Paper Girls 5

 
 
Paper Girls 5
by Brian Vaughan
art by Cliff Chiang

Image Comics

2018 

 

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

Witch Hat Atelier 13

 
 
Witch Hat Atelier 13

by Kamome Shirahama

Kodansha

2025

 

 

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

The Blacktongue Thief

 
 
The Blacktongue Thief

by Christopher Buehlman
Tor
2021 
 
 
The Blacktongue Thief is an inventive, humorous, and very dark fantasy by Christopher Buehlman. It's the first book in a series (although the next entry is a prequel set a decade earlier), which becomes clear somewhere in the long middle section of cross-continental travel, when you realize that there isn't enough time left for the cast to complete their 'there and back again' in this book, and will probably only make it 'there'. The mission is to go into a land ruled by giants and ... well, there's some disagreement about what to do there.
 
Thief is set in a fantasy Europe that hues fairly closely to reality (and stereotype). Spain on the Iberian peninsula becomes Ispanthia, home to the Spanth, known for their fiery tempers and love of horses. Gaelic Ireland becomes Galt, a conquered region of English-analog Holt, home to people with literal black tongues who are known for being short, musical, and good at thieving and lying. The biggest difference from reality (aside from Manreach being a mirror image of Europe's geography) is an alt-historical element that's a classic of science fiction: most of the adult men died in a catastrophic war against the goblins, leaving women as the numerical majority and as the elites across the now matriarchal human civilization.
 
There were three human-goblin wars in the recent past. Humans won the Knight's War with the help of our war horses. Then goblins created a plague called the Stumbles that killed all the stallions and most of the mares and invaded again. Goblins won the Thresher's War, so-called because so many men were conscripted even the farmhands had to go fight. This was the route that wiped out a generation of men. Most recent was the Daughter's War (the subject of the prequel I mentioned) where humans trained and fielded an army of women, supported by magical, horse-sized war corvids, driving the goblins off the mainland and back to their island. 
 
You can see how Buehlman has taken some of the real world consequences of the Black Death, the invasions by Attila the Hun, intra-European fighting like the Thirty Years War, and more recent memories of women adopting new roles during WWII, and transformed them into elements of fantasy. His alt-historical worldbuilding is pretty impressive, and I hope to see more of his medieval women's world later on. As we travel the continent, we encounter everyday words in a half-dozen invented languages, verses of poems and songs, and see a number of ways women have taken charge. I would say Buehlman is relatively pessimistic - we mostly see women stepping into men's old jobs and titles and continuing them, rather than the roles themselves changing much.
 
Blacktongue Thief is narrated in the first person by Kinch, a low-ranking member of the Thieves' Guild, a continent-spanning mafia that seems stronger than most of the formal governments. He's a Galt, and thus the titular character. Kinch has a good voice; he's funny, profane, and basically good natured, he gives everyone nicknames, and Buehlman gets a lot of use of his many invented swears that all mean variations on "pussy" and "shit", and he mostly manages to make them seem humorous without just sounding silly. Kinch owes crippling student loan debts to the guild for training him (yes really), which is how he gets conscripted to go on a mission to travel to the mountains at the western edge of Manreach, where giants have recently started invading human lands, and to aid the guild in its goals once he gets there.
 
Kinch is assigned to accompany Galva, a Spanth corvid knight, who has her own reasons for going to the giant lands. She wants to rescue a princess and return her to the throne of Ispantha. Galva is brave, noble, serious, a demon on the battlefield, basically everything Kinch, the lovable loser, is not. The downside of having him as a narrator is that we don't get access to the interiority of any other character. You very quickly begin to suspect that the guild wants Kinch to sabotage Galva. Kinch suspects it too, and that they'll kill him and his family back home if he betrays the guild by not betraying Galva, but he might be willing to take the risk...
 
The pair get up to a fair number of other adventures along the way to the far west, despite the urgency of their goal. I found the book most engaging as they prepared to leave and once they arrived. The middle half of this 400 pager are taken up by the journey, and I wish that part had been shorter or more engaging, because it seemed to lack the energy and purpose of the first and last hundred pages. There's a hunt for a minotaur, a voyage at sea, a shipwreck, two separate encounters with goblins, a (cringe) comedy of errors when Kinch realizes they're being followed by an assassin from the Guild but can't tell anyone she's there... It's a lot. 
 
An early standout is a visit to the inverted tower of the witch Deadlegs, which also gives us the witch's apprentice Norrigal as a traveling companion. Kinch is instantly smitten with her, and watching their tentative romance shows us one place where women's equality has truly changed things. There's kind of a lot of magic in the book, especially magical tattoos, but some of Buehlman's best writing is when the magic is at its strongest and most mysterious.
 
This is definitely a fantasy world that's compatible with Dungeons & Dragons. Thieves have named levels within the guild. Adventuring types have clear roles and are basically fantasy superheroes. Magic is abundant, and even though we're told most of it is 'weak', it enables all sorts of cinematic combat and action. There are goblins and giants. Religion is polytheistic and the gods are interventionists, though mostly in minor ways. Kinch is aware of his 'luck' and knows if he's likely to succeed or fail at whatever he does next. This felt like he could see a pre-rolled dice at all times, and was probably the D&D-ism I liked least.
 
Overall though, there's a lot to like here, and I will probably try to continue the series.

Seek You

 
Seek You

A Journey through American Loneliness

by Kristen Radtke
Pantheon

2021 
 

 

Seek You is graphic nonfiction about loneliness. Kristen Radtke says she was inspired by the widespread social isolation of the coronavirus pandemic. Isolation isn't quite the same as loneliness - it's possible to enjoy a certain amount of time alone, and possible to be in the presence of others and still experience loneliness due to a lack of connection. What Radtke has produced is partly a personal essay where she looks back on the times in her own life when she's felt loneliest, partly an intellectual history of the idea of loneliness, and partly a tour through a few ways people have responded to being alone.
 
Radtke's tour includes the invention of the laugh track, Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone, the visual artist Yayoi Kusama, the rise of 'cuddle parties', and Casey Kasem's long distance dedications, among other topics. She talks about American gun culture, the way distrust of other people encourages gun ownership ... which then fuels more distrust, and the way mass shooters are invariably described as 'loners'. Cars are also isolating, especially compared to public transit, something Radtke feels viscerally when she moves from New York to Las Vegas.
 
At two different points in the book, Radtke talks about the research of psychologist Harry Harlowe, who is best known for his study showing that orphaned baby monkeys prefer a 'soft mother' made of cloth, who provides only comfort and nothing else, over a 'wire mother' made of metal but equipped with a milk bottle nipple. Many of Harlowe's experiments seem like animal torture, and he seems to me to have continued long past the point of learning anything new. These parts of the book were genuinely upsetting to read. Harlowe himself appears to have been a very lonely person. Radtke says that one benefit of Harlowe's research was to overturn the prevailing parenting advice at the time, which amounted to physical neglect in the name of preventing the spread of infectious diseases.
 
Two of the book's strongest sections are when Radtke talks about her father's teenage hobby as an amateur radio operator, and his late-night CQ searches for other operators, and later, when she talks about her own teen years on the early internet, maintaining a personal website and talking to strangers in chatrooms. Despite increasing concern about loneliness, it's not actually clear if more people are lonely now than in the past, or if it is simply more part of the public conversation. The similarity of Radtke's and her father's two activities serves as a kind of embedded metaphor for the universality of the human search for connection with others.
 
If Seek You has a throughline though, it's a growing pessimism about how people are harmed by loneliness and isolation, and how that harm becomes self-reinforcing as those people then find it harder to reconnect with others afterward. One of the findings of Harlowe's monkey research was that monkeys who had endured long isolation found it increasingly difficult to interact with others; they became stressed and overwhelmed by time spent with others, even to the point of self-harm. Beyond a certain length of isolation, they basically cannot rejoin the group; beyond another threshold, the other monkeys simply kill them.
 
Among humans, Radtke notes that lonely people often fear rejection more than they fear remaining isolated. This fear becomes self-fulfilling and self-defeating, as it taints every interaction with anxiety, making them awkward and uncomfortable, and can lead to people preemptively avoiding or rejecting others before they can be rejected. Loneliness is contagious with social networks - knowing a lonely person makes you feel lonelier yourself. And because lonely people withdraw from public and create solo spaces for themselves, they reduce the pool of potential people for others to meet or interact with and the shared space where such chance encounters might occur.
 
Seek You predates the much-discussed 'male loneliness crisis', and reading it, I thought about how people sometimes talk about men's very special and important pain as though women never feel lonely. The book also predates the rise of ChatGPT and Claude, although I suspect that Radtke must've felt more resigned than surprised when we started seeing news that lonely people were using chatbots as substitutes for human friends, that some people were even falling in love with chatbots, and that some people were developing 'AI psychosis' as their too-long chats overrode the sense of shared reality that comes from interacting with other people. It's easy to see links between Radtke's observations about the difficulty of connecting with others in "Seek You" with Alison Pugh's findings about the importance of it in The Last Human Job. 

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.