September 2021Books Read Standouts: DC: The New Frontier, Vol. 1 / The Devil Is A Part-Timer! , Vol. 1

DC: The New Frontier, Vol. 1 

(Written And Illustrated By Darwyn Cooke)

    DC:NF is an exercise in what TVTropes calls reconstruction, which I will let a for-real comics author, and so has the edge over your humble blogsman in that he actually knows what the hell he's talking about, explain:

"It strikes me that the only reason to take apart a pocket watch, or a car engine, aside from the simple delight of disassembly, is to find out how it works. To understand it, so you can put it back together again better than before, or build a new one that goes beyond what the old one could do. We've been taking apart the superhero for ten years or more; it's time to put it back together and wind it up, time to take it out on the road and floor it, see what it'll do."

— Kurt Busiek, Astro City

    So basically, what if the Justice League and everyone in it were actually what we remember them being in our collective cultural heart and mind? Not as laced with sexism, racism and homophobia as they were in the Golden Age? Not as artificially perfect, bland and two-dimensional (largely because they were bein strangled by censors and moral guardians) as they were in the Silver Age? And the less said about the Dark Age, the better, although it did lay the groundwork for a lot of good stuff, introducing the concept of the graphic novel and making Aquaman cool. (The Bronze Age is generally agreed to be Pretty Okay, as far as I've been able to discern.) What IF the heroes we know and love were Good and True but also capable of moral nuance, and aware that real problems require more than just punching and that sometimes there's just no good solution, but that you have to try anyway?

    You get New Frontier, is what.

    Combining extremely strong artwork, humanized versions of heroes it's previously been very difficult to empathize with, and origin stories for the Green Lantern and the Martian Manhunter that make them actually interesting, New Frontier is a chance to take what we love best about these characters and let them use those traits to ask some hard questions: is Superman a war criminal for following orders and supporting a possibly* unjust war**, is Wonder Woman right in her assertion that there's no point following the made-up 'rules' of war that make them feel better but don't actually do any good for the people they're supposed to be helping***? Does the Aqua-Man (BADASS BEARD DANCING LIKE KELP IN THE CURRENT) actually have any obligation to help a crisis threatening the dry-landers who are actively destroying his kingdom with pollution, and if so how in Davy Jones' ass is he supposed to when he's already responsible for the safety of an undersea empire more than twice the area of the entire surface world? DINOSAURS!, which is not a question but still very important? Has Captain Cold considered that he might just have a hypothalamus disorder, and maybe that's why he's always wearing a damn parka? SOME OF THESE AND MORE, because I actually just remembered Captain Cold was in this book before I remembered The Flash is; WHAT CAN I SAY: I'm a Snarter at heart. Also at heart? A guy who's gonna root for a black man forging twin sledgehammers and using them to singlehandedly murder an entire chapter of the Klan. I don't have any jokes for that one, it was just extremely upsetting and satisfying; 0/10 that it had to happen, 10/10 that it did.

    New Frontier isn't perfect--the Big Bad is a thing that's super cool unto itself but makes negative 6,000% sense in this story for my money--but it isn't trying to be; it's trying to show that we were always right to care about these characters and their stories, and it doesn't matter if they're going through a gross gritty phase, or they've got a writer with upsetting and obvious personal politics this year, or if three company-wide continuity reboots in the span of 24 months may actually have made it literally impossible for J. Jonah Jameson not to have been Uncle Ben. What matters is that when we read these, the make us want to be our best selves; that's not often easy or simple, and it helps to know that it isn't for Hal Jordan, either, and he's got a friggin' magic ring and he doesn't even have to deal with that absolute chudguncher Deborah In HR who still hasn't set up your direct deposit even though that's her whole goddamn job, DEBORAH, we all know you're just playing Angry Birds and pretending to know how NFTs work over there.

Score: 9/10 Times J'onn J'onzz Turned Into Columbo Before Realizing He Wasn't Real, But That The Litigious Estate Of Peter Falk Very Much Is 

*Definitely
**Yes
***Absofuckinglutely yes (in context)

August 2021 Books Read Standouts MANGA TRIPLE-FEATURE! Time Paradox Ghostwriter, Vol. 1 / Mama Akuma, Vol. 1 / Delicious In Dungeon, Vol. 1

August 2021 Books Read Standouts MANGA TRIPLE-FEATURE! Time Paradox Ghostwriter, Vol. 1 / Mama Akuma, Vol. 1 / Delicious In Dungeon, Vol. 1

Review: The Low, Low Woods

The Low, Low Woods

(Hill House Comics and DC, Written by Carmen Maria Machado, Art by DaNi)

    "One day, it was just your regular piece-of-shit coal-mining town where people died the way God and the company intended: hacking up pieces of lung or crushed beneath ten tons of rock."

    So we are introduced to Shudder-To-Think, Pennsylvania, a coal-mining company town that's spent the last hundred years burning from the inside out, and that somehow just won't realize it's dead. That is not a metaphor. 

    Despite what certain chopped-up snake-flags will tell you, there's always been an understanding that the United States is too big to be one thing, and that the different countries-with-in-a-country all have distinct personalities, histories and ghosts: Southern Gothic stories don't happen in the same world, much less the same nation, as foggy Northwest Passage mysteries in Oregon, sun-bleached Florida Noir or Midwestern massacre. The last few decades have seen a resurgence in a specific subflavor of these stories dealing with what some would call coal-country, from the massively (and deservedly) popular fictional horror podcast Old Gods of Appalachia, hilarious but heartbreaking novel Meddling Kids and horrifying comic Redfork, to the crumbling smelting-town of Possum Springs in Night In The Woods and going all the way back to a ghost-town full of spectral miners damned to wander beneath the earth for their crimes in an episode of Carnivàle from 2003. 

    Key to this specific subgenre of Midwestern Gothic are two facts, indisputable and fundamental in the telling of a story in this setting:
    The first is that the Appalachian Mountain Range is unbelievably huge, it is the single largest thing on this continent, spanning 21 states and 5 Canadian Provinces, and even as mountains go it is inconceivably, impossibly old; yeah yeah the Grand Canyon is maybe as much as 70 million years old, and that's cool, but there are caves in the Appalachians that you, a human person, can physically walk into that have been there, in that exact spot, every second of every day since before life existed on this planet. These mountains are a reminder that as a species we are truly in the middle of our first breath; we have no ability to conceive the amounts of time the world actually deals in and as a result we are terrified of these fuckin' things. That's why the Rockies, the Cascades, the Superstitions and the Adirondacks, the Sierra Nevadas, those are all friendly mountains; gentle, lightly baked folk-singers write sweet, melancholy songs about those. But the Appalachians are something else entirely, and since you can't, as a grownup, point to a rock and say 'THAT BAD ROCK SCARES ME", we frequently imagine that they hold secrets, that they're gateways to--or prisons for--things beyond our understanding, because in a very real sense they are.
    The second key to understanding Appalachian Gothic is this: the extent to which small mining towns and the generations of American families (mostly poor and many of color) that worked them have been left in absolute ruin by the purpose for which they were created absolutely cannot be overstated. Of course there's the economic devastation when the single industry around which an entire community's livelihood depends upon and revolves collapses; the U.S. is littered with the corpses of these towns, abandoned when the coal or the iron or the granite runs out, or else peopled by living ghosts who either couldn't afford to leave when their host-body died or couldn't bring themselves to leave the only land their people have ever known. But the blood-cost is arguably higher: black lung (or any number of equivalent industrial diseases), industrial collapses and disasters, natural gas poisonings and fires, catastrophic environmental runoff that poisons the land and the water for the rest of time, the depression, addiction and other mental health issues that accompany all of this and, to top it off, the absolutely brutal retaliation against any attempt to improve on any of it; there's a reason that the United Mine Workers of America is one of the oldest labor unions in the country, founded after decades of strikebreaking and outright violence and murder against miners who fought for even the most basic rights and protections. All of this to say: the people who work towns like these are trying to get along like anyone else, but the mining itself, the towns and the companies are capital-b Bad, and given the nature of the story may also be that they dug too deep, either in ignorance and greed or, worse (maybe?), trying to Find Something down in the dark of the earth.

    All and all and all of this to say that The Low, Low Woods is unique in my experience of Appalachian Gothic stories, because the small, decaying coal-town of Shudder-To-Think is definitely chock fulla naturally-occurring Grade-A weird shit, monsters in the woods, magic-women and skinless men beneath the earth, but none of it is inherently malevolent, and there's definitely a Company that is extremely willing to write off human life for a profit, but they're not the bad guys. No, The Low, Low Woods is unique because it deals with the horrific brutality of small, poor, oppressed people turning on one another instead of on the Powers That Be, but more specifically it's possibly the oldest story in the history of civilization: men discovering something powerful and valuable and actively deciding to turn it away from the common good and weaponize it toward controlling women with violence and imposed silence. It is not my custom to reduce a story to being simply an aspect of its creators, but it is not coincidence that the artist and writer are both kickass dames, one of whom actually grew up in what might as well have been Shudder-To-Think, and are able to bring the darker side of the company town to light.

    Here's the breakdown: it's the nineties and two best friends, both lesbians teens of color, have no idea how they're gonna get the fuck out of this town when they graduate. Your English teacher thinks you have enormous talent and should go to college? That's great,  but you're 17, your dad's on disability from the mines and your mom's a waitress. You gonna stay in town and try to scrape out a living? Good luck, the mines caught fire and are burning beneath the streets; sinkholes swallow children and cars alike, and the ground is so hot that snow evaporates the second it hits. And if you stay, and if you can both survive and make a living, something...happens to the women in Shudder-To-Think when they stay here; they get forgetful, and blurry, and start to wander and lose track of themselves. And so we find our heroines as the story begins: waking up from just such a fugue in the movie theatre as the picture ends, aware only that they have no memory of the last two hours, and deciding it's fucking well time to find out why.

    I'm a white cishet dude, which means there's doubtless a lot about this story that isn't aimed at me and that I'm not catching, but it seems to me it's an excellent example of LGBT+ representation because it focuses on two gay girls of color whose characters are informed by those traits, but whose stories aren't impacted by them any more than they would've been if one of them had gone to her boyfriend's house instead of her girlfriend's. Personally I think people whose lives are very often in real danger for the crime of being who they are should get to be who they are as loudly and belligerently as they like, but I also understand that many in those communities just want to be allowed to live their human lives without constant focus on what makes them Different in the eyes of others, and this is a fantastic example of how that can be just as effective a storytelling and characterization technique. There's a trans character! They're referred to as such exactly once because it bears on how they came to be where they are, and then it's never mentioned again and the character is still entirely awesome, because they're an awesome character that's trans, not the other way around, and for trans people who just want to live life I have to imagine that kind of representation is just as important as the groundbreaking, public kind that's externally important. 
    Other symbols and themes that I am qualified to notice are: does the burning coal-mine stretching beneath the ground represent the endless, simmering hatred the patriarchy feels, and its invisibility represent the way our society chooses not to see the damage that silent fire does to real humans every day? Do the half-human monsters in the woods show us what some people have to do themselves in order to survive in a world that doesn't want them to exist? Are sinkholes that only show up when people are happy representative of the way we have to empty ourselves out and sell pieces of what's inside in order to have what we want? And the Skinless Men...well, the Skinless Men speak for themselves, although admittedly they mostly go 'BLARGH!'; we all know this classic way. I'm sure there are a bunch more! Maybe I'll find them someday.

    The Low, Low Woods is not what I expected, and not the story I would've told with this setting, and that is a good thing. It's filled with horrors I didn't know existed, both mundane and arcane, which make for much more effective storytelling and provides more of what stories are, fundamentally, supposed to do: place us in a new perspective and show us what life is like for people who aren't necessarily like us, why they're just as real as we are, and why we need to look at ourselves to see what endangers them instead of at dark, darting shapes in the wood. I mean the shapes are definitely there, they're just minding their own business and suggest you get your own house in order before you call the cops on theirs. Oh also: one of the girls has a bitchin' pocketknife named 'Toldyaso' that saves their asses more than once, and that is the raddest fucking thing I have ever heard. 

Score: 9/10 Bells At Rest, Lambs To The Slaughter.

    

and I've got imitation moonlight

July 2021 Books Read Standouts: DCeased / Black Hammer: Skulldigger + Skeleton Boy

 DCeased

INT: My Conservatory, A Fire Crackling Merrily, My Crab-Butler MR. SCUTTLEBUTT In Repose, Knitting Himself An ADORABLE NIGHTCAP In His Wee Crab-House

CASEY Sits In A Chair Made From A Whole Sea-Bear, A FEZ Rakishly Askew, Swirling A Snifter Of DR. PEPPER Cuvée 1967

Me:

*minding my own business because I know what's good for me*

Comixology: 

Hey did u kno that DCeased is on sale

M: 

Eh, DC is really hit or miss for me and 'planet zombie' stuff doesn't sound gr--   

C: 

But did u know it was written by ur boi Tom Taylor

M: 

...hm. Okay maybe I'll check the preview of the first pa--HOLY SHIT

    Y'know, generally speaking, I stand by my earlier assertion: "zombie planet in Setting X" is a bad and lazy premise! For me, anyway. Because I am as tired of zombies as anyone; if zombies are someone's particular thing, fair play to them, godspeed. THAT SAID: goddamn Tom Taylor is good at writing comic books, and it is known that a master can do more with weak material than a lesser creative can with supplies of higher quality; see Michelangelo being intentionally stuck with a block of shit-grade marble and producing David, or, conversely, what J.J. Abrams squatted down and extruded all over the moviegoing public after tearing The Last Jedi apart with his teeth like a fucking animal.

"So then, after spending two movies setting Rey up as a staff-user, I'm gonna give her a dream where she has an evil twin-blade staff-lightsaber, then give her TWIN lightsabers from her two Jedi mentors, then have her struggle with the potential for good and evil within herself, and THEN, you guessed it: have her make her own stupid yellow lightsaber for some reason. What? No, why would she combine Luke and Leia's twin ones into the first non-evil example of a staff-saber in the film canon to show the reconciliation of her Jedi training and Palpatine blood, and so of the Light and Dark sides of the Force and the dissolution of that false dichotomy? Why would I do that? That would make Casey HAPPY.

    THE PREMISE, friends and neighbors, she is a simple one: Darkseid, father of Orion and Mister Miracle, ruler of Apokalips, He Who Is...wins. He captures Cyborg, calls in a favor with Death and extracts the missing half of the Anti-Life Equation out of his fucking eyes, and finally succeeds in dominating all sentient life in the un--wait. Remember when he summoned Death? Well, turns out, if you ask a mechanic to help you move a couch and make him stop doing a transmission replacement to do so, you're gonna get goddamn transmission fluid all over your couch, and the boss is coming over for dinner in half an hour, and you haven't even started the roast yet! Some of these are metaphors. Some are just me being hungry. Some are hard-earned lessons from mechanics that it has been made very clear to me I am not friends with anymore. Regardless, the upshot is that Darkseid badly miscalculated, which is actually pretty hilarious for a guy that's been trying to conquer the universe with math since time began, and we are all screwed because the Anti-Life Equation is now self-replicating, is visually transmissible and injects itself into any eyeballs that see it, and worst of all, it knows how memes work. It instantly kills Cyborg, and Darkseid, AND DEATH, then uploads itself into the fuckin' space-internet or some shit and zoops over to Earth to begin the final calculation and zero out all life in existence, everywhere. WE ARE NOW ON LIKE PAGE SIX.

    It, uh--it does not get more hopeful from there, and in fact things get worse in every imaginable way with incredible speed and intensity and it does in fact appear that the end is extremely fucking nigh (despite the presence of at least one sequel series and two spin-offs, all of which are intriguingly actually written by Taylor as well). Heroes and villains die in droves, absolutely no one is safe, and in a scenario we've all become eye-rollingly familiar with given the deluge of zombie-media in the past fifteen years, Taylor manages to draw real drama, real danger and real pain out of characters that are supposed to be above, beyond or immune to that sort of thing, including a genuine tear-inducing moment with that Clancy Brown-voiced motherfucker Lex Luthor, of all people.

    DCeased also does a good job at introducing the uninitiated (or just confused, like myself) to the major players in the current iteration of the larger main-ish DC-verse, including several who are getting their own series even as we speak, such as Wondergirl and Jon Kent, the Superboy, which is actually also being written by Taylor himself and whose books I'm eager to check out once the trades drop. Tom Taylor: A BUSY MAN.

    DCeased is a great exercise in asking "What's the worst possible thing that could happen right now?" and then making it happen twice at the same time; it rules and I recommend it.

Score: 8.5/10 Uncles Who TRIED TO TELL YOU That Facebook Would Kill Us All

____________________________________________________________________________

From The World Of Black Hammer: Skulldigger + Skeleton Boy

    If I've done my math right, this is the first time I've mentioned Black Hammer here, and there's a reason for that: I am nowhere near qualified to talk about how goddamn great Black Hammer is. Go read it! It's dope as hell, and then you'll see what I mean.
    One of the few things about it that I am able to praise to the extent that it deserves is how its system of spinoff titles has evolved. One of the reasons that comics, especially superhero comics, are thought of as having a high barrier to entry is that in order to understand what the hell is happening to any real extent, you frequently need to do considerable supplemental reading in other titles in orders and articulations that can range from counterintuitive to fucking labyrinthine. 

Silly me, thinking that more than a goddamn third of the story of Blackest Night would take place in books with those words on the cove! What a maroon! 

    In the process of looking for that I actually discovered that there exists a website dedicated specifically to collecting and collating this information for the readers, which on the one hand is really cool and convenient and they are doing the Lort's work, but on the other, like, doesn't the existence of this and the fact of its necessity point to a pretty enormous problem in structure and marketing, and in-built secondary cost and time-sinkage? Cross-title pollination is one thing, and I've certainly discovered a lot of cool stuff that way, I'm just saying I shouldn't have to watch A Very Brady Sequel, The Wire, Arrested Development, a specific episode of Late Night With Jimmy Kimmel and six other things Detective John Munch has shown up in just so I can enjoy him in Law & Order. 

    That scathing rebuke of an industry I enthusiastically support aside, Black Hammer does the opposite: It has one ongoing core title, and at count eight side-titles (past and present) orbiting it under the World of Black Hammer umbrella, all of which are great in their own right and provide valuable context but are, in the strictest sense, optional to those who only want to read the main series. This is clearly intentional; Black Hammer is, at its heart, an attempt to take what Marvel and DC have taken 60 years to learn the hard way and do it right, on purpose, from the beginning and in a way that won't fall apart when it naturally grows and expands. Black Hammer is the shared comics universe you've wanted all along, but didn't know you needed. It's also diverse as hell and assertively LGBT+ positive in ways that feel natural and, when they stand out at all, really just underscore that those things are actually necessary for a world that feels real, because any other arrangement asks us to believe in a world that is naturally white or male or straight or whatever bullshit and and suspend the natural sense of disbelief that tags that as patently false and unrealistic, and that nonsense is exhausting. The real world has people who are different from you but are still people, get over it and join the party, and that's the world Jeff Lemire is creating one page at a time.

    BUT ENOUGH WELL-EARNED PRAISE FOR DARK HORSE AND JEFF LEMIRE, THAT PRINCE OF THE WORD-BALLOON. What the hell is a Skulldigger, and I have been ASSURED that there is no such goddamn thing as a boy, girl, other or N/A skeleton, so what's the friggin' deal? A FAIR HOWEVER MANY QUESTIONS THAT WAS.

    Black Hammer isn't afraid to openly harvest from the rich history of comics it's inspired by and attempting to spiritually reboot, and as a result many of its characters are, on paper at least, clear deconstructions of, homages to, or combinations of classic heroes, and this is no exception: Skulldigger is equal parts Batman and Punisher and so, as you might imagine, gets QUITE A BIT of vigilante murder under his belt before the day grows much fuzz on its cheek. The cops are not fond of him, and the way he caves in peoples' ribcages with a solid-steel skull on a chain! But they are even less fond of his nemesis Grimjim who, being essentially the Joker if he was immortal due to demonic possession, is just as if not more murderhappy and doesn't even wait for people to deserve it first! You can imagine the bind they're in, but it's tough to have time for ethical conundra when Grimjim is setting in motion his plan to kill the entire city for funzies. Luckily Skulldigger has no such compunctions and is prepared to do a GOOD BIT MORE than is necessary to save the city, and along the way will collect an apprentice with a tragic past he absolutely does not want but can't friggin' get rid of, the kid's like a fly that won't stop landing on you.

    Now, all of this sounds tropey as hell, and it absolutely is, but the genius is that it uses well-understood tropes and story shapes to build a framework--a skeleton, if you will--that could almost run the distance all by itself, but instead they actually fill it with life and memorable characters we can actually care about and a deeply thoughtful meditation on the cyclical, viral nature of violence and trauma and what it means to make a choice to either pick up or set down a weapon when it's responsible for who you've become. If you've been looking for a story that's not just well-built but is actually trying to say something with the tools at its disposal, look no further, because Black Hammer in general and Skulldigger + Skeleton Boy specifically are for you. 

Score: 9/10 Skull Helmets That Don't Look Distractingly Like Hellboy's Face Even A Little, I Swear

you are coming down with me, hand in unloveable hand

June 2021 Books Read Standouts: Kaiju Score, Vol. 1 / Perestroika In Paris

 Kaiju Score, Vol. 1: A Monster Affair

    God(zilla), what a fun book. 

    Okay, so let's say there's a crimer, out there doin' crimes, right? And one day, she gets the call that comes to all professional scofflaws if they manage to stay in the game long enough: the call from another crimestype, trying to rope her into One Last Job, the one that will allow her to get Out Of The Life For Good. This guy? Well he's Putting Together A Team, and he needs her Special Set of Skills. 

    See there's this vault, right, nestled away all safe beneath a museum, wherein is kept a cache of arts and such so deliciously valuable that it might as well be made of solid gold. It is, unfortunately, extremely well-guarded, as befits a prize of its ripeness. The location is not, however, unassailable, the vault not impregnable; it would merely take a distraction of sufficient potency to provide the time necessary for the team to ply their trade. And as luck would have it, Mother Nature will be kind enough to provide one in the shape of a GODDAMNED ACTUAL GODZILLA MAKING LANDFALL IN MIAMI.

    I mean. That'll do it.

    Kaiju Score takes place in a world like ours, but they've got Godzillas; they're actually pretty well understood from a natural science standpoint, and are accounted and prepared for to the extent that they can be, much like any natural disaster. So when a WALKING MOUNTAIN comes ashore to flatten the Golden Girls house and have a wee nap in the Florida sunshine after gorging on the school of fish it followed to the Miami coast, YOU GUESS IT, FOLKS: IT'S TIME FOR A GOOD OL' FASHIONED ART HEIST.

    Straightforward heist-media isn't generally my thing; it's gotta be a wizard-heist (like the 15th ((and one of the best)) Dresden Files novels, Skin Game) or a planet-heist (like I feel safe in assuming the upcoming comic Planet Heist is going to be) or a time-heist (like the not-overthought Doctor Who episode Time Heist), but I'm familiar with the story-structure and this hits all the beats: Betrayal, and not from where you'd think! Something goes wrong! "I need more time!" DaneCookWhere'sTheVan dot gif! And the real beauty is that the crew doesn't engage at all with the fact that there's an omegafauna outside, except inasmuch as they would need to if their crimetimes were put at hazard by a hurricane or a dancing-plague or a world-spanning bloodwave or the roving, hive-minded giant pack of feral hounds known only as DOGSTORM. Them treating it like any other challenge presented by The Job grounds the world and invests you in the characters, allowing you--or at least me--to care about a story in a genre that doesn't normally command my attention.

    Look, we all know how the non-superhero-comics dance goes, right: limited series with satisfying but open-ended conclusion in case four issues is all it gets, trade paperback collection labeled 'Volume 1' in case it gets a second one or picked up for full series. Due to that I can't speculate on whether more will be coming down the line, or whether a second volume would take place in Germany and be titled Kaiju Score: Heist Nummer Zweist, as I suggested to my very alarmed, confused wife once she woke up a little bit and realized I wasn't yelling because there was a fire or anything. But rest assured: If there is a Kaiju Score Volume 2, I will be waiting by my phone with bated breath for a call from a team who's pulling off a job and needs a--I dunno like an action-linguist, or like they anticipate encountering a lot of cheeseburgers and need me to handle those so they can steal France or something.

Score: 8/10 Carefully-Planned Timetables Thrown Off By Big Ol' Monster Poops

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Perestroika In Paris, by Jane Smiley

    I was introduced to Jane Smiley by my beloved uncle Kevin, whom an unthinkable number of you were kind enough to GoFund after his cancer diagnosis earlier this year; seriously if you're in the Venn-overlap of people who will read this and people who helped me help him in his time of need, I am in your debt, and though I'm not a member of an amoral noble house in a series of fantasy novels that have aged pretty poorly, I honor my debts.

    That bit of gratitude and vulnerability aside, Jane Smiley is a treasure in general and Perestroika In Paris in particular is a warm, sweet, funny book that I read out loud to my wife at bedtime for a month because it is soothing without being patronizing, strange without being performatively Quirky™, and sad without being depressing or maudlin. 

    LET US SAY that there is a horse, a racing-horse, a champion racing-horse descended from kings of horses and horses of kings. Such is our hero, Perestroika, by Moscow Ballet out of Mapleton, by Big Spruce, heir of Northern Dancer and Herbager and scion of Saint Simon; or just Paras, if, like your humble servant, you didn't realize that horses apparently have fucking dynasties. You'd think it would be more of a sheep thing, what with Ramses. In any event: one fine summer, after a hard day of having more money spent on her mane shampoo than I've spent on Diet Coke this year, Paras notices her stall-door is unlocked and proceeds, as we have all dreamt of doing, to steal her trainer's purse, get the fuck out of the Place du Trocadero while the getting is good, and become a feral foal of the Parisian streets, a local cryptid, beloved by all and feared by some, but not a local stray dog--wises in the ways of Paris--with whom she quickly forms an alliance in the interest of doing twice as much confusing damage. Eventually they meet a bird! And some mice! And a human child who should definitely be remanded to the custody of the state instead of  his impossibly old grandmother! But mainly: chaotic-neutral horse carnage, devoid of direction, thought, or fear of God. 

    Perestroika in Paris is a Big Lebowski of a book: there is a plot, but it's happening at the periphery and doesn't have much impact on anything until the end; the book itself is mostly just Stuff That Happens, like spooking an elderly greenskeeper, weighing in on the domestic squabbles of some ducks, and making a local baker think that she's having a supernatural encounter instead of just getting bilked out of oats like a fuckin' chump, and it is delightful. There is real emotion and sentiment, real human stakes at play, but they are seen through the lens of a horse's big, weird face, and treated much as we would treat any strange creature doing something we didn't understand because it's a lizard, how the hell am I supposed to know how it's feeling or what it's interior life is like? I'm a horse, and I deal in horse-chaos. This is a book that does not require a single thought of the reader, not because it's stupid but because it brings us to a place where thought is largely unnecessary, and in the midst of our lives we are free--but for a moment--to relax, kick off our iron shoes, hook a bag of oats over our faces and poop all over the grounds at the Eiffel Tower.

Score: 8/10 Trainers Receiving An Identity-Theft Alert On Equifax; Get It, Equi--'Cause Horses--It--You Get It, Youuuuuuuuu Get It

herein are photos of ghosts

May 2021 Books Read Standouts: MIND MGMT Omnibus, Vol. 1 / Animeta!, Vol. 1

MIND MGMT Omnibus, Vol. 1: The Manager And The Futurist

    “Mix ingredients. Close bottle with a cork and fix cloth rags around the mouth. Soak rag in kerosene immediately before use. Light and enjoy!”

    If I was dialing up the latest post from a blog I enjoyed--"Operator! Get me that jackass!", I'd say--and saw that the author had reviewed MIND MGMT, my first thought would be "How the hell do you review that bonkers masterpiece? You'd have to be a fool to try! A fool damn'd!" And then I'd look in the mirror and see that I had spoken the truth; ridi, pagliacco, etc.

    Meru, a one-hit-wonder true-crime novelist, thinks she's found her next big project that'll pull her career out of its slump: an aeroplane, Flight 815 (by coincidence ((maybe)), which suddenly found itself at 42,000 feet and filled with people--passengers, crew and pilots--who had no goddamn idea who they were. Meru begs an advance from her agent to investigate and is quickly drawn into a web of what-the-fuck involving psychic spies, a secret globe-spanning metaphysical espionage network at war with itself (the titular MGMT), and a man named Henry Lyme who may be at the center of it all, and who seems to know an awful lot about Meru for someone she's never met.

    MIND MGMT cleverly combines several things I love (cyclical storytelling, melancholy, secret paranormal organizations with secret compounds in the jungle, pervasive existential dread, and gorgeous watercolor pages) and several things for which I do not generally care (spies and spycraft-adjacent skulduggery, amnesia, vaguely-defined 'psychics', and not being able to tell which friggin' side of a friggin' conflict anybody is friggin' on), and the result is...the result is. I'm honestly not sure if I like it or not, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad, and I'm sure as hell still thinking about it four months later, so it must've done something right but I'll be damned if I could tell you exactly what. And honestly that's a good thing: I'm a big proponent of shameless junkfood-reading, of gobbling down your favorite warm-hearted if unchallenging comic or trashy hot-werewolf-love-triangle romances or wizard-private-eye novels that get more indefensibly misogynist as the years go by or fuckin' whatever, but you should also tackle, heavy, heady, complex works that put you through the paces and make you ask the hard questions, and they shouldn't all be things you anticipate (or end up) enjoying. Just as it's important not to speak only to people with whom we agree (except Q-Anons, Covid deniers, Nazis and similar, obviously) we must engage with media that we may find disagreeable, for there is something to be learned from any endeavor, even if it isn't what we were intended to.

    That said, MIND MGMT isn't unpleasant or objectionable or offensive; it's complex and complicated, the good and bad kinds of sad, and beautiful and confusing like a wife, or the sea. When I say I'm not sure if I like it or not, I mean I can't decide how it made my heart feel, but honestly that's pretty on-point for the story it tells. In this book, as in life, answers do not come easily, if at all. We are not guaranteed explanations, success, or a happy ending. But when all else fails, we can know this much to be true, always: 

Trust your training, disbelieve your eyes, and burn after reading.

Score: 9/10 Cryptic Excerpts From The MIND MGMT Field Manual Running Along The Edge Of Every Page 

    

Animeta!, Vol. 1

    This one's easier! And sweeter and funnier and lighter; not junk-food level, as described above, but certainly straightforward and intentionally educational.

    Know what Miyuki loves more than anything? Anime, specifically one magical-girl series that blew her goddamned mind when she saw it for the first time and changed her life. Know what Miyuki wants to do more than anything? Work for the studio that produced it and make more anime to show other people like her what stories and art have the power to do for people. Know what Miyuki can't do even a little bit? Draw, like seriously, at all. KNOW WHAT THAT ISN'T GONNA DO: STOP HER FROM ACHIEVING HER DREAM.

    Animeta! wears a disguise: on the surface it's a delightful slice-of-life manga aimed at young adults, and it 100% is that in form, but not in function. Much like Delicious In Dungeon is secretly a cooking manga dressed in the plate and wizardly robes of a sword-and-sorcery dungeon crawl (more on that in a later post), this is actually a really in-depth and fascinating look into the mechanics of producing anime, like down to instructionals on how storyboarding and the physical correction of roughs and inbetweening work, and as with any deep dive into an industry that has evolved in a very specific way it is both incredibly interesting and makes you wonder how literally anything ever gets actually made because holy shit, there is a lot to this. One of my oldest and dearest friends, Shannon Hay (@ShannonSketches), is a professional storyboarder (late of Muppet Babies; they boarded the scene that became the falling-over-potato meme) and one of course does one's best to understand the jobs of one's friends, but Animeta! provides the kind of insight that really emphasizes how little you can actually explain about certain industries to people who aren't in those industries. But as core as those explanations are, they're wrapped in an extremely charming story about a young woman who just decides that god dammit she's gonna make a thing and be a success and nothing is going to stop her, except may an actually humanly unlivable wage, but she'll figure something out! 

    Like anything this specific, detailed and dedicated, it can't go on forever; it's not one of those series that can go on for dozens of volumes, which you only realize after you've already gotten hooked and now you're stuck paying $6.99 for the next one every week for the next seventeen fucking weeks, thank you so much The Devil Is A Part-Timer!, to say nothing of One Piece. It's only six volumes, and they actually happen to be on mega-sale right now on Comixology for I think like $4.99 each, and I recommend them both as a story to enjoy and as a way to learn about how something we love and that can be important to us is actually made, and possibly more importantly, who makes it, and that's always worth our time and effort.

Score: 8/10 Just Seriously Unbelievably Long Transformation Sequences, What The Hell, Even

it's always been the same, same old story

April 2021 Books Read Standouts: Heterogenia Linguistico, Vol.1 / Ring Shout

 Heterogenia Linguistico, Vol. 1

    Honestly, I've been staring at this blinking cursor for a good chunk of this Mad Men, wondering how I can even begin to describe a book that I absolutely cannot be objective about because it feels like it was written exactly, specifically for me. Then I remembered that I'm under no obligation to be objective, just like Pete Campbell is apparently under no obligation to have anything resembling a redeeming or relatable fucking character trait. 
    God, I've started this paragraph over so many times, I'm just gonna go for it. Okay so Hakaba, a young, bookish man is forced by cruel circumstance to take his master's place on a mission into the goddamn land of monsters. For why? To what end, besides INEVITABLE CHOMPENING and the necessary, if tragic, culling of the annual apprentice population? I will tell you, my friends: BECAUSE HE IS A LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGIST, and it is his job--his privilege--his duty--to assemble the first human-to-werewolf dictionary and visitor's guide to werewolf culture. 

Brb, I think I just qualified for a new loanword

    Okay look, either that sentence grabbed you or it didn't, there's only so much work I can do on behalf of an idea this incredibly specific and niche. If that sounds like your scene, come join the fuckin' party, because it's CHOCK FULLA good shit like Hakaba, being a hu-man, having different respiratory and vocal physiology than his werewolf hosts and therefore having to work around sounds in their language that he physically can't pronounce, which is expressed visually by having his dialogue lisp when he's speaking werewolf. I will die mad that somebody thought of that before me, and I am so endlessly grateful to live in a world full of people smarter, funnier and more creative than I am so I can enjoy their hard work.
    Heterogenia Linguistico has a lot of other things working in its favor as well that, again, seem like they're aimed specifically at me: Hakaba fully immerses himself in monster cultural customs and cuisine as well as language without judgment and in an amazingly pure spirit of real cultural exchange and learning, he gets an adorable wee werepup companion to protect his killable human ass in the Monstrous Country, and as if those weren't enough, every volume includes at least once instance of my actual kryptonite: a detailed list of Hakaba's equipment and supplies, or a description of werewolf tools and cultural items.

    One of the biggest points of Heterogenia Linguistico is that once you spend enough time with them, 'monster' becomes a meaningless term. Every instance of 'monstrosity' is, with context, revealed to simply be a cultural quirk or point of values dissonance; their weird worm-loaf is the tastiest, most nutritious thing they can make out of available local wildlife just like your awful regional sandwich everyone pretends not to hate, and my dude if you should accidentally propose interspecies marriage to a surprisingly amenable lizard-lady then you just let her down easy, because your own societal marriage norms are probably just as baffling to them. Ultimately, like any work that boils down to an honest, good-hearted exploration of the way others live, it comes to an inescapable conclusion of joyous cultural relativism, and it doesn't hurt when the food is good.

    I love this series so much and I am genuinely shocked every time a new volume comes out, because like, how, man? How can a title like this survive in a market fulla spiky-haired orphans with special destinies and teams of uniformed solar-system defending girls and One-Punching Men? I don't have the answers; I'm just glad I'm still able to ask the question, and I'll ask it for as long--and in as many languages--as I can. 

Score: 9/10 Humans Trying To Translate From The Lizardmannish Dialect Of Werewolf Into Standard Werewolf Into The Humannish Dialect Of Werewolf Into Human, Like In That Lucy Bit

Ring Shout - P. Djèlí Clark

    Okay I'm gonna take a step back from what I said a second ago; sometimes 'monster' does just mean 'person/being I just don't understand yet', but yeah sometimes it does also mean 'person who has actively extinguished the light of humanity from their soul', and sometimes it can also mean 'six-eyed, pointy-headed gangrel-nightmare from the Dimension of Meat and Teeth'. SUCH IS THE CASE HERE, CITIZENS.
    So, what if a work of art could change the world--not just metaphorically, but metaphysically? What if a film could portray its version of the truth so powerfully, so convincingly that the warp and weft of reality actually began to shift and melt, the crystal and grain of the plane we inhabit twisting like the splintered flesh of a green branch to match the image on the screen?
    And what if the world on the screen, the world that's trying to infect yours and lay glistening eggs in its belly, is a world where all you will ever be is an animal, bred to be eaten alive and screaming?

    P. Djèlí Clark is the fuckin' guy, is what. All of his Cairoverse stories are incredible, starting with A Dead Djinn In Cairo, which is bite-sized but absolutely packed with mouthwatering worldbuilding-chunkums, and his steampunk novella The Black God's Drums, which I haven't read yet--
    --sorry, I just lost three literal goddamn hours and many dollars hunting through various SF&F/Speculative/Weird Fiction anthologies trying to see where the shit I can read his short story The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington, which as far as I can tell has never been published as a digital single; what the hell, Tor? Get on that, jeez! Don't worry, I'll yell at them about it on Twitter, put the fear of Blog into them, that oughta do it. Anyway dude is very possibly the presiding monarch of alternate black history; N.K. Jemisin would naturally also be up for the title, but she likes to speculate far and wide, whereas Clark seems to prefer--and is very good at--versions of our actual world. 

    Okay so Ring Shout takes place in our world, and supposes that D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation--which I will remind the reader was singlehandedly responsible for the revivification and second era of the Ku Klux Klan after it had been dead and fallow for forty years, it was that fucking racist--is literally a magical Working, a spell on celluloid, designed to fertilize our world for the arrival of parties from...Somewhere Else, whose footsoldiers are already here: ten-foot-tall, six-limbed, pointy-headed, six-eyed tooth maelstroms called Ku Kluxes, which KKK uniforms and regalia are pathetic human imitations of.
    But! Fortunately! And as always! Black women and men are here to save our asses and get none of the credit, and no small portion of the blame, somehow. And they've got mystical firepower of their own, blades and blessings on behalf of the benevolent Powers That Be from the New World and the Old, both of which are aggressively interested in making sure the Management that the Ku Kluxes answer to don't get their foot in the door.
    Ring Shout kicks ass, and is sad, and frustrating, and funnier than you'd think, and if you're a linguistic anthropology nerd like me the strings of Carolinian Gullah dialect are gonna crank your pupils wide open. Racism is monstrous, and in our world that's an internal quality, but it's--not exactly nice, but maybe satisfying--to be reminded that internal or not, visible or not, to consider another less than human makes you less than human, and we would do well to question what powers are served in this world or others by imagining that for us to be more than what we are, others must be less, for surely we will not be the only ones making that consideration.

Score: 9/10 Restaurants Where 'How May We Serve You' Doesn't Mean What You Think It Does

i'm gonna bribe the officials, i'm gonna kill all the judges