Qifrey has brought her to the royal Healing Tower to receive medical attention. Master Beldaruit, Qifrey's old teacher and one of the three highest ranked witches, is there too. He creates a portable illusion of Coco, looking like a tiny little fairy with her face, to fly alongside Qifrey as he searches the evacuated capital city for Custas, the injured boy who learned forbidden magic in order to save his father.
 
Of all the things you might do with magic that are forbidden by the Pact, healing is by far the most tempting to try and the most difficult to understand restriction. The witches who use forbidden magic have used that possibility to draw in Custas, and may be trying to appeal to Coco along the same line. (Though Coco and her friend Tartah have both realized this on their own anyway, and are actively questioning why healing is forbidden, and if they might be willing to break the Pact to try it.) 
 
The forbidden witches hope that once someone tries one form of forbidden magic, they'll readily throw out all the rules and try the others too (and the Knights Moralis, who enforce the Pact, fear the same), but I wonder if the slope is really so slippery.
 
The Knights Moralis routinely use the one form of magic that directly affects people's bodies that the Pact allows - magic to erase memories. This lets them keep the secrets the Pact requires. Non-witches who learn how magic works can be made to forget it; witches who use forbidden spells can forget how to cast them. I suppose these spells are only allowed when they're defending the Pact, that you can't just erase someone's memory for your personal benefit and have it be okay, but there's an obvious contradiction here. Memory erasure is a much worse thing to do to somebody than healing them, and it does affect their body, so that the usual objection to healing sounds silly in this context.
 
That contradiction comes to a crisis point in this volume, because when Qifrey finds Custas, he's used more counterclock tattoos to save dozens of people from the poorest neighborhood from their injuries. Draw a counterclock spell on a shattered water jug, and its existence will rewind to a time before it broke, giving you a chance to pour the water into another container, or set down a cloth to catch the fragments, before it catches up to itself and shatters again, exactly as before. Draw it on an injured person and their body AND MIND will return to an earlier time before they were hurt. Custas saved his dying father and has kept him in a kind of half-life for weeks by drawing and redrawing the tattoo each day. For his father, it is perpetually the day before he died - he has no memory of being hurt, or anything else that's happened since then. He doesn't know and can't understand that his son is using forbidden magic.
 
While this is happening, the royal prince meets Riceh's timid older brother. (This is our first time meeting him too.) We learn that he was physically abused by a cruel teacher, who also tried to crush Riceh's creative spirit, which is why she reacts so badly against any compulsory or rote parts of her education. Shirahama has shown us over and over how bad teachers can basically destroy the students trusted to them. With the brother's help, the prince finds Riceh, Tetia, and Agott, and they use Tetia's sand-tents to provide temporary shelter to all the evacuees. We also briefly meet Agott's mother, who is pleased to see her daughter looking happy to be helping people in need.