WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Book: Saga Volume 1

Writer: Brian K. Vaughan

Artist: Fiona Staples

Published: 2012 (Image Comics)

This sentence, written on a page dominated by a pair of ram-human hybrids who are fighting winged people for a planet on a different plant – these particular ram-humans have just busted through a wooden rocket ship to travel with their rogue pacifist ram-son who fell in love and married and just had a kid with a rogue not-quite-as-calm winged deserting soldier – and –

“To be continued!”

AND I DON’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT. GAH.

Okay. But you got all that about a galactic war, right? The war has been outsourced to different planets so now it sprawls across the galaxy and these humanoid robots with TV heads are the main forces and they’re chasing the rogue couple because they deserted a prison and they’re not supposed to have kids. They want the kid for SOMETHING THAT I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YET GAH.

I will keep harping on this NOT HAVING THE NEXT BIT OF THE STORY until I can check out the next bit from the Library because it’s the only thing I didn’t like about this story. The war storyline is handled well in how it shows how all-consuming and wearyingly normal this lifestyle has become; it also adds urgency and desperation to the couples’ escape. They don’t know if they’ll ever actually find a safe place.

AND NEITHER DO I RIGHT NOW.

Ahem. The art is awesome; strong lines and bright colors that don’t compromise subtlety of shading or expression. There’s some weird-ass stuff in here, like the TV-head robot monarchy, and the ghost of a girl who got killed by a landmine and is now pink and legless with entrails hanging down from her torso. She’s the planet native that helps the couple and their baby find the rocket ship; she’s a total teenager with a good heart and sarcasm. My favorite mix. And a spider-lady assassin who was chasing the couple was probably the creepiest image. Like a centaur only with spider and boobs. Yeah.

Really great start to a story, very seamless blend of personal and political world crises and how they depend on each other, and I want more, dammit! Sigh. I guess I’ll be patient. This is worth digging into the catalogue and waiting list.

Note: My boyfriend points out that this writer (although not the same artist) wrote Y: The Last Man, which is out in its full incarnation and is just as weirdly wonderful ride as Saga will hopefully be.

British stories aren't afraid to get weird

Book: Best English Short Stories II

Authors: various (edited by Giles Gordon and David Hughes)

Published: 1990 (Norton) (collection)

Pages: 332

At work, a person in the break room saw me reading this during lunch and asked, “Are you reading that because you have to or because you want to?”

Dear readers, I am happy to report that for about a year and a half now, I have not read a book that I didn’t want to read. Continuing that trend, these short stories don’t make me question my choices.

It’s a decent array of contemporary-ish short fiction from British people, although none of them slapped me in the face with their Britishness. Which I appreciated. A good story is a good story, especially the beginning one that was about a Jewish man who was in a concentration camp and since he was young and strong the guards made him work cutting the hair of the women and children who came through. It ends on a hopeful echo that’s a handy metaphor for him reclaiming that part of his life. (Spoiler alert: He gives his daughter a haircut that was the opposite of all the other haircuts he had ever given.)

The stories go from your standard lit-fic meditation on an alcoholically crumbling marriage to a ghost story about a dead World War I soldier trying to make friends with the girl who now lives in his house to how a man uses driving lessons to relieve himself of the guilty burden of keeping his dying male lover company in a hospice.

That one (“Baby Clutch”) was another favorite of mine. It was slantingly confessional – the protagonist never said anything direct about his feelings, but he over-described stuff like how he learned to shift in a way that showed how he was trying to distract himself and make himself better for his lover at the same time.  

Also, some English people aren’t afraid to get weird by writing about skeleton whores, Jewish doctors with shifting names, and how a love of geology can prove you innocent of murder. Yeah!

Had to? Hell no. Wanted to? Yes! Bookshelf!  

Little Brain rides again

Book: Fury

Author: Salman Rushdie

Published: 2001 (Modern Library)

Did you guys know Salman Rushdie is funny? I sure as hell didn’t. But he is!

This is a lot like Humbolt’s Gift in that it’s the downward-y spiral of a rich guy with an ex-wife and a weird way of earning a living in an iconic American city. Malik Solanka, however, carries the extra weight of being a British ex-pat who gave up an academic life to make dolls, one of which is called 

Little Brain and becomes a cultural icon after starring in BBC history shows.

Also, murder. Murder was in Humbolt, too, but only on the fringe. Solanka here winds up into blinding rages that he can’t control or remember and when he hears about young women getting strangled around town, he’s really scared that it’s him. It’s not (oops, spoiler), but Rushdie does a great job of using third person limited perspective to hint at unreliable narration that slowly unravels tension until it’s gone and some frat boys did it. You’re as relieved as Solanka is when it’s proven that he didn’t do it.

The murder thing is a big surprise – but it makes surprising sense when you think about how Solanka’s let his life go out of control and when Rushdie incrementally reveals just how much has gone to shit for him.

Solanka goes on philosophical monologues about the state of America too but they’re hilarious because A. he doesn’t have the indignation that a native has that all this shit is actually affecting him, and B. he uses old arguments to back up pop culture rants instead of the other way around.

So anyway eventually through a nymphet wanna-be and a new doll he gets his creative groove back and starts another story phenomenon through a constantly evolving web-based sci fi story-building world, and he gets to reunite with his son. Earned happy endings? Sure!

Again, this is a Book I Picked Up In Place of the Famous One I Actually Wanted to Read, aka The Satanic Verses for Rushdie. I believe I will pick that up and see what all the fuss is about. Eventually. (You guys, I fell off the no-new-to-me-books wagon so hard during the Friends of the Library’s book sale. My car is now unofficially a bookmobile.)    

And we shall have peace

Book: Siddhartha

Author: Herman Hesse

Published: 1951 (New Direction)

Pages: 152

Q: How do you find happiness?

A: Live simply.

That’s it. Maybe you could listen to the river – that really helps. So does being a shallow materialistic rich guy for a couple decades so you can remember what that’s like and appreciate how much better the simple stuff makes you feel.

That worked for Siddhartha, son of an Eastern holy man who rejected all teachings because he found words meant nothing so therefore all teachings meant nothing and what he felt meant everything. He goes off to join a religious order, then falls into materialism when he goes off by himself, and finally finds peace helping an old man paddle a raft across a river because that puts him in touch with the earth. That’s where he finds true happiness.

It’s a fable, told with very pointed dialogue and formal language structure and time that melts away in a sentence. I knew this, and I put off reading this because of it, and that was a dumb reason. A less dumb reason was I didn’t want to find out that you have to be still and calm and give up yourself to find yourself. I don’t want to start agreeing with that and am being completely 100% serious when I say that my nervous tics and preoccupations make me feel human. I want my meaning of life to be as loud as possible.

But that turned out to be another dumb worry too. Siddhartha’s ultimate peace is based on, and I’m paraphrasing here, noticing how awesome everything is and being super-psyched about it and using it to enjoy life without unnecessary superficial crap that secretly or not-so drags us down.

And he’s totally human, guys. Like, when he meets his young son and takes him in after his mother dies, the son acts like a total brat and eventually runs off and Siddhartha goes after him but then the raft dude says, “That’s how you started to find your way, right? Leaving your dad’s?” It hurts like a bastard, but Siddhartha recognizes the truth of that and lets him go.

None of it’s easy but it’s all worth it in the end. I really like that message.

Note on copy of book: I’ve no idea where this one came from. It looks exactly like the type my high school AP English teacher had in a set on her bookcase as one of the extra books we could choose from to do some sort of project about, and a fellow APer said Siddhartha was really good, so it’s possible… but my boyfriend, double English and Philosophy graduate that he is (also Library Science, y’all! He had me at “So, I’m a librarian.”), also said that. Possibly I bought it cheap and used after talking about it with him. I DON’T KNOW, and that sort of bothers me. But not enough to keep it off my bookshelf. 

The ABCs of LARP

Book: Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms

Author: Ethan Gilsdorf

Published: 2009 (Lyons Press)

Pages: 293

If you can tell me what LARP means and use it in a sentence that describes why the participants get angry when you call their events Renaissance Fairs, then you have graduated from this book before opening its pages. Don’t worry about reading it.

As for the rest of you – who the hell are you and how did you find this blog?!

I kid. But not by much. I’ve only gotten geekier since high school, so none of this surface-level dive into role-playing games, fantasy literature, Lord of the Rings tourism, and Dragon*Con was any sort of news whatsoever. If you’ve ever wondered about any of this stuff but neither you nor any of your friends are into it, eh, this would be a good very basic starting point so you can go into your local comic book shop and know how to tell them to teach you more.

I don’t really like the writing style. Gilsdorf circles around the same points (Fantasy lets people escape their boring/stressful/terrible real lives! Role-playing and tabletop games are actually good socializing! Geekery is something you grow out of except when you don’t!) over and over even when his chapter title indicated he had moved on to something else.

And oh my god he dropped the Styrofoam mace SO HARD when it game to the Geeks in Love chapter. Seriously, it was about half a page of “Here is this couple who both like nerdy things [she likes fantasy and he likes sci fi] and their shared house reflects that” before he goes back to wondering why people love disappearing into fantasy so much and never mentions the, you know, actual LOVE STORY of the two people who were geekily in love. That would’ve been SO COOL to hear about. Maybe I’m biased but geeky love stories are the BEST, y’all. They’re about smart people connecting and coupling over complex things, and –

But we don’t get any of that.

He does distinguish between fantasy and sci fi; although he doesn’t talk about the latter too much and the future will always have much more of my heart than the past, it was refreshing to acknowledge the real differences and not just do the thing that every retail bookstore does and smushing them together.

He fails at the personal connection thing, though. His D&D younger days keep coming up, in valid exploration of how he used that to feel powerful in the wake of his mother’s incurable brain aneurism, but then he can never decide if he should outgrow it or the Lord of the Rings obsession that he uses as an excuse to explore New Zealand. His girlfriend kind of wants him to grow up, but maybe that’s not all she wants, he doesn’t really know, so they stay together but not happily and it’s all Frodo’s fault? I guess? He’s not clear about that at all and it pops up randomly and awkwardly. Much like those adverbs.

It’s weirdly condescending for a self-proclaimed one of the tribe, and he always sounds so self-conscious and like he’s trying to find a genuine reason to laugh at all this and dismiss it as ridiculous. BUT THE GEEKERY IS TOO STRONG and it’s getting too mainstream to call any of this weird anymore.

Ahem. It mostly made me want to go to Dragon*Con so I could write better than he did about that experience. I COULD MEET DARTH VADER, Y’ALL.

Gothic daddy issues

Book: Heart-Shaped Box

Author: Joe Hill

Published: 2007 (Harper)

Pages: 351

If we’re going on Fiction as a Psyche-Revealer (and it totally is), Joe Hill has daddy issues.

Let’s get the probably-haunted elephant out of the way by mentioning that Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son and writes on the same sort of subjects/themes – more mention of that really soon, I promise. But right now I just want to tell you that none of the father figures in this book are short of psychologically deranged.

Okay. So, Jude’s an aging rock star who buys a dead man’s suit and ends up getting himself and his latest girlfriend haunted until they travel back to the lady who sold them the suit, then back to Jude’s long-fled home in Louisiana, chased the whole time by the stepfather of the girl Jude dated before his current girl.

SPOILER PARAGRAPH: It was the stepfather’s suit, and it looks like at first the former girl committed suicide after Jude dumps her because she’s depressed, but really she was getting ready to write Jude about how the stepdad (a professional hypnotist) hypnotized her and did all sort of ooky abuse to her and her big sister knew and encouraged it and even offered her own daughter up for it. Jude and his current girl basically have to fumble their way into figuring out how to open a portal to the beyond so the abused girl could come back and pull her stepdad back for revenge and destruction in the underworld. END SPOILER PARAGRAPH. Pretty much.

Hill wastes no time getting to the action. Jude was being haunted by seriously page five, and once the stepdad ghost crept on the scene, he took no time at all to keep their lives at a screaming hell until they manage to beat him back like a week and a five-state road trip later. It’s quick but works; the characters flesh out on the move. I like how Jude called his girlfriends nicknames based on where they come from (Florida was the former, Georgia was the current), and I love that he has dogs he’s named after John Bonnom from Led Zeppelin and Angus what’s-his-name (AC/DC) and that the dogs are a big part of their protection but don’t turn into furry mcguffins. Also, I loved that burning the suit does jack shit.

The ending is tied up too neatly in that prologue of generic good quiet life, and none of the story had an extra touch of weird humanity that made me love it, but as mentioned on the AV Club of Hill’s comic series “Lock and Key,” he leaves you with at least one image that will make it a little difficult to go to sleep in a dark, empty, shadow-ridden apartment. This time it was the creepy old guy’s scribbled-out eyes.

Right now, I’m putting it on my bookshelf, but when I run out of room, it will be one to get weeded. 

Not quite Joan of Arc

Book: Joan Books I-III

Author/illustrator: Yoshikazu Yasuhiko

Pages: 579 total

Published: originals in 1995-1996, English translations in 2000 (Comics One)

Joan of Arc’s story is excellent to read when you want to latch on to someone else’s higher purpose and also swords. Although it’s got all the same details, this is not Joan of Arc’s actual story in these three manga volumes, and I spent most of my reading time wondering why.

Emil is a lot like Joan, in that she comes from the same town and grew up with the same stepdad and dresses like a boy and goes in her stepdad’s place to advance the same cause – only this time it’s a more muddled conflict between the King and the Dauphine of France instead of just France vs. England, so not only does Emil have a finer point of ideology to hang her conviction on, she also has a harder time figuring out who’s on her side for the King.

I would’ve enjoyed this so much more if it had either been a straight history of Joan of Arc or Emil finishing Joan’s crusade through her own completely different story. Instead, both stories get watered down and smushed together into a half-assed reincarnation journey that was frustrating mostly because Emil knew exactly how Joan’s worked out but does the same thing anyway hoping for pretty much the same result only not quite so burn-y at the end. My favorite part was when the ghost/spirit of Joan calls this out and is all, “Why’d you come to Orleans, dumbass? I sent you on this mission to get it done, not get you killed like me!”

It’s still exciting and a quest for justice against a Dauphin sporting the worst ‘80s-villian bowl-cut/fringe combo this side of a Very Special Episode, with exacting political intrigue and battles and stuff. But then she gets sentenced to burn at the stake (gee, I wonder who could’ve helped her prevent that…), and right as they’re tying her up, the stake is struck by lightning and the dauphin sees an effigy of Joan (‘s ghost? Spirit?) burning, and that’s it. He gives in to Emil, surrenders his rebellion, waits for his dad to die before trying to be king again (according to the prologue).

The art is gorgeous watercolor with colors that can contrast so much better than I ever thought of water colors being able to, all contained within long, ominous inked outlines. But sometimes in quarter profiles a person will blatantly have only one eye – like, the other one wasn’t even sketched in shadow or anything – and the speech bubbles don’t look like they were changed to accommodate the English translations so that makes for odd deciphering once in awhile.

I read this series a LOT quicker than I thought I would, so I can bring them back to the anime club my boyfriend heads on Wednesday nights and put them back on his Free Manga!! cart for The Teenagers to discover and give a good home.