A man who secretly hates his family comes up with the most absurd story to explain why he abandoned his wife and newborn son to go on a 20 year bender with his mates. This is: The Odyssey, or How I Left Your Mother (But Came Back - Eventually, and Will Probably Leave Again Quite Soon Cos Me Not Family Man…)

I keed, I keed, but come on, who doesn’t already know the premise for THE foundational story of all Western literature, eh? Ok, quickly: Odysseus is on his way back from the Trojan wars where his side sacked the city of Troy (with a little help from a wooden horse) - except the gods have other plans, and sends him on a wayward journey as punishment for his actions, which will take him many more years to get home.

Along the way, he will encounter fantastical creatures like a cyclops, giants, a witch, and sea monsters while his faithful wife Penelope endures boorish suitors waiting for her to decide which of them to marry - unless her long-lost hubby can return, string his bow, and bring down the house. Opa!

Yeah it’s fine.

That’s basically the TL;DR.

…

So I read the 2017 Emily Wilson translation of Homer’s epic poem. I’ve never read The Odyssey before so I can’t compare this to other translations but I had no issues with it, although I’ve heard political grumblings about her work. Namely that she eschewed previous translations of “maids” and “domestics” in favour of calling them what they were: “slaves” and “house boys/girls”, and removed slurs like “slut” and “whore” in relation to a scene towards the end, as these were more recent translational additions and not close to the Greek original text. None of which sounds at all controversial to me, if these are the gripes some people have with it.

She also chose to translate the archaic Greek narrative verse from dactylic hexameters to the conventional English meter for narrative verse: iambic pentameter, and kept to the same number of lines as the original.

I picked this up (after watching the Nolan film, which was atrocious - and that’s all I’ll say about that, because this is a book review) fully expecting to quickly put it down. Classics, poetry - neither especially jibe with me at the best of times for any number of reasons but mainly for their inaccessibility - and The Odyssey is in many ways the ultimate version of both.

So colour me surprised when I found myself easily getting caught up in the story and flying through the book. Maybe it’s Wilson’s translation, maybe it’s the quality of the story, maybe it’s both, but this is a very clear book. It’s laid out like a poem but it reads nothing like one. It reads like a contemporary novel in the form of a poem.

My biggest complaint is with the length of the tale. I didn’t like the framing story of Penelope, the suitors, and Telemachus, Odysseus and Penelope’s son. It’s not particularly interesting, nor is Telemachus going off to visit his dad’s old army buddies to see what they know of his pops and finding out whether he’s alive or dead. It’s fine if it’s just a few pages but it’s the first 75 pages of the book and I kept wanting to get to Odysseus and his adventures instead of reading about his weeny son and boring wife.

It also feels like a weird plot element. These suitors have nothing better to do - for literally years - but squat in Odysseus’s palace, eating and drinking on his coin, in the vague hope that his possible widow might marry one of them? It’s crazy - but then The Odyssey is a kind of proto-fairy tale and this simplicity is a feature of that style of story. It’s memorable, I’ll give it that.

The adventures of Odysseus are worth the wait though. The Cyclops episode is brilliant, as is their encounter with Circe. The episode with the giants (“Laestrygonians”) is laughably rushed - Homer will spend scores of pages on repetitive, static scenes elsewhere in the book, but an action-heavy, dramatic scene involving Odysseus and his men fighting for their lives against GIANTS is dealt with in less than a page!

The rest of his journey is great as well. He sails to Hades(!) and meets the dead, he hears the sirens’ song, and he survives encounters with the multi-headed monster Scylla and the thirsty sea creature Charybdis. I liked the idea of Calypso - who keeps Odysseus a drugged-out prisoner for 7 years - more than how she was written, which wasn’t nearly as creepy as I felt like it should be.

The return to Ithaca is enticing but Homer spends nearly 200 pages building up to the bloody finale, which is far too long considering all Odysseus seems to do is get insulted over and over and lie in wait interminably for no real reason. It drains the story of the momentum it gained from the excitement of the journey/return.

I noticed certain phrases repeated throughout the book - the “rosy fingers of dawn” and the “wine-dark sea” - which I was going to say felt oddly cliched for such an esteemed text, until I read Wilson’s introduction (last, after the main event - always read introductions to classics last; the academics writing them usually have no concept of spoilers). She explains that the repetition is deliberate - in the oral tradition that Homer mimics, there were stock phrases like these that allowed performers time to compose their thoughts as they prepared their next verses.

I also learned that, while The Odyssey is often referred to as originally an oral poem, it was likely always a written text that paid tribute to the oral tradition with repeating phrases like these. It’s much too long a work to ever be performed in one sitting. It’s a really informative introduction that also explores the authorship - not just whether Homer himself was real, but how many creators there may have been involved (particularly if Homer was blind and illiterate, he would’ve needed at least one other person to write it down for him), and how translations over the millenia may have shaped the text we have today.

I liked a lot of the characters. Odysseus isn’t a bland hero, but a complex man with failings. Athena is wonderfully playful. I was expecting Circe as a one-dimensional witch villain but she was definitely not that. The story is kept interesting by the frequent inclusion of gods like Hermes and Poseidon influencing key plot points before reverting back to the mortal story. It’s a good balance between a human tale and a fantasy, like the trip to Hades, which is pure fantasy, but has a lot of human emotion attached to it as the dead speak to the living.

For a text that is nearly 3000 years old, The Odyssey reads very smoothly and better than many more recent novels, which I’ll credit in part to Emily Wilson. The story is intermittently compelling - when it gets going, it’s really good, but there’s lots of overlong passages and dull scenes that add significantly to the page count without adding much to the narrative (the Telemachus/Penelope subplot, Odysseus disguising himself as a beggar for too long).

To anyone who is wary of classics, particularly really - really - old ones, in poetry form no less, I will say: give The Odyssey a try; you might be pleasantly surprised. Definitely not an amazing book but also worth a read as one of the better classics, despite its inconsistently engaging narrative and flawed pacing.

…

Yeah it’s fine.

Opa!

A group of families rent out a mansion for their summer vacay and the parents partay while the kids look on disapprovingly. Then the world ends, floods are a’comin and the fun’s over. For no reason, the events of the bible play out in this part of America.

A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet stinks. It’s a badly conceived, even more poorly written, and utterly unimpressive snore of a read. The characters are non-existent, the story is about as exciting as rice pudding, the point was unfathomable, and I hated it.

Millet sets up her novel to mirror facets of the Bible for no reason. The title, the narrator’s called Eve, and there’s a Biblical flood that kicks off the feeble apocalyptic story (that always feels boring instead of dramatic or tense). The families splinter between the apathetic, drugged out/drunken parents and the holier-than-thou kids who decide to abandon the parents and forge their own destiny.

Why are both groups so uniformly written - why are the parents all helpless morons, why are the kids all weirdly more mature and framed as “better”? I suppose because Millet’s going for a parable-style story which goes for symbolic simplicity rather than realism and parables fits in with her Bible theme. And it’s this consistent level of contrivement that bothered me.

Because Bible, the kids (12 of them geddit) save a bunch of animals during the flood because Noah and the Ark. Later, a pregnant mother gives birth in a barn with a donkey and then 3 men and an angel (trail angels - people who leave water, supplies, etc. on the Appalachian Trail for hikers) show up, and an authority figure gives them rules to follow. Geddit. BIBLE.

But why? I never understood what the point of the book was. Why write a story about the end of the world and hit a Bible theme so hard? Are we meant to think that Biblical-style events recur in human history and that this is the latest version - a younger, or Children’s, Bible? Except she forces the details of the Bible so clunkily into her story that it doesn’t feel at all convincing that this is a story that naturally keeps happening.

Then there was the unimaginative Walking Dead rip-off where the “characters” are on a farm and evil survivalists show up and take it over - the leader is even called the Governor for Carl’s sake! Millet botches this episode too. The one part of the book that had potential for dramatic tension and she sweeps it away in one convenient gesture when, effectively, “God” shows up to put things to rights. It’s such bad storytelling.

I put “characters” in quotation marks because I never once felt like I could see or hear any of them. They all have the same voice, none seem to have any discernible characteristics and they all become one formless blob of dull names and toneless dialogue. I couldn’t distinguish between any of them.

The story is dull and rambling that fails to build to anything meaningful - it remains flat and uninteresting the whole way through. I suppose the kids hate the parents for the world they’ve been given (although the state of the world goes beyond the previous generation and is the accumulation of several generations), conveniently ignoring any positives, but what makes this young generation the pure saviours - who says they’re not going to grow up to be the supposed “failures” their parents’ generation became?

There’s a lot of fuzzy, half-baked, quasi-thinking going on in this book which reflects how unengaging and boring it is - it felt like it was dreamt up and written by a child. Absolutely terrible, I got nothing out of A Children’s Bible and wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

Samantha Strong is a pillar of the community in her small town of Woodbrook.

She’s also a serial killer.

The reason why she’s been getting away with it for decades is because she doesn’t shit where she eats - she plucks her victims from the big city and butchers them out in the country, beneath the trees where nobody sees.

And then a new killer emerges - except they’re killing the Woodbrook townsfolk! Sam’s desperate to shut down this new killer, not because she cares for her neighbours but in case the local sheriff unearths her own crimes in the course of his investigation!

Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees is a decent and original crime comic that’s drawn in a cutesy kid’s book style with animal-headed characters but with subversively adult and graphic content that’s decidedly not for the little ones. The story isn’t wholly satisfying and aspects of it annoyed me, but it’s not a bad book.

The characters all being animal-headed felt stupid to me. I get it - hoho, look how it’s initially presented as this wholesome family book and then gore gore gore, how unexpected! - but that rug-pull approach feels childish. If the book had been drawn with the characters as humans, it’d be better. Because all it allows is for Patrick Horvath to wave away the one truly interesting part of the story with a trite dismissal later on.

There’s also the Goofy/Pluto conundrum at work here. There are dogs here that are like real dogs in our world, as well as humanoid dogs that talk like the sheriff - why is that?? And presumably there are regular cows, pigs, et al. as the butcher’s shop is prominently featured as well. So how did some of these animals become human-like and others didn’t? Just seems lazy and contrived.

Where it feels like a cop-out is in explaining Sam’s urge to kill: cos she’s a bear and bears kill. That’s the most lazy and contrived aspect of the story. Of course bears are violent - nature, red in tooth and claw - but that doesn’t explain calculated murder that some humans do and which Sam is mimicking. That’s why it’d be better if these characters were human: Horvath would be challenged to explain why some humans behave like this and have to come up with a better reason than “because they’re bears - bears kill duh”.

But the story is interesting. I wanted to see what would happen next - whodunit and why?! - and the premise is well set-up and draws you in. Parts of the first half have obvious beats - you know who’s going to die because that character is being annoying and is featured prominently; you know that character isn’t the real killer because it’s too early in the story for the reveal to happen - but it was entertaining to see Sam investigate.

And Horvath develops his story well, upping the stakes in the second half once the real killer emerges and puts Sam on the back foot. The ending is wrapped up a bit too neatly and quickly for my liking and I’m not sure what setting the story in the 1980s added to things. And the trope of the news reporter narrating everything is a pet peeve of mine - I hate seeing this in comics, and that unimaginative style of presentation is trotted out here for the umpteenth time.

Horvath’s art is very skilful. The animals’ body language is expressive, some sequences are creatively presented - the hallucinatory scenes as Sam’s past catches up with her - and the colours fit the style; not overpowering but quietly complementing the comic.

Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees has a compelling, unique story that kept me turning the pages even if certain parts turned me off. It’s fine - besides its presentation of the animal characters, it’s not doing anything especially standout for the genre, but it’s also definitely worth a look if you enjoy crime comics.

Calamity Before Jane is Noah Van Sciver’s second of these educational comics on American folk heroes (the first was on Paul Bunyan) and it’s definitely the lesser of the two, though neither are that amazing.

Jane was born in the 19th century and was among the settlers who embarked on the Oregon Trail. Her parents died when she was young, she worked for the Pony Express, she was a sharpshooter and a scout under General Custer and she told her stories of the Wild West at sideshow attractions towards the end of her relatively short life (she died at 51).

I was expecting a bit more from her story. Considering it’s not that remarkable, it’s strange that she has become as famous as she has over time. I remember first reading the Calamity James strips in the Beano when I was a kid, and then saw her character in the brilliant HBO show Deadwood, but she’s also been depicted in numerous other books, comics, films and TV shows over the years.

How she got her nickname is weird - she saved a Captain from certain death after he fell off his horse during an Indian ambush. How that makes her a “calamity” I have no idea.

Van Sciver draws her sweating and drinking a lot in her later years, implying she was alcoholic, though, like much of the book, the facts on her life are unclear. And then the book - which I already saw was quite short - suddenly ends with her leaving the Wild Bill show. It’s very unsatisfying and unedifying, as is the accompanying academic-ish essay by Dr. Susana Geliga (which is more on the era than Jane herself) - I know about as much of Calamity Jane now as I did before I read this comic (which isn’t much).

Noah Van Sciver’s a great cartoonist and, as a fan of this creator, I didn’t dislike reading Calamity Before Jane, though it definitely felt lacking in substance and is instantly forgettable. Even for fans of this creator, or anyone looking to learn more about this person, I wouldn’t recommend this book.

Schoolboys survive a plane crash into a remote tropical island. It’s just them on the island - no other humans, no means of escape. How will they survive - what will happen to the boys without civilisation, without adult supervision for so long… and will they all make it back home?

Aimee de Jongh adapts William Golding’s 1954 classic Lord of the Flies into an absolutely triumphant masterwork of comics in its own right. I read the original novel years ago but it feels fresh in de Jongh’s capable hands because of her incredible art and perfectly laid-out pages.

The story is as iconic and exceptional here as it always was. Ralph meets Piggy, they find the conch, we meet Jack and the older boys who become the hunters, and, though the boys establish a semblance of order to begin with (whoever holds the conch gets to speak at the assembly), their shaky society gradually breaks down as the boys revert to a terrifying primal state and the violence escalates into murder.

De Jongh keeps Golding’s sentences intact so it feels like a perfect collaboration beyond the grave - her images complementing Golding’s prose - and the story beats are as remarkable as they ever were but feel more powerful because of the visuals. Piggy in particular seems more tragic here, because of how de Jongh draws him - vulnerable yet dignified, sad but noble.

Piggy is such a brilliant character. I felt for the poor kid all over again - he’s asthmatic, he’s kind to the younger boys, making them feel safe, he stands up to the bullies despite being the target of bullies prior to this book, and he appeals to reason and compassion in the face of naked aggression and rootless hatred. And we know what happens all too often and unfairly to good people. He doesn’t even get to have a real name - just the cruel nickname he hates.

Piggy is the best character but the others are just as perfectly written - Ralph, the hero of the story, and Jack, the horrible older boy who leads the descent into madness. And Golding throws in some inspired scenes as well to keep up the tension like the introduction of the dead soldier parachuting over the island and one of the most creative, ingenious scenes in all of literature: the Lord of the Flies scene.

The ending is equally perfect with that haunting final image, reminding us of what happens when boys grow into men and the violence only becomes more sophisticated and extreme, rather than stopping.

The story is perfectly paced, the characters are unique, it captures a truth about humanity so astutely, and the book as a whole is so memorable and imaginative. It’s no wonder Golding was awarded the Nobel for this book and that it’s gone on to influence numerous other major works of fiction over the years from Battle Royale to The Hunger Games and their many lesser iterations.

Aimee de Jongh’s art is beautiful. It’s colourful, evocative - there isn’t a single page that doesn’t look amazing. She found another level to Golding’s story with her art - as much of an achievement as Golding’s novel is, this comics adaptation may be even better. I found that all aspects of the story - the scenes, the characters - were more powerful to read because of her vivid art.

From subtle details like seeing the boys getting more dishevelled over time, to the horror of the soldier’s corpse, the radiance of the island’s nature to the jarring scene when the pig’s head starts talking - what a contribution she gave to an established masterpiece to somehow make it that much better.

Even if you’ve read Lord of the Flies, this comics adaptation is still worth reading - a genuinely great book from a world-class artist lending her talents to a deservedly legendary story. I couldn’t recommend this book more.

It’s the summer of 1984 and the workers for the local paper mill in Waterville, Maine, have been on strike for over a year - without progress. As the money of local families dries up, Babs Dionne, the head of the union, begins to contemplate desperate measures to end the deadlock and get her town back to work.

Here’s a tip you can take to the bank: NEVER read a book that Stephen King endorses. Uncle Stevie has the most atrocious taste in literature and a pull quote from him is at the top of the cover of this book.

However - Ron Currie’s previous novel, The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne, the first book in this series (We Will See You Bleed is the second, despite it being set decades before the first), was so utterly brilliant, I was willing to see past the equivalent of a poison symbol on the cover and still pick it up.

Well. The king of bad taste strikes again because We Will See You Bleed is a terrible novel and a hugely disappointing follow-up.

Its trashness is not immediately apparent though. Savage takes place in 2016, at the end of Bab’s life, and we only hear in passing about her husband Rheal because he died before the events of that book. Bleed takes place 32 years before and Rheal is alive and kicking - he is in fact the best character in this book, and his introduction is very promising: he’s in a bar when a would-be assassin wielding a chainsaw tries to murderise him.

This is the second scene in the novel and the last time it will be interesting for well over 200 pages.

In the meantime, we hear about how the strike is affecting the various people of Little Canada and the poverty of the area. We meet Claude, Rheal’s best friend, and his wife Sophie, who has bad kidneys and is fed up with dialysis and wants to die - the only solution? A transplant. But Claude doesn’t have nearly enough cash - or a donor - to make this happen. And Father Clement supports the strike, going against the Church’s orders to remain neutral, and is removed from his parish. From his new home in a remote recordskeeping office, he will play a role in the Spotlight articles on what the Catholic priests have been doing to kids for years.

Let’s take these one by one. The strike’s effects: I get it, we need to understand the stakes, and humanising the characters is always a good idea. It doesn’t need to be this drawn-out though. Especially when nothing happens and the same message is repeated over and over: how capitalist greed ruins ordinary people’s lives. It’s too static for too long.

Claude and Sophie: the first of the two boring sub-plots. They complain, reiterate the misery, and, eventually, without any real drama, let alone excitement, it’s resolved. Again, I get why Claude gets built-up given the novel’s conclusion - but there’s too much on this kidney stuff, and it keeps the pacing of the narrative frozen in place for way too long.

Father Clement and the priest diddlers: why did we need to hear about the filthy Catholic Church - has everyone forgotten how gross that outdated institution is? Of course not, but it wasn’t as publicised back in 1984. Ok, but it’s not that publicised then either - so why did we need to know that Clement supposedly played a part in the Spotlight articles that appeared years later? What does this add to the book? It’s absolutely pointless and tedious.

This being a prequel, there is some needless table-setting for the first book. We see how Bates becomes police chief, how Babs establishes the Little Canada crime syndicate, and, knowing that she becomes a mother of three, gosh I wonder what the nausea then-childless Babs feels could be?

The novel finally comes alive in fits and starts in the final third when Babs and Rheal decide to take the fight to the mill and its owner Sutton. It still feels too little too late, though there are some great scenes that I won’t spoil.

What’s really frustrating is that Ron Currie has created some fantastic characters here. Babs remains wonderfully brutal, as is her husband Rheal, who brings real terror when he unleashes his anger towards the end. Sutton is a cool villain, as is Aucoin, a rival mob boss - Currie writes the bad guys so well in both books (never over the top - the evil is always simmering tangibly just beneath the surface). The Saucier brothers, Ray and Normand, steal every scene they’re in - oddly comedic but also crazy (think Frenchie from The Boys but two of him). I loved these two madmen, especially when they begin their invasion of the mill.

It’s just that he doesn’t let these great characters do anything until the very end. Savage is different because it’s nothing but bonzer characters doing interesting things from start to finish. Bleed introduces a brilliant cast and has them sit around twiddling their thumbs until finally giving them something to do at the end.

So far, this is the biggest let-down of my reading year because I loved Savage so much and was hoping the follow-up would be as good - and it wasn’t even half as good. What it turned out to be was a dreary trudge through 250+ pages of changeless, predictable rubbish that didn’t need to be told to get to a sporadically exciting payoff.

Whereas The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne made me hungry for more, We Will See You Bleed has turned me off of reading any more in the series (though I expect I will eventually return, albeit more cautiously, whenever the next book is out). Did Currie put all of his best ideas in his first book and has already run out? That’s what it feels like.

I’m not opposed to prequels in general - so long as the story is entertaining, it doesn’t matter if they’re broadly unnecessary in setting up the story they’re preceding - but this definitely felt like one of those prequels that you’re better off skipping because it’s that dull and pointless.

Dan’s in his 60s, retired and living in Dubai. He’s done well off of crypto - made some big money bags by being an earlier speculator of Bitcoin. Then he meets Vikki - the one who got away, the possible love of his life. And then… nothing! He warbles on about his life story until he doesn’t.

Much like my attempt at a summary of this novel, Tibor Fischer’s My Bags Are Big goes well until it sputters out - and then it’s just really blah. Unfortunately, the really good part ends relatively early (around page 30) and then gets steadily more tedious until the end.

The book starts very strongly. Dan’s voice reads like an early Guy Ritchie character (Lock Stock/Snatch-era) and it’s funny and engaging. The tone is very London, everyone’s got a nickname (Tree-Hugger Trev, Disaster Dmitri), and there’s a bizarre running joke where Dan keeps meeting David Bowie even though he’s not really a fan.

Dan repeatedly returns to Vikki in the present who reminds him of Vikki in the past which makes him tell his entire life story - which isn’t that interesting. He plays tennis until he realises he doesn’t have the onions to make a career out of it, so he stumbles into sports management, then middle middle middle, some more about boring Vikki, and Bitcoin until the end. Which is just Dan talking about crypto, and it’s kinda dull.

You would think with all the Vikki talk that the novel is about their relationship and the arc would be the two finally getting together but no. Vikki instead gradually disappears and nothing in the form of a story emerges to fill her absence. The novel peters out into emptiness long before the end and I kept wondering what the point of it all was.

Fischer is clearly a decent writer but is really lacking on the story front. My Bags Are Big has a great few dozen opening pages which isn’t enough to recommend this nearly-200 page novel. A meandering shrug of a book.

What if George R. R. Martin was given a secret ghost writer with a bag full of great ideas for how to finally end A Song of Ice and Fire - would he accept it, if it meant keeping the ghost writer’s identity a secret? And, if after delivering the finished manuscripts, what would he do if the ghost writer threatened to expose their secret - would he resort to murder?

Before I start, let me just say: thank fucking god for Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. Not just the best creative team in comics, but dependable and prolific too. There are precious few good comics being published each year and there’d be even less without these two around. This is their second book I’ve read this year (the other was Five Gears in Reverse) and both were absolute knockouts. As a fan of quality comics, thank you both and I don’t know how you’re doing it at this pace but please carry on!

Now onto Unfinished Tales. Obviously Brubaker’s not using George R. R. Martin’s real name but his proxy - “Finnegan Blake” - is clearly modelled on Martin’s career as it relates to his hit fantasy series. Blake too has a bestselling swords and sorcery series that got made into an even bigger TV show, but the show outpaced his publishing and they had to make the final series based on his notes, rather than an actual book. The final series was panned by all and Blake’s writing has stalled. It’s years later now and fans are still waiting for the final book in the series, but Blake can’t bring himself to complete it.

So yeah, if you know anything about Martin and ASOIAF, it’s the same thing but with different names.

And relating that story alone is compelling. Brubaker provides credible insight into the life of a popular writer with the fan signings and editorial meetings that I’m sure he’s experienced firsthand (maybe not on the same scale but still), and posits a convincing theory for why Blake/Martin is unable to finish the series: the TV show finale was his real finale and he doesn’t want to write it because he knows the fans will hate it and he hasn’t come up with a better alternative.

Brubaker then throws a crime element (of course) into the mix which is basically a version of Strangers on a Train where two people enter into a secret pact which can only end badly. I won’t go into the details but suffice it to say I was totally enthralled with every aspect of this story - I read it through in one effortless sitting because it’s just that damn good a comic.

The title is a partial nod to Tolkien, the creator of the fantasy genre, who has a book called Unfinished Tales. I wonder if Finnegan Blake is a reference to Finnegans Wake, famously a novel without an ending (the final line is the first half of a sentence with the book’s first line being the second half of that sentence; the implication being that the book is a never-ending loop), while Finn is a writer in search of an ending.

I’m just glad that Brubaker doesn’t have what George R. R. Martin has and he’s able to put out high quality stories at an unreal rate. An absolutely wonderful standalone comic from Brubaker/Phillips that’s very contemporary and a superb read to boot. You’ll probably never read The Winds of Winter/A Dream of Spring (unless someone like Brandon Sanderson finishes them years after George’s death) but Unfinished Tales is real and definitely worth reading.

(Thanks to the publisher, I was able to read an advance copy for review - Unfinished Tales is out in December)

It’s the early ‘90s and Noah Van Sciver is a kid living in New Jersey with his Mormon family. The kids in the town he lives in are all obsessed with superhero comics, including Noah and his siblings, and this is the time of the great comics boom when everyone thought comics were great investments and creators like Todd McFarlane were becoming millionaires. Spawn #5 is the hot new comic - it’s sold out everywhere but luckily Noah’s brother Ethan has a copy. But oh no - in his perpetual nervousness, Noah’s accidentally torn and ruined it! How will he replace it without getting caught?!

Maple Terrace is a fun short memoir about a time that seems incongruous now - comics as cultural hotrods - but I also felt that the story was a bit thin and would’ve liked some more substance.

The book is essentially about Noah being bullied - either by siblings, bad kids at school, or even his dad - but it never feels sad or self-pitying. The comic is a romp, with Noah comedically pinballing around town trying to find the right comics to make good, but you sense the sadness around the edges - not just the overt violent threats, but the grinding poverty and the social stigma that follows this.

It’s part-origin story too as we see Noah fail other subjects at school except art where he excels. That and his obsession with comics shows you how he came to be such a great cartoonist as an adult (his older brother Ethan is also a successful artist at DC).

Maple Terrace is a fine comic - it’s just too short and the narrative wasn’t enough to sustain an entire book. Still enjoyable, Maple Terrace is a good addition to Noah’s other childhood memoir, One Dirty Tree, and fans of this creator will definitely get something out of this one.

The nameless narrator is a writer in a world where only a few dozen books have ever been written. He’s hounded by his ex Margaret, and, because talking tigers killed his folks, he lives in a compound called iDEATH where everything’s made of watermelon. A nearby villain called inBOIL lives in The Forgotten Works and grumbles about the integrity of iDEATH.

… riiiiight.

If you didn’t know that In Watermelon Sugar was written by a mentally-unstable alcoholic hippie in the ‘60s, you’d probably guess that it was, wouldn’t you? Because it was.

Gawd knows what it’s meant to be about - and that’s generously assuming that it is about something. It sounds vaguely dystopian but it’s not sci-fi. It’s about life on a commune I guess? Which is pretty banal apparently. Narrator’s ex Margaret wants to get back with him but he doesn’t because she seems to like the evil inBOIL (no idea what’s with these names either) so he’s with Pauline who cooks iDEATH’s meals. Yawn.

It might be a metaphorical story with the watermelon and tigers symbolising something but who knows - it might’ve just made the author chuckle and that’s why it is the way it is.

In Watermelon Sugar isn’t even a half-decent novel. It’s the inane, pointless ramblings of Richard Brautigan and amounts to zilch. I’m confident I will forget this novel in totality in no time. My impression of Brautigan is that he’s the poor man’s Kurt Vonnegut.

Still, there’s something unique here - the narrative is strange, imaginative, unpredictable, if unfocused - and that kept me turning the pages. But when I finished the novel - and, my word, is it a quick read - I mentally shrugged and thought, so what? Why do people like Richard Brautigan? Much like pondering on what In Watermelon Sugar is about, I have no idea. All I know is I doubt I’ll ever read anything by him again.

Christie Malry, a young accountant, decides to apply the method of double-entry bookkeeping to his own life - if the world wrongs him, he will debit it and credit himself; that is, allow himself some form of revenge to “balance the books”. Except Christie begins to lose perspective over the value of the wrongs done to him and his reactions become more extreme and darker very quickly.

BS (Bryan Stanley) Johnson was a 20th century British novelist known for his experimental approach to fiction. One of his books had holes in it so readers could see things happening pages ahead before reaching them. Another of his books came unbound with the idea of the reader choosing the sequence of pages themselves.

Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, Johnson’s last novel to be published in his lifetime, is, I’m told, his most accessible. And while it is that, I can see why he was and remains an obscure literary figure - this isn’t the most compelling of reads.

The story of Christie’s rather dull life working in one dreary company after another, having an unremarkable relationship with a girl known only as “The Shrike”, and the rushed, comedic terrorist actions he enacts towards the end don’t make for an exciting narrative and my attention often wandered.

What kept me engaged was the playfulness with form that Johnson scatters throughout. He frequently breaks the fourth wall, addressing the reader as himself, talking directly to the characters - who also seem to be aware that they are characters in a novel - and the meta-angle feels very modern (the book was first published in 1973).

Johnson also randomly inserts esoteric vocabulary for no other reason than for literary colour which was amusing to see. From a single paragraph on page 42 alone: trituration (to reduce to a fine powder through grinding), helminthoid (wormlike), cryptorchid (undescended testicle), and eirenicon (peaceful).

The bleak and destructive finale seems to foreshadow the author’s fate - at just 40 years old, Johnson would take his own life shortly after this novel’s publication, depressed about his lack of commercial success, as well as other problems in his life. More sadly, he never really found fame in the following 50 years, despite believing he would* (unlike, say, John Kennedy Toole would after doing the same thing).

Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry isn’t a good novel - the story and characters are no great shakes, and, despite playing with form, Johnson’s not doing anything in this book that’s especially standout, and the novel as a whole feels very unimpressive. I enjoyed the moments of unpredictable, imaginative flourishes dotted sporadically throughout, but it’s not hard to see why BS Johnson was, and remains, a minor/basically unknown writer with limited appeal.

-

*I wonder if that’s why Terry Pratchett named his Discworld character Bloody Stupid Johnson in reference to this author, as a comment on the stupidity of offing oneself? Perhaps he just wasn’t a fan of Johnson’s avant-garde novels.

Batman: Dark Patterns is 12 issues of the dumbest Batman comics you’ll ever read.

It’s made up of four 3 issue story arcs, loosely connected to no effect, each increasingly stupid and more pointless.

The Wound Man has the worst character design I’ve ever seen. He looks like a human pin cushion and is more of a danger to himself than to anyone else - and that’s also the point, and that’s still ridiculous. Dan Watters seems to be trying to channel Se7en in this arc but fails because his story makes no sense. It’s some vague rubbish about evil corporation Ace Chemicals poisoning the water supply of a town just outside Gotham - nothing about it added up.

It gets worse with the next arc, Scarface Towers, about an apartment building with echo-y walls where someone pretending to be Scarface (the gangster ventriloquist dummy) speaks and, somehow, the voice hypnotises people into taking cops hostage - for no reason?

And it keeps getting astoopider still with the next one about a giant shanty town somehow being in the centre of Gotham and an unlikely trio of people trying to remind people of a forgotten gang from 70 years ago that might’ve come back in an effort to make everyone behave?!

The motivations, the plan - none of it makes sense. Least of all the shanty town - if Gotham is basically New York, ie. the place with the most expensive real estate in the world, it wouldn’t have that much space going to waste on bums. You would have developers like Trump swooping in, buying the land, kicking out the squatters, and building condos on it.

The book closes out with the final arc about Some Guy starting random fires around Gotham while dressed as a baby to frame a doctor for no reason. Pitiful garbage.

How does Dan Watters keep getting work? He’s one of the worst comics writers around who doesn’t seem to get any better over time. I read his awful Lucifer book in 2019 and he’s still putting out low quality drek for DC except now he’s been elevated to Batman?! Comics is apparently just another industry where you fail upwards the longer you stick around.

The Absolute Wonder Woman artist Hayden Sherman draws all of the issues here and, while none of it looks bad, I’m just not that taken with Sherman’s style. To me, it looks like Eduardo Risso-lite.

The only pattern discernible here is how terrible the comics that make up Batman: Dark Patterns are. Badly conceived and poorly written, there’s nothing here that’ll stick in the memory for longer than it takes to read it. What a dark time to be a Batman fan.

Roald Dahl’s Matilda is the first time I saw mention of William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury as it was on the booklist the kindly librarian gives Dahl’s precocious heroine (by the by, I re-read Matilda years later and, miraculously, it still held up). I’ve also always been aware that Faulkner is part of that cadre of mid-20th century American writers - Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck - and that he’s my blind spot in that group.

So, in an attempt to finally cross this title off my Matilda reading list and to say that I’ve read all the great US novelists from that era, I decided to read The Sound and The Fury. Well, I think Roald Dahl was utterly mental to put this on a list of books a kid - even one as bright as Matilda - should read because this was not just tough to get through but an utterly loathsome and ugly novel (and not just because the n-word is on every page).

Good fucking luck finding a story in this disasterpiece. It’s set in the American South in the 1910s and 1920s. There are names - I won’t call them characters because they didn’t have any - yammering at one another but seemingly not doing anything. The few scenes that were decipherable was one name arguing with another name (possibly his kid) about skipping school, and one scene where a man helps a lost child get home and her older brother thinks the man’s trying to abduct her.

It’s mostly written in that maddening stream of consciousness style that was all the rage back then, having been (then recently) pioneered by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. In Faulkner’s hands, the overall effect is of impenetrable, wholly unengaging sludge on the page.

Another stylistic choice that I despise is idiolect - writing the way a person speaks. He does this for the black people in the story, but not the white people, and I’m going to speculate, but I think he did it to make black people look ignorant and stupid in comparison to white people. I can’t imagine Southern white people spoke the King’s English themselves but it’s only black people who are portrayed as barely articulate, thoroughly simplistic caricatures. But beyond the foul taste of racism this leaves, it’s a horrible experience to have to read through and I hate any novel that employs this moronic style.

There’s no story, no characters, no point - I read the blurb and it mentioned some drivel about this being about the decline of the South, perhaps to make it seem like it’s not the overrated garbage it is, but I don’t buy it. Like the Shakespeare quote from which the title is derived, The Sound and The Fury is a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing.

I don’t think we’ll ever get a great David Sedaris book again - like Me Talk Pretty, Dress Your Family or Santaland Diaries - because he’s become too rich, famous and comfortable, and those books contained a relatability and desperation that comes from not having those things. And I think he told his best stories in those books and hasn’t got any more.

So it goes with The Land and Its People, Sedaris’ latest essay collection, which is ostensibly about the author’s charmed life of travelling and is in line with many of his recent books which are just ok. It’s not very funny, and quite a few essays are unmemorable, but the majority of them are pleasant to read, well-written, and a couple are even quite brilliant.

My Cousin Melvin is the best essay here. Someone sends him something ChatGPT wrote when they gave it the prompt “write something in David Sedaris’ voice”, and he rewrites it. He superbly shows you how bad the writing that these garbage language learning models spit out - I can always tell when I’m reading something AI-generated because I start to feel dead instead; well, it’s either AI-generated prose or something produced by a Modernist writer - and how much better human writing is. Sedaris’ rewrite shows his inventiveness, skill and comedy writing abilities that a computer can’t come close to emulating.

Say It Like You Mean It is about Sedaris’ DuoLingo obsession, the language learning app that gamifies education (with dubious results). He becomes obsessed with racking up the most points and has fun trolling the game’s AI in increasingly bizarre conversations that surprise even him.

Some essays are just interesting in how unusual his life is now as a famous rich person. He’s summoned to the Vatican, along with many other famous rich comedians, for a brief audience with the Pope. In another, he talks about his trash taste in books but has some pride in being a part of a literary biography of David Foster Wallace because they once met at a dinner. In Portland, Oregon, preparing for a show, he’s bitten by the dog of some meth heads who have come up with an inventive way of smoking meth in public by housing the pipe in a baby carrier.

There are 28 essays here and I won’t go into them all, but most are not bad to read but also not especially engaging either. The overall impression I had from this book is of being in the company of a somewhat amusing older relative telling you stories of varying quality - I never minded the experience but I didn’t love it either (and was mildly relieved that it was over when it was).

After finishing the book and before reviewing it, I flicked through it and was surprised at how many essays I had little or no memory of - and I’d just read it! Like a lot of Sedaris’ essay collections post-Dress Your Family, The Land and Its People isn’t a bad way to spend your reading time but nor is it a great book that’ll make you laugh or stay with you as much as his earlier books do.

If you ever see a book marketing itself with the phrase “a meditation on…” then drop that book immediately because it will almost certainly be a total waste of your time. Unfortunately for me I didn’t notice that the copy on the inside jacket called this book “a brilliant meditation on…” until after I’d read the book but my theory checks out as Transcription by Ben Lerner is not good.

The book is divided into three sections: in the first, a writer visits his elderly mentor for what will probably be the mentor’s final interview. Before beginning, the writer drops his phone - which he was going to use to record their interview - into a sink, breaking it, and instead of cancelling the interview or explaining himself, he decides to proceed with the interview, pretending his phone still works, and then afterwards reconstructs from memory his mentor’s words.

The second section reveals that others have found out that the writer falsified quotes from his interview with the mentor and the people who liked him are upset with the writer for this. The third and final section is the mentor’s son talking to the writer about, mainly, his daughter’s eating disorder, and partially about his relationship with his father.

And this is why I think books describing themselves as “meditations” are bullshit as there’s nothing else to say about them. Transcription doesn’t know what it’s about. It says something about how dependent we are now on phones, which is an absolutely banal point. Yes, it’s bad that everyone’s addicted to their phones, but there’s a moment in the third section where a phone provides the most moving scene in the book so phones are also… goooood? (albeit this was a basic phone and not the mini computers that the majority of us use - so basic phones = good, smartphones = bad?)

I get the general concept of what Lerner’s attempting about the fragility of memory, unreliable narrators, and how everyone’s perceptions are different. We don’t know what’s real about any of the sections, whether the writer in the first section is making it all up based on his conversation with his mentor’s son in the third section, or vice versa, because elements of both stories appear in both sections. The book cover (to this edition anyway) looks like a recording device and different people reading this book will come away with different perceptions of what they’ve read - meta! I get that Lerner’s vaguely trying to say something about the nature of reality, what’s real and what’s in our heads are two different things, etc.

I just don’t find what he’s doing in this book at all convincing, clear or enlightening. Parts of the book are frustratingly contrived - why is the writer in the first section so unprepared for an interview, bringing only his phone to record, and so unable to articulate his mistake to his mentor, or even attempt postponing the interview until the next day?? Other parts feel annoyingly unclear on when they’re happening - are the sections happening in sequence? - with the third section in particular feeling meandering and largely pointless.

Much of the story is underdeveloped - although I thought it was kinda funny that we never even find out what the mentor did for a living, as in what was he mentoring people on? - so that we never understand the stakes of what the writer did or why any of it matters. Some people thought poorly of him for bungling his account of his mentor’s final words - so what?

There is a moving scene in the third section when the son thinks his father’s dying of Covid and tells him what he thinks in one garbled, but realistic, speech, and the aftermath of that moment. And, while feeling disjointed, it was mildly interesting to read about the daughter’s eating disorder (social media helped with that - nuance! Gawd amighty).

I didn’t enjoy reading most of Transcription. I don’t think Ben Lerner is a good storyteller or writer, or an especially good artist. What I believe he was trying to convey - a clumsy and weak commentary on technology’s ubiquity in modern life, and the complexities of its benefit/detriment to society, as well as something on the use of language - was shallow and ineffectively portrayed in an unmemorable and often baffling narrative.

So of course it won a literary award - you know, those things that some judges, who have such poor literary taste, award writers who use AI (like Jamir Nazir’s story "The Serpent in the Grove" for this year’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize). I recommend that potential readers meditate on something other than Transcription.

How I Make Comics is basically about anything but how Kim Deitch makes comics!

The book is made up of random, some loosely-connected, stories, with of course Waldo making his usual appearance, none of which were that interesting to read or gelled together into a memorable narrative, let alone explore Deitch’s creative process in any meaningful way.

The stories are about: when young Kim Deitch met young Donald Trump at a taping of Howdy Doody in 1952 (whether true or not who knows); the fictional origin story of Little Orphan Annie; a lonely elephant formerly of Ringling Brothers Circus; a 40 year old Siamese cat that can mysteriously kill people with a glance; a pastiche on Golden Age superheroes called The Avenging Angel (featuring the questionably-named “Midgetville”); sentient, reincarnated rats; a 1930s artist who once drew a mural on a rich person’s wall; and a girl who falls in love with sci-fi and meets a young Ray Bradbury.

Deitch loves breaking the fourth wall and often inserts himself, and his wife Pam and their cats, into his comics, and he does so here. It’s in these parts that we learn that he uses model sheets, and draws on a piece of plexiglass. Fascinating. You’re not gonna believe this either but his drawing process? First design, then pencils, layouts, and finally inks. You mean how pretty much every comics artist does it?! Yuh huh.

The above information appears in a few pages in between the stories, so we technically do learn a bit about how Deitch makes comics, but a few pages out of nearly 200 - when you’ve called the book How I Make Comics! - is a tad misleading. It’s just a bad title.

He also writes a short essay at the end called Why I Make Comics - turns out it’s because it’s very “doable” for him. Woah. He does it cos he can. Just as insightful and deep as his production process then. The story of the girl who loves reading and discovers sci-fi is apparently about his mother, if that’s interesting to anyone.

Instantly forgettable, poorly conceived stories aside, I remain a huge fan of Deitch’s artwork which is unique and effortlessly eye-catching. He’s still a master illustrator and every page of this book is full of his recognisable, intricate and detailed artwork, beautifully drawn and imaginatively laid out. I wasn’t taken with any of the stories here but it’s still a gorgeous book to look at and the imagery alone kept me turning the pages.

Which isn’t to say that Deitch is a bad writer - he’s written some fine comics over the years like Shadowland, The Search for Smilin’ Ed! and Deitch’s Pictorama, all of which I’d recommend over this one - but How I Make Comics definitely doesn’t feature his best storytelling. This one will really only appeal to fans of this creator’s artistic style, and even to those I would say not to expect anything like Deitch’s best books, let alone something substantial about his creative process.

Xavier, Doug and Tim are three single men living together and working in the same local restaurant - Xavier and Doug are short order cooks while Tim is a dishwasher, aspiring to become a cook. The book follows their attempts at dating in modern-day Canadia.

I normally think Nick Maandag is the jizz - The Follies of Richard Wadsworth is a great comic, really funny, and Harvey Knight’s Odyssey has its moments too - but his latest book Betas is just bad.

It’s a dull satire on the current political climate replete with irritating phrases like “cultural appropriation” and “toxic masculinity” as the guys date progressive women who are only about social justice. This leads to scenes like Xavier and his date having a consent app AI monitoring their intimate moments, or a club with a cartoonishly hawkish bouncer who enforces a no staring/no touching policy where the guys are surrounded by naked women that leads to one of Tim’s balls exploding from blueballs.

You get the point pretty early on - it’s political correctness gone mad!!1 - but Maandag continues to hammer home this very obvious message over and over throughout the book. Tim can’t get ahead because of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) hirings, despite his seniority at the restaurant (and his passivity because, hoho, he’s a beta), while their boss has to crawl around on all fours all day because of White Atonement Day (chortle, wot a beta).

This repetitive and thoroughly unentertaining story culminates in an extended and wearisome sequence where an offhand remark lands Xavier in front of a Human Rights Tribunal. What follows is page after page of uninteresting, unremarkable dialogue where common sense is roundly ignored to once more underline the obvious satire/it’s political correctness gone maddd1! again.

Maandag is a genuinely funny cartoonist - there’s many a chuckle to be had in Follies - but aside from one weird scene (Doug used to be a flasher and he thinks telling his date this information is appropriate?!) Betas is a punishingly unfunny read, despite its many attempts at comedy. Doug was too strange to find his failed dates funny, while I wasn’t sure what to make of poor pathetic Tim or his fate. As for Xavier, the book’s conclusion is very dark and points the finger at the other end of the political spectrum for extremist behaviour, which doesn’t feel convincing at all.

I agree with the viewpoint that all of this social justice and DEI shit can get out of hand, and maybe because I don’t live in Canada, where perhaps this stuff is more pronounced, I’m not as exasperated as the characters/Maandag might be (although I live in the UK and I get the impression that the perception of the UK is on the wacky PC side too even though it doesn’t feel like it is in everyday life); like most people, I’d like to think I’m on the side of common sense over identity politics slop.

But even if my biases were being confirmed, I still needed more than just that from a comic. Betas is missing interesting characters and a storyline that I cared about, as well as the usual Maandag humour and imagination. As it is, it’s such a tediously plodding and unrewarding read that I’m not sure even Maandag fans will get anything out of it. Really disappointing stuff.

To paraphrase The Dude: you’re not wrong, Nick, you’re just tiresome.