Witch Hat Atelier 1

 

Witch Hat Atelier 1

by Kamome Shirahama

Kodansha

2019

 

 

I decided to start a new manga series, and Witch Hat Atelier is one I've had my eye on for awhile, just from peeking at the art in the bookstore. In both her storytelling and her illustrations, Shirahama has crafted a beautiful world with an undercurrent of darkness.

 

I think Witch Hat Atelier is a very post-Harry-Potter fantasy story. Not only is it set at a magical school, but the lead character Coco is kind of a fangirl, someone who's very interested in magic, who's spent her life wanting to learn to do it, but who also had no real expectation of becoming a witch until the start of the comic. (Not unlike Akko in Little Witch Academia.) Harry is an audience viewpoint character because he was raised in ignorance of the wizarding world; Coco is an audience surrogate for readers who grew up devouring such stories and wishing they could be part of them.

 

An important touch-point here, I think, is Fullmetal Alchemist, since it also involves a child attempting magic and causing a terrible accident, though it's much more accidental for Coco than it was for Ed and Alphonse, who at least had some idea what they were dealing with. There are also a number of parallels to Howl's Moving Castle, including Coco's family store, and Qifrey's window that opens on multiple locations.

 

Okay, so Coco is a cute little kid who works with her mom in the family dress shop. She wants to be a witch, but like everyone else, believes that witches are born with something extra that lets them do the impossible. The world Coco lives in (something like 19th century England) is powered not by an Industrial Revolution, but by magical tools that only witches can make.

 

One day, the witch Qifrey comes to the shop to buy some fabric. Coco manages to watch him doing something that's normally done in secret - casting a spell. When he does, she realize that spells aren't spoken or performed, they're written, they're drawn. 

 

Coco remembers years ago, when a creepy costumed witch at a festival gave her a book of diagrams, and realizes these are spells. Coco copies some of the diagrams and produces small effects, then traces a complex one and accidentally turns her mom and the whole shop to stone. Qifrey's intuition leads him back just in time to save Coco and adopt her as an apprentice.

 

Apparently in the past, everyone knew that everyone could do magic, and terrible war-spells were created that nearly wrecked the world. Witches used memory erasing magic to drastically curtail knowledge of magic among the public. Now memory modification the only allowed spell that directly affects people. All the other non-forbidden spells only affect objects, and thus create magical tools. Not unlike the allowed and illegal magics in Charlie Holmberg's Magician books.

 

Qifrey has a handful of other students, including Agott, the top girls and Coco's new roommate. Coco learns some magic drawing; survives being hazed by Agott by being sent on a too-hard solo assignment that she initially fails, but doesn't give up, and passes by creatively applying knowledge from the dress shop; and then everyone goes on a classic wand-buying trip to a village of witches. 

 

Coco knows the tropes and is delighted to be participating. She also feels guilty about her mom, is afraid she might not be smart enough or a good enough artist, wants to be friends with the other girls, and wants to learn as much as she can so she can save her mom.

 

Shirahama's art is very pretty, and Coco is an appealing protagonist, curious and genuine and enthusiastic. I'm looking forward to finding out what happens next, especially with the mysterious costumed witch who gave out the cursed spellbook...

The Oracle Code

 
 
The Oracle Code

by Marieke Nijkamp

art by Manuel Preitano

DC Comics

2020

 

 

The Oracle Code is the second of DC Comics' all-ages graphic novel series. With the exception of Superman Smashes the Klan, I think that all the comics in this series might be origin stories (and honestly, you could make a strong argument about SSTK). Oracle Code is an origin story for Barbara Gordon as the wheelchair-using hacker Oracle. In the original comics, Barbara was introduced as Batgirl, was shot and paralyzed by the Joker, became Oracle, then got unparalyzed and became Batgirl again. In this version, she's a precocious teen who gets shot by a random nobody because she followed her dad, Police Commissioner Gordon, to a crime scene.

After this brief into, Barbara moves into a creepy and barely ADA-retrofitted residential facility inside a crumbling Victorian mansion to do physical therapy and learn wheelchair skills. Perhaps the most implausible part of the book is the idea that this rat-trap is considered a state-of-the-art facility and not a candidate for getting condemned and knocked over. I guess that's Gotham for you. Initially Babs is angry and tries to isolate herself. She rejects other girls' offers of friendship, misses her programming-buddy from before her injury, tries to rush through her PT, and keeps hurting herself due to over-exertion.

Barbara starts to make one friend, a girl whose parents died in a house fire who walks the halls at night, and tells Babs spooky stories to help her fall asleep. Barbara starts making a couple more friends, gets more comfortable using her chair, and stops fighting with her dad on the phone all the time. Then the girl claims that her brother has vanished from the facility (the director claims the brother died in the fire), and then the girl disappears too (the director claims she finished her therapy).

Obviously this is a mystery, and Barbara enlists her other new friends to help investigate. They use both computer hacking and lock-picking skills to access some hidden parts of the creepy old building where, quelle surprise, there was indeed something sinister going on in the secret areas. Babs doesn't do anything super-heroic. She just investigates, learns the truth, and calls in the police, without wearing a costume or performing acrobatics, as I wished Willow had done in Whistle. 'Oracle' is just a screen name. I don't know if Nijkamp's writing is better than Lockhart's per say, but I like the plot resolution a lot more this time.
 
Mauel Preitano illustrated both Whistle and Oracle Code, and his versatility is pretty impressive. His art in Whistle had a sketchier, rounder, warmer, more energetic quality. The palette had a lot of bright colors, especially sky and accents of orange. Here Preitano's drawings are cleaner, cooler, flatter, more polished. The colors are autumnal, even Halloweeny, with darker oranges and blue-grays. There's a recurring motif of puzzle pieces showing Babs thinking about the mystery. And Preitano also switches styles again to illustrate the bedtime ghost stories as though they're drawn by a teenager in a school notebook.

The Curator

 
 

The Curator

by Owen King

Scribner

2023

 

 

The Curator is a horror novel that initially masquerades as historical fantasy. Owen King provides us with a kaleidoscopic view of his world, showing rapidly shifting political events through the eyes of people on the ground. He has a large cast, but he returns to each of them enough, and has them run into each other enough, that the effect is a bit like a Dickens novel, or one of those hyperlink cinema movies where each of the lead characters has their own storyline but they all loosely intersect over the course of the film. King also gives us two different monsters, who represent failings of each side of the central conflict.
 

We open in an unnamed city, nicknamed 'Fairest,' where some almost fairytale narration informs us that there's recently been a revolution, and an alliance of workers, students, and homeguard soldiers have nearly bloodlessly routed the entire ruling class, who've all fled for safer environs. In the aftermath, the tripartite provisional government is busy seizing city property and private wealth alike, and redistributing it to the needy. 

 
Dora, a girl born rich, orphaned, and lately working as a maid in the university, manages to adopt the National Museum of the Worker and become the new curator of its wax figurines. Her goal is actually to learn more about her older brother, who died when they were children, but who volunteered at the Society for Psykical Research, and who told her he'd learned there were other worlds, and perhaps survival after death, right before the cholera got him. The Society is next-door to the Museum, but it burned down during the revolt.

 
That mix of the whimsical (the mannequin museum), the supernatural (we see a conjuring trick early on that proves something supernatural is afoot), and the deadly, prosaically serious (the vulnerability of the human body to mundane injury and death), is pretty consistent throughout, though the blend changes and gets darker the longer the book continues.

 
Although King's close third-person narration checks in on many characters, Dora is pretty central. She has a boyfriend who's a student and volunteer in the provisional government, a 'quick boy,' a teenage thief, has a crush on her and helps steal things around the city to refurbish the museum. There's a professional soldier with a grudge against her boyfriend who's decided to rape Dora in revenge, and in the unnamed but obviously America embassy next-door to the museum, a man working for the provisional government tortures servants of the rich to death for information every night, and he feels duty bound to kill his neighbor Dora too just as soon as he has an opening in his busy schedule. It's a volatile mix, certain to explode. Also Dora's search for information about her brother will eventually reveal the truth to her, as well as the basic mechanics of how the central supernatural conceit of the book works, and a form of exploitation that involves the direct transfer of the lives of the poor to the lifespans of the rich.

 
After the revolution, the city is closed but optimistic with anticipation. There's a blockade of royalist soldiers cutting off the main road in, but the home guard outnumber them, and will surely open the city soon, right? We see flashbacks of how the revolution started, endure the long interim period of waiting and dreams deferred that never seems to resolve, and then the sudden collapse of the provisional government as the royalists return in force at the end.

 
King balances the two sides of this conflict well. The city's poor and workers suffered pain, hunger, indignity, and early death under the old regime. The inequality was real and ugly, the urge to correct it, to share the work and rewards more equitably, was admirable. But the new government doesn't know what it's doing and can't do it well, and no amount of good intentions can make up for that. There's no work, food is dwindling, looting and black-marketeering are rampant, and people are going missing. 

 
The torturer is one of the two monsters I mentioned. He embodies the failures of the provisional government, the failure to know what all its members are doing, the failure to deliver the fairer world they promised. The second is a supernatural monster connected to the Society for Psykical Research, who represents the evil of exploitation. Both men fancy themselves hard workers who are doing good, and both are arguably the worst thing to ever happen to the organizations they joined, and definitely the worst things to happen to all the people who meet them, and die for it.

 

The Curator also features a magic doorway, meaningful triangle symbols, and an awful lot of cats, all of which make the cover. There's a whole subplot about a ghost ship collecting the spirits of the dead (mostly torture victims) who will come to the aid of the living in the final act. And in the end, in part through Dora's intervention, we finally do get to see what a fairer version of Fairest might look like.

Radial Symmetry

 

Radial Symmetry

by Katherine Larson

Yale University Press

2011

 

 

I'm halfway through a longer novel, but taking a break to read some poetry. Katherine Larson is a working biologist as well as a poet, and Radial Symmetry is so far her only collection.

 
Larson writes about love, about a loved on dying, about a research project on a Mediterranean beach, about loneliness. Her poems tend to refer to a specific moment in time and space, when she felt a particular emotion in response to a certain stimulus. She's very effective at evoking the specifics of both the place and the emotion.

 
When I read Kimiko Hahn's poems earlier this year, they reminded me of little essays. Larson's feel more like single memories - individual moments trapped in glass. For whatever reason, I think I like Larson's work better.

 
Larson uses a lot of oceanic imagery, and also frequently references sea birds, mollusks, insects. They're both real and metaphorical, but not romantic. She writes about the stink of rotting carcasses on the beach, and viscerally describes how an animal's body is turned into a meal.

 
Most of Larson's lines are short. They usually break mid-sentence, creating pauses that interrupt how how you would read it, if it were printed out like prose. Some of her poems are just one long stanza. The others are usually made up of 3-line stanzas. The shortness of the lines fits the mood of someone slowly recounting a memory, adding details as they surface in the mind.

7th Time Loop 2

 
 

7th Time Loop 2

The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy!

by Tuoko Amekawa

art by Hinoki Kino

translated by Hana Allen 

Seven Seas

2022

 

 

Before we dive into the second volume of 7th Time Loop, let's quickly review the premise. On the night of her 15th birthday, minor royal Rishe was dumped by her price boyfriend and exiled from the country. At 20, she died and was reborn at the moment of being dumped. She's on her seventh life now, and is subjectively 45 years old. In each previous life she's had a different job and learned a different skill ... and died at 20, always due to a war of conquest started by Emperor Arnold Hein.

In her seventh life, Rishe is engaged to Arnold and determined to prevent his war. The Arnold Rishe knows is thoughtful, seems sympathetic to her attempts to treat others fairly, and doesn't appear to have a bad temper. She's not sure what will happen to change him.

In this volume, Rishe recruits the maid-staff for her manor, tries to reconnect with the merchant company she worked for in a past life, and meets Arnold's enigmatic younger brother Theodore.

Having worked as a maid in one previous life, Rishi goes undercover among the maid candidates. She ends up hiring the youngest and least experienced, plus the one maid who came from a rich but bankrupted family, who'd been bullying the other girls, to tutor them and teach them to read instead. This mostly seems to be about Rishe valuing education and second chances due to her unusual life, but she may also hope to use the maids who are loyal to her as spies in the main palace in the future.

Next Rishe tries to hire the merchants she was so close with in a previous life to supply her upcoming wedding to Arnold. They can tell she's keeping secrets and refuse. She disguises herself, sneaks out, and approaches them again. They still won't accept her as a customer, but will be her business partners if she can impress them in the near future. I guess this will get resolved in volume 3, presumably with Rishe enacting an ingenious stratagem.

When Rishe sneaks back home, Arnold is waiting for her. But he's not jealous, just curious about her hidden depths. He does warn her to stay away from his younger brother Theodore. Naturally, Theodore shows up napping in Rishe's herb garden the next morning.

He tries to warn her off marrying Arnold, and when that doesn't work, sends her an invitation (seemingly from Arnold) to a secret nighttime rendezvous. Rishe goes undercover as a maid in the main palace to learn more, then attends the night meeting (while sneakily alerting Arnold to it as well.) She wants to know more about the family dynamic, but I didn't feel like much was revealed. After sending Theodore away, Arnold is once again intrigued by Rishe's mysterious behavior.

The series continues to have a lightly comedic tone. Due to her many experiences, Rishe is hyper-competent, and due to her knowledge of likely future events, she's goal-driven and secretive about her motives. All of which seems strange for a 15 year-old royal fiancee with no major life experiences. I'm hopeful that in a future volume, we'll learn more about how and why the seemingly-kind Arnold Hein becomes a warmonger and mass-murderer. In the meantime, we've got Rishe's subterfuges and antics to entertain us. I'm especially curious to see what comes of her attempts to create a network of literate maids, employed other places, who are loyal to her as a result of how she treated them when they worked directly under her.

Since I borrowed this from a coworker and the series is still coming out, I'm going to wait until a couple more volumes are available before continuing with the series.

Six Angry Girls

 
 

Six Angry Girls

by Adrienne Kisner

Feiwel & Friends

2020 

 

 

I don't actually know Adrienne Kisner, but her husband is in my regular Friday night gaming group, and we've been playing together for about a decade now. So Adrienne is the friend of a friend, at the very minimum. Six Angry Girls is her most recent YA novel, about a group of scorned high school girls who form a Mock Trial team in the spring of their senior year.

 

We follow the alternating perspectives of Raina and Millie. The heading of each chapter is stylized as a court case, showing one or the other viewpoint character v. someone or something, in the Court of Public Opinion or the like, with a meaningful docket number.

Raina is one of her Pennsylvania high school's two lead actresses. At the start of the spring term in January, she gets dumped by her boyfriend, gets outmanuevered by her theatrical rival Claire, and starts questioning whether she even wants to act, or if she was only doing it because her boyfriend used to encorage her. She quits the Drama Club and starts knitting at the local yarn store, where the regulars are starting yarn-based activism against a misogynistic local judge.

Millie is thethe hardest working member (and the only girl) on the Mock Trial team, but the boys plan a coup via open tryouts, and kick her off entirely. A chance meeting with Raina when they're both crying in the bathroom convinces Millie to start an all-girl rival Mock Trial team. It's interesting to see some of the same characters from a different perspective - Raina's ex-boyfriend is one of the boys who ousts Millie, and Raina's nemesis Claire is Millie's best friend.

With Raina and Millie teaned up, we're off to the races! Sort of. Raina meets new student Grace at the yarn store. She becomes part of the team, and starts dating Millie. Veronica usually rock-climbs but she has a broken foot, so she joins in. Izzy is trans and a nonbinary demigirl; like Grace, she's new, after just transfering over from an all-boy's school. They recruit the school librarian to be their faculty advisor, and Nikita, who is on punishment for overdue library books is their reluctant sixth.

Meanwhile, Raina is getting more and more involved with activism, while trying to figure out who she is without her ex and what she wants to do with her adult life. Millie is also trying to figure out her plans, especially as her dad and his conservative new girlfriend keep trying to derail her from trial, friends, and even college next year, in favor of housekeeping and taking care of the girlfriend's kids from a previous marriage.

But the girls' Mock Trial team is on a winning streak! They advance past the district level to states, where they face off against the boy's team from their own school for a chance at nationals.

The bigger challenge though is the new case everyone is assigned for the tournaments - a free speech case that pits a fictional queer feminist club against their school's fictional religious conservatives. It's a case that hits too close to home, a case where the girls don't feel comfortable arguing the anti-gay side. Millie wants to win, but at what cost? Will the others support her  over their own objections? Does she actually want them to?

I feel like in some other version of this book, Raina would learn that the hated judge is really a very nice person once you get to know him, or Millie would realize that the Mock Trial boys had been doing more than she gave them credit for, or she'd be forced to abandon college to babysit her new step-siblings but later decide it was for the best. 

Kisner isn't writing that kind of book though. She's not ashamed of her characters' feminism; their legitimate grievances are not treated as character flaws to be overcome. The judge, for example, might indeed be a nice man off the bench, but his rulings still disfavor women, and they're still an appropriate target for public protest. Not everyone needs to 'learn a lesson' - the closest anyone comes is Raina re-evaluating Claire once they have a mutual friend and aren't competing for the same roles anymore.

Kisner gives her characters problems at home, at school, and as burgeoning political adults. Raina and Millie are definitely the best developed characers. The others aren't flat, but they're not given as much detail or as much agency. Grace and Claire, who both know both the mains in different ways, emerge as the second tier. Kisner's depiction of feisty craft-store feminists felt authentic to the women like that I've known before. 

The girls are coming of age, but not everything is going their way. Whenever their first choice is blocked, they have to do some soul searching and decide who they want to be instead, and what to do to become that. So it's less about a smooth path, and more about self-knowledge, resilience, getting appropriately angry at the correct parties, and figuring out the best alternative. Oh, and yarn-bombing,  activism, community, and politics. Probably a good book for a real life angry high school girl.

Whistle

 

Whistle

A New Gotham City Hero

by E Lockhart

art by Manuel Preitano

DC Comics

2021

 

 

A few years ago, one of my coworkers showed me some new Raven and Beast Boy graphic novels she was excited about, that had been announced by DC. Sometime after that, I read the truly excellent Superman Smashes the Klan without realizing it was part of the same series. Between then and now, it seems like DC has put out with about a thousand of these standalone YA comics! I decided to check out a few of them. First up is Whistle.

 

This one has a pretty good set-up, but I think it sacrifices a proper ending for the chance to imagine the lead character maybe having ongoing adventures. It confronts her with a difficult moral choice, but then seems to let her eat her cake and still have it too. And honestly, it might've been more satisfying without her getting powers or putting on a costume.

 

Willow is a poor Jewish kid in an underserved neighborhood in Gotham. She's kind of an activist, showing up at demonstrations with signs to demand better funding for her school. She's very motivated, very hard working, maybe not very popular - a Tracy Flick or Rory Gilmore type character. She makes friends with the new kid at school, an African immigrant, who seems to be a version of Beast Boy, although without any powers (yet?) 

 

Willow's single mom is sick with cancer - and she can't work, doesn't have insurance, can't afford her treatment, and is falling behind on her rent. Willow takes a part-time overnight job cleaning an animal shelter to help out, but you can't imagine it pays enough.

 

Also the neighborhood has a problem of someone making plants grow to cover up buildings and make them unusable, especially churches and community centers.

 

Willow gets a message from her mom's old friend (or boyfriend?), the Riddler. I mean, Willow doesn't know that, but the audience does. He hosts biweekly underground poker games, needs a new event planner because Killer Croc murdered the old one, and he heard Willow's mom was sick, and thought he could help out his old friend who cut off all contact with him by offering her daughter a secret, high-paying, illegal, possibly dangerous job...

 

Willow takes the job, makes friends with Poison Ivy who is a regular at the games, gets a glamorous new wardrobe, gets enough money to pay the rent and cover her mom's hospital bills, starts ignoring her friends and schoolwork, stops having time for activism, starts to feel enchanted by her connection to this cool rich secret poker club. 

 

Willow's mom and friend Garfield (aka Beast Boy) tell her that she's changing and they're worried about her. She slowly realizes that Riddler and Poison Ivy are the ones behind the plant attacks. They're trying to buy up cheap real-estate and gentrify it. It will be good for "the neighborhood," but most people living there now will have to move away.

 

And then Willow gets mauled by Killer Croc. She's with a shelter dog when she's attacked, and for unclear reasons, gains dog-like hearing and sense of smell, the ability to talk to dogs generally, and the ability to understand the one shelter dog. 

 

More importantly, while she's healing, she gets some time to think about what she's doing and who she wants to be. She needs the money her illegal job gives her, but doesn't want to let Riddler and Poison Ivy succeed at their plan. 

 

So this is the important moral choice Willow faces. She wants to be a good person, to protect her neighborhood, but also to keep taking care of her mother. I feel like she tries to have it both ways, and that the book lets her, while acting as though she's made a wholly righteous decision.

 

Willow gets herself in shape and makes a very CW-ready costume, and shows up to stop Poison Ivy from making plants take over the next building on her hit list. They fight, neither Ivy nor Riddler recognize her, Ivy nearly kills Willow with her poison kiss, but then some shelter dogs come to her rescue. Riddler gets away, Ivy gets arrested and released, and Willow congratulates herself for saving the building without doing more than throwing a few punches.

 

She does not however, like, tell anyone the Riddler's plan. Or stop working for him. Or tell him that she thinks what he's doing is wrong. Or stop being friends with him and Ivy. I think she sees herself as a spy in his organization? But she also helps her mom start reconciling with the guy, so like, that's a very deep cover. It's implied that Willow will continue being both a costumed crime fighter ... and a paid member of the Riddler's criminal gang.

 

As I said, I think that trying to single-handedly thwart gentrification by becoming a superhero is the wrong ending for the story Lockhart set up. I recognize this is a superhero comic, so the genre more or less requires it, but Lockhart wrote a character and built up a scenario where it's kind of disappointing that that's how Willow decides to take action.

 

I'd have rather seen Willow stand up to Riddler as herself, and try to get journalists and other activists to oppose him in the press and on the streets. The Willow we saw early on appeared to have real moral courage, enough to do what's right even at some cost to herself. 

 

Keeping her new job and her new friends, avoiding any financial sacrifices or uncomfortable conversations, then getting to feel good about herself by inconveniencing the bad guys without doing more to really stop them - that just feels like wish fulfillment rather than Willow actually doing what's right. I wish she'd been allowed to do better.