The Fifth Beatle by Vivek J. Tiwary and Andrew C. Robinson

This was kinda a big deal about ten years ago; you may have heard about it then. The edition I read was a tenth anniversary thingy - that's the technical term - from 2023, with additional essays and material in the back to justify a new hardcover price. (But I read it digitally, which mean pinching to blow up double-page spreads quite a lot; much of this is in Eye-Strain-O-Vision on a normal-sized consumer tablet.)

So it was a New York Times bestseller, won Eisners and Harveys and a Reuben - as I said, a big deal. The Beatles, you might have heard, were somewhat popular - more so than Jesus, one guy noted in the late '60s - and this was not just well-done, but hit at a good cultural moment.

The Fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein Story is a graphic novel, about a hundred and thirty pages (plus, in the current edition, the additional material I mentioned, mostly essays by the author on various aspects of the book's and Epstein's history), written by Vivek J. Tiwary and painted by Andrew C. Robinson, with lettering by Steve Dutro and one section with art by Kyle Baker.

It covers the rise of the Beatles in the 1960s, as seen by their manager, Epstein - he's the viewpoint character and our central protagonist. The Beatles themselves are mostly in puckish-goofball mode here, occasionally getting individual moments (just John and Paul) but clearly backgrounded: the premise is that they are a world-changing creative force, and are out there doing that, while Epstein supports and facilitates and manages that work. More important to the narrative is Moxie, a young woman who first works for Epstein in his family store NEMS and comes to be his personal assistant in his wider-ranging Beatles businesses. (From Tiwary's note at the end, I think she's completely fictional, and exists both to indicate the support he got from the family business and a semi-love relationship for Epstein - though utterly unrequited on his side - that's somewhat positive and happy.) We also see other business contacts, a few of them multiple times, but the focus is on Epstein and, mostly just offstage, the continuing creative engine that is the Beatles.

Epstein was Jewish in an era where prejudice was still pretty open in the UK. And he was gay in an era when that was actively outlawed, and being arrested could lead to ruin and jail. His Jewishness isn't particularly important to Fifth Beatle, other than making Epstein a bit more of an outsider, but Tiwary uses his homosexuality - other than one, possibly fictionalized, off-and-on relationship with an American man that turns into blackmail, entirely as a background longing or note - as a central motif, core to his outsiderness. 

Tiwary implies that Epstein sublimated his sex-drive into business, that he poured all of himself that he could into working as hard as possible to make the Beatles the world-famous band he was sure they would be. And he also implies that's what eventually killed Epstein, of what he doesn't actually say in this book was an accidental overdose of barbiturates combined with alcohol.

(I suspect those both are plausible simplifications, which work in a creative story, but that Epstein both had a much more active sex life than Tiwary shows here and that his death was basically a random accident. Thematically, though, it all works within The Fifth Beatle.)

I appreciated The Fifth Beatle - especially Robinson's magnificent pages; the new edition's cover by Christopher Brunner and Rico Renzi is, I'm sorry to say, vastly lesser than the original sweeping wraparound and the atmospheric, electric interior art - but I found Epstein mostly a one-note character. He's a sublimated homosexual, a workaholic devoted entirely to making the Beatles as huge as possible - really? All of the other acts that he quickly started representing; what about them? What was his sex life really like - purely cruising and cottaging, or anything longer and more meaningful?

The Fifth Beatle wraps things up too neatly to touch on questions like that; it's too much the story of The Man Who Died Making the Beatles Famous. That's what the audience wants, clearly - see how successful the book has been - but it's only about as true as any similar simplification for a mass audience.

A Prefect's Uncle by P.G. Wodehouse

Second novels are not necessarily disappointing. But they regularly are the same sort of thing as the first novel, executed more quickly or with less inspiration, and suffer a bit from comparison.

A Prefect's Uncle was P.G. Wodehouse's second novel, published way back in 1903 when he was in his very early twenties. It followed The Pothunters, which hit shelves the year before. I can't find any indication that it was originally serialized, as Pothunters was, but it feels like a serialization, and it looks like all of Wodehouse's early school stories were originally published in magazines such as the obviously named Public School Magazine.

Pothunters was a small thing, a book clearly assembled from parts, but it was fun and amusing, full of characters who sounded real and inhabited a real world, and it had a plot that meandered but did, more or less, circle the missing trophy alluded to in the title. I don't want to claim a lot for it, but it was a solid genre exercise - in a genre that's been dead for a hundred years now, admittedly, and never was popular on my side of the Atlantic to begin with - and it showed that this Wodehouse fellow was someone to keep an eye on, who could do good things and probably would.

Prefect's Uncle is the same sort of thing, but down a notch or two in most areas. The central plot is not really about the uncle of the central prefect; it's more a sequence of mostly cricket matches, told in very detailed language that I have to imagine would be smashing fun for someone who actually understands how cricket works. From my seat, I can say it all sounds impressive, and that Wodehouse describes the action of the matches well, with a deep facility at drama and knowledge of cricket terminology and tactics, even if it all just turns into a wall of random words to me.

Our central character is Alan "Bishop" Gethryn, head prefect of Leicester's house at the fictional Beckford public school. He's seventeen or so, near the end of his schooling, smart and upright and full of all of the traditional English public-school virtues. Bishop meets two new students in quick succession: first is his new fag (yes, yes, I know - it was a very different era and the usage of that word has shifted quite a lot) Percy Wilson, who is true and smart and good and rather boring and plays very little part in the novel. Next is Bishop's uncle, who he has to meet at the station. He thinks this is a conventional uncle: a generation older, with luck open-handed with the pocket-money and not too tedious with the advice. But it is actually a younger boy, one Reginald Farnie, who has been kicked out of three well-known public schools already, and is the kind of terror Wodehouse would get a lot of mileage out of later in his career.

As it is, though, Farnie doesn't do a whole lot here, though he does cause Bishop to miss a very important cricket match - which Bishop cannot explain to anyone, for the usual vague and unclear stiff-upper-lip reasons - and that means Bishop loses his place on the school's cricket team after they lose that very important match to a rival school. But Bishop is still captain of his house's team, so there's more planning and training and detailed descriptions of inter-house matches and a muddled rebellion by some of the "bad boys" of that house, who Bishop kicks off the team and replaces with very junior boys.

Again, there's a lot of cricket in this book. I think it's told well, and could be gripping to a reader who understands what's happening. For me, though, it was largely a sequence of baroque technical terms about kinds of bowling and where balls are being hit and how wet and/or sticky the particular ground was that day. Wodehouse also includes a certain amount of "well, this match is against that village, and they have a couple of ringers from this county team, so it's semi-important, but the next one is against Rival School, so it is of earth-shattering importance, and then there's the inter-house play, of which only these three houses are important, for reasons I will detail at great length". So I did the names-in-Russian-novels thing and mostly hummed through the cricket matches, which are roughly 40% of the novel by weight.

If you want to read a really early Wodehouse novel, to see how he did school stories, I recommend Pothunters. If you know how cricket works, you could try this one instead, but be sure you really do know how cricket works. It will test that knowledge very strongly.

Better Things: First Train Home

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

I'm solitary by nature, and often feel like I'm over things before they've really started, or out of place basically anywhere. And this is the song that often plays in my head in those situations, or has for the last fifteen years or so.

This is First Train Home by Imogen Heap, one of the clearest, loveliest musical expressions of the thought "I just want to get out of here" that I've ever heard.

I want to get on with getting on with things
I want to run in fields, paint the kitchen, and love someone
And I can't do any of that here, can I?

This is the song for everyone stuck in a group you can't stand, listening to things you're not interested in. For everyone who wishes they could just get out, go home, and do what they really want to do right now. And, you know what? You probably can.

So what? You've had one too many.
So what? I'm not that much fun to be with.
So what? You've got a silly hat on.
So what? I didn't want to come here, anyway.

So, for all of you: best wishes to get out, get on that train, and get home. 

Quote of the Week: Quite Attached to It

I felt the back of my head. My hat was still on. I took it off, not without discomfort and felt the head underneath. Good old head, I'd had it a long time. It was a little soft now, a little pulpy, and more than a little tender. But a pretty light sapping at that. The hat had helped. I could still use the head. I could use it another year anyway.

 - Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, p.812 in Stories and Early Novels

Bogart Creek, Vol.2 by Derk Evernden

Bogart Creek may be yet another thing I discovered only after it ended; it looks like creator Derek Evernden stopped posting it on Instagram and Reddit a year or so ago. On the other hand, he's published three books, the website is still there, and there's a Patreon, so maybe he just managed to paywall it and actually make some money from his cartooning.

(As you know {Bob}, cartoonists used to be able to get publications to pay for their cartoons regularly - many of them making decent livings and a few making actual fortunes. Since techbros demolished print media and advertising, replacing them with outlets that only bring profit to them, cartoonists have found that making any income from drawing funny pictures has been much more complicated and difficult - much like everything else the techbros touch.)

Bogart Creek, Vol.2 is the middle of the three books to date, published in early 2021, a little more than a year after the first book. And, like I said the first time, it's a single-panel comic in the Far Side mold, with no recurring characters or themes. It is cheerfully gory, mostly dark humor with lots of severed limbs, murderous folks (both crazed killers and gangsters, as on facing pages as I'm poking through for examples as I write this), sharks, aliens, and media references.

Now, I don't want to oversell the darkness - it's probably only about a quarter of the strips that feature a murder or other violent death, and, in many of those cases, the violent death hasn't quite happened at the moment of the strip. But there's no fluffy bunnies frolicking happily in a field - the lighter jokes are the media references and amusing wordplay and funny juxtapositions. And Evernden draws a bloody splat, or those severed limbs, a lot more often than most cartoonists - even the supposedly "dark" ones.

I like this stuff, and I think people who enjoy dark single panels will agree with me. The cover shows his visual inventiveness pretty well - that's the caliber of his non-gory gags, and the gory ones are equally well constructed but substantially darker. If that sounds appealing, there's three books of his work available, plus a fair bit floating around online for free as a teaser.

Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

Farewell, My Lovely was Raymond Chandler's second novel, coming out in 1940, just a year after The Big Sleep. It's again a story of a couple of plotlines that seem separate but intertwine, but, more interesting to me, I found the language was even more Chandler-esque than Sleep, with a good half-dozen passages that I dog-eared to use as quotes later.

Does that mean Chandler was somewhat more confident in his novel-construction skills this time out, since he'd already done it once, and spent more time polishing his prose? Or is it purely an observer affect on my part? I don't know, and I don't know if I could know. And that's a good thought to have when discussing a mystery novel, the best of which are strongly about what you can know and what you can't, about facts and history and the motivations of other people.

(I read Farewell, like Sleep, in the first of the two-volume Library of America Chandler collection, Stories and Early Novels. I think the text is basically the same in all editions, though, so that shouldn't make any substantial difference.)

The first plot in Farewell is about Moose Malloy, a giant of a man who just got out of prison after eight years away and is looking for the girl he left behind, Velma. Philip Marlowe is in the wrong place when Malloy visits the nightclub where she used to sing - now changed entirely in ownership and clientele and side of the color line - and is interviewed by the cops after Malloy's questioning techniques prove too much for the manager of that club.

Marlowe has no paid reason to want to find Malloy, but he's not a private detective because he likes to get paid, but because it's the way he thinks and how he likes to work. And the detective officially assigned to the case is old and lazy and not planning to do much; he more or less asks Marlowe to do some free legwork for him. So Marlowe sets off to see if he can find Velma himself, hoping that will lead to the big man.

Soon afterward, he's contacted by Lindsay Marriott, to assist in paying off a ransom gang. This gang - Marlowe is familiar with how it works - hijacks someone rich with something priceless, in this case a necklace of ancient Chinese jade, which would be difficult for them to fence. So they "sell" it back to the owner, through either the insurance company or another intermediary, like Marriott, for a fraction of the price. It's potentially dangerous, and it's a red flag that Marriott only called Marlowe the day of the exchange, but it's not out of the range of reason.

Things go badly at the exchange, and Marlowe is once again questioned by police in a murder case - a different set of cops, in a different Southern California jurisdiction this time. This one he really shouldn't try to investigate himself - it's in a deeply corrupt small city, for one thing - but Marlowe has never been very good at doing what he's supposed to.

Marlowe gets put through the wringer during the course of the two investigations, getting caught up in the schemes of two different con-men-cum-medical-practitioners, plus two attractive young ladies - one rich and glamorous and the owner of the stolen necklace, and the other honest and tough and the daughter of the former local police chief. 

Without detailing the plot of the back half of the novel - never a good idea to do when discussing a mystery - Marlowe, who would appear in five more novels from Chandler, makes it out to the end mostly unscathed, and does solve the murders. And they are, as they must be, related.

I always have a vague uneasiness about the "two unrelated murders turn out to be related" plot - it happens a lot in this field, and it always feels a bit too flamboyant too me, too much like the writer is showing off. (Of course, Chandler did it here at least partially because he was taking some existing separate short stories and combining them into a novel, which is the opposite of showing off.) It works here, and it usually works, and it's just my personal prejudices, so I don't know why I mention it.

As I said up top, I found the language in Farewell even more striking than in Sleep. I've seen it claimed that this was Chandler's favorite of his novels, and that may be part of the reason - he's got a lot of great lines and paragraphs and thoughts here. The plot isn't too shabby, either.

Woe: A Housecat's Story of Despair by Lucy Knisley

So I'm not really a "cat person," actually. (More so than a "dog person," I guess, but not much more. Frankly, I'm not even a people person. I guess I'm an "over there by myself" person.) But people who make comics are often cat people, and make comics about their cats, and I like reading comics, so....

Lucy Knisley's career has taken a turn into books for young readers recently - and by "recently" I think I mean the last decade. (A comics career takes a while to turn and move, since projects tend to take a long time - maybe even more so than prose writers.) I think her last book for adults - the last one I read, anyway - was Kid Gloves, a 2019 book I read in 2023. She's had a three-book YA graphic-novel series since then, plus at least a couple of picture books - I used to love picture books when my kids were the right age; I miss being part of that world now - so she's definitely been busy and productive; it's just been in regions I don't get into as often anymore. (And, to connect the dots, Kid Gloves was about her pregnancy and the birth of her son in 2016, which explains quite a lot of the kid-focus since then: memoir cartoonists tell stories about the things close to them.)

Woe: A Housecat's Story of Despair was published last year, by the kids' arm of Random House, but it's the kind of small-format humorous book about cats - in this case, one particular cat, which is a common variation - that has been a staple of the checkout counter in bookstores for at least fifty years, and I'd guess closer to a hundred. I suspect the fact that it's from RHCB is more to do with the fact that Knisley's current editor works there than that this book is particularly kid-focused.

This is the story of Linney, who was Knisley's cat. I think some parts of it originally appeared on Knisley's Patreon - it seems to be partially collecting existing comics and partly a loose project she started when she realized how old Linney was and that old cats don't last forever - and it doesn't necessarily follow in strictly linear time. Well, the end is the end, and you can guess what that end is. But, before that, it's mostly riffs and moment in the life of this loud, demanding, selfish furball who was deeply loved by Knisley and the rest of her family (husband, young son).

Knisley draws Linney as a chubby, semi-shapeless mass, with a big floofy tail and giant green staring eyes - and, most importantly, that strident, demanding voice, which Knisley puts into human words most of the time for maximum amusement. The point of view is often at Linney's level, to better put this cat in the center of the action - as she, of course, insists and demands she should be.

Knisley uses borderless panels, often with a blob of background color to define and separate them, usually just two or three to a page, keeping the activity moving and the moments running into each other, like any other life.

Woe is fun and amusing and touching, even for someone like me who could easily do without a cat entirely. (I have, for the past year or so, though that time will soon be drawing to a close.) People who actually like cats will probably enjoy this book even more.

What If We Were... by Axelle Lenoir

I have to start, as usual, with my biggest criticism, and get it out of the way. I'm sorry to slam Axelle Lenoir and her publishing team so hard, but it has to be said.

What If We Were... only has a three-period ellipsis in its title. This is wrong. When an ellipsis ends a sentence, it needs to have four periods. I am incredibly disappointed at this major, unforgivable mistake.

This book collects what I think were forty or fifty individual strips - the main story seems to be in two-page entries, but there's also interstitial material that might have been attached to the stories, added for this book, or maybe the alternate version in every other issue - that appeared in Quebec's teen-focused magazine Curium in French. From the copyright page, I think a version of this collection then appeared in book form in Quebecois French, from Front Froid, and then this edition came out in 2020, from Top Shelf, translated by Pablo Strauss and Aleshia Jensen. It is the first of two books collecting this strip; I have no idea if that's the whole run or not.

Marie and Natalie are teens, best friends who have played the title game since they were little kids. One of them has a premise - what if the two of them were Vikings, or superheroines, or world-famous scientists, or whatever - and they both riff on the idea. The strip is about their friendship, using the game as a regular (but not required) element to show how they relate to each other and what they care about. Oh, and Natalie has a crush on another girl they go to school with - first unnamed, then called "Jane Doe"...which somehow turns into her actual name over the course of the strip.

Jane does become the third major character during these strips, first having that very teenager-y  circumlocutious conversation with Marie to ask if Natalie 1) likes girls and 2) likes her. Since Natalie does and definitely does, Jane starts circling the outer orbit of the strip about a third of the way into this book, gradually getting more and more central until the two of them actually have a date.

This is very much a story about teenagers, originally for teenagers. It has that nervous, insecure-in-its-own-skin energy of the teen, the sense that all of the world is new and overwhelming and awesome but also deeply scary. Marie and Natalie are interesting, quirky, real people with foibles and distinct personalities - Jane is a bit more of a plot token, especially early on, but she does get somewhat more depth once she's in the strip more.

What If We Were... is fun and zippy - it's clearly a collection of a loose serial, and equally clearly a work for teens (especially French-speaking teen girls in Canada, which may be a bit too far away from some readers' experience), and definitely not as ambitious and impressive as Lenoir's big graphic novel Secret Passages. But Lenoir has an infectious energy in her drawing and her dialogue is always specific and grounded - this is a story about these people and what they care and think about.

Better Things: We Care a Lot

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

This year's choices will lean into my being an '80s kid quite a bit, I think - I'm free from the shackles of  the calendar that I had for This Year, and can hit all of the other bands I was listening to at the same time, back in my misspent youth. I make no apologies.

If you were around then, you know this song. You might even know it if you weren't around then. But there's a certain weird fraternity of the people who knew who Faith No More was before they switched singers and suddenly got huge in 1989.

And that later, more popular incarnation of the band is good, don't misunderstand me. But if I could save one Faith No More song, desert-island-style, there would be no question. It would always be We Care a Lot, one of the iconic songs of the 1980s.

(We care a lot) about the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines
(We care a lot) about the NY, SF and LAPD
(We care a lot) about you people
(We care a lot) about your guns
(We care a lot) about the wars you're fighting, gee that looks like fun!

It's a snotty song - as a lot of my favorites from the '80s are - and a deeply sarcastic one, a song that means pretty much exactly the opposite of what it says. It's a parody of We Are the World and all of those similar good-cause songs, a piss-take on the idea of caring in the first place.

And yet...is there some actual caring, buried in the sarcasm? You'll have to decide that for yourself - Faith No More is too busy having fun.

Quote of the Week: That's Not an Insult. THIS Is an Insult.

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume, but its outrageous Book of Rudeness is a hefty tome. Being offensive in a matey way gets people's attention, and Down Under you often make friends by being intensely rude in the right tone of voice. Australian English (one of Australia's glories and its greatest art form) is a language of familiarity.

 - Paul Theroux, The Happy Isles of Oceania, p.36

Macanudo: The Way of the Penguin by Liniers

This third collection of the Macanudo daily strip - by the Argentinian cartoonist known as Liniers - is in the same style and closely follows the first two books, Welcome to Elsewhere and Optimism Is For the Brave. So, normally, I would struggle to say something different here, when the underlying work is the same kind of thing - more penguins, elves, Olga and her boy, Henrietta and her cat, two witches, Mysterious Man in Black, and so forth.

But I read this book two weeks ago, before a major vacation (my first getaway vacation in about five years), so I would already struggle to remember or think of things to write about it. And having a built-in excuse that comes with links to two long posts about basically exactly the material in this book gives me the warm and fuzzies, this morning when a major snowstorm threatens to drop six or more inches later in the day.

All that is to say: this post about Macanudo: The Way of the Penguin will be short and vague. Jump into those links above for a lot more about Liniers, his thoughtful comic strip Macanudo, and all of the various (mostly separate) casts that appear in it.

Way of the Penguin was published in mid-December; I read it at the end of January. It's still essentially brand-new, as you read this. Macanudo is - not quite paradoxically, but something in that territory - both one of the most positive and one of the most intellectual strips out there. Linier's characters read serious books and think serious thoughts...though often in silly ways. They engage with the physical and the intellectual world without excuse or minimizing. And they're also almost always happy and energetic, no matter what they're doing or what odd landscape they're traipsing through. (Even the witches, who are most likely to encounter townspeople with torches and those Frankenstein rakes, are at worst bemused by it.)

Again: this strip was fully-formed and mature before it even appeared in the English language in the US in 2018; Liniers had been doing it in Spanish for an Argentinian audience since 2002. His art is soft and organic - it looks like watercolors, or maybe colored pencils over ink, to my eye (though, knowing the little I do about the coloring of newspaper strips, I don't know if that can actually be the case). This is often billed as an modern version of Calvin and Hobbes, since it also has a couple of imaginative children in prominent roles, but Macanudo is more centrally about major (I don't want to say "adult") ideas and thoughts. It has plenty of whimsy, but not the same kind of whimsy - there's an underlying regard for knowledge and truth and understanding here.

My Time Machine by Carol Lay

Comics take time to make, and come out at moments in time - that's the same as any media product, obviously. But comics often take longer, and the method of creation means they're harder to change, late in the creation, than a prose book would be.

Carol Lay is ambivalent about the future in My Time Machine. I don't want to say it's a lucky ambivalence - it's probably built in, from the beginning, as she thought about the story she wanted to tell - but I think she conceptualized this book starting right around the 2020 election and it was published a couple of weeks before the 2024 election, which obviously foretell very different futures.

So, as I said, the dark aspects of the future her time traveler sees in My Time Machine may seem even more likely now than they did even a few months ago.

Lay's protagonist is unnamed, a woman in her sixties, some kind of artist or creator, living in Sacramento. It's Lay herself: the book doesn't say that explicitly, but we know it. It's very much like her self-insert character in her Story Minute/Way Lay strips. The book is set in the modern day, starting in 2016 and running - aside from the time travel - through 2020.

In this world, Wells's Time Traveler was real, and his time-machine plans come into the narrator's hands, over a hundred years later. She gives them to her ex, Rob, a physics professor at Stanford, who gets obsessed and spends the next few years building a working, advanced version of the machine.

This is the story of her journey, alone in that machine, roughly following the outline of the original Traveler. She jumps to 2035 to see the near future, then in quick steps of five or ten years, then to 802,701 AD, to see if there are Morlocks and Eloi, and finally to 30,002,020 AD, to see the end.

Our narrator is most concerned with climate change; her stated purpose is to bring back proof of how the world will be devastated, which somehow she hopes to leverage to change things in her modern day. She and Rob discuss this, and neither is particularly optimistic - or has a half-plausible mechanism for actually changing things - but she wants to see the future, she assumes a warming Earth will destroy everything, and she wants to accomplish something, so this is her goal.

It doesn't quite work out that way. The 2035 she finds is a dystopian nightmare of pervasive surveillance, collapsing food-production, climate refugees, and dictatorial government. It's also almost the last time she sees human beings at all.

Jumping forward, she sees her surroundings change, burned out by the warming planet, and then somewhat recover when she hits 800k AD. But there is a hostile element in that era - which I won't spoil - and she has to flee that world, as well.

Eventually - well, the book starts at this moment, so more than eventually - she's thirty million years in the future, looking out at a once-again-dead world, dealing with a balky time machine. Will she make it back to 2020 to report on what she saw? That's the story here: you need to read it to find out.

I always like Lay's art - she's a bit less spiky than usual here, with full-color and full pages surrounding her people, so it's not quite as Lay-like as I expected. (I feel like the Story Minute years were the purest Lay drawings, all pointy jaws and spiky hands and stark black-and-white.) And I'm roughly in sympathy with her (not overt, but clear) political concerns here as well. Any time-travel story is always, paradoxically, intensely about the cultural moment when it's created, and this is no exception. This is a good one, with a clear, distinct take on the outlines of the original Wells story.

City of the Chasch by Jack Vance

I've been re-reading Jack Vance books the past year or two - first the Dying Earth series, then the Demon Princes. I am vaguely lazy in this endeavor, so I've been picking things available in convenient omnibus editions. And that meant next I found the Planet of Adventure compendium, and read the 1968 first book in that series, City of the Chasch.

This is from the same era as the first Demon Princes books, but substantially less ambitious. That assumes it makes sense to talk about ambition when all of the book were disposable mass-market paperbacks published by the same small group of houses, at basically the same length, to the same audience. The Tschai books are old-school planetary adventure - and I mean they were already old-school in 1968, when Vance wrote this one. It was a solid armature for a traditional story, which Vance tells with verve and energy but doesn't get into the depth he does in Demon Princes.

Adam Reith is a scout on the starship Explorator IV. This is probably the same universe as most of Vance's SF, but it feels fairly early in the timeline - maybe before the full Oikumene is settled - because the focus is on this ship being from Earth. Because Reith and his partner had just cast off in their space-boat to explore the planet Tschai, he was the sole survivor of the expedition when missiles from the planet destroyed the ship and sent the boat crash-landing on the planet.

He soon learns that Tschai is home to four alien races - the native Pnume and the successive invaders Chasch, Wankh, and Dirdir - who have been warring for tens of thousands of years. Each of the invaders also has a caste of humans - this is the 1960s, so Vance always calls them "men" - somewhat transformed through long-term breeding programs to be more like their alien masters. They have at least a minor capacity for space travel - the invaders obviously came from other planets, once upon a time - but the low-level war seems to have kept the planet mostly stagnant for long eras, a place where small wars or sudden devastating attacks could pop up at any moment and destroy entire cities.

The series is about how Adam Reith, the mightily-thewed Earthman, tackles each of the alien races in turn, defeats them with the power of his Terranness and wit and prowess, and gives the oppressed human peoples of Tschai a vision of how they could live free from alien shackles and be reunited with the main course of humanity.

Reith starts this book with a whole bunch of injuries from the crash-landing, and gets lucky by being discovered by a tribe of non-alien-affiliated tribesmen. He befriends the chief of the tribe, Traz, retrieves some of his survival gear from the crash, upends the social structure of this tribe, and runs away with Traz, hoping to find where the Chasch have taken his space-boat.

He learns that the Chasch are divided, like Gaul, into three: the civilized Old Chasch and Blue Chasch, who are also eternally at war with reach other, and were two separate waves of invaders back in the mists of prehistory, and the Green Chasch, nomadic bands of telepathic semi-barbarians who are purely a force of destruction.

Reith and Traz save the Dirdirman Anacho - one of the human subject to the Dirdir and resembling their masters - on the way, and then join a human caravan, where Reith discovers a beautiful woman, held captive by the Priestesses of the Female Mystery and to be taken to their templet for a presumably-horrible fate. The woman turns out to have a bewildering array of names, but we can call her Ylin-Ylan.

Reith saves Ylin-Ylan from her horrible fate - two or three times, as I recall; the Priestesses are pretty determined - and all four make it to Pera, a human settlement in a ruined old Chasch city. Nearby is the current Chasch city of Dadiche, where Reith's locator tells him the space-boat is. 

Reith tries to be sneaky and reconnoiter the space-boat; that does not go well. (He also, almost incidentally, overthrows the tyrannical human leaders of Pera, and unexpectedly is himself installed as the new leader, because he has to save Ylin-Ylan once again.) The Chasch attack Pera, but Reith, now in charge of a militia he organized, takes advantage of their contempt for humans to trick and defeat them, eventually leading an attack that murders pretty much every Chasch in Dadiche, and a large number of the Chaschmen (presumably including Chaschwomen and Chaschchildren).

And the book basically stops there: Reith has the scout-boat, but it's been gutted. He can't use it to get back to Earth; even the comms equipment is gone. The story, obviously, pick right back up in the second book - good thing for modern readers that all four were published quickly more than fifty years ago.

This is Vance in adventure-story mode; it doesn't have the languidness of his better work, or the in-universe quotes that open chapters in many of his later books. Vance is good at adventure stories, and is here, as ever, interested in quirky societies and the many ways humans can be turned into slightly different sub-groups. His writing is quick and energetic, and his language not as baroque as it gets in the books I would call his best. So it's a solid but not really typical Vance book - this series could serve as a good introduction to Vance for readers more used to straightforward adventure stories, in particular.

Please Destroy the Internet by Michael Sweater

This is a sequel, technically - but it's a collection of mostly 4-panel gag comics with some recurring characters, so the sequelness (sequality? sequelissiousness?) is somewhat muted and not a big deal at all.

Michael Sweater, from what I've seen, does punky comics about the kind of people who work McJobs, live in grungy basements, and probably drink (or use other substances) more than they think they should - the young and not-all-that-fabulous, more or less. Sometimes that person is a version of the cartoonist, named "Michael Sweater" or not.

I don't think "Please Destroy" is the strip title or anything like that. But his 2016 book was Please Destroy My Enemies and then this follow-up, two years later, is Please Destroy the Internet. Hence my point about sequels. I think Sweater is old-school enough that his comics mostly appear on paper in 'zines most of the time, but he also has an Instagram where it looks like you can sort-of read stories, panel-by-panel, in almost the right order. (It's just annoying enough to push you to buy an actual thing, which, in my opinion, is exactly what it should do.)

Internet is a 64-page book, so it's fairly small. And it's all separate strips, so there's no "story" or "overall narrative" to explain. There's a bunch of comics about a cartoonist, who we can take to be Sweater - many of them about making art, or being in art school, or realizing what art school gave him was mostly whopping debt. There's some other recurring characters, and a few captioned drawings that might be tattoo designs - Sweater does those as well.

It's mostly smart-ass humor, done well. Sweater has a gnarly, organic drawing style that's fun as well - his people tend to have gigantic toothy mouths and no noses. If you are Old and particularly grumpy or stodgy, this will not be for you, but when was this style of humor ever for the old and stodgy? Leave it for people who can appreciate and enjoy it, you humorless killjoy!

Better Things: Last Cigarette

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

This is the only band I know that's actually from my hometown. (Two asterisks immediately: they got famous - well, as famous as they got, which is not enough - only after they moved to LA. And there's another, somewhat bigger band that used the name of a place in my hometown but wasn't from there.)

Dramarama was founded in the basement of a record store in Wayne, NJ in 1982, and I'm enough of a romantic to think every band should have an origin story something like that - a specific place and time, a bunch of people who want to play music together, and, eventually, some great songs.

For me, Dramarama had three great songs. That might not sound like much, for a decade of albums and touring and work, but how many bands have even one five-star song? It started with their breakout, Anything, Anything (I'll Give You), a compelling, compulsive story of longing and need. And the third one, on their last major-label record before they broke up (the first time) was the semi-autobiographic, overwhelming Work for Food.

But, today, I want to celebrate the song in the middle. I don't remember if I heard this first - I'm pretty sure I knew Anything, Anything - but this is the song that got me to pay attention and buy the record and become a fan. That's Last Cigarette, from their 1989 record Stuck in Wonderamaland.

It's getting late you got to get the kitten fed
You got to kiss the little woman put the children in the bed
Check the sports and weather and the living and the dead
You don't have to hear the headlines you can hear what Johnny Carson said

It's straightforward, growling rock 'n roll, with energy and purpose and wit and energy to burn - a nearly perfect pop song on a subject that hasn't been ground into dirt by a million songs before it. It's a song about something mundane and ordinary in life - in this case, smoking one last cigarette, which was much more of an everyday thing for people in 1989 than it is today, I hope - and about all of the little rituals and moments like that.

And it kicks ass. I love that a band from Wayne, NJ kicked that much ass. Rock on, Dramarama. You should've been much bigger than you ever were.