Dead Memory

 
Dead Memory
by Marc-Antoine Mathieu
translated by Helge Dascher

Dark Horse Comics

2004

 

 

I really liked Marc-Antoine Mathieu's The Museum Vaults, a comic about an explorer mapping a giant, endless Louvre, when I read it a few years ago. Unfortunately, I found Dead Memory, which I just finished, unsatisfying.

 
Dead Memory is a relatively short graphic novel set in an infinite city that's beset by crisis. It's told in voiceover flashback as an ineffectual bureaucrat listens to a recording that narrates his failed efforts.
The city is densely built and mostly laid out like a grid. One night, a brick wall appears and blocks a road. It goes straight from the edge of a building on one side of the street across to the other, so no one can go around without going around the buildings, and it's too tall to easily climb.

 
More walls appear, then lots more. The city government wants to study the problem, but not do anything so rash as to act on it. They assign the bureaucrat to take measurements of the new walls that are quickly strangling everyday life. We keep seeing overhead maps with more and more diagonal walls chaotically carving up the grid of the city.

 
Also, everyone is losing their memories and forgetting how to talk. Somehow the two problems are related?
 

The most interesting scene, I thought, was when the bureaucrat went to the observatory to look through a telescope at a further-away part of the city to understand the extent of the problem. But in looking out over space, he's also looking back in time. All he can say for sure is that there weren't any walls over there at that point in the past. I thought this was a fun reimagining of how astronomy works.

 
Anyway, eventually the bureaucrat goes to the central computer, who like, sort of runs things, and sort of acts as advisor to the human government. It turns out, the computer did it! The computer also made the recording the guy will start listening to in the next scene. The computer resented being the responsible for remembering everything and making all our decisions, so it somehow engineered both the walls and the progressive amnesia. 

 
This is maybe a metaphor for the internet, I guess? Or the way writing and then printing supplanted the oral tradition and ended the ability of any one person to hold all their culture's knowledge inside their head? I don't really know what point Mathieu was trying to make here.

 
Anyway, then the bureaucrat turns off the computer, the walls fall down, people get their memory's back, the guy starts listening to the recording, and everyone starts using the bricks to build new walls that intersect the city grid in the form of concentric circles. What this is supposed to metaphorically illustrate, I have no idea. The end. 

 
Don't bother with this one, go read The Museum Vaults instead.

The Darkest Knight

 
Dark Nights: Death Metal
The Darkest Knight

DC Comics

2021
 

 

The Darkest Knight is the first volume of supplementary material to accompany the main Dark Nights: Death Metal storyline, which I read last month.

 
We start off with origin stories for a bunch of the evil Batmen from last time - Batman Who Laughs, B-Rex, Batmobeast, the giant evil Gotham City mecha, etc.

 
Then we see longer versions of some plot points that were handled very quickly in the main story. I think I mentioned there was a convoluted plan to save the day? It had three main parts. Each one gets an issue-long story instead of just being declared successful in a single panel.

 
Wonder Woman, Superman, and original Batman would sneak and fight their way into the evil Bat Castle to travel to alternate Earths where three previous DC Crises were still ongoing, to rerout the flow of 'crisis energy' away from the bad guys.

 
Simultaneously, the Green Lantern Corp and some sort of multiversal Justice League would travel to the last few evil Earths left in the collapsing multiverse, and knock out the antennae towers being used to receive and collect crisis energy.

 
Also simultaneously, all the Flashes were on the run from the super-powerful Batman Who Laughs (whose brain was transplanted into the body of Dr Batmanhattan after Wonder Woman killed him with an Invisible Chainsaw, and who has renamed himself The Darkest Knight), so that when the other two missions succeeded  Kid Flash would be able to become the new receiver for all the rerouted crisis energy, and channel it to restart the multiverse.

 
I did warn you it was complicated!
 

The next volume, I think, is going to expand on Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman's difficult adventures on the Crisis worlds.

Not Good for Maidens

 
 
Not Good for Maidens
by Tori Bovalino
Page Street
2022

 

 

Not Good for Maidens is a YA fantasy retelling of Christina Rosetti's 19th century poem The Goblin Market. Most of the book takes place at some point in the 2000s or 2010s, with flashbacks to events 18 years earlier, so maybe in the 1980s or 90s.

 
Let's start in the past. British teen May succumbs to the temptation to enter the annual Goblin Market, bad things happen to her there, her sister Laura enters to rescue her, and the two girls are shipped off to live with their estranged father in America, where Laura almost immediately gets pregnant.

 
In the present, Laura's now teenage daughter Louisa is looking forward to the annual visit of her other aunt, Neela, who's only a year older than her, and who she loves like a sister. But Neela does not come visit - she too has become trapped in the Goblin Market. Laura rushes off to try to save her, and May and Lou soon follow. 

 
As far as Louisa knew, she lived in a mundane world, so the revelation that magic is real, goblins are real and dangerous, and her family members are all witches comes as quite a shock. Laura fails at her rescue and gets injured, and so, inevitably, it's up to Lou to enter the Market to save them both.

 
As the present day events unfold, we keep following May in flashback as well. We learn why she went in, and what happened to her there. Both May and Louisa reach points where seemingly their only hope is to trust a goblin and hope they aren't being deceived, despite all the warnings they've both gotten that goblins can't be trusted and always try to trick you.

 
One thing Bovalino does well, and that makes the YA designation appropriate, I think, is to portray the overwhelming intensity of teenage emotion. The desire to enter the Market is a wanting, a longing so intense that you give in even as you know it's a mistake to do so. This isn't quite explicitly identified as being the same as the desire for sex, but also, it clearly is even if Bovalino doesn't literally say so. May's emotions, as she considers going in, in the past, sound a lot like accounts I've read of what it felt like to want sex as a young woman before abortion was legal, to know it's a terrible risk, potentially a life-altering, even life-ending risk, but want it anyway. The goblins lurk outside teenage girls' windows, beckoning them 'come buy, come buy, come buy,' like the real life adult men who start propositioning girls the moment they hit puberty.

 
This makes Louisa an interesting protagonist. She's asexual, and also feels no desire to go to the Market (except to save Neela.) She can't understand why anyone ever goes in, when they know the dangers, in the same way that the ace author of a nonfiction book I'm reading remembers when her high school friend got pregnant, and she couldn't understand why her friend didn't just not have sex. On the other hand, because Lou is the main character, Bovalino doesn't explore the blend of emotions that lead the others into danger as much as she might, though May's perspective helps.

 
Bovalino's writing really shines once we get into the Market. The goblins are all deeply inhuman, with a blend of plant-like and animal-like features. The space of the market is full of tempting fruits and wines, but also human body parts sold like produce. Anyone who stays too long will be killed. Bovalino is very attentive to the intoxicating but sickening blend of smells. The market space is a dungeon, a maze of connected underground rooms that seem to shift position to draw you deeper. It's halfway between Labyrinth and Pan's Labyrinth. It would make a good model for a D&D setting.

 
The original Goblin Market was about sexual peril too - the fear that girls would leave the countryside, visit the city, and in pursuit of their own pleasure and own autonomy, end up 'ruined' by an unwed pregnancy, or worse, be kidnapped, raped, or trafficked. 

 
In this sense, the book suffers from being YA, because while May and later Neela experience the Market like high school girls at a college party where they've been given spiked drinks and the mood has just taken a bad turn, Bovalino also still portrays the goblins as fundamentally rule-abiding and fair, and escape without permanent harm is still possible to someone clever enough. It's affirming to see Laura and later Louisa save the day, but the happy ending feels false. It's not that easy in real life. Real danger doesn't follow any rules, and can't always be avoided, no matter how hard you try. And the trauma of bad things happening, which felt so present at the beginning of the book, seems a little too easy to get over by the end.

Gentlemen Callers

 
Gentlemen Callers

by Corinne Hoex

translated by Caitlin O'Neil

Dalkey Archive
2017, reprinted 2022

 

 

Gentlemen Callers is maybe halfway between Hilary Leichter's Temporary and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, but for sex.

 
Each night, an unnamed woman, who is presumably a partially-fictionalized version of Hoex herself, dreams of a sexual encounter with a man she's encountered in her waking life, mostly men with service industry jobs. 

 
Each chapter, each dream, is a vignette, maybe 1 - 2½ pages long, and introduced with an epigraph vaguely about the man's profession quoted from the French literary canon. Each vignette seems like the amplification of someone's passing thought when she spots a good-looking stranger, magnified and expanded into an imaginative, poetic wet dream.

 
In one dream, Hoex is a cloud, and a pilot flies around and through her until she rains. In another, she is the sand, and the beach attendant rakes her. She's a Persian cat, and the groomer brushes her until she offers her belly. She is a stream, and a construction worker splashes her on his face and chest to cool off before drinking his fill. Hoex seems to like men who are skilled with their hands.

 
In some dreams, she stays human. In a few, she ends up disappointed. Her adventures are mostly told through metaphor and analogy, but Hoex also isn't afraid of a simple dirty pun (as when she snuggles close to a beekeeper to avoid being stung but still feels a little prick), or a straightforward porn scenario (as when she watches the butcher work, he asks her if there's anything else he can do for her, and she answers knowingly, 'I think perhaps there is.')

 
This is a short book, but it's better not to read it too quickly. Hoex's encounters with her gentlemen aren't usually smutty in a conventional way, but you can also enjoy the breadth of her imagination and her playful, joyous use of language. While I can't independently verify the quality of O'Neil's translation, the syntax here seemed agile and playful, which matches the tone set by the content, so I think it's faithful in that sense.

Dark Nights: Death Metal

 
Dark Nights Death Metal
DC Comics

2022

 

 

Sometimes it's nice to take a break with some good old fashioned comic book madness, and Dark Nights: Death Metal is just about the most unhinged superhero story I've ever seen.

 
Death Metal is one of those big annual crossover events, and a rough sequel to the Dark Nights: Metal event from a few years ago. In that outing, when the Batman Who Laughs (an evil Batman who's also the Joker) invaded with a small Justice League of other evil Batmen (evil Batman-Superman, evil Batman-Aquaman, etc) from the Dark Multiverse.

 
This time around, Batman Who Laughs has completely conquered the planet with an army of hundreds of evil Batmen, counterparts to seemingly every other DC hero and villain. Plus like, a Batman who uploaded his mind into the robot dinosaur from the Batcave, an evil sentient Batmobile, and an evil giant mecha Gotham City robot. This is the ridiculousness I crave! 

 
What about the good guys? Batman is undead and using a Black Lantern ring to raise an army of zombie heroes, Superman is turning to stone because evil Darkseid-Batman exposed him to Anti-Life, and Wonder Woman has turned her Lasso of Truth into the ripcord and 'chain' for a badass Chainsaw of Truth. It's nice to see her getting to have some fun!

 
To prevent the whole multiverse from being destroyed, there's a convoluted plan that involves revisiting the Crisis on Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis, and Final Crisis, and funneling some of their 'crisis energy' to reboot another new multiverse, again. Whatever. Of course things go wrong, until eventually a skyscraper-tall metal-dipped goddess Wonder Woman faces off against an equally huge an powerful Batman Who Laughs whose brain has been transplanted into the body of a Dr Manhattan Batman, with the fate of everything at stake.

 
Wonder Woman seemingly loses, but actually wins, everything is reset, and DC announces its new approach to continuity, which is to stop pretending that each 'crisis' ushers in an actually new comic universe with new backstory, and go ahead and acknowledge that the history of the DC Comics universe is just the history of what's been printed in the comics. And yes a lot of it's contradictory, and collectively makes no sense, but while you can pretend or ignore parts you don't like, you can't actually go back and prevent them from having already been published. I don't expect this one to last any longer than any of their other, previous new approaches to continuity, but for what it's worth, I think this more relaxed attitude is the right way to go.

 
This volume contains the complete story, but there are companion volumes that add detail to various parts, so look forward to me reading those soon!

Blankets

 
 
Blankets
by Craig Thompson

Drawn & Quarterly
2003
 

 

20 years old this year, Blankets is a graphic memoir that tells the story of the author's strict Evangelical childhood, his first love, and how he eventually outgrew both relationships. It's moderately famous, and something that I think is sometimes credited with helping to popularize independent comics in the 2000s.
 

There's a central narrative that's told in order, but time moves subjectively. We return over and over to Thompson's painful memories of his childhood, when he shared a bed with his younger brother, their parents were harsh disciplinarians, and a babysitter abused them. Thompson remains haunted by guilt for not being a better brother - from growing up and out if their early closeness, and for failing to protect him from the adults who hurt them both.

 
In his rural high school, Thompson is bullied for having long hair and being sensitive and artistic. (He's not gay, just grunge.) He feels even more an outsider at the church camp he attends every winter - he's still bullied, the other kids come from better-off families, and he seems to be the only one there who's really devout. But at camp he meets Raina, a sensitive artistic girl, and the two of them become fast friends.

 
Because Raina's parents are also conservative Christians, Thompson gets permission to visit her at home in Marquette, Michigan for two weeks. She greets him with a handmade quilt. Raina's parents are getting a divorce, and she does a lot of the care work for her two adopted siblings (who both have Downs Syndrome) and her infant niece (because her recently married biological sister wants more time alone with her husband.)
 

Thompson and Raina spend all their time together, he helps her with her caretaking responsibilities, and at night, at her request, he sleeps beside her before sneaking back to the guest room each morning just before her parents wake. Over several days, they work up the courage to kiss, then make out, then, if not actually 'have sex,' then something very similar. They make plans that Thompson will come back after high school graduation, live with Raina, work in her father's construction company. The two weeks span at least half the book, their brief time together seeming to last forever, the way it must have felt at the time.

 
Afterward, we see Thompson and Raina try to maintain a long-distance relationship by phone, begin to grow apart, break up, stop talking entirely. We also see him begin to question his faith, and during seminary, lose it. Throughout the book, child and high-school-age Thompson quotes Bible verses related to his current situation. His sexual love for Raina is maybe the first thing that really makes him question his faith, but other doubts come from the strictness and intolerance of the church. Learning the history of Biblical translation is the nail in the coffin. He moves to a city, gets a job, and resumes his art. He also reconnects with his younger brother, now an adult too.

 
Thompson's lines are fluid and expressive. Almost the entire book takes place in the winter, beneath the snow, another kind of blanket, along with the one from his childhood bed, and the one he shared with Raina. Thompson's love and faith are both incredibly intense. There's something comforting, in the final part of the book, about seeing that intensity reach a fever-point and break, seeing him healing and leading a calmer, healthier life afterward.

Revenge of the Librarians

 
Revenge of the Librarians

by Tom Gauld
Drawn & Quarterly
2022
 

 

Revenge of the Librarians is the most recent collection of Tom Gauld's standalone comics. Gauld usually draws his comics as single panels the same size as an old newspaper daily strip. Physically, the book is like a much nicer version of the old Garfield collections I used to read as a kid.

 
Gauld's comics return again and again to a few themes - in this volume, particularly, writers who procrastinate instead of writing, readers who buy more books they can read, and the effects of the pandemic. As usual, he is witty and self-deprecating, which I appreciate, since book culture has a tendency to be overly self-serious.

 
Gauld also experiments with comics in the form of a diagram, a flowchart, a random generator, and a choose-your-own-adventure. (Pretty impressive, given the space constraints!) And he has several comics with variations on famous books, such as prequels like 'Brideshead Visited' and 'The Young Man and the Sea.'
 

This is the first Gauld collection I've read since You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack. I should try to find out what else he's published in between!