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.

Destined for Greatness

 
Destined for Greatness
Passions, Dreams, and Aspirations in a College Music Town

by Michael Ramirez

photos by Mike White

Rutgers University Press

2018 

 

 
Destined for Greatness is a sociological study of rock musicians in Athens, Georgia. Ramirez interviewed 48 musicians across 22 bands about how they got started in music, what their music career has been like, how they imagine their future. His interest here isn't in the artistic content of the songs, but in the job of being a musician. The book is organized around the stages of the lifecourse (and their intersection with the stages of having a career) with a special emphasis on differences between men's and women's experiences.
 
Although all Ramirez's interviewees were based in the same town, his research is not ethnographic, and there's no thick description of the Athens music scene, of what it's like to play or listen there, of what any of this music sounds like, beyond that it's rock rather than some other genre. If you go into the book expecting that, you'll be disappointed. His study is written up much as it would be if he interviewed people from across the country, about almost any kind of work. Though just as Ramirez isn't trying to be Gary Alan Fine, he's also not trying to be Michele Lamont, so there are no elaborate selection criteria for making a half-dozen comparisons between various 'halves' of the sample. Gender is the main point of difference between the musicians. Most of the rest of what Ramirez finds is similarity across them (or differences with little systematic basis).
 
The musicians Ramirez talked to aren't nationally famous; most are probable little known outside of Athens. Their level of success varies. A few make enough from playing local shows and regional tours to treat music as their full-time job; most are musicians in addition to other work, usually service jobs, occasionally office work. To be included, the band had to rehearse and perform regularly, and to either tour or have an album. The weakest part of each chapter is actually the introduction, when Ramirez tries to link whatever he's talking about to something a nationally famous musician has said in a public statement. He's on far firmer footing writing about his actual interviewees.
 
Ramirez frames his work primarily from a lifecourse perspective, and he's especially interested in the idea of emerging adulthood - supposedly a recent stage of life that sits between the end of adolescence and the start of full adulthood, when people have mostly achieved independence from their parents, but not yet achieved a marriage, mortgage, career, and children of their own. (As I understand it from authors other than Ramirez, the idea that people commonly wed and start having kids in their late teens or very early twenties is an expectation set in the historically abnormal 1950s. We hold ourselves to an imaginary standard set at a weird time.) 
 
Like many people their age, young adult musicians tend to delay forming their own families. Unlike most, their chosen career isn't seen as a 'real' or 'grown-up' job by others, so they have added difficulties in feeling like full adults, rather than like they've 'fallen behind' their peers. I think the extended apprenticeship of grad school might produce a similar feeling, and there are probably other career trajectories with the same problem, particularly in any creative field.
 
As I mentioned, the organization of the book centers on the stages of the lifecourse. We get a chapter about how they discovered their love of music, how they learned to play an instrument, and how they started playing rock music. We get a chapter about forming their first bands and playing their first shows. We get a chapter about the challenges of making a career out of music, especially for those who have to integrate musicianship with other employment, and about how they think about their identities as musicians and as adults. We get two chapters about gender - one about men in rock music, and one about women. And we get a chapter about how musicians envision their futures, whether they'll keep performing, and how they plan to continue their careers.
 
I started reading this hoping for an ethnography of the Athens music scene, but I appreciate Ramirez's research, and his insights into how people negotiate informal careers in creative industries. There are a handful of black and white photos of the scene; I sort of assume these are from around the same time Ramirez was doing his interviews, but that they probably don't show anyone he actually spoke to.

The Creepy Case Files of Margo Maloo

 
The Creepy Case Files of Margo Maloo

by Drew Weing

First Second

2016 

 

 

The Creepy Case Files of Margo Maloo is a kids' comic about a boy who moves to the city, discovers it's full of monsters, then learns that monsters aren't as scary as he thought. 
 
Our viewpoint character is Charles, an aspiring journalist whose parents have just moved into a fixer-upper apartment in a former hotel. Echo City is on the coast; it's a bit economically distressed, though maybe things have recently improved. The titular Margo Maloo helps out other kids who have monster problems. Her main rules for helping are that the monsters were here first and have at least as much right to a peaceful life as the human kids do, and that you can't tell any adults about the existence of monsters. 
 
Creepy Case Files has three chapters. In the first, Charles sees a troll in his bedroom at night. A neighbor kid, who really wants to set a world record for like hopping on one leg or standing on his head, gives Charles Margo's business card, and she shows up to help negotiate a peaceful resolution. The troll's annoyed that the hotel's getting remodeled, but he and Charles find common ground in their love of little stuffed toys that definitely are not Beanie Babies. In the second chapter, inquisitive Charles gets Margo to agree to let him tag along while she helps find a lost kid in an abandoned restaurant that's haunted by a ghost. In the third chapter, Charles is falsely accused of kidnapping a baby ogre. (He's been seen snooping around, and monsters have trouble telling humans apart!) Margo finds the baby and clears his name, with Charles taking on a Watson-like role.
 
Charles's parents dress like former Gen X alternative kids. They're excited by the DIY opportunities, and the fact that unlike in their old small town, the can get quinoa in the grocery store here, and carry-out from Korean restaurants. I feel like author Drew Weing included those details for parents who are reading with their kids to enjoy. Also for grown-ups' benefit - Charles's dad trying to explain the fraught ethics of gentrification to an disinterested 10-year-old, and dad clearly worrying that his White son isn't getting along with the neighbors before realizing Charles is talking about monsters, which are obviously just make-believe. The neighbor kid who wants to set a record is Black, and it seems like they will be friends. Margo looks Mediterranean to me. She's too much of a loner to consider Charles a friend, but by the end of the book, she might accept him as a partner in this monster business. 

Witch Hat Atelier 12

 
Witch Hat Atelier 12

by Kamome Shirahama

Kodansha

2024

 

  

The previous several volumes of Witch Hat Atelier set up all the pieces of a comprehensive disaster. Now they've been set in motion, and everything's in chaos. The girls have traveled to the annual Silver Eve festival, attended by witches from all over the countryside and by even more onlookers. The festival is a chance for witches to show off their newest spells and compete for royal patronage, and for the public to enjoy the spectacle. 

 

The king is there, ready to meet with the most promising inventors, publicly affirming the agreement about witches' role in society, while privately studying old forbidden healing magic. The Pact, you see, says that spells should only be cast on objects (never on people), prevents ordinary people from knowing the truth about magic, and bans witches from learning anything about first aid or medicine. The Knights Moralis enforce the Pact by erasing the memory of anyone who violates it (the only spell they allow to be cast directly on a person). So the king's secret is a serious breach of the law!

 

Coco and Tartah have started realizing they have feelings for each other. They also have serious doubts about the Pact. It's not just that Coco fears that saving her mother (who's been turned to stone) might require forbidden magic, she's also increasingly uncomfortable thinking about all the other people magic could help if it were used for healing. Coco feels especially guilty about Custas, who was injured and lost his dad in a landslide. The accident was partially caused by one of Coco's spells, which came out much stronger than it was supposed to. 

 

Custas is at the festival too, angry and volatile, using forbidden magic to compensate for his injured legs. And his dead dad is here, returned to a kind of cursed half-life by forbidden magic. The forbidden witch who taught Custas is here - she looks young and innocent, like one of the student witches. She wants an audience with the king, and extorts Coco to try to get one. Among her threats is the tantalizing promise that the king could truly heal Custas and his father.

 

The Knights Moralis are at the festival of course, there to prevent any breach of the Pact in the setting with the most contact between witches and ordinary people. They've arrested a very important witch, the old ambassador to the king, accusing him of taking bribes. And they've arrested a dirtbag witch who was selling magic glasses that can see through clothes (a very timely bit of commentary on Shirahama's part, considering one common use of AI image generators). One knight tried to arrest the forbidden witch who tutored Custas, but she turned the tables on him and erased his memory, taking almost everything he knew.

 

Now, in Witch Hat Atelier 12, in the king's jail, the old ambassador and the dirtbag plot to escape. The whole castle is warded against magic; it simply doesn't work inside. The ambassador draws a spell on the skin of the creep, with the idea that he can stick his hand out the window and get it to activate. (Apparently the ambassador already knew forbidden magic even if he didn't use it before his arrest.)

 

And that's what starts the disaster. As is so often the case, the king's jail has a guard monster, a leech that lived between the walls. When the creep sticks his hand out, the leech bites him, his blood mixes with the ink used to draw the spell on him, and everything goes wrong. The leech and man merge into one gigantic being, an impossibly vast multi-headed creature, like a net thrown over the entire festival biting at everyone there. 

 

The ambassador wryly observes that this is the secret reason for banning magic medicine and spells cast on bodies - that blood mixed with ink produces extraordinary, unpredictable results. This is a totally different justification than we've heard previously! (The avalanche that injured Custas happened after a forbidden witch replaced Coco's ink with something much more powerful. Could it have been as simple as ordinary ink mixed with blood?)

 

This is a disaster that could kill countless people. Olruggio and other adult witches use fire spells to burn the monster. The Knights Moralis try to fight the leeches and evacuate the public. They want to keep people safe, but they also fear too many people witnessing just how easily all the helping magic they've been seeing at the festival can be used as a weapon of war. In a moment of irony, the forbidden witch who looks like a school girl gets rescued from the leech by the knight whose memory she erased - he doesn't remember her, or anything really, but he still feels a duty to protect others.

 

Tetia and the other girls feel helpless watching ordinary people bandage the wounds of the injured, and start having doubts just like Coco's. Why shouldn't they do something to useful? In the chaos, Coco confesses what she's been thinking to Master Qifrey. His reaction isn't instant rejection as she feared it would be. He understands her doubts about the Pact.

 

Right now everything is chaos and everyone is in danger. The leeches can just barely be held back, but seemingly not truly injured or defeated. It's an ongoing disaster, and it'll continue in the next volume.

Gnomon

 
 
Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

Knopf

2018

 

  

Gnomon is a very literary scifi mystery novel set in a dystopian near-future Britain. We follow Inspector Neith as she tries to determine responsibility for a death in custody of an elderly privacy advocate. Was she simply too old, stubborn, and frail? Or were her interrogators at fault for pushing her too hard, beyond what anyone could endure? To find the answer, Neith downloads a recording of victim's thoughts during the session - but instead of just one woman's memories, she finds four other people's stories too. Is it possible they could be true, or are they just a trick the woman used to avoid revealing herself? 

 

The System is a surveillance state that styles itself as a perfect democracy. Everyone is being watched all the time, not only by ubiquitous cameras and their own smart phones, but by their whole internet of things, fridges that know what they eat, washing machines that monitor alcohol intake and run pregnancy tests. But only the machine sees any of this, unless it flags something for human review, which will be conducted by a member of the Witness, like Inspector Neith. 

 

Everything is decided by direct democracy - sometimes by a jury-like subset, and sometimes by a plebiscite of the entire public. The machine decides who will vote, tallies the totals, and enacts the results. The machine, we are told, is perfectly fair and impartial, seeing everything and treating everyone the same, without the possibility of discrimination or corruption. (Though later we are asked to contemplate what it would mean if some people got preferential treatment, or if the electorate for some votes were chosen to ensure the result.)

 

Sometimes the System marks someone as suspicious and requires them to submit to questioning. If human Witness agents can resolve the suspicions, they will. But if the suspect refuses or seems dishonest, the machine can quite literally read their mind. The death Neith is investigating was someone who died while her thoughts were being recorded; in addition to traditional modes of investigation, Neith plays the transcript, meaning she experiences everything the dead woman thought from the moment they hooked her to the machine until she died. The substories framed by this main plot are narratives the woman was thinking at her interrogators, tales she was telling to avoid revealing herself, and perhaps to communicate another hidden message.

 

The title of Gnomon refers to a tool for drawing right angles, or a thing that is perpendicular to its surroundings, like the upright hand of a sundial, or it could refer to one who knows. The gnomon will recur in one form or another in each of the substories, and that's really just the start. There are a host of recurring images that repeat across the tales and accumulate new meanings and significances as they reappear, including five-factor authentication and the idea of a truth that can only be understood by superimposing multiple allegorical reflections, which doubles as advice for how to understand this book as a whole. There are frequent incidents of metalepsis, when events in one level of the story seem to affect another, and the kind of 'rhymes' Fritz Lang often used as scene transitions, like when one story ends with a character being kidnapped with a sack over his head, and the next starts with a different character being kidnapped the same way.

 

The structure of the book is a much-extended version of a traditional detective story, and that familiar formula helps you avoid getting lost along the way, which is important, because the substories are probably collectively longer than the frame story, and certainly they're long enough individually that you could lose track of where you are within the whole. Cloud Atlas famously used recurring themes and images across several stories that spanned over time and place, but in Gnomon, the substories are much more explicitly linked together. Remember that each of these stories supposedly has the same teller - the woman being interrogated by a machine that records her thoughts - even though there are multiple narrators, each so fully realized that they feel like an authentic person in their own right.

 

There's Constantine, a Greek math genius who became an investment banker. We join him as be has a life-changing encounter with a shark, which sends him on a stock-trading hot-streak, turning his life into a bacchanal while he ascends to multi-billionaire wealth. There's Athenais, an alchemist from Carthage and the former lover of St Augustine, who's asked to investigate an impossible murder and realizes she has a chance to make the mythical Alkahest. There's Berihun, a retired Ethiopian painter living in London who gets inspired to paint again by his genius granddaughter, who's making a video game about mass surveillance. Both Constantine and Athenais are mourning a dead loved one, and are offered a supernatural opportunity to be reunited. Constantine and Berihune's stories take place at the same time, starting before the Brexit vote and continuing a few years after. And then there's Gnomon, an artificial intelligence from the far future who has supposedly traveled back in time and occupied a human body on a mission to kill the other characters.

 

While Neith starts out convinced that these stories are nothing but a distraction, of course, I as a reader want them to be more than that. Granted, the whole novel is a work of fiction, actually entirely written by Nick Harkaway - but within that larger fiction, the stories are sub-fictions or hypo-fictions, they are presented as bring fictional even within the 'real' world of the larger fiction, and so I found myself questioning how 'true' they were supposed to be. I spent a fair bit of time considering that Gnomon the narrator might genuinely be a consciousness from the future. I do think that one of the narratives originally came someone else who was interrogated by the System, understanding how that story got inside this suspect's head is one of the many, many revelations you learn along the way.

 

I think of success of Gnomon the novel depends on the substories; if they were just a distraction, if they were merely well-told tales that are fun to read, then the book as a would be less successful than if they are (within the larger fiction of the novel) in some sense 'true'. Within these stories is hidden an account of how the System came to be, the story of someone who was horribly mistreated by it, and an account of why the woman being interrogated came to be arrested. Some of it is lightly fictionalized, some very allegorical, some extremely literal, and all of it told in such a way that the meaning and significance of what you've learned is revealed only after you've learned it, so the truth of each story propagates backward in time, changing the meaning of the stories in your memory as you think back over them. I think Harkaway was very successful here, in a way that's clearer now as I write this than it was when I first closed the book.

 

Lest you be worried, Harkaway did not cast Inspector Neith as a true believer in the perfection of the System, only to have her finish the case convinced she's right, that distributed democracy can't be manipulated, that total surveillance is good, that privacy and secrecy are inherently unacceptable, and that having certain knowledge of what people have done means the accused deserve no rights. But giving the System a robust intellectual defense and a defender whose own conduct is above reproach makes the later turn against it more satisfying. It takes no special insight to oppose a society that's obviously capricious and unfair. Like any good detective story, Neith's own tale will see her finding flaws with the side she serves and seeking to correct them, a quest that will put her into alliance with the interrogated woman and opposed to the System that interrogated her to death.

Quiet City (2007)

 
 
Quiet City
directed by Aaron Katz
written by Erin Fisher, Aaron Katz, and Cris Lankenau

Benten Films
2007

 
 
Quiet City is another early mumblecore film, about young people not long out of college, struggling to find their way, and looking for an authentic emotional connection. This one is almost like a fable, a serendipitous encounter between two lonely people, who spend time together, and surprise themselves by developing a genuine bond with a stranger. Perhaps it's a bit like The Breakfast Club, or Before Sunrise in that respect.

 

Jamie flies to New York and takes the subway to Brooklyn to meet a friend. The early shots are saturated with the orange of sunset and the tunnel lights. Her friend isn't there, and can't be reached by phone. Jamie asks directions from the only person around, Charlie, who first walks her to the diner that was supposed to be her meeting spot, then waits with her. Then, when it's clear her friend isn't coming, he invites her to come stay on his couch, and she accepts.

 

In Charlie's apartment they talk, have a drink, play a duet on a small keyboard. Jamie cuts his hair, then falls asleep in his bed while he's showering. Charlie sleeps on the couch. The trust and intimacy of this part is breathtaking. Both of them are taking a terrible risk, and both are rewarded for it.

I don't think it's an accident that everyone in this film is White. Jamie and Charlie are both vulnerable and naive, but also safe. They're two people who could easily hurt each other, but don't, who create a little world for themselves, fragile as a soap bubble, where the dangers out in the real world don't even exist as ideas, as possibilities. I don't know if I've seen people of color being depicted in a film being at once so innocent, and so secure that their innocence is rewarded instead of punished.

 

The next day, Charlie and Jamie try to visit her friend, who isn't home, then break in using the fire escape. (Can you imagine!?) They look around, but find no clues. They go play in the park. They visit a friend of Charlie's, then go to the gallery opening of another of Jamie's friends. They go to the after-party together, and learn more about each other, by seeing each other interact with someone else, by asking their friends about each other. Both are alone, both lonely, neither fully fits in with these friends, or feels at home where they live. Each maybe already knows the other better than anyone else does.

 

It seem notable that no one in this film has a smartphone. Of course, it's because they don't exist yet. Jamie is initially preoccupied trying to call her friend, but once she and Charlie are alone together, they have no distractions except the ones they make. No television, no internet. They each get the full force of the other's attention for hours and hours. It's a recipe to cultivate connection, and something that seems hardly possible anymore (I say, by typing these words into an app on my smartphone...)

 

After the after-party, the two ride the subway back to the airport together so Jamie can fly home. The scene of intimacy that ends the film isn't sex, isn't even a kiss - it's Jamie falling asleep resting her head on his shoulder, and Charlie falling asleep resting his head on hers. The final shot is the plane taking off in the orange of another sunrise. We don't know what either will do next, but we can hope their connection will somehow last.
 
 
Originally watched March 2023.

The Art of Memory Collecting

 
 
The Art of Memory Collecting
15 Scrapbook, Collage, Trinket, and Zine Projects for Crafting Treasured Moments
by Martina Calvi

photos by Petrina Tinslay

Quadrille

2024

 

 

The Art of Memory Collecting is a craft book with advice for contemporary scrapbookers and other mementos, emphasizing collage and ephemera. Martina Calvi has a second book about 'junk journaling', and I feel like you can see her advice here already leading in that direction. I would contrast this way of documenting memory with an earlier style of scrapbooking that was mostly about displaying photographs and writing meaningful captions, although Calvi herself never makes this comparison.
 
Calvi given advice for journals, a few kinds of boxes (including time capsules), a few kinds of personal zines, and a few kinds of greeting cards (including advice for making letter-art pen pals). Because several of these projects are quite similar, just at different sizes or with different themes, Calvi has a couple chances each to teach the crafting techniques involved. Her broader vision of how to make any of these projects, however, remains consistent throughout. The projects in The Art of Memory Collecting are ultimately quite similar to the mail art in Good Mail Day.
 
Save any trinkets, scraps of paper, physical photos, or other odds and ends, especially (but not only) ones that have some sentimental value or look cool. Set them out along with any stamps, stickers, fabrics, prints, or washi tape you want to use. Pick a subset that go together based on person, place, event, or even just color. Try arranging them until you find a layout that pleases you, then cut, glue, layer, and embellish until whatever you're collaging is completely covered and your star objects are displayed to good effect.
 
In general, I think Calvi does a decent job steering her instructions between the two shores of 'simple enough to understand' and 'technical enough to be useful' without running aground on either side. I would've enjoyed a few more example photos of finished projects. And I think Calvi assumes her reader pretty much already has a collection of things to scrapbook with. She spends a little time giving examples of the kinds of things you might collect, and more to discussing how to choose from among your collection for a given project, but that's an area I might've liked a bit more advice.
 
Calvi mostly assumes her reader already wants to do these projects and already sees them as worth doing, but I found myself thinking about how I would justify them. My defense would be twofold. First, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. If you are only willing to scrapbook when you can do everything right, you'll hardly ever do it at all. A finished page that's messy or ugly is still better than a blank page, or a perfect page that only exists in your head. Second, objects tell a story. They provide context and trigger memories. Whatever scraps of paper you've acquired recently tell the story of your life right now, even if they seem insignificant in themselves. You can make a perfectly curated page for an important occasion another day. For now, right now, use whatever you have on hand to commemorate your ordinary life at this moment.
 
Calvi and photographer Petrina Tinslay also deserve credit for how good all the photos look. I'm not really sure about the division of labor here. Calvi got a book deal because she has a popular Instagram, and I sort of assume she usually takes her own photos. And photographers usually set up their own shots, so I don't know if Calvi just provided the projects and materials to shoot, or if she helped pose them at all. Anyway, however they did it, the result is a book full of photos with almost supernaturally good composition. My personal shorthand for this look is 'Wes Anderson style', but what I mean is bright cheerful colors, eclectic mixes of materials, things arranged neatly with consistent spacing between objects, the use of negative space as a frame. The photos in a book like this are obviously supposed to look good, but these photos look really really good. 

The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All 1

 
 
The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All 1
by Sumiko Arai

translated by Ajani Oloye

Yen Press

2024
 
 
The cover of The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All stands out for its eye-catching electric green background, and while most manga are black and white inside, cartoonist Sumiko Arai deploys the same neon green in the interior, often in the background or between panels, but also to highlight moments of emotional intensity, like when one if the teen characters speaks from the heart and Arai briefly colors their irises green.
 
The color-scheme, the theme of high school girls in a burgeoning but still undefined relationship, and the long title that invites some sort of shorthand has led to TGSWIIWAGAA getting nicknamed "green yuri" online.
 

The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All is really something special. I was expecting a sitcom-like comedy of errors where circumstance and coincidence conspire to maintain a case of mistaken identity far beyond the realm of plausibility, the sort of thing you really only see in old superhero comics (or parodies of them), where a woman swoons over the handsome superhero and has no time for her boring, oft-absent coworker and never suspects the connection. 
 
Instead, The Guy She Was Interested In is much more emotionally-realistic, with its setup mostly serving to set events in motion before allowing them to unfold in a more believable way. Arai really captures the intensity of teenage feelings, the way finding a song or a musical style feels like discovering something brand new, like something could define your whole identity if you wanted it to, the way making a new friend or getting to spend time with your crush feels like the most important thing in the world, even if you don't know what to call these exciting new emotions, or how to describe the way you spend so much time thinking about them and wondering if they're thinking of you. The fact that Arai's characters are often confused or hesitant or overwhelmed makes them feel all the more like real people, especially real teens, for whom all of this is completely new.
 
Popular high school girl Aya looks and acts a lot like her popular friends, but she's got two things special in her life right now. First, she's gotten really into American rock music from the 1990s. She talks it up to her friends, but they don't really see the appeal, so she always listens privately, at home or on headphones. The second big thing in Aya's life is that she's got a huge crush on the cute, mysterious guy who works at the CD shop. The guy has a goth or emo fashion sense, wearing all black, including a hoodie and dust mask, and likes the same music Aya does, even playing Nirvana at the store the same day she listened to them at school.
 
Aya tells her friends all about the guy, not noticing that the shy, nerdy girl sitting next to her is having a panic attack hearing this, because while Mitsuki tries to go unnoticed at school, she gets to dress how she wants at her after-school job at her uncle's CD shop... Mitsuki knows she should tell Aya right away, but she's too shy to do it at school, and at the store later, when Aya comes up to flirt with her, Mitsuki can't resist flirting back. She finds that she likes Aya too, and she likes that Aya likes her. Their friendship builds naturally, chatting at the shop, exchanging phone numbers and playlists, and all the while, Mitsuki knows she needs to get up the courage to tell the truth, even as she fears losing her new friend when she does...
 
Rather than using comedic mishaps to drag things out, Arai has Aya begin to suspect, then discover the truth, and has Mitsuki confess even after she worries Aya already knows, and then allows the girls to continue their friendship once the truth is out. Aya freely calls her feelings a crush when she thinks Mitsuki is a guy; later neither one seems to know what to call what they're feeling, except that they want to spend time together, and share their love of music with each other, as much as they can. I kind of think this might still be a romance, but it could also be a passionate friendship between two unexpected kindred spirits. It's clear the girls don't know what it is yet either. It feels authentic to a high school relationship, especially if neither girl previously thought of herself as queer.
 
Arai writes in 4-page scenes, which allows her to vary her chapter length in a way that most other manga artists can't. She varies the viewpoint across the scenes, mostly showing us things from Mitsuki's and Aya's perspectives, but sometimes others as well. We see them through the eyes of Mitsuki's uncle, who's simultaneously happy for his niece and feeling very old watching her grow up, and who intially fears the playlist Aya sent Mitsuki might've come from an adult man, a realistic concern that helps establish that not every possible young crush is appropriate or safe. 
 
We see them from the perspective of a good-looking boy in their class who's shocked that neither girl seems interested in him, but who gets over himself enough to become a friend (and to "ship" the two girls once they start hanging out more). And we see them as one of Aya's popular friends would, watching her bestie spend more and more time with a nerdy girl she seemingly has nothing in common with. Aya's friend might just be jealous, or she might be homophobic, but not everyone in the story is as happy about this new relationship as we in the audience are.
 
I was very pleasantly surprised by The Guy She Was Interested In, and recommend it to anyone who likes this kind of story.

The Waste Land

 
The Waste Land

by TS Eliot

Liveright
1922, reprinted

 

 

I thought I was rereading TS Eliot's The Waste Land, but after finishing it, I'm certain of a couple things. First, I'm sure I never read it before (it must've been Four Quartets before). And second, I'm so far removed from the context Eliot wrote this in that it's nearly impossible for me to experience it the way readers in 1922 would have. The reprint edition I read was made to look as much like the original as possible, but unfortunately it takes more than the same dust jacket to recreate the original effect. I can parse the words I'm reading, and get meaning from the sentences (except the few bits that are in other languages), but I can't understand it as Eliot meant it, or as his intended audience probably received it.

 

I've seen any number of essays lauding The Waste Land as the one of the most important poem of the 20th century, as a text that perfectly captured the post-WWI zeitgeist, and that changed how poetry was written afterward. I'd hoped that reading it during a new age of warmongering and robber baronry, in the aftermath of a recent global pandemic, at a time when any sense of shared cultural referents or agreed-upon version of reality seems to be disintegrating, I'd hoped that some of it might still resonate. But I guess not. 

 

Apparently, one thing that was radical about the poem in 1922 is that it has no single narrator - the text is fragmented, with many speakers from many stations of life, making references both high and low, with allusions to classical poetry, but also Buddhism and popular children's rhymes. I suppose this must've seemed extraordinary the first time people encountered it, but by now, the technique is so common across every possible storytelling medium, that it might still impress when used well, but it no longer shocks.

 

One of the first audiences to watch the ballet The Rites of Spring rioted after seeing it because it was such a departure from what they expected or thought was permissible. I'm not saying audiences now are more tolerant or sophisticated - there are riots all the time because fans are very happy or very angry after an important sports match. But it's really difficult today to think of ballet or poetry, no matter how novel or strange, as being capable of inspiring violence or unrest.

 

Another thing that was apparently scandalous was that Eliot included end-notes to cite his allusions to the classics. Apparently, at the time, the suggestion that the highly educated audience of poetry readers might not share enough unity of culture and education that they would, that they might not all know all the references the poet was making, was either insulting or a further elaboration of the poem's themes of the old world falling to pieces. (If so, Eliot's audience may have inferred some authorial intent that wasn't really there. Because according to the reprint's introduction, he only added the end notes after the publisher demanded something, anything to pad out the page count before going to press.)

 

By contrast, I know I haven't been schooled on a single timeless canon of classics; I have no expectation that I'll recognize every allusion. For me, end notes like "V. Spencer, Prothalamion" or whole paragraphs of untranslated Greek or German or Latin are essentially useless, even as starting points; I'd need annotations just to understand the citations! (Another tidbit from the intro is that Eliot originally wanted to title the poem He Do the Policemen in Different Voices as both an allusion to Charles Dickens and an instruction about how to understand its polyphony of speakers. I can't help but think we wouldn't still be quite so enamored with the poem if it had a silly title instead of a harsh one.)

 

In trying to make sense of The Waste Land, I found that cartoonist Julian Peters has made an illustrated version of the first section of it. I have to say, it helped me enormously, because the visuals help provide the missing context that the intervening century between Eliot's time and today has deprived me of. Peters keeps sight of the fact that this is about the aftermath of WWI, and either on his own or by consulting the appropriate literary analyses, has given a new face to each voice, which also clarifies to edges of each fragment. If I do re-read The Waste Land again sometime, I'd probably be wise to seek out an edition that provides more context somehow, either with illustrations or annotations or companion essays.

Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre

 
Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre

by Tom Scioli

IDW

2025 
 
 
Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre collects a 3-issue comic miniseries by Tom Scioli. Taking advantage of some very recent additions to the public domain to unleash the city-destroying might of Godzilla on the unsuspecting party-goers of Long Island during the Jazz Age. That's right, Godzilla wrecks West Egg and makes an implacable enemy of the wealthy and obsessive Jay Gatsby.
 
The first issue is the best, because Scioli has Nick Caraway narrate that issue, mostly using text directly from The Great Gatsby juxtaposed against illustrations of Godzilla causing mayhem, first in the suburbs, and then in downtown Manhattan. There's a great scene of Gatsby rushing across the bay to rescue Daisy in a speedboat, paired with the famous last lines of the book. Daisy is injured (although she'll eventually recover), and Gatsby swears eternal revenge for the insult.
 
In the second issue, Gatsby assembles an international team to help - an elderly Sherlock Holmes, the time traveler from HG Wells's The Time Machine, a Jules Verne who actually built all his fabulous devices instead of only writing about them, and Dracula. It reminds me of Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, although Moore chose slightly less prominent characters, while Scioli recruits the stars. Moore also writes more text and imbues his characters with more complexity. Scioli doesn't write all that much dialogue, and his characters seem flatter and more one-note, with just a single defining trait they repeat again and again.
 
In the final issue, in a surprise betrayal that no one could've seen coming, Dracula attacks his teammates with the goal of dominating Godzilla and ruling the world. A werewolf, a mummy, and an enlarging ray show up too. The climactic showdown is exciting, but also a bit silly, in its sheer over-the-topness. Godzilla isn't so much defeated as simply driven away, and by then, Gatsby might still be determined, but he no longer has any resources left to keep fighting.
 
This wasn't as good as I'd hoped, but Scioli does capture the feeling of dumping out a boxful of toys from different makers and playing with all of them together, telling a new story that's only slightly connected to the tales they originally came from.

Anya's Ghost

 
 
Anya's Ghost

by Vera Brosgol

First Second

2011

 

 

Anya's Ghost is a YA graphic novel about a high school girl who meets a ghost who offers to help her get ahead, which forces her to reevaluate what kind of person she really wants to be. Vera Brosgol writes convincingly about the experience of feeling like a outsider and wanting to fit in. At first, the ghost seems like a shortcut to success, but of course, it's not really going to be that easy.
 
Anya is a Russian immigrant in her first year at a fancy private high school. After being bullied in middle school, for having an accent, for being fat, she's remade herself as someone who seems more like the other kids. She's still on the periphery - her only friend seems to be a tomboy who likes to sneak out of class to smoke - and she's afraid of being 'found out' and getting bullied again. She's ashamed of her mom, and desperate to not be seen with the nerdy Russian boy in her grade who still has his accent and tries too hard in class. She has a crush on an athletic boy, but his girlfriend is one of the popular girls, and neither of them seems to know she exists.
 
Then, in the park, Anya accidentally falls down an old well. She's trapped, and no one will even hear her yell for help unless they're right at the top. She could easily die down there, which is driven home by the presence of the skeleton of someone who actually did. The skeleton is haunted by a ghost who can't travel far from her bones. At first, Anya's frightened, then glad for the company, and then the ghost helps her get rescued by spotting someone close by and encouraging Anya to yell at just the right time.
 
Somehow, a finger bone from the skeleton makes it into Anya's school bag, allowing the ghost to follow her home. Since she died a hundred years earlier, the ghost seems pretty nerdy by modern standards, but she's curious about Anya's life and the world today. Anya's near-fatal accident gets her attention and sympathy at school, including from her crush and his girlfriend. The ghost starts helping Anya, giving her answers on quizzes, playing look-out so she can sneak off for a cigarette, and encouraging her to get an invite to the big weekend party all the popular kids will be at. The ghost even advises her how to dress to get attention from boys at the party...
 
The party doesn't go well. Anya learns some unflattering things about her crush that pretty much kill her attraction to him. The ghost, who's restyled herself to look like a popular girl, is angry that Anya's no longer willing to follow her advice or let her vicariously pursue a teen romance. At the library, with the help of the Russian boy she's always scorned, Anya finds an old newspaper and learns more about how the ghost died, which makes her realize she really doesn't want to take advice from this person...
 
At this point, Anya starts to reevaluate herself and how she's been acting. She's finally been getting what she thought she wanted - a taste of popularity. But she's been acting like a jerk, and she realizes, she was before too, especially to her mom and the nerdy boy. Meanwhile the ghost is getting stronger and more ambitious. She wants Anya to be popular so she can live out her own fantasy, and she doesn't care what Anya wants for herself. A confrontation is inevitable.
 
As I said, I like how Brosgol writes Anya, and how she sort of universalizes the immigrant experience in a way that almost anyone who was bullied when they were young, and who made a conscious effort to become less nerdy, should be able to relate to. Brosgol's black and white art expresses emotion really well, which is important for this story. Making the ghost pure white with grey outlines also helps her stand out as otherworldly amidst the darker lines and shading of the living world.