The Spire

 
 
The Spire
by Simon Spurrier

art by Jeff Stokely

Boom! Comics

2016 
 
 
The Spire collects an 8 issue comic book miniseries written by Simon Spurrier and drawn by Jeff Stokely. It tells a neo-noir mystery, complete with a hardboiled investigator protagonist, set in a New Weird fantasy city. 
 
The namesake city of the comic, the Spire itself, is a towering cone of adjoining buildings, all in the same shade, like a sandcastle or a wasps' nest. It sits in a wasteland, called the 'Nothingland', and the outside air is poisonous to normal humans. The city's residents are a mix of humans and beings who are politely called 'Sculpted' but usually called by the slur 'Skew'. Their name seems to me to imply that the first sculpted were created from humans by genetic modification, probably to survive the outdoor pollution, and possibly to perform specialized work, during the 'antiki-times' where all the best tech comes from. 
 
There are various tribes of sculpted who all share the same traits, like the messengers - tiny bald men with the proportions of infants who fly on miniature wings and are propelled forward by farting. Humans resent the sculpted for taking up space in the Spire (when they could live outside), exploit them economically (giving certain low-paid jobs to the sculpted, and demanding annual tithes from the wasteland tribes), and then resent that too (because "they're taking our jobs"). The city is a multiracial society with an official policy of strength through diversity, but it's also tense. Also living in the wasteland are a religious sect who preach death to all the sculpted, and who use antiki-tech environment suits and shelters to survive the toxic air.
 
The modern-ish city, the unique nature of the humanoid residents, and the attention to race and class inequality reminds me of China Mieville's city of Bas Lag from Perdido Street Station. (I think Mieville had some babbling little flying men too, now that I think of it.) Stokely makes everyone look vaguely grotesque in a way that matches the low tone of Spurrier's writing. The city is dirty, people piss themselves in fear, mock each other for smelling like shit, swear constantly. The upper city dwellers, who get the majority of the natural sunlight, are racists and snobs, the religious are zealots who preach genocide, the cops and military are reading to beat anyone who's insufficiently respectful, and they'll actually carry out a pogrom before the book's over. But the overall tone mostly varies between ironic detachment and darkly humorous. There are only a few moments when it seems we're encouraged to feel sincere emotion.
 
Our hard-bitten investigator is Sha, the captain of the city watch. Sha is a Medusi, a sculpted person with jellyfish characteristics, including thin tentacles she can use for climbing and catching criminals, the ability to heal from injuries (except the missing eye she wears a patch over), and the ability to reshape her skin, temporarily as a disguise or more permanently if required. Sha's an amnesiac who is estranged from her tribe and never ages. She's like one "snikt, bub" away from being a female Wolverine. Sha is foul-mouthed, an overly demanding boss to her put-upon subordinant, obnoxiously rude to ever other member of the city government, and , inadvisably, is sleeping with the younger daughter of the royal family (who can't really understand that her family won't allow her to make a lesbian relationship with a racialized commoner public or official).
 
The mystery here is a series of murders of servants close to the matriarch of the royal family that start right after her husband dies of a disease of old age. The older daughter will soon take the throne ... unless the murderer ultimately plans to kill a royal and not just their staff. Sha is determined to solve the case and protect the family, even as the incoming queen prepares to undo her father's progressive reforms, make peace with the zealots, and persecute the sculpted anew. The solution to the mystery is based in events from decades earlier, shown in cryptic flashbacks, when the matriarch was young, and in the specific details of several sculpted tribes' abilities.
 
One detail we learn near the end is something Sha forgot long ago because of her amnesia - she's transgender. As a Medusi, she could fully and permanently reshape herself to become female without any outside help. That forgotten transition turns out to explain a number of things about Sha, and to be an important piece of the puzzle to finally solve the mystery by unraveling the killer's motivation. You can file The Spire next to All About My Mother as stories where a closeted trans woman gets someone pregnant, then abandons them in order to finally come out and begin living as a woman herself. I can only imagine the level of dysphoria that becoming a father might trigger in someone who was previously resigned to life as a man, but the nature of both narratives are that we see the aftermath of that decision, rather than the pain that led up to it, and the possibility that the couple could've remained together is never really considered.

Michael Robartes and the Dancer

 
 
Michael Robartes and the Dancer
WB Yeats

Cuala Press

1921, reprinted 1998

 

 

Michael Robartes and the Dancer" is a collection of poems by WB Yeats. It was self-published in 1921 and many of the poems seem to me to be inspired by WWI. In the introduction, Yeats claims his main inspiration was the work he was doing translating a philosophy text.
 
The first few poems, including the title poems, which has the most obvious claim to philosophical inspiration, are written as dialogues between a man and woman. In one, they debate mind/body dualism and the way some men, including some philosophers, view women as all body, no mind. In another, a woman seems to describe at length an orgasm so good it reminded her of the creation of the world. Later, in a poem meant to be a prayer for his infant daughter during a particularly rough storm, Yeats wishes for her to be somewhat beautiful, but not so much that people only value her for her looks, and to be good at keeping her opinions to herself so she doesn't get in fights.
 
A couple of the poems are dated, either 1916 or 1919. In one, Yeats mentions several people he knew who died, I think during WWI but perhaps from other causes. Those dead friends' names then go on to show up in several more poems, as he continues to think about them.
 
The showpiece of this very slim volume us "The Second Coming", which was indeed the reason I sought this book out at all. If I found TS Eliot too obscure, and The Waste Land's commentary on WWI too opaque, "The Second Coming" offers no such difficulty. It is direct and explicit, and in a hundred years has lost none of its urgency. It is not, fortunately, trite or sentimental, but well-said in a way that's made it part of our common language to describe unsettled times. I've seen almost every line of this poem quoted, and so have you, and yet put together they remain a powerful description of a world falling apart.

The Third Reich of Dreams

 
 
The Third Reich of Dreams
The Nightmares of a Nation
by Charlotte Beradt
translated by Damion Searls

Princeton University Press

1966, reprinted 2025 
 
 

The Third Reich of Dreams is a work of social science by the German journalist Charlotte Beradt. Between 1933, when Hitler came to power, and 1939, when Beradt fled the country for refuge abroad, she collected over 300 accounts of people's dreams that seemed to be inspired by fears about the Nazi government. In this novella-length book, Beradt identifies about a dozen recurring themes and describes each along with examples and a bit of anaysis about the connection between the dreams and life under Nazi rule. Beradt wrote the accounts in code in the bindings of books, which she then mailed to friends overseas. She finally wrote her own book in 1966; it was recently republished by Princeton.
 
The first dream in the book is the one that led Beradt to start her project. A socialist factory-owner dreamt the Goebbels visited his factory. In the dream, the man knew that if he did not give Goebbels the Nazi salute that he would lose his factory, and if he did he would lose the respect of all his workers. He dreamt he spent an agonizing eternity raising his arm in salute, and as soon as he finished, his back broke from the effort. Most of the dreams are like this, they are dreams of submission and defeat. In one chapter near the end, Beradt discusses the handful of dreams from people who dreamt of defying the Nazis. All the rest are from people whose unconscious minds could imagine only terror, not resistence.
 
There were dreams of surveillance and snitching. People imagined being arrested for having private thoughts against Hitler that they never spoke aloud, they dreamt that ordinary household objects were listening to every word that was said and then speaking the most incriminating passages aloud in deafening voices. They dreamt of failed resistance, of writing a letter of complaint but, even in the dream being so afraid of punishment that they mailed a blank page, or of speaking out to denounce the Nazis, but choosing to speak in a made-up language so no one could understand them.
 
Some dreamt of new propaganda or new restrictions, new punishments for Jewish Germans. Beradt notes that many of these dreams seem prophetic, they anticipate real political events that happened later, years after they were dreamt. It is as though, Beradt claims, people subconsciously understood the direction the Nazis were taking the country in, and imagined likely signposts along the way. It is also as though living under the Nazi government was a waking nightmare, governed by a regime that operated on dream logic, that demanded and often received total obedience, so that people were afraid even to imagine themselves saying what they really thought. Some of the people Beradt spoke to had partial Jewish ancestry but dreamt that it defined them totally and led to them being treated exactly like other Jews, which was indeed what eventually happened.
 
The most shameful dreams are by those who imagined themselves knowing Hitler or some other Nazi official personally, who dreamt of wanting some form of praise or affection, of receiving it, and then in the dream of feeling inordinately proud after.
 
As a work of social science, this is a fascinating document precisely because it's so unusual. Beradt was a journalist rather than an academic, but this is not just a collection of interviews, and someone hoping for only the dreams, or a transcription of all of them, is going to be disappointed. Beradt quotes several dozen dreams in full, but these are examples. They show us the patterns she found, and they allow her to perform close-readings, looking for meaning. 
 
The strangeness of this as a study owes both to Beradt's status as an outsider to the academy and to the conditions of its production. Obviously Beradt has no strategy for sampling, beyond collecting whatever she can; her methodology is idiosyncratic, her theory minimal. But her subject was urgent and her data were collected under duress. It reminds me of mass observation, another early 20th century attempt to learn from directly from members of the public by compiling first-hand accounts of important events, a way of knowing that takes advantage of exigence, but is mostly overshadowed by more formalized academic approaches. There are good reasons to prefer rigor when it's possible, but I think there's also real value in projects like this, that manage to snatch something from the lion's mouth before it closes. 

Paintings of Portugal & Paintings of Italy

 
 
Paintings of Portugal

by Angela Pan

self-published
2024
 

 

Paintings of Italy
by Angela Pan
self-published

2024 

 
 
Paintings of Portugal and Paintings of Italy are a pair of self-published art books by Canadian artist Angela Pan. They're similar to Pan's earlier Paintings of Japan books that I read previously, though longer - the "Japan" books were about 40 pages each, while Portugal and Italy are about double that.
 
Paintings of Portugal collects city scenes from three trips Pan made to Portugal from 2021 to 2024. Italy covers two trips there from around the same time; it's mostly views of the city, but includes a few countryside landscapes from Tuscany and the Dolomite mountains. Pan paints using acrylic, and her paintings use a mix of bright colors and pastels. There's not a drop of black or brow or gray here - nothing is drab; everything is the color of candy.
 
The paintings are accompanied by a sort of travel diary describing where Pan went and what scenes she sought out. She's an intensely crepuscular painter - most of her scenes are captured in the 'golden hour' after sunrise or before sunset or the 'blue hour' before it's up or after it's down. In Portugal, she was usually able to find an elevated viewpoint to capture the cities from above; in Italy more of them are from ground level.
 
Pan has visibly grown as an artist since her earlier books, and I was most aware of the refinement of her technique in Portugal. That book also benefits from the relative novelty of its subjects. Lisbon and Porto and the like are simply much less scene in art than Venice and Rome and such. If I had one complaint, it's that I wish she'd say a bit more about the places she visits beyond naming the cities and describing the walks to and from her chosen viewpoints.

DIE 4

 
 
DIE 4
Bleed
by Kieron Gillen
art by Stephanie Hans

Image Comics

2021 
 
 
From the start, I've found myself drawn to the high-concept worldbuilding of Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans' comic series DIE, but (especially after the first volume) I've been less impressed by the plot and storytelling going on there. The comic is at its best when introducing a character or idea and letting admire all the allusions and creativity on display in each one, but then less successful at setting them in motion. Which is especially a problem here in the final volume, "Bleed", because there's little left to introduce, and a lot of plot left to resolve.
 
As an example, consider the Fair. These are Die's equivalent of fairies, but they're also robots. They act fairly in the sense that they'll hear any request, and they have a 50 percent chance of granting it, so they are fair like a coin toss. The two faces of the coin are 0 for no and 1 for yes, because the binary outcome is like a computer bit, which is why they're robots as well as fairies. Also, the way that you meet them is by going to the Fair, a kind of traveling festival they run. 
 
Merging multiple inspirations like that and layering multiple meanings into one thing is kind of impressive ... but then in this volume, all we see of the Fair are their smashed bodies, because the flew to the center of the world to take part in a climactic confrontation that happened entirely off camera. We just see the ruins of the aftermath, like HG Wells's smashed time machine from whatever his role was in the decisive last battle, which Gillen and Hans decided not to show us any of.
 
This is what I mean when I say that the ideas of the comic are very careful constructed, while the story itself is ultimately pretty disappointing.
 
In the 1990, a group of teenagers found some magic dice that transported them to the fantasy world of Die. There, they each had a fantastic persona and access to powerful magical abilities. They spent a couple years trapped there, battling the evil Grandmaster, before defeating him and performing the ritual to return to Earth. But in the last moment, the Grandmaster grabbed Solomon, and so only five of the six friends made it home. Since they had vanished without a trace for two years, it was a big deal when they came back, but they were magically prevented from saying anything about what had happened.
 
Then, a couple decades later, when the survivors were all in their early 40s and facing the typical (stereotypical?) problems of midlife, they were transported back to the world of Die and thrust back into the old game, only with their former friend Solomon acting as the Grandmaster this time. They defeated Sol, but then couldn't actually agree about returning home, some because they wanted to avoid an impending divorce or a cancer diagnosis, others because they felt guilty about destroying a whole city to defeat their former friend. Basically whenever someone changed their mind to return, someone else changed it the other way to stay, so that collectively they just seemed to be dithering indecisively.
 
While the heroes spent the next two volumes of the comic squabbling and sabotaging each other, we got a bit of a tour of Die. It's a planet shaped like a d20, and each face is the realm of a different Master, an echo of a real person who had some idea that contributed to the history of roleplaying. There's Eternal Prussia, based on the original German military war game, Kriegspiel. There's Little England, a mash-up of Tolkein's Lord of the Rings and HG Wells's Little Wars, a war game for hobbyists to play on their living room floor. Eternal Prussia and Little England are locked in an unending war that resembles WWI. There's Angria, based on the Bronte siblings' childhood game of make-believe, a site of political intrigue, and the place our protagonists did most of their bickering. In this most recent volume, we also got to see an ocean face based on HP Lovecraft's fiction, which holds the stairway to the center of the planet. 
 
Near the end of the third volume, we got a call to action that seemed to set up an exciting conclusion. We learned that between the group's two visits, Sol had been busy working on behalf of the planet Die itself to send inspirations backward in time to ensure its creation. Supposedly Sol made the toy soldiers that inspired the Brontes' for example, and sent them to them so that they'd write their stories, so that Angria would be here waiting for teen Sol in the 80s. The friends learned that if Sol succeeded in making the dice that had transported them as teens, and sent them to himself, then the time paradox would resolve, Die would fully merge with Earth, and everyone would be trapped in a fantasy realm. To prevent this, the friends recruited the Fair, rallied Wells and the armies of Little England, plotted to entangle the plotters and schemers of Angria ... and then, as I mentioned, in this volume, Gillen and Hans decided not to show us any of that.
 
Instead, we watch the six sad adults mope down the stairs to the center of the world where they don't stop anything, but also nothing bad happens. Die, suddenly now personified as a guy with a d20 for a head, explains that they're too late, he's already successfully closed the time loop to ensure his own existence, and now that they've witnessed it, he can send them home. In explaining all the steps, he even claims to have caused WWI, which would otherwise not have happened, purely so that Tolkein would be inspired to write The Hobbit, which horrifies the friends, but they're too late to do anything about it. There's no mention of the planets merging; it seems less like anyone saved the day and more like the authors forgot what the consequences were supposed to be. When they get home, it's 2020, and they arrive in the middle of a global pandemic with no idea of what they've missed.
 
Along the way down the stairs, we finally get a bit of resolution about Ash's up-to-now unspoken feelings about gender. I felt let down about this too. On Earth, Dominic is a man and seems to be fine with that; on Die she is a woman named Ash and seems to be fine with that too. As they descend, we're told that the Grandmaster only caught Sol because Ash paused during the ceremony because she didn't really want to go back to Earth. We also meet the giant fiery spirit of Ash's femininity, who blocks the way unless Ash will agree to merge with her. 
 
Ash says that on Earth, Dominic thought about being a woman at least once a day, not that he minded living as a man, just that it was a thought he had every single day. And given the chance to have a woman's body, Ash didn't want to leave Die then and doesn't want to leave now. And she merged with the spirit of herself (?) which supposedly displaced Dominic entirely. And what this means, the characters tell each other, is that Ash is gender fluid. Dominic definitely wasn't a closeted trans woman! And he'll be fine having a man's body and social identity again as soon as they all leave, even though right now Ash can't bear to give hers up. Yes, the characters repeat, this isn't being trans, its gender fluidity. 
 
This development adds DIE to my list of disappointing works where a character is seemingly portrayed as being a trans woman, only for late-in-the-game dialogue to reveal that, oh no, they're definitely not that, they certainly couldn't be that, they're just like, really sensitive and in touch with their feminine side, or maybe their gender cannot be labeled in any way at all. 
 
I would be interested in seeing more authentic portrayals of nonbinary characters in fiction; I am not interested in seeing yet more characters who are written in every way like they're trans only to make a surprise announcement of some sort of nonbinary identity at the last minute instead. I'm not interested in listening to people who seem to think that saying you're bisexual or gender nonbinary is enlightened and expansive (so long as you publicly live a conventional hetero life), but that being gay or trans is small-minded and unworthy. It's not fair to the people who are treated like their identity is unspeakable; it's also not fair to the people who are treated like the name of their identity is a cudgel to beat the unworthy, while the actual experience of what they feel or how they live is never shown.
 
But then, many things about DIE disappointed me. The first volume seemed promising, but overall, the comic has seemed more like a neat idea than like a good story, and nearly every time I've felt interested in some aspect of it, character or plot or whatever, that aspect has been ignominiously dropped or anticlimactically abandoned.

The Anthropologists

 
 
The Anthropologists

by Aysegul Savas
Bloomsbury

2024 
 
 
Asya, the narrator of The Anthropologists, isn't literally a social scientist, but she is metaphorically like an anthropologist as she closely observes her friends' lives and her own, trying to discern new rules for living as she seeks to make her life 'sturdier' and more settled.
 
Asya and her husband Manu met in college, both foreign students from different places, who now live in an unnamed city. I suspect that Asya may share some biographical details with her author, Aysegul Savas, who is from Turkey and now lives in Paris, but I have no reason to think this is based especially closely on herself. The couple's experiences are pretty common, I think, to young adults trying to build a life for themselves in a new place after college.
 
The book coincides with Asya and Manu searching for an apartment to buy; it begins at the start of their house hunt and ends when they move into their new place. In between, we mostly see them when they're meeting with friends - brunches, dinners, drinks, happy hours, parties, hang outs, lazy weekend afternoons. Manu works for a nonprofit and Asya is a documentary filmmaker; her latest project is about a local park. 
 
The book is told in very short chapters, many less than a page long, each narrating a single incident. Each scene is titled, but there are two that recur over and over. In each section called 'Future Selves', Asya and Manu visit an apartment and think about what their lives would be like if they moved there. In the sections 'In the Park', we read someone's answers to Asya's questions about how they use the park. These are the only scenes not narrated by Asya, instead they're like watching a snippet of her film in progress.
 
At the beginning of the apartment search, the couple's shared life is much the same as it has been up to this point, but by the time they move, it's kind of the end of an era, as other people they know reach their own inflection points and head off in other directions. Asya and Manu are each, in different ways, confronted by the realization that things are happening to their families back home that they can't fully share in because they're not there. They grow close with an elderly neighbor, and act like surrogate grandkids when she needs someone. Among their friends, one very carefree fellow starts to get more serious, a woman who's always been a bit prickly grows embittered. The move may not even be the biggest change.
 
Like Asya, Savas is a keen observer herself, and a very good writer. The Anthropologists is full of small moments, common to many couples, rendered at once specific, recognizable, universal by Savas's insightful prose. For example, there's a part about how Asya and Manu cannot speak each other's native languages, but have developed their own private little language as a couple, using words from both plus accumulated nicknames, references, in-jokes - the kind of thing my partner and I have built up over the years too, just for ourselves, not for others to hear. 
 
Savas gives Asya a casual, conversational voice, but everything she says is clear-sighted and well-spoken. The tiny chapters pass quickly, and the book itself is short, less than 200 pages, but a kind of quiet wisdom builds up along with the accumulation of small details, amounting to something that might not be profound, but nevertheless feels considered and true.

The Princess in Black and the Prince in Pink

 
 
The Princess in Black and the Prince in Pink
by Shannon Hale and Dean Hale
art by LeUyen Pham
Candlewick Press

2024
 

 

I visited some family recently, which included a chance to see my niece. Since my last visit, she's gotten a preference for longer books and series, as well as for princesses and other trappings of fantasy. She's especially fond of the Princess in Black series, so I decided to read one that caught my eye, The Princess in Black and the Prince in Pink.
 
The Princess in Black is basically a superhero. Whenever monsters show up to ruin things, Princess Magnolia slips away and puts on her costume, becoming the Princess in Black to fight them off. She has lots of other princess friends, who all have flower names and heroic alter egos, (probably accumulated over the course of the many books in the series preceding this one), and if I've understood correctly, none of them knows each others' secrets. They're more like superheroes than magic girls because they change into their costumes like any other set of clothes rather than having a transformation sequence. As far as I can tell, they have no powers, just the bravery to stand up to scary monsters and the athletic fitness to chase them off.
 
In this story, all the princesses have organized and are helping to run a spring festival, complete with rides, games, snacks, and the like, with the princesses operating all the booths. A rude emu shows up and creates a ruckus, kicking over stands, scaring all the kids in the crowd, smashing some decorations for the dance that Princess Magnolia brought. It's all very sudden and very public, so Magnolia has no opportunity for a costume change. Fortunately, Prince Valerian is attending too, and he manages to simply push the emu back outside and bar the gate.
 
Magnolia is sad about her decorations, but she's visited by the Prince in Pink, a hero who specializes in throwing parties rather than fighting monsters. (This is very obviously Valerian in costume, but Magnolia never suspects.) The prince helps her salvage the remaining decorations and set up for the evening's festival dance. The decorating sequence is illustrated in much the same way I suspect the monster fights usually are, as a montage of dramatic moments.
 
The dance is a success, but the emu comes back with two ostrich sidekicks. The birds can't talk, so none of the princesses know what they want, but the narration grants them enough interiority to reveal that they're equally fond of kicking things and dancing. The lights go out, and literally all the princesses change costumes to produce a team of like a dozen heroes ready to defend the party. The Prince in Pink is there too - he decorates the birds and restarts the music, and instead of fighting everyone dances, leading to a happy ending for all.
 
As far as I can tell, the Prince in Pink is the first costumed boy in a series that's primarily about showing little girls that they can be a princess sometimes and a tomboy others, they don't have to choose between tea parties and rough-and-tumble play. 
 
It seems notable to me that what appears to be a popular series has included a book introducing a character that at least some parents are going to read as gay. But aside from his pink costume and his love of parties and decor, Valerian isn't otherwise coded as gay. There's a long tradition of artists indicating to audiences that a guy is intended to be seen as queer without anyone saying a word or showing him involved in romance. In the past, I'm certain Valerian would've been queer-coded, if he was introduced at all. But I didn't see any of those techniques in use here. Valerian isn't feminine or campy, he's not a sissy or coward. He fights the emu without any hesitation, but dressing as the Prince in Pink lets him do what he really likes, just like dressing as the Princess in Black gives Magnolia the chance to be a hero.

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002

 
 
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002

edited by David Eggers

Mariner Press

2002 

 

 

I enjoyed working my way through the Best American Comic series. It was a nice way to see a selection of good works from the years it ran, and I learned the names of several artists to add to my list. There are a couple earlier comics anthologies I want to check out too, ones the BAC editors named as inspirations for the series. But now that I've read its entire run, I also want to start something new.
 
My first encounter with the Best American Nonrequired Reading series was the 2007 volume, which has a cover by Carson Ellis, an introduction by Sufjan Stevens, and which showed up in bookstores that year more than any other volume of BANR before or since. So the idea of reading maybe these someday has been at the back of my mind for awhile now. 
 
My understanding of this series was that it was meant to be an anthology for vaguely alternative culture, the kind of thing that might show up in The Believer or McSweeney's but probably wouldn't be included in the more traditional Best American Essays series. And that might be kind of right? But it's also explicitly intended to appeal to a broadly-defined young adult audience, conceptualized as readers 15 to 25. The forward by the series editor is almost shockingly optimistic about the state of writing for young audiences and about the prospects for people in that age group (people like me, at the time this was written). By now, I basically can't even remember what it felt like to imagine a near future that's not worse than the present, but in 2002, the hopeful spirit of the 1990s still persisted, even if cracks were showing in the facade after September 11th and the US invasion of Afghanistan.
 
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002 is mostly nonfiction, with a few short stories in the mix. There actually is a McSweeney's piece in here, as well as a couple from The Onion, including the now classic "Marilyn Manson Now Going Door-To-Door Trying To Shock People", and a David Sedaris piece like you'd hear on This American Life. There's even a comic, "Bomb Scare" by Adrian Tommie, whose name I recognize from BAC, about a teen boy who isn't interested in sex, and finds that's starting to isolate him from his friends who are increasingly obsessed.
 
The entries are arranged alphabetically by author's last name, so any thematic clusters are pure coincidence, but near the beginning there are several pieces of longform journalism about teens from other parts of the world that politically-savvy Americans would've been especially interested in at the time - the 'Lost Boys', orphaned refugees fleeing the civil war in Sudan, a Taliban fighter persuaded to defect for the Northern Alliance by letters from a childhood friend, Tibetan teens trying to decide whether to make a life under Chinese occupation or in exile in India, the appeal of cheap methamphetamine and motorcycle racing in a poor neighborhood in Thailand. Later Seth Mnookin profiles "The Nice New Radicals" for Spin magazine, about young liberal activists who care about most of the above causes but prefer working within institutional channels. (With a start like this, there's not a piece about Kony 2012 in BANR when I get to the right year, I'll be a little disappointed.)
 
Eric Schlosser has an article from The Atlantic that's apiece with his book Fast Food Nation about the manufacture of natural and artificial flavors called "Why McDonald's Fries Taste So Good". Probably the longest piece in the book is Gary Smith's "Higher Education" from Sports Illustrated, a profile and obituary of a Black high school basketball coach and how he grew to be a part of the community in the tiny Amish and Mennonite town he moved to in Ohio. Rodney Rothman's "My Fake Job" is a funny account of him hanging out at an internet start-up that was so disorganized no one even noticed he didn't actually work there - but apparently by the time it was chosen for the book, The New Yorker had disavowed it because it was at least partially fictionalized.
 
I didn't think the short stories were quite as impactful, but I liked David Schickler's "Fourth Angry Mouse" about the anxious grandson of a popular comedian trying and failing to live up to his legacy, and Heidi Jon Schmidt's "Blood Poison" about a young woman struggling through a particularly hellish annual visit with her aging father. 

In the Half Room

 
 
In the Half Room

by Carson Ellis
Candlewick Press

2020

 

 

In the Half Room is a children's picture book by Carson Ellis about an odd but still cozy cottage, that seems well-suited for a bedtime story. In the author's note at the end, Ellis says the idea for the book came from one of her children (though the child is somewhat unsettled by the way Ellis implemented it).
 
The half room is a place for impossible objects, a room of half-things. There's the right half of a person, the front half of a cat, the back half of a pair of shoes, and so on. Everything is fine, just halved. The text is simple and has a sing-song rhyme. Like in Goodnight Moon, we're introduced to objects individually, and then they're placed in the context of the room.
 

 
Once the scene is set, the half room gets a couple visitors. First, the left half of the young woman (who maybe looks a bit like Ellis herself). The two half-women go outside to dance together, and eventually recombine into a whole person. Then, the back half of the cat arrives. The two half-cats tussle and spat; they don't merge, but do eventually settle down to nap together. I think this is the detail that disturbed Ellis's kid, but it feels like authentic cat behavior.
 
This is a short, gentle little book with narration to lull you to sleep and imagery that feels like it comes from a dream. 

The Sword of the Lictor

 
 
The Sword of the Lictor
by Gene Wolfe

Orb

1982, reprinted 1994
 

 
The Sword of the Lictor is the third book in Gene Wolfe's quartet, The Book of the New Sun. It's the most episodic of the books so far, basically a picaresque, as Severian leaves the city of Thrax and journeys north through the mountains until he arrives at a very high lake nestled among them, meeting potential allies and enemies all along the way. Based on Wolfe's description, I think these are the Andes mountains and Lake Titicaca of the far future. Over the course of the journey, Severian both literally and metaphorically leaves behind his career as a torturer and executioner, and starts to become something like a hero (though still without becoming someone I would call a good person). In the first book, Severian told us that this entire tale is being narrated in retrospect from a time when he has become the Autarch, and at this point it's still basically unimaginable how that might happen.
 
If there is a theme to Severian's journey in this book, beyond his transformation from villain to savior, it seems to be a kind of uncanny doubling. He interacts with nearly every major character he's met so far, or else with someone like them. He also becomes increasingly convinced of the power of the gemstone he found in the first book, the Claw of the Conciliator, and loyal to that power. The description of the Conciliator makes him sound like a Christ-like figure, which I suppose makes Severian something like a convert to Christianity, someone like St Paul who received divine revelation on a long journey.
 
At the start of the book, Dorcas says explicitly what was already clear to me from the original scene, that the Claw brought her back from the dead after her body had been preserved in a lake for a generation or two. She can no longer bear to stay with Sevarian now that he is the chief executioner in Thrax, and leaves to return to Nessus. Severian can't really bear to stay in this job either. He gets invited to a party thrown by the Archon of Thrax where he's expected to strangle a noblewoman to death; instead, as he did with Thecla, he has sex with her and then helps her escape her sentence. He is once again disgraced by his act of mercy, and is once again forced to flee to the north.
 
In the mountains, he stays the night with a family of farmers. Here he encounters the alzaebo, alive this time. In the second book, Severian drank a potion made from the alzaebo's brain and ate some of Thecla's, and it was this that put a copy of her mind inside his. The living alzaebo uses its abilities to hunt, imitating the voices of those it's eaten to draw out their living relatives in a way that's genuinely creepy. Severian fights off the alzebo but the only survivor is their young son, also named Severian, who is the same age our Severian was when he was orphaned and given to the torturer's guild. At the same time that he meets the alzaebo, Severian meets Agia again, and she again tries to kill him (I have no doubt she'll show up to make onee last attempt in the final book). She explains something that definitely wasn't clear to me earlier, which is that a particular recurring character I'd barely attended to is loyal to her as has been responsible to siccing the various alien monsters that ambushed Severian in the previous book on him.
 
After failing to save the rest of the family, Severian takes the orphaned boy on his trip through the mountains. He reads to him from the book of allegorical stories about the future history of the world. The neo-medieval character of the far future world Wolfe has written seems to be supported by the lack of any forms of mass transit, mass communication, or mass education, and by the dictatorial power structure that prevails at every level. People are trapped wherever they're born, assigned to be a farmer or guild member or soldier or noble, stuck with the personalist rule of whoever's in charge of their village or city, unable to learn much about any other way of living.
 
The little boy dies in the mountains, killed by traps left by a previous autarch, a man powerful enough to command an entire mountain be carved in his likeness. If the boy was like Severian's doppelganger, then he fails to save himself. The old autarch awakes from cryosleep with plans to reconquer and resubjugate the world, and Severian kills him, prefiguring on a smaller scale how he will have to defeat the current Autarch to take over the role. 
 
Severian also fights and kills his former friend, Balderdans the giant, another small-scale prefiguration of what I think is his fate to kill the alien giant Aiba, who lives in the ocean and grows large as a continent and plans to break the whole world. We'd heard repeatedly that Balderdans and Doctor Talos lived in a house in the north. Well, Severian finds it, and calling it a 'house' really undersold its size, or the way Balderdans rules all the villages around the lake. Nearly everything we initially thought we knew about the giant and the doctor has proven false or misleading by this point. 
 
Severian's executioner's sword is broken in the fight, completing his separation from his old life, and his two symbolic victories - against a lesser Autarch and a lesser Aiba - now set him up to complete the real versions of each task. I find Wolfe's plotting strange, but what initially appears to be an almost random sequence of events across this book looks by the end to be a map in miniature, a fractal part that repeats the pattern of the whole, including both what's come before and what has yet to come.
 
The other thing we've kept hearing is in the north is a war, between the country ruled by the Autarch, and a people called the Ascians, who we know nothing about. Severian plans to continue north and join the war in the next book, so I suppose we'll see.

The Council of Frogs

 
 
The Council of Frogs

by Matt Emmons
Second at Best Press

2023
 
  
The Council of Frogs is a fantasy comic by Matt Emmons. It's set in the wastelands of a post-apocalyptic future, but events are unquestionably guided by magic, rather than science. A tiny little frog goes out into a hostile world to deliver a message to a warlock for the sake of his community.

Generations ago, a war-mage died in battle, and his corpse sank into a bog ... then returned to unlife as a lich. His magic also fused with a purse of frogs' eggs; they became his children, unable to speak but imbued with intelligence. Now he's reaching the end of his unlife, and sends one frog as a messenger to ask the warlock to take over his duties as the frogs' guardian.
 
Our little messenger sets out on a quest to find the warlock. Along the way he encounters dangers in the form of hungry birds and human knights and war-mages. He's aided by a beast-man, an oracle, and eventually by the warlock too. Each of those three initially seem dangerous, and Emmons gives the little frog an expressive face that shows his fear. In each case, it kind of seems like they might be trying to win his trust so they can trick him ... but then no, they all turn out to be as honest and helpful as they initially said. No one who's actually hostile bothers lying to the frog; they just immediately attempt to eat him or stomp him underfoot. 
 
Something about this plotting choice bothers me, although I can't quite say what. Maybe it's just the contrast with the knee-jerk stranger danger of the media I grew up with? Over the Garden Wall also has characters who look scary, but whose protestations of innocence prove true, but somehow the depiction of the world as fundamentally less dangerous than it seems rings more true in OTGW. In The Council of Frogs, the world is in tatters, and human supremacists aim to kill or subjugate anyone who's unlike them. In that context, it's important for those others to trust each other and form coalitions for safety, but I feel like Emmons make that look easier than it should be.
  
Emmons portrays the world as a wasteland where medieval technology mingles with the last remnants of the old society. The frog meets the beast-man (who will eventually become his closest ally) near an oil pipeline. The oracle (who tells the way to the warlock) has four arms, two of them obviously robotic. The warlock himself is either a robot or wears futuristic plate armor. The knights and war-mages are armored as well, but their outfits are more obviously medieval. In the end, the lich does find a successor and passes on his magic to a new guardian, though not the one he initially expects.

Stages of Rot

 
 
Stages of Rot
by Linnea Sterte
Peow

2017, reprinted 2023
 
 
Stages of Rot is a deeply enigmatic comic that depicts the decomposition of a dead whale, not at the bottom of one of Earth's oceans, but on an alien world where all manner of sea life fly through the air instead, the undersea biome coexisting with and layered on top of the surface. And because the whalefall is on the surface, humans are now one of the scavengers that feasts on the giant carcass. 
 
Artist Linnea Sterte divides the process into chapters based on which human group is present and what they're doing, but we're only one small part of the process. Sterte shows us the fish, the fungus, the macroscopic single-celled organisms that arrive to play their own roles. You get a sense that you're seeing a series of close-ups on a larger picture, a whole functioning ecology that remains mostly out of focus and even out of sight. 
 
Successfully communicating that feeling, of watching one step in the functioning of a larger machine, without ever zooming out to show the whole, is no simple task, I suspect. Done incorrectly, and I think it would seem too simple, or else like chaos, with no sense that it's guided by an invisible order. Keeping you, as the reader, with that tip-of-your-tongue feeling in your mouth the whole time, without ever telling you the word or making you feel like you simply don't know it, is kind of an incredible accomplishment. Scavengers' Reign was rightly hailed for doing something similar, and it had the benefit of animation, being able to show its processes in motion.
 
We watch as the flesh-eaters come to collect blood and meat, and to slay the 'pilot' who we're told is a human-looking homunculus who lives in the whales heart and guides its flight. Fungus begins to cover the whale and form the heart of a forest. 
 
The bone-cutters arrive to collect their materials. One carves a diatom, which we're told live in the upper atmosphere where humans rarely see them, so that perhaps the statue represents a memory in the bone as much as in the mind of the carver. 
 
The barbarians are next; called to the whalefall by a vision or dream. For them the journey into the whale represents something hard to define, perhaps the passage into adulthood, though I might be wrong. The forest expands ever outward. 
 
The last humans to arrive, the entomologists, collect specimens of every kind of life that visits or emerges from the fallen whale. They catalog it all and fill a museum. They even resurrect the pilot, who lives in the museum for awhile, before flying away, to the highest part of the sky, to join with another living whale. The cycle is complete and begins again.
 
Sterte uses a limited color palette to give each chapter its own feeling, distinct from the others. The flesh-eaters and barbarians both have more pink and red, the bone-cutters and entomologists more yellow and green. The alternation feels like a cycle, like the turning of seasons, and feeds back into the sense of hidden order propelling the book. This is not an especially long comic, and it has very little dialogue, but it's very effective at communicating the mystery of the way bodies are reclaimed by the world after death. 

Shadowlands

 
 
Shadowlands
A Journey through Britain's Lost Cities and Vanished Villages

by Matthew Green

WW Norton & Company

2022 
 
 
In Shadowlands, author Matthew Green takes us to 8 sites around Great Britain where people used to live and now do not. These aren't small places that got absorbed by a bigger neighbor. A couple were replaced by public works, a couple were subsumed by the sea. The others were abandoned due to economic and social changes more so than to politics or climactic disasters. 
 
The chapters are arranged chronologically by the date of abandonment. The oldest site was an island village whose inhabitants left around the end of the Stone Age; the newest was a Welsh town that was evacuated and flooded in the 1960s to create a reservoir. Green tells us the history of each place - what it was like before, how its abandonment went, in a few cases how it was later rediscovered. He visits each site in person to tell us what they're like today. Perhaps because his head is so full of their history he tends to perceive them as haunted, unquiet places despite their stillness and solitude, the vivid past overlaid atop the muted present.
 
The quality of Green's writing makes this book especially interesting to read. His physical descriptions of place are evocative, with details that make it relatively easy to imagine what each place might've looked like in its heyday, and what it's like to visit now. His historical reconstruction is empathetic, but doesn't shy away from unflattering details. He lists all the ways the Marcher Lords, empowered by the English king to war with and conquer the Welsh, would've used the iron produced in Trellech, an ore mining and blacksmithing boomtown, the grievous injuries inflicted by weapons and implements of torture. He tells us of the piracy practiced by the port town Winchelsea, the ships burned and sailors drowned, and the toll of a famous, terrible naval battle fought off its coast. He tells us the toll of the Black Death in Wharram Percy, and the bloody bird hunts on St Kilda island, where sea birds and their eggs were the main source of food.
 
Some of the sites enjoyed a second life after an earlier disaster. Old Winchelsea relocated to the mainland as its island flooded. For a time, it was a major hub for wine merchants, until it was sacked as revenge for decades of piracy, with civilians killed inside the church where they sought sanctuary, and its harbor filled with silt, becoming too shallow for large ships to dock. Wharram Percy was devastated by plague, but it disappeared, alongside many medieval villages, because of economic changes. With fewer serfs available for farming, and peasants able to choose where to work and demand higher wages, swaths of farmland (along with the farming villages) were converted to pasture for grazing sheep.
 
Green also shows us the role that the loss (or rediscovery) of of inhabited places has had on British culture at various times. The city of Dunwich, built on a coastal cliff, progressively fell into the ocean over several hundred years as the shoreline kep moving inland, and its increasing ruin help inspire the first antiquarians to care about preserving Britain's historic sites, and served as a muse for generations of romantics and poets who wanted to contemplate their mortality. Philosophers traveled to St Kilda island during the Enlightenment because they thought its inhabitants existed in a 'natural state' and could resolve the ongoing dispute about whether humans are innately good or wicked. Later, Victorian tourists came en masse to gawk at the lives of 'primitives' living as the imagined their own ancestors might've. When we think about the past, we often use those thoughts to provide motivations or justifications for our actions in the present.
 
Shadowlands reminded me a bit of Cal Flyn's Islands of Abandonment. Both Flyn and Green visited places people no longer lived, though for different reasons, and they saw different things. Flyn's sites were mostly abandoned since World War II, often because industry or warfare made them uninhabitable, and she focused on the reintroduction of nature to those sites. The places Green visited are mostly older, and many are places people could still live, they just don't (and of those now unlivable, three are underwater). He's motivated by fears for the future, inspired by the covid pandemic and rising sea levels due to climate change, but at each site his focus remains on the past. I probably find these sorts of tours of lost places inherently fascinating, but I appreciate when they're thoughtful and written well.

Tower Dungeon 3

 
Tower Dungeon 3

by Tustomu Nihei
Kodansha

2025
 
  

The previous volume of Tower Dungeon ended on a cliffhanger, with a party of rival adventurers ambushing our heroes. In the brief, losing fight, Yuva (our audience viewpoint character) got knocked off a ledge, guaranteeing a 10 meter fall and a hard landing on the stone floor of the story below.

 

The whole mission had been a mess from the start. The Necromancer killed the king and kidnapped the princess, caused the legendary Dragon Tower to reappear, and took his hostage up to level 100, a kilometer above the base. The titular tower dungeon is big like a mountain, with a perfectly circular base, flawless construction, an impossible height and size. The royal guard sent to save her was massacred by the tower's perils, and the survivors were recalled by parliament, who wanted the royal-blooded guard to sit as a place-holder on the throne until the princess could be returned. 

 

Master archer Enriqo, fire magician Lilisen, and the recently conscripted Yuva were the only official rescuers left. A boom town sprung up outside the dungeon as ambitious adventurers sought to make their fortune by pillaging the tower. But the ambush wasn't just treasure hunters - they were a handful of former royal guards, now mercenaries, sent by an unknown rival member of the royal family to prevent the princess's rescue.

 

Now Tower Dungeon volume 3 opens with super-strong Yuva proving himself much hardier than anyone suspected. Until now, he's only used his strength to carry heavy supplies, and he's seemed to get hurt as easy as anyone. But he survived the fall, and we watch him scale the stone-block wall, endure several arrows, and overpower the mercenaries to save his friends. The trio seem bonded by the experience. Enriqo reveals something the mercenaries wanted - a magic arrowhead given to him by the departing guard captain, which should be able to slay the undead dragon on level 80. Lilisen was initially pretty dismissive of Yuva, but her feelings are warming rapidly.

 

Fearing there might be more mercenaries waiting back in town, they decide to push on despite their injuries. They find the all-girl adventurer gang the Excavators have been turned to stone by a basilisk, depicted here as a giant moth with eye spots on its wings. Yuva is turned to stone too, but Lilisen and Enriqo manage to slay the monster, returning everyone to normal. A goth gal from the gang kind of flings herself at Yuva which makes Lilisen visibly jealous. I think she likes him likes him. Later, she gives him a magic ring so they can hear each other's thoughts. The poor guy is so naive and innocent, but his thoughts reveal he likes her too.

  

The final chapter of this volume opens up the narrative a bit more. In his sleep, Yuva dreams of the kidnapped princess. It seems she's made a kind of psychic contact with him. Members of the royal family all have dragon blood, they live supernaturally long lives and some can transform into dragons. Lilisen's magic might be a draconic power too. The princess warns Yuva that the necromancer is trying to merge his consciousness with the zombie dragon, and that Bad Things will happen if he succeeds. When Yuva awakes and tells the others, Enriqo realizes something Yuva (raised by his grandparents in a tiny rural village) never guessed about himself - he's part of the royal family, and his super strength comes from his dragon blood.
 
Nihei continues to show us unusual takes on classic fantasy creatures. The basilisk moth is both imposing and different from any interpretation I've seen before. Up to now, interactions between Yuva and Enriqo have been a bit stiff and formal; between Yuva and Lilisen almost cartoony in their sibling-like antagonism. As the three become closer as a result of their shared experiences, their interactions also become friendlier and more genuine, with the barriers imposed by rank or rivalry coming down to allow more honest exchanges.

Fantasy Sports 1

 
 
Fantasy Sports 1

by Sam Bosma

Nobrow
2015

 
  

Fantasy Sports is a fun little graphic novel by Sam Bosma about a pair of adventurers who must defeat the mummy and win his treasure by ... beating him at basketball?

 

I've been looking for a term to describe fantasy stories like this one, where the worldbuilding is based on conventions derived from Dungeons & Dragons, but where the world doesn't specifically operate on game mechanics. The consensus among my friends is that there is no one standard name, but we might call the genre dungeon fantasy or rpg fantasy. I'm thinking of stories where Adventurers go into Dungeons to find Treasure and defeat Monsters. The adventurers might belong to guilds, and they probably have named sub-types based on their special abilities. These stories are usually a bit humorous rather than serious, and they often incorporate anachronisms and scifi elements - the kinds of things that come up while playing D&D with a group of friends.

 

In my search, a friend introduced me to the idea of litrpg, which is related, but I think different from what I'm talking about. In litrpg, game mechanics like character levels and hit points are literally true and part of the physics of the world, and the characters are aware of them. For dungeon fantasy, I'm thinking of Adventure Time and Delicious in Dungeon, not That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime.

 

In terms of length and humor, Fantasy Sports is kind of like an episode of Adventure Time. Mug and Wiz are uneasy partners in the Mage's Guild, and both would prefer to be paired with someone else. Mug doesn't actually seem to be a mage? He's a huge, muscly rage monster who can punch through stone walls and has no time for a nerdy sidekick. Wiz is a magical teen apprentice who thinks that Mug is too quick-tempered and short-sighted to teach her anything. 

They get sent into an ancient tomb their disparate approaches make quick work of all the traps an obstacles, but the final guardian is an undead pharoah who insists that he'll only give up his treasure if they can beat him at one-on-one basketball. Mug plays first, struggling against the pharoah's inhumanly long reach until Wiz gives him some advice to play to his own strengths. It's a near tie at the end when Mug gets injured and Wiz has to sub in. The pharoah's getting exhauated but convinced he'll win easily against a kid, and ... well, what do you think happens? C'mon. This is not the sort of story that has a sad ending. I think there are a couple more in this series, so I might try to check those out.

Mainly in Moonlight

 
 
Mainly in Moonlight
Ten Stories of Sorcery and the Supernatural

by Nicholas Gray
Meredith Press

1965, reprinted 1967 
 
 
Mainly in Moonlight is a collection of fantasy stories from the 1960s by Nicholas Gray. The stories are meant for older kids or younger teens. They're structured like fairy tales or bedtime stories. Each one begins "Once, not so very long ago," but they subvert the usual plotlines of the genre in a way that young kids might find frustrating or boring. These are stories of princes and princesses, sorcerers and magic, quests and adventures, but they never go quite how you expect, in ways that might be thought provoking, or disappointing, or both.
 
In Rhetorics of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn identifies four kinds of fantasy - portal fantasies, immersive fantasies, intrusive fantasies, and liminal fantasies, which are the kind I think is most relevant here. In a portal fantasy, we follow as someone from our world travels to a fantasy world. In an immersive fantasy, we are immersed in a fantasy world, following characters who are natives to it. An intrusive fantasy mostly takes places in our world, but fantastic characters intrude into it from some hidden and previously unknown place. And then there are liminal fantasies, which I think describes most of the stories in Mainly in Moonlight, where we follow a character who encounters the fantastic but turns away from it instead of going in.
 
In one story, we follow a lady-in-waiting who learns that a handsome prince has been transformed into a loathsome animal. She rushes to help him regain his human form, but when he offers to marry her she demurs. Unlike in "The Frog Prince", she wasn't looking for true love and didn't find it. She saved someone who needed rescuing, but that doesn't mean she wants to upend the rest of her life for him.
 
In the title story, "Mainly in Moonlight", a young man dreams his pregnant cat will give birth to a white kitten, and so he finds a sorcerer who'll make the dream come true, on the condition that he provides a month of drudgery and servitude in the sorcerer's house. He accepts but quickly regrets it. A creature trapped in the well promises to cast the spell instead, if only the guy frees him; he does, but is told he's now enslaved to the creature for a year. He's tricked by two other false rescues, before the sorcerer takes pity and gives him what he really wants - just to go home where (because the spirits did it all in one night) his cat has just given birth to three white kittens.
 
Things often come in threes in these tales. A meek king lives in fear of his selfish, demanding son. When the prince is visited by a great wizard in the night, he's given a simple task, which he immediately fails because he has no impulse control. As punishment, the wizard makes him spend decades as a tree in a snowstorm, conscious for every moment, then after two other tasks and two other failures, centuries as a cloud circling a mountain, a millennium as sand in a burning desert. By this point the prince has been fully broken emotionally, and is prepared to obey any command without question, but when the wizard returns him to the present and tells him to kill the king, the prince still refuses, because he finally appreciates his father's love. It's like the reverse of Abraham and Isaac, but the wizard never really wanted loyalty, just to teach a brat that lesson.
 
In one of the best stories, "According to Tradition", a selfish prince is paired with a generous younger brother. The king has always gone easy on his awful older son and been harsh and stern to the gentle younger, because he's a genre savvy monarch and knows from the tales that all beloved eldest sons are doomed and all meek, selfless second sons will ultimately inherit the kingdom. The boys go on a quest together, to rescue a neighbor girl who's been kidnapped by the fairies. Three times the meet a magical figure in need, the older boy is loutish, and the younger one helps out by giving up a cloak, a ring, an act of kindness. In the second half of the the quest, they face three trials, and each time someone who was helped returns to repay the favor. (I think this is a really classic fairy tale plot.) The older brother receives no help, but gets through by giving up his heart, his ability to wed a human girl, and then his humanity - he becomes a fairy himself. The younger brother is free to return home with the girl, whose kidnapping was only ever a pretext to spare the kingdom from the awful son.
 
"A Lady's Quest" deserves a special mention because it's about a tomboy princess rescuing her brother, who is implicitly, but very clearly, written to be gay. The prince hates hunting and the military, wants to laze about the castle in comfort, and calls whoever he's talking to 'darling' in every sentence. The princess opines that she'd've made a better boy and her brother a better girl ... and he doesn't contradict her. The prince invents a fake quest to get his father off his back, and uses it as an excuse to hang out with his very close male friend, who doesn't enjoy the company of ladies. Then the pair of them are kidnapped by a witch, and the princess gets to do what she's always wanted, and have a quest herself. She doesn't defeat the witch, just offers her a chance to come back to the castle, have friends, and be a lady-in-waiting. The witch agrees but fears she won't be any good at the feminine activities of a lady; the princess reassures her that her lack of skill won't matter. Nothing about the initial situation is resolved, no one uses magic to switch anyone's genders, the prince will still be put upon and the princess thwarted, but the story ends there anyway, in a move that's typical of these stories.
 
One thought I had about these stories is that by denying us characters who accept the fantastic, by denying us satisfying endings, Gray might be encouraging his young readers to make up their own second chapters to each tale, to imagine what a proper adventure and a traditional ending might look like for each of his reluctant protagonists.

Super Late Bloomer

 
 
Super Late Bloomer
My Early Days in Transition
An Up and Out Collection

by Julia Kaye

Andrews McMeel
2018

 

 

Super Late Bloomer is a collection of autobiographical comics by Julia Kay, drawn in the 4 panel cartoon style of a daily newspaper comic. For Kaye, these comics functioned like a diary, helping her keep track of moods and events during her first summer living openly as a trans woman. Kaye was in her mid-20s at the time, and had moved back in with her parents while she started taking estrogen, getting laser hair removal, wearing women's clothes in public, changing her name and documents, and coming out to a widening circle of acquaintances.
 
Because they're so short, each comic is a little vignette of a single mood or incident. There's a mix of joy and self-acceptance with various forms of awkwardness and unpleasantness. I found a lot of Kaye's experiences really relatable, some from when I was first coming out myself, and some still today. A consistent metaphor is that taking estrogen and transitioning is like going through puberty again, with all the doubt and awkwardness that entails.
 
Kaye has a lot of self doubts - she worries that others will see her as a man playing dress-up, she frets about visible stubble, she's self-conscious about her voice. Sometimes she gets misgendered, even when she looks her most femme; other times she fears she will be, but then it's fine. Sometimes she hates her reflection. There are a few comics about public bathrooms - being afraid to come out of a stall when someone else is there, worrying what a friend will think when you're both in there at the same time. Kaye's parents are supportive, but there's one family member who's distant now, and she misses their friendship.
 
I think that for a lot of trans people, the process of figuring out what it is you're feeling and trying to decide what to do about it, is inherently isolating. You're doing a lot of introspecting, thinking about some of your most uncomfortable memories and emotions, and imagining how you might be able to feel better in the future. And you yourself might be the only trans person you know personally. It's easy to feel alone. 
 
Coming out, starting to socially and medically transition, hopefully does make you feel better. It's also different from anything you've done before, and it's new for your friends and family too. I think one of the most valuable things about a book like Super Late Bloomer is that it reminds you you're not alone, that others have felt what you're feeling, have done what you're now doing. You may be different from most of the people you know, but there are others like you, and things went mostly okay for them, and they can for you too. 

Paper Girls 4

 
 
Paper Girls 4

by Brian Vaughan
art by Cliff Chiang

Image Comics
2018
 
  

In volume 4 of Paper Girls, I think we finally start getting some clear information about what's been happening across the previous volumes, thanks to a helpful true believer who tries to indoctrinate the girls to her side. The new info helps make sense of what we've seen up to this point. Til now, we've mostly been along for the ride as the girls were menaced by a baffling conflict going on around them. We still are, really, but at least we're starting to understand the conflict!

 

In the first volume, the girls' suburban Cleveland neighborhood was invaded by strangeness the morning after Halloween in 1988. We saw that the two factions were mutated teenagers dressed like ninjas or burglars, and an army of knights riding pterodactyls. The future teens language is incomprehensible without a translator; the knights speak a barely intelligible version of English that reads like online forum slang. The knights are led by an old man who sounds perfectly contemporary and can barely understand his own troops.

 

We now know this is the War of the Ages, fought between the Old Timers, who want to avoid making any consequential changes to history, and their own descendants, who want to use time travel to change things. The linguistic drift we see suggests how long a span of future history we're dealing with here. The Old Timers have robots that can repair property damage, and to keep people from witnessing anything, they teleport them into stasis pods and use amnesia rays to erase anything out of place. They want to fight the teens whenever they show up, and use their tech to keep the fight itself from being recorded or remembered. We're told that the teens want to change history for the better, although we've mostly seen them stealing, perhaps supplies or maybe just souvenirs.

 

The girls time traveled by accident and arrived in 2016 in volume two. They met Erin's adult-self and also a future-teen who was a clone of Erin. Mac learned she has as-yet undiagnosed cancer and only a few years to live. The future clone accidentally brought tardigrades with her, and even more accidentally, they arrived as giants that began destroying downtown Cleveland. That brought in the Old Timers, flying a giant airship like a cathedral. 

 

The girls got sent through time again, appearing in the Stone Age in volume 3. They met a cavegirl their own age (who they could speak to using one of the translators) and the woman who invented time travel, on the very first trip. Unfortunately, the past was already littered with future junk when she arrived. Based on the two factions' philosophies, I'd guess the abandoned tech was left behind by the future teens. Touching an anomaly gave KJ a brief, kaleidoscopic vision of events from her own future, including kissing Mac. KJ was surprised and shaken by the vision. The scientist was killed by a caveman, but the girls used her time machine to escape.

 

Now in volume 4, they arrive back home, but on New Years Eve in the year 1999. In the comic, the Y2K bug caused mass power outages and other infrastructure shut-downs. Also, giant robots are fighting in the Cleveland suburbs, but only Tiffany can see them! Half the robots are being piloted by future teens, and half by the Old Timers. The leader, who we've always seen as an old man, is still young here, and the pterodactyl breeding program isn't finished yet. From his perspective, this battle happens early in his career. For the teens who met the girls in volume 1, I think this fight is immediately before that meeting; they retreat backward in time when their mecha is damaged.

 

The girls meet an elderly cartoonist who lives in their neighborhood. She met the future teens when she was a kid, and she's become a fanatical believer in their perspective on the war. They also meet Tiffany's college-age self. She grows up to be a goth! With a White boyfriend! The girls get into the damaged, abandoned mecha and it takes them further into the future, where the leader of the Old Timers is waiting. That particular mecha killed his copilot (who begged him, with her dying words, to hold fast to their principles and not overwrite her death), and he wants revenge. Hopefully he'll learn that it has a new pilot before he destroys it!

 

 

You'll want to break out the decoder ring for this one, because the future teens have kind of a lot of dialogue. It's depicted using a substitution code, with strange symbols replacing familiar letters. It takes a bit of time and effort matching the symbols to figure out what they're saying. The effect is interesting. Each symbol is complicated, looking more like a Chinese ideogram than an English letter. So the future teens' speech bubbles look like they're saying a lot. Somehow when I look at the symbols, the way it's written makes what they're saying look technical and complex, or maybe angry and warlike. Then I translate it and I see they mostly speak in short words and simple sentences, and most of what they're saying is just simple expressions of surprise or dismay. There's dramatic irony in the contrast.

 

Things are pretty tangled at this point, especially with the revelation that the order that we (and the girls) are seeing events in doesn't match the order the factions perceive them, and that the factions also have different timelines of events from each other. Time travel plots are frequently confusing, and this one has more interweaving than most.