helpful snowman: Recent Episodes
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Food shows and a food show and some guests and why my mom has no time for Alton Brown’s theater kid nonsense.
It’s Halloween, so we cover the rest of the Goosebumps series, all the stuff we didn’t get to. Plus, stick around for a bonus review that…WORMED its way in because I’m stupid and counted wrong.
Micro books from the Goosebumps Haunted Library Thrillogy. Hey, they’re not THAT micro. They’re a good size.
We finally get a scary grandma in this Goosebumps version of a Choose From Many Ways to Die Adventure.
The Bone Chillers series, the only books guaranteed to change the temperature of your skeleton, leaving the rest of your body unaffected. Many resources were put towards verifying this claim. Don’t argue. It’s sciencetific.
A ghost writer ghostwrites the scariest book of all time. Unfortunately, we don’t get to read that book.
The Spinetinglers series, the books meant to tingle a certain part of your anatomy. Less dirty than it sounds.
The Are You Afraid of the Dark books series asks us if we’re afraid of the Canadian darkness.
It Watches in the Dark by Jeff Strand brings us the most likely successor to the Goosebumps throne. And hopefully the treasure room that I assume goes along with it. I’m pulling for you, Jeffy. Or Strandy. Whatever you prefer.
All of the books in the series of Bonechillers, books meant to affect the temperature of your bones. This was a serious medical problem in the 90s.
Be careful what you wish for…especially if you wish for a novelization of a TV show based on a novel.
Tiny Town Terror is our first Deadtime Story, and it features a hobo/killer doll with the power to create life. Yep. This children’s novel addresses homelessness and slaps god right in the face.
Graveyard School is a Bumpoff series that DEMANDS further exploration. This MAY be the origin of people eating your pets and that whole thing. I mean, it isn’t, let’s be real, but as far a trying to boost the presence of this show in algorithms, IT MAY BE.
Slime Lake is possibly the slimiest lake of all time, but nothing compares to the sliminess of a corporate takeover of Slime Lake!
Goosebumps return with Monster Blood! The slime that is apparently what pumps in the veins of monsters.
Stay out of the basement. Please. I’m begging you. I’m being smothered in this family. I need my space. Just stay out of this godforsaken basement!
We deviate from the main Goosebumped path and into Strange Matter: Bad Circuits. Killer robot versus fear bomb. Plus, the greatest villain, Frank Dunk.
The deadest of dead houses greets us In Goosebumps 1, Welcome to the Dead House! It’s dead!
Here we are, another Podoween, and it’s time for the big reveal! Oh, wait, I already revealed this is Goosebumps year like ten times? Well, okay. This is the OFFICIAL reveal, you pedants.
Gambling, smoking, gun shootering, and maybe a little naughty kaiju? It’s Helpful Snowman’s Bachelor Party!
In which I realized I blew it and did a boring podcast on accident instead of doing a boring podcast on purpose. I followed the money, made sure to go the other direction, and now we’re here.
Thanks to Seanbaby, we have a collection of Hostess ads featuring your favorite Twink. ie.
Top GunThe Kenny Loggins still slaps, the flying parts are pretty good, but man…I don’t know about this one, guys.
This isn’t one of those reviews that’s like, “He follows her INTO THE BATHROOM!? #NotOKAY!
I mean, I get it, following a woman into the bathroom in a continuing campaign to pick her up in a bar isn’t a good move, but it’s a fucking movie, flying jets around and shooting Russians(?) with missiles is also not something that real people should be doing, banging on a piano and playing Great Balls of Fire in a restaurant while people behind you are trying to eat is not something you should do, hell, riding a motorcycle without a helmet is pretty stupid, getting super sweaty playing volleyball with your best bros and then showing up at a girl’s house and telling her you plan to immediately take a shower is a real dick move, but ALSO, the individual in the instructor position of an instructor/student relationship would mean the onus is really on you to maintain a professional, non-romantic relationship, and it’s incredibly irresponsible to chase someone in your car and run a stop sign, potentially killing someone, just so you can…finish complimenting someone.
There’s really not much behavior in MOST movies that’s real-life applicable, and I’m fine with that because these are movies, not real life.
I like to judge movies based on their own reality. Top Gun is a weird heightened reality where people call each other by their call signs in real life, where you might graduate from some kind of top gun academy and be dogfighting MIGs like two days later. It’s a reality where you give someone the nickname “Maverick” and then act surprised when the person ACTS LIKE A MAVERICK.
So while a bunch of the stuff in here isn’t 2024 real-world behavior, I think it’s probably aight for 1986 movie world behavior.
Ahem.
Top Gun has some good highs for me, but, man, the parts where we’re not in jets are kind of a drag. The romantic subplot is just kind of meh for me. But I want to focus on my favorite aspect of the movie: the conflict between Maverick and Iceman.
If this movie were made in 2024, the two of them would definitely have a fistfight. But in 1986, Iceman didn’t like Maverick’s, well, maverick ways, he says so, and what’s great is that Iceman is mostly right!
I feel like it’s been a minute since I’ve seen a movie that works on that level, where the primary antagonist is completely correct in his criticisms, delivers them bluntly but not cruelly, and he makes the critiques because they need to be made.
Iceman is opposed to Maverick because Maverick is doing dangerous things that work for him once, but done 100 times, will fail 99 of them. You can’t run a military that way.
AND then, when the Goose stuff happens, Iceman is totally NOT a dick about it.
Again, in a modern movie, Iceman would blame Maverick, probably make some snide comment about it, and they would fistfight,
In 1986, Iceman says something nice about Goose and leaves it at that.
I REALLY liked how that conflict played out. It was realistic, and it had the core of a good conflict in a story: both people are a little bit right.
And I miss that kind of thing in movies. I miss romcoms where the second-best suitor is also a pretty good guy who is deserving of love and unfortunately just isn’t totally right for our protagonist. As opposed to the second best suitor being a tech billionaire who shoots homeless people from a helicopter for sport or whatever.
I miss sports movies where the opposing athlete isn’t an inhuman monster, but is instead a lot like our hero, just from a bit of a different background.
Censor Can we get an advisory sticker for movies that are like, “We started shooting without having fleshed out an ending and it shows”?
DreamscapeI wasn’t sure at first why I’d never heard of this one, then I figured it out when the, er, saucy scene came in. That alone would make an interesting movie, the court case and all.
The other big flaw is the miscast David Patrick Kelly, who you might know from his role clinking bottles together and telling the Warriors to come out and play.
It’s not that he’s bad, he’s great. It’s that when he’s in a movie, you instantly know something’s up, and he’s so evil you’re just like, “RUN Dennis Quaid, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!” I think it might’ve worked better if the casting was a tiny bit different, if they swapped him and George Wendt, and then the reveal would be more shocking.
The movie is about dreams, and I think dreams are fascinating.
Yes, I’m a backwards man. I don’t care for time travel stories, but dreams I’m all in.
I think most people hate dreams, and the problem is that we try and talk about dreams narratively, “this happened, then this happened, then this happened,” and that’s not really a good way to describe or talk about a dream. It’s like describing someone’s appearance from left to right instead of from top to bottom, or like describing the baseball game you saw by showing someone a program you filled out. Yes, a baseball game has hits and pitches and so on, but the linear description of those things does not capture the idea of a dream.
What’s fascinating to me about dreams is that we all have them, they can feel very real, and yet we don’t REALLY know what purpose they serve, if any. There is not a scientific consensus as to whether or not they serve a purpose and what that purpose might be. Which seems bizarre to me. There’s a lot science can’t explain, but I feel like the things that almost every person experiences almost every night are things we should know more about, study more.
That being said, I PARTICULARLY hate when a dream is inserted into a fictional narrative in order to provide some kind of context to the character or the viewer. I really fucking hate that. Because that’s not really how dreams operate, in my experience, and I think it’s a very lazy way to either provide backstory, use some interesting lighting effects, or give the character/audience hints about something without doing the heavy lifting.
RunLittle tip if you’re living a secret life: maybe don’t keep a box that serves as a timeline of newspaper clippings, basically a scrapbook confession, in your house. Maybe Marie Kondo that shit.
Road HouseThe first film about gentrification.
Nightmare on Elm Street 4Why would anyone think that you could bench press your way out of trouble with Freddy? That’s just gym bro madness.
I’m reading that this part is not as bizarre as the series in general, and that maybe the beginning of the series isn’t the strongest. So let’s hold out hope. Because while it was a tiny bit unusual, I wouldn’t call this a “bizarre” adventure. I’ve probably had weirder family dinners.
The ending on this one is good, interesting, but getting there means slogging through the well-trod beats of a DCU that is almost identical to the one we know. The thing is, if you’re not familiar with DC storylines, this will be super confusing. If you’re moderately familiar, you’ll have read these stories before. So it’s a bit of a story without an audience.
This is Crisis 23254 in this Crisis of Infinite Storylines!
Crisis of Storyline 5656: I felt shades of Tom King in this, with the integration of the trolley problem and other things like that in the story. BUT they mostly didn’t feel fleshed out, they were kind of brought up and abandoned without all feeding into the same overall story or theme. I think that’s kind of the secret of what Tom King does, his stories have discrete sections that feed into a cohesive, larger theme.
Crisis of Storyline 89723: Superman was boring. Superman being boring is, I think, the challenge of writing Superman today. You have to make him not boring. OR, you can make him boring in a way that’s charming, that simplifies a complicated world and brings comfort, but having him just be boring is not my favorite.
Crisis of Storyline 4985: At the risk of sounding like I hated the politics at play, I was rolling my eyes at a lot of the, “Lois Lane has to work twice as hard at news BECAUSE SHE’S A WOMAN!” I don’t hate the idea, but it felt like…with so much going on in this book, it was an element that felt bolted on and didn’t serve the story. I think this could easily carry its own story, I also think it could have fed into the larger thematic narrative, but it just happens.
Crisis 09435: Bruce Wayne realizing he can do things as a billionaire is not the most original idea. In fact, at this point in my life, I would LOVE to read a story about Bruce Wayne attempting to get things done as a billionaire and struggling, meanwhile his Batman-ing is getting results. A story about a Bruce Wayne who doesn’t really want to do Batman shit but is finding that, despite what he would like, to be effective, would be a twist on the story we’re seeing a lot right now.
Crisis 409587: The ending, while clever and a twist, is one you couldn’t possibly see coming until it happens. The ending really comes into play in the final 10% or so of the book, and…this is hard to describe, but I like a surprise ending that FEELS like I should’ve been able to see it coming, or that had a lot of clues that would’ve, in theory, let me put it together. I never guess endings ahead of time, I just can’t or don’t think that way, but this ending holds out so long before ramping up that it doesn’t give the reader time to feel like they could have seen any portion of it coming.
I like a lot of Mark Russell’s work, I LOVE Mike Allred’s art and was really happy to see him take this on, and it makes me wish he would do a run on Swamp Thing.
This was just not a hit for me.
author: Elle Nash
review:
I think what Elle Nash delivers that a lot of authors don’t is a very authentic version of the rural/suburban sort of trashy realism. If you grew up somewhere that is NOT a big city, you know these people, you’ve been friends with some of these people, you went to school with them, you wonder how they’re doing every so often, some of them post pictures of their kids and that’s a little scary, some of them are going through some big problems in public in a way that’s more than a little off-putting…
I think when writers from big cities and who come from that MFA writing background try to do this sort of thing, they never get it right. It always has that feel of like, I don’t know, a sitcom set in New York where the characters are scumbags but live in nice apartments and wear good sweaters. A lot of times if feels like the lowest class person those writers can imagine is basically the most successful person you know.
These are writers who will have a dinner scene at Cheesecake Factory to indicate how pathetic the characters are. “He didn’t even realize that taking his wife to Cheesecake Factory is pathetic!?”
I’m a non-secret Cheesecake Factory stan, by the way. We went there after our cat died, both of us were super sad and just kind of didn’t know what to do. We just ate there because it was open and there were lots of darker, more secluded booths, and that was kind of the vibe we both wanted. But also, Cheesecake Factory is fine, y’all. Nobody is pretending it’s the fanciest restaurant on earth, but if you grew up in a rural place, it may be the fanciest place in town.
Anyway.
I’ve just gotten really tired of that fake-feeling attempt at writing characters from places other than New York or LA, and I’ve gotten tired of stories of people from those places as well, and boy it does end up limiting what you can read in terms of “literary fiction” a little more than you might think.
I’m not into the “the suburbs, now that’s REALLY scary” kind of thing that most people who don’t live in suburbs want to write about.
Good thing Elle Nash is around, eh?
Up to now-ish I’ve been having a pretty good time with Superman and have been like, “Why did they kill this guy off? Things are going great!”
Then I read Panic in the sky.
Panic in the Sky would be a really good, bonkers crossover with Brainiac taking over Warworld and trying to crash it into Earth, but the problem is that there is SO MUCH going on and SO LITTLE to care about.
I wish I would write to DC and be like:
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Nobody thinks Guy Gardener is awesome. He has red hair fashioned by the same barber as Moe from the Three Stooges. His last name is Gardener instead of, I don’t know, BloodAxe. He’s dressed like Pat Benatar becoming a Green Lantern. He’s not badass just because he says sassy things.
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Why would you try and make a love story between Supergirl (who is just some weird shapeshifter blob woman) and a monster man gladiator guy? Both of them are pretty much blank slates as characters, why make them in love? What does that gain anyone?
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Can we please stop with Gangbuster, who is just a lesser Batman who raided the Spaceballs costume department?
This guy is so boring. And the graphic design of his logo, clearly a throwaway design from the company that made DARE t-shirts in the 90’s, is terrible.
- With all the flashbacks going on here, why don’t you give us a single flashback to Lex Luthor’s brain being in a cloned body and then pretending to be his own son? You don’t think that’s important information, but every other panel is someone going, “Gosh, I remember how you helped me out during that whole mess with the mole people or whatever, see issue #585.” Not one nod to this developing, insane, soap opera plot where Lex Luthor is also apparently affecting an Australian accent to throw everyone off the scent?
I’m not totally on the “Only thing to do now is kill him” train, but I can see why Superman fans, and especially non-fans of comics, would be pretty bored with the boy in blue at this point.
My favorite part of this book is that Thorkell is sad or angry every time there’s not a fight or he’s left out of a fight or someone says, “Looks like the war’s going to be over soon.” He just immediately gets pissed or sullen or has big feelings about not being able to chop heads off all day long.
Do you think Thorkell’s first name is Steve? Steve Thorkell? And the Urkels named their kid after a viking warrior?
I wouldn’t hate that addition to the Family Matters lore. Someone could probably hit the Family Matters wikipedia page and make that edit, and the chances someone would know it was wrong seem very low. And wouldn’t the person who knew for sure it WAS wrong have no real business on the Family Matters wikipedia page? Wouldn’t they know everything already?
That’s the thing, internet, wikipedia is supposed to be for us amateurs to just sort of work out what feels like the right ideas are. Since when did it become this legitimate house of facts? What is this, school?
I think the me of 15 years ago could’ve probably eaten human flesh to survive in a that-or-death situation.
I think the me of today is a little bit older, and not at all wiser, just a little less willing to struggle that hard to survive. What, I’m gonna eat a guy so that I can survive an ordeal and then go back to WORK!? No thanks!
The Catbus has tiny lil balls. This is the kind of attention to detail that wins awards for animation, damn it.
Also, the Catbus having tiny lil balls suggests that the Catbus is able to procreate with a female Catbus. OR a bus. OR a cat.
Probably the biggest plus of riding the Catbus is that the strong smell of cat pee can be assumed to be from the bus itself as opposed to another passenger.
I feel like, “Dying with your sword in your hand is the only way to get to Valhalla” is the Viking version of, “Working yourself until you’re retirement age and therefore no good to the company anymore, at which point you can live without working, provided you have made no mistakes and had no major misfortunes over the last 50 years.”
Thorkill, Thors, and Thorfinn.
How many people had names based on Thor?
Do you think “Thor” was like the “Gunner” of the day, and it eventually became an old man name? Or did the relatively short lifespan of vikings probably make those sort of name trends a little less obvious?
You know what’s hilarious? All this stuff around the internet of living like ancient peoples because our modern society is full of toxins and whatever.
Do people not have the ability to google the typical viking lifespan? Because it was like 40 years. The average human lifespan today is in the 70s.
“People were so much healthier. You didn’t see the vikings using walkers.” I mean, yeah, because the chances of a viking living to age 60 was almost nil.
I feel like the cover of this book is the biggest lie it tells, and this is a book in which toys come to life and start attacking kids with actual lasers.
The character on the front is clearly meant to be none other than Charles Lee Ray, aka Chucky the doll who kills people for increasingly opaque reasons as the series goes on.
However, this character is meant to be Hurley the Hobo, a tiny figure for a model train set, who is, as his name would indicate, a hobo.
Why does this hobo look like Chucky? I guess because that indicates scariness waits within the pages.
But this isn’t really the first face I think of when I think of “crazed hobo,” the chubby, but also evil, face of a child.
By the way, we’re talking about a hobo, here, not a “person experiencing homelessness.” This is a fictional character with a bindle, not a dude living in his car because he lost his job last week. Hurley never had a job. He’s a figure for a model town. Who, also, is insane and is able to imbue other toys with sentience. Really, his having a home is far from the most important thing about him.
Is it super progressive or regressive to have a hobo in your model train town? On one hand, he’s basically a decoration, but on the other hand, literally every figure in the town is a decoration. It’s not like the guy with the top hat and monocle is highly respected by a child with a model train while Hurley the Hobo exists to be pointed and laughed at.
author: Makoto Yukimura
name: Peter
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/25
date added: 2024/03/25
shelves:
review:
I’m not the biggest swords and sandals guy, a genre which I feel also includes other footwear, such as snowboots in this case. Was Braveheart what really goosed this whole thing with two groups of guys running across a field at each other for like hours and hours?
I mean, there are great examples, fun books and movies about this stuff, stone cold classics, but overall, if you tell me there’s going to be a lot of swordfighting, I’m usually uninterested.
I have my doubts about whether the swordfighting you see in movies was super common in ye olden days. Like, was there a lot of perry, thrust, block, kind of shit? Or was it more like a bunch of guys running and stabbing or cutting each other with very little real experience or technique?
Which is fine for these sorts of stories! Drawn out swordfights are usually pretty boring, IMO. Unless they’re set in a chandelier factory and we can have lots of swinging on chandeliers, or in a chandelier exhibit at the museum, or something like that, know what I mean?
How were there not space chandelier lightsaber duels in Star Wars? They were always fighting in basically a space warehouse. How boring is that? I guess there were not guardrails, so that’s something, but surely chandelier technology would be amazing by then, like a chandelier that’s a drone and flies overhead, bringing light along with you into each room you enter.
I guess I should mention that there were SOME lightsaber duels not in space warehouses, and those were always TOO not in space warehouses and on like a lava planet with explosions and EVERYTHING happening. And yet, still kinda boring.
It’s all the chandelier, man. That’s the key. You want that little bit of intrigue without going overboard, which only a chandelier can provide.
I really enjoy that in this world, an evil witch is basically just trying to staff her business. She forces people into servitude, their lives kind of suck, but it’s mostly because she’s trying to run an otherwise legitimate bath house that caters to monsters.
There should be a lot more stories like this, someone building a tale around a supernatural world or heavy, weird elements, but in the service of doing something super normal.
Vampire temp office where they provide overnight employees for stuff?
Ghosts who can pass through walls and make excellent home inspectors as a result?
Mummies who go on the teaching circuit, lecturing about ancient history, aka their day-to-day lives?
My preference would definitely be Working Blobs, a movie about blobs who live on a farm and devour pests while leaving crops alone. Sort of like barn cats, but, you know, pink and probably glow in the dark.
There we go: Monster Farm. Monsters could use their monster-y skills to run a successful farm. Especially when it’s pumpkin patch season.
Oops, sorry, got to go. Phone’s ringing, and it’s almost certainly Hollywood calling.
Dumb and DumberMost underrated part:
“Hey, guys! Oh, Big Gulps, huh? All right. Well, see you later!”
Quiz LadyWhen Sandra Oh got hit by a car in the opening minutes, I was like, “Oh shit…is this gonna be one of those movies where the one sister is a party animal and the other is a bookworm and they learn a little something from each other?”
But the movie kind of rights itself once it has a story to pursue and we end up with a good comedy with an earned emotional moment or two that’s, well, not some piece of shit about some lady who’s supposed to be in her late 20’s and can’t get her life together and learns a bullshitty lesson like, “And then I realized that maybe it’s not cool to have a toddler hold your lit cigarette while you’re pumping gas,” and her sister isn’t like, “I guess I can drink half a glass of white wine once a month and not do my taxes or something.”
I always hate that. The responsible sister is fine! She doesn’t need to be on TV! She doesn’t need to be super rich! She’s content! Jesus Christ, do you know how few people are content?! Leave her alone! She doesn’t need to learn a lesson. She’s a millennial who will never own a home, her life doesn’t need an ill-conceived road trip to the Wigsphere to fix her. That’s such a Hollywood idea: people who don’t pursue their silver screen dreams are cowards who are unhappy. No! Lots of people don’t want to do that stuff. I know you think it’s gross that some people are happy working as accountants for small organizations and having a small family and owning a home in, let’s say, Omaha. But it’s true. Face your fear, Hollywood: we don’t all want to be you.
Ahem, anyway, solid movie that doesn’t go those dumb places.
Kiki’s Delivery ServiceFor a movie with almost zero plot, it delivers.
Fuck you, cute movie, cute review.
It’s also kind of the best Spider-Man movie. Person trying to use powers loses faith in ability to do good, loses powers, regains them to help someone in crisis high above the city.
Extra points for hitting the comedy point I was salivating for, when the guy is like, “That’s MY broom!” when his broom is on TV. That man and I, we are the same. Just hoping to one day see a broom we use sometimes on TV. That level of fame is right where you want to be.
Cat + Gamer, Volume 2It turns out that cat drawings are also very appealing to me.
Reminder to self: Write a post-apocalyptic novel where all the cats suddenly vanished overnight. Society collapses. People good at drawing cats become insanely wealthy and powerful. Cat photos become the new currency.
Giganto MaxiaI’m not as into wrestling, but Kentaro Miura’s artwork NEVER disappoints. What can I say, I’m in love. If I was head over heels for someone and they loved wrestling and we had to watch wrestling every week (is that how often wrestling happens?), that’d seem like no biggie.
Isn’t it funny how when you’re young, someone liking a shitty band is a dealbreaker, at least in your head, and then when you get older, you’re like, “Who gives a shit?”
Some may feel it’s a lowering of standards. I feel like it’s acknowledging reality. Because, in reality, if some hot babe approached me at age 20 and was like, “I’m a huge wrestling fan, we will have to watch it for two hours every night, however, check out this hot bod,” I would’ve been like, “Yep, I can see a future for us together.”
If some lady now is like, “Hey, I love something you don’t, but we can date for the next 10 years and maybe have like 4 or 5 minor conflicts in that entire timespan,” I’d be like, “SOLD.”
So I guess what I’m saying is that Kentaro Miura is my hot babe who is obsessed with wrasslin’, and I am more than mature enough to deal with that.
I Luv Halloween vol. 1This book has a BIG speech balloon problem. There’s no consistent order, so sometimes it’s whichever balloon is higher goes first (regardless of left/right orientation), and sometimes it’s left/right, regardless of height.
There’s very little more frustrating in reading comics than reading a speech balloon, being a little confused, then reading the next speech balloon, realizing you read them in the wrong order, and then repeating that process throughout the entire book.
I have my preferences for speech balloon order, but I can hang with anything so long as it’s pretty consistent. So you can either engage in the mysterious art of making it super intuitive, which is a mastery of the form, OR you can make it super consistent, which creates the same effect, albeit while making some sacrifices in the art here and there.
Which is, I think, what was going on with this book: they had a SUPER talented artist with an interesting style, and that overrode all other considerations for the book. I kind of get it, but at the same time, each panel of this book was like my own personal Memento moment where I was reconstructing the story’s order all the time, so the art was awesome, but it felt like it was a beautiful mural on the side of a porta potty.
That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, Vol. 1This is fine, a little like a sitcom pilot where it seems like the idea is still finding its footing.
The premise is pretty good, a guy is reincarnated into a fantasy world, but instead of being like a warlord or a skilled elf or whatever, he’s reincarnated as a slime, which is generally a weak, ineffectual creature in fantasy settings, to my understanding.
It’s kind of funny to watch a slime sort of bumble through a bunch of situations, but maybe it’s just not quite funny enough for me.
Whoever came up with fighting slimes in RPGs is both a genius and a terrorist. It’s super simple, so that makes it pretty easy for game designers, but my god does it get boring fast.
Someone needs to make a game called World of Slimes where you fight ONLY slimes. You level up and it gets easier and easier to the point of slimes being a complete annoyance who really can’t possibly kill you, and yet, still more slimes.
Yes, someone should definitely take the time to program a game because I think it has a funny premise.
UzumakiProbably Junji Ito’s best in terms of being one long, coherent story where all the pieces fit together and things go from bad to worse to worse to worser to worstest.
Something Junji Ito does really well is diving into the horror where the folks involved are deliriously happy. The characters who are evil or who are transformed or whatever are going through these nightmarish things, but it’s mostly, sort of, something they WANT to do, and I think that’s a scary concept that’s rarely explored.
In slashers, for example, it doesn’t seem that Jason is particularly tickled by killing, or Michael Myers. Freddy is the closest, and even he seems like he’s in it for revenge, and at some point, he’s like, Okay, time to finish this kid off. Freddy knows what he’s doing is evil, where the characters in a Junji Ito horror comic seem to often not see themselves as the bad guys at all, and instead they’re like, “I know this looks freaky, but it’s amazing, my life is much better now!”
It’s a strange kind of horror, but I like it. It solves a lot of motive problems you see in horror movies where we’re limited to the concepts of revenge or “he just kills people because he kills people.”
Sneeze: Naoki Urasawa Story CollectionIt’s always good to prepare for what you would do if you met The Beatles…
Not that it’s likely I’ll travel back in time, but you never know.
I’d definitely turn it into a money-making scheme, have them sign a pack of notecards or something? A bunch of vinyl records?
Maybe I’d try and figure out the deal with Yoko Ono. There’s been a recent spate of Yoko cultural reevaluation that I’m not really buying into. There have been a lot of artsy types who didn’t get their due because they were ladies, but I’m not so sure that Yoko Ono A) hasn’t got her due and B) has produced a body of work in need of analysis.
She definitely got some unfair blame for breaking up the Beatles (even if she played a part, Lennon made the choice, ultimately). But we all live our versions of that: My mom still blames me for bottle rockets that were shot off in the garage, and it was DEFINITELY my brother, and why he won’t fess up to it 30 years later is very baffling to me.
Maybe I’d ask the Beatles to drive me to my house, witness my brother shooting off those bottle rockets, and then write a song about it, or add a liner note in a record so that my mom would HAVE to buy my side of the story.
Knights of Sidonia 1This is a book with lots of good ideas, and probably the least good idea is people fighting monsters in mech suits, and it seems to be a primary focus.
I don’t know where that leaves me and this book, but it’s not looking good.
I do like the idea of mech suits fighting things, though. It’s incredibly impractical, which is why it’s awesome. Maybe it’s because we live in the age of drones, so it’s easy to be like, “Why would you do all the work to make a bipedal, humanoid robot when you could just have a weird lil helicopter airplane guy blow things up?
But there’s a good answer: Because nobody wants to watch that, stupid. You little dumbass. Idiot. DumDum.
後遺症ラジオ 1 [Kouishou Radio 1]The stories are super short and mostly not connected, except when they are, I dunno. I guess that’s not what I was expecting, which, from the book’s description, seems fair? Because the description doesn’t, you know, describe?
I get the idea of doing a book description that is already weird, leading people into the weirdness early, but I think this book would probably attract its audience and confuse fewer people if it had a description. On one hand, I, as someone who screws around with writing things, can appreciate the idea of making this a cursed object in every possible way, including a description that appears to have been written by some kind of ghoul. On the other hand, as a reader, it’s a bit of a waste of my time when I end up on books that aren’t going to be to my taste, and it was difficult to learn this fact via the provided info.
Tomahawk Angel Volume 1There are monsters, and we don’t know how. That’s…about all we get in this first volume.
Amnesia is not my favorite plot trick. It has its uses, god knows, but it’s just so vague and I think it should only be used briefly, not as the setup for a whole thing. I understand it’s helpful because then we, the reader, can have everything explained like we’re idiots, and it still feels sort of natural. But I think I’d prefer an alternative method more often.
You know what I would like, though? A machine that would cause you to forget specific books or TV shows or whatever. Then you could watch them again for the first time! Wouldn’t that be great?
I mean, sometimes it would suck, because sometimes I think I’d like the memory of watching something more than watching it again. But DAMN would it be handy if you cheated and watched a new episode of Bake Show before your partner.
What’s the protocol for you all in that scenario? I’m of the “just fess up” school of thought. It’s really not THAT big a deal, it’s not like I’m going to be furious or anything. I’d rather you just tell me you had a moment of weakness and watched a show without me rather than pretending like everything is happening for the first time. OR, the only other option, you must never admit you watched it before. Never, ever. Those are really the only two choices.
神さまの言うとおり弐 1 [Kami-sama no Iu toori Ni 1]One of my favorite genres, people trapped in a bad situation, looking for a way out.
My favorite part was probably that the one loser guy gets picked up by a robot, and halfway to the destination, realizes he got on the robot wrong, so he’s the only one facing backwards while everyone else is facing the right way. Perhaps this will be an important story point later, but I’m hopeful it’s simply that this dumbass did something that seemed reasonable at the time, then he realized it was all wrong.
I felt very seen.
ワンパンマン 2 強さの秘訣 [One Punch Man 2: Tsuyosa no Hiketsu]It only took me eight years to get back to this one. Worth the trip.
I laughed several times at this one, it’s just so goddamn absurd, and I don’t know why, but something about the main character, the most dangerous man on the planet, also looking so silly just really pleases me.
Zom 100: Bucket List of the DeadVolume 5There’s always that one guy in the zombie movie who can’t just hang out at the mall and enjoy this new life where you never have to go to work again.
What’s with that guy?
Like the bikers in Dawn of the Dead. I guess it kind of makes sense if we assume that bikers are already, pre-zombie, living the life they want to. Maybe bikers prefer the zombie world? Maybe this is better for them? I’m not sure I really believe that, but hey, my experience with bikers is not vast, so I’m not the right person to ask. I just sort of think that even a hardened biker, if they came upon a mall with working toilets, might be like, “Whoa, hold on, boys. Maybe we should go ahead and trash EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE WHOLE WORLD and leave this place, and its functioning shitters, intact?”
Volume 6An overanalysis of this series would have to ask the question: Are zombies more interested in a naked man’s admittedly juicy ass than they are in more run-of-the-mill “foods?” Because that seems to be the implication, however it could just be that the naked man in question just enjoys displaying his juicy ass (who wouldn’t, with an ass like that!?) and is the only one insisting on repeating this trick.
My only hope is that hundreds of years from now, instead of analyzing Shakespeare, scholars are analyzing Zom 100 and getting to the root of these important questions.
Volume 7This series is just fun to read, and Akira is the person you want around during the zombie apocalypse: he absolutely refuses to have a lousy time. It’s just not in his nature. I don’t know that it’s possible for him to be a downer.
He’s definitely that friend that pulls people together, has great ideas, and makes the world a more interesting place, even when it should be horrible.
It’s the person I aspire to be: when you’re stuck in a bad situation, which in my case is waiting for a delay at an airport or something, you want to be the person others don’t mind being trapped with.
I like to make up games when I’m bored. One of my favorites is The Best Friend Game, which I made up at a baseball game because I was bored out of my goddamn mind, mostly because I was at a baseball game.
TBFG works by scanning a crowd and selecting a person who you will now be forced to be BEST friends with for the next year. You’ll be at their life events, they’ll be at yours, you’ll see them every couple of weeks. You may be a people watcher, but this game is about people scrutinizing. Every little habit, everything they’re wearing, this is all the info you have to try and base a yearlong friendship on.
Where this gets fun is your friends saying, “Ugh, no I could never be friends with someone who wears yellow shoes.” You find out your friends are goddamn weirdos who really have no business just existing in the world with everyone else.
That’s my life advice: Whenever you’re bored, make up a game. And if you’re bored while playing a game, make up your own game within the game.
WITH THE EXCEPTION OF that bullshit where someone is like, “Make cleaning the bath tub into a game! Time yourself, then see if you can beat your best time.” That is NOT a game. Working hard and then seeing if you can work harder is work, dummy.
Volume 8A funny thing about this zombie series is that it works kind of like others, but kind of backwards: Mostly, the characters go from fun activity to fun activity, and the zombies eventually show up in order to push the characters onto the next thing. I think in most series, the zombies kind of work to push characters out of comfortable, reasonable survival situations and into danger instead of pushing them onto the next item on their itinerary.
The way it’s the same, though, is that the zombies fade into the background as the series goes, really only popping up here and there as the plot requires. If you go through the early parts of The Walking Dead, the zombies are a significant threat, but as you go later, they’re really no big deal most of the time. Same here, except less emphasis on “The walking dead is us guys!” or however that was expressed.
Volume 9I learned a thing!
Apparently, people from Osaka have a reputation:
“In Japanese media, if there’s a character from the Kansai region (Osaka especially), chances are they’re the most crass character present. In stark contrast to the rest of Japan, Japanese Politeness (or even just basic concepts like decorum and “good manners”) doesn’t exist for these guys. The people themselves are portrayed as lacking any semblance of sophisticated culture, being idiotic, loud and passionate, alcoholic, gluttonous, materialistic, prone-to-violence, incredibly cheap (yet somehow always broke), and speaking with a characteristic Kansai accent instantly recognizable to native speakers of Japanese.”
Now, in Zom 100, this seems softer, that Osakans are more passionate and boisterous, not so much crass or whatever, although I guess that’s a little hard to tell when we’re talking about Osakan zombies (where’s the decorum in flesh-eating?).
It IS pretty hilarious that in this series, zombies kind of reflect their former more alive selves in some ways, which is pretty fun, and I guess if I was a zombie I’d spend most of my time not really wanting to party with other zombies, so on one hand, you’d be safe as far as me joining a big horde, but on the other, I’d be that one zombie that’s always hiding out in a room alone or whatever, which can be the most deadliest zombie of them all!
OF THEM ALL.
Volume 10My understanding of geisha stuff is not strong, and my hesitance to google it is, so I guess this is an area of Japanese culture that will remain somewhat mysterious for me, which is probably just fine.
Volume 11One of my eccentric millionaire ideas (I have many) is to create a walking pilgrimage in America like this. I love this shit, like when you have to walk towards a rock with a hole in it, eyes closed, and see if you can put your walking staff through the hole without looking, or legends about what happens if you do or don’t see your face in a reflection pool.
Some of the features of my trail:
-A heavy stone to attempt to lift as a test of strength.
-A wishing well that only accepts 20-dollar bills.
-A part that requires crossing a somewhat challenging creek, a rite of passage in rural America.
-Probably a danger zone where you try to navigate a roundabout on foot (I don’t have strong feelings about roundabouts, but I feel like Americans…let’s say they’re not at their best in roundabouts).
-A lot of pizza places along the way.
Volume 12Well, the cover got horny. Which is not unusual in the manga department, but I take umbrage with the cover being MUCH hornier than the contents.
Because if the contents aren’t going to be this graphic, then why are you making me hold a book with this facing everyone but me, causing people to be like, “Typical manga-reading pervo”?
Which is fine, I have no issue with that label, but if I’m going to get stuck with it, give me the pervo goods! Don’t force me to wear the label without even giving me the joy of perversion!
Fist of the North StarVolume 3If I had to be The Fist of [something], what would I be…?
The Fist of The Sometimes Harsh Book Reviewer?
His blows are not mighty and harm very few, but those who feel his wrath are forever haunted.
Volume 4I feel like me and my brothers do not fistfight anywhere near as often as is depicted in this series. We also weren’t competing to be the sole practitioner of a martial art, but still. I wonder how many times in history two brothers have engaged in hand-to-hand combat to the death? I know they say The Civil War was brother against brother, but that’s not literal, right?
Well:
-There was a pair of brothers who fought, and the one brother captured the other brother and took him prisoner. Seems like that probably worked out okay, probably much better than running at a Gatling gun.
-There was a pair of brothers who both gained the position of brigadier general on opposite sides. One was relieved of duty for drunkenness. That’s a rough Thanksgiving right there, you come home and your brother is not only as high a rank as you, but he fought on the winning side AND didn’t get fired for drinking.
-Oof, while we’re on that note: As cited in the book, “A Century of Wayne County, Kentucky”, brothers Anthony and William McBeath fought on opposite sides of the Civil War, Anthony for the Confederate Army, and William for the Union Army. At the end of the war, both brothers returned home the same evening, William in a “resplendent uniform of a Major in the Federal Army”, and several hours later, Anthony in “rags with a ‘taterhill’ hat.”
It looks like the closest this came was two brothers, on opposite sides, fighting within yards of each other and not realizing it until the end of the battle.
It seems they took a lot more prisoners in those days. Maybe that was the “civil” part of The Civil War, they would take prisoners and not torture them and shit, perhaps because they were often related? Perhaps also because what would that do to help? It’s not like some dude with a single shot rifle fighting in central Kentucky has any fucking idea what the Union is planning for their next big strategic move.
Volume 5Where is the mother of all these boys? And the father? Their parenting styles really should be studied.Volume 6I feel not enough emphasis is put on the fact that Ken is fistfighting a horse. I’ve had a lot of terrible ideas in my time, and trying to punch a horse is one of them thanks to Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs in which the hypothetical is asked:
Let us assume a fully grown, completely healthy Clydesdale horse has his hooves shackled to the ground while he head is held in place with thick rope. He is conscious and standing upright, but he is completely immobile. And let us assume that for some reason every political prisoner on earth (as cited by Amnesty International) will be released from captivity if you can kick this horse to death in less than twenty minutes. You are allowed to wear steel-toed boots. Would you attempt to do this?
I just looked up how many people this would be, and it’s estimated to be one million.
So I guess I’d try. Mostly because if I didn’t, I’d always wonder, right? And I feel I owe it to the prisoners to at least give it a shot. I mean, god forbid I ever meet one of them, and I’m like, “Bro, you should’ve seen this horse. My man was HUGE.”
It’s why the question is “Would you attempt to do this?” as opposed to “Would you do it?” Because the idea isn’t about your likelihood of success, it’s about whether you’d rather live with the memory of trying or not trying.
I wouldn’t enjoy attempting to kick a horse to death, and I don’t think I could possibly succeed.
But if Ken would try punching a horse just to fight his brother, I suppose I should go ahead and give it a whirl.
Attack On TitanVolume 28I finally got to read this, but I had to put the physical copy on hold because the digital was taking SO LONG to arrive from my library.
That’s right, wood pulp and ink touched my hands. I read like a peasant. This is a personal attack on the titan that is my dignity.
Volume 29Somewhere around here, this series probably gets a little too complicated for its own good.
On the other hand, gotta respect a series that tries to keep the story developing instead of the rinse/repeat cycle you see with some titles.
There’s a part of me that thinks it would be hilarious to publish a manga title, call it volume 29, and ONLY publish that volume. Set up a fake website and some summaries of other sections, but only put out 29, have the story be absolutely impenetrable, and just sort of see what happens.
This is why you should buy my books: If I become rich, I’ll do a lot of stunt publishing that’ll make the world a much more interesting place.
Volume 30The series is highly-rated at this point, and that’s a comic book effect you see on Goodreads:
It’s not because volume 30 is necessarily better than volume 10, but what happens on Goodreads is that as a series goes on, only people who like what’s happening tend to stick with it this long. You’ll get a ton of people who kinda like it, maybe, sorta, for the first 10 or so volumes, but when you’ve got a 34-volume series, even completionists will drop off somewhere before they hit the 30’s.
The result is that when you hit the last quarter of a long series, you’re almost guaranteed to have pretty high ratings because you’ve weeded out anyone who isn’t going to like it long ago.
It’s not a problem with goodreads, per se, but a quirk: the later volumes of a long series will almost always have a much better rating than the earlier ones.
Which is why I’m going to break up a future novel into 34 very short, separate chapters. That way, I can finally get some decent ratings around here.
Volume 31Yeah, once we knew what was up with the massive number of gigantic titans, would we have been satisfied if they never came to life and started trampling shit? Chekov’s Hidden Army of Naked Muscle/Skin Men tells us No.
Volume 32This is the first series that has sorely tempted me to keep charts of what’s happening without completely turning me off reading the whole thing, and for that alone, it earns some stars.
Volume 33It’s so strange to review the penultimate volume of a long series like this because it’s like, “Who cares?”
Nobody is going to stop at volume 33, right? Except maybe for some maniac who, I don’t know, decides to read a bunch of series right up to the end, then save the final volumes for later in life? Which is not a terrible idea, TBH, you could probably get away with that. Maybe it’s wise to save something for later, you know? Something that gives you a reason to get up and be like, “Well, I haven’t read the last Attack on Titan yet, so I don’t know how it ends, so I guess I might as well keep going.”
The risk there is that you’ll die in some sudden unexpected way, and you’ll NEVER finish it. Although maybe thinking about how you never finished a manga series on your deathbed means you must’ve lived a life of non-major regrets, so, you know, could be a plus.
Volume 34Alright, let’s do an overall series review with no real spoilers here.
This is a really good series that is imperfect in a lot of ways.
I think it becomes a little too complicated, too many factions with too many varying goals, and because there’s a lot of different people lying to other people, it’s a bit hard to keep track of what’s happening when.
These issues are exacerbated by a few things:
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There are A LOT of characters to keep track of.
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The characters could be more distinct. I think some design choices would help Eren look less like Levi, for example, make Mikasa look more different from some characters, make Reiner and Floch look more different. Some really different hair, some more obvious nods to differentiation, some clothing choices, a scar, facial hair, all of these things would help. As an example, I never had trouble telling who Zeke was, and he has a beard and glasses. That’s enough!
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The flashbacks aren’t always easy to identify as flashbacks, and when we flash back, it’s not always easy to tell exactly where we are in the timeline. There were some charts/maps in the series early on that explained how the walled cities worked and how there were “bumps” on the outside wall that acted as their own sort of cities, and the manga sort of stepped out of the story and explained this pretty nicely. I think there was probably a way to introduce flashbacks similarly with a timeline or other device that’d make it easier to tell where we were and to know immediately that we hadn’t just changed scenes, we were in a totally different time.
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Because the story has a lot of lies built on lies, it becomes a little hard to know when it’s okay to completely dismiss plotline A (because it was just a character’s theory, a speculation, or involved something hidden from other characters), and when it’s time to move on to plotline B.
All that said, some things that I do like:
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I like that the reader is discovering the truth of this world alongside the characters. Readers don’t really know more than the characters at most points, which is a pretty big feat in a book with this much going on. It’s not 100% successful 100% of the time, but it’s mostly successful most of the time, and I really prefer this method of storytelling to the version of this that could’ve been where the reader knows a lot more than the characters, or the reader is always two steps ahead of the characters.
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I like that the story does evolve and get more complex as it goes. I can see some people reading this and yearning for the simpler conflict of humans v titans from the earlier volumes, but I think when something goes on this long, it doesn’t HAVE to change, but change is earned and welcome.
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I like that the characters change to an extent, and that the series is not afraid to kill characters or really change how they operate. I think this keeps things a lot livelier. When a series has stakes, but the stakes are kind of a secret handshake between the reader and the author that say, “Don’t worry, nobody you like is in trouble, and you will continue liking them throughout the series,” it kills a lot of the excitement and drama.
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The series really doesn’t have much bloat. Something is always happening, most of the things that need to be paid off are, and I think we reach a conclusion that wraps up what needs to be wrapped up.
I understand there are lots of people who are not happy with the ending of this series, but I think it works, and I’m pretty satisfied.
I don’t usually enjoy an ending like this that’s a bit abstract and where the plan didn’t make a ton of sense because there are a lot of “What if this happened, what if this didn’t go as planned?” sorts of questions we’re left with. However, in this case, it works for me.
The ending and final plan have an infinite number of unknowns, and it couldn’t be masterminded perfectly, but I think what we’re seeing is a character who makes a choice and sees no option other than to play that choice out. It’s a horrible set of options, none of which have bloodless results, none of which can guarantee success, so I think our “villain” goes with the choice that he feels has the highest probability of success.
It’s super important that success for this character is defined in a pretty concrete way: a specific group of people living long, happy lives.
I think where this is mostly open to interpretation is in deciding A) Whether the cost is justifiable, and B) whether the plan succeeded.
I think most of us would say the cost isn’t justifiable, and that’s okay, I think it’s reasonable to view things that way, I don’t think the book precludes that line of thinking.
I think lots of readers would probably say that massive bloodshed would have been the result regardless of the plot’s direction, so perhaps this is something that worked out for the best.
And I think the series earns its ambiguity, it’s moral question the reader is left with.
I also feel that the success in terms of “long happy lives” is very debatable, and that’s also okay. I think “long, happy lives” is a very relative proposition within the world of this story, and there’s a lot to be said for, “Nobody is going to see their mother eaten alive by a giant naked man” being a form of “happiness.”
Overall, a really great series, an achievement, to be sure, and while the series has some rougher artwork earlier on and doesn’t have the smoothest story, it’s certainly well worth the trip, in my opinion.
For Potential Readers:
I would do things a little differently if I were reading this again, and I do have some advice for first-timers:
-I’d keep track of characters and major plot points, probably in a journal or online document. Writing these things out helps me clarify for myself, so I’d probably do that. If I were in your shoes, I’d probably be saying, “Why would I read a series that I have to keep track of that way?” and I’d tell myself, Listen, dumdum, you don’t NEED to do it, you’ll mostly get it and read a couple summaries along the way, but I think your experience will be more enjoyable if you do keep some track of everything going on.
-I’d try and read this series completely within a couple weeks, and I’d put other reading and especially comics aside while I did so. This isn’t an easy one to dip in and out of, you’ll forget SO MUCH, so if I did this again, I’d try and do it in a shorter period with no other reading happening at the same time.
-I’d REALLY avoid spoilers online, I think a lot of the fun of this is some of the discovery along the way, and it’s a series where things that don’t seem like spoilers may chip away at the story and lessen the experience a bit.
-I’d turn off the part of my brain that tries to predict what’s coming next and just enjoy the ride. This isn’t a problem for me, I’m not much of a predictor with stuff like this, but I know that’s how some people engage with stories, and I’d really encourage you to relax that side and just go with the flow a bit more. The characters WILL puzzle things out for you at a very good pace, and the energy you spend trying to figure it all out is better spent enjoying the ride, know what I mean?
We choose some of our OWN adventures, and luckily we get one over on those stupid little dumbasses who have never seen Empire Strikes Back.
I only like disaster movies that involve flying severely unqualified blue collar workers to space armed with a nuke that’s going to solve the problem.
Really? Did we really buy that nasa scientists and pilots would have more trouble working on an oil rig than oil workers would have trouble in space?
This shit is amazing. It’s that martial arts stuff where so and so’s north star technique defeats so and so’s south pole technique, and a guy touches like 5 points on some dude’s body and then his head implodes. It’s glorious.
There’s a good idea to be mined from this book: next Batman movie, make Bruce Wayne a super flamboyant drag Queen instead of a billionaire trying to fly under the radar. It’d totally work: who would suspect that a high profile drag Queen was really Batman? Wouldn’t he keep a low profile?
Plus so many people would be so Fuckin mad. And then some dolts would take it as a social cause, that if you don’t go see the new Batman, you’re a fascist monster. “Cultural impact” is the idea I’m selling here.
1:
I don’t have a ton of “where do they come up with this shit?” moments in my reading life, but this one hits the mark.
Giant naked men with no penises have consumed most of the human race the way I, a normal-sized man with a penis (nothing to brag about, but it DOES exist) consumes tortilla chips at a Mexican restaurant.
There is no point at any Mexican meal where I would say no thanks to another basket of chips. No circumstances, either. They could blend the chips and salsa into a slurry, and I’d still give it a swig.
When I had adult braces, the food limitations were mostly easy.
No gum? No problem.
No hard candy? No problem.
No chips? “Listen, doc, either I put some chips in my mouth sometime over the next 3 years or I put a revolver in my mouth right now. I’ll go by your recommendation as an oral health professional on this one.”
I guess what I’m saying is that I identify with dickless giants who swallow people whole more than I do the brave souls fighting to save humanity.
2:
What is with criminals in fiction that they are also all rapists? Isn’t there like one bank robber who is like, Listen, I want this money badly, but I have no interest in getting all assault-y on this bank teller we’ve got tied up?
And why do they always try to get it on with a lady who’s like a ruthless super spy? I don’t think I could handle a consenting, happy-to-be-there minor league softball player let alone a trained-from-birth killer. How does the criminal THINK that’s going to go? “Oh, here’s Harley Quinn, basically female joker. Somehow she occasionally beats Batman and The Flash and shit, but I think I can make dis woik.”
Or they easily fall for the whole “helpless damsel” act after the lady has been captured for like 3 minutes. If it was me, and the lady was like, “Maybe we could loosen these ropes, they’re hurting my widdle wists,” I’d be like, “if you’re serious, you’re so weak and setting back women by decades. If you’re trying to fool me, also not cool from a feminist perspective. Aphra Behn is rolling over in her grave. That’s right, I known who Aphra Behn is. You’d think with this kind of knowledge I could find a job, but knowing a lot about dramatists is actually the perfect kind of knowledge to never get a job. Hence robbing the bank here.”
3:
I think I’ve finally, after a lot of searching, found a manga I enjoy. It hasn’t been easy. It’s just not my thing. The storytelling is often very decompressed, stretching one volume of content into three or four. And oftentimes you’ll find things repeated.
It reminds me of what drove me nuts about Harry Potter, the repeating. Once you discover a rock that can make people immortal WHO CARES ABOUT QUIDDITCH? I still can’t figure out why Harry Potter didn’t say, “Hey guys, do you realize we can do magic? Like, all kinds of magic? But instead of learning how to liquefy people we’re going to play broomstick basketball.” Despite all that (and SEVERAL letters to JK Rowling which I was very fortunate to not have end in legal action) I felt like whenever I picked up a Harry Potter book, before I knew it I was reading sports writing. YOU CAN’T TRICK ME INTO READING ABOUT SPORTS! Especially made-up sports. Because we all know there’s only one made-up sport of value, and that’s any sport where the point is to hunt other human beings. Running Man, Hard Target, Battle Royale, Hunger Games, and to some extent, I guess, 1994’s Ice-T vehicle Surviving the Game.
4:
Okay, you ready for a little fact-ing that fans of this series probably already know?
I was thinking the title of this is kind of strange. I was wondering if we’d eventually get a character saying, “It’s time for our attack on the Titans!” Sort of the Walking Dead moment when Rick is like, “WE are the walking dead!” Which, bro, I get the symbolism here, but I still have to give that one to the literal zombies. When a metaphor is presented in the context of a reality as though the metaphor is more powerful, you may have taken one English class too many.
Anyways, Japanese is kind of different. I’ve taken very few lessons on Duolingo and been trapped in learning the katakana/hiragana characters. This is difficult for me because my drawing abilities are terrible, I have fat fingers, and memorizing characters and how they’re drawn is very difficult for me. I make a lot of English letters and numbers backwards or in weird orders, and Duolingo is like my 2nd grade teacher who insisted we learn to draw 8’s the right way, not as a sad snowman with only two balls.
Two balls. Heh.
My understanding of the original Japanese title of Attack on Titan is that it’s a bit of a play on words because it can be translated as The Attack of the Titans, The Titan of the Attack, or The Advancing Titan(s), with some ambiguity on who is the attacker, attacked, and whether the attacker or attacked are plural.
This is the sort of thing I first experienced when I learned of the existence of Wario’s brother, Waluigi. To my English-speaking ears, this seemed like a weird thing, like we decided to just throw “wa” on the beginning of a word and that means “evil version,” sort of like how we put “-gate” on the end of something, and that means “scandal.”
But then I learned that all of this is clever wordplay in Japanese, the whole Wario/Waluigi thing, that just doesn’t translate to English.
it’s a little sad because I feel like English doesn’t have as many puns of this type, except for the “Two-Est” jokes I make, most of which are based on the idea of calling a very small version of a forest a “Two-est,” two being half of four. The humor of these might be totally lost on a Japanese speaker, although it also doesn’t seem to get much action from English speakers. It almost makes me think they just aren’t funny jokes, but at this point, I’m married to the format, no going back now.
5: We should make an official Goodreads ruling that spoilers for a series are totally acceptable a certain number of books in. Like, 10? Why would anybody be looking at volume 10? Either you’re at volume 1 or you’re committed to reading and have no reason to look ahead like that.
6:
I don’t feel like I fully understand how the whole vertical maneuvering thing works, and the real issue is that I don’t want to know. I feel like if I watched the TV show, I’d get it, and I’d be like, “Oh…I guess that’s pretty cool or whatever.”
Some things just work better in comics, I think, where you don’t have to fill in every gap, just get the sense of what’s happening.
This is also how I feel lovemaking should be evaluated. My lovemaking, anyway.
7:
I just searched “Attack on Titan” on Etsy and saw someone offering to create artwork that presents you and your family members as Titans.
If you’re unfamiliar with this book, Titans are these weird-looking, giant naked dudes with no genitals. They have crazed looks and eat people whole.
And I must say, the person making these does a good job of conveying that weirdness: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1376719718
I don’t usually send out Christmas cards. But occasionally, I really want to.
8:
I just discovered that in Japan, a bath tub is typically more like a barrel shape, being shorter in length but deeper, so you’d sit in it about up to your neck. Also, it’s designed to keep the water at a consistent temperature, usually by recirculating it through a heater.
I just have to ask, what the fuck are we doing, bath-tub-wise? Filling up a mini coffin-shaped tub to be painfully hot at first, then pretty quickly turning tepid, then straight up cold? And the length only allows a person to choose between having their entire torso above water or to bend their legs so their knees/thighs are above the water and they can be in about up to their nipnips?
How did this become the standard tub? Who agreed to this? I want names.
9:
I looked up “Attack on Titan memes” because I need something to write about in this book review, we’re 9 volumes in with no end in sight.
Almost everything was about one character or another having sex with each other or being sexually attractive. Which is hilarious.
I don’t mean to kink shame or anything, if that’s your bag, go for it, but I DO think there are some kinks that, while I wouldn’t say the holders should be ashamed or face any sorts of consequences, we all should all be permitted to acknowledge they’re hilarious.
I’ll go first: My first sex dream was about a female ninja turtle. You could tell because her headband was pink!
Is that something I should be horribly ashamed of? No, BUT it IS hilarious.
10:
Doing some googling for this one, I found out there are Attack on Titan Funko Pops.
Now, don’t call me a cynic, but the characters in this book, many of them have very similar looks, and the Fonko-Pop-ization process DOES make all characters in all things look very similar, so the result is that the AOT Pops (of the human characters) are pretty underwhelming, kind of just the same guy in a few different positions, same clothes, same body, know what I mean?
The Titans are a bit better, but they don’t retain their menace. Which is I guess the whole Funko Pop vibe, much more cute, not so much designed to create a feeling of existential dread while simultaneously kind of making you want to puke.
HOWEVER, the potato girl has a potato. So that’d be my AOT Pop of choice, obviously.
11:
I just found out that the creator of Attack on Titan opened up a bunch of AOT stuff in his hometown after he noticed the town was struggling and lots of shops and things were closing. There’s a museum, a cafe, and a couple of bronze statues of characters from the series in his hometown.
Maybe one of the cooler ones, there’s a statue of the three main characters, when they were kids, making the expression from the book that they make when the Colossus Titan smashes the wall.
What’s neat about it is that the statue is placed right in front of this huge dam, which looks a bit like one of the giant walls from the series, and the creator has said that the dam and surrounding mountains played a big part in inspiring the series.
I just really like that someone is pimping out their creation for good, you know?
Buy my shitty books, and I could help out a struggling small town. Probably couldn’t get like a bronze statue, but maybe a 3D printed statue of a butt? Which would be pretty appropriate for my books.
12:
This review doesn’t actually contain any spoilers, I’m just reviewing like 4 of these in a row and have run out of things to say. But, aha!, if I just hide it because of spoilers, nobody will know that the ol’ idea bank is overdrawn. The ol’ spank bank is closed. That’s what “spank bank” means, right? Ideas?
God, this is possibly the cleverest thing I’ve ever done. And yet, it’ll be hidden. It’s both a tragedy and brilliant.
Maybe the spank bank ISN’T as empty as I thought…
13: If I lived in Titan world where I could be eaten by a giant man with no genitals at any moment, I’d never dust an object ever again. Can you imagine? You bust some dust, then ten minutes later you’re being eaten alive, thinking, “Why didn’t I build a giant deadfall in front of my house to trap titans or something?”
14: There MUST be dorks who are comparing current American politics to Attack on Titan, right?
Which is…I mean, there’s an extent to which bad politics is bad politics, but comparing our current status to one where there’s a country surrounded by literal man-eating giant monsters who massacre the shit out of everyone seems like a mild stretch.
15: Is it weird that Goodreads makes me to a captcha to write this review? What is this designed to prevent?
And can I set this up for my own books? “Always ask for captcha if the score is less than 5 stars, please, and make it a shitty one, like one where it asks if there are stop lights in the image, and you’re like, ‘Eh, kinda, does that count?'”.
16: As someone who is lazy, I find the captcha that asks you to click on stairs mildly offensive.
Just typed that, then got a captcha with mountains or hills, nature’s stairs.
I’ve always said the mountains are just uphill woods, and I stand by that.
17: At this point, I’m feeling very smug about reading this series now that it’s complete. No cliffhangers for Pete! Ha HA! I’ve beaten the system for once in my miserable life. Yes, in order to tout my accomplishment, I have to tell people about a manga series about giant naked monsters with butts but no junk in the front (junk in the trunk, as in elephant’s trunk? But that’s confusing because trunk is also the butt. Maybe we should use UK slang on this one? What rhymes with boot…).
18: Sometimes I wonder about the things people click “Like” on in Goodreads. Seems fairly arbitrary. Almost like none of this matters and all our Goodreads reviews will one day be dust, or not even dust because they don’t exist in physical form. Less than dust. Good title for my compendium of Goodreads reviews, coming to you probably never because who has time for that shit?
19: You know, something I have to credit this series for is creating a situation where swords and guns both exist in the world, but swords are actually useful and guns aren’t. They always try to pull this off, like in Star Wars, and it doesn’t usually work because it’s like, “Well, I think given the choice between a sword and a gun, I’ll take gun.” Don’t the blasters in Star Wars basically shoot out short segments of lightsaber? Is there any difference? Does even considering learning about this make me want to beat up a nerd, by which I mean, beat up myself?
20: Solid stuff, nothing pleases a Pete more than a series where nobody is safe.
21:The excitement of this cover, people opening a book, is not quite up to the level of a giant man with no skin smashing a wall from the first volume, and I say that as a librarian with a degree and everything.
22: At this point I had to go read a summary online of what is happening, just to make sure I had it straight in my head.
Many thanks to Reddit user aidanyyyy for posting a great summary, but more importantly, titling this “aot thing,” which is so much like the way that I title documents that I feel very seen right now.
23: Boy does this story get complicated. There are so many factions and so much going on, it’s a little…well, I have to wonder if the plot is going to continue to grow and expand like some kind of COLOSSUS TITAN or if it’s going to kind of even out, like…some kind of regular guy who grows when he’s like 16 and then smokes one cigarette that stunts his growth forever, as we all did.
24: I’m very distracted by the fact that there’s a country called “Marley” in this book. I just picture a country of super stoner college kids with Bob Marley posters on their walls. I would like for this country to exist, purely because I’m very curious what kids in that country would write essays about.
Now that weed is legal so many places, what do high school stoners write persuasive papers about? Now that they can’t really argue about hemp or whatever, what are these kids to do? Did we not even spare a moment to consider their fate when we legalized marijuana?
25: This was kind of like an awesome action movie where I have no idea what’s going on, but that’s okay because the action is great.
I’ll need to return to the AOT THING document I found earlier. I feel like this is going to be something I do every 4 or 5 volumes or so.
26: Can someone please name a kid Levi and then turn them against Levis jeans? I would find that VERY funny.
Probably thinking about these sorts of things is what’s preventing me from following the story of Attack on Titan very closely.
27: Some dickwad has volume 28 checked out from the library, so now I’m stuck waiting for them to finish it, and every moment that passes is a moment where more details of the story fall out of my brain. I know it’s only going to be like 2 weeks, but if you are the person who has this checked out from my library, please know that you’re basically denying someone with the inability to remember things for longer than 10 minutes the option to get through Attack on Titan. You’re one of history’s greatest monsters.
Volume 1:
Imagine Walking Dead, except the person involved had such a shitty life before that a zombie apocalypse is a significant improvement, and you’ve got Zom 100.
It’s depressing in that it’s relatable: maybe an apocalypse, though certain to come with some negative things, would almost certainly mean we wouldn’t have to go to work anymore. I mean, at least none of us who have useless jobs in front of computers, like me. I suppose if you were a doctor or a mechanic or something useful, they’d have LOTS of work for you to do.
That’s the real horror…if you’re a helicopter pilot, even a zombie apocalypse can’t save you from working.
Volume 2: If anyone from The Asylum or whoever makes those Sharknado movies reads this volume, just know that we’re all okay with it, go ahead and rip off the good idea in here and run with it.
Volume 3:
The idea that we run into the former boss playing a Negan-lite character is absolutely hilarious.
I’d never considered this in a zombie apocalypse story before, but what a nightmare it’d be to run into someone from work that absolutely sucked. Things are bad enough, then you run into that person who totally sucks, and it’s like, “Ah, kinda wishing I’d died yesterday instead.”
Volume 4:
It’s funny to see a German person show up because it’s SO true: we never do the things in our home state or country that people come from SUPER far away to do. Which I’ve never totally understood, probably because where I’m from doesn’t have big stuff, but like how do you live your whole life in New York and never see the Statue of Liberty or something? You could do it in an afternoon!
I know touristy stuff is not cool, but you know what? It’s usually pretty fun if you let go of that and go do it. Everyone really should take a look at the biggest attractions in their area and just go for it. Why not? What do you have to do that’s better?
I, like the character featured in this book, know a martial art of which I’m the only practitioner.
Okay, there are some differences between me and Ken.
For one, the martial art I know was forgotten intentionally because it doesn’t work. Also, the person doing it looks stupid. In fact, it most likely will do more harm to my body than it will to my opponent’s. But as the last person who knows it, I have no choice but to carry on the tradition and get my shit kicked out of my every so often. Because there’s always some fighter who rolls into town and says, “Surely you can’t have the WORST style of fighting.” And then I have to show them, make them really see just how shitty this style is.
Well, a kid gets stuck with his deaf…aunt, grandma, something, doesn’t really matter, and when he visits a local toyshop, he finds a container of Monster Blood, which appears to basically be Nickelodeon Gak, but has odd changes in temperature, starts growing, and then starts attacking people like a The Blob, a The Stuff, or a The Blob (remake, which is by far the superior The Blob. A kid gets goddamn skeletonized in the sewer, like a little kid, gets his flesh burned off by the blob, it’s awesome).
Here’s my suspicion with this one: EVERY kid in the 90’s wanted slime of some sort. A slime puddle from a quarter machine, a sticky hand that always had box art with a kid using it to pick a dollar up off the ground (as though the speed was the only reason you weren’t able to snatch up all those dollar bills you found laying around), and, of course, various slimes, ectoplasms, goos, and the king: Nickelodeon Gak.
What all these substances shared was the fact that while kids loved ’em, they were a nightmare for their parents. They would leave a greasy stain when they stuck to the walls or the ceilings, they could peel the finish right off just about any piece of furniture, and if it made contact with the carpet, you were done for.
I’m suspicious Stine wrote these Goosebumps to teach kids a lesson, and the lesson with this one seems pretty clear: goos are to be feared!
After reading this book, I went down a minor Gak rabbit hole and found several memories shared on Reddit. Here I present some of the better ones to you:
*Oh man..I loved this shit as a kid. For some reason I decided to stuff it down the sink drain and as I tried to scoop it back out I ended up just stuffing it deeper into the sinks piping. I was too scared to tell my parents what I did and figured it would just slowly wash away. Instead that shit turned rock solid and clogged the sink… I decided to feign ignorance as to how it got clogged so my folks had to call a plumber and of course he had to take the whole thing apart . And what do you know, there is a bright orange mass hardened into the pipes. My parents almost killed me when they realized it was the gak they got me. I don’t know why I even did that, but needless to say I definitely was never allowed to get it again.
*When I was young, I was watching TV while playing with some gak. Ended up rubbing my dick while it was in my hand and ejaculated everywhere. First time I ever came and never had “the talk”, so I was extremely confused. Took me awhile to figure out you could jerkoff without gak.
*Upon touching Gak for the first time I vomited. I never touched Gak again.
*I had the scented Gak that was supposedly “Pepperoni Pizza”.
It didn’t smell like pizza for shit. My theory is the scent was actually thyme, but that was too hard to market to kids, so somebody figured pizza was close enough.
It reeked though. My mom wouldn’t let me play with it indoors. Sometimes I’d try to sneak it out thinking she wouldn’t know, but within thirty seconds she would yell “Put that back in the container or take it outside!”
*First day I got it I threw it in my ceiling fan to see it go flying. It got stuck on the fan blade. It’s still there to this day, and despite all attempts to get it out, it’s still there. Hard as a rock.
*Left it on parent’s wood grain television set…. woke up to find it had removed the finish. Grounded 4 life.
*I had a full on tantrum at universal studios when I was like 7 or 8, screaming “I WANT GAK!!!!” My parents were mortified and did not get it for me – I don’t know why I thought a tantrum would work, they never did. I finally got it months later for Christmas. But to this day my family still mocks me (I’m 29 now) about it and screams “I WANT GAK!”
*Ugh. When I was about 12 I got the bright idea to put my penis in it. What a mess. I had to shave all my pubes off.
*When I was about 9, Chuck-E-Cheese ran a promotion where you could somehow obtain limited edition scented Gak by going there. I don’t remember the details. But my parents agreed to take me and a few friends there for dinner.
After loading myself up with greasy pizza and playing a few games, I left with a small container of sunscreen scented Gak and another of pizza scented Gak. I played with them all the way home, despite the nauseating scent. About halfway home, I spray-painted the backseat of my parent’s minivan with greasy pizza upchuck.
*I was the coolest kid in school for about a week.when I got back from a big mall in a big city with a big toy store (I grew up in a tiny, isolated town) and I brought Gak to school. Everyone had only ever seen it on TV. I was a celebrity. But then everyone wanted to touch it and it got gross and I was taught a valuable life lesson that day about the cost of popularity.
But imagine my good fortune when I showed up to school at a later point with Floam! Another cool kid fix for about 3 days.
*I wrote my first “business letter” to Gak.
I used my own money to buy the rainbow colored Gak, which, within minutes, turned gray from all the colors mixed together. 10 year old me was PISSED, so I typed up an angry letter, using the business letter format they taught us in school. My mom got a stamp and mailed it for me.
They actually wrote back! It was a canned response, but still. They thanked me for my feedback, and they included coupons. I used the coupons to buy Floam and either the scented Gak or Slime, I can’t remember.
*I remember everytime we got a new vat of Gak, within a few days my mother would chase us around with a wooden spoon for some odd reason.
strange coincidence I suppose.
A good book about a true original, a maverick, if you will. It does make me wish for a bygone era of office nonsense, the type that occurred in the Mad offices. Not like “Sexual harassment ain’t so bad!” kind of stuff, stuff like keeping a list of everyone who pissed you off or was annoying over the year and then inviting them to your annual party where you just bring the worst, ladder-climbing, jerkoff self-promoted people together to enjoy each other’s company and see what it’s like. And you feed them. Sure, the finger sandwiches have cigarette ash in them, and the “wine” is mostly grape soda that was opened a week ago so it’s good and flat, but food is food.
The Fyre Festival guy should’ve claimed that’s what he was doing, that he was mocking rich kids who would pay all that money to go to a concert. He could’ve swung into being a cultural hero if he’d gone that route. “It was a big joke that only I was in on, and it DID get a bit out of control…”
The sad thing is that this book is VERY out of print. It’s pretty hard to get a copy, they go for $50-$70 bucks on ebay, and there’s no current digital edition, it looks like someone put one out a big back, but that was not a legit thing?
Which I can understand!
I’ve emailed two different publishers to try and inquire about the rights to this title. I’m not really an indie press, but I COULD be, I have the DESIRE to put out a few books, mostly because I’m personally interested and (foolishly) believe that others will be interested, too.
The first publisher sent me to a second publisher. The second publisher sent me to a third publisher. Now I’ll try that third publisher and see what happens. The problem is that The Mad World of William Gaines was published, that publisher was bought out, then THAT publisher was bought out, but it’s not like these publishers were saying, “I must have the Mad World of William Gaines in my roster of books!” Instead, it was a mass buyout where Publisher A sold their entire catalog to Publisher B, so Publisher B had a lot of stuff they wanted to reprint and distribute, I’m sure, and a lot of “other” that they just kind of…have.
I tried to get the rights to another book, Campfires of the Dead by Peter Christopher, in early 2021. At that time, most publishing folks weren’t in the office, and apparently couldn’t access their records (which I guess means these were either only in print or were stored digitally on a non-networked server?), so it wasn’t until December of the same year, nearly 12 months later, that I got an email that the rights had reverted back to the deceased author’s wife.
HOWEVER, I don’t think I got this news in time because on September 22 of 2022 (9 months after I heard about the rights) 11:11 Press put out a collection of Peter Christopher’s work that included Campfires as well as some unpublished stories. My suspicion is that this would take longer than a year to put together, edit, get an intro from Chuck Palahiniuk, and publish, but maybe I’m wrong on that one…
I’m not angry about that or anything, I mostly thought Campfires should be more widely available for a reasonable price (it’s another one that was super expensive due to being out of print and not having a gigantic original print run, also in the $50 to $75 dollar range). It seems possible, if it came out in late 2022, that I was already too late in inquiring in early 2021.
I’ve since learned a little something about the rights to stuff like this: The problem with acquiring the rights to reprint something like this is that it’s such small potatoes for the publisher. While they’re not making anything from it currently, they don’t stand to make much by selling the rights, either. The time and energy it takes them to do this would probably result in something approaching a break even.
It’s not that publishers are hoarding rights and stuff, it seems more that publishers don’t have simple mechanisms for small sales.
Which is, in my opinion, one of the problems of big publishing. It’s like the film industry, there’s not really a middle class of publishers. There are indies who strive to not lose TOO MUCH money on their passion projects, and there are the huge boys who try and make their nut on 4-5 titles, huge tentpole books that keep things afloat.
“Nut.” “Tentpole.” So sexual.
I would like to make a suggestion to big publishers out there, who almost certainly read my Goodreads reviews as they are an excellent window into a certain audience of readers, sometimes referred to as idiots.
Guys, make it simple: Pull together your out of print shit, and sell the rights on eBay. You don’t NEED to make $10,000 on this. Have your attorney draft up fill-in-the-blank paperwork, make this super easy, make it super clear which rights are eligible for this type of sale, have one of your interns, who you don’t pay because you don’t need to because the ONLY way you could be an intern working for a publisher in Manhattan is to be super rich going in, run this.
Hell, make the criteria super simple: Has it been out of print for 10+ years? Did it fail to crest a certain dollar amount or number of copies in sales? Is there no digital edition available?
You might as well sell the shit.
I don’t know that you’ll make billions, but maybe that’s the thing about publishing in 2024: You need to stop looking for the big payday and start looking for the steady paycheck, know what I’m saying? You’re not sitting on a gold mine, but you are sitting on a modest amount of cash that’s very illiquid and not doing you any good.
I’ll keep trying to get the rights to the Mad World and update you all. Let’s see what happens!
This is the romcom we all need: a young, attractive businesswoman clocks out at precisely 5 every night, never socializes, goes straight home, all because she’s a hardcore gamer who wants to 100% every game. But then a man comes into her life and everything is thrown for a loop. The catch? THE MAN IS A CAT! Not like a furry cat-man man-cat, just a regular-ass cat.
Manga draws the cutest cats with the possible exception of Biggs from Howard the Duck.
What is with writer types and The Jabberwocky? Has a bunch of nonsense ever garnered so much praise from such self-serious people? It’s as if “We Didn’t Start the Fire” was the favorite song of classical music enthusiasts.
I liked the personal, quiet nature of this book, but I prefer the manic energy of Tekkonkinkreet. Just a matter of taste, but weirdo kids fucking shit up with goggles on does more for me than the quiet retirement attempt of a manga artist.
I kind of also feel like there are some pieces of this that I don’t relate to because A) I don’t fully understand the place manga occupies in Japanese culture, and B) I don’t really know what it’s like to work a job that’s your one true passion, and then what it’s like to sort of see that passion die out or be misdirected along the way.
I guess a good thing about just having a job that’s a job is that you can never really feel like a sellout. But I guess it’s also kind of impossible to be a sellout in a normal job because it’s not like there’s a side of work that’s big money with moral problems or something, at least for most jobs. It’s not like working for Circle K is for good, ethical clerks and 7/11 is for scumbags who are just in it for the money.
I like Jim Mahfood’s art, and I think these comics are a lot of fun, however, they’re a bit rich, and this many of them back-to-back is a bad idea. It’s like fudge: a little goes a long way. If you’ve ever eaten an amount of fudge in one go that can be described in pounds, even as fractions of pounds, you know what I’m talking about. You know, and most dogs know. What is it with dogs and fudge? It’s like they know it’s poison, and they can’t help themselves, and they’ll not only eat it, they’ll eat a brick-sized hunk of fudge. But I guess I shouldn’t throw stones in this very transparent, fragile, glass house which currently does not contain any fudge but does contain one man with a bloated bellyful of guilt over eating a big plate of fudge alone. Or maybe that’s not guilt, maybe that is once again the fudge.
First, if you’re wondering, the Netflix show follows this EXACTLY, so if you’re into that, good news for you. If you like reading the book to get a deeper experience, sucks for you, loser.
Here’s what I love about this book: So much fantasy fiction is so similar. You got your dwarves, your elves, your orcs, and that’s about the extent of the creativity there. It sucks. When I’m feeling cynical, all fantasy feels like fanfic of other fantasy, bad fanfic that doesn’t do anything interesting with the characters, it’s just like, “What if these same characters had another adventure that was less interesting and exciting than their last adventure, and the characters were robbed of their previous depth and had to learn the same exact lessons again?”
I mean, if your book is about an Ian McKellen looking wizard in a dungeon, fuck off with that shit.
Delicious in Dungeon brings a new element to the table: Food.
The premise here is that dungeon exploration is challenging because it’s hard to pack in enough food to sustain adventuring, so bro gets an idea: What if we eat stuff we find in the dungeon?
I mean, what’s the difference between eating a walking mushroom and one that doesn’t walk? Or, what’s the difference between eating a walking mushroom and a pig, in terms of ethics?
As a side note, this character is actually kind of obsessed with eating stuff in the dungeon, he’s a real psychopath, and I’m all for it.
The setup bring out a combo of a dungeon crawling adventure and a cooking show, which is pretty fun, and I think the real appeal is that you get to view dungeon crawling fantasy through a different lens. When you’re looking at the dungeon as a food source, it brings a lot of new ideas and elements to the stories, creatures, and typical things that go on in these dungeons. As an example: We encounter a room with a flamethrower trap, and one dude is like, “Hey, if there’s fire, there has to be some kind of fuel. Chances are it’s oil, and if there’s oil, we might be able to cook with it.”
It peels back the layers of the dungeon, like an onion, a dungion. See how clever that is? It’s about food, and I compared a dungeon to a food? I’m practically Ryoko Kui here. Or Arcimboldo. Or…who was that guy who carved vegetables and made them into faces and shit? Saxton Freymann. In my first apartment, I had FRAMED Saxton Freymann vegetable pictures in my kitchen. How’s THAT for classy AF?
I can’t remember the last time I read a comic and then turned around to re-read it from the start within a month of finishing.
These deluxe editions are great, the drawings look fantastic, and I’m pondering constructing a bookshelf specifically to hold these editions. Seriously pondering. Pricing lumber pondering.
Kind of like Kitaro but with a little more violence and maybe some grosser monsters, which are the two things I want from any version of anything: violenter and much more grosser.
You might be thinking: Pete, surely that can’t be true for intimacy?
Can’t it…can’t it?
This is fine but more a series of references to GBBO than a story, know what I mean? You know what I mean.
If I was on that show, I think I’d be the lovable but hapless goofball who’s doomed to go out week 1 but perhaps holds on a couple weeks because someone royally screws up or someone is sick and can’t be in the tent for a week, and they send no one home as a result. I’d show up for the final picnic thing and I’d have been out so long that people would not even really remember me unless I decided to adopt a very loud personal style that would jog the memory.
Mmm…this is one of those “a lot going on here” books, not in a good way. Ton of characters, not real clear what’s going on, and I think it becomes kind of an issue when you’ve got 4 different threads and all of them are kind of confusing.
The whole thing where we’re looking at modern Qanon politics through the comics lens doesn’t work for me. The problem I always run into is that in the comics, the Qanon people are kinda right. AND, in a world of gods and supermen, the conspiracy theory mindset does actually make some sense. There’s a whole shitload of space cops with literal magic rings out there. There’s a Source Wall at the edge of the universe. These are things we know about. Time has been traveled and messed with and Death is a Black man who shows up on skis, like with poles and everything. In that universe, wacky ideas about school shootings not really happening are still stupid, but we’d all have to be a lot more forgiving of conspiracy thinking simply due to the sheer numbers of stranger things that HAVE happened.
So it’s A) kind of silly to me that people would pay any attention to low level conspiracies and political intrigue on Earth, and B) presents a worldview that’s totally unreasonable in our world and totally reasonable in the DC comics universe.
On one hand, working for a company that does murder stuff isn’t the best.
On the other hand, the company seems to be pretty good about promoting from within, being concerned about the well-being of employees, and praising employees for a job well done.
The company is doing the worst things, but doing them the right way.
I’d probably apply under the rationale, “Sure, they’re killing people, but not like arms manufacturer numbers of people, and besides, most jobs kill people anyway over the course of a couple decades. You just can’t tell because it kills them from the inside out.”
I like how weird this was, how silly in places. I was going to say this is perfect for fans of One Punch Man, but then I figured out the creator of that and this is the same guy, so that’s probably not a hot tip anyone needs.
Although it IS up to Amazon standards. You like this book? May I recommend another book by the same author?
Amazon, bro, I’m aware of the fact that the author of one thing may have other things. That can’t possibly be generating a ton of income for them, can it?
Although what the hell do I know about generating income? I price my books so that I make 11 cents per copy. At that rate, I’ll be rich shortly after the sun explodes.
I do not recommend reading this volume 18 months or more after reading the first. You’ll remember less than you need to. Unless you’re one of those people cursed to have a photographic memory. Which people say is horrible, but what I have is worse: an incredible memory for the most unimportant things. Do I still remember the number for the Denver Post Classifieds from the 90’s? Does this answer the question: 825-2525?
Do I remember my mom’s birthday?
Does this answer THAT question: August-ish?
Reverse Meet the Parents, not for me.
I also really despise “hitman with a heart of gold” stories. There is no such thing. John Cusack from the 90’s in a nice suit is not what a hitman looks like. John Cusack makes more movies per year now than the average hitman has teeth.
I think the story is repulsive to me because I’m like, “having a heart of gold and being a hitman are completely opposed to each other. Not killing people is pretty high up there in terms of values that would count towards the precious metal to which I’d compare your heart.”
I also don’t like the idea of someone having a child, therefore being a good person. They sold that shit in The Bear, and I’m not buying. Having a child does not make anyone a good person, and “I’m doing this to support my family” is not a great reason to kill people for money. Let’s consider: the people you’re killing often ALSO have families.
I’m not opposed to it because it’s morally bad, I’m opposed to it because it’s lazy storytelling. “How can I signify that this person who is constantly doing one of the top two worst thing an individual can do is not a bad person? I know, I’ll make him a loving father.”
This really has nothing to do with Spy Family, I didn’t find this to be a big issue because the tone of this book is not that serious. It’s more something that I find to be annoying in other media.
And I very much enjoyed the old man cumming all over himself whenever he witnessed elegant behavior. That shit was incredible.
Volume 2:
My first book of 2024! And it was alright!
Okay, it was pretty good. It had some very Lost vibes where the volume kind of putters along, then ends in a place that makes you go, “Goddamn it, now I’ll be reading the next one, I suppose, but by FORCE.”
I’ve been enjoying these darker manga that sort of ask the question of what makes life worth living, but also, it’s a little depressing because the main character in this book probably is more “alive” in his horrible situation than he would be in MY life situation.
Which, you know, doesn’t sting that bad because I AM dead inside, but it’s like, damn, do you have to remind me? Can’t I read these books to escape the emptiness of my own existence?
TBH, I’m just in the dumps because I have to go to the dentist next week. It’s time again. It comes around so fast. I’ve been tortured at the dentist so much that I dread going, even though I don’t usually have bad appointments anymore.
Kids, let this be a lesson: soda is not an appropriate drink to accompany breakfast, and toothbrushing is not a “sometimes” activity. You’ll get dental insurance in your mid-20’s and have to answer questions like, “Did you grow up drinking well water?”
Volume 3:
I didn’t realize how many people discovered this because it’s a Netflix series, but there you go. Can they make a John Swartzwelder Netflix series already? So people can discover him? Can they just put up a thing that’s like, “Coming Soon: Some John Swartzwelder Shit” and then make a 1-minute preview for a show that’s never further filmed?
The man has given us so much. Can’t we at least give him that?
Volume 4: Volume 4, still no Alice. False advertising. Lawsuit.
And I googled it, “Arisu” sounds a little like Alice, but I’m not buying that.
Volume 5:
I read a review of one of these that was something about watching the Netflix show and then indulging in “the feminine urge to consume anything related to something you like.”
I was confused by this, but upon googling, found a New York Times article that explained the “the feminine urge to…” meme.
I am a middle-aged man googling memes, finding NYT explainers on them.
You can’t kill me. I’m already dead.
Volume 6:
You know what I’m finding to be a manga staple? Flexible rules about what would and would not kill someone.
Sometimes, a guy gets punched a lot, and he dies.
Other times, he gets hit in the head with a brick thrown from a moving car, and he’s fine.
I guess that’s kind of how reality works. Some dude gets hit with a brick, and he’s totally fine. Some other dude steps off a curb wrong and he’s dead.
Here I am, criticizing manga. Meanwhile, Reacher, a human-bear hybrid, is walking around doing shit that Colossus from X-Men would find too strength-intensive.
Can Reacher even use a pencil? Does it just powderize as soon as he lays hands on it?
Volume 7: I know it’s a dark and unyielding world…but I wouldn’t mind the option to have sex with a doctor as opposed to paying a medical bill. Honestly, based on an ER visit for a busted toe, I think my “gifts” would be wildly overvalued if they covered that bill.
Volume 8: I thought this whole series was out, but we’ve still got two months to wait.
This is what I get for not paying attention in Japanese class. And for not going to a school that offered Japanese. And for being born before 2015 when you could learn online. And for still not availing myself of any of that stuff, just thinking it’s nice to have options.
“Zdarsky books start at an automatic 4 minimum, but vampire books are an automatic 2 with room to grow. This is a show-er, not a grower, so it gets a middleground 3 stars.”
“You might be asking, “Pete, why would you read this book that’s clearly meant for children and probably just a Goosebumps knockoff that is not hilariously bad, not a stunning novel either, just kind of, well, IS?”
And I wish I had a good answer for you.
Here’s the best I can come up with:
I walk to the ARC once a week during my lunch break at work, and I look at the books. And on one of these trips, I thought, “You know, I bet some of these horror books for kids have some weird and hilarious stuff in them.” I bought one, this one, because it was there and the cover was at least a little funny. I didn’t read the description or anything, just went for it.
Basically what we’ve got here is an AI gone awry (this is kind of a pun depending on how incorrectly you’re willing to pronounce “awry,” which in my case is VERY wrong). A kid’s science project, a mechanical brain designed by his dad (who’s maybe dead? I think dead? Shot by hunters in the woods or killed by an evil wizard or, I don’t know, take your pick), goes horribly wrong because the brain does not want to ever be turned off, so it decides to KILL ALL HUMANS.
The funniest part is that our main boy, Daniel, has a rival: Frank Dunk. Just typing the name gets me all agitated, fuckin’ Frank Dunk.
Frank Dunk, in addition to having one of those names that demands putting down both the first and last name, has won the science fair several years in a row. This mechanical brain is Brian’s big shot.
Frank Dunk’s science project? A fear bomb. Yep, a bomb that will make people so terrified that they cannot do anything.
In what’s perhaps the ultimate version of, “Why, I never considered this wonderful invention being used for evil!” Frank Dunk presents his fear bomb as a home safety device.
So we’ve got a science far with an AI designed by a grade-schooler before the internet was really even functional, and we’ve got a fear bomb. Both WELL over the bar for a school science fair while also being almost immediately turned to evil purposes when the AI, now inhabiting a mannequin’s body, for which he’s created joints and so on, basically a Terminator underneath, steals the fear bomb.
Who could’ve seen this turn of events!?
The real question: do you give the science fair first prize to evil robot or fear bomb?
I think a lot of us would think evil robot at first, but I encourage you to dig deeper. Okay, an evil robot is badass, but is there anything about it we don’t really understand at this point? In other words, a group of unscrupulous scientists with a lot of money could probably present us an evil robot in like a week.
But fear bomb? Does anyone even know how to make that?
And once we have fear bomb, we’re only one very small step away from having a Scarecrow tormenting the city.
Once we have Scarecrow, we’re one step away from Batman, AND from answering the question of whether Batman is stopping crime or accidentally encouraging it just by existing (if the chicken comes before the egg, the scarecrow before the Batman, boom, problem solved).”
“You may have noticed that I skipped volume 8 of this series.
This is not because of some numerology nonsense where I was terrified to use anything with the number 8. I wish the explanation was that interesting.
My library doesn’t have volume 8. For no good reason, number 8 has disappeared and never been replaced.
To which I say, what the hell?
Also, did someone just have volume 8 checked out and not return it? Or damage it? And why did they take out volume 8? Why start there?
I guess, in the interest of chaos, the world is kinda burning in this series, so maybe someone figured it’d be a closer reading experience, more interesting to be very confused as well. It better simulates how nuts it would be to live in a world of monsters ravaging everything?
Is that a reach as explanations go? Absolutely. But hey, reaching is what I do. It’s how I get the Milanos down from the top shelf.”
“You know, this is a good example of a comic where describing the plot makes it sound way stupider.
Daredevil is Hulk’s lawyer, and Hulk is working for SHIELD, but…
Well, that pretty much does it.
But it’s great. Sometimes you have to stop thinking about something and just read it.”
“Yuck. Time travel.
Also, I don’t keep up with the larger world of comics like I used to, but this thing reeks of stupid crossover. Is that a thing that was happening when this came out? Dudes, you do not need to do crossovers anymore. That shit’s dumb. I mean, it’s cool to see characters show up in other books, but you don’t have to screw around with what is a very cool Silver Surfer story because Doctor Doom is becoming the whole universe or some shit. And what’s with the “If the heroes prevail, they’ll need a universe to come back to” horseshit? Of course they’ll prevail. That’s why they’re called The Prevailers. It’s what they do.
Just stop it with the weird crossovers already.
Oh, and stop slapping new covers onto comics from the 60’s. We know what you’re doing. Stop that. Bad.”
“You might notice I just reviewed another title called ‘The Faggiest Vampire.’ Now we’ve got ‘The Baby Jesus Butt Plug.’
So there’s this section of Powells in Portland that I always feel calling to me from across the continent. It’s one set of shelves, all small press, and a lot of it pretty weird. There’s the zine-y stuff like ‘On Subbing’ or the beautiful weirdness of Trinie Dalton. And there’s also a big gob of Bizarro.
What’s Bizarro?
Rose O’Keefe from Eraserhead Press calls it the book version of the cult section of the video store. “Basically, if an audience enjoys a book or film primarily because of its weirdness, then it is Bizarro. Weirdness might not be the work’s only appealing quality, but it is the major one.”
Bizarro delivers.
Sure, there’s times when you can’t help but feel like it’s being weird for the sake of weird. But hey, people are a lot of ways for the sake of being a lot of ways. I’ll take weird over a lot of other stuff.
Every time I go to Portland, I make sure to grab a couple titles from that shelf.
Here’s where this gets fun.
I’m at Barnes&Noble last week. We don’t need to get into it, but some pretty heinous shit went down at work. My boss, who is pretty cool, said it was alright if I left for the day. “You know, when something like this happens, I say you have to do something that feeds your soul.”
Which is how I ended up at the bookstore. And when I saw, somehow, by some miracle there was bizarro on the shelf at my Barnes&Noble, which is exactly 1,210 miles away from that shelf in Portland. Somehow, some of it made its way here.
What I didn’t consider, when I picked up a book called ‘The Baby Jesus Butt Plug’ and another called ‘The Faggiest Vampire’ is that I’d actually have to check them out.
I have this very old blog post I wrote once about an equation I invented. Basically, it describes the curious fact that the more embarrassing your purchase, the more attractive the checker will be. You can buy toothpaste a hundred times and you won’t even notice the checker. Then, you buy Preparation H, and for whatever reason you end up in line at the grocery store, and the checker is the most beautiful person ever. Behind you in line is a modeling scout, and he’s about to make the find of a lifetime. Right after you buy your hemorrhoid medicine.
Of course, such was the case at Barnes&Noble. Of course, it took several scans to get in ‘The Baby Jesus Butt Plug.’ The machine wouldn’t cooperate. It was nerve-wracking, then a little fun because I was imagining that the lady would have to call out a price check, across the room or maybe even over a loudspeaker. I know it was hoping for a lot, but still.
Anyway, my soul was fed. My twisted, awful soul.”
“You know what I’ll never understand about the old west?
Why does everyone mess with the baddest badass?
I’d be a total coward who messed only with the least badass badasses. Like a grandpa who runs a church, that’s the guy I would mess with. And not if he had a dark past or something. He was mostly in a hospital as a child. And an adult.”
“You know what always bothers me about books, movies, and so on?
How come almost all of our entertainment is based around characters that are either A1 great people or at the very least have very strong redemptive qualities?
This is a little heady for a review of a picture book.
Here’s the thing: Kid doesn’t want to read a book. We go through a whole slew of ways the kid could be tortured that still would not convince him. Hanging upside-down, having a pool of sharks below him, being waterboarded, receiving a FedEx box containing his wife’s decapitated head (note: my memory is a little fuzzy here, but you get the drift).
And, of course, by the end he relents and allows someone to read him the book. And we live happily ever after.
Okay, can we get one goddamn book where the kid acts like an asshole and remains an asshole? Because most of the kids I’ve met have moments of greatness, moments of rock bottom assholery, and then a lot of in-between times. So maybe it would be reasonable to say that the kid remains an asshole for the entirety of the book? And then the parents reading this aloud can say, “Man, what an asshole. I’m glad you’re not like that, son.”
Does everyone have to provide a good example? We had Goofus and Gallant. Goofus was the bad guy. The dum-dum. The one who could do no right. And who was more fun to read about? Goofus, goddamn it! Gallant was boring.
The other thing I’ve never really seen a kid do is express their disdain for forced activities in cool creative ways. Hell, if the kid can string together an ever-building list of mortal threats, remembering each one in order and constantly adding more, I would say that he probably doesn’t need to read the damn book, or any books for that matter, until at least junior high. He seems to have a pretty developed sense of narrative already.
I just hate that. I hate when things get cute at the end. Everything has to end cute. There’s not one picture book out there where the dude says, “You know what? Being a porcupine blows, and although people want me around when an evil fox shows up, I’m still pretty pissed about the litany of other issues here. It doesn’t really make for a good cost/benefit ratio here.”
“
“You know what every apocalypse has? One big huge asshole who seems dead set on doing whatever the polar opposite of the protagonist is doing. Why? There’s always got to be some asshole ruining the fun for everyone.
Apocalypse books are kind of all the rage right now, or maybe that’s just starting to die down, but part of me wonders whether those kind of people would really show up? More to the point, who are all these crazy assholes they always get to hang out with them?
“Hey Pete, it’s the apocalypse. We could head into the mountains and live in peace. Or we could sign up with the dude wearing a Jason mask and a sash made from bullets. What do you think?”
Well, nameless questioner, I think we’ll just go ahead and let bullet crazy man drive towards the abandoned nuclear plant or whatever damnfool plan he’s got and wait for him to die. Everybody else seems to be dying without trying, and this guy seems to be ACTIVELY doing things that would have gotten him killed before all this apocalypse business. Sooooo I’ll take my chances by not taking my chances, thanks.
“
“You know what I don’t like about these books? What’s with the story? There’s SO much story compared to the amount of fucking. It’s an 11-page story, and they fuck for 2 pages! I know that sounds like a decent ratio, but when we’re buying a book called Conquered By Clippy, and when the subtitle is An Erotic Short Story, and when the cover is an animated paperclip next to a bikini babe, am I WAY off in expecting more than one sex scene?
To be fair, this book blew its mercurial load all at once. You can’t do sex AND butt sex the first time! That’s an amateur mistake. You either save the butt stuff to escalate, or you turn the tables on us, start butt, then go vagina or mouth, but in a way that surprises me because I’m like, “Damn, I thought they kind of got to the butt stuff too quick, but this is great too.”
Some lines? You know you want to read some lines.
“Unlike an actual paperclip, the end of [Clippy’s] coiled body was rounded, and it felt smooth in her mouth. As she lapped and tongued and sucked at it, it became even redder and hotter. Her own human body part (vagina) felt hot too.”
This is a thing in this story. Some pretty unnecessary parenthesis here. It’s not like “Her own human body part” is euphemism I can’t understand. I don’t even think it’s euphemism. Is it? And I’m going to assume, since the whole idea is that she’s human and fucking a paperclip, that her body parts are all human.
Here’s another one:
“He complied, pushing more of his hot (in temperature) body inside of her…”
Thanks for the reminder that a paperclip is not sexually attractive.
Have you ever wished, and this is off-topic, that you were really attracted to something like paperclips? Like you could look at them and just, that was all it took? Maybe something slightly less common, but something that no one would suspect. You know, like if it was wooden pencils, you could have “porn” all over your desk, all day, and nobody would say anything. I could walk around the house with a fetish object behind my ear at all times, and nobody would say a thing. If I rolled up a porno magazine and stuck it behind my ear, I feel like we’d have problems.
Anyway, Clippy pushes so deep inside this woman that the FLESH UNDER HER STERNUM BULGES. That’s less erotic to me than it is the chestburster from Aliens. Seriously, Clippy, what the fuck?
But we do get this classic line: “It looks like you’re trying to reach orgasm. May I assist you using butt stuff?”
Ah, butt stuff. Yes, many a long, sensual night has begun with me opening the old MS Word and clicking on Butt Stuff Wizard. Butt Stuff Templates. I can’t tell you the way I wept over the loss of Butt Stuff ClipArt. Ah, well. All part of a beautiful memory.
“
“You know what I find odd? When I go to the grocery store and pick up groceries (I do the pickup thing, I don’t go inside, like a peasant), they always ask me if the substitutions they made are okay, but at that point it’s like, “Well, I mean, maybe I hate them, but what am I gonna do now?” I’m obviously not going INSIDE. If I was going to do that, I wouldn’t be here in the first place.
This review is specifically for everyone who has ever complained that one of my reviews has nothing to do with the book and that I’m personally ruining Goodreads. “
“You know what stinks about writing a Choose Your Own Adventure?
I figured it out when I read this. I mean, what stinks other than the fact that I die constantly.
The thing that stinks, if the text is actually good and funny, you don’t get to read it. Not really. Because you’re following the story, but then I flip past what looks like a hilarious picture of a guy in a convertible with half a head, and I want to know what that’s all about.
“
“You know what was weird? That brief period where gym bros and manga nerds crossed over in the form of gym clothes that talked about going Super Saiyan or whatever. Who could’ve predicted these two audiences would agree on the same thing?
What happened to that? What do gym bros like now? Rick and Morty? Are there any ripped dudes on there?”
“You know what’d be REALLY nightmarish about this?
Being trapped at school.
I’d rather be trapped ANYWHERE but school. The Drifting Taco Bell Drive-Thru Line, The Drifting Bathroom at a Concert Venue.
Anything but school.”
“You know what’s frustrating about science comics? They put forth all these fantastic ideas, yet I still don’t have the shit I’d like to have from science. I think my requests are pretty humble and reasonable.
-
A Sleeping Pill That Works
Non-Habit-forming, timed out perfectly, and it doesn’t put you into that Nyquil fog sleep or passed out drunk kind of sleep. It’s exactly like real human sleep, but beginning and ending the moment I decide. -
Robots
Where are the robots? Seriously. Not nearly enough robots around, and the ones that are around don’t look like weird skeletons and shit. They’re just a welding tool on an articulated arm. No. Not good enough, science. At the very least, I’d like those little rectangular robot mice things that were always scooting around the Death Star. Even if they don’t do anything, just for the sake of getting more robots in my life. -
Space Tourism
Theme parks on the moon. This is a classic sci-fi trope, and we can’t do it? How come I can’t stay in a hotel on the moon where I get a Travelocity deal and find out there’s no view of Earth but instead an alley? I should be able to do that in space just the way I do on Earth. -
Shit That Hovers
I don’t care what it is, the hover version is cooler.
“
“You know what’s super weird and distinct about Japanese horror comics? The main character torch gets passed around a lot.
In an American comic, you can almost guarantee that whoever you’re reading about at the end of issue 1 will probably still be around until the end of the series. In a Japanese comic, you’ll be thinking a certain character is the hero, then bam, a tentacle bus slams into him and he’s a smear on the sidewalk, and the hero is now some random dude who jumped into the fray for some reason.
It got me thinking because I was reading Thanos by Jeff Lemire, and one of the problems of a comic like that we end up killing a lot of time. Because Thanos will be fighting some dudes, and it’s not like Thanos is going to get killed in issue 3 of 5, so why even bother?”
“You know what’s weird about fleshing out characters in flashback?
We have typical high school students, and then they’re thrown into a pretty wild situation they’re totally unprepared for. But then we get their backstories, and I have to wonder whether the backstories matter?
When your school gets picked up and thrown onto another planet or whatever, do you, at some point, abandon aspects of your personality or identity? In other words, if you’re the uptight student council president, do you remain the uptight student council president, or do you YOLO that shit and just start, I don’t know, breaking everything made of glass you can find just for funsies?
The characters have to be sort of static when you tell the story this way, because we have to see them, get their flashback, and then, once we’ve seen the flashback, they’re able to change. But only after. If the change comes before the flashback, we won’t understand the change.
It creates a sort of artificial time bubble that preserves the character as very similar, at least until their backstory is spooled out. THEN they can change.
Why is writing stuff hard? “
“You know what’s weird about the world of comic books? How does it seem to work out that there are so many villains? What’s up with all these assholes getting superpowers and using them to initiate a beating by their arch-nemesis (by which I mean “most local superhero”)? The math just doesn’t work out for me so much. How many people grow up wanting to be Batman compared to the number who want to be the Penguin?
The real losers in this whole thing? The banking industry. How many times does Dr. Octopus rob your local Wells Fargo before you say fuck it and keep your cash in a mason jar? Even if he doesn’t get your cash through bank robbery, I can barely stand going in that place based on the waiting in line alone. If there was even a slim chance that I’d be crushed by a robotic arm or webbed to a wall, forget it.”
“You know, every time I think maybe I don’t give a damn about Walking Dead anymore, some great stuff happens and then I do. Some pretty shocking stuff in this one.
Rather than talk about the plot and all that, I wanted to use this space for something. To talk about why people should be reading this series INSTEAD of watching the show.
Yes, I know people always say the book is better than the movie. I disagree with that statement more often than the average person.
Yes, I know that the show and the comics are different so doing both works.
Here’s the thing: I honestly think that this series will go down in comic history as a big, huge thing. Nearer a cultural phenomenon than a successful series. And it built a success from the ground. Issue one had between 5-7K copies printed in its first run. Issue 100? Over 350K were ordered. That’s an absolutely insane increase, especially considering that this book is printed entirely in an era where just about everything becomes available in trade paperback, meaning that unlike comics of the past that may have sold more, this book has to compete WITH ITSELF.
The show…I have my issues with the show. I think it’s fairly slow. I think that it dabbles in the newer TV show style of amazing season openers and closers with some filler in the middle. And readers will probably note that the brutality is toned down a bit. Which makes sense because certain things that work in black and white print don’t work when played out on screen. However, I think it’s done masterfully in the book. Violence used right.
More than anything, though, I’m less confident that the show will live on to be a huge classic in the TV medium. Not because of its flaws. Because television is such a weirdly competitive, crowded market that caters to everyone.
I really believe there’s more great TV now than there’s ever been. Starting somewhere in the late 2000’s, I switched from watching nothing to watching a good number of shows. Comedies, dramas, all this great stuff started coming out of HBO, AMC, FX, and even network TV scored huge with The Office.
The downside of every golden era, however, is that it makes identifying the real gold from the pyrite very difficult in the moment. Ten years from now, I think we’ll have very different opinions on some of the shows we love now. Some shows that were very popular in the past just lose steam over time, and they’re almost difficult to watch, or worse yet, you just don’t feel in any way compelled to watch them. When’s the last time you turned on Frasier?
Now, I DO want to say that I don’t think timelessness is absolutely necessary for something to be great. Sometimes a thing is great because of its timeliness, its ability to come along at the right time, when you’re in the right frame of mind for it. It scratches the itch, and just like scratching a real itch, nothing is better in the moment, but just scratching that same spot minus the itch has a very diminished effect.
However, one of the big factors that I use to judge what I truly enjoy is my ability to go back to it. I’ve re-read volumes 1-10 of Walking Dead at least 4 or 5 times apiece. I bought the first trade right when it came out, and after that I would re-read each one that I had whenever a new one was about to hit the shelves. And it works.
I saw the first season on TV. And honestly, I haven’t had a lot of desire to go back. Or forward.
There is an extent to which this has been caused by reading the books first. So as much as the story differs, and as much as I appreciate that, the characters and a lot of the big events follow similar lines.
Okay, this is getting nutty, so let me summarize here.
The Walking Dead comics are not only great, they are standout gems in the medium of comics. They push the boundaries of a medium, and they also use its timespan, paneling, and other nuances to really heighten the drama and the story.
The Walking Dead tv series is enjoyable, but I just don’t think it occupies the same space. It’s good television, but it’s not changing the way people consume television.
“
“You know, Iâm not a celebrity memoir fan. Iâm just not all that interested in who boinked who where and when or what have you. I think this one is probably more suited to people who care more about celebrities that I do.
Elvira stuff doesnât show up until about halfway through, maybe even later, and that portion wasnât as central as I thought it would be. It was the part I was most interested in, so there was some letdown there. Itâs not a bad book by any stretch, but itâs probably only for megafans or people who love 60âs/70âs celebrity gossip.
Iâve long considered my horror host character options, as I assume everyone does. Here are a few I came up with:
The Reelman
This is a guy who owns a movie theater in 2020/2021 and is desperately trying to save it. So he tries to interest people in all these shitty movies so he can keep the business alive. But he can only get shitty movies because he has zero budget. I donât act very well, but I could probably pull off depression and desperation mixed together.
The Film Student
This is a jerkoff film student whoâs been trapped in a basement and forced to watch lousy horror. Heâs only seen stuff like Citizen Kane, so this is all very shocking. I do own glasses, and I could probably watch Citizen Kane and make this work.
Clearance Clarence
This guy gets all his movies from the clearance bin at a cursed Walmart. But he enjoys watching people go through horror because it makes him feel better about his own life. The bonus of this one is it can be filmed in any crappy apartment. Convenient!”
“You know, if I felt like being a real asshole, if I was dying in this walking dead world, I’d armor up before I zombied out. That’d show ’em…”
“You know, the good and bad of the Valiant universe is that while I appreciate their attempts to make a cohesive universe where it feels like all the characters live there together, because I don’t read Valiant as often, it doesn’t do a lot for me when Ninjak shows up. It’s like back in the day, it’d be exciting to have the Human Torch show up in a Spidey book, but this is like having a Darkhawk/Sleepwalker team up. You know, it’s fine and all, but it doesn’t blow my balls off. “
“You know that piece of shit, Here, that everyone is always talking about? THIS is the book, people. It presents a similar idea in a way that’s more entertaining, the art is better, and it’s so much warmer.
There’s a history of NYC in here, so there are pages of storefronts and streets as they appeared in the 20’s and as they appear now, which is the Here-like part. Then there are some sketches of the interiors of some different dwellings in NYC. Then there are some more personal things, like Wertz’s favorite bookstores and a favorite walking route.
Why is this better than Here?
For starters, the title. Here? That’s like IT. It’s so hard to talk about something with a one-word title like Here.
Here has no personality. It’s like an unobtrusive observer. I get the idea, but it’s just so cold and articficial feeling. It’s a little like…I know this shit is made up, so why am I watching it? Who is the person behind the idea of putting all the same shit in this one spot? TTT (see, the name can be shortened!) has personality. And the author knows when to step in and provide some personality and when to step back and let the shit speak for itself.
The art in TTT is never flat. You’ve got these detailed, Chris-Ware-esque architectural drawings, and you’ve got these…I guess Chris Ware also draws cartoon-y characters, but whatever. The art is beautiful and intricate in places and cartoon-y and expressive in others. Here is just one style, all very flat.
There’s big stuff, like Fresh Kills on Staten Island, and there’s small stuff, like the use of pneumatic tubes in Manhattan. The mixture is great and gives the book a variety of textures, big and small.
Sometimes I hate books about NYC. Some people have a little bit too much of a boner for the place where they live. It’s like they wrote a book with a sub-agenda of proving that NYC is the greatest place in the world, which is like, “WOW, big thesis there! Maybe next you’ll do something SUPER brave and write about how L.A. is weird!” TTT is pretty fair. I think there’s a love for NYC, and I think there’s also a recognition that some of the things that happen in NYC are stupid. And that the city is so fucking expensive. So, so fucking expensive.
I think my big pet peeve from New York people is complaints about tourism. I mean…if you’d lived there since 1965, I guess? But how long has it been since NYC has been a HUGE tourist destination? Do you really think something like Broadway can exist if it’s just like a fun, local thing? If there weren’t a shitload of people coming from out of town? I’d be fucking annoyed too, believe me, I get annoyed when the population in my city increases somewhat when the college is back in session. But it’s not like, “Fucking college students make this place suck.” It’s just like, “I wish there were less people around when I really need to get somewhere.”
Anyway, rant over.
You can read this one and enjoy it without having to get an I heart NY tattoo on your bicep. “
“You know how there was always a rumor in school that if you took the SAT and answered “C” on everything, you’d pass? That’s what I decided to do here. Whatever options, I took number 2. That is, the second choice. I didn’t take a dump and decide what to do on the toilet. You probably didn’t assume that. It’s a stretch for this joke premise, thinking someone might assume that I was taking dumps and pondering on the shitter. But that joke is in the past now. Let’s not dwell on it.
2’s got me pretty far. I got to an ending where I wasn’t dead, but it turned out the Evil Power Master was maybe not evil? I landed on his planet, and everything was pretty nice and everyone was happy. So maybe he’s not evil? Maybe I’m the monster?
Wait, no. That doesn’t make sense. He blew up a bunch of planets. He “showered” a planet with missiles. I mean, maybe his pad is cool, but…I don’t know. Isn’t that like saying Dr. Doom must be alright because life goes on in Latveria?
Book, you’ve tricked me. You’ve tricked me into one of those dumb “Maybe it’s us, HUMANS who are the real monsters!” but it’s totally unearned. The Power Master is clearly evil. That’s why he’s called the EVIL Power Master. You don’t just voluntarily add “EVIL” to the beginning of your name because it’s a family name or something.
I did enjoy the opening crawl of this book. Yes, these books have text in a Star Wars style, except the text isn’t yellow and isn’t in space and there’s no music and it doesn’t make sense…actually, scratch that one, that part is exactly like Star Wars.
This one had a line that said, “This time he used his highly focused laser. Next time it could be a shower of missiles. Or a pay-off to some corrupt official.” Now, hold the phone. Rule of 3’s here. You can’t go laser, shower of missiles, then paying off some guy. This sequence does not escalate things. It goes, it gets better, then…eh. I mean, paying off a politician? [Pete: this is a placeholder reminder to insert politics/corruption joke here once you’ve finished googling them and found one that’s only been told a couple billion times]
Oh, also, I should mention this is apparently a sequel to another book. This book started out talking about what great decisions I make and what a good leader I am. I felt like such a fraud because I knew that I didn’t belong here. I hadn’t made good decisions. I died way before I ever got to the sequel. Not since I started with Zelda II have I felt so bad about myself. “
“You know how sometimes you’ll read a great book and then it’s hard to get into anything else? You read the words, and the next book might be alright, but you’re still waiting for that great, tragic character from the last book to show up?
I think this tiny book is an awesome post-excellent read.
Not that this book isn’t also excellent. But it’s a small, contained world, and it’s divided into these small chapters so you can take breaks along the way. Everything is so vivid that you don’t have to worry about pining for the guys from the last book. The writing is strong enough that you won’t keep hearing the last writer in your head.
It’s a dubious recommendation, but trust me, it works. “
“You know how some short story collections are a parade of same-y stories that feel like someone’s attempt to impress George Saunders? This ain’t that. You get a staggering variety of stories. Weirdly, this book and another favorite from this year both have stories where airplane bathrooms figure prominently. “Nobody Rides For Free” was my personal favorite. Because I like the sick shit.”
“You know how some books you read the title, and then you can pretty much guess where it’s going from there?
Orcs in Space.
I have my questions about how involved Justin Roiland was in this. When I watch Rick and Morty or Solar Opposites, I feel his stamp on it, but this doesn’t have that spark of hilarious cruelty, which you’d think would be a slam dunk with orcs mingling with much friendlier Star Trek types. It doesn’t hit those highs.
I guess I also sort of thought this would be a riff on the Star Trek thing where it’s sort of hilarious to have Klingons, this war-like race, who somehow developed warp capability, a very science-y thing. They sort of hate bookworm types, yet somehow figured this all out? I’m not sure how that happened. Maybe there’s a secret, shameful part of Klingon culture where their nerds are kept in a secret bunker or something, toiling away on science projects and spaceships so that the jocks can all go punch each other in space.
I don’t know why I thought that’s what this would be, but I did, and once I went down that road, I was a little disappointed. “
“You have to read this one WITHOUT LOOKING UP ANYTHING.
Because most of the book is about getting to the climax in this first volume, which probably would’ve been a huge shock. But if you read/see anything about it, it’ll blow the surprise, and reading this volume becomes almost perfunctory.
I spelled “perfunctory” right on the first try, by the way. Whether or not I used it correctly, I give that a 50/50.”
“You can’t rate this anything but 5 stars because if you do, you only demonstrate that you’re a moron.
If you look at the title, author, and description, you will get precisely what you should expect. This includes speculation on whether or not Luigi believes in the flat Earth theory, whether Laikitu and Luigi are secret friends (both have an affinity for green), and reasons why Luigi’s 2-tuft mustache are superior to Mario’s multi-tuft jobber (because it’s 2 tufts. I guess that one’s self-explanatory).
Anyone who rates this with a single star out of five is a moron. WHAT DID YOU POSSIBLY THINK THIS WAS GOING TO BE? A poetic novel? A collection of prose poems about consumer culture?
Of course not. It’s a bunch of borderline-copyright-violating, silly Luigi shit, and that’s why I’m giving it 5 stars. Because I’m not fucking stupid.”
“You know that saying about something not being equal to the sum of its parts?
Here’s what you’ve got:
Punisher: the guy who shoots everyone in the face
Deadpool: the guy who also shoots everyone in the face and oftentimes gets shot in his own face
Venom: Flash Thompson is now wearing the Venom symbiote, which makes sense as his legs don’t work the rest of the time
Elektra: Okay, I was never all that hot on Elektra, but that’s mostly because she used sais all the time. You know, those weird fork thingies that Raphael of Ninja Turtle fame was really into.
Red Hulk: Well…fine. I guess if we have to have a red hulk, he might as well be here.
And what happens? They kill some dudes. A couple of them have sex for no real reason. And beyond that, there’s almost no interaction between the characters, which is kind of the point of these team-ups, huh?”
“You can’t go too far into books about fighting without running into this one over and over.
Like a lot of older books, you can feel the vintage on this one. For me, it’s about three things: Descriptions of people, descriptions of places, and a careful catalouging of what everybody is eating.
The first serves the book well. Getting a description of the different boxers is helpful, especially because it seems like most descriptions of the time are strongly influenced by whether or not the writer is a fan of an individual.
The second is alright, but every bout the guy attended was prefaced by a description of the crowd and the venue. There was some pretty good material about people seat-hopping and the way they would try to pretend like they had no idea what they’d done, but ultimately it got to be just another part of another chapter.
The third, I could care less. Eat an egg hard boiled or soft. Just eat the damn egg already.
Probably the most interesting part of this book, to me, was that Liebling made a pretty good case for television ruining boxing. It would go against logic in a lot of ways. You’d think the increased chance for exposure would be huge. But in fact, television killed amateurism, which killed the sport.
The problem, as he put it, was that time was a young fighter would fight in small clubs, clubs spectators would pay to enter. This meant that a young fighter could get quite a bit of experience before stepping into the ring for a full-length match against a dangerous opponent. Television, however, only featured big fights, which meant that a lot of fighters had to either be pushed into the big time way before they were ready or figure out how to make their money elsewhere.
He probably put it best, saying that television’s not concerned with the sport, only the sale of beer and razor blades.
I don’t think much has changed, sadly. Most fighting sports are amped up artificially with layers of invented grudges and so on that are supposed to heighten the drama, but to me they just cheapen the whole thing and are meant to sell energy drinks.
Hell, at least when they were selling razors and beers they were selling products I could get behind.
I guess the book also makes a case against television in that it is very descriptive of a world that existed around a sporting event. Through the long descriptions of New York City, the ways Liebling got to the fights and the bars he visited afterward, you got the sense of these fights being big events, a full night out for a lot of people. There’s a positive to being able to see every major league game in your living room, but there’s also a price, and that price is the loss of a sense of community around sports. At least for me. I could watch 100 games on tv, but I’m way more likely to remember actually going to ONE because of the people I’m there with and what we might have talked about.
This might be why people are always wanting to talk about sports. Maybe if everyone was actually going to stuff, they could talk to the people there and leave me the hell alone about it.
Anyway, I would skip this one unless you’re just a huge fan of 1950’s boxing. It’s a bit of a slog, and to me there’s a lot about it that’s very dated. It’s about a golden era, and it’s got some cleverness to it, but it’s just not that great a read, start to finish.”
“Y’know, fun stuff, a Fantastic Four team-up, which is always nice.
There’s some Fantastic 4 action. Y’know, I always feel like the f$ end up…
The Thing: Getting beat up a lot while everyone else solves the problem in a permanent way.
Mr. Fantastic: Does a science that fixes everything. Except like normal human diseases and shit. Why, haha, why would you bother with that?
Invisible Woman: Make shields. So kinda a Captain America clone, just with invisible shields that have an indeterminate strength.
Human Torch: Use up his fire until he’s super tired, and then he’s not on fire anymore.”
“Yikers.
The art and story don’t work together at all. If you’ve got a confusing, time-jumping story, you need solid art where characters don’t look alike and it’s not just a bunch of neon with blur effects applied. Normally I’m not this hard on art, but this just didn’t work to my taste in any way. It almost felt like the art and story were competing to be more inscrutable.
The story is a good idea, and it could go a few different ways. Alien shows us a spacefaring future where space becomes a boring 9-5 job, and that works. Star Wars is an adventure tale where space is magical, and that works. This book shows us magical space and the 9-5, and somehow it’s really mundane. They’re mining the corpses of gods for profit, and somehow it’s totally boring, and not in a funny, Starship Troopers way where it’s funny to watch because everyone experiencing this bizarre thing is just bored by it.
The overall plot, the twist, is one of those deals where once you get there, you’re like, “If you’d told this in a straightforward way, I think it would’ve worked a lot better.” Instead, we find out the twist, which isn’t so much a twist as a massive misunderstanding where nobody really acted in a way that’s outrageous, stuff just happened, and…there we are.
The characters, there are basically two we need, and then we get a half dozen others who are just sort of in the area because I guess we couldn’t have one guy push all the buttons on a space ship. But they only serve to confuse the story.
I don’t know why this one pushed all the wrong buttons for me, but it did. “
“Yes, I finally experienced the Princess Bride, both in book and in film.
The movie is one of those that you have to see if for no other reason than to stop people’s incredulity when you explain that you haven’t. There are plenty of other reasons to watch it, but good god, there aren’t many statements that bring forth as much shock and awe as “Princess Bride? Never seen it.”
Some statements that bring forth equivalent surprise:
“I’ve never been in a ball pit.”
“I’ve never see precipitation of any kind.”
“I’ve never seen the Goonies/the Breakfast Club/the Karate Kid.” (these I know from experience to be on about the same level)
I’m guilty of doing the same thing, though. When a friend recently told me she’d never seen Back to the Future, ANY of them, I said, “Really? None of them?”
It’s a nice way to communicate with someone, restating everything in question form.
“That’ll be $4.95.”
“Really? $4.95? In money? American money?”
The book is really good, though. It has a surprising element thatâs mostly absent in the movie, which is the author writing short asides explaining how he edited the original text and why. Great stuff, really funny. I can see why itâs so popular amongst adults. Itâs got that vibe to it, maybe the closest equivalent being a Pixar movie, where you feel like itâs for kids, but also that weâre being tricked into thinking itâs for kids when really itâs more for adults in a lot of ways. As if theyâre somehow made to make us feel nostalgia for the movies of childhood, but to feel the nostalgia when seeing something brand new and for the first time, as adults. Itâs very tricky.
One more thing: if a friend tells you that a book is a favorite, or a movie, or a song, itâs probably worth your time to see what the fuss is about. Seriously. Thatâs how I ended up reading a long form fairy tale in between a book about cage fighters and a book about a bomb tech.
The beauty of reading a friend favorite is that even if youâre not all that into the book, youâll still understand something new about your friend. So if it drags in sections or if it takes a little longer to convince you of its value, youâve got more reason to read it.
Everybody has plenty of stuff on the to-read list. But if youâve got a little time, try reading something that a friend or a loved one would claim as a favorite. Itâs time well spent.
“
“Yeah, I’m as surprised as anyone. But honestly, of the half dozen titles I’ve read from DC’s relaunch, this one has been the best. By quite a margin, in fact.
For one thing, it’s a pretty comprehensive relaunch. You don’t have to know much about Aquaman to read it, and what you don’t know can be picked up through the information-delivery vehicle the writers found, which is the ignorance of the general population when it comes to all things Aquaman. Which is in full force because, let’s face it, no one respects Aquaman.
Perhaps in a world devoid of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman (although it was a little puzzling that people seemed so fixated on Aquaman’s orange shirt when Batman and Superman wear underpants outside their pants and Wonder Woman is parading around in what appears to be a woman’s one-piece bathing suit) Aquaman would seem more special. But because he is in a world with not only a Superman, a Batman, AND a Wonder Woman, but also a Flash, a Green Lantern, a Captain Boomerang…I could go on.
What makes this a good read is that you still get your comic book elements, your fight against the bad guys and all that, but this book also does a nice job with the human side of things, which is something that I think suffers in a lot of DC’s books, if I can make an unfair and sweeping generalization.
The beauty of Marvel, to me, is that the characters are usually somewhat powerful, but for the most part they are still fairly human. Spider-Man is the prime example, of course, because Amazing Spider-Man has always been just as much about a guy being Peter Parker as it has been about a guy with super powers.
I think that feeling gets lost in a lot of DC books. The characters are just too powerful. And the human side is often very weak as a result. Does anyone give a shit about Clark Kent? Is there ever any question about which side is dominant, Barry Allen or the Flash?
Part of the reason that Batman has been such a success, to me anyway, is that he’s one of the few characters where the repression of the human side is a part of the story. He’s more human than most of the other characters, but he’s ACTIVELY pushing that part of himself away. DC managed to turn the flaw in many of their characters to their advantage, and it was a great idea.
Aquaman, from the new 52 books I’ve read so far, is the only one I cared about as a guy. Deathstroke had a son that I couldn’t care less about. The characters in Suicide Squad were flat. Batman, though enjoyable, went on a hallucinogenic trip within the first few issues, which is always a problem for me.
Aquaman is a real guy. He has to deal with idiotic questions all day because people think they’re hilarious. His wife gets into a conflict when she goes out to buy dog food. They have a laugh about a childhood picture of Aquaman on skis.
This is what’s so great about comics. With some good writing and relieved of the burden of past continuity, just about anything can be a great read. Even Aquaman.”
“Yay! Representation!
Science
ScienceisUhmazing
DiversityInComics
…
Have I gone far enough down that people can skip this review? The actual text?
Is it safe to post this as a summary of the book?
Truth be told this is not a 5-star book for me. But I recently learned a lesson about being a white dude who has feelings about comics that feature characters who are not white dudes. And that lesson is: don’t.
Well, I SORTA learned my lesson. I now hide my feelings behind a 5-star rating and hashtags, writing them out below because I still have opinions, but I kind of think that when someone sees my stupid mug next to a low-star review of a book with a black female character, they tend to react strongly to that combo. So, I will bury my feelings deep within myself, several lines below the fold, for those intrepid readers willing to trudge on. #I’mDeadInside
The truth is, this is like a 2-star book for me. While it’s a thumbs-up on the representation side, I can’t really say there was much else I liked about it.
I think it’s fair to give a book a thumbs-up for diversity and still talk about why it wasn’t so good, and to rate it as a book. It’s not the diverse aspects that drove me away from the book. I read the damn thing, and I wanted to enjoy it because, frankly, I thought it would be about a little girl with a giant, super dinosaur, and what’s not to like about that?
A few things, it turns out.
Let’s do it.
I think a lot of people would argue that this book is for kids, and that gives it a pass in terms of being enjoyable by adults. BUT, why then do we have Moon Boy (the original pal of Devil Dinosaur) BEATEN TO DEATH in the first issue? With blood and everything? That seems like an odd way to kick off what seems to be a fun, kid-oriented series, to me. There wasn’t much else I found objectionable, content-wise, so why put that up front?
On the other hand, the content seems to be written as very affirmational towards a younger crowd:
“Fooling everyone was too easy. People see what they want to see. And most people never wanted to see me as anything but a normal little girl. But I have big ideas.”
“Doing my best…Fitting in…Doing my best isn’t fitting in.”
There’s a heavy amount of this type of internal monologuing. The tone of which smells, to me, of adults telling kids that they can be great and they can achieve, which they CAN, but the truth of the message isn’t really done justice by the delivery. I feel like these moments really reveal the grownup behind the curtain and conflate good messages with good storytelling.
If I may, let’s move away from this book for a second. There’s this free comic online called Avengers: Saving the Day. It’s about the Avengers learning how to use things like savings accounts.
Spider-Man: I can’t believe how many different papers the bank uses!
While I think it’s totally a good idea to have a savings account, I can’t stand behind this comic as a good comic. Is it a good message? Yes. Is it good to take a shot at spreading the word about financial responsibility? Totally. Am I pissed off that someone made an attempt at putting a positive message into the world? No way! Should this comic be canonical and should Spider-Man now be educated on how to use a bank and never again run out of web fluid for financial reasons? Yes, for the love of god, yes.
But does all the goodness, does the intent make it a good comic? No. It’s not a good comic. Avengers: Saving The Day is not a good comic. I’m VERY confident in this stance.
And that’s how I feel about this volume, though without the confidence because of the other issues at play. It’s got great intentions, representation and making kids feel empowered, but my feeling is it’s not a great comic.
There’s a lack of flow between the scenes and storylines. It feels really disjointed. There’s almost no reason that Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur have teamed up, that I can tell. Moon Girl seems fairly non-plussed by a giant red dinosaur, and her parents are even LESS shocked, mostly concerned with her running around out of the house, not so much by the presence of an inexplicable, giant read dinosaur. Thugs capture a dinosaur and put him in a giant cage…in the back room of a museum? The dinosaur rampages through the city and just sort of gets away? Twice? There’s a weird Amadeus Cho Hulk scene where I feel like all characters are very off-character (a teen supergenius patronizing a pre-teen supergenius? Wha? Why?). Moon Girl’s genius seems to be expressed by making Inspector Gadget devices (count ’em. I count boxing glove thingie, mini helicopter, AND springs in the shoes. Go-Go-Gadget Copyright Infringement Suit!). I don’t mean to make a laundry list, just to say that there were a lot of elements that didn’t really click into place.
I don’t mean to be overly hard on the book, and I don’t endeavor to say this book or its message have no right to exist. It’s just my opinion that it’s not a super enjoyable book if you don’t enjoy books by imagining the positive message they convey to young people. If I picture a young lady reading this and feeling good and positive and having a great time, then I feel like a dick for disliking this book. On the other hand, I don’t think there are any science genius 9 year-old kids reading my comics reviews, and therefore they will never know I didn’t dislike this book. If there are, if you’re out there, give me a shoutout. In fact, if you’re a science genius OR 9 years old, give me a shout.
Wait, scratch that. If you’re 9, stop reading my reviews. And do not contact me on the internet or in person. Jesus Christ, where are your parents?
I think, overall, what I see happening in comics from time to time is something that happened in video games for a while. Video games wanted to be seen as legitimate art, but whenever issues of sexism or representation came out, when feminist critique of games grew more prevalent, these angles were cast off because, “Dude, it’s just a game.”
Many people wanted video games to be taken seriously, but only when it was beneficial to them. Only when it elevated games to the status of “art.” Only when it was positive.
But when games started being critiqued as art and culture instead of as “just games,” there was a lot of backpedaling.
This is something I’ve started to see in comics as of late.
“It’s for a younger crowd, so it’s not fair to criticize it.”
“You’re critiquing reality in a story in which people have superpowers.”
“Ms. Marvel is the greatest thing ever and any opinion otherwise is objectively wrong.”
Comics are an art. There’s no doubt about it. And as an art, I think they’re open to critique. Even when they’re doing good things, they’re still open to critique, as comics. The same way a video game that’s just unplayable isn’t a good game even if it has good goals and spreads a good word.
And as an art, the only way I know to critique comics currently is by delineating the objective and subjective. The only way I know how to talk about them without sounding like a monster is to do it this way:
Objectively, this comic fulfills the goals of bringing diverse representation to the world of mainstream comics in terms of race, age, and science-ness(?)
Subjectively, the experience wasn’t enjoyable.
And overall, I would love to read something that fulfills the objective goals just the same or better while also being a better subjective experience.”
“Wow.
It was a couple years ago maybe that I read a Nova reboot, and I was complaining about the fact that superheroes can never be old dudes. It’s always a teen, navigating the world of superpowers, homework, and gulp, girls!
I’m sorry, I had to take a break to shit in my own pants, sit in the shit, and think about the disappointment that life can be sometimes.
Ah, but it turned out, my old man comic existed all along.
Jason Aaron’s Punisher is an old, desperate, broken man. I think it’s a look at the Punisher we always should have seen.
Punisher is one of those characters who’s a good concept, visually stunning, and contrast-y to the other characters in the Marvel Universe, but who just hasn’t seen a lot of really great runs. You’d think he had, but really, there are a handful of really great Punisher reads.
For me, this one goes behind Garth Ennis’ first run, the one that ended before the Russian got breast implants and things got wacky.
It’s not an optimistic book by any means. It’s fatalistic, sad, and it’s a character that pushes the reader’s limits of empathy. But goddamn does it work.
I was reminded of Rorschach from Watchmen, a character willing to go to the limit and never surrender.
By the way, I just recently read this stupid, pretentious thinkpiece about how Ted Cruz was a maniac for saying that Rorschach from Watchmen is his favorite superhero. What a pile of shit. I mean, Rorschach doesn’t have superpowers, so there’s something there, but this guy was just talking about how Rorschach is a bad guy, and therefore can’t be your favorite superhero. And in fact, that might mean you’re a crazy, bad person.
[for the record, fuck Ted Cruz]
I say nay. Because, to me, superheroes can be aspirational, but they don’t have to be. I don’t have to like everything a hero does, and I don’t have to like the way he does it, to still really enjoy the character.
Watchmen was a book filled with non-aspirational characters. Dr. Manhattan lost his humanity. The Comedian was nuts, and probably the one best equipped for the real world. And Rorschach, despite being a bad dude and pretty crazy, had strong convictions. The man wasn’t a quitter, even when he was totally outclassed.
I think that’s the kind of hero we get with Punisher here. He’s so damaged, so fucked up. He’s running himself into the ground, fighting 20 year-olds with his 60-something body that’s pretty much running on willpower at this point.
It’s a different kind of story. Defeatist in a way. A downer in the way that I think we miss in the movies.
I’m always looking for things that comics are doing that we don’t see in their movie counterparts, and downer, non-aspirational, truly dark stories are one of those things. I think the darkest movie we’ve gotten from Marvel is Deadpool, probably, and that’s far from dark. DC has gone darker, but it feels so artificial because they don’t really take it all the way. They edge up to the darkness, then pull back. As much as Dark Knight had a dark tone, it was a superhero movie through and through. The Joker was dark, and the Dark Knight was heroic as fuck.
I’m waiting for the Marvel movie with this tone. I wanna see it. Because I think you can tell a really powerful, really different kind of story. One that doesn’t involve saving the world with a dance sequence. “
“Wow.
I didn’t know what to expect from this one, a collection written and illustrated by a dude who was making his nut drawing pornographic comics, but wow.
If you’re into punky, Transmetropolitan-type stuff, this is a great read. It’s creative, new, and almost every page has something new to offer, whether it be a zombie war in Korea or a cat that can duplicate a key by swallowing it.
With this kind of comic, I often worry that it will just come out like a bunch of nonsense, a bunch of cool ideas jammed into a tiny space. But King City holds it together. The supplementary material at the end of this volume isn’t quite so coherent and really did a job showing me how this could have turned out in less careful hands.
This was my biggest surprise of 2012, and it was a great one.”
“Wow.
Here we have a story about Agent Cold Beer. Not a secret agent name. This dude is named Cold Beer. Hi, my name is Beer comma Cold.
And he is, as the title says, On Assignment.
Normally I don’t like to do plot summaries as a review. It kind of ruins the experience, and it’s not really a review, review. But in this case, the story is only 6 pages long, and I really feel like the plot speaks for itself. So if you think you might want to read Agent Cold Beer On Assignment, skip the rest of this and go get you some.
~
As a “secreted” agent, Beer is tasked with taking down Jack Knife Joe, an evil…some kind of guy who knocks over liquor stores that don’t exclusively stock his brand of beer. Oh, and he owns and operates a bar where he holds a monthly beer drinking contest, the winner of which receives $1,000 and free drinks for a month. Jack Knife Joe, in what can only be described as a Ponzi scheme that’s either VERY complicated or MASSIVELY stupid, always wins his own contest, pays himself $1,000, and drinks for free for a month.
Cold Beer is tasked with getting close enough to Jack Knife Joe to bring him down, and the way to do that is clearly through winning the beer drinking contest.
But before the assignment begins, we stop by Shorty’s lab.
Shorty is the Q of the Agent Cold Beer universe, the Beerniverse, if you will. And he hands over some very important gadgets:
Beer Can Grenades (6)
Knife That Shoots Bullets (1)
Recording Cigar (1) [note: apparently a cigar that, when lit, records audio]
Bulletproof Jean Jacket (4. One white, one blue, one brown, one black)
Beer then uses exactly none of these devices to win the drinking contest. Which is the big build-up scene that lasts for all of two sentences. And not only does he win the contest, but he picks up a lady who he bangs in the back of his pickup truck about ten feet from his burning trailer home (which was destroyed in an explosion after some thugs, looking for Cold Beer, decided to wait and ambush him in his home. They helped themselves to a beer, which just so happened to be a beer grenade!).
Then, Beer and Jack Knife Joe sign a contract that says Beer and Joe will have a knife fight, and the winner will get the bar forever.
They square off, and then Beer shoots Joe with the knife that shoots bullets. He wins the bar, and he changes the name to Beer Rock And Roll Place.
In the end, Beer reports back to his supervisor, who gives him another assignment.
Beer: What’s my new assignment?
Boss: I’m going out of town for a week. Your assignment is to babysit my nine kids.
End!
?
I don’t know what to say other than there’s nothing about this I didn’t like. It’s exactly what I want out of a lark Kindle purchase: fast, short, and stupid.”
“Why is it that superheroes always have such a diplomatic problem with Wakanda? I get it, we want to respect laws and shit. But…you don’t really respect the laws where you live. You’re swinging around, punching people in the face all night. How does that work? Why is it always this weird, diplomatic situation with Wakanda where you have to play your cards carefully, meanwhile you’re in New York kicking someone’s head off his body?”
“Why in the world is the identity of the ultimate baddie revealed in a Hack/Slash crossover issue? Why would this be the first time we’re seeing this character? That’s nuts.”
“Wow.
As with a lot of poetry, this can be a tough read. Not because the prose is difficult to parse, but because it’s very dense emotionally.
Even though you could read this in an afternoon, I recommend spreading it out over a few days. I think it sinks in better that way.
I think the world created in this book will be sticking with me for some time.”
“Wow. Walt Simonson draws an awesome Thor!
This is a really good Hulk series to jump on with if you’re looking for something that doesn’t require a lot of knowledge of comics or the Marvel Universe. It seems especially geared to fans of the movies. Or everybody, as it were.
I’ll give the bad guys credit: No matter how many crazy whatever guns fail to stop the Hulk, they still keep blasting him in the goddamn face. Seriously, when is a baddie just going to say, “Listen, fuck off. I’m not shooting the Hulk in the face with something. It doesn’t work. I’ve tried it like 70 times and not once has it really worked. Give it a rest”?”
“Why does every bad guy power his super ray or his mega bomb or his evil plan with diamonds or some shit such? How is that a plan? If you invented a device that’s powered by diamonds, then it better be a device that converts those diamonds into bigger diamonds, because otherwise you just wasted your time.
Like this guy! Remember this guy?
The guy who is holding fancy diamonds because that’s how he powers, essentially, a refrigerator body suit?
I don’t know HOW that works, I don’t know WHY that works, and I can’t think of a single reason why a scientist would even begin pursuing the construction of a device that turns a highly-valuable resource (diamonds) into a far less valuable resource (energy).
To put it simply, how long would that fucking necklace pay your power bill? Like, forever? Steal the necklace, plug your suit into the wall, and watch some Netflix.
Anyway, this book is total garbage and bullshit. Basically, it’s someone at Mattel being all, “Let’s show Barbie in an empowering role!” so they put her in tech glasses and give her a motorcycle, and she kind of just moves from place to place until a mystery resolves itself. And she’s got two friends who do nothing except for the moment when they provide their bodies as literal stepping stones that allow Barbie to achieve a goal. “Hey, gang, I got an idea. Let’s use teamwork. Kneel down so I can step on your back!”
This book also features Barbie Classic, by which I mean thin Barbie. I guess Mattel put out some new Barbies with different body shapes, and I saw that as nothing but a naked attempt to be all, “Hey, now their clothes don’t fit each other, so you have to buy completely separate wardrobes and accessories for EACH doll!”
I’m sure it’s very different for women, but I’m just going to say right now that I had zero desire to play with an action figure that looked like my dad. Spindly with gross chest hair? No thanks. Actually, wait, they made those. They were Playmobile, and they sucked. Point proven. I’ll take my super-ripped Wolverine and Spider-Man, thanks.
And where’s ripped Barbie? Where’s hunchback Barbie? Where’s the Barbie that has a Barbie body with a shark head?
Where is the Barbie with light-up laser eyes? Where is the Barbie with web-shooting action? Where’s the action?
Not one fuckin’ grappling hook with these Barbies. “
“Wow. Of course, wow.
“I’m awake and my father is dead. It’s snowing and my father is dead. I’m hungry and my father is dead”
Whatever Michael Kimball chooses to explore, he does it right. He’s an incredible writer and has a way of taking a story, boiling it down, and simplifying it without sacrificing any of the flavor.
His books have always stayed with me in a way that’s difficult to describe. I tend to be short on memory for book plots and quotes, but I’m long on memory for how a book made me feel. By the time you finish this book, that feeling will be inescapable. Which is why it took me so long to read it. I knew that it would be like this.
I know it’s hard to convince people to read a book that’s a downer. This most certainly falls into that category. But it’s a downer in the best possible way. I personally guarantee that you won’t walk away feeling manipulated or like you were tricked into feeling a certain way. This isn’t a book where we’re having a great time until the dog dies. It makes no mistake about what it is, and you can read this excerpt and see if maybe you’d like it: http://www.vice.com/read/my-father-at-the-end-0000191-v19n6
My personal advice, however, is to get it and read it cover to cover. It’s so much more than the sum of its beautiful, tragic, awe-inspiring parts.
“I tie my shoes in the morning and my dad is dead. It’s lunchtime and my dad is dead. I get the mail and my dad is dead. It’s sunny outside and my dad is dead. I’m happy right now and my dad is dead.”
“
“Wow, we wrote a second issue!
Me and my brother waded in again, did a second issue of our digital magazine about videogames with a title that is a not-at-all-whatsoever-clever pun for masturbation, and here it is!
And look at that beautiful cover. Headless, pink bubble gum men. I spent hours staring at those torsos, which might not seem too bad based on your proclivities, but trust me, you can’t stare at shredded abs like that too long without feeling at least a little shitty about yourself.
So do me a favor, give us a read. If for no other reason than to help pay for the blow to my body image, which will require therapy and/or possibly some donuts so I can just accept reality and really get that gut pooched out.”
“Woop Woop! Sound the alarm! We have a movie that’s better than the book!
The primary reason to read this sucker is because it’s the basis for the movie Die Hard, a Christmas Classic (don’t fight me on this, just accept).
This is one case where the movie WAY outshines the book.
John McClane is charming. He’s an underdog. He’s like Howard the Duck: Trapped in a world he never made.
Joe Leland is a dud. Also, he claims responsibility for encouraging stores to put high-theft items like pens on cardboard backing to discourage shoplifting. Seriously? In the middle of a firefight, that’s what you’re thinking about?
Can you imagine John McClane taking credit for that? Hell, no. If he did something that resulted in that, he’d regret it for the rest of his life, and he’d probably go on a minor bender every time he had to buy a pen at Walgreen’s.
There are a lot of the specific little things from Die Hard in the book. Some of the key moments play out nearly the same. But take my word for it, this book is so skippable. The folks who tell you how faithful the adaptation is are folks who skimmed the book, saw the beats, and ignored that the tone and character are so different, and holy shit is it slower.
I’d sooner watch Die Hard’s 4-6 (is that how many we have now?) than read this book again. Easy. No contest. Is John McClane crashing a truck into a jet absolutely insane? Yes. Does it really violate the appeal of the first, second, and third movie to make John McClane a superhero? Sure. But fuck it. At least it’s entertaining as hell. “
“Wonder Woman. This is a character I want to love, but I just haven’t read the right comics yet.
What is it? Why is this so difficult?
I guess Wonder Woman has this added thing that most heroes don’t, which is that she’s got the burden to be THE lady superhero. So maybe the stories are designed to please everyone, which means they are passable, but nothing super exciting.
I do think it’s weird that there’s so much focus on how Wonder Woman is dressed. At the risk of sounding like a complete pervo, I thought Cheetah’s jugs were totally on display in this book, and that makes no sense. What is a cheetah-woman doing with boobs flopping around? Why are they fur-covered and still oh-so-shapely? What exactly is going on with that? I know I’ve strayed far beyond the pervo line, but flip through this book yourself, tell me I’m wrong.
Anyway, Wonder Woman’s attire is the source of a lot of focus, but I gotta say, Superman runs around in what is basically body paint these days. Highlighted red over his crotch. Often complete with bulge! Crotch bulge! Why? Captain Marvel’s costume is lauded, but to me it just looks like a naked chick and someone grabbed a blue pen instead of peach. But she’s got full sleeves and a collar, so it’s all good(?) Pardon me for being an asshole for a second. I think we give Carol a pass because she’s got a hip haircut. We’re like, No, she’s empowered. Look at her hair! Parts of it are really short! Just ignore that her suit cups every part of her body that can be cupped.
Given the choice to run around in a skirt and bustier or body paint with my dongle painted red…I don’t know, I need at least 3 beers to make a decision like that, and currently I have none beers.
I think the worst costume, hands-down, is Robin. OG Robin. It’s not just the briefs, it’s the little elf shoes that really top it off. At least Wonder Woman usually has cool boots.
That’s the worst for me, but the worst for everyone else would be Power Girl. A boob window on me? Pale chest with wispy chest hair. Guh.
But that’s kind of part of this whole thing. Wonder Woman has to be strong, but beautiful. Wonder Woman has to be complex, but also relatable. Wonder Woman has to be a goddess, but also a woman. Wonder Woman has to be real, but also fantastic. Wonder Woman has to be all these different, polarized things, and the compromise seems to be meeting in the middle, which makes for something that’s a little homogenized for my liking most of the time.
I’d say, Consider:
Consider giving Wonder Woman a worthy foe. One that tests her in some significant way. Her rogue’s gallery is pretty weak.
Consider Wonder Woman’s unique position in being a hero who doesn’t need a dual identity. What does it mean if she’s Wonder Woman all the time?
Consider Wonder Woman’s weakness. I don’t know what that is, but characters are more interesting when they have one. And I don’t necessarily mean Kryptonite. I mean, for example, Thor’s weakness is that he’s arrogant. That’s what makes him interesting. He’s a god, but he’s not perfect. Wonder Woman seems pretty perfect. Consider how that might change and what that might buy you in a narrative.
Consider a Wonder Woman team-up with another hero, and the pair have no romantic interest in each other. What do we get from a team-up where we forget about the romance for once?
Consider what Wonder Woman wants. Does she want to be a superhero? Does she want to have a private life? Does she want to see the world? Does she want to go to The Moon? Does she want to eat tacos? A lot of her stories, this one included, see her sort of ping-ponged around from thing to thing, but I don’t really know what she WANTS to be doing.
Consider what’s at stake for Wonder Woman. It’s hard with a very powerful character, but consider a story where the stakes are a little scary. Where you can tell me the premise and I’m interested. “
“Wonder Woman has always been a problem for me. Because I don’t dislike the character, but…I haven’t read a lot of Wonder Woman comics that I loved. I like her a lot in some ensemble books, like Kingdom Come and some JLA. But solo. Well, lets talk about why.
-
Her rogues’ gallery sucks
The bad guys in Wonder Woman are kinda shitty. Look at Batman. That shit runs deep. Even your third-tier characters, your Mr. Freezes, have some solid moments. Solomon Grundy? Seems dumb, but Long Halloween has a great Grundy. That sounds like an exclamation: “Great Grundy!” Spider-Man? Probably the best rogues’ gallery. Enough bad guys that he has a Sinister Six! His own team of bad guys. Wonder Woman? I mean, Cheetah? So like a slower Flash lady in tacky tights? Yawn. On the flipside, we have someone like Ares or Zeus, but in the comics, it’s not like they’re fistfighting Wonder Woman. They do that godly, set things up in a bizarre plan sort of thing. And gods, as characters, aren’t usually 3-dimensional, interesting characters. Nobody I can hang my hat on. -
Her powers are extremely flexible
Can Wonder Woman fly? Well, it depends. Golden Age? No. In this book? Yes. 10 years later? Maybe. In the movie? No. Is she harmed by bullets or would she need to deflect them with her bracelets? This happens with all heroes, for sure. Spider-Man can sometimes hold up a building, sometimes would have a hard time lifting a car over his head. BUT, Spider-Man isn’t bulletproof on some days. And homeboy can’t fly. I’m good with any level of a power, like if someone is super strong, eh, that can be malleable. With Wonder Woman, it feels a little like her powers change based on the story someone wants to tell. What keeps characters more interesting to me is when new stories come up but the characters are still within the same limitations. -
The gods and heroes thing doesn’t work for me
This book was an exception. It bridged the gap between old mythology and modern day really well. This had some, ahem, objectionable results re: Heracles, but we’ll talk about that last, at the end, for anyone who’s interested and okay with a spoiler. But most times, I feel like Wonder Woman (along with Thor) makes the whole universe weird because of the connection to gods and such. My personal theory, this works in the movies because they can carefully decide where it begins and ends. It’s not like an 80-year continuous story the way it is in the comics.
I recommend this volume. It lines up the origin in a way that makes sense, the plot is big without seeming totally ridiculous. Like…you can see why it’s important, but it also seems like Wonder Woman can rise to the occasion and solve the problem. It makes sense in a comic book kind of way.
You can read this one without having read any Wonder Woman comics before, and this is probably the one that had the biggest influence on the movie.
The whole rape thing with spoilers:
I’m about to ride a line here of sounding like some sort of rape apologist, perhaps. Which I’m not. What I want to say is complicated, and I just want to take this opportunity to remind everyone that this is a fictional rape that happened to a fictional character that was in no way real. It’s my belief that fiction does not have to play by the rules of real life, and I feel like the discussion of a fictional rape is open to discussion in a way that a real rape is not. That’s the perspective of the person you’re about to read, so if that sort of thing is a huge issue for you, I think we should just part ways here. Just click away to something else. @benbencatcat is one of the best cats on Instagram, and it would serve anyone better to scroll through that feed than to read this.
So the book opens in a very mythological style with Heracles leading a band of men to the Amazons, then raping and pillaging. Not graphically, but there are no bones that this happened, including Heracles forcing himself on Wonder Woman’s mom (though Heracles is not Wonder Woman’s father). This is also tied up in a lot of that mythology stuff with gods indirectly influencing and blah blah blah.
Heracles ends up imprisoned in classic mythological style, which is the realm of prisons where a dude has his eyes eaten by birds every day and shit like that for like a thousand years. Wonder Woman’s mom rescues him from his imprisonment, and at the end of the story, Heracles has not only been forgiven, there is a small spark of possible love between Heracles and Wonder Mom. They kiss.
Obviously I wouldn’t argue that I don’t see the problem here. What I want to say is this:
Wonder Woman lives in the world of mythology, and we’re talking about a mythology where Zeus basically had one of those wheels that makes the animal noises, the ones for little kids? And he’d pull the ripcord, see which animal it landed on, and that’s either what he’d turn himself into or have sex with. “The swan says: #MeToo.” So I know that’s a problem for some readers, but for me, it was thematically aligned with the whole gods and monsters thing. Mythology is weird with sex stuff, so I think that it’s distasteful, and at the same time it fits. It doesn’t HAVE to be there, I’m good with a different version of mythology, but…
Let me put it like this: one of those Expendables movies is all about human trafficking or something? The aging action stars are attempting to stop a truly heinous crime, and…it’s like, not for THIS movie! Have the bad guys steal a weird bomb or something. A bizarre plot with space satellites. Not sex trafficking! An Expendables movies should be wacky and fun, and that’s just a complete wrong turn. It’s not on-theme. When Van Damme throws a knife in the air and kicks it into Thor’s brother’s chest, that’s not a movie where I think we should be getting into this shit.
In this version of Wonder Woman, this rape and pillage thing is distasteful, but it’s on-theme within the context of ancient mythology where this stuff was happening all the time, and that mythology is pretty heavy throughout. So while I don’t require it for verisimilitude, it doesn’t feel totally out of place. We’re not chugging along in a fun, sexless, victimless world and this comes out of nowhere.
Now let’s talk about the forgiveness aspect.
I think its inclusion is complicated.
We could view it as just lazy, thoughtless and a complete misread of the character, and that’s where most interpretations go. I think Perez did a pretty good job over 400 pages of comics here, writing quite a few strong female characters, so it begs the question, What if it’s not? If we can be so bold to ask the question, we have to look for a different answer.
Here’s mine.
I think characters are always more compelling when they make bad choices. It’s my opinion that Wonder Mom is making a bad choice. It’s an extreme, god-proportion version of a woman going back to the arms of her abuser. Which is a thing that happens.
It’s totally reasonable to not like the inclusion of forgiveness in this fashion, and I think it’s also reasonable to read this as a case where someone wrote a character making the wrong choice.
I think one of the primary issues with this is that it takes what would otherwise be an empowering piece for women and turns it into something that’s not so empowering.
Perfect women are women for people to look up to, especially young people. Kids don’t really make bad decisions so much as they’re manipulated by adults. I mean, sure, kids do dumb shit, but we’re not talking about a treehouse of questionable construction here.
I’m of the opinion that this is an adult-oriented book, and having characters that are problematic is appropriate for an adult book. Bad decisions belong in an adult book because adults make bad decisions. And we have to learn to reconcile with people who’ve made bad choices that we would never make. On a big scale.
So.
It’s a weird thing to think about, and I’m still not totally sure how I feel about the whole thing. For me, the question was “Why didn’t this bother me?” and I wanted to explore the answer in writing. I hope this exploration has been helpful or interesting to someone else. But if not, again, @benbencatcat. “
“Why does this book remind me of Stephen King’s IT?
-
Death
They both are about death or evil forces that kill. -
The Tone is More Interesting Than The Plot
The plot of IT ends up being less interesting that the setting and that feeling of old-timey U.S. suburban life. The tone of Shadow Life is slow and thoughtful, and the plot is a little less interesting than the portrait of the character’s life. -
Perhaps Needless Sexuality?
IT has a scene that you can google for yourself. Shadow Life gives us a bisexual character, who was apparently with a woman before she was with her husband. It’s kind of tossed off, which is fine, but I think if I found out my mom was with a woman before she was with my dad, I’d have a few questions and curiosities. Not because I’m reprimanding my mom, because I’m curious about her life and who she is as a person, and if she had a romantic relationship with a woman, if that’s part of who she is, that matters to me. Where in the book, the mom is kind of like, “What do you want, sexual details?” and the adult child is like, “Ew, no.” I mean, I think I’d be like, “Well, no, of course I don’t want a Dear Penthouse Forum version. If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. I’m just curious about you. You’re my mom, and up to now I had no idea about this important facet of your identity, so it’s something that I’d like to hear more about sometime, but I’ll let you take the lead on that.”
I don’t need the main character to wear rainbow sweaters or whatever, I think I just feel like…you, the comic, brought up sexuality, so why bring it up if you don’t want to talk about it? The former flame serves the story identically to a close friend, so, I don’t know, it just seems like an important part of a book where the other highs are things like buying a vacuum and losing your wallet at the library.
- The Spider
Both stories have giant scary spiders as the ultimate manifestation of the villain. I don’t know that spiders are necessarily a recurring theme in either story, just creepy, I guess.
I didn’t expect this to have much in common with IT. And yet, here we are.”
“Why does the briefcase have 100 bullets? That seems like way more than necessary. I mean, I’m no marksman, but I think I could probably manage in, I dunno, 70 bullets?”
“Without reading the reviews, this book is almost certainly compared endlessly to Kick-Ass. With good reason. The ultra-violence feels pretty similar, the art isn’t too far off, and if you liked Kick-Ass, you’ll dig it.
Kick-Ass had its moments. Although I have to say, something about Mark Millar (the writer) rubs me the wrong way now and again. I get the impression that he has somewhat of a distaste for comic book fans.
But, as I learned with Metallica at a young age, you’re really only likely to end up liking something less if you spend too much time looking into its creator. Seriously, it’s very sad, but the truth is that you like something, you’re drawn to it for whatever reason, and then if you look into the creator you’re almost certainly going to be upset/disappointed/pissed off.
See: Metallica
See: Orson Scott Card
See: John Byrne
It’s a weird thing. I guess creators should be allowed to have their own opinions. I mean, they ARE absolutely allowed. I just wonder…
Okay, why is it important, for example, that I know Orson Scott Card is not a fan of gay people? I guess for a select few that might enhance the reading experience. But for the most part, I would think him expressing that opinion makes things worse for most people. And how bizarre is it that this dude with such a wild imagination has such a narrow view on that topic?
He’s made some wild speculations on the gay lifestyle, so I’ll go ahead and wild speculate back:
I’m guessing that any man with a shred of style has told him that he can afford to not do his own haircuts anymore.
And he just assumed that these people were gay. Call it a hunch.
Anyway, reading this was like reading Kick-Ass without going into it thinking the author kind of sort of hated me. In fact, the premise of this book, that Luther Strode becomes an ass-kicker by ordering one of those Charles-Atlas-type of workout books from the back of a comic, feels like a genuine nod to comic book fans. Which is nice. It’s not playing to fans to the point of ridiculousness. But it’s asking the question, “Wouldn’t it be fun to see if one of these ridiculous things actually worked?”
It’s a quick read, check it out.
Oh, and when they kidnap a woman, they don’t seem to plan on raping her in any way. Just beating her up the same way they would have beat up a male hostage. Which, and this is REALLY pathetic, is a step forward in comics.”
“Why would anyone want to read a book about mixed martial arts? Especially someone who doesn’t really have all that much interest in the sport?
Well, what’s funny about this book is that the title and cover really convey how I feel about the sport in general. The book itself, as an object, is really kind of a representation of everything good and bad about the sport.
The good parts of the book are mostly the sections that serve as a biography of Pat Miletich, a smalltown bar fighter who finds his way in the world through mixed martial arts. The guy starts out fighting anyone and anything that gives him a hard time, including at one point fighting a jeep. Yes, as in the vehicle.
In a weird way, delving into the world of cage fighting was the beginning of Miletich’s calming down just a bit. His life became more regimented, and he started to build relationships with other people, eventually becoming an excellent and generous trainer as well as a respected fighter.
Which sort of brings us to the bad part of MMA and the book itself.
As Miletich became a better fighter, his skills got to be more technical, but his fights were not as exciting to watch unless you were so into the world of MMA that you could understand exactly what he was doing. Which meant he never really got his due, in my opinion, and the world of MMA passed him by.
So here’s the thing, what I learned from this book. After reading the book and learning a bit more about the history of the sport, I feel like the world of MMA has room for people who are willing to play good versus evil roles in the style of pro wrestlers. It has room for people to have ridiculous ads slapped all over their trunks. It has room for energy drinks and some of the most egregious affronts to the world of fashion that t-shirts have ever made. What it doesn’t seem to have room for is someone like Pat Miletich, which to me kind of explains everything that’s wrong with it.
The promoters of fights, the ones making the money, don’t care about the sport one bit. They just care that people pay to watch it. As long as people will pay, they’re happy.
The sport has definite potential, and underneath the shell of bullshit and outright douchebaggery, there’s a legitimacy and a stable of super, ultra-elite athletes who are doing a hell of a lot of work for a hell of a small paycheck, in most cases.
So the book, as a read, was pretty good. You learn a lot of interesting stuff, and if you ever question the legitimacy of MMA as a sport, it gives you something to think about. Especially as it’s sort of considered the bad boy cousin of boxing, when in actuality boxing is far more damaging long term as fighters are taking repeated shots to the head as opposed to damage to the body or even tapping out before real damage is done.
Here’s what I hate about the book, which is also what I hate about the sport. Why do we have to have this decent book wrapped in a cover and title that is so silly? It’s not really what the book is about, as evidenced by the long subtitle. I honestly found the book to be fairly critical of the UFC overall, which I don’t think was suggested by the title. Just the way we have this sport that’s wrapped in a bunch of nonsense, silly sponsors, horrible music, entering an arena through machine-provided smoke, we have a book that is also wrapped in nonsense and makes a person like me embarrassed to even be associated with it.
I understand that people want to make money. And if MMA went the way that makes sense to me, it would be about as popular as Olympic wrestling. Same deal with the book. They had to sell it to SOMEONE.
But for my money, I feel like there are plenty of activities and products that appeal to assholes, and it sure would be nice if there was something out there for the rest of us.
The real tragedy of the sport and this book is that the only way for them to sell is to submit to a terribly flawed market system that ends up polluting the end product. It’s such a waste.”
“Why so low? I guess I’m a contrarian bastard.
If I can be honest for a bit, this is one of “those” graphic novels. No, that’s not a thinly-veiled racist thing. What I mean is, there are those graphic novels that are approved for adult use and those that aren’t.
I can give you some tips for recognizing these types of books.
Does it have superpowers? Then it’s probably not one of the acceptable ones.
Do most of the images lack backgrounds? Then it’s probably cool.
Does it feature someone who experienced a somewhat positive effect from radiation exposure? Then it’s probably not.
Does someone come of age over the course of a single book as opposed to, oh, 50 years or so? Then it might be acceptable.
Bewbs in bewb window? No.
Bare breasts? Yes.
Distant space travel? No.
Dead Russian dog who was like barely in space? Yes.
Does a discussion of continuity come in? No.
Environmental issues? Yes.
Environmental issues as pondered by Swamp Thing? No.
Did you hear about it on NPR? Yes.
Did you hear about it from a blog with a name like “Dollar Issues and Longboxes and Spinner Racks?” No.
Does the author or illustrator have a cool haircut? Yes.
Does the author or illustrator have loud-ass shirts that his wife makes for him? No.
You get the idea.
What I mean is, Persepolis is the book that a lot of people jump to after Maus. Because it’s a safe jump. It’s an important book that discusses real life shit, and for someone who doesn’t like comics, the content is serious-minded enough to overcome the medium. It’s a good jump to make, but I hope people are making a third jump after that, and a fourth, and by the time they’re done, I hope they’re seeing that comics, the medium, the format, aren’t inherently one thing or another. Saying you can only tell one type of story in a medium is silly.
My beef with Persepolis isn’t really its audience, though. Because I think that’s fair. I’m a person who really enjoys Fight Club, so you have to accept that there’s an audience for a thing and there’s the thing itself, and you don’t have to agree with both.
Here’s the thing. I don’t have the best memory in the world. That’s putting it very lightly. But I don’t have any strong memories of specific scenes or moments from Persepolis. I remember things from comics, things form X-Men or Spider-Man or Preacher or other books. But Persepolis, in my memory, is a pleasant, well-crafted blur.
I’ll grant that it’s been a long time, and I could totally give this another shot. Although, really, I should read one of Satrapi’s other books, methinks.
Maybe it’s like, there are times you walk out of a movie and you’re not sure how you feel. And then it’s two days later and you’re still thinking about it. That tells me there’s something. Maybe I didn’t quite grasp it, or maybe it wasn’t done perfectly, but there was something of value there. Something that grabbed onto a part of my brain and won’t let it rest.
Then there are movies that kinda don’t do that. I liked Avengers 2, but a couple months later, I didn’t really remember much of anything. I haven’t made any effort to see it again.
I guess Persepolis is like Avengers 2 to me. Which is probably something nobody else has said, ever, because it’s a profoundly stupid thing to say. But there you go.
If someone wants to use that for a cover blurb, be my guest. And just say I’m Joss Whedon. People listen to that dude.”
“Why Pete Doesn’t Love Saga As Much As Everyone Else: Part Whatever
Decompressed Storytelling
At the risk of being patronizing, a short explanation of terms:
Decompressed Storytelling is something we saw come into comics when, instead of telling an entire story in a book, story arcs stretched across multiple books. Maybe even a year or multiple years of books.
This is good because it can allow space for more epic tales, bigger stories, more in-depth stuff. But sometimes it’s bad because things become SO decompressed that there’s not a whole lot of story in a given issue.
I can’t imagine trying to read this book month to month. I’m not really sure why it’s published that way. It must take about 5 minutes to get through a single issue, especially when we’ve got an issue that involves a lot of narration, which tends to be something like a dozen words per panel. And with so little movement between lots of issues, how would you remember where you were last time?
That’s my main issue with the decompression in Saga. When I read volume 7, I don’t remember where we were, who’s alive and dead, and what’s happening by the time I pick up volume 8. Unless I wait for 4 or 5 volumes and read them all at once.
We see this on TV lately too. During the sort of second golden age of television, we saw shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad, which seemed a little artificially lengthened at times. It’s not the world’s greatest sin, but it does feel like a little bit of a chore to sit down in front of something like Lost, and by the show’s end the plot or conflicts haven’t moved forward, or only advanced in the episode’s final moments (PS, Brian K. Vaughn was a writer and producer on Lost!).
If you’re like me and sometimes struggling to remember the last volume when jumping into the next, consider if that might be because, volume to volume, the story’s movement can be a little slow. “
“Why Pete Doesn’t Love Saga As Much As Everyone Else: Part 5 (I don’t actually know which part this is, but who cares?)
In this episode: Having Cake AND Eating It
Something that’s really good about Saga is that it’s strange, and it’s a universe that does look pretty different from our own. The way things work, it’s different. The creatures, they’re different.
But the letdown of this is that sometimes things are exactly the same as they are in our universe, and that’s kind of weird.
Take this volume. In which we have a 3-person family where the mom is a centaur, the dad is a human, and their son is a centaur, but his torso is sort of in the middle of his horse body, where a person would ride. Someone thought that one out a little, and that small, unmentioned physical detail makes the world more interesting and real.
But. When it comes to an issue like a transgender character, things are exactly the same in the Saga universe. Being transgender means the same thing in Saga that it does in our universe. It takes a child to say, “I have horns and wings. I’m curious, but I don’t think you’re a monster.” Which you would think would be closer to the attitude of more folks in the Saga universe. For example, if you’re a TV-head robot man whose hand turns into a gun, how uppity could you be about a totally different species having a penis or not? If you can do actual magic, like Harry Potter shit crossed with being a cold-blooded killer, where’s the shock and awe of meeting someone who’s transgender? You just encountered a centaur family. Which means a humanoid dude was banging the horse half of a woman centaur (I mean, I assume. I don’t know much about centaur physiology). You were hanging out with a meerkat wearing a polo shirt. Your planet is headed towards what looks like a giant dead space baby. The boundaries of “weird” are so different in this universe that I have some trouble understanding why something like being transgender raises a brow.
And don’t get me wrong. It’s not a morality thing. I don’t think the issue is that I have is the treatment of a transgender character as unusual. What I’m saying is that I think Saga does some picking and choosing so it can make points about our world, but it comes off as a little lazy because the context doesn’t really work.
For example, women seem to occupy a similar role in the Saga universe, lots like what they do in most of our societies. Women’s history seems to be similar to women’s history in our world. Which doesn’t really make sense to me. The role of women seems to be the case on most planets, across the entire Saga universe, which seems a little unlikely. That’s not necessarily true amongst different species on Earth, so why would it be true across a vast universe of different creatures?
I think the answer is because they want to talk about issues. To be a dick about it for a second, it seems to exist so Saga can use a quote like, “It doesn’t matter who started it or what it’s really about…war usually ends up sucking most for women. Even when we’re not fighting the battles ourselves, we somehow always end up with the lion’s share of the suffering.” I’m not going to argue about the point, nor the difference between death and suffering. I just want to say that it seems that sometimes Saga is more gender egalitarian, when it suits the story. It seems that women characters are often combat veterans. But sometimes, when it suits the story, women occupy a role more traditional to our world.
Wealth and power, religion, gender power differentials, the role of war, all of these things kinda work the same in a universe that is not bound by the same rules. And maybe that’s the point, if I was going to let the book off the hook, maybe the point is that people are small-minded and even with access to a vast universe, we’ll still fight over some tiny planet or dislike someone for having a wang when, from what we can tell, they shouldn’t have one (god knows whether or not a giant topless spider-woman should have a penis or not. I don’t think I could muster the energy to get all uppity about it).
If I was going to let the book off a little more, I think I’d have to admit that you have to have some parallels as a given in order for the story to make any sense.
If I was going to…keep the book on the hook? Does that phrase work that way? If I was going to keep the book on the hook, I’d say that when socio-political things work exactly the same as they do in our world, and when they rely heavily on my knowledge of Earth/human society to make sense of what’s happening, it stands out a bit.
It seems to work for a lot of people, and that’s cool. I don’t think that’s bad. Just another entry in this series that nobody asked for, Why Pete Doesn’t Love Saga As Much As Everyone Else.
Merged review:
Why Pete Doesn’t Love Saga As Much As Everyone Else: Part 5 (I don’t actually know which part this is, but who cares?)
In this episode: Having Cake AND Eating It
Something that’s really good about Saga is that it’s strange, and it’s a universe that does look pretty different from our own. The way things work, it’s different. The creatures, they’re different.
But the letdown of this is that sometimes things are exactly the same as they are in our universe, and that’s kind of weird.
Take this volume. In which we have a 3-person family where the mom is a centaur, the dad is a human, and their son is a centaur, but his torso is sort of in the middle of his horse body, where a person would ride. Someone thought that one out a little, and that small, unmentioned physical detail makes the world more interesting and real.
But. When it comes to an issue like a transgender character, things are exactly the same in the Saga universe. Being transgender means the same thing in Saga that it does in our universe. It takes a child to say, “I have horns and wings. I’m curious, but I don’t think you’re a monster.” Which you would think would be closer to the attitude of more folks in the Saga universe. For example, if you’re a TV-head robot man whose hand turns into a gun, how uppity could you be about a totally different species having a penis or not? If you can do actual magic, like Harry Potter shit crossed with being a cold-blooded killer, where’s the shock and awe of meeting someone who’s transgender? You just encountered a centaur family. Which means a humanoid dude was banging the horse half of a woman centaur (I mean, I assume. I don’t know much about centaur physiology). You were hanging out with a meerkat wearing a polo shirt. Your planet is headed towards what looks like a giant dead space baby. The boundaries of “weird” are so different in this universe that I have some trouble understanding why something like being transgender raises a brow.
And don’t get me wrong. It’s not a morality thing. I don’t think the issue is that I have is the treatment of a transgender character as unusual. What I’m saying is that I think Saga does some picking and choosing so it can make points about our world, but it comes off as a little lazy because the context doesn’t really work.
For example, women seem to occupy a similar role in the Saga universe, lots like what they do in most of our societies. Women’s history seems to be similar to women’s history in our world. Which doesn’t really make sense to me. The role of women seems to be the case on most planets, across the entire Saga universe, which seems a little unlikely. That’s not necessarily true amongst different species on Earth, so why would it be true across a vast universe of different creatures?
I think the answer is because they want to talk about issues. To be a dick about it for a second, it seems to exist so Saga can use a quote like, “It doesn’t matter who started it or what it’s really about…war usually ends up sucking most for women. Even when we’re not fighting the battles ourselves, we somehow always end up with the lion’s share of the suffering.” I’m not going to argue about the point, nor the difference between death and suffering. I just want to say that it seems that sometimes Saga is more gender egalitarian, when it suits the story. It seems that women characters are often combat veterans. But sometimes, when it suits the story, women occupy a role more traditional to our world.
Wealth and power, religion, gender power differentials, the role of war, all of these things kinda work the same in a universe that is not bound by the same rules. And maybe that’s the point, if I was going to let the book off the hook, maybe the point is that people are small-minded and even with access to a vast universe, we’ll still fight over some tiny planet or dislike someone for having a wang when, from what we can tell, they shouldn’t have one (god knows whether or not a giant topless spider-woman should have a penis or not. I don’t think I could muster the energy to get all uppity about it).
If I was going to let the book off a little more, I think I’d have to admit that you have to have some parallels as a given in order for the story to make any sense.
If I was going to…keep the book on the hook? Does that phrase work that way? If I was going to keep the book on the hook, I’d say that when socio-political things work exactly the same as they do in our world, and when they rely heavily on my knowledge of Earth/human society to make sense of what’s happening, it stands out a bit.
It seems to work for a lot of people, and that’s cool. I don’t think that’s bad. Just another entry in this series that nobody asked for, Why Pete Doesn’t Love Saga As Much As Everyone Else.”
“Whoa-ho. There is SO MUCH DIALOGUE in this book that there’s barely room for art in the panels. The dialogue is pretty alright. It just…it feels a little decompressed. I’m all for a thriller that spools out the story slowly over time.
Wait, no I’m not. I hate that.
I wish this was moving a little faster. Captain America being a Hyrda-er (“Being Hydra?” Hydra-ing? Being a Hydrometer?) is a story and a half, but between this volume and the last, we’ve got more than a story and a half. Maybe two stories. Check my math.
Also, I’m not totally sure why I care about Maria Hill being ousted (or not) as the leader of SHIELD and being replaced with Sharon Carter.
Wait, yes I do. Because everyone wants to do a court scene.
Objection! Overruled! 5th Amendment! Leading the witness!
Everyone wants to do a court scene, but let’s face it, the court scene has been done amazingly well in so many different ways as to be unnecessary. You could just put in “A great court scene happened. Use your imagination” and we totally could.
After these court scenes another one has never been necessary:
-Omar on The Wire
-“Now, I may by just a simple country Hyper-Chicken, but I know when we’re finger licked.” from Futurama.
And we’re good.
I’m still curious to see how this all ends, but as stories go, the more the goodness of the story comes to hinge on the satisfactory resolution of an arc, and the more that arc starts to appear impossible to resolve in a satisfactory way, the more hope tends to dwindle. It’s like a TV show that ends. When a TV show strings you out such that the ending is super important (Lost) the quality of that ending can really hurt the legacy of the show. Likewise, if the show’s ending doesn’t really matter (Sopranos, arguably), then the same ending can be arguably good or bad, but the people who like it like the whole series, and the people who hate it still say, “Great show, except that ending.”
With this, we might be slowly sliding into territory where the ending is uber important, and when an ending is imbued with such importance, it’s nearly impossible to create something satisfactory.
The only thing that’s got that much build up and tends to deliver is…sex? Sex is probably built up for most people, and it tends to deliver. Not the first time, but eventually. At some point. If you’re living life the right way, it eventually comes to deliver pretty nicely.
The rest of life is like Chinese Democracy (the album by GnR, not the concept). After that much build up, even a totally competent, maybe even very good album just won’t suffice.”
“When we visited my grandma, she had one VHS we watched all the time: Stand By Me.
It was like a ritual. Every time we visited, when it was time to find something to watch, that’s what we watched.
It was like a ritual because I don’t know how it started, and I don’t remember the last time. But for years, it’s what we did, and just the look of the movie reminds me of visiting her house.
It made a great movie for this sort of thing. When you’re a kid, Stand By Me is just a little…advanced. Or it feels that way. It feels like something that’s not totally outside the stuff you should be watching, but it’s not like watching Nick Jr. either. And then you get older, and it’s still pretty great.
The book and the movie are very close. The events are very nearly identical, for the most part. If you’re familiar with the movie, the book doesn’t hold a ton of surprises. But there’s a little more depth, and the ending wraps things up more. The movie ending is really good, and so is the book ending. Different, but both worthwhile.
The only knock on the book, it contains a couple short stories. The one is clearly designed to give us some insight into Gordon’s relationship with his older brother. It’s not bad, but it feels like it’s just kind of in there. I don’t know that I needed it, or maybe that I needed as much of it as I got. Stories within stories are tough. The pie-eating contest really works because it’s exactly the kind of story a kid that age would make up, and it has the feel of lore that a kid that age passes around. But the brother story, I dunno. I think it’s supposed to be from an early “professional” writing of Gordon’s, which is fine, but it’s the only time in the book we really get into this period between childhood and the present, and bridging those times with a story written by a 20-something(?) Gordon, as being re-read by an adult Gordon, detailing events from childhood Gordon, it’s a little complicated.
That said, that’s a nitpick on a really good book, and a book that I’d recommend to folks who want to try out some King but aren’t big horror buffs. If you liked the kids in the 50’s business of something like IT, this is a great choice. “
“When you first pick this one up, it’s sort of hard to look at. There is SO MUCH ART on every page.
It’s a little like looking at an R. Crumb or maybe Charles Burns picture about 1 inch from your eyeball.
But then it calms down, or maybe your brain learns the language of it, and it’s cool. So if you open it up and feel like it’s super busy, I say give it a couple dozen pages.
This is one of those books I don’t want to rate, star-wise, because it’s about abuse suffered by Glenn Head and a bunch of people he went to boarding school with. Super fucked up, and, well, I don’t know, it’s hard to rate something like that without feeling like you’re rating the act of putting such a story to paper, which takes some serious balzac.
I do appreciate that Glenn believes that the abuse he suffered has caused problems throughout his life, but he doesn’t necessarily force the reader to believe the same thing. This is like the least “woe is me” narrative with the most fucked-up shit I think I’ve ever read. The ratio of how bad things were for Glenn to how little time he seems to spend feeling sorry for himself is different than the norm for this sort of comic, and it’s a good read as a result. It just gives you a different perspective, or maybe helps a reader see that this shit hits different people differently. “
“When you get The Unfortunates, what you get is a box.
Inside the box, 28 pamphlets.
One is an introduction, one is labeled First, another is labeled Last, and the rest have symbols at the top with no prescribed order.
The idea is that you read First first, Last last, and then others can go in any order.
The basics of the plot: a sportswriter is in a smallish town to cover a soccer game, and once he arrives, he realizes the town is one where a friend spent the final years (maybe months) of his life while being killed by cancer.
Each pamphlet, then, is a memory or something happening in the present, sometimes a mixture. Lots of the memories are about the narrator’s friend, some about the narrator’s love life, some about eating lunch.
And the whole concept of putting it together this way is that it replicates how memory works: things don’t have a nice, linear flow. Instead, we remember things as we go. Sometimes those memories seem related to what we’re seeing, sometimes not.
I get a little fartsy here:
This really worked for me. It made me think about the way books are put together, that the author makes things as linear as possible, forms memories or ideas into a story by creating that throughline, but The Unfortunates still creates a story and a strong sense of emotion without a”this happened, then this happened” kind of structure.
It’s not something that’d always work, not something everyone could pull off, but B.S. Johnson makes it work, and it’s one of the cases where the gimmick enriches the story instead of taking away for it or trying to be the story’s entirety.
If you’re into experimental narratives, on some level, this is a great read. It works as an experiment, and it works as a book. It hit me on a “the feels” level even though there was a little bit of a barrier, a learning curve.
Learning that Johnson committed suicide not too long after writing this…
Well, damn, I feel like there’s something about it I get.
I think Johnson was really trying to express something in his books, something about what it’s like to be inside his head. And while his Wikipedia (and other sources) say that his death had some to do with his lack of commercial success, I can’t help but feel like “lack of commercial success” takes on a deeper meaning when part of why you’re writing is to be understood.
It’s probably common among writers, to make something in order to express what things are like inside their heads. But I think Johnson went an extra distance to replicate that experience in new and different ways, and that’d probably make it all the more painful when he didn’t reach a wider audience.
Because “not reaching a wider audience” probably felt like, “not being understood.””
“When you read experimental, literary shit, there’s a definite fear of looking stupid because you didn’t get it.
This is a fear I have confronted on many occasions, so I have no problem telling you that I did not get this book. Like, at all.
I vaguely understood what it was, what it referenced, and the plotline, moment-to-moment action I generally understood. What I didn’t understand was what this is about.
I’ve been really trying to explain how confusing this book was, and I think it’s best said like this: If I wrote something like this, I don’t know how I would know that it was done.
At what point do you step away and say, “Yes, that’s it!”?
Maybe this is like that part of the art museum that some people really dig, where the art is like…there’s this thing they had at the Denver Art Museum, it was part of a cultivator with a big skull on it or something. I guess you see it and feel things, but nothing definable, and what you feel and I feel are going to be totally different.
If you really like that part of the art museum, maybe this book is for you.
It’s weird, I’m not someone who feels like art has to “do” something or be “for” a purpose or anything like that. It’s more that I feel the writer’s work is to show people something, and I’m not so sure I saw anything here.
I’m just not sure how to approach this as a reader or a writer, which are the two primary ways I look at books, and that leaves me with very little.
I googled a bit to read reviews other people had done, and I understood what they meant when they said things like “The blank frames in the book force the reader to be complicit” and stuff about the grotesque and everything. And I’ve felt that way about other books. But this one I think I just found a frustrating experiment, and at times I felt like this was a joke being played on me, like everyone was pretending this was a deep masterpiece and then you open it up and it’s all potty humor. But, see, it’s on purpose potty humor, it KNOWS it’s being scatological (that’s the fancy word for potty humor), so it’s different.
I guess the biggest feeling I got reading this was that maybe this is a prank, and I fell into it. Maybe this is a huge prank on the literary world, and some folks are laughing their asses off at people grasping for deeper meaning in this text.
Or, maybe that’s how this book functions: Intentionally shallow, and therefore the reader has to create the connections for themselves.
Or, maybe this book is about the fact that things don’t always have deeper meaning, sometimes things just exist.
And where this ends up is me saying that the book could be interpreted any number of ways, and when a book can be interpreted in an unlimited number of ways, I have to bow out. That’s not my scene.”
“Whenever there’s a crime spree with 2 or more criminals in fiction, one of them is a rapey moron who blows everything by being a rapey moron.
When I put my crew together, I’m not going to hire a rapey moron. I know it’ll probably cause me come trouble at the yearly convention (Con Con ’23), but I don’t care, I’m really tired of these guys wrecking a perfectly good heist to do some sex on someone.
Plus, it seems like the rapey moron is always kind of worthless. It’d be one thing if he was the safecracker or something, and you’re like, “Shit, I really don’t care for this fella, but there’s no way we’re getting ANYTHING unless he comes along.” But he’s never that, he’s just kind of a fuckup who’s there to fill the quota.
Well, I say no more!”
“Where are the real life robot hands?
They’re all over in fiction, it totally makes sense that we’d have robot hands by now.
So where are they?
Is it that too few people are missing a hand, so it’s not a top priority or something?
Or, how come nobody has figured out how to make humans grow new limbs and shit? Like the Lizard from Spider-Man, but, you know, without turning someone into a lizard man.
Or maybe it does turn someone into a lizard man. I don’t know, what’s so bad about being a lizard man? Seems alright as long as you’re not murderous, right?
I’m just saying, I’d like the option.
Science never asks the right questions. “How do you feel about becoming a lizard man?””
“While this is the penultimate book, it’s also one of the best. Shit hits the fan, and it hits hard.”
“WHO was responsible for going forward with “Krisis of the Krimson Kryptonite?” KKK? Really?
I mean, no part of me was like, “This is a racist dog whistle” or whatever, but, guys, c’mon, I did better than this in the 6th grade.
True story: We used to do this thing in 6th grade, instead of the science fair, we’d do the Invention Convention where you were supposed to invent something.
Because we were in 6th grade, all of these inventions were terrible. Mostly a thing with a clock added on, oftentimes something that absolutely did not require or benefit from a clock.
I invented the Keen Key Kontainer. This was a Nerf ball that I cut up so you could put it around your house key, like a sheath, and then if you fell on your keys while rollerblading, which was something that could happen to me because I was in 6th grade in the 90’s, the foam would prevent you from being in a minor amount of pain.
I attempted to decorate this and make it look nice, and when I brought in the “prototype” the science teacher was like, “Okay, this works, but the final version will look a little better?” And I was like, “Totally.” It totally didn’t, the final version was EXACTLY the prototype because, I mean, why else would this matter?
I did my “research” portion by putting a key in the Kontainer, putting it in my pocket, and falling over a few times. SCIENCE!
We also had to include some scientific background, so I did mine about buoyancy because the Kontainer also happened to float, a huge bonus if you happened to be waterskiing and put your keys in your pocket(?)
My dad helped me with that part, although I think his explanation of buoyancy was a little over my head and more than was warranted by a nerf ball hastily cut into a vaguely boxy shape.
I remember my good friend’s invention was a lock for CD cases, which was a diary lock he glued onto a CD case. This was ostensibly to keep your siblings from borrowing and scratching your CD’s. Our science teacher told him that if he was grading my friend on his own abilities, this would be an F, but because he had to grade him with regard to his peers, it was a B. I did not receive such a speech, which I guess tells you either that I met my potential with the Keen Key Kontainer, or my science teacher was very wrong.
I’ll let you be the judge, but I DID get a masters of science. Okay, Library Science, which is questionable as “science” goes, but still.
Anyway, during the process of creating the Keen Key Kontainer, I realized that the initials for it was KKK, and even though I was in 6th grade, I decided to go ahead and abandon the 3-k name and put a C in front of Container.
If I, a 6th grader living up to his full potential by butchering a Nerf ball, can be self-aware enough to catch that, you’d think DC comics could pull it off.”
“Whoo! Okay, this is the story of America’s first marathon, but it reads more like a script for an episode of Wacky Races.
Someone vomits in the first mile. Another dude steals a bunch of peaches from some spectators and runs away to eat them. The race doctor falls off a cliff. A racer is chased a mile off course by a dog.
Okay, then the leading runner is begging for water, but his trainers will only give him, get this, strychnine. Yep. Because they figured it would make him run faster, and of course, being old times, they combined it with an egg white. And then they do it again. And then they give him a warm sponge bath in the Missouri heat!
And this man won the race in 3 hours, 28 minutes.
Now, please know I’m not bragging. Quite the opposite. I ran a marathon in 3 hours and 25 minutes! Haha! Take that, first marathon winner ever! Then I had a margarita and fell down some stairs, after which I spent the evening at some clothing-optional hot springs where the only naked people were me and a very old local man who complained that the race screwed up the arrival of his mail. And THAT is why we run. Not for the stickers on Subarus or the desire to keep up with water bottle technology. Nope, for the humiliation and old man nudity.
I was pretty proud of myself as I read this, until I thought about the fact that I ran about as fast as a dude who drank no water and instead consumed RAT POISON MIXED WITH EGG. TWICE. I mean, that’s like if I stabbed myself with 5 miles to go, just to up the ante or something.
People were hardcore back then.”
“Why are there like 5 titles running under the New Avengers title? This shit is really confusing. I put a volume on hold at the library, and some other weird-ass book shows up. And I read it because I’m a comics nerd and that’s what I do, but I’m not happy about it. Not happy about it at all.
And can someone explain to me if Jonathan Hickman’s web site is trolling me: http://www.pronea.com
And while we’re asking questions can someone tell me what the appropriate amount is to tip a bartender for
A) A beer can
B) A shot
C) A Mixed drink?
And are people tipping maids at hotels? Is that a thing? Please only answer if you’re NOT a maid at a hotel.
There are probably more important questions, but let’s start with those.”
“Why do golden retrievers always show up in these disaster movies and make it?
I’m sorry, but if Martians were death-raying everything that moves, I don’t think the goldens would last too long.
I put my money on the survival of old potato dogs who probably would stay in bed or on the porch, even if everyone was getting zapped. It’s entirely possible that in all the mayhem, the Martians wouldn’t even register those dogs as alive, and they’d pass right by. Maybe those Russian dogs who know how to ride the subway, they seem like they have a good shot.
That’s why this book is a reminder: cherish the time you have with your golden. Because when the Martians come, he’s probably going to run up to a bipedal Martian war machine and drop a tennis ball at its feet.”
“Why do I feel like I’ve read a lot of stories about the Mole Man lately? Is it just bad luck or is he everywhere all of a sudden?
It happens from time to time. There was a period in the late 90’s where I felt like I couldn’t turn around without reading something about the Absorbing Man. The guy who can turn into any material and also feels the need to carry around a ball and chain.
And I know we’re getting a little deep here, but the ball and chain? That was a real stupid idea. Your plan to hobble a prisoner is to attach him to a minimum of two weapons? What’s next? “Oh, we make our prisoners carry a very heavy set of knives. Keeps ’em from running away.” Good one, the law.
It’s also strange that the Mole Man has those weird mole people who seem to worship him. I mean, I don’t really know how this happened. And it’s weird because, you know, he was a total knob on the surface, but then he gets down there and everyone thinks he’s the cat’s pajamas, the cat’s meow, the feline AIDS (I made one of those up. See if you can guess which one!). It’s sort of like…imagine if people in Belarus decided that Billy Ray Cyrus was the coolest dude ever. And that they thought Billy Ray Cyrus was the coolest guy ever in America. And then, some dude from Belarus comes to America and suddenly realizes that almost every other American is cooler than Billy Ray Cyrus.
That’s what I imagine it would be like if a moloid came to the surface. That Mole Man wouldn’t seem so rad all of a sudden. In fact, he might be one of the least rad people of all time. Green pants, green shirt, and a green cape? Please.”
“Why do scientists always be like, “Bro, I just figured it’d be tight to like study this weird biomass that might be super dangerous, but fuck all that, what if it’s not and it’s super cool?”
All these horror stories have a scientist who makes something, and then is like, Holy shit, how could I have ever DREAMED that this scientific discovery would be used for evil?
And then you find out the scientific discovery is like a giant missile with sawblades on it, and demons shoot out of the back as soon as you launch it, and contained inside is a mixture of every disease ever catalogued, and the viruses are all mating in there and shit, and it’s electrified and if you look at it indirectly, you usually see all of your dead ancestors crowded around it-
They make THAT thing, and then they’re like, “Now, look at this and tell me how anyone could see such a thing as evil.””
“Where to start with thisâ¦
I suppose âWhy?â is the big question. Why read this?
Well, one reason was because a favorite author, Chuck Klosterman, has mentioned it a number of times.
Reason two was a matter of convenience. I found out this is available as a free audiobook on Internet Archive, and I was curious. Iâm like a cat that way. Iâm also like a cat because when Iâm hungry, Iâm obnoxious as hell.
Reason three was that this is a fascinating cultural document. One way to get published in the New York Times? Threaten to send people bombs. Poets, take note.
I suppose the next thing is to say that the star rating is completely divorced from the way Ted Kacsynski decided to try and bring about what he thought was a necessary revolution. Maybe my rating it this way is upsetting to some, but I donât really care. Get your own Goodreads going, review shit based on how you felt about it. Thatâs kinda how this whole thing works.
I donât think thereâs much reason to read this thing if youâre looking to decide whether or not Kaczynski was a bad guy. He was OBVIOUSLY a bad guy.
I do think thereâs an argument to be made that what he did was wrong, but perhaps he thought that what he was doing was taking extreme measures to prevent what he thought was basically the complete dissolution of human society, or that he was taking actions that he felt were necessary to âfreeâ humans from their technological/societal enslavement. I donât necessarily agree with these ideas, but I do see similar sentiments in modern culture, that extreme measures are justified if the end goals are important enough. If you tweeted or Instagrammed âBurn it all downâ in response to a demonstration last year, I donât know that youâve got great ground to stand on in terms of judging hardline ideology and the willingness to go pretty far in order to achieve a goal.
Please note that Iâm not saying that tweeting a sentiment is as bad as sending someone a bomb. Iâm saying that holding the idea that itâs okay to create destruction and harm in order to achieve a goal (that would better society) is closer to the beliefs of Ted Kaczynski than the beliefs of Gandhi.
ANYWAY.
This starts off with a critique of the modern (at the time) left, which sounds almost identical to what someone would say about the modern left today, just with a less internet-centric focus. Itâs almost uncanny, really, because this came out in 1995, almost 30 years ago, and yet it reads like something written by one of three people: A modern conservative pundit, a modern centrist criticizing the left because itâs currently the seat of power and the individual is more concerned with power than left/right dynamics, or a modern leftist who wants to make a name for himself by being anti-status-quo. So edgy! K (Iâm just going to call Ted Kacynski K from here out because thatâs not the easiest name for me to spell) even quotes a lot of French Revolution philosophy and ideas that are very en vogue right now with groups like antifa and ecoterrorists and whatnot. But seriously, if youâre a pundit or political commentator or whatever, you can basically just rip off this essay, and if you get caught, just say that you were taking Kacsynskiâs ideas and removing the problematic context, and that you werenât necessarily denying him credit, you just donât think a murderer should receive any notoriety. Might work?
Kâs bashing of the left isnât really about the left, I think. I think heâs trying to say that the problems of technological modernity are easily seen in progressive, leftist people of the time. Itâs important to put this in historical context: Bill Clinton was President from 1993 to 2001, so the Democratic party was experiencing a moment of real power. From 1987 to 1995 Democrats held the majority in the Senate. So Iâd guess the bashing of the left is probably more about bashing the center of power at the time than it is specifically about the positions of the left, and I think if things had been the other way, K wouldâve trashed Republicans instead.
K then talks about the main problem, as he sees it, with modern society: people have no access to going through a process of power acquisition. K defines âpowerâ a little differently in terms of the type of power he sees as critical for personal development. Power over other people is not real power. Money is not real power. For K, itâs a more primitive thing, confidence in oneâs self, that an individual can determine his own destiny. As an example, a person living long ago would obtain their power through learning to become a hunter. That would fulfill their power process, and they would feel fulfilled as a human being. People kind of had to learn something, be tested, and come out the other side in order to be a fully realized person.
Modern, technological, industrial society makes our baseline survival tasks easy enough that most of us do not have to do anything strenuous just to get by. As K puts it bluntly, to get a mid-level job with a comfortable salary usually only requires a moderate effort. Far, far less than the effort required to hunt and gather for survival, basically. Living a comfortable life in modern society isnât all that difficult.
The last big thing is about technology, and this is where it gets a little depressing. More than a little, maybe.
According to K, technology is the most powerful force in the modern world. Technology ALWAYS progresses up to the point a society completely collapses. Itâs the one force that operates this way. Regardless of who holds political power or what the prevailing ideology of the time is, technology always moves forward. Morality, centers of power, and other concepts may change, but technology is always expanding and moving forward.
âThe systemâ exists to feed technological advancement, not human enrichment. People conform to the system, and to the needs of technological advancement, not the other way around. Kâs assertions here are that we force kids into math and science because thatâs whatâs required to advance technology, not because this is what makes people happy. He also asserts that we mold the individual to fit society instead of molding society to suit individuals, even to the point that psychological and pharmaceutical interventions exist because they can turn someone who cannot or will not exist in modern technological society into a productive person.
TRUTHS
There are some things that K got right, if you ask me. Iâd like to highlight some of those.
Early on, K warns that separation from industrial/technological progress will be painful and difficult, and the longer we go, the more difficult it will be. I think that if youâd told people they had to give up their smartphones in 2010, theyâd have an easier time doing so than in 2020.
I do think, as K says, that technology is a difficult force to stop because each little piece develops separately and for a seemingly good or at least benign purpose. There are very few technologies that are âevilâ from the outset, the problem is more that technologies come about, mesh with each other, and remove the human element from day-to-day tasks and interactions.
K talks about how itâs inhumane to use technology to make some jobs irrelevant, then to tell people they need to learn how to do other jobs instead. That there is no dignity for the people who lose their occupation, and thereâs rarely consideration of technology removing jobs people may enjoy and that give them fulfillment. I think the most modern example is the whole âLearn to codeâ business. The concept of replacing manual labor with a computer-based profession probably gets caught up in the environmental discussion and the need to move away from fossil fuels, but Iâm of the opinion that if coal miners were able to get jobs making solar panels or wind farm blades and so on, safer jobs that are still very hands-on and require physical skill, I think weâd be in a very different situation.
K mentions that the needs of a technological society are often disguised within propaganda. A technological society will need more people who can work with and advance technology, therefore more young people are pushed into science, math, and tech, even if they find these subjects uninteresting and unfulfilling. This seems possible to me. Movements like STEM-based education and Girls Who Code make it seem like a good thing, a pressing social issue, that more girls get into the tech industry, but I do question whether itâs a human-centered movement, intended to improve the lives of girls and women, or if itâs a techno-centric idea, intended to improve technology and the tech sector while mostly disregarding the happiness and preferences of the people who get swept up in it. Is the problem that we need a more even distribution among genders in the tech sector, or is this an inhumane effort to propagandize the underlying need, which is simply more people working in STEM? Iâm 100% sure there are girls who are interested in these fields and who would be successful in them, by the way, and I donât think people involved in these movements are consciously doing something wrong or evil. My question is: Are these movements really about getting a more even distribution of girls and women in STEM as the end goal, or is this more about getting more people in STEM, in general, as a method of continuing the technological system, and girls are a convenient, untapped population? By forcing the needs of the technological system through the lens of gender, we can actually make it seem as though weâre doing a good thing by pushing girls into STEM, and we can convince girls and women who might not be interested in STEM that by going into a STEM field, theyâre in sort of activist role. So, a career field that might be very boring, rote, and machine-like in its day-to-day tasks may be marketed as a âfeeds the soulâ kind of job because by being in that chair, youâre representing an underrepresented group in the field. Meanwhile, the reality may be that the system just needs more bodies. I mean, this is depressing as fuck, but think about The Matrix and all those bodies plugged in to operate the machine. Is there a need to have a more even gender representation inside the matrix, or would that just be transparent propaganda to get more people in the system, powering the system, and the truth is that the system doesnât give a flying fuck about the gender of those bodies?
This is hard to talk about, so maybe itâd help if I flip it to something more personal:
I worked as a librarian in a public library for 15 years. There are men in libraries, but not many, and there are very few men that I would call âtraditionally masculine.â By the by, I donât define âtraditionally masculineâ as being assholes or mean to women or whatever. I mean more like a fella who is interested in traditionally masculine things. Fuck it, a guy who doesnât wear skinny jeans and suspenders, who has opinions on brands of power tools, drinks brands of beer that are sold at 7-11, and does not spend time or money on hair products, including and especially overly-precious beard care routines. A manâs man. Okay? I guess pretend you donât know what Iâm talking about if you want. Iâm sort of over talking about this stuff in ways that anticipate the weirdest idealogues reading something and interpreting it in the wrong-est way possible.
I enjoyed working as a librarian, for the most part, and I do think itâd be nice to see more men in the industry. But, if an individual, a manâs man, asked me whether I recommend working in the library…I might say no. While itâd be good to have this person in the profession, itâs good for the profession and maybe the public served, it might not be in the best interest of that individual. So, is the abstract concept of diversifying this profession more important, or is the overall happiness of the individual over the course of their life more important?
This one mightâve spoken to me more than anything else: we donât have to strain ourselves to do things that are useful in a direct way, like finding food, and we fill our lives with surrogate tasks and goals. Bodybuilding or distance running are surrogate tasks unless you actually need your strength and endurance for your everyday life (and if you did, you wouldnât have to bodybuild, youâd build the needed strength from your work). Basically, everything we do, other than those things that are not for direct survival, are surrogate tasks. You can have goals, or even things you consider altruistic, but the truth is that these are filler tasks artificially created to fulfill our human needs and to create a faux power process. Itâs an extremely depressing way to look at modern life, and itâs a little difficult to think another way once you go down this road.
Whew
SOME THINGS I DISAGREE WITH
Well, arenât you glad THIS section exists!? And that there are words here!?
K sees genetic engineering as a big threat. I do not. I think, like most scientific ideas, genetic engineering is not inherently good or bad, itâs the application of it that changes things. K sees the obsession with beauty and longevity as a really bad thing, and he might have some points there, however genetic engineering has the potential to make the lives most of us live no longer, and maybe not aesthetically different, but better. I think most people see genetic engineering as basically evil Hitler shit. I guarantee you those folks have never been on dialysis. Thereâs a huge gap no one talks about between making all babies blonde and blue-eyed and making sure that someoneâs vital organs function within a typical range, which allows them to live in reasonable physical comfort. I donât really see genetic engineering as an evil influence if it allows people to have typical biological human functionality and removes suffering from people who just lost a genetic roll of the dice. I mean, thereâs no reason for anyone to suffer from certain ailments if a cure, or even lessening of symptoms, is attainable through gene therapy. Thereâs no âHuntingtonâs Cultureâ or âDementia Cultureâ that would be lost, and I think, weirdly, K talks so much about individual freedom and so on, yet doesnât feel like genetic engineering should be a matter of individual choice. Maybe he feels that it should be, but it wouldnât, in practice.
I think my primary disagreement with K is in the idea of what humans are âmeantâ to do. I think he sees humans as unhappy as a result of technological advancements, and I think thereâs validity to his claims. I donât see the advancement of technology as a force that increases happiness. However, Iâm not sure that the answer is to go backwards on a societal level, both because that seems unsatisfying to me, and also because I donât think thatâs realistically possible.
On the realistic side, I just donât see us rolling back technology for the sake of humane life. I honestly think itâs a possible solution, but I think when the rubber meets the road, itâs just impossible. We might compel people to give up technology, either by restriction or by damaging infrastructure, but that just seems so unlikely and difficult to manage.
On the reversion side, I wonder if the technological revolution is a necessary part of human development, and if there will be a fading of technology. K asserts that technology always advances as long as societies do, and that is true so far, but perhaps itâs possible that a society will last longer than the advancement of technology.
I wonder if technology naturally ebbs and flows, but on a longer curve than other things like politics and economics, which will always change and restructure with each subsequent generation (where technology is a-political, so it doesnât necessarily change when a new, more progressive generation comes to power).
The thing that makes me doubt this the most: Weâve got so much amazing technology now. Shouldnât most of us be able to work like 10 hours per week? Arenât we capable of getting things done so much faster and more efficiently now? Why have we filled the time provided by technology with…more work? Or has work amount dwindled and like a goldfish, the remaining work expands to fill the time allotted? Either way, weâre all working 40-hour jobs even though weâve got all this time-and-effort-saving tech.
I wonder if the technological revolution is necessary, and after we might get to something like a social, artistic revolution. If all of our daily needs were fulfilled by machines, what would we do with our lives? K seems to think weâd be miserable, but Iâm not so sure. Weâd certainly have to find new ways of living, but I think we would and could. People retire, and some are definitely miserable, some donât know what to do with themselves, but others really enjoy retirement, find ways to be useful to others, and stay busy doing unimportant but fulfilling things.
This probably wouldnât happen in my lifetime, I think weâve got too far to go in terms of setting up a structure where people are clothed and fed without lifting a finger, figuring out how all of this would work. But as far as this version of society goes, it could be a total fucking disaster, but it could be fun. I mean, what if everyone you knew who had a mid-level job they didnât care about was replaced in that role by a machine and was now a mid-level rapper? Would that really be a problem?
SHOULD YOU READ THIS?
Eh, maybe. If youâre curious, especially about systems of power, this is a pretty good read.
I think the most sort of stirring part is the way K talks about power and systems of power using lingo that has more recently come into the broader culture. I guess itâs a…useful mental exercise to consider that someone who did something horrible might hold a lot of the same beliefs as other people who have good goals.
I do think itâs also a useful exercise if you can read it and then think about the way that thinking only in terms of systems of power maybe isnât wonderful. Or maybe even expanding it to looking at hardline ideologies as very questionable frameworks for looking at the world. Like, if you are of the belief that being wealthy is inherently immoral, youâll hear echoes of yourself in here, and maybe thatâs a good thing. Maybe you can kind of see how your hardline ideology comes off to other people.
Overall, the existence of this writing makes a great argument for the difference between speech and violence.”
“Whew, done!
Just about four months after starting, I can stick a fork in this one. And then return it to the library and pretend to be mystified by the four lined-up holes that have appeared in the book. Maybe it was one of their machines?
So what the hell took me so long to finish this book? It was long, but even at nearly 700 pages that puts me at a rate of about 7 pages a day. Not too impressive.
There were a lot of factors. Have you guys heard that Nintendo Wii is a thing that was invented?
But there was something else that made it even more difficult.
I visited with an old teacher from college. She was (and is) a fantastic teacher, as evidenced by the fact that she always asks âWhat are you reading?â I told her that I was working on Garp. She told me that one of her professors brought Irving to her school and that he was a short asshole who was trying to nail every student on campus.
It was kind of an awkward moment, made worse by the fact that she dropped a grape on the ground, and after I nudged it into the sewer with my foot she suggested that I could have left it out for a squirrel or a bird.
Does it matter if the author is an asshole?
It shouldnât. I think that I enjoy the music of Metallica the same amount as I would have regardless of their dislike for Napster, although thatâs kind of different because though what they were doing seemed a little greedy, it wasnât morally reprehensible. Plus, you canât take the most extreme example. Iâm sure that if Hitler had written the Cat in the Hat it would have seen a pretty sharp decline in sales in the mid 1940âs, spiking somewhere around the release of American History X, and then falling back into the red.
Hereâs the big difference I see, however:
Garp, in the book, is a writer, and if you do a little digging youâll find that the writing paths taken by Garp and Irving are pretty similar. Whether or not the book is autobiographical, and I hate to confuse the author with the narrator, it sure as hell FEELS autobiographical, which I think is no accident. Now, that in and of itself isnât an issue, but let me pose this:
As an 18 year-old kid I went with a buddy to Chicago ComiCon. This has a point, I swear. Among the things to do at ComiCon, such as meeting Lou Ferrigno or being very saddened when the original Green Lantern artist is trotted out as a symbol of the way comic companies screwed creators, you can meet some of the big writers and artists of the day.
At the time, I was enjoying the hell out of a title called 100 Bullets by Brian Azarello. He has become a pretty big name in the meantime, but at that time he wasnât one of the people with a long line waiting to see him.
I wanted to bring books for him to sign, but because I was traveling from Colorado to Chicago, I figured Iâd leave my comics at home. So when I got to Brian Azarello, I just asked for his autograph on a blank piece of paper in a journal. He looked up at me like I was a fucking idiot and said, âJust sign this?â He sighed, signed, and handed it back without saying anything else.
I understand that itâs not the best thing to go to a signing and not bring the proper book. But I came so far, was a genuine fan, was only 18, and I was pretty saddened by the whole thing. It was so depressing that I tore the page out of the journal and threw it away, hoping that I would forget the whole thing. That wasâ¦coming up on 10 years ago, so obviously I didnât forget.
After that, it was tough to read his stuff. I knew that I shouldnât let it bother me, but I didnât want to support someone who treated me like shit. I havenât bought an Azarello book since.
Contrast that with James Kolchalka, who not only signed, but even drew his signature elf character in my book without me so much as asking. Since then, Iâve followed his work, and have recommended American Elf to anyone with even a subtle interest in comics.
Iâm not saying that the one encounter turned the tide for Azarello, or Kolchalka for that matter. But hey, if you have 100 interactions like that, and someone else across the convention floor is having 100 positive interactions, youâre putting yourself in a bad place.
And to authors and artists who do signings and whatnot: If you donât want to be there, we donât want you there. Period. Iâd rather miss out on seeing you entirely than have a bad experience that taints all your future work.
Letâs bring it back to Garp.
Garp felt autobiographical, and I heard from a trusted source that Irving was an ass. It made it really hard to not read it as the main character being Irving, which made it hard to get through. Which is why I put it down for a solid month.
But, bolstered by the fact that I had made a vow to try some long books this year, and further bolstered by the fact that this was only number 2, I pressed on.
Based on the two books by Irving that Iâve read, I can say a couple things about them. They can be long, and they can be a bit of a slog, but they often pay off in a lot of ways. Iâm not an ending guy, and flipping to the end of a book has never been a satisfying experience for me, but the endings of Irvingâs books always seem to happen in the right place and at the right time.
Itâs also notable that his books tend to be pretty long. What I was looking for in reading long books this year was that sort of cumulative effect, the emotion that was heightened by spending what amounted to three times as long with a set of characters. And for me, it worked.
If you like Irving, you like him. If you pick this up and get 200 pages in, you will finish. If youâre not a fan, Iâm certainly not the person to convert you.
“
“While not bad or evil like a lot of folks might say, I suppose this one missed the mark for me in a couple ways.
One was at the intersection of memoir and guides for fellow teens.
A memoir can be anything. It can present one individual’s view, and a memoir can present a person’s point of view without apology or pulling back or stepping out of the narrative and saying, “Here’s what I said at the time, but that’s because there were things I didn’t know…”
A guide for fellow teens has a bit of a different responsibility in my view.
I wasn’t 100% sure if I should be reading Gender Queer as one adult talking to other adults, sort of showing that as a teen, Maia engaged in some of the silliness and confusion we all have, that a gender queer person also has a lot of the same thoughts, teen angst, and so on, or if I should be reading Gender Queer as an adult talking with teens.
A specific point of contention for me, if this is an adult talking to teens, was in the way that Maia discusses and depicts pelvic exams.
Pelvic exams were pretty horrible and traumatizing for Maia, and I get that, if you absolutely can’t stand this part of your body, having it examined would be a tough moment on a lot of levels.
BUT
I do think, because this book is being put on shelves as important for teens, as a book speaking to teens, it’s important to relate to teens that pelvic exams might be really unpleasant and emotionally and physically challenging…and if you’ve got the parts that warrant an exam, you should get them checked out by a good doctor.
Maia’s second pelvic exam seems to have come from a very understanding doctor who thanked Maia for talking about gender identity and how this was a very loaded experience, and the doctor did eventually have Maia leave and come back with a prescription for a pain pill and a xanax or similar to make the process less unpleasant. But this exam is described as being worse than the first.
What never happens in the book is a spot where adult Maia says, “Hey, teens reading this book: My experiences with this were pretty awful, and this still isn’t an activity I’m totally good with, but if you have the parts, and if you’re sexually active, you really do need to get checked out.”
There were other sections like this. I can understand why young Maia didn’t want to deal with having a period, so the move was to just reuse the same pad day after day until it was, by Maia’s own accounting, miraculous that Maia never got a UTI. And I wouldn’t blame a young Maia for this, but I do think, if this book is meant to be a guide for teens, that it’d be a good idea to put something in here about how, for the purpose of medical safety, it’s a good idea to take care of yourself.
Let me put it this (very awkward) way: If my child read this book, I wouldn’t be worried about this “warping” their gender or whatever, but I would feel like we needed to have a talk about periods, pelvic exams, and the like, and I would want to see if we could talk about these things in a less fearful way, a less threatening way, because I would want my child, of whatever gender identity, to be alive to assert that identity.
And, yes, elephant in the room (well, elephant’s trunk…eh, that’s a MAJOR oversell, but whatever), I don’t own a vagina, so I might be talking out of turn to some extent. But I DO own a butthole, and I’ve had more than one exam that involved some fingers headed up there, including a colonoscopy! And I recommend it! Not for the fun factor, which I would rate as VERY low, but because, you know, I’d prefer people not die of totally preventable shit way before their time just because they don’t want to let a doctor throw a couple digits up their backside.
That’s my PSA: Let doctors look at your equipment. It sucks, but it’s better than the alternative.
Gender Queer provides a picture of a person’s experience, the micro, and in that way, it’s successful memoir and probably a solid read for the right young person. And I don’t think it’s the responsibility of singular memoirs to provide an overview of everything for everyone.
Gender Queer does not, in my opinion, provide a roadmap for teens that would be helpful in navigating being gender queer themselves. It may make them feel less alone, less isolated, and this is good, but I do think that if it’s going to be placed in the position of a how-to or a what’s happening to my body book for teens, it could have more utility for gender queer teens if there was a little more…how should I say this…
Look, I had HORRENDOUS dental experiences that I would not recommend to anyone, and if I wrote about them in a memoir, I’d write about them in gory detail.
If I was writing a guide to life, I’d probably include some detail, but the sort of takeaway would be, “Don’t fuck around, don’t stop going to the dentist, you will regret not going.”
So maybe what’s happening, in my mind, is that Gender Queer is a memoir that’s been thrust into the position of a guide to gender queer teen life, perhaps without that being the intended position of the book or the author. And in that case, it’d be sort of unfair to ding it on that count.
The other thing that has me rating this one a bit lower, the stories often felt like discrete vignettes that were blended together as opposed to having a feeling of throughline, and that didn’t work for me. It ends up feeling disjointed in that way. Again, not a big deal, just a personal taste thing that didn’t go my way. “
“While there were some interesting insights into the development of Shovel Knight, and while Craddock’s writing is clear and to-the-point, this just isn’t a terribly compelling story. Shovel Knight’s development plays out pretty much like you’d expect, and while I think the cohesive dev team made for a great game and a good work environment, it doesn’t make for an exciting story.
I do think there’s a missed opportunity here to talk more about crowd-funded games, what the results are like, how many of them sink or swim, and so on. Shovel Knight was initially crowd-funded, and it’s certainly one of the more successful games of that type. “
“When we left you last time, your hero (me) was pondering whether the slow burn first volume of this book would be justified by the greatness of the second volume!
Since then you’ve hopefully made a very thorough and searching inventory of yourself. If you’re calling me your “hero” in any sense of the word, you’ve got some problems.
Also, since then, I’ve read the second volume. And I have an answer: kinda.
Kinda!
The first volume was slow as shit, and the second volume is fast as fuck. At all the oddest times. The actual fighting that goes on between Dr. Strange and Science Badguy Asshole is very, very brief. The collecting of artifacts and interesting bits that could go along with that are also rushed. But the standing around and talking about how the odds aren’t good…that seems to go on and on. Like a Jack Johnson song. The one that goes “On and On.” That wasn’t a slam on Jack Johnson. I COULD slam Jack Johnson, but I won’t. I feel like he lives in Hawaii and is stoned all the time and has probably one of the better lives ever lived. Why attack? If I’m not going to have one of the top 10 best lives ever, someone should, and I don’t want to be the guy that shits all over that possibility.
Anyway, the story is decompressed up top, compressed to hell after that.
Oh, and we also get an issue that shows how the Mexican Dr. Strange got involved (pretty much exactly like Dr. Strange did) and a couple of Chinese Dr. Stranges (pretty much exactly like Dr. Strange did), a Dr. Strange from New Orleans (pretty much exactly like Dr. Strange did, but with PYM PARTICLES!), and an eastern European Dr. Strange (pretty much the same, but drunk).
All these other Dr. Stranges have weird, made-up sounding names. Which has to be hard. If you’ve ever had a friend who tried to change his name in, say, college, nobody lets that shit fly. So if you changed your name in adulthood, and if you cited the reason for the name change as being “because I’m a wizard now,” I think you’d run into some resistance, and I’d have to say I side with the resistance on that one.
At the end of the day, a pretty good book, but damn do I feel like the beginning was really slow and the end was quick, that we saw a lot of stuff I didn’t care about and then rushed through some things I really wanted to see.”
“When stories were âSubmitted for approval by the Midnight Society,â did they ever not get approval? I donât remember any episodes like that, but itâd be a convenient way out of a jam as a writer for that show. âYeah, this story isnât very good ON PURPOSE!â
If Josh Malerman sat by the fire and threw the magic dust on it and told these stories, Iâd probably vote him in, but with some things to work on. The stories in Goblin had really detailed character sketches, and then by the end of the story the characters were gone and you had to repeat the getting to know you process for each story. So it felt a little slow as a result.
Have you seen Death Proof? You know how Tarantino makes like a short movie, then the entire thing resets and we see the same movie again but with a different outcome? It feels a little like that here and there in Goblin, and so when weâre getting to the long setup of a kid magician and then another magician and what his childhood was like, and when I suspected I wasnât gonna hear from either of these characters shortly after getting their backstory, I tapped out. I just didnât get into the rhythm of reset, new story, lay it out, character details, story ramps up and concludes, resetâ¦
This is my first Malerman, and Iâd give him another try on something a little more focused. This one just didnât do it for me.
Also, characters didnât make a big enough deal about the town being called Goblin. That shitâs hilarious. Also, built-in mascot for everything.
2022 Update: I tried this again where I left off, finished the magician story, started in on the next one, decided I’d made the right choice the first time.
Two whacks at this one, same result. When will I learn…”
“When I was a kid, my mom looked at a Hellboy comic I had, and she was like, “Oh, so is this some kind of goal for you now?” I guess maybe I was getting into metal or something at the time? She was pretty unamused, and I don’t think my narrative-accurate description of Hellboy’s arrival on Earth and his rejection of his demonic destiny convinced her much. If Hellboy was real, I guess my mom would’ve thrown old vegetables and bottles at him or something. She would’ve been one of the many ungrateful people he saved from ghosts and vampires and shit. Oh, well. Someone’s gotta be the mob.”
“When I think about the Silver Surfer, I think it’s gotta be one of the most profoundly stupid ideas that works somehow. Like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It’s like, “What if we had this shiny chrome dude who traveled through space, nay, SURFED through space. Or, wait. Through the cosmos. I think we call it a cosmos when it’s like this. Cosmos is space too, but like more trippy.”
But it totally works! I don’t know why, I don’t know how…
Saying that reminds me of Eric Kimmel. He’s a guy who did a bunch of books for kids. He wrote this one called I Know Not What, I Know Not Where, so that’s where the memory comes from.
So when I was in elementary school, he came to visit. And he read to classes and was a super nice dude. He sat in this chair in the library. It was some kind of memorial chair for our school’s founder, and in the middle of reading to a class, the chair broke and he went tumbling out.
Bad as it was, it was also caught on video. So, when my class watched it (we saw the video rather than the guy, sort of like how they showed us pictures of musical instruments in music class rather than the real thing. Public school) the teacher tried to fast-forward through the chair break, but that just meant we saw it in fast motion, which made it even funnier.
I’m sorry, Eric Kimmel. You seemed like a really good dude. And in fairness, you didn’t seem like a big dude. Kinda seemed like a crappy chair.
Anyway, Silver Surfer.
A great series with a fitting, romantic ending. Everything ties together, everyone kinda gets what they want and kinda doesn’t.
I’m not usually a fan of the romantic subplot in things, and it’s because a lot of times I think the plot of something like Silver Surfer is 100000000X more interesting than a romance between two people. But in this book, the romance grounded the story in something relate-able, and it gave the story a lot more than “Here’s an alien to beat up, oooo, here’s a crazy-looking creature! Neat!”
“
“What’s funny about this book is that when I picked it up from the library, it had a little blue sticker with a magnifying glass on the spine, the kind for Mysteries.
I read the description and was sort of familiar with the book, and I really didn’t think there was much mystery to it. Not the kind of mystery that magnifying glasses help with, anyway.
How did that whole magnifying glass thing get started? Was there one farsighted detective who made it a thing? When I was a kid, I was always dying for a mystery to happen so I could break out the rectangular magnifying glass that was stashed in a tiny drawer attached to our two volume dictionary.
Why were criminals in mysteries always walking through paint or tar and leaving footprints? How easy would it be to just SAY that fingerprints matched in 1850? Who is going to disagree?
My point here is that I’m not very sharp when it comes to mysteries. So not sharp, in fact, that I don’t think I appreciated this book as a mystery until finishing it last night.
There are so many elements that are wonderfully wrapped up in the last pages of this book. You get so comfortable with everything, the dead girl game, the telltale heart, the animal behavior. You get so comfortable with everything that the effect when it’s twisted up at the end is really powerful. Because it’s well done and also (again, I suck at mystery, so it could be just me) because you’re tricked into thinking these small elements, these running gags if you will, are not as important as they become.
It’s reading a mystery that you didn’t know was a mystery. Where a lot hinges on the ending, although you don’t know that until you get there. It’s an impressive writing feat, really. “
“What’s here is okay, but shit, there’s not a whole lot of it. It feels like if they’d compressed a little bit of this, made the first two volumes into one, we’d be better off.
Also, I’m sorry, but these characters, a super hacker and a master thief, are dopey as fuck. They really thought they were in a time machine situation? I didn’t think they were in a time machine situation, and I am stupid. Seriously, I just read Kyle Baker’s How to Draw Stupid, and I was insulted when, page after page, Baker recommended drawing ME. And even still, I put this together much faster than these dopes.
I’m also not real into computer hacker stories. Because…okay, this one does that thing where the hacker can’t keep up with a superathlete, so the hacker does a bunch of shit like manipulating traffic lights so the athlete can’t cross, then has an ATM spit out money so a crowd forms that’s hard to get through, so on and so on, and this is possible while the hacker is also on the move, so she ends up beating the superathlete to a destination?
We’ve learned nothing from Office Space, a movie that proved you can take fractions of pennies, and THAT’S what you do as a computer hacker.
Or you maybe put my books on torrenting sites. Has anyone checked torrents for my shit? It’d be silly, they’re all available for free on Internet Archive and shit. “
“What’s left to say about it? Great. It’s great, you guys.
The last 50 pages or so were probably my favorite. There are a few strange, spooky thing that happen near the end that really made the book for me.
I wish I had more to say about this, but I can’t imagine writing a review that’ll skew anyone’s decision to read this one way or another. If you think you might want to read it, you’re probably right. If you’re not a fan, then you’re probably right to skip this one.”
“When I come home, I greet my cat by saying “Herro.” Because when she wails in the night, as cats seem to do, that’s what it sounds like she’s saying. Like she’s forgotten where she is, who else is around, and she just yells “Herro?” into the darkness.
It’s now our greeting. I feel like I’m just trying to use words she understands. Meet half way. It also spawned a song called “Herro,” which is sung to the tune of Adele’s “Hello.”
It goes like this:
Herro.
It’s me.
Sicily [that’s the cat’s name]
That’s all the lyrics so far. Also, I just heard “Hello” for the first time a couple weeks ago, and I don’t know what the fuck I thought I was parodying, but it’s not “Hello.” “Herro” sounds NOTHING like “Hello.” That Weird Al must listen to a lot of radio to get those things right.
All of that is necessary to explain why, as I read this book, I read the title “Harrow County” as “Herro! County,” and I imagined the cat saying it.
I feel like I may have extinguished some of the haunting vibe of the book for myself by doing this, and I do not recommend you adopt this behavior.”
“When Desdemona gets assigned to work the hottest New York magazine ever right out of journalism school, she didn’t count on one thing: Othello.
Othello is the hottest boss a girl could dream of. He’s smart, capable, and he knows how to wear one of those things around his neck that looks like an automotive air filter.
And it just so happens that there’s a big story a-brewing.
Beneath the streets, a race of ninja turtle men has risen. From how, we don’t know. If we knew, then it wouldn’t be all that exciting, and we’d miss the great scene where the ninja turtle men reveal themselves to a terrified public, probably, I don’t know, right when they light the tree at Rockefeller. The mayor pushes the button to light the tree, the whole square goes dark, and then the lights kick back on and there are turtle men EVERYWHERE!
And these, my friends, are not just turtle men. They’re fearsome fighting teens. They’re cool, and they’re rude. They do machines. They’re party dudes.
In what can only be described as the most out-radical-ragoues takeover of all time, the turtle men run rampant in the streets, playing obnoxious 90’s rap at inappropriate volumes, eating pizzas, throwing vegan pizzas at people and burning them with the hot cheese(like substance that I understand is part of a vegan pizza). They tip over cars and light things on fire.
And it’s up to Desdemona and Othello to stop them.
Desdemona: I can fight. I’ve fought many mutants in my time.
Othello: Not like this.
Then, Othello plays a song on the piano in his office, and a secret panel moves off the wall, revealing a hidden staircase. It looks suspiciously like the staircase from Tales From The Crypt.
Othello open a huge cabinet and it’s full of ninja weapons, but with a twist. Swords connected by a long chain, nunchaku with acid all over them and special gloves for the handler to not get acid-ed.
Othello and Desdemona load up, and Othello says, “Let’s make Turtles out of these guys.” And Desdemona doesn’t get it, and Othello is like, “You know, like those chocolate candy things? What I mean is, let’s make them like that, by which I mean, let’s shit on these guys so it’s like they’re chocolate-covered.”
Desdemona thinks it’s dumb, but she just nods and they go have a huge karate fight.
Highlights:
A turtle man gets his head sliced off and it falls in a toilet.
A turtle man gets impaled by a giant, gas-powered vibrator, and his corpse vibrates around on the floor for a while.
A turtle man gets shoved out of a helicopter, into a volcano.
I won’t spoil the rest, but trust me, this is one thrill ride you don’t want to miss. So buy your tickets early. Because seats are going fast.”
“When are we going to have to say, “Okay, if Magneto was a child during the Holocaust, he’s going to be pretty goddamn old?” This Magneto was a survivor, and he was still beating the holy shit out of people, sans powers. That seems pretty unlikely. No disrespect, but I’m pretty sure I could beat up most 90 year-olds, and I know precisely dick about fighting.
Maybe that’s my next Andy-Kaufman-esque thing to try. Go around the country fighting super old men. Bring your grandpa! Bring your grandma! Is your grandpa deserving of a good ass-whuppin’?
Do you think this would fly at the county fair? Popular, or a little too heinous?”
“When “Fantasia” is unleashed, it’s the total opposite of when Fantasia was released in theaters by Disney and Pete was bored out of his mind. Except for that one section that was like a Meat Loaf album cover come to life, that part was amazing. I guess THAT part of the Disney movie is actually quite a bit like Berserk…but I feel “Like the best part of the movie Fantasia” is a huge undersell for this comic.”
“What’s to say?
The author is great, and he’s written a lot of great stuff. This one just didn’t do much for me. It was a book where I found myself marking the page, closing the whole thing, and watching the bookmark’s slow march towards the back cover.
It does bring up a larger point that I’d like to think about a bit, however.
My brother started reading this before I did, and when I asked what he thought of it he said that it was a little “overwritten” which may be true, maybe not. I didn’t even ask for elaboration, but once that cat was out of its gilded bag, it was out big time.
The problem with going in after hearing this is that I was looking for it. Either seeing it and thinking, “My brother was totally right!” or seeing what I THOUGHT were the parts that were deemed overwritten and thinking “My brother is an asshole and doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
The point, however, is that it made the book very difficult to enjoy on its own merits as I spent most of the time very aware of what I was looking for.
To make a comparison, it’s the same reason I really try to avoid movie trailers for movies that I want to see. New Batman? I’ll skip the trailers, thanks. Because I know I’m headed there anyway, so what’s the point in spoiling bits and pieces for myself? I’ll just be waiting for those parts to happen, and the whole movie becomes about waiting for the fulfillment I’m expecting rather than enjoying the ride.
Previews, trailers, and reviews all leave me feeling this way, and in general I try to avoid them.
With books it’s a little tougher. It’s a time commitment, and there’s so much out there that one can’t reasonably expect to hear about the next great book by word of mouth alone. I do think, and this isn’t another case of The Book v. The Movie, but I do think that a book has to be more attuned to a reader’s taste than a movie because it’s just plain a bigger time commitment and because I can’t read a book in the background while I’m folding laundry. Okay, more like while I’m calculating how long it would take to read all of Amazing Spider-Man, but same principle.
One could argue that audiobooks are an option here, but I find that I can only listen to certain kinds of books on audio. They have to be fast, keep my attention, and also written in such a way that I can zone out for 30 second stretches and then come back in. I rarely sit and just listen to an audiobook while doing nothing else.
So moving forward, learning something from this experience, I think my new plan is to avoid reviews and previews of books that I will probably read anyway. I picked up this book on my own and sort of stumbled into someone else’s review in conversation, which isn’t something I have to avoid too often. But from now on, when something comes out and I am interested based on the author, premise, or book jacket alone, I think that perhaps the best thing is to just give the damn thing a shot and see what happens.”
“What’s to say? If you’re waiting for David Sedaris to fuck up and just not be entertaining, prepare to be disappointed.
If you’ve never read him before, you really need to get on it. I know that he’s sort associated with this precious, NPR style of storytelling, but you just have to trust me when I tell you that I can’t stand a lot of that stuff and still found myself laughing my ass off reading this last night.
There’s not much else to say about this book, although I am comfortable saying that when it comes to humor, we are so quick to excuse people. We’re so quick to say, “It’s just a matter of opinion.” Well, I’m here to tell you that’s not really true. Some things are funny and some aren’t.
I think we have a good idea about an enriched versus a surface experience when it comes to other emotions. Think about fear. There’s a difference between someone jumping out when you’re not expecting it and someone producing a horror movie that has you up all goddamn night wondering how quietly you might be able to nail boards over the windows. There’s a difference between crying because something is truly sad and because a cartoon lion dies and triggers something. Look, I know that when I start getting misty-eyed watching Rocky Balboa, that’s not the same thing as attending a funeral. Some tears are shed in both cases, but some are more rich and meaningful.
Comedy is the same way. David Sedaris writes what I consider very rich comedy. It’s not as simple as a setup and a punchline. It does a lot more than that, and that’s why I recommend his books all the time.
Okay, with that out of the way, there was one other part of this book that brought a piece of the past rushing back to me. Just before the start of the book there’s a brief author’s note. It goes like this:
Over the years I’ve met quite a few teenagers who participate in what is called “Forensics.” It’s basically a cross between speech and debate. Students take published short stories and essays, edit them down to a predetermined length, and recite them competitively. To that end, as part of the “Etc.” in this book’s subtitle, I have written six brief monologues that young people might deliver before a panel of judges. I believe these stories should be self-evident. They’re the pieces in which I am a woman, a father, and a sixteen-year-old girl with a fake British accent.
Ah, indeed. Indeed there is a thing called forensics. I know it all too well.
I don’t remember exactly how I ended up in the class. It must have been one of those things that other kids were doing, which has always been more than enough reason for me to do something as well. That thing parents say about your friends jumping off a cliff? That’s dumb. Because no, I wouldn’t jump to my doom if my friends did it. The reason I did the stuff my friends did was because some of them had girlfriends, and some of them had even gotten handjobs from these girlfriends. You can’t get a handjob when you’re dead, so cliff jumps were out of the question. HOWEVER, if my friend jumped off someone’s roof and into their swimming pool, and if this friend had gotten a handjob before, the only scientific way to make sure I would someday get a handjob was to try anything and everything he had done. So: cliff? No. Roof? Yes. Forensics? Apparently.
At our school the class was a weird hybrid of a class and an activity.
The class part was just about like any other class with the notable exception of our teacher, who we will call Ms. Hanson because that was her name. She didn’t really earn the respect of a fake name here, although I do have slight concerns of her being a murder these days, based on her behavior with kids of about 14. But she may be beyond the point of even having memories or eyeballs at this point.
She was famous for throwing temper tantrums, throwing a chair or a clipboard across the room because someone hadn’t done homework or said something disrespectful. She was infamous for announcing to our entire class that she was pregnant and then going into detail about the pregnancy being the result not of intercourse, per se, but of her significant other masturbating ON her and one of his gametes finding its way to hers.
With her at the helm, we would meet for class and then, much like the track team, we’d load up on a bus early on a Saturday and be driven off to some other school that was like the bizarro version of our own. They had amateurish mascot murals on their walls too, but theirs was a bulldog instead of a wildcat.
Upon arriving at the school, you were essentially turned loose. You’d find out when you had to perform, a couple sessions which would kill a total of about 90 minutes of the entire day, and then spend the other 10 hours screwing around.
There’s this sort of rumor, an idea swirling around that kids who are in plays and marching band are all just fucking each other like crazy. They don’t mix in with the more popular kids and instead just go at each other because why the hell not. I’m not here to say whether or not that’s true. It’s not really true for me, honestly. But it did seem like there was an awful lot of making out, switching between girlfriends, all that weird stuff. But fuck me, you had all of Saturday to do nothing else, really, and you were wearing a tie.
And I WILL say, one advantage of forensics over sports was its co-ed nature. Boys and girls on the same bus, spending the entire day wandering a school with a very low level of supervision.
I wasn’t exactly poised to be the ladykiller that could really take advantage of something like this. I had a friend who had better luck, and one young lady of the…burly persuasion was so taken with him that she bodychecked me out of the way so she could sit next to him on the bus ride home. As for me, I can remember one time going to a tournament where I thought a girl might, MIGHT, like me, and then I realized I hadn’t put on any deodorant before leaving the house and spent most of the day in the bathroom washing my armpits and trying to use the ubiquitous pink liquid soap from school bathrooms to create a sort of crusty shield between my armpit and the outside world. I don’t think this advice is necessary, but I will strongly advise against this tactic. You end up smelling like a sweaty elementary school janitor.
The acting and debating part of forensics was completely ridiculous. You’d sit in a classroom and watch teens pretend to be grown people with grown people problems. There were a few stalwart pieces, ones you saw over and over. Something called “Watermelon Boats” that sounded to me like a weird and somehow even more boring version of my mom talking to one of her friends. “The Bad Seed” where a girl pushed an old woman down the stairs to get her prized snow globe, which should have been great but really wasn’t.
One of the funniest I ever saw, looking back, was performed by a guy and a girl. They would come into the round, take their seats and pretend to be in love. Then they would perform. Their piece involved the husband character smacking the wife around, and then after they finished they would take seats again, but they would sit far apart and spend the rest of the round glaring at each other.
I must have seen dozens of fake couples involved in abusive relationships over that year. Not many pieces about older, dispassionate but happy couples picking out a lunch together.
People were taking this very seriously, I guess. I don’t know. The piece I did with a friend was some bullshit where we added on a scene of us fighting with folding chairs, and the biggest laugh we ever got came from an accidental pubescent voice crack.
It’s really silly. You put a bunch of teens on a bus. Then they act like teens and try to make out with each other. Then, for about 3 minutes they act like adults, I mean actually act like adults, as in fill the role of an adult. But even from that short few minutes you can tell they aren’t all that good at the adult thing.
I only did this for one year before deciding, as I did with most school events and activities, “Fuck this shit.”
However, being in forensics meant I was picked to be in a play by the aforementioned Ms. Hanson. A play that was a total abortion due to some serious stunt-casting, me as the captain of the football team, for instance. I was the smallest person she could find.
As an added bonus, the play included a good deal of semi-nudity. All male, of course. Three fellows were doused in cooking spray and ripped their shirts off to dance around at one point. There was a fat one, a skinny one, and a hairy one. Then there was me. Bill, the captain of the football team whose quirk was showing up in scenes with different articles of clothing missing, something that was never mentioned and that baffled the holy bejeezus out of my mom when she came to the show. (“Why did you come out on stage and take off your pants?”)
However, after the last show we had a cast party, and some crazy, stupid, stupid idiot gave a bunch of teens free reign over their backyard hot tub. Where, for the first time ever, a person that wasn’t me touched my penis.
Granted, she would later go on to allegedly do drugs, pass out near a heat register and wake up with serious brain damage, a fact I would later find out from a mutual friend and never be able to confirm. But that’s probably a monologue for another time.
“
“What’s the deal with Bruce Wayne and girlfriends? I mean, I get it. Who isn’t into hot babes? But my question is, Why do people who write Batman comics include a girlfriend angle? I have to say, Bruce Wayne’s girlfriends must be the least interesting aspect of most Batman stories. Think about it. This is a guy who flies around in jets and speedboats, is a martial arts expert, has all kinds of crazy gadgets, and I’m being told about a date he went on to some stupid ball? Hell, I get bored when my friends tell me about the people they’re dating sometimes, and the closest thing my friends do to Batman shit is rolling out of bed at 1 on Sunday, holding a comforter around themselves in somewhat cape-like fashion.
And why do we always have this conversation:
Alfred: Master Wayne, your date with Carmen DeSexia is this evening.
Batman: Cancel it. The Joker’s on the loose.
Alfred: I shall send my regards. If I may, perhaps it’s best to let her go.
Batman: Not this one Alfred. This one is special.
Really? This one? THIS ace reporter, one of the hundreds of attractive ace reporters you’ve dated, is the special one? Would you say it’s because she’s attractive, or is it more because she gets super upset when you cancel dates, or is it because you, for absolutely no reason, think this is the one girlfriend who isn’t being used by one of your enemies in order to find out your secrets?
If there’s some story to it or some appeal, by all means, bring on the lovey dovey stuff. But if it’s just some other lady who doesn’t understand an appropriate cleavage amountage for being on the news, or if it’s some shape-changing monster on the attack, or if it’s both and I’m left feeling very confused about my sexuality, I’m giving everyone permission to go ahead and skip it.”
“What’s sort of amazing to me about Dragon Ball is that the wishes people intend to make are SO small scale. Wishes for a perfect boyfriend, to not be nervous around girls, stuff like that.
I guess there’s no Holocaust in this world. That does kind of eliminate a whole sector of wishing. “
“What’s so special about Seinfeld? What about that show makes it so different?
“No hugging, no learning.”
This was the rule, the mantra of Seinfeld writers, started by Larry David.
No matter what happened, the characters did not hug, and they did not learn.
It takes a special kinda show and a special group of people to commit to that. I’ve always felt that Seinfeld’s success came from being very funny, and because it was different from so many other shows in that the characters are reprehensible. Seriously, you would never want to be their friends (with the possible exception of Kramer if you’re someone who likes to be on the periphery of a wacky scheme and doesn’t mind eating a salad that was made in the shower).
The best parts of this book told some of the stories behind the stories, which turned out to be quite close to the finished product in a lot of cases. If you remember “The Jacket,” the episode where Jerry meets Elaine’s father, a gruff, frightening man, you might be interested to know that the story came from Larry David’s real life. I won’t spoil all the details, but I was surprised to find out the gruff father was based on writer Richard Yates!
I also really enjoyed that this book tells some of the backstories of the writers on Seinfeld. I’m always on a soapbox about this shit, so I’ll keep it brief, but we give far too little credit to writing staffs out there. This book definitely gives a large number of writers a little ink, which is really nice. “
“What’s really great about Dreadstar is that there’s progression in the series. Things change, characters change, the world changes, people die and don’t come back. It’s got all the cosmic weirdness of a comic book, but it does have this sort of progression where you feel like things happen and do have some weight. It’s pretty cool.
I was really sad to read the intro and find out that Jim Starlin had injured his hand and couldn’t draw, however I gather that in 2020 he announced he’d rehabilitated it enough to draw again! It sucks we missed out on 5 years of his talent, but it’s good to know he’s back in action.
I did miss the art style from the first omnibus and first Dreadstar stories. It was so unique and stylish. The later volumes, including this one, are aight, but you won’t find yourself staring at the images the way you would’ve in the first. “
“What makes this a good sci-fi is that people are trying to do something ethically questionable, but nobody is evil.
Itâs too easy when thereâs just an evil madman or when someone drinks invisibility juice or whatever and the side effects include being insane and evil.
In Upgrade Soul you totally understand why everyone makes the choices they do.
That said, I think I might turn evil if I was a science experiment subject because it might just be more interesting. Just warning you. So weird science guys, people brewing up invisibility juice, just remember, if you come knocking on my door, Iâll go evil, and you canât pretend like you had no idea thatâd happen. “
“What really makes Steve Rogers Captain America?
Some might say that it’s not the crazy steroid stuff coursing through his veins, but his spirit.
I would probably say that the mega steroids that enhance every single aspect of his physicality probably have something to do with it. I mean, come on. Spider-Man without the spider bite? Daredevil without the toxic waste spill?
I have to say, it’s always weird when superheroes do those Very Special Issues where they do things like tell kids not to take drugs. Sure, kids probably will just end up huffing paint out of a paper bag. But on the other hand, they may become one of the greatest heroes of all time. An icon! “I was a mild-mannered junior high student until I huffed paint out of a magical bag I found buried near the mall. Something in the Krylon spray paint must have activated the ancient magicks in that old bag, and when I inhaled I became…The Inhaler!”
How does Captain America tell kids not to do drugs? Doing drugs is the best thing that ever happened to him. And frankly, if he’d been straight edge, the Red Skull would have blown up America.
If’n you’re looking for a good drug story, I have to recommend Batman: Venom (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/107117.Batman) Okay, it’s not the greatest story ever written. But at the very least it makes a case for not using enhancing drugs. And I think I would have gotten more enjoyment out of this than all the stupid videos I watched in school, the ones where a multi-ethnic group of children, one of whom was most certainly in a wheelchair because this was the 90’s, come across drugs and end up having all these negative effects.
Seriously, I think the goal of 90’s parents was to scare the holy shit out of us when it came to drugs. Some guy would take a drug (almost always a pill because I guess they didn’t want us to know how to actually consume drugs), turn into a complete moron, giggle, then fall into a chasm or accidentally launch a nuclear weapon or something. Seriously, watch this episode of Captain Planet to get an idea of what we were exposed to (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwDB20T7Gus). Especially enjoy the clothes that druggy kids wore. What appears to be a skull wearing a party hat? Oy.
Anyway, back to the book at hand. I think that I’m over comics where the main character loses his/her powers. It’s kind of an old trick, and one that doesn’t satisfy. Because when I read something called Steve Rogers: Super Soldier, I’m going to be let down when he is not a super soldier. Spider-Man 2? Why with the losing of the powers? I want to see a dude swinging around like crazy, not strolling in nerd journalist clothes.
So let’s try something else. And if you want to scare me about drugs, here’s an idea. Find the druggies in junior high right now. Take pictures, do a short interview. Then catch up with them every five years. When we see that most of the people who were getting stoned in junior high aren’t dead because they tried to run through traffic, but instead they are managing a Red Robin and paying child support to a kid they never even wanted, that might help me think twice.”
“What a weird and difficult task. Imagine you’re a comic book artist, and someone is all, “Make a comic ABOUT a well-known artist.” How the hell do you manage that?
Well, Barbara Stok does a pretty good job. Without re-creating Van Gogh’s paintings exactly, she definitely evokes his work and his colors while telling a very different story than is told by the paintings themselves.
Ha, did you see that art bullshit I just pulled off there?
Truth be told, I know almost nothing about painting. I don’t really understand painting, I don’t get it. When I go to an art museum, I’m totally worthless because all I can say is, “Oh, I like that” or “Pfft. Sucks.” But I really have no idea what that means, and I’ve always found that to be the most worthless criticism of other forms of art. When I’ve been in writing groups, the goal is to always go beyond saying you like or dislike something. That’s not helpful. It’s just your reaction to something, but what you really need is an understanding of WHY you like something. Is it the sentence? The words? Is it the thing being expressed by the sentence? You have to help me out!
But also…I don’t think art museums are well suited to my kind.
First, I never know how to dress. I never wear shorts because I’m not a child or appearing in a Sir Mix-A-Lot video, but I don’t know if jeans and a t-shirt are cool, or should I be in something fancier.
And then you get inside, and it seems like they try to trick you into paying for some unknown exhibit all the time. “Do you want to go in the special gallery? We have a show of art from [person I’ve never heard of], and this is it’s only stop in North America.”
Well, if it’s exclusive, who cares? Sign me up for that shit. I don’t know a lot about art, but I DO know that you’re supposed to see some shit and then be like, “Did you guys see that? No? Oh, too bad. It was really magnificent.”
Also, why are so many art museums set up as these big rooms with a bench in the middle of the room? Can’t I sit a little closer to a fuckin’ painting? That’s what I came for, the paintings. When you put the bench in the middle of the room, I can’t pretend I’m studying a painting. I have to admit I’m just enjoying a bench more than fine art. Admit my brain AND my body is shitty.
And what’s going on with the museum docents? Seriously. Is the qualification for this job that you can look 100% asleep while standing? Because that’s how it seems to work when I’m there. What’s this dude going to do if I touch a painting? Rush up behind me and break my arm? Is that why he’s sleeping, so he can conserve energy and kick my ass?
Whenever I walk around, I feel like I’m going to end up opening a door and an alarm is going to sound. I can’t tell which way I’m supposed to go and which way is, I don’t know, some kind of freight elevator.
Everyone else there seems to have a lot to say about paintings, but it also seems to kinda be horseshit.
Are art museums designed partially to help art students make friends and/or have sex? Because it seems like you’ll see a group of 4 walking around, and one person is explaining WAY too much about the art, and if my theory is correct, then good for you, artists. You figured it out.
How are the art museum gift shops always great and the art museum cafes always horrible?
Get it together, art museums.”
“What an interesting book.
I think what would prevent most people from reading this is probably some version of a sentiment that can be summed up as “Okay Boomer.” But if that’s how you’re feeling, I would encourage you to give it a shot.
Although there are lots of examples from college campuses, they’re pretty balanced between things that overly-sensitive people are doing and things that crazy people are doing (usually white power weirdos). And while there is some condemnation of behavior, I felt like the author was very empathetic towards people and wasn’t saying anything remotely like, “These snowflakes need to shape up!” or “These iGen kids are ruining everything!” If you read it that way, that’s probably your preconceived notion and sensitivity lenses at work, not the real content of the book.
The most interesting portions to me were related to parenting and how much it’s changed in just a few decades. There was a section that listed a checklist for parents for school readiness for young kids. 30 or 40 years ago, the list was a lot of things like, “You child can ride a two-wheel bicycle, Your child can walk alone to a store or home 2 or 3 blocks away…” where now it looks more like, “Your child can spell phonetically, Your child can understand basic mathematical concepts…” So where once it was “Is your child capable of managing their physical safety?” now it’s more “Can your child fill out a worksheet?” Which seems profoundly stupid to me.
This is my Okay Boomer moment, so buckle up.
When I was a kid we used to roam around the town in small groups of 2-4 kids. Sometimes on bikes, sometimes just walking. And it wasn’t like we had to check in every hour with our parents. I rode the bus to the mall. I would go to the grocery store alone or with a friend. In the summer, this was basically all we did, screw around during unstructured time.
You learn a lot without realizing it. You learn to avoid true danger, like weirdos and creeps. You learn how to do simple shit like walk into a grocery store, pick something out and pay for it. You learn how to take a bus. You learn the geography of where you live.
I had a coworker who lived in a very safe neighborhood and wouldn’t allow her son to walk to the bus alone. It was like a block. Eventually, she did let him do it, but he had to be on a walkie talkie and talk to her the whole time until he got on the bus. I’ve had a number of people tell me that when their kids are learning to drive, they have no idea where they are inside of their own towns. They don’t know how to get from home to school.
Every day, the school I work next to, parents line up their cars to drive up to the door of the school, at which point their child is released, gets in the car, and then the parents drive them home. Like they’re goddamn diplomats in need of a secure escort. This line of cars extends several blocks, and parents will wait up to an hour in a line of cars to pick up their kids. The kids can walk or bike or whatever, but very few, if any, do this, and if they do want to do it this way the parents have to sign a waiver.
I can already hear the parents: You don’t have a kid, so you don’t understand. If you don’t have kids, you’ll hear this all the time. And I totally agree, I don’t have the emotional understanding of a parent. However, I would proffer this: I probably have a more realistic assessment of danger to children because I’m NOT a parent. I’m not emotionally invested, which means when I’m looking at the realistic dangers, my thinking isn’t tainted by my personal stakes.
There are some parents who agree with me, that kids should have a little more freedom. There was the mom profiled in the book, the sort of mother of the Free Range Kids movement, who let her young son ride the subway home by himself at one point, which turned out great.
I do think kids probably need a little more room, a little more agency, and a little less structure.
One of the more profound insights in the book had to do with the level of discourse we’re experiencing today. In short, people suck at discussing things because they never had un-referee’ed disagreements as kids. When you’re a kid, if you’re playing a game with 4 other kids, you have to learn how to argue or disagree without the other kid getting up and leaving, at which point the game is unplayable. Newer parents tend to referee everything, jumping in if things get intense. But letting kids work these things out themselves might be a way to help them learn the skills of discussing things without getting to the point that everyone takes their ball and goes home.
The best part of the book, however, is that it offers a lot of potential solutions. I’ve found that I’m a solutions-based thinking, so solutions speak to me. Even when I disagree with the solutions, I think solutions-oriented thinking speaks to me and gets me thinking along the lines of productive movement. Way too many books that I might put in the sociology category seem very focused on talking about the problem. I usually hear what the author is saying and think, “Okay, I buy that this is a problem, but what now?” To borrow an analogy from another book, a problem that’s well-explained is great, but if you went to the doctor with a pain, and if that doctor could explain why you’re feeling this pain, does knowing the pain’s origin solve the problem? No. You go to the doctor not for an explanation of the history of the pain, but for the cure.
It’s how I feel when a cold is being passed around the office, and everyone wants to trace back to patient zero. As if it’s really that person’s fault. Sidebar: it’s my pet peeve that people come in when they’re sick. Don’t do that. But once you’re sick, figuring out who “got you sick” is a complete waste of time and energy. Once you know, does that help your symptoms? Does it speed your recovery? Absolutely not.
Yes, I think the history of some things can be valuable in understanding them. But the history and origin of a problem without solution is not terribly useful.
I think a lot of people don’t have the guts to offer a solution. Because that’s the easiest thing to attack. You can nitpick someone’s solution, which will be seen as an effective way of discrediting their entire argument. Which is stupid.
I deeply appreciate the solutions offered in this book, especially because they’re solutions based mostly in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (which totally works) and because they’re solutions that any individual can choose to apply. It’s not a set of solutions that goes “You motherfuckers need to stop doing X.” It’s a set of solutions oriented towards, “If you want to be a better person and have a better life, here are some realistic options.”
Great read, and I’d definitely call it a must-read for parents of young kids who haven’t given a lot of thought to giving their kid some rope. And parents who feel pressured by other parents, who are afraid of being seen as bad parents.”
“What? I read a book that isn’t a comic book? Has the world gone mad?
Well, sometimes I like to get away from my regular, capital-L literature featuring metallic men and men who fly around in jet suits and metallic men who have the metal in their skeletons instead of using it as skin.
The Film Club. Recommended to me by a friend a really long time ago, I got around to it on a trip and read most of it in two plane rides.
Welllllllll that’s not entirely true. There was also a 3-hour airport delay where I proceeded to get a little thrashed on airport beers. Can you all read after drinking? Because I really can’t. I wish I could because those are two activities that almost seem made for each other. A whiskey in one hand, some book about an eastern european gulag in the other. What could be better?
And I must say, when you’re loaded the pages FLY by. I mean, it’s almost TOO fast.
Scratch that. It IS too fast, which is probably why I didn’t retain all that much.
But what’s really weird, flipping backwards in this book, I did remember most of what had happened. Just not off the top of my head.
“Oh yeah…that’s the part where he sets up his son with beers on the porch to discourage neighbors from moving in.”
“Oh yeah…that’s the part where he and his son talk about cocaine.”
Okay, the book.
The author definitely has a gift for talking about movies. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to go back and watch some of those old terrible movies that everyone says you should watch. I usually respond to those people with a polite “BITCH do I LOOK LIKE someone who does fucking homework?” However, I sometimes carry a backpack and I have adult braces, so the answer to that one is Yes more often than I’d prefer.
The movie parts are great, but the father/son stuff fell a little flat for me. I thought it was going to be great. A son who hates school gets the chance to drop out provided he and his father watch three movies a week together? Sounds like fertile ground, no?
Well, it turns out, no.
I mean, I hated school. HATED it. I even tried that BITCH/homework line there a few times, and it was only slightly less effective than it is now. I would have dropped out to watch three movies a week, absolutely, no doubt. Hell, I would have dropped out if I had to commit three murders a week with a parent. That would have been a decent trade in my eyes.
Sadly, however, I never got the offer. And though the son in the book learns a lot about film, I would say that the remarkable thing about the whole adventure is the fact that, clearly, education beyond the 8th grade might be kinda bullshit. I don’t know for sure, I don’t know if the son is in a gutter somewhere, but I doubt it. And he seemed to be going through the same shit that we all went through at that age, namely a series of extremely painful relationships that ended in ways that were hurtful to all involved. THANK GOODNESS WE ALL STOPPED DOING THAT STUFF, HUH? HAHAHAHA! HUH!?
-ahem-
At any rate, for doing something like this, the true outcome is that it’s no big deal. It’s no big deal in that the kid seems about average.
In fact, I know a lot of people would question the wisdom of doing something like this, myself included. But on the other hand, I don’t think fathers and sons spend a ton of time together. Especially after those sons are over the age of 15. Really, the experiment here seemed to be about whether it was worth it to have a potentially drastic negative impact on your son’s life with this plan, but the benefit would be that you would have spent a good long time doing something together when he was of an age that the two of you could actually have an intelligent discussion. I feel like a lot of dads check out during this part of life. Shrug and figure there’s not much use talking to kids during those teen years.
Ultimately, the reason it all works out is because the parents obviously care about their son. They may not make all the right choices, but they think a lot about the choices they do make, and the entire book reads like a letter of love and admiration from a father to a son.
So the reading of the book didn’t do a lot for me. That said, I’m glad that someone out there did something like this. And I can’t imagine a lot of people (those with shithead dads excluded) who would prefer a high school diploma over some quality time spent with dad.”
“Whatâs sort of weird is the end of the book does that recent comics thing of having a serious essay in there, but this book has like 5 or 6! You might trick me into reading an essay at the end of a comic, but not 5. Iâm not so dumb that Iâll be tricked that way, yet Iâm way too dumb to read that many essays. I’m a very specific kind of dumb.
I think this is a great concept, and the overall idea and direction is a good one, the representation is good, but I think those things are overshadowed by the storytelling, which is kind of a mess. It’s not super clear what’s going on, it’s hard to follow exactly who’s doing what and why, there are a lot of characters that aren’t fleshed out, and I think there are some serious shortcomings in this volume that left me pretty disappointed. I feel like there’s a lot of good going on here, but I don’t think the reader is shepherded into this world very carefully, and the end result is that the reader is a bit confused.
And I think you’ll see this as a theme in lots of other reviews here, and it’s something people are struggling with a little because it does seem like we’re all happy with the ideas and representation and to see comics with Black creators, but at the same time, this book just is challenging to read and comprehend. Not because I think the idea of racism and so on is challenging, because I think the basic plot is a little convoluted.
Unless things coalesce better in the next volume (if they do, please let me know!) this will be the end of my brief love affair with Bitter Root.”
“Whatâs weird about this book is that I canât really imagine anyone reading it without being much interested in fighting. Whatâs REALLY weird about THAT is that I donât have much interest in fighting. Not on this level, anyway, with descriptions of people Iâve never heard of doing things that are difficult to imagine. Just trying to understand whatâs going on, my recent Google search history must look like that of a guy prepping to street fight his way across South America. The long way.
What I WILL say is that there are some really interesting insights in this book that apply to a hell of a lot more than fighting. To everything, really. Which serves to make the point made in just about every book, something about how fighting is a universal language and takes us back to our roots and so on and so on. But honestly, thereâs some stuff of value in here to the complete non-fighter.
Because I donât want to ruin the whole book by summarizing it, Iâll just talk about what I found to be one of the more interesting ideas in the book, and based on that you can decide if itâs worth your time to look through the rest.
One thing a lot of the interviewed fighters agreed on was the idea of attacking someone where they are strongest. Letâs take this out of the realm of fistfighting for a minute.
Letâs say youâre a warlord. And Iâm a warlord. I built a huge fortress that I claim is impenetrable. Nobody has broken down the doors in a hundred years. Nobodyâs even gotten close.
Now, youâre going to attack me, and youâre faced with a choice. Most would say, Okay, the gate is impenetrable. Letâs go in the side door. But what a lot of fighters would tell you, and chess players and ping-pong players and all kinds of weirdos profiled in this book, is that you should come right through the front door. Crazy, I know. But the thing is, if you enter the fortress by digging a tunnel underneath, you still have to beat me once youâre inside. Itâs going to be tough. I still think the front door is impenetrable, and though youâve worked around it I still have that mental security blanket. If you manage to come in the front door, however, everything I thought I knew about how the battle would go is destroyed. I was expecting you to go around, or to subvert my defense. But instead you came right through, ran right over the top of my best weapon, and now I have no confidence in anything.
In the world of mixed martial arts, you can kind of think of there being the worlds of stand-up fighting and ground fighting. If we were fighting, you an expert wrestler and me coming from a boxing background, you would assume that I was going to try and beat you with punches and to stay off the ground however I could. So your game plan would be to get me on the ground, even if it meant eating a few punches. But if I know thatâs your strength, imagine if I decide that Iâm going to take things to the ground right off, and for the first few minutes I manage to hold my own. The round ends, and then we both go back to our corners, but you go back knowing that Iâm not afraid of the best weapon you have.
Itâs a lesson that applies to a lot of things, I think. I donât think of myself as a person who is often frustrated, but in looking at it I think that a lot of the times I DO feel frustrated itâs as a result of being stymied by something that lies within my strengths. If I make one out of every 15 shots in pool, it doesnât faze me because I donât expect to make ANY. But if I try to spell the word ârhinocerosâ ten times in a row, and every single time I see that red squiggly line appear beneath it, Iâm going to start thinking somethingâs wrong. Iâll be wondering if Iâm not the speller I once was. Iâll be thinking about ârhinocerosâ the next time I go to spell âdiplodocusâ and feel completely sure that Iâm going to fail.
Itâs a really great tool to be aware of, that in life youâre going to fail at things youâre good at, and it would behoove a person to be very aware of that and not be overly sensitive.
There are probably half a dozen lessons like that in the book. So if itâs of interest to you, and if fighting is at least not a hindrance to your reading it, then I say go for it.
If the fighting is still completely nonsensical and barbaric, you might try the authorâs other book, A Fighterâs Heart, which is more about explaining that inexplicable: the Why.
Oh, and also, Marcelo Garcia is a guy mentioned in the book. Hereâs a brief video that goes a long way to explaining whatâs so difficult to capture in words, especially at about 4 min 50 when heâs rolling around with a guy who is WAY bigger (even non-fight-fans can probably appreciate this, and itâs more akin to wrestling than fighting. No blood ). Itâs like watching someone wrestle a pile of snakes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY8JlJZBgCk
“
“What can I say? I thought the Darth Vader and Son book was a little better, and this was kind of more of the same thing.
I DO think it’s funny, reading other reviews, that people think it’s stereotypical. I mean, yeah, it’s stereotypical that a dad would have arguments with his daughter about leaving the house in a belly shirt. But I think that’s really the whole point here. Leia is used as a device to put Darth Vader in humorous situations, not the other way around. It’s funny to watch Darth Vader have a tea party. It’s funny to have him watching her leave the house in pajama pants. It’s funny to watch Darth Vader teach a young Leia, who apparently just got her license, how to drive in a TIE Fighter.
So yeah, these are pretty stereotypical daughter/dad roles. That’s the joke. If you don’t like the joke, don’t think it’s funny, that’s cool. But there’s a difference between not enjoying the joke and blaming something for stereotyping.
And holy crap do I feel sorry for you. I mean, if this book sets off your alarm bells when it comes to stereotypes, is it possible to actually enjoy anything?
Can I tell a quick story about this?
When I was young, maybe 2, my mom gave me a doll. I was a boy, but she was into this whole idea of giving me toys that would traditionally appeal to girls as well as boys. You know, to avoid the stereotypes.
After a short time the doll disappeared, from the way she tells it. It was gone for a while, and then resurfaced when she found me playing with it in the bath tub. I’d stripped its clothes off, torn the head off, and was using the hollow plastic body as a drinking vessel.
The head was never recovered.
I don’t think I knew a lot about the glass ceiling, and I really don’t think it was any sort of chauvinist statement as I wouldn’t even know what that was.
I guess what I’m getting at here is that I don’t really know if there’s much value to looking at everything through the “is this a stereotype” lens. I’m sure some little boys responded well to dolls, smashing the stereotype. I’m extremely sure that at least one little boy did not respond as well, reinforcing the stereotype.
So at some point, do we just become a list or a balance of qualities that either reinforce or break stereotypes? And fuck that because I want to do things I like, regardless of the stereotype. If there’s a stereotype that your race likes a certain food (okay, I’ll be honest, I’m talking about the Swedes and their love of taquitos. We’ve all heard it a million times, I know) does that mean that I, as a member of that race, have some sort of responsibility to not enjoy that food in order to break the stereotype?
I’m a man who likes beer and hates wine. Should I be drinking wine and gagging just to break out of that middle class white male stereotype?
I’m a guy who likes wearing jeans. Should I be looking into wearing tight aqua pants even though I think they’re stupid looking and uncomfortable and they would make me unhappy, just to make sure I’m fighting The Man?
I’m a nerd who enjoys the occasional foray into the Star Wars universe. Should I make sure that those pieces responsibly represent a challenge to gender stereotypes, especially considering that THESE EVENTS DON’T EVEN OCCUR IN OUR GALAXY AND ALL THE PEOPLE HAVE MOTHERFUCKING LASER SWORDS?
I mean, FATHERFUCKING LASER SWORDS?
There’s a planet of LIVING TEDDY BEARS!
A giant immobile worm man is a CRIME BOSS!
There’s a guy named DASH RENDAR!
This isn’t even our reality!
Forget traditional gender roles. Vader is like the Hitler of that galaxy. And if you want to talk about breaking traditional roles, a twin brother and sister kiss on the lips in these movies. And the sexuality of C-3PO is something that I don’t think I could even begin to extrapolate without some kind of advanced engineering degree. Oh, but the way they stereotyped the Rancor as a murderous beast, that was just horrific and damaging to the race as a whole.
I work in a female-dominated office in a female-dominated field. I know many a strong lady who is still down for tea. I talk to ladies who are making their own way in the world and also enjoy clothes shopping. You have to do what makes you happy, and I don’t think you need to excuse that stuff because it’s stereotypical to your race, gender, or status as a horrifying monster that ravages prisoners in a dank pit of despair.
If humorous picture books about Star Wars are the important front to fight this battle on, then I guess you’ve come to the right place. Otherwise, I don’t know. Read something else. Stuff I don’t like or things that have a real opinion about this stuff. “
“What’s confusing about this book is that it’s not awesome, but it’s STILL one of the better Supergirl stories, so that makes it relatively awesome on some level.
I think the issue with this is the narration, which comes in the form of a book written by our narrator/main character. She’s a farm girl who talks in a very odd, stilted way, the sort of thing that…well, it mixes “high” speech, usually avoiding contractions, fancy turns of phrase, shit like that, but also that sort of folksy eloquence you might catch in the south where someone will use 10 words when 1 will do.
I think this kind of dialog can work when spoken, but in writing, it’s a slog, and it didn’t feel consistent to me. The character said things like “ain’t” a lot, but also took a lot of pains to avoid easier ways through certain phrases and blocks of dialog.
The narration is sort of successful in that it feels written, feels like writing, and that’s what it’s meant to be. But that kind of thing isn’t very pleasurable to read. So for me, it felt stilted, and it was supposed to, so that leaves me with…eh?
It’s a style thing that doesn’t work for me on this one. The narration just didn’t gel with the things I was seeing on the page, and that killed some of the fun for me.”
“What can I say? If you’re gonna read this, read as much of it as possible in as short a time span as possible.
Or maybe this is the strongest endorsement I can make for wearing helmets and avoiding drugs and alcohol.
“Kids, when you grow up, there will be comics you like. But when you’re older, you’ll only get about 22 pages every 30 days. You can do the math on that, it’s not a lot. And when these stories get complicated, you are going to need every ounce of brainpower to remember the details of what the hell is going on. Please. Don’t do drugs. Don’t drink alcohol. Wear a helmet. Don’t do it for me. Do it for the love of comics.””
“What happens when a really stupid detective goes back in time and ends up on the Titanic? He makes a $100,000 bet that the ship WILL sink. The captain disagrees.
They drive around for a bit until things get REALLY interesting and the detective starts demanding a little more action for his money:
At my direction, we began running the ship into reefs and rocks and every other navigational hazard we could find. We rammed into lighthouses, backed over fishing boards, and drove up on beaches and knocked over those lifeguard things.
Everything we hit was either severely damaged or destroyed, but the Titanic steamed away without a scratch every time. I knew it was waterproof, but now I was finding out that it was unbreakable too. The captain said that all of the parts that went into building it were just too big to break, that’s why. How do you sink something like that? What a ship.
I insisted we keep trying, at least for a while. For $100,000 I figured I should get at least 100 crashes, maybe 100,000. The captain didn’t mind. He was so supremely confident in his ship. Plus, he’d never had so much fun in his life. He said he wished he’d met me before.
But after we wrecked a coastal town in France and one of our passengers had shot Teddy Roosevelt and we found ourselves hiding in fogbanks and telling all the passengers to keep their voices down for God’s sake, as police boats patrolled slowly back and forth within 100 yards of us, and we could clearly see the cops looking at a wanted poster with a drawing of our boat on it showing me and the captain on deck jumping with excitement, we realized that maybe we’d gone a little too far with all this. “
“What I appreciate about this book is that it’s a personal travelogue, it’s got info in it, but it’s more centered around Steve and his humor than it is around the destinations.
I guess there is an audience out there for cold travelogues with facts and figures, where the writer removes themselves from the narrative as much as possible.
But I don’t see the point of that. In the early 1900s, sure, that makes sense. It’s not like I’m going to make my way to Bolivia from Wisconsin in that time, unless that’s basically my life goal. In order to get even a shred of info about a place, I’d have to turn to travel narratives.
Now, you can read Wikipedia, look at images, hell, you can jump on Google maps and take a virtual walk down the roads in just about every country explored in this book.
What I’m saying is: that information-dense sort of thing is out there, it’s easy to use, it’s free, and to me, the point of a travel narrative in the 21st century IS to see a trip through the eyes of someone else, to have someone next to you saying, “Hey, look at this! And here’s what I think about it…”
I don’t know that I could read a travelogue without a personality to it these days. It’d feel hollow and boring.
So, when you pick up a travel book like this, maybe it’s best to think about the writer as opposed to the destination. Sort of the way traveling in real life is really more about who you’re with than where you go.
I have friends who’d make going anywhere fun. I went to Pigeon Forge with a group of friends, and it’s about the most fun I’ve ever had on a trip. Going somewhere more incredible or beautiful or something (though that’s hard to imagine, Dollywood is fucking dope) might be great, but I’d rather go to the Milwaukee State Fair with those friends than to The Louvre with someone boring. I was stranded with my partner in the middle of nowhere, Utah, for two days, and we had as much fun as I’d have going somewhere spectacular with an asshole.
I think I’d enjoy traveling with Steve Hely. He’s funny, he seems easygoing, he seems fairly well-informed about the places he goes, enough that I’d be interested, and at the same time, he knows how to have fun on a vacation.
Maybe Steve’s not your speed, and that’s okay. I mean, you’re objectively wrong, but that’s your right.
Instead of looking to travelogues based on the places profiled, find writers you like, and go with them.
Do the same thing with your real-life trips. Find someone you’d like to travel with, and go with them. Oh, and try and BE the person someone else wants to travel with. Mark of a good person.”
“What I don’t get so much is what the fuck are people are thinking when they call Midnighter “fruity” and the like. Why? Why would you watch this dude tear someone’s head off and then be like, “I think I can get away with calling him fruity”?
Not because a gay superhero wouldn’t tear someone’s head off, just because I don’t understand the idea behind antagonizing someone after you just watched him pull someone’s head off his body.
The bad guys always do this. You put a super dangerous dude in a jail cell, and you’re like, “He’s never getting out of there, so I might as well make fun of him, too. Haha, hey, I’m here 8 hours a day, gotta have a laugh now and then.”
He’s getting out! I guarantee it! So maybe don’t give him a reason to EXTRA kill you.
I mean, sure, make fun of Superman. He’s not going to punch straight through your torso and swing on your intestines like Tarzan.
People make fun of Batman, too, and that also seems kind of crazy. He’s not going to kill you, but he’ll shatter every bone in your body? And he seems to regularly fistfight gods, so maybe people shouldn’t assume that they’ve got this locked and might as well toss an insult his way?
Maybe you should, if you’re going to fistfight him, take a shot and hope he uses some kind of knockout gas on you?
Maybe I just don’t have high self-esteem, and maybe that’s why I wouldn’t make fun of Midnighter for being gay before we had a fistfight.
But maybe that’s also why, if I lived in the DC universe, even if I was a hired thug, I might still have most of the inside stuff from my body inside my body.”
“What the hell is going on with horror set in the 80’s? Stranger Things, IT, Super8 (technically 1979, and maybe sci-fi, but whatever, sue me. Sue me and then you’ll see all my financial life choices laid out before you, and you’ll wonder what you’ve done), that Black Mirror episode, San Junipero.
My theory is that it’s the easiest way to get rid of the smartphone. Because
A) No service and no battery doesn’t cut it
B) They provide too-convenient filming, which means no convincing other people you saw something
C) There’s nothing more boring in a movie/book than someone tapping away on a computer or phone
Anyway, My BFF’s E (I added an F. Again, SUE ME).
To explain how I feel, minor spoilers (although one could argue these spoilers are contained in the book’s title).
The thing is, you, the reader, know what’s happening. You know the titular BF is possessed. You know that, and our main hero knows that, but it takes 80% of the book to convince anyone else of this fact, and to convince our hero of it to the point she’s willing to do something about it.
It’s weird because I don’t feel like this book is trying to make you, the reader, doubt that the BF is possessed. It never really twists you away from thinking that, never tries to make you wonder whether or not the friend is possessed. The book sort of…drags out the part between the possession and the part where we get down to horrifying. It felt a little like Batman V Superman (which is not a comparison I planned to make until just now, but here goes) in that you’ve got the title, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, so you assume that you’ll be seeing said best friend’s exorcism, and it feels like they really make you wait for it. And the stuff in between, while not bad by any stretch, started to wear thin for me. It was a lot like, you know how there’s that part in a horror movie where there’s a night watchman, and he sees a figure in the dark and he’s like, “Frank? Frank, is that you?” And you’re like, “C’mon, dumbass. That fucker doesn’t even have a head! When are you going to figure out that’s not your buddy Frank and get the fuck out of there!?” But the night watchman never listens and the monster gets ridiculously close, at which point you’re like, “You know what? This guy’s too stupid to live anyway.” You know that whole thing? A lot of this book was like that. You sitting there, wondering when the hell everyone in the book was going to figure out what you already know. Which is a needed element in horror, but there was a whole lot of it here.
I think I understand the book, and what I (think I) understand is that this book is saying something about the fragility and strength of friendship, and it’s doing so using the lens of horror. Someone fears something, and they write a book, but not exactly about that thing. About something related to that thing. The lie that tells the truth truer, as a friend would say. In this case, the truth is that friends will drift, fade, piss each other off, and rarely last forever. The lie that makes that truth easier to explain and listen to is the idea that your friend isn’t really your friend anymore because she’s possessed by a demon.
Aside from one pretty good scene (which I won’t spoil) the horror elements didn’t push my buttons, and like I was saying, almost nothing horrific happens until the last 20% of the book. I’d have liked to see more spread out along the way, keep me going. Like ET with those Reese’s Pieces. You can’t just put a pile by the door and expect that little bastard to scarf them down. You have to spread them out, make a trail.
If you dug the aforementioned San Junipero episode of Black Mirror, then I bet you’ll like this one. I’ll probably go down in history as the only person who didn’t love that one (I mean, what’s the conflict there? I already said I don’t love it, so I might as well go all out: I feel like it’s a silly Would You Rather because both choices are good. Sweet release of death or awesome party heaven? Either way, SIGN ME UP!).
The gorehound in me wasn’t satisfied. And I didn’t feel a rising, ratcheting-up feeling of dread either. It’s pretty fun, and it’s a quick one, and there’s stuff in here that’ll certainly resonate with some readers. But for me? Eh, I get why my friends don’t hang out with me. I’m kind of an asshole. “
“What I don’t love about this is that EVERYONE is a quipster. Even old man with evil-sounding German name is making wisecracks (by himself, alone, in a lab, while dying or something).
I’m a big fan of comedic writing, and something that benefits comedic writing is when some characters are funny and some are not. Because you need that buffoon, that wiseacre, that snarky person, to run up against someone who is, for lack of a better term, normal.
Because if everyone within the bubble that is a piece of fiction is funny, then no one is funny, because the bar for “funny” is higher within this fiction than it is within our world. Baseline Guy in this world is much funnier than a fairly funny person in our world.
Contrast. That’s the world I’m looking for. It sort of erases contrast, and contrast is, for me, the key.
Take the return of Spider-Man from the events of Superior Spider-Man. Spidey encounters Green Goblin, Spidey now fully himself, fully restored, and as they’re about to fight, Spidey says something like, “Yeah, well at least I’ve never had the indignity of carrying a man purse.”
Green Goblin is incensed. We get a panel of Gobby in complete stunned silence. Then he just says, “It’s you.”
And Spidey replies, “The one and only.”
And that’s the thing: The one and only.
Because Doc Ock, who was occupying Spidey’s body for awhile, was not quippy and was not fun, he was not Spider-Man.
When Spidey says that line to Goblin, Goblin knows, instantly, that it’s the kind of thing only Spider-Man would say, and Spider-Man is most definitely back.
It’s a beautiful character moment for Spider-Man, and I think that’s something you can’t get in these first few issues of ASM by Nick Spencer.
Spencer’s characters are funny, I enjoy them, but I think a funny character is funnier standing next to a character who’s not funny.
So, weirdly, I’m saying I think this would work better if it was less funny.
Is this adulthood?”
“What I liked is that Doctor Strange, Stevie, uses axes and swords and shit and isn’t just waving his hands around all the time.
Also, why, in the old comics, was he always wearing gloves the color of macaroni and cheese? And, wait a second, why was The Infinity Gauntlet the same color? And Adam Warlock’s skin?
Why is macaroni and cheese the color of magic?
Anyhoo, good book, but the first volume is totally build-up to the second.
Oh, also, points removed for librarian character. Why does everyone think that every librarian is SO concerned about how they store their books? If I was in the Sanctum Sanctorum, I think I would give no fucks about the fact that Strange’s books were poorly arranged. My books are poorly arranged and I don’t have a magical bone in my body!
Heh. Magical Bone. Okay, review over.”
“What is Catwoman’s deal? Seriously.
She goes back and forth, living the fast life with stolen diamonds or whatever, but then always feels regretful when one of her dopey sideline friends gets caught up and usually murdered in a fairy non-graphic fashion.
I mean, what’s the deal here?
I’m cool with a reckless lady stealing weird jewels and living it up on the run. And I’m cool with a story about a lady trying to get things right. But honestly, I’m fairly bored and frustrated by a story about a lady who wants it both ways. For example, I feel pretty ambivalent when Catwoman does some righteous street justice stuff on a dude who killed one of her friends back in the day because I’ve just watched her also do a bunch of bad stuff. So sometimes she’s doing Catwoman stuff to steal, sometimes to do justice-y stuff? And how does that get decided? And when a cop rolls his car chasing her from a crime scene and dies, what then? And how come she makes the “that’s it, from now on I work alone” declaration only to go back on it two issues later?
You know what Catwoman is like? Did you ever know a person who was in college and was always changing his/her major every three months? And could never decide on anything because ultimately he/she was very unhappy but couldn’t connect that, without any sort of commitment to anything, the happiness would never come? And you always had to hear the deep thoughts of this person, but in the back of your mind it was always grating because the person seemed completely unable to apply any of the thinking to him/her self? And one week it was short blue hair and the next week it was something with bicycles and then right after that it was thick-framed glasses and then weird piercings? Always something that the person thought was an expression of personality when it was really being used to stand-in for personality? THAT’S what Catwoman is like, and it’s annoying because I don’t really want to read about a woman in her 30’s with superpowers who doesn’t really know who she is. The only difference between her and a total loser is that she runs around on rooftops instead of rewatching the Wings box set over and over.
Also, the whole Catwoman/Batman love affair makes no sense to me whatsoever. I just don’t understand why this dude, who has a bizarrely strict crime-fighting code of sorts, can’t seem to apprehend Catwoman. Or at least convince her that maybe Gotham City, home of the world’s greatest detective, isn’t the best place for robbing safes. “
“What the hell is with people in semi-apocalyptic scenarios putting prisoners into a gladitorial arena? This has to be the favorite activity of warlord jerks who take prisoners in any kind of situation where the world has partially ended of there’s a dystopic thing happening. Descender, Escape from New York, Escape From LA, Planet Hulk, Exiles, Hunger Games, Battle Royale, Star Trek. It’s like, “What do we do next?” “I don’t know, throw ’em in a loincloth and give ’em a sword.”
Anyway (a word I use A LOT in book reviews), Descender is pretty cool, even if this first volume has a lot of elements that will feel familiar to sci-fi fans, and it does feel like it’s going somewhere, not as meander-y and decompressed as some similar books (Trees, perhaps Saga).
I’m pretty interested in Jeff Lemire’s take on whatever, so I’m biased that way. If you told me he was writing an 80’s comedy about a group of kids who have to save their beachfront from an evil land developer by competing in a topless volleyball tournament, I’d read it. Actually, that would be super exciting, so that’s a terrible example. But you get the drift.”
“Well…sometimes I like how Sandman works, and sometimes it’s like, everything is dreams, so anything can happen or not happen, and that doesn’t leave a shitload to tension.
I could also do with less “A small boy fidgets in his sleep, the gossamer webs of his dreams pulling him into the mellifluous, syncopated heartbeat of The Dreaming.” Like, okay, we get it. “
“What a tough read.
It’s an interesting bit of history, seeing how Japanese forces were living and fighting. And this is a great example of a book for those who have a low opinion of “those backwards graphic novels” (by which I mean read right-to-left, not so much as a racial thing. Although maybe I’m misinterpreting the criticism?)
What’s sort of bizarre about the whole thing is that it does make me question how effective Japanese forces could have been as WWII went on. They were outnumbered and stuck on islands, but there was always a fear that the Japanese would dig in and be almost impossible to beat, and the only way to break through would mean great loss of life.
However, this book makes me think otherwise. Because when given the choice between retreating to the mountains and engaging in guerrilla warfare or making a suicide charge, the leadership elects to make the suicide charge. And when some of the force fails to make the charge, their leaders commit suicide and the rest of their troops are ordered to make a second, re-do suicide charge. It’s a bizarre way to fight a war, in my humble, 2013 opinion. Or maybe it’s a western viewpoint? Either way, I can’t wrap my head around the idea of putting some version of honor above the possibility of success when it comes to winning a war. Because let’s face it, dropping the bomb was effective, successful. But as honor goes, I don’t know that it’s exactly a noble act or anything. I guess one of the most undervalued resources in wars has always been the willingness to abandon the moral high ground.
Oh, and by the way, as most books regarding war, this one definitely proves that the whole thing is really, fundamentally stupid. I mean, just a mind-blowingly poor way to resolve anything. I’m not calling the soldiers stupid or anything like that, but the very concept of war is such a bizarre, ridiculous leftover from a time long past. “
“What a total piece of shit.
Popeye’s, if you’re listening, I’ll do a for-hire romance novel based on…well, Popeye? Is that where your chicken restaurants get their name?
Okay, I just Googled, and it turns out Popeye’s is named after Popeye Doyle, as portrayed by Gene Hackman in The French Connection? Whaaa…?
So I guess technically there already IS a book based on Popeye’s, and it’s called The French Connection.
But dudes, I’ll write you a great romance. It’s perfect. It’ll be a detective story that goes all soft and mushy, unlike your delicious friend chicken.
In fact, let me just lay out a premise for several different fast food franchises, and I’ll add my fee for writing them:
Wendy’s: Wendy is the greatest burger chef in the world, known as much for her delicious burgers as she is her red hair. But when she decides to make her burger patties square, she rocks the burger world, and she finds a surprising ally in her old rival, Thomas Davies, and the two fuel each other competitively and, perhaps, in other ways.
Fee: I’ll do this one for free. I fuckin’ love Wendy’s.
McDonald’s: a McDonald’s marketer from the 90’s end up in a time machine and comes to the present, only to discover that McDonald’s has abandoned most of its McDonaldland characters because some jackoff made a stupid movie where eating McDonald’s one time made him barf. Anyway, this plucky marketer is teamed up with a more cynical fellow who is constantly talking about AI algorithms and blah blah blah, and she has to remind him of the magic of characters, narrative, and fries made in beef tallow.
Fee: I worked for McDonald’s for about a year when I was 15, and I made something like $4.50 an hour. I figure you could pay me a fairer wage, let’s call it $6.00 an hour, so a makeup of $1.50 an hour…Let’s call it $1500.
Burger King: The King of Burger is bored, lonely, and kind of creepy ever since a wizard put a curse on him that froze his face is to a plastic-y, terrifying rictus. The only way to break the curse is for him to eat the most delicious burger he’s ever laid face on. In rides a hero who might just be able to provide.
Fee: $500. This is a pretty random figure. I don’t really have much of a personal relationship with Burger King. But they do feel wildest in terms of what they’ll do marketing-wise, so game recognizes game.
Arby’s:
In the gold rush town of Arby, Colorado, prospectors arrive by the bucketful every day to make their fortune. A woman, Horseysauce (pronounced “or-see-saw-say,” she’s French) has set up shop feeding hungry golddiggers her delicious roast beef sandwiches. But when an evil land baron comes along and attempts to put her and most of the town out of business, it’s up to Madame Horseysauce and her companion, a miner with a heart of gold, even if his pickaxe can’t seem to find any, to right the wrongs and save the town.
Fee: $800. I’ve eaten Arby’s like twice in my life, and though I don’t personally like them, I respect their commitment to the curly fry. Is it me, or are curly fries never quite hot enough? That’ll also be a plot point. Horsesauce makes curly fries in honor of her miner friend’s curly hair.
KFC: Let me start by saying where Tender Wings of Desire goes wrong.
It’s boring.
The plot is boring: precocious young woman does not want to marry a duke and instead wants to run away and make a life for herself, work and go to school and stuff.
Which, Honey, sounds more fun than it is.
She meets a man named Harlan, and they fall instantly in love.
Now, the conflict, because there must always be a conflict in a romance, comes when our heroine, Madeline, confesses to Harlan that she used to be a lady of society, set to marry a duke, but she ran away because she…wanted to make her own way in the world. Which means working in a sleazy seaside bar, I guess.
She gets pissed off because she finds out that Harlan is not a simple sailor, he’s actually a Colonel who created a restaurant empire!
Upon learning this, Madeline rides her horse to a cliff. I think she’s going to just leave the seaside town, not throw herself off, but whatever. Harlan admits he’s wealthy and powerful and left that behind to see the world, but now he has to return to the States and be The Colonel again.
Madeline doesn’t want to go with him because the book requires some kind of plot. She has to be convinced that she likes her current life that she built for herself. It’s one of those things where it’s like, “It’s not much, it’s a bartending job and a place to sleep above the bar, but damn it, I earned it!”
I don’t know why fictional characters are so obsessed with that. I mean, I like doing things for myself, but if someone was like, “We’re totally infatuated with each other, and it turns out she super rich, and it’d be preferred by society that I not work in a bar” I think I’d somehow, some way, muddle through.
But I guess this is before Nintendo was invented, so whatever.
The plot is just so basic, the book is so boring, there’s NO description of the Colonel really knocking the back out, so it’s pretty chaste. NOBODY would give this a second glance if it weren’t a KFC marketing gimmick.
Which I’m not opposed to, but there are just so many missed opportunities.
For starters, Madeline could be betrothed to a boring duke who’s a hamburger magnate. She’s eaten many a burger and she finds them tasteless and boring. If only there was something herby-y-er, spicier.
Second, why does she run away to a seaside town and meet Harlan there? Isn’t the way to do this, you set it in The States, she lives in a seaside town where everyone is eating fish 24/7, and then she runs away to rural Kentucky where she gets a job working on a chicken farm?
Third, Madeline gets on the Colonel’s radar because she has an unusual quirk of bringing her lunch to work in a red and white striped bucket.
Fourth, there HAS to be a duel for Madline’s affection, but instead of pistols at dawn, it’s fried food at midday. Fish filet versus the Colonel’s secret recipe. Duh.
Finally, at the book’s end, a shadowy figure waits in the wings. He has his own ideas for what the future of chicken looks like. His name…Popeye.
Lotta missed opportunities in this book, and nothing that makes this remotely KFC-related. Normally I guess it’d be a good thing if a novel didn’t feel like it was written as KFC propaganda, in fact it’s one of the top criteria on the Pulitzer consideration process checklist, I think, but in this one case, I could’ve gone for it.
Fee: This one’s $2500. Because it’s damn good, and because I had to read your original recipe, and it sucks.”
“What a loaded question. If there’s one thing to take away from this book, it’s that you should never ask this one. Was she pretty? Of course she was.
The book is a series of very short bios, usually one or two sentences about an ex. For example, “Katya’s boyfriend never stopped sending her postcards” or “Isaac would not let Rebecca answer the telephone in his apartment.” Mini stories on one side of the page, sketches on the other.
I can’t decide if this would be a great book or a depressing book to read right after a break up. Maybe both. And maybe that’s why the detatched sweetness of the book is so effective.”
“What a great, big pile of shit!
Let’s be clear, I fully expected a great, big pile of shit. I read it for that specific experience.
The first third or so was pretty amazing. Then…it almost felt like Johnstone submitted the first third, then got an advance, used it for cocaine, forgot about the whole thing, and the night before it was due, put it all together, shipped it off, and whoever was proofing it was like, “Fuck it, this is my last day, let’s just put the apostrophes mostly in the right places and I’m outta this hellhole!”
I’m now going to attempt to summarize the plot. Spoilers? I put a question mark because I’m not sure that I’ll be able to reassemble what I read, and because I don’t know if telling anyone what happens in this book spoils it, per se.
Jay’s aunt dies. So he goes back to Victory, MO to claim an inheritance. His aunt sucked, but I guess Jay was the closest thing she had to an heir.
Victory is apparently not a real city, BUT Missouri has a Liberty AND a Freedom. Just putting it out there.
Victory is real fucked-up. We immediately see a fat guy who is doing something fucked up to a doll that’s also sort of alive, and Johnstone tosses in that the guy is basically a child rapist. This is like page 2.
Here’s what happens in Victory: When the sun goes down, the fog rolls in, and everyone starts acting insane. A teen boy just starts jerking off on his front porch. People have sex even though they probably shouldn’t. For example, Jay, our hero, has sex with this young woman (17? 18?) who is the daughter of one of his old townie buddies. I lost track, but I think this character gets raped somewhere between 2 and 8,000 times in the course of the book.
Okay. There’s also a haunted house. Filled with living dolls. There are also dolls roaming around the woods. There are THREE kinds of living dolls in this book, near as I can figure:
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Porcelain Mannequins
These are porcelain, human-sized dolls that can walk and talk and shit, but when they’re attacked, they shatter. Also, they’re killed with fire, which seems less efficient than the shotguns and pistols everyone is toting. If I’ve got to destroy a plate, and I can use a gun or fire? C’mon. These dolls are all bad guys and kill people, mostly while their arms are detached from their bodies. These people seem to be sometimes people who used to be real humans, sometimes not, and how they become this way isn’t explained. -
Little Evil Dolls
All kinds of dolls, evil, stabbing people with needles and tiny swords. These are apparently the new bodies of people who lived in Liberty. This process isn’t really explained. -
Little Not Evil Dolls
These seem to be identical to the Little Evil Dolls, except they’re not evil and they want to fight the evil dolls. I’m not entirely sure what the difference is between them and the evil dolls, what makes them not evil, or how the characters would know which dolls are evil and which aren’t other than the not evil dolls being gruesomely mutilated by the evil dolls now and then. They also fly planes and drop firecrackers on the bad guys.
Okay, so Jay comes to town. Evil shit starts happening, especially around roaming packs of teens. Which, how can you tell the difference!? (dad joke)
A blind priest, his former surgeon/thug assistant, a retired general, a news team, a cop (who is named Jim, which was REALLY confusing because we’ve got a Jim and a Jay, and these characters are not exactly well-rendered and I lost track of the differences), an archery expert doctor, and some other randos fight against the evil in Victory. They can’t seem to get police help from outside the city because…reasons. They can’t leave the town because…reasons.
Jay almost has sex with his daughter while they’re both in the fog, but then their cross necklaces click together, yanking Jay out of his fogged-in stupor. But then, the next morning, it turns out Jay’s lady friend and her daughter had sex at their house. Which…I guess part of the problem here is that there’s a SHITLOAD of incest going down in Victory, which results in weird monsters somehow, but that doesn’t really explain a mother/daughter evil fog tryst.
There’s a part where Jay gets captured and put in a hospital. Where he sort of puts together there’s an ancient evil of some kind that does…something. Somehow. It’s involved in making the dolls (maybe all three types) in addition to some mutants, plus spreading the evil around. He escapes via clever ruse (and also punching a guy super hard in the balls), and then gets back to running around with his cronies, shooting stuff, burning stuff, and then sometimes being easily cowed by a group of teens.
Can we talk about lost subplots?
TOY FACTORY: There’s a toymaker shipping toys all over the world. Which I think was supposed to serve as a last-minute, pre-credits sort of wink that things aren’t really over, but it doesn’t go anywhere.
CHILD PORN: Apparently the evil one is making child pornography, which is a financial endeavor(?) This is very unclear, although I guess it’s here because it’s one of the evil-est things you can do? It doesn’t really play into the plot so much.
THE AUNT: I don’t know. She’s like a ghost? They burn her house down? A bunch of dolls live there, but some are evil and some aren’t? Super confusing.
THE NEWS: A news team shows up at some point to sort of help with things and show the world what’s going on. Doesn’t really go anywhere.
THE DOLLMAKER: I could be wrong, I read this kind of fast, but I don’t know if the evil, fat dollmaker ever gets his, escapes, or what. He seemed like the sub-villain, the one we’re supposed to think is the villain, but then he isn’t. But…I think he just kind of vanishes from the book.
SATANISTS: These guys meet in a church and talk cryptically about “the dark one” or “the evil one” or whatever. They turn the cross upside-down while they meet. I’m not really sure why they’re meeting in secret (having an orgy at one point) when everyone in the entire city is part of the craziness. Why the cloak and dagger shit? EVERYONE YOU KNOW is in on it.
TIME: Jay figures out that something is happening regarding time. And that by disrupting this, he can accomplish something. So he blasts a clock to pieces, which solves the problem, whatever it is, briefly catapults our characters back in time to the 20’s or so, then that just sort of resolves itself and the time distortion is over. Although everything seems exactly the same following the resolution of this problem.
TEENS: There is a group of evil teens. Which it turns out, Jay’s daughter is one of them. He tries to kill her a couple times, which you would think would be kind of a big deal, but it’s not.
There’s a bunch of mayhem (which is the best shit) and then a twist when it turns out some of the good guys are actually bad guys, and the whole anticlimax ends with Jay stabbing an old man at the dump, which apparently ends the curse.
I have, I think, three criteria for enjoying shitty shit:
-
I have to be able to follow it, generally. It doesn’t have to be an amazing plot, but I like to know what’s going on from moment to moment.
-
It can’t be intentionally shitty. Sharknado is my prime example. When someone makes something shitty on purpose, feh.
-
It’s got to have some real crazy nonsense that takes things too far in one aspect or another.
This one has two of three. It’s got some real crazy, and I think it’s sincere. But it was just so damn hard to follow, and it was like Johnstone had a chance to write one book, so he threw in EVERYTHING. Which is insane as he wrote 25 horror novels in like 10 years.
I’m torn on it. If you, like me, sometimes enjoy getting loaded and reading at a bar, this is perfect. If you, like me, also kind of hate working really hard to follow something you shouldn’t give a wet fart about, this is very much imperfect.
Mixed bag? Yeah. Hopefully I won’t be thinking of the time I spent reading this when I’m looking back on my life. “
“What a great example of comic book plotting.
The impossible happens. Something that I DON’T want to happen happens. And the story works. It’s great. Tension, action. It’s all there.
And at the same time, it plays with comic book tropes in a big way. The whole time, you figure Doctor Octopus is just hatching another dopey scheme that will never work. He even makes a big mistake early on that you, as a comic reader, look at and say, “Well, now he’s screwed. He should have just gotten on that flight! THIS IS HIS UNDOING!”
And because you’ve read comic books, you figure that, like always, Spidey will figure a way out.
Dan Slott’s run with Spider-Man will go down in comics history as one of the best runs of all time, mark my words. This stuff belongs in there with Frank Miller’s Daredevil, Chris Claremont’s X-Men, and probably some other classic run written by a guy who has been working really hard to tarnish his own legacy.
Fuck me, I really hope it doesn’t turn out that Dan Slott is some kind of evil bastard. That would be just about perfect. These guys really have a way of writing a great run, then doing something crazy that makes it hard to like them anymore.
Dan Slott, if you can hear me, please don’t blow this for me. I know you have to live your life, and if that life involves racist screeds online or bizarre sexual appetites, that’s totally cool. Just keep it a secret FROM ME. Please, please, please.”
“What a fantastic book. I’m so disappointed in myself that I’m only getting to King in my mid-30’s, but I’m making up for lost time. He’s gotta be the most underrated-yet-super-famous writer of all time.
This book was so good that I listened to it while picking up garbage with a grabber and a bucket, and I actually looked forward to doing it because it meant I got to hear more. Seriously, picking up plastic and bottles (and bottles and bottles, someone is making a cry for help) of Fireball, and even a diaper. Seriously, a diaper. Guh ross. Still, totally worth it. “
“What a delight! Although I feel bad for poor Bigfoot.
You know what I don’t like? That new cryptids, like Slenderman, have a known creator. That’s some bullshit.
If you create a cryptid that catches on, do the world a favor and don’t tell anyone. It’s a gift to the world.
I guess this is my way of saying that I DEFINITELY didn’t create SnakePushkin, an ape-like creature that perfectly combines the attributes of Snake Plissken and Alexander Pushkin. It’s a weird combo, but when pushkin comes to shovekin, it all works out.”
“welllllll…
I think a lot of discussion about this book regards the authenticity of its depictions.
I’m of the opinion that, as that goes, you can kind of say, “This makes Indians/Indigenous People out to be criminals, drunks, and so on.” And I get that. But I don’t really read comics or watch movies that way. I don’t assume that Scalped, or other depictions of its type, are meant to depict an entire culture. I guess it could come with a caveat like, “This is a specific story about fictional characters, not a depiction of real life or an overall survey of a people,” but at the same time, I feel like when you’re watching the main character fight with nunchucks, that’s an assumption most thinking adults would draw, no?
I just didn’t feel like there was a whole lot of story here. For the length, we just didn’t get very far. I think the story gets set up, but then it just kind of…continues as-is.”
“Well.
I have mixed feelings.
The book is a fun read, no doubt.
If you like Petey Wheatstraw, this is about as close as a book is gonna get. If that comparison made you smile, you’re gonna want to read this.
That said…
The book is written in a language that a lot of white people here on Goodreads are calling “urban vernacular” and shit like that:
So in his mind, he equates that wit FRIENDSHIP
As long as he kan git sumpen frum you.
You gotta be kareful.
Basikally.
What’s weird, though, is it’s sometimes the way a person would speak, like typing “ion” instead of “I don’t.” But sometimes, it’s something like “kareful” where, far as I can tell, you’d pronounce it the exact same way.
And mostly, it’s both.
Here’s what makes me suspicious: it’s consistent, far as I can tell. I flipped through a bit, and I can’t find a “can” anywhere, just “kan.” “Mite” and “rite” are both consistent, two different words, both spelled incorrectly in the same way.
It makes me suspicious that Duvay Knox knows exactly what he’s doing. Because if this was the true way the book was written, I think you’d have flip-flops and inconsistencies. Things would be misspelled in inconsistent ways.
This is a just a longshot hunch, okay? Not an indictment.
Because this book isn’t a bad thing, and I’m not trying to say that we’re being taken for a BAD ride. I liked the ride, I was entertained, so it really doesn’t matter whether this is a huge persona someone’s putting on. I’m game.
I don’t really give a shit whether something “feels” gritty and real or actually is gritty and real, same book as far as I’m concerned.
I’m just curious if anyone may perhaps recognize Duvay Knox as their English professor or something someday.
And just know: No fair going back and changing your opinion on this one later if we find out Mr. Knox is a Guggenheim fellow or some such shit.
Just sayin.
I loved the book, I had a good time with it, and I think a lot of you will like it, too. It’s weird, it’s got an unusual voice, and it’s short enough that the extra brainpower it takes to read it doesn’t overstay its welcome.
I kind of want Duvay Knox to be a street genius, and I also kind of want him to be an ivy leaguer who just wanted to try something weird, see what happened.
I think those are shades of the two most likely outcomes, and either one leads to interesting questions and answers, so we’re good either way. “
“Well…I gave up. I bought the audio for 30-some dollars and figured it might be a great listen. But I find myself dreading listening.
Part of it is the bleakness of the current landscape. That’s certainly not Roxane Gay’s fault. Every day is something new. Author Colleen McCullough dies, and in her obit someone basically feels the need to point out how unattractive the woman was, physically. Patricia Arquette makes a speech about how women should be paid the same to do the same work, and Fox News has to have an opinion about that. What the opinion is I don’t know. I’m still not entirely sure what the fuck Gamergate is, and frankly, I’ve been avoiding it because I like playing Castlevania. The main character in Castlevania wears a short skirt and has no face, so really that seems like the O.G. of gender ambiguity right there. I just want to play Castlevania. Two buttons, no faces.
I had a GIGANTIC review here, but I’ve decided to replace it with the other reasons that I didn’t want to continue and finish this book, and I decided to just put them out here.
If some of this was addressed later on, then please excuse my ignorance. I passed on about the last 1/3rd of the book.
- The intersection of serious thought and pop culture didn’t really work for me here.
I’ll be the first to admit, a lot of the pop culture items discussed in this book aren’t ones I pay much attention to. That’s not in a holier-than-thou way. I just listened to a Now That’s What I Call Music album and will readily admit that the best song, easily, was a Katy Perry song. I’m not putting myself above pop culture. It’s just that the pop culture highway traveled by Roxane Gay and the one I travel are different.
Additionally, I think the idea of giving serious academic or emotional thought to an unserious topic, or a topic we don’t typically consider serious, is not something that lights a fire for me. The discussion about what is and isn’t high and low art, and the decision to give something more or less consideration because of that distinction, is really not an interesting conversation for me. Whether or not you think 50 Shades is a good book, it warrants some discussion because of its cultural impact. Which brings me to…
- The criticisms of media didn’t get to the meat, or the meat I was interested in.
I’m not going to disagree that there’s something pretty racist about The Help. What I’m more interested in is why THAT book caught on. Why is a whitewashed (in the most literal and figurative sense of the word) version of black history one of the bestselling books of the last few years? I think I’m more interested in knowing why people like The Help rather than having it proven to me that it’s racist, and this is a critique I’d make of a few of the cultural essays. Rather than convincing me there’s something racist about Tarantino, I’m more interested in hearing why he’s such a darling. Rather than explaining to me that 50 Shades isn’t a great representation of a sub/dom relationship, I’d rather assume that stance with you and then hear about why that version is so attractive to people.
Now, I’m re-writing the book a little, and maybe what I wanted was never the intent. Which is cool, but it’s one of the reasons I didn’t continue on. I felt like the way this book dealt with pop culture didn’t go where I was hoping.
- The language police discussions don’t do much for me.
In one essay, Gay says how a rape joke can never be funny. Then, in the next, there’s some discussion about how maybe a rape joke CAN be funny. There’s discussion about Tyler the Creator using the word “faggot”, and also some talk about how an audience received the word “nigger” in Django Unchained.
This is such a hard thing to change someone’s mind on. Which isn’t to say a person shouldn’t try. But frankly, I don’t have much cause to make rape jokes, I don’t use the word “faggot” and I don’t use the word “nigger.” Except when I’m putting the words in quotes in a review, an act for which I genuinely apologize if I’ve caused offense here. On the other hand, I’m not really into telling the general population what they can and can’t say, or what they can and can’t joke about. I’m not upset that Gay does it, I think it’s just a message which I’ve heard, made a decision on, and feel pretty good about. Which brings us to…
- I think the sales pitch for this book was…well, a lie.
I feel pretty strongly that the audience for this, we picked up this book with the intent of loving it. Or loving it as best we could, considering the hard truth of the material.
I think the issue I had, this book was sold to me as being a bit more poppy than it was. The Amazon blurb says it’s funny. There were some jokes, there were some turns of phrase, but I’d be hard-pressed to call the book funny. Matter of taste, for sure, but I don’t know that the book’s purpose was to be funny.
While the book covers some very accessible topics, I didn’t find the book to be, overall, accessible.
Maybe that’s too far. I think what I’m saying here, it’s a book you have to reach out to. It’s not going to reach out to you. As a whole, anyway. The first essay, I thought that was excellent. Some of the more personal moments throughout were very well-written and fantastic. But as a whole…I guess, she made a lot of points, some of which I agreed with and some of which I disagreed with. And she made a lot of points that I just didn’t feel very curious about.
Now, of course, I’m a straight, white male. So maybe this book isn’t written for me. Maybe I missed the point entirely, and maybe the point is for people who are more like Gay, or who feel more like her, to read and feel less lonely, less alone. Maybe the point isn’t for me to see things from her perspective, and maybe the idea is that people who share her perspective see that they aren’t the only ones.
This might be another issue where I just wasn’t reading the right book for me. But I will warn you, if you’re looking for a good READ in addition to a book that makes a lot of great points, you might be let down a little. I think this is an important book, I think it has a lot of good things to say. But I felt more like I was reading an academic text than a book I would pick up on my own.
Again, it’s fine if that was the intent. Reading something like this in a college course would be pretty fitting. But I don’t feel like it was sold to me that way.
When you pick it up, read the first essay. That will give you an idea of what the best parts are like. Before you buy it, read one of the book reviews contained within. That will give you an idea of the parts that were, for me, a little tougher to enjoy.
- “Men Want What Men Want.”
A quote, a chorus from one essay.
In this case, what men want is sexual conquest.
For a book that is very sensitive to race, orientation, body type, and a number of other things, this book tends to think of men as men. If you’re a man, you watch sports, you drink beer, you want sex, you think of women only in the context of sex, and probably the one I have the biggest problem with, you are very happy that things are the way they are.
Reading this book, I felt like being a man was treated as a tacit endorsement of the way society currently functions. Or doesn’t.
Like I said, I’m a straight white male. I recognize that provides things in life for me that other people do not get. I have access to things that other people do not have access to. There’s no argument, my life would be different if you changed any of those categorizations. I’ll own that.
What I won’t own is the idea that I’m happy about it, and that I like things the way they are. I will own the idea that I’m at the top of the demographic heap, but what I won’t own is that I’m fighting to keep it that way.
What I also refuse is to say nothing when men, the entire gender, are categorized as being, essentially, every dad from a sitcom. An uncaring, unfeeling idiot. A dolt. An oaf. Someone who can’t empathize and is emotionally underdeveloped and uncomplicated. A person who thinks only of sex, who puts the same value on consensual, loving sexual experiences as brutal, forced, criminal behavior.
Okay, that last one veered out of King of Queens territory. I don’t remember that episode.
“Men want what men want.”
Can we phrase this as a question? “What do men want?”
I want everyone to have the same opportunities. I want everyone’s basic needs to be taken care of, even if that means I pay a little more or have to work a little harder than my neighbor. I want kids to have the chance to succeed. I want people to feel safe. I want everyone to know and be confident that their basic needs will be met. I want the best person for the job to get that job, and I don’t want it to be a decision based on someone’s dumb, pre-conceived notion about what this or that type of person is good at. I want people to have sex with the people who want to have sex with them, and I don’t want to punish people for loving men or women or couples or transgender people or whoever. I want to be kind to people. I want to drink beer because I think it tastes good, but I don’t want to watch sports. I don’t even really want to talk about sports. I want my mother to feel loved. I want my sister and my brothers to feel that too. I want people to be nice to me because my feelings are pretty easy to hurt.I want to compete with men and women of all different types in all different fields, and I want to win when I do the best and I want to lose when someone else does better.
But hey. If it serves your thesis, go ahead and assume that my main purpose is the thoughtless moving of a blood-filled piece of flesh in and out any orifice with complete disregard of what that means to anyone or anything else. I’m not here to convince you otherwise. I’m not here to scream “not all men.” I’m just here to explain why I didn’t finish a book.
Let’s not assume that I’m finishing this review to go exercise and listen to podcasts because they make me laugh and because I like to laugh. Let’s not assume that afterwards, I’ll go home and cook chicken and vegetable stir fry for me and my partner. Let’s not assume that we’ll sit together in our pajamas and maybe I’ll make fun of her because she likes making spreadsheets and she’ll make fun of me because Katy Perry was my favorite part of Now That’s What I Call Music. Let’s not assume I’ll wake up tomorrow and go to my job, a job I’ve chosen in a female-dominated field. Let’s not assume I’ve found that experience fascinating and rewarding. Let’s not assume that one of the best parts of becoming an adult, for me, has been getting to know women as professionals and as friends who I really respect and care for and who respect and care for me as well.
It fits the narrative better, so let’s just assume I had to end this review now to swing out to a bar and pick up on some sweet poontang.”
“Well…here’s the thing, the writing is absolutely wonderful. It’s really great stuff. But the story is harder to follow than my non-signaling, weaving uncle is to follow through downtown traffic.
So, if you’re a fan of writing that is gorgeous in its own right, then you’ll still get something out of this, something great. But if you’re a big plot person you might find yourself a little confounded”
“Well. There’s a guy named Shoemaker. And there’s a report. And, as the parenthesis indicate, there are space aliens. So I guess I can’t complain about being sold a bill of goods. Whatever the hell THAT means.
Most significant, a woman is impregnated by an alien that looks like a giant ant, and she gives birth to an ant baby just a day or so later. Does this, combined with the character Antant from Eagle Bird One, signal the Charles Hinton cinematic universe? Is this how it begins? “
“Well, this should be popular…
I think it’s fair to point out that I got about 20% of the way through this book before I quit. I told my impressions so far to a trusted friend, asked if the rest of the book was basically the same, and they confirmed.
So I’m tapping out.
Let’s start here:
- None of you read this, right?
Did any of you fuckers actually read this book? Because I don’t think this book was accurately represented to me.
I thought this was mostly going to be about a different way of looking at racism/antiracism/whathaveyou, but most of what I read was memoir about Kendi’s familial experiences from before he was born and his personal experiences. One of which was a groan-er.
Okay, that sequence where Lil’ Ibram, who’s like 7, is at a school and asking, in a very adult and 2020’s way, why there aren’t more Black teachers? That’s some definite r/ThatHappened fodder.
- Since the dawn of time…
Oh my christ, why do so many books on racism endeavor to give readers THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF RACISM as proof that racism is real and is a problem?
Hear me out for a few lines:
I voluntarily picked up a book called How to Be an Antiracist because I thought it might provide some ideas and insight.
How likely is it that the person who picks up this book is someone who needs to be convinced that racism is a thing? Why would I pick up a guide to antiracism if I didn’t think racism was a thing and a problem? To “own the libs”?
Honeys, I’m not reading an entire fucking book to own the libs. I won’t even bother to sign onto Twitter to own the libs, you think I’m putting in the effort of book reading?
Business books do this too, and I lambaste them the same way. I don’t need to know the history of accounting in ancient Egypt to understand lean management.
It makes better use of the reader’s time if you spend the majority of your book talking about the new, interesting ideas you’re bringing to the table, and maybe we don’t all need to take the entire journey that brought you to those ideas.
When a middle schooler starts an essay with “Since the dawn of time…” you know they’re padding it out. When a modern intellectual does it…
But for real, the antiracism concept, as I understand it, isn’t that complicated: In many life situations, when you’re presented with a choice, you can make a selection that’s more or less racist or antiracist. Making antiracist choices is good. Making racist choices is bad.
I don’t think that’s a new idea, and what Kendi brings to the table is the idea that a person isn’t racist or antiracist, they do things that are racist or antiracist.
There, I just saved you a good chunk of time. Use it to live your life.
3: It’s boring
Iâm sorry, everyone, but this book is boring.
Look, Kendi is a college professor, he comes from an academic background, and this feels like a super long class lecture.
Iâm sure for some people who like school, that works. For me, who hates school, who finished school mostly so he’d NEVER have to sit in school again, it doesnât.
- The examples are not contemporary, and theyâre not great
Kendi namechecks Gunnar Myrdal, who won a Nobel in 1944, but then Kendi uses a quote from W.E.B. DuBois that he says makes a point similar to Myrdalâs regarding assimilation.
Why is Myrdal quoted at all? Oh, right, because we can be like, âThis racist mofo won a Nobel!?â
What even with this structure?
Itâs another aspect that makes it feel like a report for school: Youâve gotta quote 20 sources, so letâs throw Myrdal in there, in the middle of a completely different source, and check the box.
Hereâs a summary of what Myrdalâs work was about from Wikipedia:
“Gunnar Myrdal headed a comprehensive study of sociological, economic, anthropological and legal data on race relations in the United States funded by the Carnegie Corporation, starting in 1938. The result of the effort was Gunnar Myrdal’s best-known work, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, published in 1944, written with the collaboration of R. M. E. Sterner and Arnold Rose.[10] He characterized the problem of race relations as a dilemma because of a perceived conflict between high ideals, embodied in what he called the “American Creed,” on the one hand and poor performance on the other. In the generations since the Civil War, the U.S. had been unable to put its human rights ideals into practice for the African-American tenth of its population.[11] This book was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in public schools. Myrdal planned on doing a similar study on gender inequality, but he could not find funding for this project and never completed it.”
For the record, in the Brown V. Board of Education case, Myrdal’s book was cited by the good guys and used as an example of why schools should be integrated.
Iâm confused. This book, to me, soundsâ¦anti-racist? Iâm sure that it poses some things and contains language we wouldnât accept now, butâ¦canât Kendi find better examples of racist assholes than a book that helped provide the foundation for the landmark court case that integrated American schools?
A lot of the other cited examples just donât speak to me, and I feel theyâre presented in confusing ways, and whatâs even more confusing about them is that itâs not hard to find legit examples of racism.
I think itâs weird to talk so much about W.E.B. DuBois, who was living in a very different time and had very different options. I think, were he alive today, he may feel and say very different things. It seems extremely unfair to judge the ideas of DuBois by today’s standards. BTW, for those who don’t know, DuBois was Black and a prominent figure in Black literature and rights activism. He was VERY progressive for his time, which doesn’t look as progressive today, but so it goes…
Or citing stuff David Hume wrote in the 1750s? Just dropping it in there but conveniently leaving out the fact that the quote is almost 500 fucking years old!?
Dude, câmon. This shit does not speak to people today. You gotta give us something that makes sense today. Nobodyâs going home to tear down their David Hume posters after reading that he was a racist. Nobody’s seriously reevaluating their ideas of racism based on the David Hume truth bombs here.
The problem with trying to use more modern examples is that, in general, the only people whoâd say these heinous, shocking things are fringe weirdos who nobody but other fringe weirdos will claim.
- The modern lens problem
Looking at the past through the lens of the present is uninteresting, and it’s easy, and I’m pretty over it.
I’ll give you an example: I was talking to someone the other day, and they were discussing Ruby Bridges:
Person A: “But, like, why did Ruby Bridges have to go to a White school? Why couldn’t the White teachers go to the Black School?”
Person B: “Because they were racists.”
Integrating schools by putting that much on the shoulders of a little girl is very not cool. Acknowledged.
However.
I think this sort of backwards-looking, Monday-morning-quarterback thinking comes from the idea that, secretly, people think if they had lived 70 years ago, they would feel and behave as they do today. That they would be as progressive and as radical as they are today.
They would get it right.
I think that’s highly unlikely. I’m a believer that our morality is probably more nurture than nature, and if you were nurtured by someone in the 50’s, you’d probably have values more like theirs than like the ones you have now.
And on the other end, in the modern day, it’s terribly arrogant to tell the past what was done wrong. Because when we say what someone should have done in the 50’s, we’re assuming that the way we do things today is right, or the views we hold are right, even if those views aren’t reflected by the world at large.
There are really only 3 possible ways people in the future will perceive the views from today:
The most likely one is that they will see our views as being archaic and barbaric, much as we do the views from 70 years ago. The future is always progressive. There has never been a time when we’d look at the mainstream views from 50 years ago as MORE progressive than the views of today.
The next-most likely one is that we’d revert to a less progressive state, and people would perceive the views of today as being soft. This is far less likely as it’d be pretty much unprecedented, but it’s possible.
The least likely scenario is that people from 50 years in the future would see our views as perfection. They would think and act like us because we, in 2022, had it right.
And although that’s the least likely scenario, it seems to be the one that the largest number of people believe, deep in their hearts. They think that they will not go down in history as monstrous for the same reasons every past generation has gone down as monstrous.
My point is that in these discussions and in Kendi’s book, it’s very easy to look at the past and say, “What would’ve been better is this…”
And I don’t really need help in doing that.
I’m very capable at looking at what Ruby Bridges went through and saying “That’s not right, I wish it had been different.” I don’t need a book to tell me that.
And I don’t know that I need a book to guide how I would’ve preferred it look different.
- The past
How to Be Antiracist is truly obsessed with this reexamination of the past, a racist-hunting expedition done via intellectual DeLorean, and Kendi has gone on to talk about how figures like DuBois, Barack Obama, Lincoln, and many prominent abolitionists were so, so racist.
I’m sorry, but I just can’t hang with that. I get where he’s coming from, I understand the point he’s making, but looking through everything William Lloyd Garrison, who was the editor of an anti-slavery newspaper and staunch abolitionist in the 19th century, founder of The American Anti-Slavery Society–looking through everything that dude said the way people will look through a comedian’s tweets from the last decade to find a way to wedge him into a definition of racism? Like…why?
Is that really the problem? Is William Lloyd Garrison, who most people don’t know and most would probably see as pretty damn antiracist, is finding a way to declare him a racist really helping anyone?
Is that version of revisionist history the kind of insight people are paying Kendi tens of thousands of dollars to speak on?
Because if so, I’m prepared to undercut Kendi, and for the low, low price of $5,000 I will give a one hour speech about how racist William Lloyd Garrison really was.
Just hope there’s nobody in the audience who actually knows who Garrison was…”
“Well, this project, begun in October 2020, has been completed!
Er, well, I finished one step in my 2020 project.
Ah, October 2020. What a terrible time that was. COVID was rampaging (although that’s now totally over with the exception of a couple hundred dorks every day in this country alone. I mean, what’s a couple hundred lives a day? Life isn’t worth living unless I can sit inside an Applebee’s), my partner had an infection IN HER SKULL, and Halloween was most certainly going to be destroyed by COVID.
On the plus, we got stimulus checks.
Remember that shit? Someone was like, “Bro, you’re getting like a couple thousand dollars this year.” And I thought it was a scam. I was pretty sure this was something cooked up by a “Nigerian Prince” to get my routing number or whatever.
Even when it turned out to be true, I didn’t think there was money for ME. What did I need that for? Surely this was going to people who needed the money, who lost their jobs or something. Nope! Yours truly got a check.
That first check, I sent half to a charity (Off the Street Club in West Garfield Park, Chicago! Look them up!) and spent some on a new phone. I was rocking an iPhone 4, and, well, to say I was “rocking” it is a bit of an oversell. I could only make calls, send texts, and sometimes, kind of, get voicemails. And for some reason, the game Desert Golf still worked. I was overdue.
Desert Golf does NOT work on my new phone. By the way, Apple.
The other thing I spent money on was books. Books from some bookstores that I’ve really enjoyed in my travels, Powell’s in Portland, OR and The Strand in NYC.
Both bookstores were got some backlash over the pandemic times, I think because their owners are rich and the people who work there are not rich. Is that the new standard? Everyone at the company gets the same pay? If that’s the only kind of place where I can shop, I’ll be dead within a week. And bored way before that.
I mean, I was genuinely afraid Amazon was going to kill the indie bookstore during the pandemic. I figured this was it. If indie bookstores couldn’t open up, which they couldn’t for a long time, they’d probably be dead and buried before long.
So I helped.
Not in a heroic way, let’s not get crazy. It was “help” that was also to my benefit. Heroic help is me fixing my mom’s printer. That does not benefit me at all.
What I did is search the oldest books on my to-read list and see if I could get them shipped to me. And wouldn’t you know, Smashed, the first book on my list, was available!
I was going to plow through my to-read list, oldest books first, support an indie bookstore, beat the pandemic (in a spiritual sense, not in an actual sense, that shit is still rocking my world in the literal sense), and then…
Well, here I am, 2 years later, one book into my pandemic reads.
But goddammnit, I made it this far.
And that’s the way to look at it: It took me a long time, but I’m still alive, still stepping in the right direction, and that’s really all a person can ask for.
Okay, I just did the math on my Hoopla favorites from the library, and I figured that at the rate of 6 checkouts per month, it’ll take me…like 4 and a half years to get through everything.
And yeah, okay, I made a spreadsheet with all the movies and TV shows I’ve got in my streaming queues. And there’s like…4 lifetimes of stuff there.
There are the video games I never finished, movies I purchased, albums I’ve never listened to…
I think the best way for me to address this is to get fired from my job and just spend my life trying to get through all the STUFF.
Can someone get me fired? What do I have to say to get fired? Is cancel culture not real, have we decided that? Could it be real this one time?”
“Well, this kind of breaks away from my normal rule against reading about super-small subcultures. You know, those books about professional Scrabble players or guys who build their own tiny cabins and release weird MP3’s on their own web sites.
I spend a lot of time on the internet. Don’t judge me.
But because this book isn’t about weird PEOPLE (ostensibly) I figured it was worth a shot.
There are some interesting stories in here. A sexual deviant font designer. A gravestone with a Comic Sans inscription chiseled into the face. It’s sort of awesome that a type designer created a font that rests on a plaque planted on the moon. Overall, the most interesting thing about this book, to me anyway, is that it will instill in a person some type awareness. It’s a slightly more interesting world when you can sit in a strip mall and pay attention to the type used in the different signs. Noodles & Company? Interesting, macaroni-like. Check cashing place? Total bullshit.
So the biggest benefit from this book, for me personally anyway, will be that I have one more thing to do when I’m bored, which happens a lot.
It’s also curious to consider type designers artists. Which I do. I mean, there are a lot easier, sillier things that are arts, and this probably puts me on one side or the other of an argument here, but I firmly believe that something being useful or created with utility in mind does not disqualify that thing from being art. I, for one, am happy to own a chair that is comfortable and stylish. Or a pen.
Because this book was one I read for professional development and as part of a plan to do a seminar on books for business people, I want to add my top 3 takeaways for the average business person.
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Like in any field, rules are meant to be broken.
People will tell you not to use more than 3 fonts on a piece, but lately we’ve seen a stylistic rise of wall hangings with phrases spelled out in WAY more. So really, today’s inexcusable rule violation is what tomorrow hangs in your aunt’s entry hall. -
Avoid fonts that are “Amateur Magnets.”
A term I’d never heard before, this refers to fonts that tend to attract amateurs because they aren’t overtly stylized, but at the same time come off as…not boring. However, you’re better off with a boring, overused font than one that makes you appear to be an amateur. To put it more simply, how often do you think about the font used in, say, a logo, and of those times, how many did you think about the font because you loved it? Most people notice fonts when they’re hideous. So be cautious of something that “stands out”. In case anyone needs further convincing, let me put it this way. I think the best books don’t make you FEEL like they were written. You don’t imagine how hard it must have been to write the book while you’re in the thick of it. It’s through the simplicity that the real art is expressed, the effort hidden. If the average person is noticing the font of your restaurant’s menu, it’s probably not a good thing. -
Remember, fonts are artistic property too.
You probably won’t get in trouble for it, but if you use a font in a corporate web site, logo, or anything, and especially if you start using a consistent font for brand recognition, make sure that this is a font you’ve paid for or licensed properly. Again, if you’re opening a mom&pop, you probably won’t get in trouble. But if you’re looking to make your mom&pop into Mom&PopCo.com, then be aware.
That point does bring up one thing that sticks in my craw a bit. Type is art, and I’m cool with paying for art. But as arts go, it seems like one of the least democratic, and here’s why.
If you have the money, you can pay to have a firm create a type for you. Anything from a bizarre, shitty glob of nonsense to a very traditional, highly readable font that will work just about anywhere. You can also afford to pay for a large suite of fonts. However, the average price for a font is a bit steep to me if we’re talking about experimentation.
For example, I am really enjoying the Futura font family. So I pop over to fonts.com to see about purchasing one for use on my own personal machine. I can buy a single variety for $30. So that’s one variety, $30. I can buy the whole family for a mere $492. I mean, $500 for a font. And not even a wild font, a fairly common one. $30 isn’t a ton of money, but come on.
This is clearly a very bad system, and I’ll explain why.
I really believe in the goodness of the average person, but that this goodness only goes so far. Napster, the thing we always come back to because it’s such a case for/against piracy, worked because it was free, but also, and this is the part that people are scared to mention, because it was light years ahead of the next best way to get music. Seriously. There was no way to get music that was easier and better than Napster, even if you WANTED to pay. There was no such thing as a service, even at an exorbitant rate, that was as fast, as simple, and that had the depth and breadth of collection. iTunes music store was the next best thing, and it didn’t even debut until 4 years after Napster, and even then it took another year and a half to get reasonably large. Now that iTunes has made it easy, I think a lot of people are back to paying for music again. I know that I do.
Fonts are the same way, and I think it’s left artists scratching their heads. How dare people pirate my work!? Did we learn nothing from Napster?
Well, they dare because you have the audacity to charge $30 for a single file. Foolish people have not recognized how the economy has changed in the internet age, and it’s changed in two significant ways:
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Time is more a commodity than money. If you gather your product in a way that’s easy to browse and search, and if I can click one button and have this thing in my font menu the next time I open my word processor, you will win because you’ve saved me time.
-
It’s not a matter of deciding to charge $30 or $1. It’s a matter of $1 or nothing. If you charge too much, people will pirate. That’s how it is. The market for fonts sucks, and it’s because you’re overcharging. Because every font designer is afraid that his or her font will sell for .99-cents and then be used on a multi-million dollar corporate logo. So we put up the $30 wall. But in reality, you’re better off having your font on a million different machines at .99 cents a pop, and you’ll capture the casual fonter that way.
iFonts. It’s that easy. Make a simple site that allows you to download fonts for .99 cents, and make the terms all the same: if you pay, do whatever the fuck you want with it. Make sure there’s a window so I can add in text and see a sample. Sort things by variety, fonts that are popular for posters, for ebooks, whatever. Show me fonts in current popular use (album covers, movie posters, book covers) and give me the option to download them immediately.
I’m a believer in type, fonts, and most importantly, art. And I do believe that artists should be paid for their art. But I also think that budding artists need the same access to art that people with money have, and that’s why I would highly suggest that the font world get on board and stay relevant by creating a legitimate market that is superior to the pirate market.”
“Well, this is really 2022 on Goodreads, but I can’t seem to locate that no matter how I search. I found it yesterday, but GR wouldn’t allow me to shelve and “review” it.
This all checks out. I decided that for 2022 on Goodreads, I would rate Goodreads rather than my own reading. Because
A)I rated my own reading all damn year, just click through, it’s not that hard, people!
B)There are some things about Goodreads that could use…I won’t say “complete overhaul,” but maybe “A little sprucing.”
- Loading Banner Ads
When you search a book on the desktop version of Goodreads, the results load, and maybe a half-second later, a top-of-screen banner ad loads, pushing everything downwards. What this means is that I often end up clicking banner ads I don’t mean to, and/or I wait around for the stupid banner to load before clicking the thing I actually want to click. This may be the result of a scam or a bad technical practice.
It MAY be a scam. If banner ads are sold/priced based on the number of clicks they get, on average, a great way to boost that click number is to have a shitload of people click on them on accident.
It MAY be a bad technical practice, and the page should be set to load from top to bottom instead of loading results first and pushing things down, OR the load area could have defined parameters, and therefore wouldn’t change size once it was populated by the content.
Either way, this is annoying for users, and kind of screwing advertisers out of money, claiming clicks that are accidental as “organic reach” or some other tech nonsense.
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Goodreads Giveaways
I didn’t win a single Goodreads giveaway this year. In fact, I haven’t won one in quite some time. My suspicion is that this is because I have an author profile, so maybe my entries get tossed or something. I could see it, I imagine most authors are smart enough not to review a lot on Goodreads because you never know who you might work with. But I’m stupid, and I want my giveaways. If my stupidity isn’t rewarded, I might just have to get smart. And nobody wants that, trust me. NOBODY wants a Smart Pete running around. -
Goodreads Giveaways II
I hosted a GR Giveaway this year, two, actually. Or…maybe it was last year. You know what? Doesn’t matter.
I found out that these giveaways don’t really work for unknown authors self-publishing. Allow me to explain:
I gave away two very different books, one a goofy heist book, one a very short, graphic horror story. I’ve got range, baby!
What I discovered is that the sets of people who entered the giveaways were almost identical, and it became pretty clear that the people who entered just go down the list of Giveaways and enter ALL of them. They don’t actually look at the items and select those that they’re interested in, they just enter everything.
Which makes no sense to me. Who is that hard-up for reading material? There aren’t enough things out there you’d CHOOSE to read, you have to go through and be randomly assigned some shit?
The problem with folks entering every giveaway comes when you get some lousy reviews because people who don’t want a gory horror story are handed a gory horror story…
I’m all good with getting bad reviews because my books are bad, but getting bad reviews because the books deliver on their promises, and those promises are not what the reader is interested in, feels like a bad use of a couple hundred bucks. That person shouldn’t have clicked on that book, but the real issue, as I see it, is that Goodreads shouldn’t select winners whose reading tastes are not remotely aligned with the material.
I think Goodreads should work on the backend a little and tilt giveaways towards readers who are more likely to enjoy them. Not because it’ll inflate reviews, but, like, you wouldn’t give a graphic novel to someone who NEVER reads comics, and I think tastes can work the same way. This would be pretty easy to do, I think, if posting a giveaway allowed the author to select similar titles, very popular ones, that would favor a recipient getting a book. For example, if I could say, “You know, I think people who liked Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy would like this book, maybe,” then I could select that, and those folks who have read and reviewed HGTTG would shoot up to the top of the list.
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Facelift
Goodreads got a minor cosmetic change this year. I don’t hate it, but it doesn’t really address the problems I have. It’s putting lipstick on a broken door hinge. Yes, I’m aware the saying is about putting lipstick on a pig, and I stand by what I said. -
Goodreads Choice Awards
I’ve long held a grudge against these awards because they ALWAYS go to things that really, really don’t need the signal boost, you know? Like, I get it, maybe the winner IS the book that the largest number of users enjoyed the most, but what’s the use of that?
Non-fiction is the worst with this, the memoir/autobiography category is always dominated by celebrity. Poetry is also kind of a crapshoot. The books that win in poetry aren’t necessarily bad, but you can guarantee which will win very easily: it’s whichever one most people have heard of.
Comics and Graphic Novels also kind of sucks. Problem 1 is that they far too often go to volumes after 1 in a series. I think that’s kind of silly, it’s not like volume 5 of something is THE ONE, it’s a beloved series, and volume 5 just gets all that emphasis put on it because it came out this year. But it’s really not about that particular book being great, it’s about a longer series being really good, and I don’t necessarily love that, especially because a comic that makes it into multi-volume territory is doing alright. Problem 2 is that the offerings make it pretty obvious that the nominees and winners are, by and large, the product of non-comics-readers making selections in comics. This year’s nominees had ZERO traditional superhero comics nominated, and while I don’t think a superhero comic needs to win to prove anything, the fact that that HUGE sector of comics is rarely in the mix demonstrates to me that comics readers aren’t generally taking part in the voting.
I understand that the awards go to certain books, and it’s sort of like the Oscars: there are just certain sorts of movies that win that award, and Best Picture needs to be understood as “Best Picture in Terms of What Oscar Voters Look For.”
However, I think the Goodreads awards afford an opportunity to honor some books and highlight some new shit that people don’t really know about. Add some stuff to the to-read list.
I would suggest Goodreads strive to add at least one indie press book to each category. I would suggest they also have a self-published book category. I think they should have a superhero comics category. I think biography and memoir should be delineated into famous and non-famous categories (or famous for writing and famous for something else).
I do understand that the awards are a popularity contest, and I’m not normally opposed to popularity contests because I am VERY popular. But the GR awards feel like the high school class president election where the most popular person wins, even though the nerd is who we should elect. I thought we’d be done making that mistake after high school, but GR gives us the chance to do it EVERY YEAR!
- The App
Kinda janky. And not in a way I like.”
“Well, this is more about the philosophy of cartooning than it is a How to Draw book, so it didn’t exactly fit into my project. But I DID have fun with it.
My favorite piece of advice in this whole thing regards stupid characters: Before a stupid character does something stupid, show them thinking about it REALLY hard.
If the stupid character just does something stupid, it might be a little funny, but it’s MUCH funnier if the character thinks about it REALLY HARD. If the character is acting as smart as he possibly can, if this is the character firing on all cylinders, it’s much funnier when he makes a terrible choice.
I guess this is where I announce: I am trying to learn how to draw this year because I want to make my own comics. Nobody is going to let me write THEIR comics. Which I can’t blame them for, I wouldn’t let me write a Hulk story either. There’s absolutely no way the Hulk doesn’t blast someone away with a thundering fart, so…yeah, keep me away.
So I think the only entry into comics for me is going to be writing my own comics, and the only way I’ll get away with that is if I can also draw my own comics.
Lower your expectations. I know they were low to begin with. Keep lowering them.
If everything goes according to plan, by the end of 2024, I’ll have some comics that are pretty enjoyable, mostly people saying, “The art kind of holds it back, but the writing is good. The fart jokes are top notch!”
Maybe I need to come up with a pen name for the “artist” I work with. That way, people will be like, “Let’s get this Peter Derk away from this Drawster Pencilton III guy.””
“Well, there are a couple different things I’ve read about this book.
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Reviews along the lines of “Nobody writes through the mind of a sick bastard like Jim Thompson.”
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Reviews that say something about a dopey small-town sherriff who bumbles his way through things.
I think I was expecting something like Confederacy of Dunces by Cormac McCarthy. But I was a little disappointed.
If you’re thinking about reading this book, give it until at least page 57. That’s where the real tone of the book begins. The author takes you for a little bit of a ride, but that’s about where you get on solid ground.
Overall, the book set up an expectation that it didn’t maintain throughout. The plot twists around quite a bit, but the twists were more quirky than dark or engaging.”
“Well, I’ve got a new obsession.
Charles Hinton has a good collection of books on Kindle. Including The Billion Dollar Lottery, War of the Dinosaurs, and Agent Cold Beer On Assignment.
In The Racist Time Traveler, we meet a professor who decides to quit his job, buy a tractor and convert it into a time machine. Why? Because he’s decided that he’d be happier in the south during the pre-war-of-northern-aggression era. Specifically because he doesn’t like black people, and the whole slave owner thing feels like a good gig.
Now, the racism in here is…shamefully for me, sorta funny. Because it feels like the author is not racist and had to kind of imagine what a racist person would say. For example, this sweet burn:
“I’ve been working on this tractor for so long that I didn’t realize so many blacks moved in this neighborhood. But where I’m going, the only moving they’ll be doing is moving cotton.”
DEFINITELY a professor of speech and communication.
So this professor is building his time machine, and a neighbor comes over. The neighbor and the professor take a time jaunt to the future where the neighbor sees winning lottery numbers for three days in the future. Which he then uses to win the lottery.
Now, a CRUCIAL detail that’s missing here, this neighbor is black. And it’s CRUCIAL because this neighbor uses his new wealth and the professor’s time machine to go back in time himself and somehow reverse American history so that white people are slaves and black people are masters. Therefore, when the professor heads back, ready to begin his new plantation life, he discovers his neighbor in the position of power. And the professor is enslaved.
Smashcut back to the present, a newspaper is delivered to the professor’s front door with the headline “The First White Secretary of State.” Which is just a bizarre choice. I would think a higher OR lower office would work better here. President? Great. Governor of Alabama? Also great. Secretary of State? Ehhhhh…
I have a few questions:
Why this racist would give a black man a ride in his time machine is beyond me. I guess he’s maybe a jerk and has no friends, and he just takes who he can get.
When building a time machine, how does this professor elect to start with a tractor? That seems like a strange place to begin. Although maybe it’s genius. Maybe we haven’t cracked time travel yet because no one has gone tractor.
This could go on forever.
The big question, is Charles Hinton a secret genius? Because I was legitimately laughing my ass off. I guess we’ll find out once I read Agent Cold Beer on Assignment.”
“Well, I hated it.
It’s kind of hard to say that because of the book’s subject matter. It makes me feel like I’m saying the subject matter wasn’t important. It’s sort of like being in a writing class where someone writes a non-fiction piece about a past trauma. It’s hard to talk about the problems with the piece without feeling like you’re invalidating the events and the person in some way.
That said, hated it. It didn’t have so much a narrative as it read like a list, a catalouging of atrocities. The only reason I read it was for a book club, and the only reason I finished it is because I downloaded the audiobook and listened to it at 2X speed on my iPod (which I didn’t even know was an option, and now that I do I can’t figure out what use that option has other than this exact sort of thing).
Also, it really felt like ten separate pieces of journalism slapped inside a cover.
And finally, I have to say, I’m sort of disappointed in this as the pick for One Book, One Denver. It just feels like the kind of book that these programs always pick. Something that addresses an issue, which I understand. We want people to have something to talk about. On the other hand, it feels like we’re trying to force people to read things for information’s sake as opposed to reading things that are enjoyable as books on some level. Which is why we still have boring books and textbooks that are virtually unreadable.
I don’t know. This book. Three Cups of Tea. These kinds of books just leave me cold.
“
“Well, I managed to clear a room of four women talking about this. Twice. Two DIFFERENT sets of women. So that’s a sign regarding how fanboyish I just might be and how much I enjoyed this one. I give this book eight women out (of the room) of eight, I guess.
Are we going here?
Why don’t women like comics?
This is being general, cutting a wide swath. I recognize that. I know there are many lady comic book fans, many of whom are a lot more rabid than I am.
What I’m saying here is based 100% on personal experience. So the weakness of what I’m saying is the lack of scientific, large-scale proof. The strength, though, is that what I’m talking about is ACTUALLY HAPPENING in my real life. So if you’d like to disagree with the assertion here, feel free, but understand that what we’ll be talking about is my personal experience. I’m a fan of comics, and I’ve never dated anyone who has been a fan of comics. I’ve never had a close female friend who brought up a comic book to me that I’d not read or heard about. I’ve never talked to a woman at a gathering and found that we both love comics.
In fact, let’s just put some emphasis right there. If you set up a male friend on a date with someone you knew, and when you asked how it went he said, “Well, I talked about Spider-Man for a while…” would you be cringing inside? I think that cringe reaction is what I’m getting at here.
Now, maybe I just don’t have interactions with the ladies who are huge comic fans. They don’t seem to be in my circles of friends and acquaintances. Not even my Google Plus circles of friends. Not even the one I titled Hot Babes Who Love Comics More Than Life Itself. I got really excited about categorizing my circles, you guys. May have gone overboard in terms of specificity.
It could be me. This wouldn’t be the first theory of why I’m less popular with women. This falls way down on the list, probably behind Buying Orange Juice With the Incorrect Level of Pulp or Not Owning Reusable Grocery Store Bags. Not to mention that making sweeping statements about the differences between men and women is traditionally not a shortcut to popularity with the opposite sex.
I guess what I’m getting at here is not really a statement about women not liking comics. It’s a question. Why don’t women like comics? But I can’t ask the question before saying that I think women don’t like comics. So I’ll say it, but mostly in service of asking the question.
If you DO like comics, let me know. I hope you don’t feel attacked. I don’t mean to sideline anybody here. It’s just an actual question I have.
If you don’t like comics, just tell me what it is about them that turns you off. I’m not going to argue with you. It’s not my goal to convince you to like something. I’m just genuinely curious.
And it’s okay to not like comics in a general way. You don’t have to be actively hating them or anything. If you’re a reader who just doesn’t really pick them up, well, I’m curious about that too.
If you disagree with the entire premise, that’s cool too.
“
“Well, I finished, and overall, this is a 5-star series for me.
It’s weirdly not life-changing or super heavy or anything like that, but it’s compulsively readable, and it’s a good time. It’s like a TV series that you wouldn’t always think of in your top 5, but then when you look back, you’re like, “I had a damn good time with Supernatural.””
“Well, it’s a pretty damn thorough book about Castlevania. I don’t know what to say about it other than it delivers exactly what it promises. Could’ve used larger images. I’m an old. Oh, also, there used to be that kid in the Gamepro ratings who was like asleep for a 1, bored for a 2, smiling for a three, really excited for a 4, and his hair was exploding off his head for a 5. I looked like that 4 kid while reading this. Except I was on the shitter. That kid may or may not be on the shitter. It’s hard to say. He’s just a head. “
“Well, I’ve seen some…interesting takes on this.
I think mine has some to do with creativity.
I do think we have traded curiosity and exploration for just looking things up right away.
In some cases, I think this is fine. I’m pretty happy that we can make something like a vaccine pretty quickly. That’s good!
In some cases, I think this is bad. AI art is an example I’d point to: having a computer generate an image based on a description, instead of either getting a little creative with your image search or creating something, is not to our benefit.
The answer (an image) provided to us so easily removes the need to learn something, explore something, or think a little bit.
It’s my thinking that it’s good for us to search. I think we’re a species that needs to explore, one way or another, and easy access to answers is meant to satisfy that need, but it doesn’t.
And I do think the worst kind of person is the person who is convinced they know everything, that there are no mysteries or things worth exploring. That they are always right. You can tell this person because their google searches are always phrased as answers instead of questions: “Masks don’t work,” or “Jim Gaffigan in Cry Baby Lane.”
So while some see this book as nihilistic or anti-progress, my take is that its message is more hopeful. Its message is that there are mysteries we can’t solve because we don’t even have the capacity to understand them. We don’t even recognize them as being mysteries because they’re that unfathomable.
Which makes for a great reason to continue exploring, and to explore in ways that we find engaging and interesting so that we’ll enjoy the process as much as we’ll enjoy the answers.
As for the book itself, I have two gripes.
One is that I was briefly disappointed to find out the art was not Bill Watterson’s alone, but a collaboration. This was a short-lived complaint, I think the art turned out to be something really unique, and although I am totally in love with Watterson’s art, I’m happy to see him trying something new in collaborating with another artist, and I hope he’s happy to be making something new.
Two is that the book is very short, pretty simple. Again, nothing wrong with that, it’s just that after waiting so long for a new Bill Watterson anything, I probably wouldn’t have been satisfied unless it was hundreds of pages of brand new, incredible material. It’s like when your favorite band puts out a new album and it’s around the 30-minute mark. It’s a little bit of a bummer, but then you consider the likely alternative: an album that’s 30-minutes of good and another 20 minutes of crap, so there’s not much to be gained quibbling about length here.
I HIGHLY recommend watching this quick video before you read the book. It gives insight into why the two artists came together, how that worked, and I think it goes a long way towards explaining some of the meaning (or lack of concrete meaning) that readers will feel when they read this.
It might be a case where the construction and story of the book is more interesting to some than the book itself, and honestly, I think that’s okay. The end product doesn’t seem to be 100% what this was about, and if I can be really up my own ass for a second, this book might be as much about the journey as it is the destination. Maybe even moreso, kind of like how filling in one of those magnetic USA maps on the side of an RV gives you a goal of getting a state magnet from each state, but that complete map isn’t the ultimate goal, it’s taking the trip. The map just represents the thing. It’s product.
A lot of time, when we have something that represents an idea, that something is imperfect or dissatisfying in some way. I think this is often because a thing in my head, especially a story idea or a song or something artistic, is a lot better before it’s fully realized. A fully realized piece is always a set of compromises to time, energy, ability, and lots of other things, where an idea that exists only as an idea can and always will be perfect.
The Mysteries is imperfect, it’s mysterious, and I’m just really happy that Bill Watterson is still making art, even if I never see another piece.”
“Well, my Kirkmania for this year, after last year’s final reckoning with Walking Dead, was Invincible, and it was another solid ride.
This is a really fun comic, goes a lot of weird and wild places that are perhaps not unfamiliar to comics fans, but if you haven’t read much comics, Invincible would be a great one to get into.
Kirkman, I have to say, does pretty satisfying endings to his series, and I can appreciate that. It’s really difficult to end a series that’s been going for like 15 years, but I think he pulled it off here again.
I’m sort of surprised he’s not more legendary in the comics world. I feel like he’s known outside the comics world as “Walking Dead guy,” but having written this, Invincible, Outcast, Astonishing Wolf-Man, all this really good stuff, I think he deserves a good chunk of cred.”
“Well, pretty great. It’s like…how do I describe something as pulpy, but in a 90’s way? If you can read this with an appreciation for that, you’ll fucking love it. It’s bonkers, it’s crazy, and there are some serious machinations involved in giving Thanos a reason to fistfight the Marvel U that are totally worth it.
I think my favorite part of this is that Thanos is basically trying to make Death his girlfriend. Death is sometimes a skeleton, sometimes a babe, and Thanos keeps trying all kinds of different stuff. This would make a great Valentine’s story if it was handled a little differently. Maybe he could get love advice from different heroes instead of fighting them.
Spider-Man: Don’t break her neck.
Cyclops: Don’t get involved in a love triangle. It’s sexy and fun at first, but it ends poorly.
Wolverine: Hey, I got tons of girlfriends. They’re in…Japan. Yes, that’s the ticket. Japan. They’re Japanese, so you’ve never heard of them.
Daredevil: You can punch your way out of sorrow, but the good vibes don’t last long. It’s very exhausting.
Captain America: I’m kind of into a GILF thing because of my circumstances. I’d rather not talk about it.
Iron Man: The bottle will always be my mistress. God do I miss drinking. You’d think flying around in tech armor like some goddamn anime character would scratch the itch, but it’s just not the same as getting housed on bourbon and filling that helmet with vomit.
I’m sure there are some heroes who have good relationships. With someone.
The Infinity Gauntlet itself is pretty much just a glove. It’s the gems that go inside it that are awesome. It seems weird and coincidental that the Infinity Gauntlet perfectly matches Thanos’ getup, but maybe he matched his outfit with the end goal of getting the gauntlet. Who has a purple body and dresses in blue and gold? The master of existence, that’s who. He can be literally ANYTHING and he’s like, “I’ll stay. Weird chin made out of ridges, built like a brick shithouse, blue and gold and purple, terrifying pits for eyes. I gotta do me, knaw mean?”
Anyway, it’s the gems that are important. According to the Marvel Wiki, we’re talking about the following:
Time Gem: Total control over all aspects of time including time travel, stopping time, slowing down or speed up flow of time and to accelerate or slow down aging.
Space Gem: Limitless manipulation of space, allowing for teleportation, dimensional manipulation, creation of wormholes, etc.
Soul Gem: Limitless manipulation of souls both alive and dead also has shown to be able to evolve or devolve a beings physical self as well as their mental capacities.
Reality Gem: Locally or universally alters the natural laws of the universe to the wielders will.
Power Gem: Controls all of the power in the universe. It can be used to augment or inhibit any force.
Mind Gem: Taps the user into the universal consciousness, allowing for unlimited manipulation of psionic powers including telepathy and telekinesis.
And the real question, how would I use each one?
Time Gem: This one I’d mostly use to bait people into hearing my jokes about “If I Could Turn Back Time,” “Time After Time,” and other time-based hits.
Space Gem: I just moved. I have never wanted a fucking wormhole so badly. If you’d set a wormhole in my living room and said, “There are infinite places in the universe and an infinitesimally small chance that your stuff will pass through here and end up in your new apartment,” I’d go for it. I’d take the risk. Moving blows, you guys.
Soul Gem: Basically, people on TV would become like a kid playing with dolls. “Look, now they’re kissing! Mmm mmm, oooh, Bernie Sanders, you’re such a good kisser!”
Reality Gem: I feel like this one is a little underused. I could change the natural laws of the universe? Now I could, for sure, meet Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Power Gem: This one’s a little vague. I think I’d end up using it to fuck with Comcast.
Mind Gem: Huh. A lot like the soul gem. Probably the most fun you could have with this would be to walk up to people and just say stuff like, “You’re buying the wrong Doritos. Your wife wants the nacho kind.” And then the person would go home, find out this is true, and wonder who that mysterious stranger with the insane, bejeweled glove was.
Aaaaand that’s pretty much why I don’t have the Infinity Gauntlet, but why I totally should. I’d only be using it for harmless pranks and to solve minor inconveniences. Selfish? Sure. But I’m not, you know, killing half the universe or whatever. I’m just killing some guy’s lawn because he was a dick to me.
Oh, also, I bet that glove smells horrible inside. It must, right? “
“Well, probably the worst joke book ever.
“What’s Yellow and Lights Up?” is not a joke when the answer is “An electric peanut.”
Another favorite?
“What’s Yellow and hides in caves?”
“A peanut that owes money.”
Guys, how is that a joke? And would you like to know how I’m sure it’s not a joke? Because I can do it. Ready?
“What do you get when you fill a shell with urine?”
“A peanut!”
That’s just as good, and I’m an idiot.”
“Well, the first story was great! It was more World War Z than Night of the Living Dead. Or, perhaps more accurately, Land of the Dead.
George Romero deserves all the credit in the world for the zombie craze. Night, Dawn, and Day are all great, all in different ways.
But then…George Romero kinda lost the thread, IMO.
A little history:
Many people will say that Night of the Living Dead is revolutionary for casting a black actor in the lead role, and for using the horror genre to say something about race in America. This is somewhat accurate, somewhat inaccurate.
The part of Ben was originally intended to be played by Rudy Ricci, however Romero auditioned Duane Jones on a recommendation, and Romero says Jones was far and away the best actor they auditioned.
However, Romero consciously resisted changing the dialog and story to be different because of the casting of Jones. That is probably fairly revolutionary for the time: casting a black man in a role originally conceived for a white man in 1968 without making any changes. This version of “colorblind” casting, though probably not in favor today, was a pretty big deal then.
In our modern lenses, Night of the Living Dead appears to be very much a story about race, especially with the ending. I think it’s mistakenly thought to be a very direct commentary on race, when in reality, it’s more a commentary on humanity, in general. Night of the Living Dead should probably be credited with the popularization of the “the real enemy…is us!” storyline. Which is great, though overused. While the overuse of the trope makes it pretty tired today, you can’t blame the OG.
Moving to Dawn of the Dead, Ken Foree, also a black man, is probably the true lead of the film, though Dawn is probably one of the movies that comes closest to having multiple leads share the screen, and it does feel very organic the way things shake out. Dawn has some very light, though a bit clumsy, things to say about consumerism. I think it still works because it’s so silly in a way. The mall music, some of the zombies, there’s a lot of silliness and over the top violence that sets this up to be goofier than Night of the Living Dead, and that leaves a little more room for messaging. Plus, the messaging is mostly speculative on the part of the characters, which makes it easier to swallow as audience, and I think the heavy-handed “this is what it means!” assertions were left to audience members and critics rather than being a bludgeon in the movie.
Day of the Dead has a female lead, ostensibly, though Joe Pilato steals the show. This one’s a little tougher, thematically. Romero intended to make the “Gone with the Wind of zombie movies,” however his budget was halved, and he had to compress a 200-page script down to a reasonable length. So it’s a little unclear how different the movie would’ve been if it turned out as Romero intended. The product we got seemed to be a return to Night of the Living Dead’s premise that we humans just can’t get along. If I’m going to over analyze, the zombies are successful because there is no in-fighting, they all get along and have a single-minded goal, where the free will of humans, and the fact that different humans want differen things, makes it challenging for humans to achieve things.
It wasn’t until 20 years later that we got Land of the Dead. Land had a decent start, but there were two things that got in the way. One was that some of the zombie beahviors were…kinda crazy. Day of the Dead was bonkers, and people trying to teach Bud the zombie to do shit fit right in. The more dour tone of Land of the Dead doesn’t work as well with a zombie who figures out A) that zombies can cross water, B) how to use a firearm, and C) in what I call the worst thing in the movie, a zombie mercy kills another zombie with a gun. So not only does the zombie learn how to use a gun, he has compassion and intelligence enough to end a zombie’s suffering. But number two is the real issue: this one really hits you over the head with Have and Have Not stuff, which isn’t totally intolerable, but with a lighter touch, the message would’ve been more effective and the movie would’ve been more fun. When you’ve got Dennis Hopper as an insane billionaire riding out the zombie apocalypse in a skyscraper, you can go WAY further and more over-the-top with his behavior, and that, for me, goes further than having him do silly things like trying to make a getaway with a bag of cash. Show him in a bathtub full of Twizzlers. Have him turn a priceless painting into a ridiculous Flava Flav necklace.
Diary of the Dead was made in a faux found footage style. I think this may have been some kind of message about the media-ization of culture or something? I don’t know. Survival of the Dead came next, and that’s mostly what there is to say about it. Diary and Survival were the two movies that made me pretty certain that Romero was out of zombie ideas.
Now, apparently there’s a Road of the Dead, unmade movie, which involves zombies doing a sort of Death Race 2000 thing. THAT I’m into. Stupid? Fuck yeah.
Which brings us to The Living Dead.
TLD is definitely a ripoff of World War Z, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. WWZ is a super good book, and super good books can hold the weight of a few ripoffs.
I have two issues with the execution:
One is that it’s a BIG book, and it takes its time getting to the zombies. Which…I don’t love.
The problem with the slow burn, as applied to zombies, is that…let’s call this book the 7th chapter in the Of The Dead series. This is the 7th time we, as audience, have seen this happen, and while I don’t mind seeing the same thing again, I think the writing should have been more thoughtful about the fact that the audience is probably numb to the creeping horror of knowing that we’re dealing with zombies while the characters fumble through those early stages. It’s almost like, in the world of the book, we’re in a parallel dimension where zombie fiction does not exist. Night of the Living Dead has its first kill inside of a few minutes. Dawn of the Dead opens on a frantic newsroom where people are deciding whether to continue bringing news or to flee because the zombie apocalypse is in full panic mode. Day of the Dead takes place after the initial panic has subsided and very few humans are left. It’s almost like Romero forgot what he’d done before, the smart move of getting us into the action and assuming that everyone was either familiar with the earlier movies or familiar enough with the concept of zombies to drop us closer to the action.
This might be an issue of personal taste: I don’t really enjoy books where I know more than the characters and have to watch them put the pieces together. For me, it’s tedious. And I recognize it for what it is: One of the oldest writing tricks in the book(s).
If you want your audience to read, one way to do that is to make them feel good. One way to make them feel good is to make them feel smart. One way to make them feel smart is to put them in the god chair, where they know what’s happening WAY before the characters. When you pick up this book, you know there are zombies, and you KNOW when a couple doctors are performing an autopsy on a guy, something bad is going to happen. No question of what’s happening or whether it’s going to happen, you know where this is all headed.
When you pick up this book, you may read about doctors and scientists, people WAY smarter than you, but you’ve still got one thing on them: You saw it coming.
For me, it’s not an effective method of engagement. And the worst part is that it’s the beginning sections, which means you’ve got the most boring, most tedious bits up front.
The other problem, which I alluded to earlier, is that the message-y parts of this book, even in what little I read, are hard and sort of all over the place. We’ve already got messages about race/culture, police, homelessness, women in the workplace, neurodiversity…and I know there’s a lot more to come.
I’ve said sort of the same thing on many reviews, but it needs repeating: I don’t take issue with the reality or depth of these problems, and I tend to agree with most authors’ takes on the problems. However, when it’s badly integrated into the story, it may have good intentions and aspirations, but it’s just not good storytelling.
The cop character is cartoonishly hateful, and he says things out loud that even a cartoonishly evil cop would only say to other cops, not to other people who happen to be around. There’s a line that goes something like, “Let this homeless bum die, his dying is clogging up traffic, which consists of taxpayers.” I get that this is how we interpret the ways some people think, but having this character say this aloud, to the person he’s speaking to, is just not writing that speaks to me.
Maybe the way I need to try talking about this sort of thing is this: Fiction has to be more realistic than real life.
The thing about non-fiction is that it’s prove-able. So, I might find dialog like the stuff spoken by the cop hard to believe, but in non-fiction, that line can be traced back to its origin. I can actually see where and how it was spoken, and the idea that it SEEMS unrelastic doesn’t matter if the thing is, in fact, real. In non-fiction, as unbelievable as something might be, all you have to do is prove that it happened.
But in fiction, everything that happens is concocted by the author, so fiction almost has a higher bar for creating realistic scenarios, characters, and statements.
In fiction, there’s really no such thing as proving it happened because NOTHING in the book actually happened. So, in fiction, you have to take it a step further and make the reader believe that what’s happening is plausible based on the situation and the characters. I have to believe the cop would act this way before he does, or I would have to be shocked and then later on get some sort of explanation or justification that makes me say, “Huh, I guess that follows.”
I’m sure some of you are reading this right now and thinking, “This guy reads Spider-Man. What the hell does he know about believability.”
Okay, let’s look at Spider-Man for a sec.
Spider-Man, and most of the 1960’s Marvel books, were created as soap operas, real stories, meant to ask the question “What would happen if REAL people got superpowers?” Spider-Man’s powers don’t exist to wow us when he lifts a car. They exist to ask the question, “What does a human being do in a position of great power?”
Time travel, magic rings, faster-than-light space travel, these are all unrealistic things, but I find them more realistic than poorly-drawn characters. For me, it’s less important if the mechanism of time travel is believable, and it’s more important that the character sitting in the time machine makes sense.
For some, I imagine that the real-life place for cops in American society right now is more than enough to find this sort of thing believable in fiction. The signifier of “cop” basically tells you everything you need to know. And that’s fine, that’s you. For me, because we’re talking about a fictional character, I feel like I need a little more. The burden of proof is paradoxically heavier in fiction. I recognize this is a strange thing to say, but hey, I’m a strange guy.
Anyway!
The early-on lack of action and seeming shotgun approach to our many social, environmental, and technological illnesses just made the book feel packed with everything I didn’t want up front. So I put it down.
It’s a little unfair, I only got through a small portion of the book because this is a HUGE book. Many reviews describe it as sprawling, which is a euphemistic term for “way too fucking long.”
What little I read makes me think the book is longer than it needs to be, and where it’s longer is probably on the sort of stuff that I’m not interested in.
Maybe someone will forget to copyright this book, like what happened with Night of the Living Dead, and someone can trim it way down to an edit that’s more focused.
In fact, I think this would be a great test: Cut this into two books. In book A, include all the messaging and character stuff, and reduce the zombie stuff. In book B, include all the zombie stuff and action, reduce drastically the messaging and character stuff. See which one people prefer.
I’m not TOTALLY certain I won’t give this one another shot. I think I could be persuaded to skip ahead and bit and pick it up where the action is in full swing. But 656 pages is just a big life commitment, and in the time it takes me to read, I could watch the original Of The Dead trilogy, probably twice. Sounds more fun. “
“Well, the parts that were good were GREAT. And the parts that weren’t as good were super not as good.
Wow. With reviews like that, who needs Michiko Kakutani?
The best parts of this Shadows book are the parts that go beyond what’s happening on the screen. When the author gets personal, or when he gives me some inside info from a fairly in-depth interview with the game’s creators.
The parts that didn’t light me up as much were the repetitive “I wake up at the temple, cross the land, get to the colossus, kill him by taking these steps” pieces that I didn’t really need because I’d played the game. These things definitely happen in the game, and if you hadn’t played the game already, I don’t think you could read this book and understand it without those pieces.
And that got me thinking, How many people who haven’t played Shadows of the Colossus are reading this book? Surely some, but not many(?)
And it really drove home for me that, with this game in particular, the original video game experience of Shadow was committed to a format that, IMHO, really, really works. And a book about Shadow is a secondary, less-enriching experience because the game was totally designed to be a game.
Which is, I think, why the parts that happen outside of the game, the part about Suttner’s life or personal connection to the game, his interpretations of what’s happening, I think that’s why I enjoyed those parts a lot more than the parts of the book that felt like they were filling in the story so that someone who had never played the game would still find the book accessible.
I know it’s really damn hard to market a book, let alone a book where one might say, “Go play this entire video game first, then come back.” But I feel like it could have made the book a richer experience for me, if it was written with the assumption that the audience would have played the game already. I think Suttner’s a good writer, and like I said, the personal stuff was great. The descriptions were good too, especially considering that a lot of the stuff in this game is not easy to describe. I didn’t feel lost, and I got a good idea of what was going on. It’s been some time since I played Shadow, and Suttner’s descriptions brought a lot back to me. And he absolutely kills it for the last 20% of the book, which I think was the part that best combined what was happening in the game and with Suttner personally.
I know the book wasn’t written to please me specifically. But that’s why, for me personally, it wasn’t a total homerun. That might be totally unfair. I don’t know.
I’d just like to use the rest of this space to recommend that people play Shadow of the Colossus. It’s a fucking incredible game. Trust me when I say, you’ve never played anything like it. It’s emotional in ways and on a level that has never been replicated in gaming. It forces you into a strange, hero-adjacent role that so many narratives are uncomfortable with.
I think that Shadow is the ultimate, for me, when it comes to storytelling in gaming. I don’t think I’ve played a game that had a stronger sense of story, and where the gameplay better served the story. I don’t know if I’ve ever played another game where it felt like the game elements are subordinate to the storytelling.
It’s also a beautiful piece of video game minimalism, which is such a strange thing to encounter in a format that’s full of SO MUCH STUFF. There is so much stuff happening, so much of it is ratcheted up. Shadow exists in this weird, other space that feels very lonely at times.
I talk a lot about what separates good and great comics when I review books, and the difference between a good and a great comic is this: A great comic is a comic that tells a story that couldn’t be done as well in a different format. In a great comic, the comic format is essential to the way in which the story was told, and I think that makes for a very rich comic book experience. It also means that when comics are adapted, they can suffer. Watchmen is a good example of a book that really maxed out what the form can do, and the movie didn’t really deliver on those aspects or make use of film in ways not prescribed by the comic.
Shadow of the Colossus is meant to be played. It’s a game, but toss aside your preconceived notions about the word “game” meaning that something is unserious or that it can’t handle serious stuff. Shadow is the rare game that showed us a different idea of what games could be.
Play that shit. “
“Well, the tree grows very slowly and with exhaustive detail.
Couldn’t get through this one. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I could have. And I don’t mean that in the way of a mountain climber who just couldn’t make it to the top and then warps reality by looking back at it. No, it’s more like “couldn’t” as in “I couldn’t eat another hashbrown from my McDonald’s breakfast.” Sure, I COULD have. It just didn’t seem worth the pain.
I get why this book is a classic, I think. My brother and I argue about this all the time. He feels like it’s important to watch a movie like Casablanca because it’s historically significant to the medium of film. He makes the point that without Casablanca, there is no Ghostbusters (okay, he doesn’t point to Ghostbusters, but he should if he ever wants to get any traction with ME). This book is definitely of interest as a historical document. An historical document(?) You know what, I’m not done talking about Ghostbusters, so we better stick with “a historical document.”
The book is excruciatingly detailed about day-to-day life in Brooklyn during the early 1900’s, down to what they had at the candy store. I shit you not, there’s a page and a half describing the purchase of a pickle. The WHY of a pickle purchase. The best practices. The roles played by both seller and buyer. And here I am, enormous pickles in plastic sleeves of juice at every gas station in town.
What I’m saying is, this is a great thing to have as it records what was happening in that time period, and also records the day-to-day life of a family that’s just this side of poor. Not a war, not a huge event. Just what happens at your average Brooklyn pickle place.
So I get why it’s important, but that doesn’t mean I want to read it. My brother would tell you that without Casablanca there is no Ghostbusters, and I can’t disagree with that. But I like Ghostbusters. I don’t like Casablanca. And with books and movies we’re lucky enough to be in an age where there is more good material out there than people can consume in a lifetime. I am wholly convinced that I will never read every book that I would truly enjoy, which is messed up. Really messed up. But it’s true, and that means there’s really no time to waste on something that, though not terrible, just isn’t doing much for me.”
“Well, if you like trippy, life of the mind shit, this is probably your jam.
I do not like trippy, life of the mind shit.
Basically, this entire thing is a dream. Sort of. And as a great writer once said, “Don’t write dreams into your stories. A dream can be anything. It can be a snake rolling a donut down a hole.”
I agree. Because dreams are basically little TV episodes you make up. They’re fiction. And if you put a dream into fiction, you’ve got fiction inside of fiction. Which is totally unnecessary because it’s fiction from the get-go, so whatever you wanted to accomplish through the dream in fiction, you’re probably better off doing it within the “reality” of the fiction.
It’s also weird because if a dream is interpreted in fiction, it can only work two ways: One is that the dream is interpreted, and the interpretation doesn’t play out, so basically it’s a waste of time. The other is that the dream is interpreted “correctly” and the thing that is suggested by the interpretation comes to pass. Which would be interesting in real life, but it’s absolutely meaningless in fiction because you’ve set up both the dream AND the “reality” surrounding the dream.
So you could have a detective story where the detective dreams what happened at a crime scene. This dream could be incorrect, which is uninteresting, or it could be correct, which APPEARS interesting, but then the reader will be aware that the dream coming true is not actually interesting because the dream and the reality around it are both fictions created by the same person.
Fictional drug trips and drunkenness work the same way. It can be meaningful or meaningless in the context of the story, but if it’s meaningless, why is it in the story, and if it’s meaningful, it’s merely a creation of the writer.
And like in this book, mental illness that causes hallucinations or multiple personalities, as perceived by the afflicted person, just don’t work. Because some of the shit is “real” and some is nonsense, and there’s no difference in terms of the functionality of the story.
This book could basically end with Moon Knight waking up and going, “Wow, what a weird dream” and it would function exactly the same and make more sense. “
“Well, this ended EXACTLY where I wish it would have started, with Tony Stark suiting up and heading into space. Of course. Goddamn it. Why did we have to fight lesser Iron Men first? Why did we have to discuss the pluses and minuses of Tony Stark banging randos versus settling down with Pepper Potts? Why would that even be on the table at this point? Why does Tony Stark look like he’s wearing dentures?
And why oh why do people keep trying to out-Iron-Man Iron Man? If you want to beat Iron Man, it’s simple. Just keep sending drinks over to Tony Stark’s table until he bottoms out, gets wasted, and spends all his time having heart-to-hearts with people instead of blasting your evil moon base or whatever.
Not terrible by any stretch, but I feel like someone somewhere was like,”Let’s do a couple months of ramp up before we actually do some cool shit.””
“We all have those books that sit on a nightstand, half-finished for weeks, right? Months? Maybe a year?
cough
Well, at some point you have to look at them and say, “I may not be finishing that one.”
Or, alternatively, you can look at it and say, “Man, fuck this book.”
It’s not like there was anything terribly wrong with the book or anything. I just…I feel like I got the idea pretty early on.
Premise:
Humans are to the point where we’ve uncovered so much knowledge that human minds can’t hold all of it. AND processes have become not only long, but very complex in some cases. Rather than count on simplification or drilling in knowledge, a checklist can be a really great solution.
The best example related to flying bombers in the 30’s. Basically, the new planes were complicated enough that they kept crashing until a pre-flight checklist was instituted, and then everything was rad.
In my personal life, the closest thing I have to flying a bomber is passengering on a commercial flight. Going without a checklist, I’ve shown up at destinations missing everything from toothbrushes (replaceable), to any sort of reasonable footwear (more a problem), to swim trunks (which is actually on purpose because swimming is for suckers).
The problem I have with checklists is that I’m really awesome at using them to replace ACTUALLY DOING THE THING for which the checklist was created. If I’m going to do some serious cleaning, I might get it in my head to do a checklist first so that I don’t waste any time. Why clean the spiders out of the curtains before cleaning the beetles out of the kitchen? Might as well do beetles first, then spiders, right? And centipedes….well, we always get rid of centipedes immediately. I don’t know which dimension they escaped from, but I do know that it’s a dark place that I would like to avoid.
Anyway, by the time I get the cleaning checklist and necessary bug taxonomy notes wrapped up and bound by a plastic spiral at Kinko’s, I feel like I’ve already done a lot of work. Which makes it hard to rally and do the actual work.
Gawande’s other books, Complications and Better, also had really simple messages explained in a way even us dum-dums could understand. But the message of this one, though important, was easy even for me, Archduke of Dum-Dums, to understand, and it might not have required a whole book.
Now, I didn’t get to be Archduke by making great choices, so it’s entirely possible that there is some great stuff later in the book that I didn’t get to. So if someone tells you this is a really great book and you have nagging doubts, just remember that those doubts were planted by a guy who uses a spatula for a scepter to punctuate the royal addresses he makes aloud to absolutely no one in his insect-filled kitchen.”
“Well holy shit.
If you like bleak books and minimalist writing, hit this one.
As a challenge to my fellow readers: A minimalist book that is not bleak or depressing? I’m just curious. It seems like a lot of minimalism comes from a sad place.
Has anyone come across anything?”
“Weirder than expected.
It’s an interesting artifact, to be sure. I didn’t read the whole thing. Part way through I decided that I was enjoying skimming it more than reading it word for word.
The setup isn’t all that shocking. We have Stardust, who is kind of like Superman except he also has magical and scientific powers. This comic didn’t spend a ton of time explaining the science behind any of this, which isn’t terribly interesting anyway.
What’s interesting is the plans of the villains and the creative and masochistic ways Stardust concocts to punish them.
In the first issue, he finds a group of evil spies. He throws them all out a window where they are suspended in mid-air, and then he uses a ray on them that causes the skeletons of their innocent victims to appear before their eyes.
In the next, a group of bad guys decides to rob all the banks in the city, and to do so decide to destroy all transportation and then use bomber planes to take out cops and just whoever is around. After apprehending them, Stardust whisks (this is a word they use a lot in this book, “whisks”) them away to a distant planet. The planet is covered in gold and jewels, but the gravity is so strong none of the gangsters can lift any of it. Also, the planet’s air is vitamin-enriched so that they can continue living for a long time just by breathing. Also, he advises them to enjoy the sight of these riches as long as they can because it’s about to be night, which is pitch black and lasts for centuries.
He punishes another guy by taking him to a prison of floating eternal ice where he’ll be able to see and think but never move, and he’ll live forever to “think about [his] crimes.”
Possibly my favorite, Stardust uses a ray to shrink a dude’s body until it’s so small that it’s absorbed by the head. The guy is just a living head, at which point Stardust “hurls him into a space pocket.” A giant headhunter, which appears to be a muscular body with no head, catches the living head man and then places the head on its shoulders. THEN the head disappears into the body.
I probably don’t have to explain why all of this is weird. I’m sure it comes off as weird on its own.
I think what I find extra bizarre, though, is that we would probably shy away from a comic book where a guy was running around, cutting people’s heads off or blowing them in half with a 12-gauge. Yet, this is acceptable. Being forever imprisoned motionless is somehow easier for us to take than the idea of just killing somebody. It’s pretty sick, really.
It also reminds me of how every so often you see a show and they have one of those creative judges. The ones who, instead of sending a dude to prison, makes him stand on a street corner with a sign that says “I Stole” or something like that. I hate that crap. I don’t know what chafes me about it. I don’t really care about the parties involved. I think it’s maybe just because I feel like, deep down, judges who do that stuff are looking forward to hearing about themselves on TV or something, about how clever they are. It’s not wrong. Just disappointing.”
“Weird.
Not a spoiler because it’s how the volume begins, but what you should know is that Doctor Octopus has put his mind into the body of Peter Parker, Spider-Man.
It’s one of those nightmare scenarios, where you’re watching Doc Ock (yeah, wer’re tight, I call him Ock) ruin Peter Parker’s life because he comes at it the way he does his own. The thing is, Ock is really smart and kind of an asshole. Peter Parker is really smart, but absolutely not an asshole.
It’s a book that tackles that old question. Haven’t you always wondered if your life would be better if you were 10% more of an asshole? If you just cared a little less about what people thought and instead just did things because you felt like it? Because Ock isn’t necessarily TRYING to ruin Peter Parker’s life. It’s not one of these situations where he’s impersonating Spider-Man so that people will continue to call him a Menace. Or a Dennis. Or a…well, you can do the math on combining those terms. No, Ock is planning to remain as Peter Parker forever. He’s in it for the long haul.
The experiment is interesting. Is there something essential to the characters that made them who they are, or could anyone be Spider-Man given some web shooters and a rad pair of pajamas?
Either way, between this and Brand New Day and Spider Island, for better or worse, I have to admit that I appreciate the people at Marvel being up for experimenting and trying some wild ideas with this character. Most of them, on paper, don’t actually work. I mean, mind swap? This is the ultimate soap opera nuttiness. As is having a clone. Or secret agent parents. Hmm…
But really, even though the ideas sound pretty stupid, I end up enjoying where they go with them. Rather than take a big story (X-Men fighting the Avengers!? WHAAAAAT?!!!) and have the one-sentence premise BE the entirety of the story, the spider books do a good job of making the premise nothing more than a platform and letting the story go from there.”
“Wait, wait, wait. This is ALSO a time travel thing! Sort of! What the fuck, Marvel!? I thought we talked about time travel.
I guess it’s not strictly time travel. It’s like a team-up of Thor from three different times. Maybe it’s time travel? I don’t know. Hard to say.
I like the idea of Thor playing World’s Not Greatest Detective and actually having to visit Space Library, but it wasn’t super exciting to watch him fly around and discover corpses. And the time jumps came at odd intervals, to me, and broke up the story in a way I didn’t love.
I just…no more time travel, guys. I mean it. I fucking mean it. I don’t care if you go back to any of the other wells. Erase reality, clone a motherfucker, Spider-Car. I’d take Spider-Car before another time travel narrative.”
“Wait…what?
That’s my two-word (and four punctuation marks) review of Multiversity.
Grant Morrison definitely doesn’t care whether readers follow the thread sometimes. And that’s cool. My fault for picking it up. But as I get older, I think one of the biggest things I care about is clarity. If something is clear, if I can follow what’s happening, that goes a long way. THEN there has to be something exciting, but without the clarity, I won’t even make it to the exciting part.
Unless it’s a nutso action movie. Then anything goes. “
“Wally West is kind of an asshole. So is this other superhero guy. I like that. I like these comics where superheroes are assholes. Not like “The Boys” level of assholes where they’re supercriminals or whatever, just where they’re regular people emotionally and have understandable emotional motivations, the big difference being they have the superpowers that allow them to act out their motivations on a different level. I want to be a superhero, so I steal some equipment, time travel, and so on.
It feels more real to me, like what would happen if real people had superpowers. Because no amount of running fast makes Wally West a good boyfriend. “
“We all know how I feel about half stars (for anyone whoâs new here: silly and unnecessary).
I just saw a rating for this book thatâs 81%.
Now weâre talking about a 100-point rating scale.
Thatâsâ¦how does one manage that? I wanna see that rubric.
Maybe thatâs the gimmick? You rate it 81%, then everyone pays attention and argues with you about one or two points up or down?
Let me impart some advice: you donât have to work that hard. Just constantly review stuff without talking about the book at all. Everyone gets pissed about that. “
“We get Slimer, more Gozer, and Marshmallow Man? I mean, this is like Star Wars 7, a lot of the same.
I never even saw the new Ghostbusters movie. Or the new, new one that maybe didn’t come out? I enjoyed the shit out of Ghostbusters, and when I was a kid I liked part 2. And I watched the cartoon and played with the toys. The toys were awesome. A grandma who turned into a giant-mouth tri-clops? I’m in. A fat mailman whose torso was a grotesque mouth? Yep. They used to do this thing in my hometown where they’d print kids’ letters to Santa. She saved one of mine, and it was ALL Ghostbusters stuff, named exactly from the little booklet I had, I guess in case Santa was a fuck-up and bought the wrong shit. By the way, there were “cameos” by some of these toy-only characters in the comics.
I was never worried about a new movie ruining my childhood or whatever. I just had my fill of Ghostbusters. Because, believe me, I had A LOT of Ghostbusters in my life. I spent so much time even playing that godforsaken video game. Ghostbusters definitely got its time in my spotlight, and…I think I’m all set. I just don’t really need more.
So why did I read this comic? I don’t know. I thought maybe it would be something totally different, comics being easier to publish than blockbuster, multi-million dollar movies.
Maybe the later volumes have more new ideas? Eh, who cares.
And that’s the whole thing. When you’re “Eh, who cares” about Ghostbusters or Star Wars or what have you, you might as well just try something else. “
“Wearing a skin suit and walking among the dead kind of makes sense. It’s gross, but…it probably prevents you from having to kill people most of the time, you know? It’s certainly safer.
I feel like there’s a weird metaphor here…like…the living wear the skin of the dead and act like animals, and then they’re no longer the living? I don’t know, I’m sure some smartyass has it figured out.”
“Weird. But good weird.
If you donât have a weird artsy friend, Lisa Hanawalt would make a good fill-in via her books.
But if you donât have a weird artsy friend you should find one. At least for a while. They do fun stuff. Like going out to bars on daylight savings so you get an extra hour.
Theyâre not the ideal friend all the time. If you need someone to be a reference for a job, your weird artsy friend is a bad choice.
But overall, your weird artsy friend will do things for no reason other than theyâre doable and youâre adults so you can just sort of decide to do them. “
“Well, honesty time. I’m reading this series in one of those huge tomes that has 5 books slapped together into one slab. A slapslab, if you will.
And I’m on the second book and already regret reviewing them one by one instead of all in one go.
I’m no historian, but I think this may be one of history’s greater mistakes, perpetrated by one of history’s greatest monsters. “
“Weird. Kinda sloppy.
I would like to share something I learned in a creative writing class.
One time I wrote this story. It was all scenes that happened out of order because…I can’t totally remember. It was something to do with a musician who found that different orders and sequences in his music caused these interesting effects. Because the songs sounded out of order, and because it’s hard to write about something like songs, I put all these vignettes that made up the story in a jumbled order.
It was a mistake. I worked really hard on it, and honestly, a really good teacher convinced me to keep the draft I brought in, but to put the whole thing in order and see what it was like.
In order, it was a lot better. It made more sense. There was a building of tension instead of having this sort of taffy machine going, stretching and compressing not the story, but the tension in a way that caused it to lose impact.
There are two things I learned from this.
First, if you want to tell a story out of order, it has to work in order as well. If the story sucks, scrambling the scenes doesn’t help. Don’t mistake this for re-ordering the events of a story. That can be a great thing. I’m talking about just putting the last part first, the middle at the front, and so on, and doing it mostly to make the story feel like it has more motion than it really does.
Second, you really have to consider how the re-ordering of a story changes that story. For example, if Danny Rand is TELLING me the story of his past, then I know he’s not dead. If I know he was trained in an ancient city, and then we flash back to a part where it’s unclear if he’ll make it through the snow to the ancient city, I’m bored. I know he makes it. Let’s get there already. If you change the order, you have to make sure that the tension and the real story are not dependent on the order.
I think that lots of writers take to heart the idea of starting somewhere near the present, hooking the reader and getting them interested before flashing back and filling in the details. I think that’s a very accepted and normal way to write.
But I also think, if you want to do that, do it honestly. Start the story where the reader wants to start reading it, and don’t use that show of good faith to convince me to then march through unneeded backstory. If you know that I don’t want to start at the beginning and go through chronologically, listen to that instinct, and don’t make me do it at all. “
“Well, after just talking about how people put too much emphasis on endings, I have to say the ending on this one let me down a little.
There was a gigantic info dump at the end meant to sort of wrap everything up, but I don’t think it quite made sense, and boy was it a LOT of info all crammed in there.
Personally, if I were to advise on the ending, I would ask whether there might be a more satisfying ending if perhaps the wrap-up wasn’t so beat-by-beat, you know? Like some shit just happened, some was by design, and it’s all sort of falling apart, so who cares?
Also, they keep talking about this Gauntlet, and the ending sets us up so the characters will have no choice but to run the Gauntlet. And then it’s like, Or, wait, we could just run away.
C’mon. Where’s the gauntlet? Don’t talk up a gauntlet and then just leave it alone.”
“Well shit.
I thought I had this all figured out between a few library services and I could read a pretty good arc. But it turns out this is not the case, so I guess I’m once again calling it quits on ol’ cappy cap cap.
I don’t know how this all works, but libraries should probably hire like one comics dork to do the buying, or maybe hire one to look over the purchasing plan for the year, pay them like a contractor, a hit man, except instead of killing people, they make a plan to buy the comics for the year. So nothing like a hitman at all. Just a guy with a regular job, I guess.
I’d apply for this job. It’d be great! It’s like a comics dork dream. Looking at someone’s collections and pointing out the flaws? This is like every comics dork’s favorite activities rolled into one.
I would buy that Howard the Duck movie prop jacket I saw on eBay as a celebratory new professional attire purchase, too.
It’d just be a better world all around, for everyone.”
It took me a week to post this, so the contents are a bit of a mystery to me as well. That’s how terrible my memory is. Just be grateful you’re not PM Flex, who has to suffer through me making the same jokes MULTIPLE times because I don’t even remember that I’ve made them […]
A brief look at TTRPGs. Because there are NO OTHER PODCASTS doing it! Hey, look at Qadida! Look. At. It. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wythe/qadida-a-spy-filled-stillfleet-gazetteer
Pretty pumped to read Craig Clevenger’s newest: Mother Howl! Also, pretty sweet Contortionist’s Handbook stamp on this envelope. I’m a big fan, and I’m going to for sure take this stamp from this envelope and turn it into a bookmark.… Continue Reading →
My newest over at LitReactor is all about Craig Clevenger’s newest book, Mother Howl, which I’ve been waiting on for…about 10 years now. Last time I mentioned Clevenger in a column, he reached out to thank me on Twitter, and… Continue Reading →
Well, it’s time. This has been coming for a minute, more than a minute. I’ve decided to leave the social medias and do most of my posting here, on this website. As a start, I’m posting about my departures here… Continue Reading →
Now that you’ve seen the middle point, let’s travel back in time. Which is kind of how Impossible People functions, so this is fitting. Look at me, doing a writery thing!
I read Julia Wertz’s Impossible People last weekend. I put it on hold digitally, and in print, and then digitally again via a second library location. This is my way of saying I was pretty excited.
I loved Wertz’s previous books, and she was one of the creators that I tried to follow, one of those writers whose work I would just read regardless of what it was about, one of those creators who you can just trust to always do something well worth your time.
Impossible People is the story of Wertz’s drinking and recovery, mostly, sort of. It’s about several other things, too, but if I had to do the one-line summary, that’d be it.
It’s also a little bit about living in New York City, being a lovable curmudgeon, relationships with other people, including family and friends. It’s a slice of life, like Wertz’s other books, but this one has a little bit more of an overall thrust, an overarching narrative.
The Good: I like that the book shows recovery/sobriety as something an average person can do and can manage. I like that the book presents sobriety as something that’s okay to pursue, even if you’re drinking a bit too much as opposed to robbing a bodega to support a heroin habit that has hollowed you out completely, sort of a refutation of the “need” to out-rock-bottom other addicts. I like that the book shows alcoholism as something people kind of suffer from in different ways. I like that the book reminds people that recovery isn’t always a linear, ever upward process for everyone.
The Bad: It felt a little overlong, and I think it would’ve benefitted from some tightening. For me personally, the romantic relationship that provides us the starting point for the book, a cliffhanger we then time travel away from, might’ve contributed to the book feeling a little overstuffed. I don’t think the story was uninteresting or badly told, I just felt like there was a lot in here already, and maybe some omission might’ve made for a better reading experience.
The above is all missing from my original Goodreads review, the one Wertz tweeted about, because there are certain kinds of comics/books I tend to avoid reviewing in-depth.
If someone does a book about their baby who died, their journey to sobriety, a sexual assault, stuff like that, I’ll often leave off a star rating, and I’ll often talk about something else entirely in the review space.
Leaving off a star rating on Goodreads doesn’t count as a zero, by the way. I checked. It doesn’t count as a review in terms of stars at all. No loss, no gain.
The reason I do this is that I feel like there’s something wrong with giving a book like Impossible People three stars. It’s hard to not feel like I’m reviewing the person’s experience.
If a book about a personal tragedy or struggle is a 5-star, unbelievably great book, I’ll give it a star rating. Otherwise, I’ll probably leave it off. If the book is a total banger, I’ll tell other people on Goodreads that I think it’s a total banger. If it’s less than a total banger, I’ll write about…kind of whatever.
Impossible People, for me, was a 3-star book. It’s good. It’s not my favorite of Wertz’s. It didn’t have the humor level of her others, for reasons that make sense, but the big laughs are part of what I really have loved about the other books.
So, because it wasn’t a wholehearted recommendation, I wrote about the weirdness of Wikipedia photos (the entire review is below, if you’d care to read it).
Cut to a day or two later, and I accidentally came across Wertz’s tweet.
Okay, this happened because part of my job involves managing a social media account for an organization, that organization follows Wertz (because I clicked Follow, like I said, I’m a fan). Her tweet was the first one that popped up when I logged in to do the kind of nonsense I do for work:
Now, I mostly took this to be a “how odd” kind of thing. But the comments on the tweet, from others and from Wertz, were of a much harsher tone (some of these are quoted below).
I updated the review, quoted the tweet:
And then got a reply from Wertz (to which I replied):
And generally felt shitty for about a week now.
A couple people were kind enough to come to my defense on Goodreads, and I appreciate that:
And I do agree with Erica, I HAVE, many times, avoided potential friendships.
But also, I agree with Erica, Goodreads is something that is meant for readers to use.
I understand what Wertz is saying: It’s very difficult to put out a book, especially one that’s close to your heart, and then to have people seemingly make fun of it or kind of dismiss it.
On the other hand, I feel strongly that it’s important to recognize that I am not a professional, paid reviewer. The Goodreads page for Impossible People is not an advertising platform for the book. I mean, it IS, but it’s not one that the author has control over.
Nobody gave me a copy of Impossible People in exchange for a fair and unbiased review. Nobody gave me a copy of Impossible People for a totally biased review, either. I never win those damn Goodreads giveaways. I’m cursed.
Negative reviews are hard.
I’m someone who has also put books on Goodreads, tried to avoid the reviews, had a review ruin my day.
But, ultimately, you have to look at a negative review as being only what it is: a person’s opinion.
I took one of my bad reviews and put it on a t-shirt.
I also feel strongly that the deal I make with a reader is this: They spend the time to read my book, and if they don’t like my book, they bought it (probably), they read it (mostly), and if they feel a way about it, they’ve earned their space to talk about it. Or, to not talk about it.
I don’t like to talk about the “right” to review, I like to talk about the reader “earning” the space to do with as they please.
Their review space is theirs, whether it’s positive or negative, whether it’s total nonsense, a bunch of gifs, or copied and pasted text from the 1920 census.
What I was most taken aback by with this whole thing was that my review of Impossible People was in no way negative. It says nothing bad about the book, doesn’t push readers away. It’s not a frothing recommendation, either. It’s closer to being a chunk of text that feels almost accidentally copied and pasted into the review box.
If someone were to review one of my books by doing something like putting in a shopping list for the week, I would think it was…odd, and I might end up telling people about it just because I would find it funny that someone was doing something so strange.
But I do feel that seeing my review as insulting is a stretch.
Here’s the harsh part. There’s a nicer part coming, but this is the harsh part of the journey, the long stretch in the desert where the A/C just isn’t strong enough.
Authors: I don’t owe you a review for your book, and I damn sure don’t owe you a certain type of review of your book on Goodreads.
From what I saw, in a brief look at Wertz’s Twitter feed, mine was the only amateur review she highlighted.
Highlighting that review was a choice. Pushing it out was a choice. Spreading only that one Goodreads review was a choice.
Further, I definitely felt like this was a downward punch.
I know Wertz isn’t Stephen King or some shit, but Wertz’s personal story has been put out by a subsidiary of Hachette (as was her previous book). Part of Impossible People is about Wertz traveling to France for a convention sort of thing, presumably something that her French publisher bankrolled. Her books are in major bookstores, in a ton of libraries, they’re all over the place. As indie comics go, there are bigger stars than Wertz, and there is an infinite universe of smaller ones.
I think what we’re talking about here is Wertz viewing me trying to make her BOOK about me.
From my perspective, my REVIEW was about me. Which is different.
I consider myself a writer, but not on Wertz’s level. I do not have much in terms of a platform. I put things out here and there, do some column writing, and I write goofy shit on Goodreads because that’s one of the places a nobody can write and some people might see it. I write things on Goodreads that are a mix of personal blog, book review, tangents, rants, pure silliness, and diary.
Some other Goodreads users HATE it. Some enjoy it. It’s a mix.
I’m walking a line here. I don’t want to say I have the “right” to do what I want with my Goodreads stuff…but I want to say that, for people like me, who try to entertain others and make the internet interesting, who do creative work in unusual mediums, who do this stuff on the side, not as a job—for people like me, spaces to write things are not easy to carve out. This is what Ive got, and I work with what I’ve got.
Here’s the nicer part:
After a week, the review had garnered a couple likes and a couple comments, and this sort of activity is what pushes a review to the top of the reviews list. The result of all this: My review was the first one that came up for Impossible People.
In some ways, I felt like this was an object lesson: Goodreads doesn’t care whether a review is good or bad, the review that garners the most attention will continue to garner the most attention. This is something important for EVERYONE online to understand.
On the other hand, Wertz didn’t tag me in her tweet. She didn’t address me directly, at all. It was pure(ish) chance that I saw the tweet. I also don’t think Wertz would have predicted that the result of all this would be increased popularity of the review that would put it at the top of the page for her book. I certainly didn’t predict that.
And I just felt shitty.
I didn’t mean to hurt Wertz’s feelings. I really had no idea that she would feel like my review was so intensely disrespectful of her and her work.
I talked myself out of it here and there, I told myself that is she thought THAT was bad, wait until an actual negative review comes in.
I figured this was mostly a product of the book being new and the review numbers still being low, and once they go up, mine will get lost in the mix.
But as the week wore on, my review continued to float up top.
And so, for the first time ever, I took a review down.
I want to be clear: This was never anything Wertz asked me to do, it’s not something anyone pressured me to do. I’m taking it down because when people like it, it reminds me of this bad exchange I had with an author that whose work I’ve enjoyed a lot.
This isn’t about me and my rights to do what I want on Goodreads, it’s about me removing something that I would sooner forget.
This is about me not wanting this whole exchange to be the first word on Impossible People, because I think the book deserves better than that.
Here’s the cautionary tale:
I was a big fan of Wertz. I gave her other books good reviews, probably of the kind she would appreciate. I talked up her books often on a podcast I do for work. My recommendation got Tenements, Towers, and Trash on the (digital) shelf in my local library. Really!
Wertz was on my list of “I’ll read whatever they do” authors, and that’s not a long list.
And now…I will probably pass.
I don’t think I will pick up another book, because I think that reading one will just remind me of all this business.
I’ve only had a couple exchanges with authors on Goodreads in the past. Most of them have been positive, most likely because authors choose to interact with people who review their work positively.
In the one other instance I can remember, where I gave a book a review I would call tough but fair, the author commented, and…I avoid that dude like the plague.
It’s 2023, I haven’t flown since 2019, haven’t eaten indoors at a restaurant, haven’t been to a concert since the pandemic started. I’m the only person in my office who wears a mask. When I say that I avoid an author like plague, it means something. I am pretty dedicated to avoiding plague.
Let me be clear: I’m not a victim here. I’m totally fine. I’m not threatening authors with “The Mighty Power of Fandom” or whatever.
This is the naked fact, take from it what you like:
If there’s another Julia Wertz book on the shelf at my library, it won’t be because I recommended it.
The last thing here, I am including the review below. This is because…well, I want people, who want to decide for themselves, to be able to look at the review, the update, this whole exchange, and I want people to be able to decide for themselves how they feel about it.
I’m not trying to control the narrative by taking down a heinous review and pretending like it was benign.
Okay, that’s all. Below is the review.
UPDATED REVIEW:
Julia Wertz tweeted out this review, and a bunch of people called me an asshole for, I guess, not spending the time/space to talk about this book the way she/they would have preferred?
As most of you know, this is not the first time I’ve been chastised for such behavior on Goodreads, and it won’t be the last.
Hi, Julia Wertz, if you read this, big fan. Well, now it’s a little weird. I still really like your work, though, and am looking forward to your urban exploration book. I feel a little weird about stumbling across your tweet, and it made me feel pretty terrible.
I meant no disrespect to your book by posting what I did below, and I get it, to put a bunch of work into something and then feel like a reader dismissed it is probably not the best feeling.
This is just kind of how I use Goodreads. I screw around on Goodreads, which does occasionally upset people.
The thing is, I’m nowhere near a professional reviewer, nobody pays me to read or share my thoughts about specific books, and I end up just sort of typing out whatever thoughts I come across while reviewing a book, sort of a reading diary that I keep online. Some people seem to enjoy it on occasion, many others hate it with a passion.
I think the reviews of some of your other books that I’ve done might be more to your liking:
Drinking at the Movies
Tenements, Towers, and Trash
I also have talked up your books in my work life in a library, adding them to lists, and in the past on a podcast I do for work, including this last episode where I recommended new books to replace classics, in this case, Towers, Tenements, and Trash in place of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which directly resulted in my local library purchasing the title.
While I see your point on this particular post, I have been a Julia Wertz backer. I do appreciate your work and have made efforts to turn other people onto it as well.
Mostly, I’m typing this to say that I’m an unserious goofball who writes unserious, goofballish things that aren’t meant to reflect on the books they appear under. I mean no disrespect to you or your work.
My post was stupid and pointless because I’m stupid pointless, not because your book is stupid and pointless.
For the rest of you: I use Goodreads as basically a blog because…I can?
There’s no shortage of places to find book reviews, so I don’t think I’m tearing down society by doing things this way. While I don’t suppose my “review” of Impossible People will turn people onto it, I don’t think it’ll turn anyone away from it, either. It’s kind of a no-impact post about a book that already seems to be quite popular. There’s no “Peter Bump” that comes from me giving a glowing review, and there’s no “Peter Slump” that comes when I don’t care for a book.
Lots of folks feel like I’m doing Goodreads wrong because I often type about something other than the book, and, eh, that’s fine with me because this is ultimately a review platform owned and operated by Amazon that will eventually be swallowed by the internet due to its lack of profitability.
It’s futile, totally. But most times, people don’t accuse me of being evil or hateful. Just stupid.
Stupid I can live with. I’ve been called stupid many times, many ways.
To address some of your specific concerns:
liz prince’s blue checkmark aka @comicnrrd”
The post screams “tell me you have no friends without telling me you have no friends”
I tell everyone who listens that I have no friends. This is probably a big part of why I have no friends, it’s hard to make friends while complaining about how few friends one has. But I can’t help it, it’s my THING.
The Ghost Of @Jason_Farrell
creepy weirdo. Either it’s an intentional schtick or they just are, which amounts to much the same thing.
I’m not entirely sure what’s creepy about the post, but I guess part of being a true creepy weirdo is having no idea that you’re a creepy weirdo, so that answers your question “creepy weirdo or schtick.”
Matthew S. Bernier @MatthewSBernier
I want to go on a deep sea fishing cruise, catch a really big fucking haddock, bury it in the yard for three days, and then hit this guy in the face with it.
Having been hit with all sorts of fish because of Goodreads posts I’ve written, which is a completely reasonable response, I can tell you that a store-bought halibut is the way to go. Being a nice, flat fish, it makes a very satisfying slappy sound when I’m hit with one. No need to get all sunburned and exhausted over a Goodreads thing.
~
Original Post:
No stars because I think that doesn’t count in the Goodreads ratings system as a zero, and that’s kind of how I roll on books about dead kids, recovery, etc. When someone writes a book about a huge personal THING, I kinda try and leave off a rating because, well, I think it’d be shitty to pour your heart out about something like that and some dweeb like me is all: “Um, it was okay, could’ve used more angst and a deeper rock bottom.”
I HAVE rated stuff like that before, and I will again, but as long as there are no stars, it’s safe to assume it’s a 3 or more, okay?
When is Goodreads going to give me the option to give vague ratings? Ballparks?
I’m a Julia Wertz fan across the board, this book is no exception, and I kind of can’t believe Wertz, Lisa Hanawalt, and Kate Beaton all worked in the same office space for a minute (alongside a few others who are very talented, I’m just not familiar because I’m not cool).
Looking at those three artists and their wikipedia pages, it’s hard to pick who has the worst wikipedia photo.
I don’t know who selects wikipedia photos, but they’re really bad at it.
Now, the three artists profiled here don’t have AWFUL photos, and it’s not about the artists’ looks. The photos just seem…odd.
Kate Beaton is probably the most unscathed, her photo looks a little blown out in terms of exposure, but other than that, I feel like if I saw Kate Beaton walking around somewhere, I might recognize her. It also looks like a picture where the person in the picture KNEW they were being in a picture, which is more than I can say for many a wikipedia photo.
Lisa Hanawalt’s looks like it was taken from 4,000 feet away while she’s speaking at a convention. Her expression is interesting, it’s hard to tell if she’s pissed, about to laugh, or…something? I’m pretty sure she’s wearing a hat that says the words “cock fighting” while also depicting cock fighting. This last detail doesn’t seem out of character for her, based on her books(?) She definitely did not know she was being photographed, in that moment, for the picture that would go on Wikipedia. Again, though I feel like it’s a bit odd, it looks like the person, kind of, far as I can tell (I’ve never met Lisa Hanawalt, so it’s a bit of guesswork).
Julia Wertz’s photo is oddly-sized, and it’s taken while she’s reading on stage, complete with total blur and blown out lighting. If you found 5 people of similar size, white ladies with brown hair of a similar style, it’d be hard to pick Wertz out of a lineup using this photo.
It’s not like I have a problem with it, it just makes me wonder what Wikipedia photos are for…
If the idea is to be able to identify the person, Wertz’s is the worst of the three.
Maybe identification isn’t the point, but then…why a photo at all? When it comes to something like, I don’t know, a solenoid, sure, give me a photo so I might have some idea what the fuck that is (not really, but I can try). But a person?
It kind of just struck me that this might have been interpreted as a women being evaluated for their looks thing, and that’s not it at all.
I clicked around after looking up these creators, as one does, and found Raphael Bob-Waksberg. His photo is of him at a panel, wearing a mask, with his head turned sideways. There is no way, anyone, anywhere, would be able to identify him, and I would also pose that most people who knew him probably would not be able to identify him from the photo either.
And yet, he’s appeared in MANY photos on big news outlets, so the cat is out of the bag as far as protecting his identity or something.
It feels like Wikipedia is like a yearbook of famous people, but not the part of the yearbook where everyone posed for a picture, the part of the yearbook with just casual pictures, probably snapped by teenagers in photo class, then badly cut up and pasted into a collage (this CAN’T be happening in schools anymore, right? In 2023?).
But, like, why does Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard, who died before 1900, have a better pic than people who are alive and working in the era of smartphone cameras?
How did this come to be real life?
Defunct restaurants including the OG breastaurant (which was just spell-corrected for me, meaning there is a correct spelling for a term to describe a very specific kind of stupid restaurant).
A book-centric episode where I bring you up to speed on what happened in a bunch of comics from like 10 years ago.
I can’t explain why I’m doing this. You just explain why you’re listening to it. That’s your business.
An interview with Jeff Strand!
This is the best episode 489b a guy could ask for.
We cover some of Jeff’s books, his writing philosophies, a couple movies, and I, for one, had a blast. I would say Jeff had a moderately good time, but that’s just because I have low self-esteem and assume an hour with me is nobody’s ideal activity.
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Jeff recommends a couple of his titles for newbies interested after listening to this episode:
One is Demonic, Jeff’s latest, which brings us a fella named Corey, who is in love with Quinn. Only problem: Quinn is married TO A SERIAL KILLER KNOWN AS THE TOLEDO TRASHER.
The other: Wolf Hunt, a book about a couple of guys hired to drive across Florida and deliver a man in a box. Or, at least, someone who appears to be a man at first…
Ignobel prizes, a slow crawl out of obscurity to a slightly lesser obscurity, and prep for the big JEFF STRAND interview!
A bro show! With the promised Kid Pix artwork! That’s right, I REMEMBERED what we talked about enough to actually do a thing!
In which we hold out for a hero, who has big plans, but for the next issue, not so much this one.
It all comes together with the help of a pot leaf chandelier and a great moment in sports history.
Peter Parker starts college. Peter D. relates his experience starting college. It’s not exactly Animal House material.
This one’s got its charms, but at the end of the day, wizards doing magic, not like a ton of new shit brought to the table. Get it, “charms.” Now Charmed, THAT was a show. They cracked the code: What… Continue Reading →
Thanks to a SPECIAL GUEST STAR we get back to our roots and help someone realize their dad is best left to his own devices.
In this newest episode, we cover a new imprint, BRAVE Books, and their first offering. Which comes with an extremely inconvenient map!
I solve every philosophical question. Cannot say why it took you all so long. Throw your philosophy degrees in the trash. You won’t need them now. You probably never did, but now it is certain.
Salacious Crumbcast begins. We’re talking about Salacious Crumb. Excuse me, Salacious B. Crumb. Would hate for you to think it’s another Salacious Crumb.
This one’s all filler, no killer. Well, some killer. Pretty cutting commentary on the quality of Halloween costumes.
Smythe, Spider Slayers, and what’s possibly the Platonic ideal of an early Spider-Man comic.
A trip through internet memory lane. Which isn’t a particularly long lane, but it DOES involve a moon man advocating beating people up, so there’s something.
Well, that’s another one for the books. We explore for a haunted statue, make a tasteless plug, and…wait, if this is what’s in books, no wonder nobody reads anymore.
The lynching of a guy who…was kinda asking for it. A charming detail I forgot to include here, when the masked men went to get the jail keys, only one of them spoke, and he used a very fake Irish… Continue Reading →
Just because we didn’t get to everything Podoween this year, some bonus: A man in the area claimed, when police responded to his call claiming that he was hit in the head with an axe, that the meth he had… Continue Reading →
We explore a conservative children’s book that explains the pros and cons of the ability to pee out a fire with your boy parts.
The lower your apartment is into the earth, the nicer it sounds. “Garden level” for example means, “Your apartment is planted in the ground, like a garden.” What’s below garden level? Corpse Level: 6 feet down, this level is not… Continue Reading →
I figured I’d do it this way instead of on Twitter because Twitter can go eat a dick. Please feel free to copy and paste these into Twitter and sell them as your own. We can only imagine the pressure… Continue Reading →
Clowns clownin’ around. If you correctly guess the fake clown, I will send you a Helpful Snowman No-Prize!
Deep Discussions of Canon You know that friend who’s really into bourbon? To an obnoxious degree? They talk about the grains and shit? They compare the flavor to lumber? For casual readers, canon talk is just like that. Bourbon is… Continue Reading →
A bit back I wrote a column about Kindle Vella, a new thing from Amazin! That’s what I call it. I think it’s Amazin! Mostly because none of you indie bookstore fuckers will put my self-published nonsense on the shelves.… Continue Reading →
It’s been a minute! We got beers. 6 hours away. Also, the return of Poonie and the first TSwift Minute.
In the newest at Litreactor, we go over Kindle Vella. Is it legit? Is this Jeff Bezos’ scheme for quick cash so he can go into space, have an “accident,” and then live a post-Amazon life? Could he grow hair… Continue Reading →
Today Bruce Wayne is trending on Twitter. Lots of folks are making the very unoriginal point that Bruce Wayne is a billionaire, and that he’s therefore immoral. I Wanna Get Fictional In real life, it would be crazy for a… Continue Reading →
This weekend is Mother’s Day. If you are like me, you never know what to get your mom for Mother’s Day. If she tells you she wants something, it’ll be some bullshit like a vacuum. I’m not buying my mom a vacuum! She can buy her own chores-y shit. If my mom wants a Nerf gun, sure, yes, I’m in. A parachute? Uh, I guess. Little nervous, but what the hell. But a vacuum? Hell to the no.
And if your mom doesn’t tell you what she wants, you just have to get her SOMETHING because, I mean, what, you don’t give a crap about your mom? That’s lousy, man. You know all the other moms will be talking up the stuff their kids got for them, and your mom will be sitting there like a single lady on Valentine’s, crying into a bouquet of flowers she bought herself, pretending her eyes are all puffy and shit because she’s allergic. But she’s not allergic to flowers, fool, she’s allergic to not being loved!
All this to say you COULD give your mom one of my books, FREE. Or a bunch of them. Because this weekend, they’re all free, all the newest shit.
Let’s break this down real quick so you can pick the best option for your mamma jamma:
Harold’s Coming: This is the story about a magic Where’s Waldo book that acts as a marital aid. Hey, I don’t know, maybe your mom is a freak in the bedroom. And maybe you know that for some reason. I really have no problem with moms who like to get down (my internet history proves this to an extreme degree), but it’s a little weird to talk to your kids about.
Misogynsit Baby: A great picture book for moms out there who want to crush the patriarchy? Smash it? I don’t know which word everyone is using, but whatever, you get the drift.
A Letter on a Letter: Is your mom really interested in a discussion of intellectual freedom? I know mine isn’t! But my mom isn’t everyone’s mom. If that were true, all of my relationships would be very problematic.
The Heist-Est Heist Ever Heisted: A Heist Story of a Heist: Special Editor’s Edition: Your mom loves Ocean’s 11, right? Maybe she’s into George Clooney, or Matt Damon, or Elliott Gould. That movie’s got a guy for everyone. I’m told the “11” in the title stands for your mom’s two erect nipples. Anyway, this is also a story of a heist, but it features vomit and poop. So again, if mom is freaky…
My Mother’s Silver Bowl: Oh, this is a mom thing! Just in time for mother’s day! How exciting. This short lil story is about a lady who melts her face off and then makes a career out of it. Eh?
Look, get yourself a book this weekend, get one for a mom, get one for a friend. Whatever, I don’t care.
Oh, but don’t get one for your spouse. I’m against parents celebrating mother’s/father’s day with each other. You already have a birthday and an anniversary. Isn’t that quite enough? Give it a rest, be an adult. Although, if you have a baby mama/papa who’s out of the picture, send them one of these books. It will be baffling and confusing, and only vaguely threatening in a non-actionable way.
Starting Saturday, free shit. All I ask in exchange is that you provide a fair review and that you say it’s a fair review provided in exchange for a copy. Unless it’s a lousy review, like 2 stars or less. Then you probably don’t need that disclaimer, right? I’ll assume you weren’t provided a free copy of a book and then were coerced into giving a shitty review to a book you enjoyed. A shitty review is almost always honest, right?
Besides, if you give me a lousy review, instead of putting it on Amazon or Goodreads, you can just put it in your butt!