Read in August

Well, it'll soon be clear that my attention wasn't on reading books this month -- but the books I did get through were pretty enjoyable anyway.

Francoise Mouly, editor, The Best American Comics 2012 (8/1)

Joe Sacco, Journalism (8/2)

A.J. Wolfe, The DFB Guide to Walt Disney World Dining 2013 (PDF, 8/7)

Tim Kreider, Twilight of the Assholes (8/8)

Daniel Pinkwater, The Afterlife Diet (8/16)

Bob Sehlinger & Len Testa, The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2014 (8/27)


And that was my August.

I'll probably have a reading project to take up all of October that will get me reading (and blogging) a lot more, but details on that will follow in a couple of weeks.

September, the month in between, might just see me continue this slow desultory meander through just a few books a month -- I'd prefer to read more books more quickly, but it seems I need some structure (provided by work or otherwise) to make me do that. As always, if there's anyone out there who wants me to write for them, just drop me a line -- I work vastly better with deadlines than without them.

Read in July

I'm going to stop moaning here about how little I'm reading -- for this month, at least -- and just dive into the actual list. So here's what I did read this month:

R. Crumb, The Life and Death of Fritz the Cat (7/5)


Charles Burns, The Hive (7/8) -- This doesn't publish until October, so I expect I'll be able to get something down in words in a timely way. For now, go check out X'ed Out, the first book of this trilogy.

Walt Kelly, Pogo Vol. 2: Bona Fide Balderdash (7/11)

I read the first volume of the syndicated-strip Pogo reprints around this time last year, and burbled excitedly about it here. This volume continues the reprint project, with the complete strips from 1951 and 1952...and, somehow, I'm not as excited.

Kelly's line is just as lovely and expressive, and the characters go through the same kind of adventures -- Kelly was particularly good at telling long continuities with funny stuff every day -- but my reaction, this time, was more "hmm, this is quite good" than "I've got to read more of this." I may be just far too jaded for a man of my years, since Bona Fide Balderdash is full of laughs and great art -- but this book didn't strike me as strongly as the first volume did.

Brian Ralph, Daybreak (7/15)

Ian Frazier, The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days (7/16)

Alex Ross, edited by Chip Kidd, Rough Justice (7/18)


Paul Cornell, London Falling (7/19)

Craig Yoe, editor, Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Creator Joe Shuster (7/21)

Jacob Tomsky, Heads in Beds (7/23)

Nick Hornby, More Baths Less Talking (7/24)

Hornby's been writing a column called "Stuff I've Been Reading" for The Believer -- entirely focused on the positive, which implies that he leaves out books he disliked -- for a number of years now, and there have been four collections of that column: The Polysyllabic Spree, Housekeeping Vs. the Dirt, Shakespeare Wrote for Money, and this book (which covers May 2010 through the end of 2011). The first book was one of the inspirations for this blog, way back when I started in 2005 -- which explains why I so often fall into just posting slightly annotated list of books -- and I reviewed Housekeeping in 2006. All of those books are deeply enjoyable to read if you're at all bookish. But trying to "review" a book of lists of books in another list of books is just far too meta, so I'll leave it at that. Oh, and the title is explained on page 115 -- you've got that to look forward to.

Jeffrey Brown, Vader's Little Princess (7/26)

Hey, remember Darth Vader and Son? (If not, see my quick precis at the end of this monthly roundup.) It was fun, and quite popular, so Brown got to do another one. This time out, Leia is the focus -- sometimes with Luke running about as well -- and Brown takes advantage of his severely out-of-continuity premise to do teen-daughter jokes as well as little-girl jokes. They're good jokes, generally, and they reference famous Star Wars lines that you will recognize and enjoy. If you need a quick gift for a geeky friend, this is exactly what you want.

Austin Grossman, You (7/29)

Barry Deutsch, Hereville: How Mirka Met a Meteorite (7/30)

Ernie Bushmiller, Nancy Likes Christmas (7/30)

Yes, she does. Nearly all of us do, actually. And almost as many of us like the clean, crisp cartooning of the late Ernie Bushmiller. This book collects all of the Nancy dailies from 1946-1948, early enough in Bushmiller's career that the gags aren't quite as precise and honed as we expect. This isn't quite Three Rocks Bushmiller, but it sees him heading in that direction: tightening his gags, focusing ever more on universals rather than gags based on current life. And even on-the-way-up Bushmiller is pretty darn good -- this shows him turning into the pure gag cartoonist he quickly became, and that may be of particular interest to budding gag cartoonists.

Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing (7/31)


Several of those italicized titles will turn into links over the next three days, and I expect (hope?) I'll be banging out things on the rest of them through the weekend. In any case, it was a decent month, with a good pile of books, nearly all of which I can recommend to the right readers.

Read in June

And here's another month in which I read fewer books than I'd like -- well, that describes all months, basically, but lately it's even more so, due to various reasons that I probably could fix if I cared somewhat more. This time out, it's a combination of a new video game -- the Lego City prequel for the 3DS, which my sons gave me for my birthday at the beginning of the month and Thing 1 graciously let me borrow his device to actually play for long stretches -- and two business trips. (I used to read a lot on business trips, when I didn't have a Wifi-enabled device in the exhibit hall and work wasn't at such a frantic pace -- I could enjoy being in wherever-it-was and get caught back up to office stuff when I was back there. No more.)

Anyway, my life has fallen into a pattern where I have much less time for reading, but I continue to hope that will change at some point. Here's what I did read:


Rob Davis & Woodrow Phoenix, editors, Nelson (6/3)
It's very rare to see such an incredibly ambitious and almost completely successful artistic experiment, but Nelson is dazzling and wide-ranging, a book that exists because two editors led fifty-four UK cartoonists to create the story of one life, with each artist or team taking on a few pages to tell one piece (a day, or a moment) for each year of Nel Baker's life. It starts in 1967, runs through her birth and childhood, all the way to 2011, the year Nelson was published and Nel Baker was 43. Nel doesn't become famous, she doesn't save the world or even live up to her childhood dreams all that much -- like all of the rest of us. She just lives her life, day to day and year to year, finding what happiness she can and becoming a fascinating, real, deep, wonderful character along the way. There's nothing in comics I can compare Nelson to; it has the ordinary every-day-ness of the autobiographical cartoonists without their self-obsession, the visual and artistic variety of a great anthology put in service of a single story, and a depth of human understanding and feeling rare in any medium. What it's most like -- and it's not much like this at all -- is Michael Apted's series of Up films; Nelson similarly look at an ordinary person's life to show that "ordinary" is nowhere near the same thing as "dull." I picked this book up because I'd seen good reviews of it, and it lives up to every bit of praise: Nelson is one of the great comics of this century.

Nate Powell, Sounds of Your Name (6/4)
Powell is the creator of the haunting and magnificent masterpiece Swallow Me Whole and the only slightly less successful Any Empire, but Sounds of Your Name came before either of those books. In fact, much of it came long before -- this collects stories of various lengths from minicomics and anthologies, originally written and drawn between 1998 and 2004, during Powell's art-school days and soon afterward. There's a lot of comics here -- the edition I have (from 2006) is over 300 pages long, and I believe there's a newer, revised version -- but they are definitely more journeyman works than Powell's full graphic novels. His art was darkly atmospheric almost from the beginning, though -- Sounds of Your Name shows an artist honing his stories and allusions and layouts to get them up to the level of his drawing. The stories themselves are mostly in the territory between quiet and understated, more about mood and character than plot, and the significance of many of them, I have to admit, was lost on me.

MariNaomi, Kiss & Tell (6/5)
MariNaomi has had a complicated love life, and Kiss & Tell covers the first 22 years of it -- from her birth in 1973 (well, age 5, really) to 1995, when she was 22. So there's a lot of "I liked this boy" leading into "I kissed this boy" and then "we made out" and then the complications (sex, boys, girls, drinking, drugs) as she became a rebellious teen. MariNaomi was a pretty fast girl -- well, most of us would say that, but, by the standards of San Francisco in the early '90s, she probably was only very slightly ahead of the curve -- so there's a lot to write about. Her art looks Marjane Satrapi-influenced to my eye, with lots of figures floating in black panels and hand-lettered captions. There's not a whole lot of through-line to this story, though -- it ends pretty much as MariNaomi gets to the point of being a semi-responsible adult, and, though her teenage years were turbulent (kicked out of her parents' house at one point), she presents it all on the same level, as an endless string of boys (and, towards the end, some girls) that she had sex with. She doesn't really get into why she did any of this, so it just becomes a series of anecdotes. They are interesting anecdotes, with lots of drama, but that's all.

Pat Mills & Kevin O'Neill, Marshal Law: The Deluxe Edition (6/7)
Marshal Law is one of the best piss-take comics of all time, and an essential document about just how extreme and nutty the superhero world was in the late '80s and early '90s. This new collection brings all of those comics -- originally published from 1987 through 1993, as a miniseries and then basically-yearly 50-ish-page one-shots -- into one shiny, spiffy package, to make the bile and spleen that much clearer and more obvious. It is darkly amusing that DC Comics -- which has brought back superhero torture porn over the past decade and invented ever greater heights for it -- is the publisher this time out, but I suppose they know what their audience wants. It's possible to read Marshal Law on the surface, without irony, but you might have to be really dim and oblivious to do so.

Carrie Vaughn, Kitty Goes to War (6/17)
The eighth book in the contemporary fantasy series and the first to be published by Tor (back in 2010) is another good outing, but I find I don't have a lot to say about the series at this point -- I read the prior book (Kitty's House of Horrors) last month, and haven't managed to put any words together about that. So let me point you to my reviews of books four and five and six -- I did the first three as an omnibus back in my SFBC days, so my recommendation then was based on actually spending my employer's money and my own time to promote a book -- instead. Besides, who starts a series with book 8? This one is worth reading, though, especially if you're interested in the question of how supernatural creatures could and would interact with real laws and governments in our world, and not about magical wish-fulfillment of any flavor.

Kevin C. Pyle, Take What You Can Carry (6/19)
I remember seeing good things about this graphic novel somewhere, so perhaps it only disappointed me because I was expecting too much of it. But it's one of those books with two stories that are related but greatly separated in time -- one set during WWII, about a young Japanese man and his life in a relocation camp, the other in the mid-70s with a disaffected young man who meets that now-adult ex-internee in what I'm afraid is a vaguely autobiographical tale -- and it just didn't come together for me. The WWII sections are wordless, which just distanced me from Ken as a boy (and Ken comes across as a grumpy man -- well, he would, since the ne'er-do-well protagonist of the '70s section, Kyle, meets him while trying to shoplift from Ken's store) without giving them much power. And the lessons Kyle learns in the '70s section are facile and obvious. Pyle's art does have a loose energy, and he varies his style (and color washes) to cleanly distinguish the two stories. But it just didn't turn into a single story for me.

Tom Gauld, Goliath (6/20)
Gauld's cartoons appear regularly in the Guardian and New York Times, but this is something larger (ha ha): a single graphic narrative, somewhat along the lines of the Norwegian/French cartoonist Jason, focusing on the famous Biblical Philistine named Goliath. In Gauld's version, Goliath is a gentle giant, happiest when doing paperwork for his regiment, but he's dragged into a sneaky scheme to frighten off the Israelites by an ambitious captain. We all know how it will end, of course, so the point is how Gauld shows us Goliath's "real" inner life, and fits his narrative into the holes and interstices of the Biblical story.

John Le Carre, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (6/21)
If you need me to tell you about the book that basically single-handedly launched the modern spy novel genre, then I hope you're quite young and/or were raised by some kind of jungle animals. (And, yes, Fleming was there before Le Carre, and Fleming's books do have more spycraft and tension and seriousness than the movies made from them usually do, but the spy novel really does descend from Came In From the Cold the same way the detective genre flourished out of "Murder in the Rue Morgue.") It's taut and smart and cold and ruthless, the way a novel like this should be, and fifty years have not turned it into a curiosity or an artifact. The technological trappings of spycraft, and the details of enemies and allies, may change, but the essential nature of the business -- obtaining information and channels for information, disseminating disinformation, and the darker operations to remove individuals -- doesn't change. Came In from the Cold is a nearly perfect spy novel: short, pointed, perfectly shaped, and driven forward with great force.

Read in April and May

I could pretend that I knew that these two months would be very light in the reading department, and so I deliberately held them to present them together. And I would love to be that organized and forward-thinking.

But it's not true; I've been full of pointless ennui lately, and I just punted on April. (A similar reason is the explanation for why I've only read a few books these two months.) But the thing about life is that, as long as it lasts, you can always start doing something today. And so I will:

Joe Meno, Office Girl (4/1) -- Meno is a playwright and novelist, as I recall, with a semi-aggressively "indy" attitude of the old school. (Old-school indies publish with small, scrappy presses in places like Chicago; new-school indies play self-publisher and their books are only available on Kindle.) Office Girl itself is a slight romance, set just before the millennium, between characters who seem destined to be played by Zoey Deschanel and Zach Braff -- it plays like an indy movie of ten years ago. Hell, everything about this book screams "indy" -- so just take that as read. It's small but perfectly formed, yet another one of those stories about young people who aren't sure what they want, but they know they don't want this. (It becomes less endearing when those people get older -- to my age, for example -- and still don't know what they want, and don't want what they have.)

Mardy Grothe, Neverisms (4/1) -- It's a book of quotes, nearly all of which begin with the word "never," arranged into categories about the kind of advice offered. Quote books are fun to browse through -- they're quintessential bathroom books -- and this one did its job well.

Paul Theroux, The Last Train to Zona Verde (4/8) -- actual review coming soon, I promise! Update: review now posted and linked.

Noah Van Sciver, The Hypo (4/9) -- This book deserves more than the quick mention I'll make here, but it went back to the library six weeks ago, so it'll get what it gets, and learn that life isn't fair. (A tough lesson for a young book, I guess.) It's a graphic novel about the young Abraham Lincoln, focusing on his depression and melancholy, and how those both caused and were the result of his early failures. Van Sciver has a rough style that fits well with Lincoln's mental turmoil, and he creates a real sense of place -- his Springfield might be the capital of a state, but it's still a muddy small town full of gossips and not-overly-honest politicians. Lincoln is a compelling protagonist, for all that he's not easy to be with -- if he lived a hundred and fifty years later, he'd almost certainly be hospitalized and medicated for his debilitating depression -- and Van Sciver gives a hint as to how he became the man who saved the Union. This is well worth reading for fans of both Lincoln and graphic novels.

Matthew Hughes, Hell to Pay (4/17) -- the finale of the "To Hell and Back" trilogy; I expect to actually review it soon, but check out what I wrote about the first two books, The Damned Busters and Costume Not Included, and then go out and buy every last book Hughes has ever written.

DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: New Orleans (4/22) -- The Wife and I celebrated our 20th anniversary recently (one month to the day after I finished this book, actually), and we've been looking around for a get-away-from-the-kids vacation together for a couple of months. For a while, it looked like we could tack on a few days at the beginning of a business trip I have to New Orleans in late June -- we did something similar in Disney World two years ago, and that was great -- but the schedule and the cost of flights stymied us in the end.

So I read this book as part of that planning: it's a relatively recent (not just post-Katrina, but post- most of the cleanup and with notes about what's back and what isn't), gorgeously illustrated look at that very odd city. DK has always been good at the visual side of their books, and this is no exception: you really get a sense of what things look like, and the maps are great as well to show how close or far away various locations are. I'm not going to get much use out of it -- I will be in NOLA for four nights because of flight schedules, but I'll be stuck in a convention hotel most of the time -- but it's an excellent book for anyone planning a more frivolous trip there.

Bob Sehleinger & Len Testa, The Unofficial Guide Walt Disney World 2013 (4/30) -- The family hasn't quite decided where we're going in November, when we take our big vacation every year. (New Jersey schools are closed three days during the week of Election Day, plus usually one half-day, so it's a great time to get away.) But it might just be Orlando once again, since we really enjoy a lot of stuff there, and know it pretty well by now.

Still, I enjoy reading guidebooks, and reading is much cheaper than actual travel, so I ran through the Unofficial Guide for this year anyway, picking up a few tips and changes along the way. (For example, it sounds like The Mouse is now clamping down on Fastpass abuse; you used to be able to use them far past the official window, up until closing time that same day.) And I still insist -- even now, after Wiley has divested them and Google has grumpily agreed to continue to put them out in that yucky, old-fashioned paper -- that the Unofficial books are the most entertaining and best guidebooks that I've ever used, full of useful information and pleasant prose alike. (See my big post on the the 2011 guide and Color Companion for more details.)

Ian Tregillis, Necessary Evil (5/7) -- the finale of the "Milkweed Tryptych" -- after Bitter Seeds and The Coldest War -- sticks the landing and is just as powerful as those two excellent books. Real review coming soon, but don't wait for me: read Tregillis now. Update: review now posted and linked.

Alan Averill, The Beautiful Land (5/10) -- a debut SF novel from Ace and winner of an Amazon-sponsored contest for new writers; my review will come soon, but it is worth reading, so pick it up and give it a glance if you run across it. Update: review now posted and linked.

Carrie Caughn, Kitty's House of Horrors (5/20) -- I'm still desperately behind on this series, but I hope to knock off a few over the course of the summer. I do expect to write a bit on it "soon." Update: review now posted and linked.

Kate Atkinson, One Good Turn (5/27) -- the sequel to Case Histories still isn't a conventional mystery, but I'll get more into that later. Update: review now posted and linked.

Paul Collins, Banvard's Folly (5/31) -- real review coming. Update: review now posted and linked.


And that took me two whole months to get through; I'm beginning to think I've gotten my priorities mixed up!

Read in March

March. What's there to say about March? Exactly. So here's what I was reading the last thirty-one days:


Lewis Trondheim, Approximate Continuum Comics (3/5) -- Trondheim is best known in the US for co-writing the Dungeon series of graphic novels with Joann Sfar, but he's a major bestseller in France with several major well-known series. So his bibliography here has random holes and confusions -- for example, his recent stretch of autobiographical comics, originally published page-by-page on his website, have come out here only slightly delayed from the French as Little Nothings (in four volumes so far). But this book -- nearly twenty years old, and Trondheim's first major stab at autobiography -- has only been available in English for a couple of years, appearing to be a follow-up to Little Nothings rather than its distant father. Approximate comes from the days when even classy Euro-comics first appeared in individual-issue form; it was a short series of six issues in the mid-'90s, but the issue breaks are silently elided here. (This is a series of episodes to begin with, so only someone counting pages will realize where one issue ends and another begins.) As he did in the later Little Nothings, Trondheim draws his characters with animal heads -- he's a bird, and everyone else are various identifiable (and not) other creatures. And the style and matter are similar to Little Nothings (see my reviews), though clearly earlier and less polished: Trondheim's art is looser and less controlled, and his life is as well -- he's younger, less sure of himself, and more insecure in his neuroses than he would be later. So Approximate is looser and wilder than Little is; Trondheim is less sure of himself, his abilities and career, and is substantially younger and less settled. The stories here are bigger than those in Little, just because Trondheim was more energetic in those days. All of them are good, insightful autobiographical comics -- but Approximate has the energy and enthusiasm of youth to recommend it as well.

Lawrence Block, Hit Me (3/5)

Richard Sala, Delphine (3/6) -- Sala is a cartoonist whose work runs very much to a type, which I find confounds criticism: once you've covered a typical work (as I did with The Hidden) and maybe looked at something outside of his usual wheelhouse (such as Cat Burglar Black), what's left is just a listing of the particular changes rung this time out, and I'm not interested in doing that. (Though the bulk of the comics-reviewing Internet is obsessed with precisely that: explaining and complaining and fulminating about whichever Big Two character is dead this week, which one has changed personality to meet Editorial dictates, and which one is savagely neglected.) Delphine is a typical Sala work: in gorgeous, supple art, a somewhat callow young man comes to a mysterious town, following a strange woman he's obsessed with, and get ensnared by the odd and horrible things happening there. Sometimes Sala has a mildly happy ending -- more often when that young man is replaced by a spunky young woman; he's much harder on his male characters -- but, most of the time, once you find yourself in one of those creepy Sala towns, your fate is already sealed. A Sala story is dark, and thorny, and full of grotesques and goose-bumpy set-pieces, like a great '30s Universal monster movie. And Delphine is a fine example of Sala in top form; for anyone who hasn't read Sala, it's as good a place to begin as anywhere.

Simon Rich, What In God's Name (3/6)

R. Kikuo Johnson, The Shark King (3/7)

Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm (3/8)

Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely, Flex Mentallo (3/11) -- I read Morrison's Doom Patrol as it came out, back when the world was young and Morrison only thought he was a god, and hadn't yet utterly convinced himself of the matter. And I had the issues of this story, stuck away in longboxes that I hadn't taken out in close to a decade when a flood wiped them away. Reading it again, for the first time in over fifteen years, it's easy to see that Morrison's early infatuation with metafiction had already begun hardening into an obsession with comics in particular -- and that means, as it has for the last thirty years, long-underwear characters with eerie powers that battle a childish '30s conception of evil, and primarily the DC/Marvel manifestations of that idea. Morrison hadn't quite gotten to the point of claiming that only comics matter and that comics are the best, purest artform ever in Flex, but you could see that argument beginning to surface in his mind. It's still undertone here, to the benefit of the work -- Morrison is always at his best when he's building subtext and connections, rather than explaining his dull Jungian theories directly. Flex is a silly superhero, but Morrison can believe in superheroes so hard that he can make Flex as heroic and believable as he needs to be for the space of this story, and the Morrison-insert comics-creator character (overdosed and possibly dying, at opera-diva length, in what is probably another universe or level of reality) meaningful and poignant and connected rather than pathetic and self-indulgent. A lot of the credit should go to Quitely's art; he has the underrated ability to draw bizarre things so that they look as solid and ordinary as dirt. So this is a story of comics -- American superhero comics, proper comics -- saving the world. But it's pretty good even given that.

Jared Axelrod & Steve Walker, The Battle of Blood and Ink (3/12)

Gene Luen Yang & Thien Pham, Level Up (3/13)

Matt Kindt, Red Handed (3/14)

Craig Thompson, Habibi (3/17) This took me a long time to read, and didn't impress me as much as Thompson's previous big graphic novel, Blankets, did. The fact that Thompson wanted to do a story about Islamic characters in an immersive setting does him a lot of credit; the fact that Habibi ends up focusing almost entirely on sex in the least erotic, most otherizing, squickiest way possible mitigates that at least somewhat. It's a beautiful object, and Thompson clearly put a lot of time and effort into it...but, sadly, that wasn't enough, and Habibi is borderline embarrassing. This is a graphic novel primarily for people who like looking at the art -- the pages are gorgeous just as art, not even counting Thompson's wonderful design sense -- since the story is a litany of misery and woe, punctuated by someone else's religion and set in a fantasy version of both medieval Arabia and modern-day Dubai. It is not deliberately racist, but many readers will find it unpleasantly, subconsciously racist, which is substantially worse. If nothing else, it can stand as a signpost of how very difficult it is to write a story from within someone else's culture.

Donovan Hohn, Moby-Duck (3/19) -- In 1992, nearly 30,000 rubber bath toys were knocked overboard from a cargo ship in an immense storm in the North Pacific. A decade later, journalist Hohn got obsessed with the story and ended up writing this book, about oceans, beachcombing, post-Panamax container ships, environmentalism, his own fears and doubts, and, most importantly, about plastic and what plastic is doing to our world. It's a decent non-fiction book, of the using-one-event-as-a-lens-on-the-whole-world style, but it's not as quirky as I hoped -- it reads like a sequence of magazine articles (which parts of it were based on) about Hohn's various voyages around the Pacific in search of various pieces of this story, without having a strong central narrative or spine to keep it all together. Still, any book about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is worth reading.

The Oatmeal, How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You (3/20) -- If you ask me, the answer to the title question is "you have a cat," but clearly the guy calling himself The Oatmeal (Matthew Inman) likes cats more than I do. I reviewed The Oatmeal's previous book, 5 Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth (and Other Useful Guides) around this time last year, so see that post for more details on what it is The Oatmeal does. This is more of the same, on about the same level -- if you don't know what that is, check out his website first. This book is cat-centric in a way the first wasn't, and is also a quicker read -- the first book had more of the long, research-heavy pieces, and this one gets to focus on his meme-ish looks at those furry monsters. If you like cats, and you like the Internet, this is the book for you.

Ellen Forney, Marbles (3/21) -- If you want to have a big hit in the regular literary world with your graphic novel, you'd better write a memoir, and, for an even better chance, you'd be smart to have overcome something serious, whether it be growing up in revolutionary Iran (Persepolis) or getting breast cancer (Cancer Vixen) or just being Vladek Spiegelman's son (Maus). Ellen Forney is a fine cartoonist -- see my reviews of her very varied books like Monkey Food and Lust for an overview of what she's already done -- and she also was diagnosed as bipolar just over a decade ago. Marbles tells that story, from Forney's life at the time of diagnosis (in retrospect, a really really obvious manic phase) through years of tinkering with prescriptions and weekly therapy sessions up to the present day. (Spoiler: she found meds that worked and got to a place she's comfortable with and continues to do great comics work.) Marbles is a loosely organized piece, turning from "comics" on most pages to more illustrative stretches/pages (including quite a bit of work Forney did at the time, included as a window into her mindset) to big chunks of hand-lettered text. It's smart and insightful and uplifting, the story of an important part of the life of a woman who's had a lot of life and knows how to turn it into a story.

Steven Gould, Impulse (3/25)

Mark Siegel, Sailor Twain (3/25) -- If I'd seen this smart, thorny, deep graphic novel for review, I'd feel compelled to sit on it for a while, chewing over what I really thought about it and trying to write something to do it justice. But I was spacing out when it published a few months back, so I had to get it from the library like a normal person, and so I'm free to react to it just like that normal person. It's the story of a steamboat crew on the Hudson in the late 19th century, the mermaid they find, and the nature of love. Siegel's backgrounds and layouts are precise and immersive, though I found some of his character designs distracting -- he has a cartoony feel, not unlike a lot of classic manga-ka, for his protagonists, but his method of simplifying facial features turns several characters into Muppets, to my eye. (There's nothing wrong with cartoony characters in a mostly-realistic drawn world; plenty of creators have done that well. But when the cartoony characters break the plane of the story by seeming to become characters in other stories, that can be a problem.) First Second has mostly been known for a bunch of great graphic novels for teens over the past few years -- and Siegel is Editorial Director there, as well as becoming one of his own authors with Sailor Twain -- but this one is clearly and entirely for adults (and some older teens who can handle cartoon breasts). And it's damn good, even if the ending felt a bit elliptical to me.

Jason, The Left Bank Gang (3/26) -- Jason's graphic novels do not precisely run to a type or formula, but there are definite points of continuity: blank-faced, animal-headed characters, whose motivations remain firmly locked in their own heads; random, unexpected violence, upsetting all plans, hopes, and lives; genre fiction elements, often mixed with supposed "high culture;" and a tight nine-panel grid, showing the action moving in lock-step towards its inevitable end. Left Bank Gang is a 2005 Jason book, with all of those elements firmly in place -- the characters are the great Modernist writers of Paris in the '20s (Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Joyce, Pound), reconceptualized as comics creators in a world where that's the dominant art, and the plot circles around an ill-conceived plan to get rich through a bank robbery. Jason starts off telling the story straight, but the robbery is told and retold through the viewpoints of each character, each time adding more detail and nuance -- it's a great conceit, and works well for this kind of crime story. The fact that his characters are supposedly the great Modernists is really an affectation; aside from some quirks of dialogue, these guys could be anybody, and they really are anybody. (Jason's work, I think, is best when he does stick to iconic or Everyman protagonists -- his style of distancing works better with A Guy or Frankenstein's Monster than with a real person with history and a bibliography to look up.)

Michael Popek, Forgotten Bookmarks (3/26) -- People leave odd things in books, and other people who work in bookstores find those things later on. Popek is one such bookstore clerk -- he's worked in a family used and rare shop for close to thirty years, since he was a kid -- and he decided to put some of those finds online, at a blog he named Forgotten Bookmarks. Every decently popular blog becomes a book eventually -- the same way that every half-decent comedian got a book deal in the mid-'90s and every magazine got a thin parody book in the '80s -- and so this eventually emerged. It works very well as a book, since it's about bookish ephemera and will be of great interest to people who love the physicality of books. The book shows 150 or so of these items, from letters to photos to leaves to receipts to razor blades -- and shows each one with the exact book it was found in, which gladdens my persnickety heart. The particular items tend to have connections to upstate New York -- when Popek's establishment is located -- and tend to be 50+ years old, either because he deliberately chose older items or because he mostly sees old books. There's a short introduction, but not really any commentary: Popek is just presenting these materials, as he found them. I imagine this will live a long life as a gift from bookish people to each other, and it's very good in that role.

"The Waiter" (Steve Dublanica), Waiter Rant (3/28) -- We all want to know the secrets; it's why magazines like National Enquirer have made so much money for so long. It's why there are intermittent explosions of anonymous blogs (tumblrs, twitter handles, etc.) from people that we're pretty sure really are as connected and powerful as they pretend to be. And some of those outlets for secrets really are useful and smart and true, which keeps the whole thing going for another cycle. One such manifestation of the "let me tell you what's really going on" impulse was the blog Waiter Rant, started in 2004 by a man who called himself "The Waiter," and claimed to be the headwaiter/manager of a fine-dining establishment in the New York area. As such things usually go, The Waiter got a book deal, and this was the book, in 2008. (Waiter was outed during the publicity for the book as Steve Dublanica, and has since written a follow-up, Keep The Change, about US tipping standards and culture.) Waiter Rant isn't deep, but no one expected it to be: Dublanica tells stories about the behind-the-scenes life of a nice restaurant (later outed as the Lanterna Tuscan Bistro in Nyack), which are as bitchy as we expected, though thankfully not quite as unsanitary as we feared. As everyone has already said, this really is Kitchen Confidential for the front of the house, and, if you're interested in that, this is the place to go. It's also amusing for those of us who don't care that much about how restaurants run, but just want some good stories about interesting workplaces.


Everything I haven't yet written about was sent as a review copy, so I feel compelled to hold them for "real," separate posts. (Which may or may not happen; I can have great intentions, but that doesn't prove anything.) Those may appear in the near future, or not -- feel free to comment if you're desperate to know anything about Impulse or Red Handed or Level Up, since I never know what will spark me to action.

And now we move on to another month, as always. Happy April to you all, and I hope you all see the other end of it as well.