"Write what you know" is pretty typical writing advice. You'll find many authors not surprisingly using elements from their own lives in their work, often going so far as to essentially write thinly veiled, if not explicit, autobiographies. This is how the best stories "feel" true if you know they technically are not -- the emotions behind them are genuine even when the events might be distorted from what really happened.

This has been evident in Ryan Estrada's solo efforts going back for over a decade as well as the books Kim Hyun Sook has been writing since she started a few years ago. I've reviewed Banned Book Club and No Rules Tonight here previously, and Good Old-Fashioned Korean Spirit follows in a similar vein. Once again we have a book that's not exactly a sequel, but still takes elements from Kim's life in the 1980s under the authoritarian regime in Korea and uses them as the backdrop for this story.

And what is the story here? It's set around Daeboreum, a holiday celebrating the first full moon of the year. There's food and drink, of course, but also several traditions around warding off malevolent spirits and putting your wishes for the coming year into the ether. Taehee is forced by her parents to help her grandmother with some of the physical labor (mostly tied with harvesting persimmons) and performing some of the more musical rituals, but she manages to 'trick' several of her friends and acquaintences to go as well, although pretty much everyone goes with the ulterior motive of getting out to the country and away from the crowds of people in the city who could have them arrested (or worse) for their contrarian views. While they're all out with Taehee's grandmother and her friends, they inadvertently learn that they're all out there for the same reason -- to get away from authoritarian figures -- and that the older generation is not nearly as stuffy and conservative as they had believed, despite their attendence to old traditions. The older generation shows they hold many of the same beliefs the younger ones do, but it just manifests differently. And the book ends some decades later with younger generation both honoring the older ones by entertaining many of their traditions and bringing in the newest generations by adapting and adding to them.

One of the recurring themes in the book is that the words and actions of an individual, if you don't understand the context behind them, can be misconstrued. A character who might be acting secretly could be up to something sinister... or they might just want to surprise someone with a good deed. Someone's bitterness at one situation might be reflective of a similar one they had to deal with decades earlier. Heck, just the technologies available to a newer generation might offer up alternatives they take for granted that previous generations simply did not have. Everyone's actions and reactions are going to be different based on their lived history, and if you're unfamiliar with that history, those reactions might not make sense.

Now, that's not to say everyone is justified regardless of what they say or do! Kim has to deal with an agitator who sneaks his way into their "book club" specifically to incite violence against the police and artifically justify a legal crackdown. Manhee's parents perform an exorcism on him because he's trans and they actively reject his attempts at being happy. Suji is kicked out of her home because her mother won't accept her as gay. People have a right to their opinions, but if those opinions actively hurt someone physically or emotionally, they can't be justified.

Despite having some context and character overlap with Banned Book Club and No Rules Tonight, Good Old-Fashioned Korean Spirit is thematically different than both of those. The backdrop of fighting against Korean authoritarianism is present in all three, but they still touch on different themes. Which makes sense. They're based on real-world events and Kim's lived experiences; if you're living your life in such a way that you have to be taught the same lessons over and over, you're not learning anything. You're not growing as a person. You should have adventures in your life, and you should learn something different from each of them. Be like Kim and Estrada; they're sharing some excellent life lessons and doing so in a fun and entertaining way.

Good Old-Fashioned Korean Spirit came out last month from Penguin Workshop. It retails for $24.99 US in hardcover and $17.99 US in paperback. You should be able to pick up either from your favorite book retailer now.

Bill Griffith's latest book is Photographic Memory: William Henry Jackson and the American West. Jackson, if you're like me and were unfamiliar with him by name, was a photographer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He took a lot of pictures of the American West and, in particular, the area that would later become Yellowstone National Park. Indeed, his photos of the area were instrumental in getting Congress to establish it as the first national park in 1872.

You might be curious why the creator of the absurd character Zippy the Pinhead would choose to write a non-fictional biography of a photographer from a century and a half ago. While Griffith explains in more detail in the book's early pages, the simple answer is right on the cover. Namely that Griffith is in fact Jackson's great-grandson. Interestingly, while this might suggest that Griffith had access to family records and documents that previous biographers did not, it does not seem that he had much that was particularly unique within his family beyond a few anecdotes from his mother and a copy of the uneditted manuscript of the biography Elwood Bonney published in 2000.

Griffith covers Jackson's life in its entirety, referencing Jackson's own autobiography for most of the earliest bits. However, since Bonney's interviews with Jackson from late in the photographer's life seem to be more robust, much of Jackson's story is told within the framing of those interviews. Griffith skips over Jackson's life as a Union soldier during the Civil War in two pages, and gets on to how his general interest in art led Jackson to take up photography. Because it was a fairly new field and because it was exceptionally tedious to carry all the necessary materials outside of a studio environment, Jackson took advantage of that and got in on many exploratory expeditions simply because he was willing to put up with the often terrible conditions where others would not.

Eighty percent of success is showing up.

The book explores some of Jackson's other expeditions and, even the ones which were perhaps more advanced in terms of the physical aspects of travel, they never seemed to cease having more than their fair share of challenges. It does not seem Jackson openly groused about these difficulties overmuch, but they did seem to get the better of him on occasion, judging by his letters home. (He was a fairly prolific letter-writer to stay in communication with his wife while he was away on travels.)

Griffith does talk about Jackson's family throughout the book, but as he frequently left them behind on his trips, they are out of the picture a lot. This becomes a point of contention in more than a couple instances when a family member becomes upset at his not being home very much. Although Griffith doesn't focus on this a great deal, between this and Jackson's somewhat condescending attitude towards the Native Americans he photographed, he actually does not strike me as a particularly likeable fellow. Griffith does grant himself an aisde in the book to talk about how Jackson's views on Native Americans in particular would not be acceptable today, and were potentially even damaging at the time. But beyond that, Jackson is frequently dismissive of whatever woman he happens to be with -- both before and after marriage -- and he seems entirely unconcerned with raising his children. Griffith even notes that his mother expressly said, "He had no use for children."

Which leads to the one other thing I shoud touch on. I noted earlire that much of the framing for the book is Bonney's interviews with an older Jackson. However, it also repeatedly switches to Griffith himself. But it weirdly even comes at that from several directions. It's initially told from his perspective as a child and learning his middle names are after his great-grandfather. But he also has some imaginary conversations with Jackson's spirit while he's in his 20s. And there are several asides and comments from Griffith today, interjecting as he's making this book. Not to mention the entire book ending on a sort-of dream sequence with an adult Griffith talking with both Jackson and Yogi Bear about a stove Jackson lost in 1871. Somehow it still seems to flow smoothly despite the changing perspectives and framing.

All in all, it's a fascinating look at an artist I was previously unaware of. It also perfectly dovetails off Guy Delisle's Muybridge -- which I happened to read a couple weeks ago -- focusing on the life of Eadweard Muybridge. While they focused on different areas of photography, they were contemporaries and were likely at least nominally aware of each others' work. These two books together make for an excellent snapshot of what photography was like in the earliest days.

Photographic Memory came out last month from Abrams Comic Arts and should be available through your favorite book retailer. It retails for $35 US in hardcover. If you order it directly from Griffith, you can have him inscribe it for you.

It feels a little odd to write about Invisible Differences here in 2025. The book was first published in France in 2016, but it was later translated into English and published in hardcover in 2020 before finally getting a paperback edition last month. So despite people like myself who picked up the most recent edition effectively as a new work, it's nearly a decade old now. Probably older if you factor in whatever time was spent working on it in the first place.

The story follows Marguerite, who seems to be doing pretty well for 27 years old. She's got a regular job to pay the bills; she's been living with her boyfriend for the past two years; they have a dog and multiple cats; she has a circle of friends and relatives she spends time with. She does have her challenges, though. She's introverted enough that many of her coworkers think of her as cold; she can get over-stimulated in crowded areas; she gets frazzled pretty easily when something unexpected comes up. None of this seems particularly delibitating or anything, but it can make things awkward for her and often inconvenient for others. She eventually starts Googling her symptoms and realizes that she sees a lot of herself in the descriptions of autistic people. She consults a couple doctors, and eventually gets a formal diagnosis, which she takes as a great relief as she now has an explanation for her seemingly atypical thoughts and feelings. She embraces the autism label and begins deliberately changing pretty much all aspects of her life to accomodate or, better yet, cater to her new-found sense of self. This includes radically changing -- even eliminating -- many of her relationships as well as quitting her job in favor of becoming an advocate for autism awareness, eventually leading to the writing of this book!

The story does a good job of showcasing how a person can get well into adulthood without knowing or understanding how they might be autistic. A lot of stereotypes and caricatures keep many people from even considering it as a possible explanation. Marguerite frequently hears "... but you look me in the eye" as a response when telling people. Several of the people in Marguerite's "support group" weren't diagnosed until they were in their late 30s or 40s; one guy made it to 50. It is a spectrum after all and not everyone manifests the same behaviors in the same ways. This is emphasized by Marguerite's own diagnosis taking two full months as her doctors sorted through all the various options.

I have met and worked with a number of people over the years who have had various neuroatypical behaviors. Some had a formal diagnosis which was explicitly told to me, some seemed to have a formal diagnosis but only spoke to it obliquely, and others either didn't even know or knew and chose not to share that information but their behavior was consistent with others I've encountered. Of those that expressly mentioned it, ADHD has been most commonly cited. And the point of my saying that is part of why it seems a bit odd to discuss this book in 2025. The landscape has changed pretty significantly over the past decade -- for a direct example, author Julie Dachez was originally diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, which is no longer professionally used/recognized in favor of simply saying that a person is on the autism spectrum. It seems to me that the autism activism that Dachez and others have done has worked incredibly well in regards to bringing more knowledge and general awareness of what autism is and how people with it are often forced to navigate in a very neurotypical world.

But on the other hand (and good grief, I literally sighed in exasperation as I started typing this) then we have assipes like R.F. Kennedy Jr. who's going around using an unearned platform he's wildly undeserving of to disseminate completely absurd and wholly unsubstanitated claims about the causes of autism. Claims that are so far beyond wrong that I won't dignify them enough by repeating them here. And, as much as I hate that this is the case, but there are people who will listen to these cruel-for-the-sake-of-cruelty claims and take them at face value because someone in a position of political authority -- though by no means intellectual, scientific, or ethical authority -- verbalized them. So maybe someone who believes his lies will see this latest release of Invisible Differences and learn a little about what autism actually is. (There is, at the end of the book, an excellent summary guide for "Understanding Autism.")

I won't get into the technical aspects of the storytelling, how Dachez and illustrator Mademoiselle Caroline handle things from a strictly comics production perspective. Suffice it to say that the 2020 edition was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work. The talent is there.

The paperback version of Invisible Differences came out last month from Oni Press. It retails for $19.99 US, and it should be available from your favorite bookstore.

The way I figure it, the problem a lot of people have is that they don't really understand media. Any of it. Maybe a vague notion about commercial interests or liberal bias or what-have-you, but little beyond that. I think people, on the whole, don't have any real media literacy. They don't see reporters as storytellers; they don't know how to judge/interpret what they're being told; they don't even understand the language well enough to discern why certain words were chosen for a report.

To some degree, I get it. Reading Marshall McCluhan is a tough slog. Trying to take hilariously obsolete opinions of new-fangled things like "radio" or "television" from their original time periods and relate them to contemporary concerns doesn't generally follow a straight path. The big picture is hard to look at, precisely because it's so big. Not to mention that a lot of people just don't even understand the basics of current technology. (Which is why phishing continues to work.)

But, at the same time... it's the 21st century, people! Regardless of what era you grew up in and how you'd like for the world to continue to operate as it did, that's not how it works now. A hundred years ago, "literacy" meant basic reading, writing and arithmetic. That's not enough any more. You used to go through life quite happily with a sixth grade education, but now it's difficult to just do that if you've got a college degree. "Literacy" has expanded considerably. Here's what Wikipedia has to say...

Some researchers suggest that the study of literacy as a concept can be divided into two periods: the period before 1950, when literacy was understood solely as alphabetical literacy (word and letter recognition); and the period after 1950, when literacy slowly began to be considered as a wider concept and process, including the social and cultural aspects of reading, writing, and functional literacy. The range of definitions of literacy used by NGOs, think tanks, and advocacy groups since the 1990s suggests that this shift in understanding from "discrete skill" to "social practice" is both ongoing and uneven... As of 2021, the International Literacy Association uses "the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, compute, and communicate using visual, audible, and digital materials across disciplines and in any context."

The ILA's definition of literacy is already a fair piece more than reading and writing, and there are some folks in education now that are suggesting that the first part of that definition is already too narrow from the standpoint of the second. It's an idea that I happen to agree with, though, and think media literacy is significant and important enough in the 21st century to be pulled under the same umbrella as literacy. The Influencing Machine is essentially a primer on that notion of literacy today. It doesn't cover nearly everything that you need to become 21st century literate, nor does it strive to, but it does tell you what that literacy is and why it's important. The book is "a treatise on the relationship between us and the news media" and "a manifesto on the role of the press in American history". But I think both of those descriptions sell the reason for buying the book short. If the last few years have taught us anything, though, it's that knowing how to read and interpret whatever media you consume is absolutely vital if you don't want to fall into a Fox or OAN or Q-Anon black hole which obliterates actual news and facts.

The book is over a decade old now, but it seems to me that its message is more critical than ever! If you slept on this back in the day, it's well worth hunting down a copy now!

The easy summation of Jon Macy's Djuna: The Extraordinary Life of Djuna Barnes is that it's a full biography of the writer, going back to her grandmother and carrying through to her death. However, that strikes me as a woefully insufficient way to describe the book. I mean, it is, in fact, a pretty straight-forward biography in many respects, but Barnes' life is so exaggerated in its own right that there's a good chance that you have to keep putting the book down to verify Macy isn't just making a bunch of stuff up!

Let me back up a bit. Before hearing of this book, I was unfamiliar with Barnes. Not only have I not read any of her work, but I don't think I'd even heard her name prior to this book. But she was a queer writer working mostly in the first half of the 20th century. She's been called "the most famous unknown of the century" because she was immensely talented and very highly regarded among the literati, but because her work generally focused on queer and sometimes racy scenes in the early 20th century, it was often considered pornographic and, thus, illegal in many areas. Curiously, though, many of the stories she wrote -- particularly the most outrageous among them -- were, in fact, autobiographical. She would often excise her demons in the written word, though few would believe what she wrote.

And this is why the book starts with Barnes' grandmother before she was born. Seeing Barnes' life in isolation without the context of her family history, one might easily think she was sadist and a nihilist, maybe with a touch of narcasism thrown in for good measure. But in fact seeing how she was raised -- the emotional abuse, the raging narcacism of her grandmother, the incest, the gaslighting... -- it's a wonder she didn't have even more problems in her life. She did spend a lot of time in self-imposed isolation, but I'm surprised she gave anyone the time of day with the background she had!

The narrative does hop around a bit, largely following Barnes' life as an adult with flashbacks to her childhood. And while Macy never expressly comes out says so, justaposing the different time periods like that does an excellent job showing readers why Barnes acts in ways that often seem somewhere between chaotic and self-destructive. Strangely, though, she seems engaging and innovative enough with others in her circle that they remain close with her. And it's an impressive circle to be sure, including the likes of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, and Peggy Guggenheim. The book is something of a who's who of 1920s Bohemenism.

It was actually this cast that gives rise to my biggest criticism of the book. Many of these people coming in and out of Barnes' day-to-day life will make oblique references to something they're doing, but without much in the way of detail. Which makes sense here -- the book is about Barnes, after all -- but I recognize just enough of these bits to understand they're real references, but that leaves many of the ones I'm unfamiliar with as giant question marks. The book already clocks in at over 300 pages, so it's not fair to expect Macy to cover every one of these instances in more than a cusrory fashion, but it did prove frustrating to keep wanting to have the broader story stop so I could find out about this or that tangent.

Macy pretty unashamedly loves his subject, but he doesn't flinch from portraying her failings as readily as her strengths. As I said, he does use the narrative structre to explain some of Barnes' problematic behavior, but he doesn't use it as any sort of shield to excuse it. Indeed, Barnes herself doesn't seem to use it as an excuse either, even after recognizing how traumatic her upbringing was and how her family continues to emotionally abuse her from afar.

And while the story does paint Barnes' death as something of a last, righteous stand against conventionality and conformity, the downward tragectory she has in the last few decades of her life clearly mark it as a tragic one.

I don't doubt that I wouldn't have liked Barnes as a person if I'd have known her. Far too much chaos energy that led to or exasperated many of her problems. I try to keep that out of my life as much as possible, thank you very much. But I did enjoy and appreciate learning about her, and the importance she has in the queer canon of literature. Djuna: The Extraordinary Life of Djuna Barnes came out a while ago, so you should be able to get it through your favorite bookstore. It retails for $24.99 US and was published by Street Noise Books. The publisher provided a digital copy of the book for this review.

There's some family debate on when exactly we first saw Star Wars. Dad insists I would've been too young to see it in 1977. This is kind of backed up in that I recall getting Star Wars toys very soon after seeing the movie, and the toys sort-of famously were NOT ready in time for Christmas '77. My brother would have been too young to go to the movies at all in both '77 and '78, so Dad would've taken me by himself while Mom stayed home with my brother. My guess is, since he was a school teacher and my mom worked weekends, we would've waited until spring break of '78 when they could've basically tag-teamed on dealing with us two kids independently. That timing would also line up closely with when the first Star Wars action figures were released.

But even though I did not see the movie until it had been out for nearly a year, it was very foundational for me. Probably for many of the same reasons it was for a lot of kids back in the '70s. I then grew up with Star Wars, and have wacthed the original film at least once a year since '78. I'm not nearly as expert as some, but I've learned more than a little about how the original trilogy was made and have loads of obscure trivia rattling around in my head. So I was eager to see what Lucas Wars by Laurent Hopman and Renaud Roche was like.

It's basically just the story of how Star Wars got made. We get a bit of a George Lucas personal biography. but mostly just enough to show how he got interested in movies and how he initially made a name for himself as a film student. The rest is the making of the movie, and it carries through to shortly after it first opens and blows away everybody's expectations.

What's initially striking is that it's really comprehensive. Most of the Star Wars documentary type stuff focuses on what ultimately got shown on screen. Actor screen tests, how SFX shots were built, etc. Which makes sense since they're mostly looking to show interesting visuals, so they go with stuff they have footage of. The graphic novel doesn't have that limitation, though, since Roche can simply draw anything he wants, so the book goes further by covering a lot of really back-end development stuff. What the Fox execs were talking about, the various early drafts of the script, what Lucas' filmmaker friends were saying when he'd ask for suggestions...

What was cool, too, is that even though I was familiar with most of the little bits throughout the story and there wasn't much that was strictly speaking new to me (though there was a bunch of stuff I'd heard at one point but had forgotten), this was I think the first time I'd seen it all put together in a single narrative. This had what Lucas was doing personally, and the financing, and the SFX, and the behind-the-scenes actor drama, and the legal crap, and the score, and the weather, and... All of these obscure anecdotes -- many of which had, in my mind, been relatively unconnected since I'd picked them up in relative isolation to everything else -- now are part of the same path.

As good as the overall story is, a lot of credit needs to go to Roche. His illustration style is deceptively simple, but he absolutely nails everybody's likeness on every single page. I immediately recognized every person straight away (except the Fox execs and the lawyers and such). But all the ILM guys and Lucas' friends and everybody. I opened the book and right there in panel one, I said, "Wow, that looks exactly like Gary Kurtz!" (Although admittedly, not many people tied to the making of the original movie had as distinctive a hair style as Kurtz, so that was kind of an easy win for Roche!) But even Harrison Ford, who is notoriously hard to draw well, looked spot-on throughout the whole book. Coupled with some impecable storytelling abolities, the whole book is an incredibly easy read in that there's NEVER any question of who is whom, or who is doing what. It's all perfectly readable even at a glance!

If you've got any interest in how all this Star Wars hoohah got started, I would recommend this over any documentary I've seen. Obviously, if you've got more interest in, say, how exactly the special effects were done or particulars on the music or whatever, there's not a ton of detail on any one specific aspect of the movie, but it covers everything top to bottom, and puts it all together in the most comprehensive -- and surprisingly succinct! -- way I've come across. The book only came out from 23rd St. Books last week, but retailing for $30 US, I highly recommend picking it up from your favorite bookstore!

Humans are messy. As a species, we inherently have any number of collective problems and, while I'm nowhere near wise enough to say which is the most significant, I think one that's definitely high on the list is that we are generally forced to start developing coping strategies at far too young an age. We're often too young to even understand what a coping strategy is, much less whether or not any particular one is actually useful, much less healthy. By the time we are old enough to start to understand the concept, they've already become so ingrained into our personality that they become exceptionally difficult to get rid of if/when we realize they wind up hurting more than helping us.

Having been picked on and bullied so much throughout my school career, I had come to understand that I could deflect a good percentage of that by demeaning myself first before anyone else could. And I recall that by the time I was a freshman in high school -- 14 years old -- I responded to one of my bullies questioning, "What are you? Some kind of asshole?" with a simple "yes" because I had already learned through experience that it would disarm him enough to stop the emotional abuse. It did indeed put a halt to that particular emotional abuse as I'd hoped... but it wouldn't be until decades later that I started to understand that it did not in fact halt the abuse on the whole, it just shifted the perpetrator of it from him to me. Throughout much of my life, I'd not only demean myself before others could, but I'd continue to demean myself when someone extended a compliment! It wasn't until I was in my 40s and my wife had to literally tell me to shut up and just accept any compliments she gives me that I realized I'd been doing that for my entire life.

Which brings me to Everything is Fine, I’ll Just Work Harder by Cara Gormally. Cara starts by giving us their daily routine. They get ALL the things done. Getting up a 5:00 every morning for a run, going to her job teaching, getting academic awards and grants, doing more research than most people know is possible, cleaning the house, working on research projects, and then speeding through whatever 'leisure' reading they're on until after her spouse falls asleep. Wash, rinse, repeat. Outwardly, they looked like a badass, getting more done in a day than most people do in a week. But then their life 'started to fall apart' when they got a connection request in her running app from the man who raped her back in college. Not surprisingly, this was exceptionally triggering and they expereinced some significant PTSD for weeks before a friend convinced them to go to therapy.

A good chunk of the book then deals with their therapy and how they're taught to process what had happened. (I won't go into detail in case any of that is triggering for any of you. Gormally includes a significant content warning at the start of the book, by the way, so they're not going to catch her readers off-guard either if they come across the book unaware.) They do seem to work through much, if not most, of their trauma from that event but this then unlocks some other issues related to how their parents never accepted them coming out of the closet. Cara continues working with their therapist and emotionally confronts some of the issues only hinted at previously. I feel I should clarify, too, that this is all work on Cara's end. Although they don't say expressly, it seems like their parents cut them out of their life entirely and they have no relationship with them at all any more. Their emotional work is in acknowledging the 'radical acceptance' of their needs and it's okay to grieve that their parents refused to meet them. This allows Cara to slow down and appreciate things of and for herself, accepting and loving who they are and who they are trying to become.

I think it's hard not to admire Gormally's openness and honesty in this book, and they pack a LOT of it in. Even though the book is only 144 pages long, their pages use a 12-panel grid making every spread very dense. This is particularly useful in relaying both their earlier sense of just burying themself in some form of work all the time and seemingly trying to keep things moving 24/7, as well as when they're wrestling with various emotional issues and they keep hitting in an unyielding, drum-beat-like series of flashes. This density allows them to include both a lot about the emotions they're actually dealing with -- not just "I feel shame" or whatever, but also the context and rationales for everything -- but also also some of the more clinical aspects of the therapy. While they do try to be accurate in their descriptions and the psychology behind the treatments, they're also clear that they're not the expert nor a substitute for a professional, so readers should contact a mental health provder if they want to explore similar treatments and strategies. That said, I found some of the treatment descriptions very enlightening, and I'll definitely be looking up more information about some of them.

I've never been raped and I'm not gay, so I can't say how cathartic or empowering reading this might be for others who have dealt with those issues directly. But even without being able to lay claim to having anything nearly as traumatic as what Gormally describes, there were more than a few aspects here that I could easily relate to. That notion of 'radical acceptance' they discussed ties very explictly back to that anecdote I started with about my wife having to tell me to stop dismissing her compliments with self-deprecation. It's something I still struggle with, despite understanding where it comes from and how it started. I suspect I have some other, less significant issues that I haven't fully identitifed yet that have kept me from getting to where Gormally seems to be by the end of her book.

Everything is Fine, I’ll Just Work Harder is a powerful read. It's estimated that 20% of women in the US have been either raped or were attemped to have been raped. I expect many of them will see a lot to recognize and appreciate here, but I believe the lessons here go much farther beyond that group. I think the vast majority of people in the country carry some form of trauma any more and could stand to see Gormally's story. The book came out earlier this year from Street Noise Books -- celebrating their fifth anniversary this year! -- so it should be availble through your favorite bookstore. It retails for $19.99 US, though the publisher provided a digital copy for this review.

So here's the setup: Lyndsay has been working at a family-run hotel for less than a month, and the owner suddenly tells her that a small conference is coming in over the weekend and she'll be running the place by herself. He assures her the demands will be minimal as the attendees are mostly self-sufficient, and then races out of there as fast as he can. It turns out the convention is for cryptids and mythical creatures and the like. From ancient beings like the Minotaur and Baba Yaga to more modern ones like the Slender Man and the Telepathic Football. All seems to be going smoothly -- Lyndsay is told (and believes) they're all just cosplayers -- until, as the title of the book suggests, the Loch Ness Monster turns up dead.

Now, while these creatures generally do try to keep humans out of their affairs, Lyndsay is asked to solve the murder because it turns out that many of the factions don't fully trust one another and she's seen as a neutral third party. So she goes about questioning folks, including Nessie herself. (I mean, Cerberus was already there guarding the portal to the underworld anyway and it only took one new squeaky toy to get him out of the way.) Lyndsay learns a lot about the collective world of mythic creatures while investigating, but has difficulty getting any closer to solving the murder before everyone has to return to their respective homelands at the end of the weekend. I won't spoil the ending, of course, but she does have an epiphany about herself that leads her to understanding the murderer's true motive, thus allowing her to pinpoint the culprit and solve the mystery. Mythic justice is served, and Lyndsay is able to move on with her life, earning the respect of her employer and, more significantly, herself.

The first thing that struck me about the story here is that creators Paul Cornell and Rachael Smith start with the assumption that the reader has a base knowledge of cryptids and mythical creatures. So they don't waste any time explaining what a Bigfoot is or how it might be different than a Yeti or a Skunk Ape. But if you come to the story without any of that knowledge, it doesn't really hamper your reading of it at all. It's mostly sufficient that you know the Chimera is a thing; every creature that's gemaine to the story is clearly identified by name and any relevant traits are mentioned in a contextual way.

What's interesting, then, is how their collective mythologies are explained in the story. Basically, how the story world operates if there are indeed yōkai and trolls and eloko and all these different creatures sharing the planet with us, but we don't have definitive proof of any of them. And also why we have what 'evidence' we do have!

Of course, this is all built off the original tales, regardles of where they came from, and several 'obvious' contemporary sensibilities are mentioned. The Slender Man has body image issues, for example, and the Dragon's 'happy place' is eating a knight. In case Smith's cartoony style of illustration wasn't an immediate tip-off, it's this kind of approach to the writing that makes the book fun. The convetion set-up, too, means that we can touch on a lot of different characters and focus on them -- or not -- depending on how much mileage can be gotten out these types of jokes/references.

When I was a kid, I had a couple of books by Norman Bridwell (best known as the creator of Clifford the Big Red Dog) in which he tried a similar tactic with classic movie monsters. If your werewolf gets sick, for example, do you take them to the veterinarian or a regular doctor? How often do you need to need to unwrap your Mummy to clean their bandages? It was entertaining, certainly, but since he limited his purvue to only four creatures (werewolves, mummies, vampires, and Frankenstein monsters) some of the jokes stretched thinner than others. By pulling from the pantheon of the entire planet, Cornell and Smith don't run into that issue.

I have to admit, too, that I was a bit surprised that Lyndsay has a legitimate emotional story arc for herself, too. And not just, "I'm all about logic, so I can't believe in fantasy creatures" but an emotional notion of self-discovery that's multi-layered as well. There's a flashback early on in which we see her with her previous boyfriend, and that sets up the character arc, but we're not limited to that. They organically tie it in with both her mother and her employer as well, but never in a blunt, hit-you-over-the-head fashion. They seem like casual dialogue in the moment, but connect together very nicely towards the end. And, as I mentioned earlier, it's ultimately her emotional journey here that helps lead her to discovering the murderer.

Who Killed Nessie? is a pretty fun read. Particularly if you have/had any interest in mythology, folklore, and such. The book came out from Avery Hill Publishing yesterday, so you should be able to pick it up from your favorite bookstore now. It retails for £14.99 UK.

If you're familiar with Carol Tyler, there's a good chance it's through her memoir, Soldier's Heart: The Campaign to Understand My WWII Veteran Father. It was originally published as three separate books between 2009-2012, and only collected into a single volume in 2015. Her upcoming book, The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief, might inititally seem like a sequel of sorts, as it covers her life from 2011-2017 but I think that would wildly misrepresent what this actually is.

The sales copy for the book reads, in part, "Drawing upon her own bereavement, renowned comics artist and writer Carol Tyler emerges from a decade long period of grief to create an allegorical masterpiece. During collisions between life and death, estrangement and loss, Carol Tyler turned to her pen to face facts and extract meaning from the oddly sacred experience." Because of that, I went into the book assuming she would mostly be discussing living with and then losing her husband Justin Green, a notable cartoonist in his own right who passed away in 2022. I thought it odd that Fantagraphics didn't name-drop Green anywhere in the promotional copy in order that they might pick up a few more sales, but I'm told Tyler had some strong opinions on that point and, given the particular nature of this work, I understand why everyone respected it. Because Green's passing is hardly mentioned at all here. You'll note that I said the book largely covers Tyler's life up to 2017; she has plans for a second half to this story to come out in 2027. This first volume is about all the other loss she experienced before that.

And that's not insubstantial. Early in the book, Tyler offers a simple list of those she lost in this short six year period: her mother, her father, her sister, her brother-in-law, a close cousin, her dog, the child of some friends, the "nice kid next door" and his father, one of her editors... in addition to a number of other friends both in and out of comics. It's a daunting list, frankly. I'm old enough to have seen many friends and relatives pass away -- some under very ugly circumstances -- but I can't say I could pull out any six year period that densely packed with funerals, much less so many significant ones.

The first part of the book discusses how Tyler looks at grief more broadly. It's definitely the more pensive part of the book, and offers some reflection on how people can process grief in different ways and how she herself processes it. If you're familiar with Tyler's work, it should come as no surprise that she relies heavily on metaphors. She receives a deed to a parcel of land in Griefville in which instead of a house, she finds her Grandma Theola's Mourning Bonnet. It is within the bonnet that she can work to process her grief -- or simply try to take a moment's comfort -- in whatever manner she needs. However, without a Guide Book, she's at a bit of a loss.

From there Tyler goes on to relay her life from 2011 onwards. Dealing with her ailing parents, trying to shield them from the ravages of cancer that are killing her sister, protecting her daughter from the repercussions of her daughter's boyfriend's dealings with some local low-level drug dealers... On top of the more day-to-day stressors like helping one neighbor to bury their dog, her own aging that's led to not only your run-of-the-mill creaky joints but also a bout of tinnitus, her husband's ongoing challenges with OCD, being forced to teach her college classes in a hallway, and -- perhaps most insidiously of all -- always having to say "fine, thanks" and pretend she really is every time someone asks, "how are you doing?"

It's a lot for anyone to deal with and she retreats to Griefville on more than a couple occassions. Hell, I had to put the book aside repeatedly because it was a lot just to read about! Tyler puts herself very much on open display for readers here, but it never feels like she's doing it to expressly gain sympathy. It's hard for me to pinpoint how, but it very much seems like Tyler was using the pages to process her grief as it continued to mount and drawing comics was the only way she knew how. Having it published seems like a "sure, fuck it -- whatever!" response to someone else's suggestion. And because of that, it's very raw and emotional. Tyler lays herself bare for the reader with an exhausted honesty and integrity that I suspect can only come from having to deal with so much death.

Look, I don't have to sell you on this book. It's Carol Tyler. If you're reading this blog, you at least are nominally familiar with her name and her reputation. There's a good chance you've read some of her work already, and there's even a half-decent chance you know her personally. This is everything you'd expect from Tyler and more; I'd certainly rank it as the best single piece from her that I've ever read. The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief is being published by Fantagraphics and should be available in your favorite bookstore next month. You can pre-order it now -- it retails in hardcover for $39.99 US. The publisher provided me with an advance copy for this review.

I'll have to admit that when I first heard Marvel was going to do an issue with nothing but splash pages, I wasn't keen on the concept. A lot of what I like about comics is the storytelling, and how an artist is able to break down the pages to draw the reader through a page and focus (or not) on particular actions and such. And while there is some element of that in giant, single-page images, I feel the focus on the illustrations over the storytelling to be less interesting. Personal preference on my part. So I was a little surprised when my monthly box of comics showed up on my doorstep a few days ago, and I found Marvel All-On-One #1 among them. I didn't recall specifically ordering it, so I guess my old school Fantastic Four completist mindset kicked in when I was filling my online shopping cart.

The story is basically explained on the cover. As the Thing returns home after a mission, the rest of the Fantastic Four attack him for no apparent reason. The Thing initially assumes someone's mind-controlling them but quickly realizes they're actually robots, allowing him to let loose without fearing of actually hurting them. He's then attacked by the Avengers, the X-Men, and pretty much everyone else in the Marvel Universe. Heroes and villains. And most of the issue is just an extended fight scene until robot-Phoenix drops the moon on the city, obliterating everything but the Thing.

At which point, the real antagonist shows up (I won't mention who it actually is to avoid spoilers) and the whole thing was basically just an elaborate setup as part of basically a real-life role playing game, and now Thing's wrecked it because he just spent the whole time clobbering everybody instead of trying to investigate all the intricacies and subplots and such. But the Thing thanks him for the workout and goes to his actual home, less frustrated than he was before.

Honestly, I found this just boring as all get-out. There was really no plot so the dialogue was almost entirely just catch phrases and quips, and while Ed McGuiness's art is pretty, the repetitiveness of page after page of splashes felt monotonous. I found myself barely skimming things by page 10 or 12, and when I caught a line of dialogue 40-ish pages later about a moon being dropped on him, I had to flip back through the issue to see what they were talking about because I had completely lost interest and zoned out by that point.

I get it. Splash pages are generally used for large, dramatic moments so if you want to do an entire page of splashes, it makes sense that you'd do it as a giant fight where every page is someone punching, leaping, flying, falling, crashing through something, etc. But the storytelling rhythm becomes absolutely static pretty quickly. Regardless of how you bookend the fight with story elements and use dialogue to highlight individual characterizations, it's just a 'song' that has a driving bass line and drum groove, but with no guitar solo or lyrics to any dynamism to it.

Back in the mid-1980s, Scott McCloud did a one-shot comic called Destroy!! in which he had a superhero go mad and just start smashing things, and another superhero had to come in to stop him. There was -- by design -- literally no characterization at all, just the bad guy yelling "DESTROY!!" over and over, and a quick explanation from a bystander telling the good guy "he just started yelling 'destroy' and began smashing things." Then it's 30-pages of these two guys hitting each other. That was more interesting to me than Marvel All-On-One #1 because, despite having technically less characterization and story, at least McCloud broke the pages up into various panels and there was some variation in the cadence and pacing.

If you're a fan of McGuiness's art, I expect you'll enjoy looking at the illustrations here. And because it's the Thing versus "the Marvel Universe," he drew all the big name characters. But I can't really find a reason to recommend this otherwise. It's not bad for what it is; I just think what it is isn't very interesting in the first place. Certainly not for a $7.99 US cover price. The book came out a couple weeks ago, so it should still be readily available at your local comic shop if you are interested though.

One of the challenges I often see with comics trying to honor Jack Kirby is that they wind up trying to rely pretty heavily on replicating his illustration style. Of course, how well executed this is depends on the talents of the artist, but it almost always feels reductive; they almost always pick up on the superficialities of Jack's work, but miss the energy and creativity behind it. So let me start this review by saying that I think The Man Who Dreamt the Impossible by Mário Freitas and Lucas Pereira absolutely does NOT do that.

Going into this, I knew the story wasn't going to be a strict biography of Jack Kirby. It says right on the cover it's "fictionalized" after all. I don't know that I was prepared for how this story rolled out, though. It takes place in a rest home for old comic book creators. Jack's there, of course, but also Steve Ditko, Bill Everett, Gene Colan, and Wally Wood among others. According to the workers, Jack's mind has been failing since the library he had spent years building up and been completely disheveled and disorganized thanks to Martin Flask. It's only when "Mike" begins to help clean up the library that Jack regains his vitality. Enough that he's able to resurrect Mike (killed by Martin to prevent the library's reorganization) and battle back Martin, who joins forces with power-monger Bolt Bisley, in an epic battle worthy of an entire movie unto itself.

The metaphors here are not subtle, and they're clearly not intended to be. Freitas and Pereira put a very clear stake in the ground on the matter of who contributed what in the Lee/Kirby debate and I don't doubt that, were Stan Lee still alive, he would be upset as his depiction as a parasitic, fame-obsessed villain. And he'd almost certainly point out that he had zero control in Marvel's creative or business dealings by the time the company was bought by Disney. But accuracy is hardly the point. I mean, the book starts with Jack being wheelchair-bound and living in a rest home, having outlived his wife Roz, so we're clearly well into fiction territory right from jump. The creators here are making a statement of ideas and opinions here; they're not trying to litigate reality.

I started this post by mentioning how often creators try to "do" Kirby when working on tributes to him, but that Pereira doesn't do that here. Not only does he avoid trying to imitate Jack's illustration style, but he also steers far away from even Jack's pacing and cadence in storytelling. There are two two-page spreads in particular which he plays with the flow of the panel sequencing in a way that (I'm nearly 100% sure) Jack never even attempted. Both spreads must have been very complicated to lay out and are actually rather dangerous to attempt, as either one would have absolutely killed the narrative if they weren't completely successful. In its own way, this type of approach does more to honor Jack's legacy than all of other people's superficial attempts; I think Jack would've thought the spreads very bold and powerful in ways he likely never considered.

While the overall story is fun and exciting, there are a couple of dark lines of dialogue if you're familiar with comics history. The allusions to some of the creators' actual deaths -- Everett's and Wood's in particular -- did briefly pull me out of the story, mostly by virtue of acknowledging the reality of their situations. I suppose they stood out to me because virtually everything else in the book has an additional layer of metaphors on top of it, and those couple references did not. It's a minor point in the story -- a couple lines of off-hand dialogue that are not germaine to the plot -- but it did catch me a bit off-guard. Fortunately, that's pretty early in the book before the action really gets rolling and doesn't cast a shadow over the remainder of the story.

I'm always a little skeptical going into tribute type books like these because of the reliance on the superficial pap I mentioned up top. But The Man Who Dreamt the Impossible does a great job of honoring Jack Kirby's work without resorting to, much less relying on, just trying to ape Jack's sytlistic quirks. The book came out from Image about two weeks ago, so it should still be readily available at your local comic shop, retailing for $9.99 US.

With a title like The Space Cat, this is a book that could easily go in hundreds of directions. So to sum things up quickly, it's basically just the life of author Nnedi Okorafor as she works on her next book. But instead of it being told from Okorafor's perspective, it's from her cat's. Which is to say that Okorafor is kind of ancillary side character at most. ☺️

Pumpernickle Pickle Periwinkle Chukwu Okorafor -- Periwinkle for short -- unlike most cats on Earth, has a father that was from Neptune. Perhaps owing to his father's adventurist spirit, Periwinkle frequently waits until his humans are asleep and then takes his self-constructed space ship out for a spin, sometimes racing alongside a six-legged cat called Orange Meow. She pretty much always beats him, so he'll work on trying to improve his ship when he's not racing. Or sleeping. Or saving his humans from miniature space aliens that look like hot sauce. Pretty much just acting like every other cat, you know?

Okorafor is sent by her publisher to Nigeria for a year to work on her next book, and Periwinkle does take some getting accustomed to the new environments, meeting a lot of the local strays and trying to stay out of the way of other humans, who have a tendency to treat cats as evil spirits. Also, there's an invasion of small, plant-looking, mind-controlling aliens that Periwinkle and the various locals animal friends he's made stop from invading. Again, pretty standard cat behaviors while Okorafor is working on her book.

If you've ever lived with a cat, you'll immediately recognize Periwinkle. He is 100% a cat in every way and following the story through his narration helps to enlighten the rest of us what must have been going through their heads when they tried to tear to shreds that stuffed toy until the squeaker came out and then they just carried the thing around like a totem. And it's also enlightening to find out what they get up to at night when you're asleep. Really, this book should be given out to people who are in the process of getting their first cat so they know what to expect.

I believe this is the second time Okorafor has teamed up with artist Tana Ford. They previously worked together on the Eisner- and Hugo-winning LaGuardia. (Which I could've sworn I reviewed here when it came out, but I can't seem to find anything.) Ford here does an excellent job portraying Periwinkle; she provides a perfect blend of realism with classic Warner Brothers style exaggerations such that every story beat seems to have just the right visual tone, even if the only difference from the previous scene is a slight change in facial expressions or something nuanced like that. And if you don't believe me, there's a few photos of the IRL Periwinkle at the end of the book and he also looks like the perfect blend of realism with classic Warner Brothers style exaggerations!

Unlike LaGuardia, I don't see much here in the way of social commentary or anything. It's just a fun story about a cat, done very well. It's a fairly light, entertaining read and made for a great way for me to wind down my week.

The Space Cat came out just this week, published by First Second. The paperback retails for $14.99 US and the hardcover for $22.99 US. If it's not stocked on your local bookstore's shelves already, they should have no problem ordering a copy for you.

Earlier this year, I posted about a then-upcoming crowd-funding project to publish The Adventures of Lion Man, which was to pick up the public domain character Lion Man -- formerly of All-Negro Comics #1 -- and bring him into the 21st century. Well, that book is now out -- or at least backers of the campaign are getting their copies -- and I wanted to share a review.

Lion Man was originally the creation of Orrin C. Evans, but could essentially have been described as a Black Tarzan. Lived in the jungle but had a formal education, super athletic, wore just a loincloth, fought against white colonialists... Evans did a good job with and it didn't feel entirely redundant, mind you, but it was still a pulpy jungle action story. Arguably, he was the first Black superhero. The Adventures of Lion Man reprints that first appearance to kind of level-set the reader as to where they're coming from.

We then get three new stories featuring different takes on Lion Man: "The Tower," "A Plague on the Nation," and "The Lion Outside." The first and last are written by John Jennings, the middle one by Bill Campnell and Yvette Lisa Ndlovu. All of the story art is by David Brame. I won't got into the specifics of each story, but to say that they interestingly take the Lion Man concept in very different directions. In one story, he's treated sort of like a Black Panther character, in another he's fighting an interdimensional villain in a story that seems like it might be at home in a Dr. Fate comic, and in another he seems to be split between life as a scientist in the real world and a superheroic fighter in the dreamscape not unlike the Garrett Sanford version of The Sandman. Each of these versions -- and indeed the original written by Evans -- are solid takes on the character and reflect a 'missing' history not unlike The Sandman character concept, which has also had taken radical conceptual turns since the original gas mask wearing vigilante debuted in 1939.

I like the idea that, you know, maybe we've had Lion Man stories published sporadically since 1947 and the character had been "re-invented" repeatedly for different audiences. Much like Sandman and Dr. Fate and Black Panther. This book, then, might represent a snapshot of those different re-inventions, which is a really neat idea I think. I might've liked to have seen different artists' takes on those ideas, too. Brame definitely does a good job re-designing the characters for each story, but they do all utilize his same artistic style, and I can't help but think that bringing in additional artists would've helped to differentiate the story approaches that much more visually. We get a hint of that with the pinup section at the back with illustrations from a variety of different artists, but it would've been neat to see that more in the stories too.

There's also Fantomah story included in the book as well by Damian Duffy and Brame. Fantomah is another public domain character that's gotten a little more attention than Lion Man thanks to creator Fletcher Hanks' bat-shit-crazy approach to comics. Here, she's been re-imagined as a Black wrestler that operates in a kind of supernatural version of the WWE.

I think one of the big takeawys from The Adventures of Lion Man is to encourage creators of how many creative directions they can go using already existing ideas. It's kind of a tired trope already that when a character lapses into public domain, someone makes a slasher horror version of them. But the creative team here instead shows that there are plenty of other interesting directions you can take a character like that. The point is even more poignant if you're familiar with Jennings' interest in the horror genre to begin with -- that he didn't go that route with his stories here emphasizes the other options even more. All in all, the stories are all fun takes on existing characters you might not be familiar with and because they go off in different directions, you don't need to have any familiarity with them in the first place!

As I said, the book was originally crowd-funded and those copies are being mailed out right now. The book should become available to the public in the next couple of weeks from Rosarium Publishing with a list price of $19.95 US.

The Underground Abductor is the fifth book in the Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales series. It's also the third biography of Harriet Tubman I've reviewed here. The book was originally published in 2015, but I have here the "bigger and badder edition" from a couple years later which has about fifteen additional pages of back matter.

But even before that, the book is notably longer than the Show Me History story I looked at in 2021. Interestingly, though, I don't think the additional page count contributes to the level of detail Underground Abductor gets into relative to the Show Me History version; however, Underground Abductor does have more detail. What I mean is that, while Underground Abductor is indeed longer, it's not that much longer so the additional pages are not what contributes to the greater insights. Rather, it's Hale's efficient storytelling that allows him to go into more depth than Buckley and Esidene did later.

Space was the limitation of the Golden Legacy version; they only had 24 pages to work with, so there's lots that gets clossed over. On the flip side, the Show Me History story glossed over a lot of the violence and physical hardships that enslaved people -- including Tubman -- had to endure. Underground Abductor seems to split the difference; it does touch on those acts of violence but the illustration style is cartoony enough that the effect is somewhat muted. Honestly, I'd say it was a reasonable compromise, and it helps to make this book the best of the three Tubman biographies I have here. Coupled with the greater detail and contemporary comparisons.

It was actually that level of detail that really stood out to me. It offered a better context for her ncarcolepsy and explained more about her trips north and South. I was quite please with how Hale reguarly offered up why Tubman did what she did beyond the notion of being a general do-gooder. Her trips often had a specific purpose and she used the communications along the underground railroad to announce her coming to other enslaved people. It's a really solid biography and paints Tubman as a full person, beyond just her work on the unground railroad.

That's one of the things I liked most about this particular book: Hale provided both the details and the context that wasn't present in either of the other two books. Hale did a good job striking an excellenbt balance between edution and storytelling, without really negatively impacting either. I learned more about Tubman here than I did from either of the two other biographies I read of her. While his Harzardous Tales series is made of several volumes touching on different events in history, there are only two others that are biographies at all. That said, the topics he does cover seem interesting and I'm curious enough that I'll likely check out at least on of the others.

This "Bigger and Badder Edition" came out in 2022. According to Hale, the changes to the story itself from the original 2015 version are fairly minimal. (Perhaps most notably, changing how he references people from "slaves" to "enslaved people/person." Not that that isn't significant, but it doesn't change the flow of the narrative.) So I would say either version is worth picking up if you're able to get one or the other.

The books was published by Amulet Books. The original 2015 edition retailed for $15.99 US and the more recent edition for $19.99 US. I believe the 2022 version is still considered in print so you should be able to order it through most any bookstore, but the 2015 edition might be harder to come by and will likely be affected by after-market pricing fluctuations. Either one should be worth checking out, though!

I attended my first comic book "convention" in 1985. I use quotes because, while there were comic books and people did convene at one location to see them, the only similarity between that convention and the ones you're likely more familiar with was a dealer's room. There were no special guests, there were no panel discussions, there was no one doing cosplay... it was just one room rented out in a hotel with a bunch of dealers set up at tables selling whatever they had. You could see everything in an hour, maybe an hour-and-a-half if you went through every single long box of back issues very meticulously. It would be another two years before I went to a "proper" convention with guests and panels and such.

I use that as a preface to say I was very much not going to comic book conventions in 1971 when Ron Kasman's The Tower of the Comic Book Freaks is set and, in fact, I was pretty well removed from that scene by over a decade before even mentioning whatever differences might be found between a convention in New York City versus one in Mansfield, Ohio. However! As I have done a fair amount of studying of comic book fandom and there weren't too many radical shifts in comic fan culture until the late '90s/early '00s, I think I can evaulate The Tower of the Comic Book Freaks reasonably as a piece of historical fiction.

See, the story is about a group of teenagers who drive down from Toronto to New York to attend the 1971 New York Comic Book Convention. They're all headed down for different reasons: Stevey wants to get his portfolio reviewed and enter an art contest for a spot working for a comics publisher, Joel is looking for rare back issues for his collection, Gilbert isn't even really all that interested in the convention and is mostly acting as a scout for his father's business trying to distribute American porn magazines up in Canada... The story, though, mostly centers on Harold. By a couple of coincidences, he almost immediately and accidentally ingratiates himself with a Golden Age horror artist who's been experience something of a career resurgence. Almost before he knows it, Harold is queued up to become the man's assistant and do the pencils on his next comic.

He then proceeds to spend the rest of the weekend running menial errands for the artist, talking with publishers, and learning about the personalities of the people he just got sucked in to working with. And it's that last part that becomes the most enlightening for him. When the teens eventually leave to go back to Toronto, none of them leave empty-handed, though most of them not with what they expected.

What struck me most about the book was the atmosphere. Every bit of this feels like a big comic book convention in the early 1970s. If you never attended a convention prior to, say, 1995, a lot of this will likely look unfamiliar. You might be wondering why there's no mention of a big publisher presence or how there are under-the-table type deals that can get a kid like Harold a professional gig without even a portfolio review. You might question how casually everyone dismisses obvious and gratuitous exploitation. You might wonder about that weird description of a dealer table with the comics laid out flat with a large sheet of plexiglass on top of them. All of that was how conventions operated back in the day. There was a very different vibe back then, and Kasman captures it very well. Even better, he reports on how it was, not how nostalgia has tricked him into believing it was. (After reading the book myself, I came across Scott Edelman's review in which he says it was exactly how he remembered the show -- himself being a 17-year-old attendee at that specific con -- with the exception of some of the names being changed.)

The story moves well and, while we focus on Harold, like I said, it does give a character arc for everyone to some degree or another. If I might offer up a criticism of any sort, it would be that some of the characters aren't always drawn super consistently, so there were a few instances where I wouldn't recognize someone until they were expressly called out by name. That typically only happened with unusual facial expressions or with an extreme close-up where suddenly a lot more details are visible. It didn't happen a lot, but enough that it did interrupt the story flow as I tried to suss out who I was talking to whom.

I think this book would be great if you want to check out what comic fandom looked like in the 1970s. I enjoyed it as it helped to offer some additional color to the fandom research I've already done. I expect, if you're more like Edelman, you'll be more interested in the nostalgia that it might unintentionally invoke. And if any of you are newer fans and just want to get a sense of what cons were like before you started going yourself, this is definitely a good vehicle for that. The book did come out back in 2016, so it might be a little harder to come by these days. The book originally retailed for $18.99 US but I don't believe it's still in print, so you're a little more subject to market forces; as of this writing, I'm seeing copies available from online retailers ranging from $3.48 to $28.72 without doing too much searching. (For the record, I found my copy in a physical comic shop and paid cover price.) It's a solid story and a good reflection of what comics looked like back in the day; worth picking up if you come across a decent copy.

I first became aware of Frederic Wetham in the 1980s when I began looking into the history of comics. He was largely presented as the most evil villain in the history of the comics with no redeeming qualities, hell-bent on destroying the entire industry. When we started getting the likes of The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, the mood was very much, "Okay, we've finally gotten past the bullshit he inflicted on the medium!"

It would be another decade or so, though, before I sat down to actually read Seduction of the Innocent. I was actually pretty astonished. I mean, by then I knew the basic premise of his arguements -- I had read any number of pieces refuting his claims -- but what astonished me was how his ideas took hold in the first place. Because even if you read nothing but that one book, his arguements don't even make sense within that decidedly limited context. It's like that scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where Bedevere tries to tease out a logical case for proving a woman is a witch by comparing her weight to that of a duck. He moves the crowd through things one step at a time, and you can't help but go slackjawed at how nonsensical it is. Seduction of the Innocent reads just like that.

And that was still well over a decade before Carol Tilley went through all Wertham's archived papers and discovered how he flat-out lied about his 'research.'

Now there has been some measure pulling back on how 'evil' he is presented as. There are not infrequently comments about how he was genuinely concerned for kids' well-being, and his clinc in Harlem was beneficial. And sometimes people will make note about his The World of Fanzines book as proof that he came around to the benefits of comics in the end. And it's all of that that I'm bringing to the table in reading Dr. Wethless, the graphic novel biography of Wetham by Harold Schechter and Eric Powell.

I'll start by saying that this is indeed a full biography. Although we don't get anything about Wetham's childhood, we do join him in 1914 as he starts his professional education. He moves to the United States, changes his name to something less Germanic, gets married, and really gets his start as a psychiatrist. We follow his career around as he repeatedly gets forced out of various hospitals and instiutions basically for being an asshole, continually demanding that his diagnoses are correct and everyone else is wrong. It's not until 1946 that he starts the aforementioned Harlem clinic and it's there that he first discovers comic books. The story then runs through the parts of his life that you're probably already somewhat familiar with -- Seduction of the Innocent, the Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency hearings, etc.

I don't know what Schechter's or Powell's opinions of Wertham were when they went into this project, but it seems like they tried to present as fair a take on the man as possible. They show him clearly very concerned with all of his "patients" (I only use quotes because some technically weren't patients in the strictest sense, even if/when he met and spoke to them in that manner) even those who openly admitted to murdering others. He seems to genuinely want to help people get better... however, he also really comes across as an egotisical asshole to everyone he deals with at a professional level. His career is littered with bosses and co-workers who refuse to even deal with him as soon as they aren't forced to. His books -- he wrote several before and after Seducation -- are read with mockery and reviewed unflatteringly, but he never seems to gain enough self-awareness to take on board ANY criticism. And to top it off, he never seems to have all but a very, very narrow view of how to approach psychiatry and remains willfully blind to other ideas.

The books ends with...

Ironically for a dedicated practitioner of depth psychology, he possessed a remarkably simplistic concept of the underlying operations of the human psyche. If there is a tragic element to his life, it is that this limitation -- his monkey-see-monkey-do view of human behavior -- has so thoroughly over-shadowed his many admirable traits. Fairly or not, in the world of comicdom, he will always remain 'Dr. Werthless.'

Honestly, I think that's still generous. As I've said multiple times in this short review already, he sounds like he was an asshole to anyone who he wasn't in a position of power/authority over, and he spent much of his career -- even before the comic book stuff -- engaging in cynical and often baseless self-promotion. The care that he showed patients does come across as genuine, but that simplistic view of the human psyche he seemed to have makes me wonder how many people he legitimately helped. And of those, how many did he wind up helping by just being someone who listened? That's not nothing, to be sure, but on the flip side, how many people did he make worse by unintentioanlly offering bad counsel? Did the testimonies he offered at various trials help people any more than any other psychiatrist's would have? Given his overall approach, I doubt it, because I see little in his work that seems grounded in actual study.

Overall, the story is presented well. However, the almost strictly chronological approach was a bit off-putting at first when we bounce between Wertham's life and that of a serial killer he later works with. I get the intent might be to show how Wertham showed compassion to a truly awful and sick human being, but since they don't meet until 1934, there winds up being the first quarter of the book where large parts seem like irrelevant tangents. And given that the entire book does indeed include a few out-of-sequence scenes, I think that might have worked better as a flashback. But aside fromt that, things flow smoothly and Powell's portraits of Wertham throughout the book (not just Wertham but everyone) was spot-on.

I don't know if it'll necessarily change your mind about Wertham, depending on where you're coming from, but I don't believe it's intended to. It's just presenting a full biography of the man as honestly as possible, and that's certainly worthy of a read in my opinion. The book is published by Dark Horse and came out earlier this week, so it should be readily available. It retails for $29.99 US.

Mafalda has finally arrived in the United States!

I suspect like many of you, I'd heard of Mafalda years ago as THE best comic to come out of Argentina, often being favorably compared to Peanuts. Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón -- better known by his pen name Quino -- began the strip in 1964 (having created the character the year before) and continued on it until 1973. The strip's humor was allegedly incredibly witty and satricial, but despite the strips being collected in book form and translated/published around the world, it's only been in the last two weeks that we finally get an English-language version here in the States.

Mafalda collects the firsst 240 strips and the comparisons to Peanuts are almost immediately obvious. The characters bear little resemblance to one another and Quino's drawing style is nothing like Charles Schulz's, but the biting commentary on adults and adulthood coming from children hits in much the same way that the very best Peanuts strips do. The strips tend to focus on a single theme for 4-5 days in a row, frequently with Mafalda trying to learn more about a subject by discussing it with her friends, asking her parents, or by simply observing things around her. She comes to the topics with a child-like naivete but manages to pose extremely pointed questions like, "Papa? Can you explain why humanity is a disaster?"

While I think Quino was often writing the strips in reaction to current events, most of the strips don't require much historical context. There were a few references to the Vietnam War and a couple of news-worthy folks that have since fallen into relative obscurity, but even those references don't need much context to understand. I think the cultural touchstones might be a little harder for Americans to connect with -- while strikes are not unheard of here, certainly, we haven't seen the spate of them that would've been taking place (and are therefore referenced) in Argentina back in the '60s. Also, Mafalda has an absolute aversion to soup, going so far as to use "soup" as a curse word; I think I must be missing something with that bit.

But by and large, the humor holds up exceptionally well and it really is as good as I'd been led to believe. More amazingly, too, it starts right out of the gate with some good gags and the really biting stuff starts coming within a few pages. I've rarely seen comics start that well-crafted and well-defined that early on. Quino really knew what he was doing.

As far as I can tell, this version is -- aside from being an English translation -- basically just a reprint of the original Argentinian edition from 1966. It's a high-quality reprint, certainly, on a very nice paper stock with better-than-I-expected reproduction quality. (I half-wonder if they were able to use the original printing materials; all the linework is incredibly clean!) So it's a very nice presentation. But that also means there's no context for American audiences -- no introduction, no foreword, not even a note about when these originally were published. Granted, we are in 2025 so that's all easily found online and the majority of people likely to buy this book are already familiar with Mafalda's reputation, so it's probably not really critical to include, but it does come as something of a departure from what I think we're used to seeing in comic strip collections these days.

Like I said, this is the first time Mafalda has made it to the US. That's why you're interested. My review, nor anyone else's, is really going to sway you one way or another. You heard Mafalda was getting published and that was all you needed to hear. It's out now, and the hardcover retails for $18 US. It really does live up to its reputation, so go get it if you've got any interest at all.

Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage -- originally published in 1895 -- has been adapted into comics form several times by a number of publishers. Probably the most well-known version, by virtue of the entire line, is the one from Gilberton's Classics Illustrated title. Fawcett did a comic adapting the 1951 movie adadptation. Marvel Comics even published one under their Marvel Classics title in the 1970s. As far as I can tell, the most recent version before this year that wasn't a reprint was from Puffin Graphics in 2005. So, if the book has been adapted into comics so many times already, why do we need another one?

The basic story, if you're unfamiliar, is that of Henry Fleming, a young soldier with the Union Army during the US Civil War. During his regiment's first battle, he flees but is soon overcome with shame. He makes his way back to his regiment, and a wound he received in an unrelated altercation is believed to be proof that he didn't just abandon his comrades. During the subsequent battles, he makes a concerted effort to rise above his previous fears and displays borderline reckless courage charging against rebel troops. The book ends with the boy earning the respect of his superiors, while he reflects on the futility of war in general and how all those he saw die over the past couple days were just so much cannon-fodder.

The reason why the book is considered a classic is that Crane was the first writer to pen a war story that wasn't actually focused on the war itself. It does have battles and troop movements and such, but the focus of the book is on Fleming's inner conflict -- how he thinks and feels about what's going on around him and, more signficantly, how he's reacting to it all. That Crane wrote in a unusually naturalistic style and from such a humanist perspective is probably why the book has remained in print continuously since its initial publication.

Despite the book's -- and its subsequent adapations into multiple media -- proliferation, I will admit that I was unfamiliar with it at all before reading Steve Cuzor's version that came out in May. So for good or ill, I'm unable to compare it against any other iteration. I choose to view this as a positive because, living here in 2025, I've seen/heard/read countless war stories that are told from all sorts of perspectives. From individual combatants to civilians simply caught in the line of fire to the generals directing the overall strategy to spouses and loved ones left at home far from the physical danger of combat. The book would not at all have seemed historic or original in that sense. Going in to Cuzor's version, then, means that I'm pretty much just looking at: can he tell a good story?

The short answer is "yes." It did take me a couple pages to get into the rhythm of his storytelling approach; he lets the story breath a surprising amount. Fleming is alone with his thoughts for a fair portion of the story, but even with that, we get many silent panels where his thoughts and feelings are to be inferred through facial expression and body language. Which is made all the more impressive by Cuzor's illustration style, which relies pretty heavily on spotted blacks with minimal feathering and no cross-hatching to speak of. You would think such an approach would make it difficult to convey much nuance, but Cuzor seems to do that with ease.

The same can be said for his color palette. It appears to have been drawn simply as black and white, and each section is then given a kind of color wash over the entire section, with just variations of a single color for the entire section. Mostly in a kind of grey-ish green range, but with nighttime scenes in dark blues. It's surprisingly effective and, again, offers a nuance that you wouldn't anticipate with that approach. Kudos to colorist Meephe Versaevel.

But back to Cuzor's illustration, the other note-worthy bit is how he manages to make each character identifiable visually throughout the book. Keep in mind that almost the entire story takes places within the ranks of an army regiment -- everyone is wearing the exact same uniform! And yet he manages to make the characters still look unique even when they're all marching in formation. Really an impressive feat!

Obviously, a lot of the book's structure and theme owe a huge amount of debt to Crane's original. But Cuzor handles them here very smoothly and seemingly with ease. As I said, I haven't read any other adapations, but I am familiar with other adaptations from Classics Illustrated and similar lines, and I am nearly 100% they don't do as good a job relaying the story as Cuzor does here. If you're already a fan of the story, this is certainly a worthy addition to your library, and if you've never read the original but are curious about it, I'd also highly recommend this version.

The book, as I said, came out in May under the Abrams Comics Arts imprint so it should be readily available from your favorite book seller. The paperback retails for $19.99 US and the hardcover for $25.99 US.