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.

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.

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. 

Arca

 
Arca

by Van Jensen

art by Jesse Lonergan

IDW

2023 

 

 

A few years ago, I read an article someone who attended a conference for billionaires who wanted to strategize how to survive the apocalypse in luxury and comfort. Obviously they'd want a well-furnished compound and a retinue of personal servants; equally obviously they'd want a cadre of well-armed thugs to defend the lair from outsiders and force the servants to work. But how to ensure the loyalty of the private army when there's no way to pay them anything of value? Is it better to use Suicide Squad bomb implants, or addiction to Ketracel White? I kept thinking about this article while I was reading Arca.
 
The city in a bottle is a classic kind of dystopia, the bad place you can't escape because you can't go outside, or because there's nowhere else to go. I would place Arca alongside a few other recent examples, like the Silo and Fallout tv series. Arca is a scifi graphic novel by Van Jensen and Jesse Lonergan, set on a spaceship fleeing the ruined Earth for a distant planet Eden. The wealthy citizens are protected by the crew and served by the young settlers, who get to retire from servitude once they become adults. This retirement is totally comfortable, it just takes place on a different part of the ship where they're never seen or heard from again. But they'll be vital to the colonization process once the ship reaches Eden, in just a few years more.
 
In any city in a bottle story, you know that the populace is being lied to, and thus that you the reader are being lied to. The pleasure of surprise and discovery in these stories comes from learning the truth, and especially from learning you were being lied to even more than you thought you were. Lonergan's visuals build dramatic irony from the start, pairing Jensen's anodyne descriptions of the harmonious society aboard Arca with images of citizens who look instantly suspicious and untrustworthy, settlers who seem oblivious and naive. Arca as a whole is incredibly successful at showing us Arca's mythology, how it really works, and what it would be like to have to live in it.
 
Our viewpoint character is Effie, a settler on the cusp of adulthood and retirement, whose curiosity is certain to get her in trouble. Like Frederick Douglass, Effie is empowered by her ability to read, and thus her ability to understand the citizens and the system they've built much better than they expect her to. Effie seeks out the truth, and finds it, and does indeed get in quite a lot of trouble. I don't know if Jensen read the same article I did, but he seems to share the same assessment of our current billionaires' motivations and goals.

The Tea Dragon Tapestry

 
 
The Tea Dragon Tapestry

by K O'Neill

Oni Press

2021

 

  

The Tea Dragon Tapestry is the third and last of K O'Neill's tea dragon books. O'Neill has grown quite notably as an artist and a storyteller across the trilogy, and I think this is their best work. Tapestry is a direct sequel to the original Tea Dragon Society, although these's a brief cameo by a couple characters introduced in the prequel Tea Dragon Festival.

 

In each of the the tea dragon books, O'Neill pairs someone who's young and getting ready to move into a more professional stage of life with someone who's burned out from too much work, who's trying to heal and reconnect with themselves. O'Neill sees friendships between these two types of people as mutually beneficial, the younger one reminding the older of what they used to be like, the older one helping the younger navigate the confusing first steps of a career. The fussy little tea dragons play a role in this relationship by forcing both parties to get out of their own heads, to engage with the world, and to take care of something that needs them.

 

In Tapestry, we rejoin Greta who wants to be a blacksmith and Minette who used to be a prophet and now works in a tea shop. Greta has learned blacksmithing from her mother and gotten pretty good. She's ready for a new teacher to help her continue to grow. One of the retired adventurers who runs the tea shop sent one of Greta's spoons to the master blacksmith who used to make their adventuring swords. Now he's come to town to test Greta to see if she's ready.

 

Minette found a tapestry she started but never finished when she was a prophet, and starts having strange, symbolic dreams. I think probably for anyone who's had one career, and had to leave it, there's a sense of shame or failure around what you left behind and why you left it. Minette's task will be to accept that chapter of her life, and to recognize that she's happy where she is now, that she has friends, community.

 

Greta needs to decide what to make to demonstrate her skill. She's also worried about her tea dragon, Ginseng, who is not actually fussy, but instead in mourning after the death (from old age) of its previous caretaker. Meanwhile, the master blacksmith reveals to his old friends the tea shop owners that he's been burned out at work, hasn't taken a new student in awhile, and is thinking of just shutting down his forge. For the test, Greta makes a present for Ginseng to let it know she'll wait as long as it needs to recover from its grief. The gift also touches the heart of the master blacksmith, who sees something he hadn't thought of before, and feels inspired to keep smithing. He also decides that, instead of asking Greta to return to his forge, he'll settle here for awhile and reconnect with his old friends.

 

Across all three books, O'Neill has offered a defense of working slowly, making things of quality, making time to spend with friends and pets, and being patient with oneself because all these things take time. This isn't just a list of different tasks; O'Neill clearly sees them as interconnected. Artisan work is a way to avoid burnout, because it's a way of working that lets you savor what you like about your job without using you up. New friendships need not only be with people at the same stage of life, but can be between people who are in some sort of transition, and can support each other, no matter what they're moving from or to. And as I said, that thesis is expressed more clearly in Tea Dragon Tapestry than I think it has been before.

The Case of the Missing Men

 
The Case of the Missing Men
Hobtown Mystery Stories 1

by Kris Bertin
art by Alexander Forbes

Conundrum Press

2017 

 

 

The Case of the Missing Men is the first of what promises to be a series of Hobtown Mystery Stories, set in a very small fictional town in Nova Scotia. This is a graphic novel with black and white pen drawings. The backgrounds and scenery are quite detailed and realistic. The people are drawn in a way that shows all their human imperfections, especially on people who are dirty, injured, or have been shaped by a harsh life. The mystery here starts out like a typical case for teen sleuths, but very quickly becomes stranger and darker, so that by the end it feels more like a horror story.
 
The book's trade dress is clearly a homage to the Nancy Drew books, and the leader of Hobtown's after-school mystery solving club is a logical, confident blond girl named Dana Nance, who I think is supposed to remind us of Nancy Drew, even if she's not a direct stand-in. The other club members are non-identical twin brothers Denny and Brennan, who might be reminiscent of the Hardy Boys, and Pauline, who is intuitive, maybe psychic, and who doesn't seem to have a direct teen detective inspiration that I'm aware of. The case starts because new kid in town Sam is looking for his missing father. Sam and his dad look a lot like Johnny Quest and Mr Quest. I could be wrong though - the twins also remind me of the twin brothers in A Wrinkle in Time, Sam might be meant to evoke Tom Swift, or each could combine several inspirations, or what I think is a pattern might be a coincidence.
 
Dana and her friends meet Sam when she's assigned to be his study partner at school. Sam's been skipping class and acting out because he's stuck in a town he doesn't live in, his dad's been missing for weeks, and the local police don't seem to care. Dana and the others do care, especially when they learn that several other men have gone missing, though the others are from the margins of society, and Sam's dad is the wealthy owner of an aviation company. They check around town, looking into the last places the men were seen, while repeatedly being warned off by the police and Dana's dad. Then a teacher is murdered at school in the middle of the day, and the search uncovers the hidden corpse of a town councilwoman.
 
What started out seemingly straight forward keeps getting weirder and weirder. The teens spot some of the missing men, but their behavior is feral, inhuman. The solution to the mystery turns out to involve two separate groups committing murders, for reasons that reach deep into the town's history, with a number of prominent people implicated. The pace of revelation is good - the things we learn are strange, some are even supernatural, but each discovery helps things make more sense instead of becoming more confusing. What we learn is really dark, involving not only kidnapping and murder but also torture and brainwashing. By the end, the teens have learned some very heavy, adult stuff. This is not the sort of story where everything is okay at the end.
 
One story-telling device I'd like to note is that at a couple key points in the book, we switch from closely following the teens in linear time to a more distant perspective, with events related in flashback and under police questioning. The discovery of the hidden body, and later catching one murderer in the act are both depicted this way. The effect is like a chorus of narrators, with these important moments shown through a kaleidoscope of viewpoints - in fragments, from many angles. 

Bad Dream

 
 
Bad Dream
A Dreamer Story

by Nicole Maines

art by Rye Hickman

DC Comics

2024

 

 

Bad Dream is an origin story for the transgender superhero Dreamer, written by the actress who played her in the Supergirl tv series. It's part of DC Comics' series of YA graphic novels, which seems to include more origin stories than ongoing adventures. The version of Dreamer we meet here is very similar to the one on Supergirl, although here she's presented as a high school student rather than a young adult like on the show.
 
Nia Nal and her older sister Maeve are both half human, half alien, and they live in a secret small town where aliens can live on Earth without attracting attention from the broader public. Their father is human, and their mom used to be one of the Seers from the planet Naltor, a kind of psychic matriarchy who use their visions of the future to both protect the planet militarily and police it internally. Their mom had a vision long ago that her daughter would inherit her powers, so Maeve's spent her whole life training to receive dream visions ... but they haven't started yet. Nia is trans, idolizes her big sister, and wishes the other alien teens would stop bullying her.
 
Nia has also started having dreams with strange, prophetic imagery. She's afraid that she's stealing Maeve's powers from her, so she runs away to Metropolis to ... well, she doesn't actually seem to have a plan. She turns off her cellphone and then just wanders around the city drinking coffee and energy drinks to keep from falling asleep.
 
Eventually, she happens to run into Galaxy, an alien teen we met in Galaxy: The Prettiest Star from this same series of YA comics. Galaxy is metaphorically like a trans girl because she was forced to disguise herself as a human boy for most of her life. Galaxy has a Black girlfriend and a Black trans best friend. They're all older teens and recognize that Nia is a kid in trouble, so they bring her to a queer community center that includes a shelter. The trans friend wears a cool space-themed outfit in a ballroom walk-off and wins the night. Nia learns a bit about Black trans and queer culture in the big city and embarrasses herself a bit with her small town ignorance, but eventually befriends Galaxy and her friends enough that she agrees to let the older girls drive her back home.
 
One of the other Seers of Naltor was also in Metropolis. She follows Nia and Galaxy back to the secret town, reveals that (quelle surprise) the psychic leaders of a planetary surveillance state are not actually nice people, and executes Nia's mom for desertion. Nia inherits her mother's full powers in that moment, and uses them to defeat the other Seer. Afterward, we're shown that Nia and Maeve's relationship is now quite strained, and that Nia has become a sometimes superhero.
 
I have a sense that DC intends the graphic novels in this series to serve as entry points for new readers, and maybe acts as self-funding market research to find out which characters spark those readers' imagination. I'm glad that effort seems to include trying out multiple trans and trans-adjacent characters, and I've seen that Galaxy and Dreamer have gotten to appear in some of DC's regular monthly comics too, Galaxy in a Hawkgirl run and Dreamer teaming up with Superboy.

The Hard Switch

 
 
The Hard Switch

by Owen Pomery

Avery Hill

2024 

 

 

The Hard Switch is a graphic novel set at the end of an age of interstellar civilization. We're told that there's a mineral needed to make hyperspace jumps, that it's nearly all used up, and that everywhere in space, people are scrambling to get someplace they want to stay before the mineral runs out for good and each star system becomes isolated from its neighbors. It sounds pretty bleak! But the characters we follow, while not satisfied with where they're currently at, also don't seem to feel any special urgency. The art style and narrative tone both remind me of On a Sunbeam, a comparison that unfortunately doesn't do Hard Switch any favors. This is much slimmer and more slight; it's not fair to hold it to the same standard.
 
We follow two women and a sentient octopus. They have enough of the mineral for a few more jumps, and they're trying to salvage old shipwrecks to find more. Because our viewpoint is such a closeup, and because this trio seems so self-reliant, the mood is less like the apocalyptic closing of all borders and Balkanization of space, and more like some roommates trying to squeeze in a few errands before a storm snows them in for the weekend. I liked what was on the page well enough, but there's a real mismatch between what we're told the stakes are and what they actually seem to be.
 
Pomery favors plot over characterization or worldbuilding, and he keeps the scale of the action quite small. We open with our trio locating a shipwreck and going in to grab the hyperspace mineral. They encounter some peaceful alien salvagers and then a team of violent human mercenaries. They escape unharmed with an object with ancient writing on it. They become convinced it's proof that before the special mineral was discovered, there was some other way to travel faster than lightspeed. Unfortunately, some rich guy recently hauled a huge cache of ancient art offworld.
 
They to track down the art collector and arrange to meet him. Along the way, they stop to help a ship in distress. It's a transport of refugees, but almost everyone has already died. The lone survivor is an alien child. The unscrupulous ship owner took everyone's money, skimped on the oxygen supply, and and left the ship and its passengers adrift halfway to the destination. This is the one place where we get a glimpse of how the coming crisis is making some people desperate and others ruthless. Our viewpoint characters don't seem especially privileged, but they must be. They own a ship, even if it's small, and have enough of the rare mineral to do seemingly everything they want to get done.
 
After that detour, the three go to the mansion of the art collector, and he lets them in to see walls and walls of ancient text, supposedly because he wants to see their fragment to to consider buying it. But it turns out he's also the human trafficker, he knows they've witnessed his crime, and he wants to eliminate them. By all rights, he ought to succeed, but our three protagonists manage to defeat his private security death squad and get away despite being surprised and outnumbered.
 
As they escape into space again, we learn that they got photos of the ancient language, so if there is a secret to FTL travel in there, they may be able to translate it, or send the images to someone who can. For now they jump someplace safe to hide out for awhile, still with enough of the mineral to jump to where they really want to be later, whether or not the translation works out.

Pomery's art style is quite simplified, which works well for the story he's chosen to tell. I thought about what it might take to communicate the scale of the upcoming disaster, and I think it would just take more - a longer book, a broader scope, more characters, more plot threads. I also thought about what the story would be like with no ancient secrets or magic remedies, and I think it would be like a parable for downward mobility. Young adults who grew up thinking they'd be able to go where they want, when they want, realizing they're going to be stuck in one place, and having to accept that because there's no way to avoid it. 

This One Summer

 
This One Summer

by Mariko Tamaki

art by Jillian Tamaki

First Second

2014

 

 

This One Summer is a young adult graphic novel about a memorable vacation at a lake, written and illustrated by cousins Mariko and Jillian Tamaki. It's fiction, but feels very much like a memoir. It's the sort of time an adult author might look back on, the dialogue is naturalistic, and the plotting and characterization both feel very true to life. This is how people talk, this is how they act. The least realistic thing is that life never has this much thematic unity.
 
We follow Rose, a girl on the cusp of puberty, whose family spends two weeks in a cabin by the lake each summer. Each year, Rose hangs out with her best friend Windy, who's a year or two younger. This year that gap translates into an awkward imbalance: Windy is still a kid, but Rose is becoming a teen. They spend the days swimming and hiking in the woods. They talk about what it will be like to grow breasts and get their periods. And they decide to rent grown-up horror movies from the local convenience store. They notice the slashers treat girls different than boys. Probably neither of them is quite ready for what they're watching, but they're both curious, and they both want to be ready.
 
Rose's parents are fighting. She knows they were trying to have another kid, but didn't. Rose doesn't really know what that might mean, or how it might relate to the fact that her mother seems depressed and unwilling to participate in many of the usual fun vacation activities. She probably doesn't understand how her dad being fun and laid back creates an obligation for her mom to be more serious and responsible.
 
The third plot thread is lives of some of the older teens who live in town all year round. Rose and Windy pick up on what's going on only vicariously, as conversations happen around them, or in a few cases thanks to deliberate eavesdropping. 
 
Windy teases Rose that she has a crush on the guy who works at the convenience store, and at first I thought it was just a joke, but it becomes clear that she does feel something for him, and when there's trouble later, she instinctively takes his side, even though she doesn't really know him. There's a running theme of characters saying 'I'm kidding' to try to smooth over the awkwardness after they've said or done something that didn't land. It's one of the things Rose and Windy talk about.
 
The trouble I mentioned is that the guy who works at the convenience store, the guy Rose likes, has a girlfriend who just found out she's pregnant. She understandably anxious to talk to him, and he keeps refusing to answer her calls. Eventually, this leads to a much bigger confrontation that brings all three plot threads together, and shows us (and Rose) a different, more sympathetic side of her mom.
 
Throughout the book, we see Rose learning about and grappling with adult femininity and heterosexuality. What will it be like to have boobs, and how big will they be? Are those older girls really 'sluts'? Is it wrong to call them that? Why are Rose's parents fighting so much? Why doesn't her mom seem to want to have fun? And why isn't it okay for her to vacation at her own pace, in her own way? Why are the convenience store guy and his girlfriend fighting? What does he owe to her? What does Rose actually feel for him? 

  

It's a coming of age story, focused on Rose's growing awareness of sexism, and of her own ability to be wrong. Because Windy is just a little younger, she functions almost like Rose's younger self. She still thinks the way Rose did last year, so when they disagree, it's a measure of how Rose is changing as she grows up.
 
I've praised the writing, but the art is worth mentioning too. Jillian Tamaki's drawings are realistic and expressive. The scenery is especially detailed. The book is printed in purple ink instead of black, with lavender instead of grey. It adds to the feeling of nostalgia. 
 
Reading this reminded me of the vacations my parents took us on with our extended family when I was younger, of the odd, timeless, self-contained quality of a week spent in a place you don't really live around people you only see while traveling. This one is really something special. 

The Tea Dragon Festival

 
 
The Tea Dragon Festival

by K O'Neill

Oni Press

2019

 

 

The Tea Dragon Festival is sort of a prequel to K O'Neill's Tea Dragon Society. The older gay couple who serve as mentors in Society are young men here, still active as fantasy adventurers and bounty hunters, not yet settled down as tea shop owners or tea dragon enthusiasts. I think we may see the moments when Erik and his boyfriend Hesekiel decide what they eventually want to do when they retire, but it's not a pivotal moment in the story, just a conversation we see them have near the end of the book. A lot of O'Neill's storytelling is like this. The pace is slow, the plot is minimal, and key moments of characterization are so brief and so gentle that you only recognize their importance in retrospect. 
 
Erik and Hesekiel are the only recurring characters, and the tea dragons - who are the only other connection between Society and Festival - play a very minor role this time around. The stars this time are Rinn, who is Erik's 'nibling', a term that's the nonbinary counterpart to nephew or niece, and Aedhan, a dragon in humanoid form who's just woken up from almost a century of magical slumber. Rinn is an aspiring cook who really excels at foraging for mushrooms in the forest. They live in a fairly isolated village (though it does have a train station), and they find Aedhan sleeping in a ruined shrine. Aedhan was sent by their dragon clan to be the village guardian, and he's shocked when he realizes how much time has passed.
 
We follow Rinn as they show Aedhan around the village and take him on a foraging trip. Erik and Hesekiel are visiting in pursuit of a bounty on an ancient spirit that puts people to sleep. 
 
We see Rinn and Aedhan become friends, and possible develop the beginnings of a romance. I know Rinn is nonbinary because the four main characters get one-sentence biographies at the front of the book. No one ever uses a pronoun for them in the actual text, though you could probably read the book without noticing. The closest we get to explicit acknowledgment is Erik calling Rinn nibling, and a brief exchange where Rinn asks Aedhan is it's true that some dragons are skilled enough shapeshifters to not only change between humanoid and dragon form, but to also change between male and female forms, and when Aedhan says yes that's true, Rinn says that sounds nice. Without the bio at the beginning, I don't know if I would've read that as an expression of Rinn's identity, as opposed to like, Rinn being impressed by how cool dragons are. Aedhan's admiration for Rinn's mushroom hunting gives them the courage to keep cooking as a hobby instead of a career, and to focus more pn foraging. (K O'Neill has come out as nonbinary since this book was originally published, which makes me wonder if Rinn is at all a representation of the author.)
 
Erik and Hesekiel find the ancient spirit. It puts them to sleep, and they dream of the forest as it was in the magic-filled days of the ancient past, a place of awe-inspiring beauty. The two manage to wake up, but decide the spirit doesn't understand human lifespans and isn't trying to hurt anyone, so they politely ask it to stop. They seem to think this will work, and I guess the audience is meant to as well. Since they didn't capture the spirit, they won't collect a bounty - I think this is the turning point that leads them to think forward to their eventual retirement from adventuring, decades hence.
 
The last thing that happens is the titular tea dragon festival. The handful of tea dragons in the village are like communal pets. The mountain chamomile dragon is very fluffy and adorably grumpy looking. For the festival, they get dressed up with ribbons, and the villagers eat a feast and drink tea. Rinn shares some tea-dragon tea with Aedhan, which shows him some memories of village life that help relieve his guilt about his delayed start to being a guardian, and kind of affirms his friendship with Rinn.
 
There's a deck-building board game based on the tea dragon books, where each player has a tea dragon and tries to give them the most fulfilling experiences while reigning in their misbehavior. (They're very cat-like.) The game has two versions, one based solely on The Tea Dragon Society and one based on both Society and Festival, and the second version is probably better. It's more intuitive, has fewer turns where it feels like you can't do anything, and just generally seems to capture the intended play experience better. I think The Tea Dragon Festival is the same way. O'Neill seems better able to tell the kind of story they want here, to tell a stronger version of the same sort of coming-of-age tale about a young person deciding on their career befriending someone just returning to society after a debilitating magical illness, helped by mentors, and needing to give help to the fussy little tea dragons. 

The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge

 
 

The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge
by MT Anderson

art by Eugene Yelchin

Candlewick Press

2018

 

 

The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge is a YA or middle-grade fantasy novel that mixes art and text in exciting ways and has a surprisingly complex critique of the way that militaristic governments misuse history to justify their wars. I was drawn to the book by the whimsical title and cover art, and by a quick flip-through that revealed that parts of the book are told in wordless sequential art. If anything, I feared it would be too twee, but while there is a certain lightheartedness to the telling, the story itself is fully aware and fully critical of how governments sometimes kill civilians, more-or-less on a whim, and call it preemptive self-defense.
 

Assassination is told with three kinds of chapters that don't alternate in any kind of strict sequence, but only according to the needs of the story. The very first chapter in the book is visual; only later do we fully understand what we've seen. The visuals are in black and white and remind me of 19th century lithographs. Each illustration is a full page, but they tell a sequential story, like the panels in a comic. These chapters depict the perspective of Brangwain Spurge, an elven historian who is conscripted as a diplomat to be launched via catapult to the goblin kingdom to deliver a present to their ruler. Many of the book's action sequences are shown this way, to good effect. To Brangwain, everything in Goblinland is giant, hideous, terrifying. It's not immediately obvious, but these visuals are more subjective and unreliable than we might expect.
 
The next kind of chapter is told in close third-person from the perspective of Werfel, a goblin academic chosen by his government to act as Brangwain's host and guide to the capital city. Where Brangwain starts out seeming like a negative stereotype of academia, vain, persnickety, overly serious, closed off, incurious, Werfel seems like more of a well-educated bon vivant, welcoming and hospitable, someone who appreciates elvish culture but really wants to show off all the charming local traditions, which Brangwain inevitably finds horrible. You begin to understand that things might look exactly as Brangwain sees them, and yet be experienced as nice - as traditional, familiar, even comforting - by the goblins, despite offending elven (and perhaps our human) sense of aesthetics. The majority of the book is told this way, and Werfel's perspective is clearly the one we're expected to feel most sympathetic to, even if we might initially expect to prefer elves over goblins.
 
The final sort of chapter takes the form of correspondence, dispatches sent from an elvish spymaster to the king of Elfland. The spymaster's voice is like an evil Bertie Wooster; he's a foppish twit who's set this whole scenario up in a misguided attempt to assassinate the goblin leader, using Brangwain as a patsy, an unwitting accomplice who thinks he's just there to report back on goblin magical infrastructure. Things don't go according to the spymaster's plan, primarily because he gave Brangwain two incompatible tasks - to snoop around suspiciously and to be a completely trustworthy courier of the elven peace offering.
 
The first half of the book is a bit of a comedy of manners, as Werfel attempts to show off all the things he's proudest of, Brangwain gets appalled and turns up his nose at everything, Brangwain courts disaster by spying ineffectually, and the spymaster brags to the king about what's going to happen when the goblin ruler receives the booby-trapped elven gift. And meanwhile Werfel and Brangwain argue about the millennium-long history of truly brutal warfare between the two sides. In Brangwain's mind, it's all very proper and justified, but Werfel's very aware of how much and how badly goblin civilians have suffered, and of how often the elves have been the belligerents. The elves are not as good as they make themselves out to be, and the goblins are not nearly as evil. Every one of these plots is careening toward disaster from the start, and they all come to a head when Brangwain finally gets to meet the goblins' ruler.
 
After that, in the second half, Werfel and Brangwain finally, haltingly work their way toward a kind of mutual respect and friendship, the spymaster scrambles to perform some damage control with the furious elven king after the first plan went awry, and the two countries find themselves on the brink of another round of mutually destructive warfare. All those plots come together in the end too, in a way that's quite satisfying, and that favors a just peace over endless bloodletting and conflict. 

Otto

 
 
Otto

A Palindrama

by Jon Agee

Rocky Pond Books

2021 

 

 

Jon Agee calls Otto a 'palindrama,' a portmanteau of his own devising that describes the fact that every bit of text in the body of the book takes the form of a palindrome, a word or phrase that reads to same forward and back, like racecar or noon. This is a children's comic rather than a picture book. Each page has multiple panels of sequential art, and the story is mostly told with pictures. 
 
The text, when it appears, is largely dialogue, but also sometimes signs and labels. An awful lot of these are longer than any of the palindromes I'm used to (which top out at like, 'Madam I am Adam,') and many of them are formed by a statement and reply, two characters working together to make one palindrome.
 
The story follows young Otto on an adventure that seemingly takes place in his own imagination, but that also involves a wider and stranger world than you'd think he could dream up alone. I've come to appreciate this as a pretty classic structure for kid's stories. In Otto's case, he's playing with his dog Pip when his mom and dad call him into the dining room to eat his wonton soup. Staring into the soup bowl, he's imaginatively transported to a beach where his parents are asleep on blankets in the sun, leaving him unsupervised. He wanders off and has his adventures before returning to the beach just as his parents are waking up, and then returning to reality as his daydream while staring into his soup comes to an end. The structure is fairly symmetrical, which suits the theme well.
 
On the beach, Otto sees a rat carrying a surf board; Pip gives chase and Otto follows. Soon he's in a desert. He briefly meets and passes by a few eccentric characters and odd food stands. He finds a doctor asleep on the railroad tracks, who's saved at the last moment by the 'Mr. Alarm' mascot from Otto's bedroom clock. He reaches a road where someone gives him a ride into the city. He sees lots of signs and advertisements, and once in town the driver points out various notable cityfolk. Otto wanders a bit, goes to the 'mueseum,' and meets more strange people, including a woman in a pink cat costume who wants his help stacking cats on a ladder. He continues wandering, through a park, a cemetery, to the lake shore and into the lake. Eventually he takes a boat ride, braves a storm, and ends up back where he started. It's fair to say Otto's dream is action packed!
 
At the end, Agee credits people who suggested a few of the palindromes to him, and of course some were simply well-known. But it seems he made up most of them himself, especially the longer and more complex ones. Whether that's something his brain was uniquely suited to, or a skill he practiced, I'm really impressed! 

Belle of the Ball

 
 
Belle of the Ball

by Mari Costa

First Second

2023

 

 

Belle of the Ball is a cute little YA graphic novel about high school romance. There's a lesbian love triangle, with all the inherent conflict and heartbreak, right at the center of the story, but Mari Costa writes it all very gently, very kindly. The result is much more of a light-hearted romcom than any kind of tale of teen angst. There are no mean girls here, just three young adults trying to follow their hearts, if only they can figure out what they really want first.
 
The cast is three high school senior girls - ambitious cheerleader Regina; her girlfriend, soccer champ Chloe; and shy, nerdy Hawkins. Regina is smart and popular, the head cheerleader who's dating the star player of the soccer team, a straight A student who's already been accepted to the local college but still has her eye set on Harvard, and a future doctor with her 10-year life plan already all mapped out. Chloe is much less ambitious. She likes soccer and is good at it, she gets good-enough grades in everything but English, but prefers video games to studying, and gets bored whenever Regina's talking to her other friends about their goals for the future. It more seems like she's along for the ride than like she genuinely wants the same 10-year plan for herself.
 
And then there's Hawkins. Shy, self-conscious and awkward, nerdy, and an accidental force of chaos, who inadvertently crashed headlong into the fault lines in Regina and Chloe's relationship. Hawkins is also the school's cat-headed mascot. At the start of the story, she asks Regina to the homecoming dance, because she's had a long-time crush on her from a distance, and she mistakenly thought Regina and Chloe had broken up.
 
When Regina realizes that Chloe's recent low grades in English are going to jeopardize her soccer eligibility and her conditional college acceptance (and thus, the 10-year plan), she comes up with a strategy to put things back on track. Regina uses Hawkins's crush to convince her to tutor Chloe in exchange for a chance to hang out with them at school. Hawkins, despite knowing this is a bad idea, really does want more friends, and friendship with Regina specifically, and follows her heart and agrees.
 
Chloe is understandably not impressed with the plan to be tutored by the person who was flirting with her girlfriend, and isn't really interested in being tutored at all. She also quickly becomes suspicious that Hawkins seems to know too much about her, until suddenly, she connects two dots in her mind, and realizes that 'B Hawkins' is the same person as 'Belle,' Chloe's kindergarten classmate and first crush, Belle, who wore a princess dress to school every day, who Chloe used to follow around the playground, wishing she could be her knight. (Separate from this, there's also a running gag that from Hawkins's perspective, she and Regina have hung out several times in group settings, but Regina literally never noticed her there until she asked her out.)
 
You might be able to see where this is going. Regina and Chloe have different visions for their futures, and care about those visions with very different levels of intensity. At the same time that they might be growing apart anyway, Chloe and Hawkins suddenly start spending a lot more time together, and any feelings of attraction either of them may start to develop have a certain sort of plausible deniability to them ... right up to the end, when the feelings become so strong they're undeniable.
 
And as I said, it's all handled in a way that's fairly emotionally mature, with a minimum of raised voices or tears. Early on, it might be easy to think that Regina is controlling or manipulative, Chloe a bully, or Hawkins a pushover, but they all quickly grow beyond that. Regina tends to dominate any scene she's in, but we spend most of the book with Chloe and Hawkins. They spend a lot of time at home studying, but a highlight - narratively, visually, and emotionally - comes when Chloe buys Hawkins a ticket to the Renaissance Fair and rents her a princess dress, the first time she's worn one in years...
 
Costa's art is friendly and accessible. Aside from the black outlines and white negative space, all the tones are shades of pink. It's not just an accent color, this is a very pink book, and all the shades are different saturations of fuchsia pink (or what you might call 'Barbie pink'). Costa gives us a diverse cast, both ethnically and in terms of body types. The general absence of mean-spirited intent makes this a light read, and the art style complements that.

The Tea Dragon Society

 
 
The Tea Dragon Society

by K O'Neill

Oni Press

2017 

 

 

The Tea Dragon Society is a cute little graphic novel about a group of people in a fantasy setting who are involved in what seems like is their world's equivalent of slow food - raising tiny fussy dragons that grow tea leaves out of their heads, and brewing and drinking the magic tea made from those leaves.
 
Our viewpoint character is Greta, a young goblin learning blacksmithing from her mother. Greta notes that it takes a long time to make anything this way, but her mom assures her that there will always be people who value things that are well-made by hand. This is probably as close as the book gets to a thesis. One day at the market, Greta spots a little tea dragon being chased by dogs and rescues it. Someone in the market directs her to the dragon's owner, Hezekiel, an old man who looks like a dragon himself. He invites Greta to cone back some time to learn more about tea dragons. He's glad she's interested, since it's a dying art.
 
On successive trips to the tea shop Hesekiel runs, Greta bonds with Jasmine, the little dragon she rescued; meets and befriends Minette, a girl about her age who used to be a seer as a child, but effectively got burnout and amnesia from overwork, who's caring for the tea dragon Chamomile, and Erik, a retired adventurer and Hesekiel's partner, who now uses a wheelchair due to an old adventuring injury. There's not much plot beyond the group getting to know each other.

The whole story kind of takes place at the margins of a traditional fantasy world. Blacksmithing and tea-selling seem to generate enough income to finance a slow-paced life that accommodates Erik's and Minette's disabilities, and seems to suit the temperamental little tea dragon pets. I feel like it's more-or-less explicitly stated that artisanally-produced luxury goods can command high enough prices to avoid needing to hustle, grind, or suffer deprivation. (Yes, I know I shouldn't look to children's books for sound economics. And, I mean it IS sound, if you can find the customers. Just ask the restaurateurs who make a nice living by serving a couple dozen customers a day and charging them my entire week's wages for a single meal!)
 
The tea dragons are silent, which I think suits the mood and tone of the book. A lot is communicated wordlessly through the art, especially when the characters share tea and see visions of someone's memories thanks to the dragons' magic. There are four chapters plus an epilogue, and really only one main scene per chapter. The pace is as slow and gentle as the characters and their crafts. The dragons appear to live a very quiet, cozy life, and their caretakers also seem to enjoy a relaxed pace and schedule.
 
There's a bit of lore at the back of the book about tea dragons and their magic, which might inspire kid readers to make up their own tea dragon stories, or perhaps incorporate some of the ideas from the book into playing house or having tea parties.

Squire

 

Squire

by Nadia Shammas

art by Sara Alfageeh

Quill Tree Press

2022

 

 

Squire is a YA graphic novel about wanting to be a hero, about how governments try to co-opt that desire to build their militaries and police forces, and about the difficult but true heroism of resisting unjust government orders.
 
The imperial government in Squire is fantasy Middle Eastern, with both the visuals and the names drawing on real-world historical examples to create a setting that's fictional, but also not far removed from reality. But the structure of the military, the empire's relationships with its neighbors, could be almost anywhere, almost any time. I was reminded of Rome, but also American rhetoric after 9/11, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Israeli policy toward Palestinians. Someone more familiar with the history of Islamic empires might see other historical similarities that I missed, as well.
 
Our viewpoint character is Aiza, a tiny little girl who wants to grow up to a hero, a knight. Aiza is a member of the Ornu ethnic minority, and lives with her family in an enclave within the current borders of Bayt-Sajji. She sells apricots every day in the market, and it's clear that the Ornu are despised by the majority - accused of hoarding food, of price gouging, scapegoated as the cause of the national famine.
 
Aiza's grown up hearing stories of Bayt-Sajji's famous knights and seeing military recruitment posters in the market. When a representative of the army announces that Ornu and other conquered peoples can earn full citizenship for themselves and their families through military service, Aiza is eager to join up. Her parents reluctantly agree, but make her cover the traditional tattoos on her arm with bandages so that no one will know she's Ornu.
 
Aiza starts making friends right away with the other new recruits, and the next part of Squire reminded me a lot of the training scenes in Mulan, and probably a lot of other war movies I haven't seen. But underneath the scenes of camaraderie and triumph over adversity, there's something more sinister and realistic too.
 
On Aiza's first day, the recruits are taken to what look like the ruins of Petra, and they're told that in the past, all the people in the region belonged to a single, unified Bayt-Sajji. But then the various ethnic minorities drew 'lines in the sand' to hide behind, depriving everyone of the previous unity. The message is clear - the Bayt-Sajji sees the other countries not as sovereign states, but as wayward breakaway provinces. The others' ethnic identities aren't real, and invading and conquering them won't be acts of aggression, they'll be defending the greater nation.
 
Aiza is scrappy, but tiny and inexperienced. A kindly groundskeeper, a wounded veteran himself, agrees to give her extra training at night so she can catch up, just as every story like this might lead you to expect. Because she's exhausted and only cares about adventure and glory, Aiza misses the parts of their classroom lectures where the Ornu people are repeatedly belittled and blamed for all Bayt-Sajji's problems. What she and her friends are being trained for, is war with the Ornu state.
 
Thanks to the groundskeeper's help, Aiza passes her tests. She gets to keep training to be a squire instead of being flunked into the infantry. The trainees' next assignment is a week of survival camping. But they're ambushed by masked and tattooed Ornu bandits. One of Aiza's friends is injured, and the only way to save him is with her bandages, revealing her own tattoos, and spilling her secret. To everyone's surprise, Aiza gets promoted to full squire after the mission, although what she and her friends don't realize is that the goal of the too-soon, not-fully-earned promotion is to inspire the other recruits to hate the Ornu in their midst.
 
And here's where, for all the smart subversive messaging, the plot takes a turn that reminds you that Squire is still a kid's book, and still wants to model some kind of hope for the future. Because the realistic paths forward here are probably pretty bleak. And indeed, Aiza learns the groundskeeper's story, of how he was once like her, until he was forced to help put down an uprising in his own home village, then refused to keep fighting, and had his arm amputated as punishment. Aiza appears to be on track for something similar when another recruit accuses her of conspiring with Ornu spies and earning her promotion through deceit and treachery.
 
But this is revealed to all be due to the machinations of the general running the recruitment camp. Rather than just taking advantage of an opportunity to make an example of Aiza, which would be reprehensible but legal, she engineered the whole situation, including hiring the bandits to attack her own recruits. Aiza finds the incriminating paperwork, the groundskeeper rallies Aiza's friends to rescue her, and everything is resolved with a dramatic, climactic swordfight.
 
Well, almost everything, because Shammas and Alfageeh return to realism for the ending. Overzealous general or no, the Bayt-Sajji army is going to continue being used to persecute the Ornu and other ethnic minorities within Bayt-Sajji's borders, and to continue expanding those borders through conquest. Rather than have to fight their own families the way the groundskeeper did, Aiza and a few of her friends desert the army, knowing that they'll have hard lives as fugitives from now on.
 
The plot structure of Squire mostly follows the traditional script of stories about coming-of-age via the military. But within that plot is a lot of meta-commentary about the role such stories play in convincing kids that the way to live out their childhood fantasies of heroism is to join the army, and a glimpse at other, more realistic ways the story of one's own actual military service could go. I think this is probably a good read for any adventure-loving teen, and perhaps an important one for anybody who thinks their own life should follow the path laid out in typical adventure stories.

Here

 
 
Here

by Richard McGuire

Pantheon

2014 

 

 

Here is a very strange, nonlinear graphic novel. Each two-page spread is a single large panel that depicts the same spot in space at a different moment in time. Most of these panels take place in the 20th century, when there's a house there, with one corner of the living room exactly lining up with the spine of the book and the edge between the two pages. In most spreads, there are additional, smaller panels stacked atop the background, showing different moments.
 
There's no direct interaction between the moments - if we see a phone ringing in 1957 and someone saying "hello" in 2014, it's a juxtaposition of two moments that look interesting beside each other, not someone hearing and answering a phone that rang decades earlier. The effect is like a collage - moments that do not coincide are placed in conversation. There's not really anything else quite like this that I can point to, to tell you that Here is like it. Reading the book feels like listening to music. I felt I could almost hear the soundtrack in my head.
 

Richard McGuire wrote the first version of Here in 1989. It was 6 pages long. The newer, expanded version is just over 300 pages, and was published in 2014. I found out about it from an excerpt in The Best American Comics 2016, which I read last year. Last year also, Here got adapted as a Tom Hanks movie, which is almost unimaginable to me. I have to think that either the film is very different from the comic, or else audiences expecting a typical narrative film were in for quite a surprise! (After seeing her in The Congress, Robin Wright fans ought to be more used to this sort of thing.)
 
There is no narrative here, not really, just moments playing off each other, like visual jazz. Even within this set-up McGuire plays around with pace and time. As you turn the pages, you might get sequential moments that are like the panels in a conventional comic, or like a flipbook showing a somersault in slow motion. A few times, you get a dozen moments all on one page, as when the original builder constructs the house, or when a bird flies in through an open window. Very often, the background is a different time from any of the moments of activity.
 
Most of the moments show the inhabitants of the house between the 1950s and 2014. But we see the history of the land from millions of years in the past, through every century since the 1400s, and into the future. These aren't shown at all chronologically, but we do get more past in the first half of the book, and the future doesn't show up until the final third. McGuire's omniscience shows us a catastrophic flood in the 2100s, and a tour group on a boardwalk atop wetlands in the 2200s.
 
Aside from the family who lives in the house, we also see two Natives having a tryst in the woods in the 1600s, Ben Franklin fighting with his son in a house that's visible in the distance in the 1700s, an Impressionist painter and his girlfriend picnicking in the field in the 1800s. We see multiple juxtaposed Christmases, pages of overlapping Halloweens. We see people telling jokes and stories, arguing and fighting, mothers holding babies, people sleeping on the floor or the couch. We see a number of spectacular sunsets.
 
Although the art style and storytelling techniques are totally different, Here reminded me a bit of Building Stories, which also covers a fair swath of time, and centers on only a few locations. Here is much weirder and more experimental, less like an epic narrative and more like a dance performance. It's hard to even judge how effective it is, because there's no other thing that uses the same techniques to serve as a comparison. But I'm glad I read it.

Glass Town

 
 
Glass Town

The Imaginative World of the Brontes
by Isabel Greenberg

Harry Abrams

2020

 

 

Glass Town is a graphic novel that presents a lightly fictionalized telling of the life of Charlotte Bronte that centers on the game of make-believe she used to play with her siblings Branwell, Emily, and Anne.
 
The book opens near its ending, with Charlotte visiting the grave site of her recently dead siblings, and being visited by a vision of Charles Wellesley, one of her imaginary characters, the one most like herself in Greenberg's telling. In conversation with Charles, Charlotte remembers her siblings and their make-believe game, and the rest of the book appears as an extended flashback from this 'present day' moment that we return to again at the end.
 
The earliest time we return to is also a funeral. The two eldest Bronte sisters have just died of illness they caught at boarding school. Charlotte is now the oldest, and with Branwell, Emily, and Anne, she starts a game they can play together, imagining the city of Glass Town, on a British-colonized African island called Angria. Greenberg portrays Charlotte as a natural leader, but one who defers to Branwell because she believes that, as the only brother, he ought to be in charge of the girls.
 
Throughout the book, the invented character Charlotte is most interested in is the womanizing poet Zamorna. She clearly loves him, gets jealous of the fictional women she pairs him with, and even changes the narrative to punish them for getting the attention she wants for herself but can't have. Greenberg depicts Charlotte as kind of romantically obsessed with cruel, patriarchal men; she wants someone who can boss her around, but she's so strong-willed that she keeps creating tyrants in an attempt to find someone to rule her. Charlotte seems to try to mold Branwell into this same kind of man, but he crumbles beneath the pressure she puts on him.
 
The siblings build up Glass Town in the stories they write for each other, especially Branwell who wants war and adventure stories, and Charlotte who wants romance and domestic drama. They spend all day every day playing. Eventually Emily and Anne get tired of always getting overrun and invent their own island, Gondal, to tell their own stories their own way, without their older siblings taking over.
 
Eventually, their father sends Charlotte to boarding school again. She and Branwell write each other letters to keep the game going initially, but when he stops writing, Charlotte carries on by herself. Things come to a head when the various ongoing plots in Glass Town come to a climax - overlapping love triangles intersecting with a revolution for African independence - and Charlotte worries that she's becoming unhealthily obsessed. She turns away from her fantasy world, she and her sisters publish their novels, and then all the siblings but Charlotte fall sick and die within a year. This brings us to the 'present' when she has the chance to choose again, to return to her fantasy and get lost in it, or to stay grounded in reality.
 
Greenberg's art is noteworthy. The proportions of the people and the perspective of the buildings resemble's children's art, an impression that's reinforced by the rough linework, which looks more like charcoal than ink. The color scheme of the entire book is autumnal, with reds and pinks, oranges and browns, splashes of yellow and purple, but no blue or green at all. Scenes and characters from Glass Town are in full color, while the living Brontes are monotone. Grey in the present day when Charlotte is in mourning, brown before the game starts, red at the height of the excitement, pink and orange when Charlotte is at school. You really feel that the fantasy world is more lively than reality, both brighter and more saturated with emotion.
 
Greenberg published in 2020, Catherynne Valente write a YA novel about the Brontes a couple years earlier called Glass Town Game. I'm not quite sure why a 200 year-old kids' game made it into the zeitgeist just then, though I'd guess that it helps that Oxford published a collection of the Brontes' Glass Town writings in 2010.
 
Lots of kids play let's pretend, but the Bronte siblings wrote their imaginary world down instead of only describing it verbally to each other. And because they became famous, various people had reasons to collect, preserve, and transcribe these childhood writings, which is why we're able to know or care about them. Whereas if you or I did something similar when we were kids, we would each likely be our own stories' only reader, if we kept them at all, instead of boxing them up in the attic or tossing them in the trash, the usual fate of kids' art, even the stuff that once got displayed on the fridge.
 
I've actually seen essays claiming that the Brontes invented roleplaying games 150 years before Gary Gygax wrote Dungeons & Dragons, or that one or the other of the sisters were the world's first Dungeon Master, but I don't really think that's true, any more so than I think HG Wells invented wargaming when he wrote Little Wars. At most, I think these might be the earliest examples of someone documenting in writing (that survived, and could become part of the historical record) the sort of games that many people played in their heads as kids and young adults, without usually leaving any record behind. And actually, I doubt they're even the earliest, probably just the best known, because these game-players became world famous, and their records got reprinted, rather than being anonymous writings that remain confined to an archive.
 
Which is not to say there's nothing of value here! Glass Town has kind of caught my imagination, and I'll probably read Valente's book about it at some point too. Lots of kids probably had their own make-believe world, but it's not so surprising to think that the future authors of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights might've had fantasy worlds that were more interesting than most, just as Wells and his opponent Robert Lewis Stevenson probably described their battles between toy soldiers more entertainingly than your average wargamer.

Building Stories

 
 

Building Stories

by Chris Ware

Pantheon

2012 

 

 

Building Stories is cartoonist Chris Ware's masterwork, a collection of 14 smaller comics that together make up one larger graphic novel. Each of the smaller comics is a different size and shape, and they're all collected in a large box. There's one like a Little Golden Book, one hardcover, one the size of a daily newspaper, a trio of comic-book sized comics, a 4 panel board that unfolds like a boardgame, and several others. Supposedly you can read these in any order, although there's a suggested order on the back that I followed, and that felt satisfying.
 
The majority of Building Stories follows one woman across a decade or so of her adult life. She has dark hair, a prosthetic leg from a below-the-knee amputation after a childhood accident; she aspires to be a writer or an artist, and her sections are narrated by her in a stream-of-consciousness style, like we're listening to her internal monologue, or reading her diary. Throughout her life, she's self-conscious about her weight and wants to be thinner and prettier, she worries a lot about the current state of the world, she ruminates a lot on her past choices, she's lonely but has trouble connecting with others, even her husband, and once their daughter is born, she worries a lot that she will never have an important accomplishment apart from being a mother.
 
The other recurring characters, whose stories are more minor and seem to complement the main woman's, are an unhappily married couple who live downstairs from her for awhile, the old woman who owns the apartment building, and Branford the Bee, who is a fictional character the main woman reads stories about to her daughter, and also a real bee who intersects with other characters' stories at various points, and also also, I think maybe Branford's perspective might be pretty similar to the main woman's husband's viewpoint.
 
The unhappy couple fight constantly - he finds her ugly since she's gained weight, she is sick of his lack of affection, critical comments, and his attempts to control what she wears and where she goes. The old woman lives alone. She never had a steady boyfriend or got married, which she blames on needing to take care of her sick mother. They both kind of seem like alternate lives - things that could've happened to the main woman but didn't.
 
The Little Golden Book, which was my starting point, shows all three - the main woman, the unhappy couple, the old lady - over the course of a single 24-hour day. It's narrated by the apartment building itself. At this time, the main woman has graduated art school, lives alone, and works at a florist's shop. This is the day she'll meet her future husband for the first time and hook up with him at a party.
 
In the graphic novel, the woman remembers art school, her first boyfriend who got her pregnant, her abortion, and her time working as a live-in nanny for a couple of working professionals.
 
In the newspaper, the woman and her husband move from Chicago to the suburbs. She worries a lot about her identity - she doesn't want to be a suburbanite mother - and she deals with a couple of major losses, including her best friend who dies at 40.
 
The trio of comics revisits each of the main three and brings some resolution to their stories. And then the game board shows kind of a narrative diagram that maybe summarizes and maps out everything else in the box, including points of intersection you might otherwise have missed.
 
What Ware has produced here, despite its formal experimentation, feels very much like a very classic novel. It's a book about the ordinary lives of ordinary people, told through close observation of their thoughts and behavior. We see a few big moments, but also a lot of little ones. We range across time to cover entire lives, but also focus closely on specific days or periods.
 
Ware is very frank and unsentimental about sexuality. Characters are shown naked or undressed as the situation calls for. Everyone wants sex, but they all have a terrible time trying to fulfill them, and each person's own feelings of self-doubt or self-loathing end up being bigger obstacles than the presence or absence of someone else wanting them.
 
A recurring theme, especially for the main character, but also for her sort-of doppelgangers, is passivity and regret. She continuously feels like she's not living the way she wants to, including being unhappy as a wife and mother; she continuously wishes she'd made different choices, and also keeps doing things she'll regret later, in part because she keeps fixating on the past. But this is true of all the characters. You might ask, why can't they be happy? But they literally don't know how.
 
The main woman feels overwhelmed by the twin burdens of keeping up with what's going on in the world, and being a mother. Over and over, we see her not paying attention to her husband or daughter who are trying to engage with her, because she's thinking about the news, or housing prices, or oil, or she's stuck in the past regretting a previous time she ignored someone who needed her. She ignores the moments she has now in favor of regretting not treasuring the moments she could've had in the past. It's infuriating and very human.
 
I think Ware has captured something that's true for a lot of us, where you might feel a bit dissatisfied with your daily routine, but you don't know how to change it, don't even know how to set aside some time out of it to plan or prepare or act in a different way. It's very easy to make resolutions, and very hard to change habits. But the alternative is spending decades saying 'any day now, I'm going to do something different...'
 
Ware's art is famously very controlled and precise. In some of the smaller formats, I struggled to make out what was being shown in a tiny panel, or to read some miniature text. In a few of the larger ones, it wasn't always clear how to follow the panels in the correct narrative order. In terms of scale and scope, artistic consistency, experimentation, in terms of telling an ordinary human story from multiple allied perspectives, Ware has done something truly impressive here.

On a Sunbeam

 
 
On a Sunbeam

by Tillie Walden

First Second

2018

 

 

On a Sunbeam is a graphic novel that started as a webcomic. My copy was a present from my sister, and I'm glad to have it on my shelf. I've read and enjoyed several of Tillie Walden's earlier works, and this definitely feels like a continuation of her growth as an artist. My personal favorite might still be The End of Summer, but a lot of that's because I like the enormous Victorian house it's set in, and the tiger-sized housecat who protects one of the kids who live there.
 

On a Sunbeam is set in a space opera future, when humanity is scattered across far distant planets, moons, and other habitats, and travelers cross space in ships that look like giant koi fish.
 
Initially, the story progresses along two tracks. In the present, Mia is a recent graduate who gets a job with a small crew of women to rehab abandoned sites so they can be turned into new housing. In flashbacks, we follow Mia in boarding school as she falls in love with her new classmate Grace. About halfway through, the flashbacks conclude as we learn how Grace and Mia got separated. In the present, having faced her memories, Mia resolves to fly across the galaxy to find Grace again, a search that fills the latter half of the novel.
 
The story is well-paced. Mia's friendship with her coworkers and her love with Grace both develop organically. And there's good foreshadowing about the importance of a dangerous region of space known as The Staircase. Although the two timelines mostly advance separately from each other, there's a beautiful moment relatively early on when they sync, when Mia makes a bad mistake at the construction site that reminds her of a bad mistake she made at school. Later there are more flashbacks to other characters' pasts, one-off chapters that give each person more depth in turn. The present day scenes are mostly monochrome in shades of lavender purple; the flashbacks are periwinkle blue. And in both, Walden uses color - rich blacks, maroons, oranges, yellows - to scenes with a lot of emotion or other importance. Mia's fondest memories of Grace appear as full-page panels.
 
In many ways, the first half of Sunbeam feels like a story that could be told in today's world, someplace where young people can make a living working freelance construction jobs. Maybe Brooklyn or Detroit. We have girls' schools. We have demand to convert old factories and churches into apartment buildings. It seems to be taking place in a period of decline, or maybe in the rebound after one, when the population is still down from an earlier high, and it's easier to repair than build something new. The second half, with space travel, and exploration in a pretty hostile planetary environment, feels more overtly science fictional.
 
Almost all the characters in Sunbeam are women, except Ell, who's described as being non-binary, which to me implies that there are men, just someplace else. The main groups of people we see are the all-girls' boarding school Mia and Grace attended, the small group of friends (including Ell) who do rehab work, and later a women's commune. Walden doesn't seem to be imagining a galaxy where men don't exist, just focusing on people and places that choose to live apart from them.
 
Just like in The End of Summer, Walden's sets and backgrounds do a lot to add interest to the story here. You could probably use a lot of the sights from the comic as inspiration for a scifi roleplaying campaign. In the first half, the abandoned sites the crew fixes up are all beautiful ruins, and they raise a lot of questions about what humans did there before and why they left. In the second half, the harsh, bizarre terrain of the alien planet Mia visits while looking for Grace are simultaneously austere and breathtaking. The sights aren't necessarily the product of a lot of rigorous scifi worldbuilding, but they have an emotional logic that fits each part of the story.
 

On a Sunbeam chapter 1 page 11 by Tillie Walden

 

On a Sunbeam chapter 2 page 7 by Tillie Walden

 
I also love the sport 'Lux' that Walden introduces us to. It's played at Mia's boarding school, and she's a big fan. It involves the players all flying around the auditorium in go-kart sized miniature fish ships, navigating a series of tunnels, and flying through a rain of confetti they call 'planets.' We don't learn the rules, but she does a good job communicating what it feels like to watch it. Later, Mia's construction friends introduce her to a board game that seems a lot like D&D. I'm always a fan of imaginary new games that show up in fiction.

 

On a Sunbeam chapter 4 page 15 by Tillie Walden

On a Sunbeam chapter 7 page 6 by Tillie Walden