Category: Reviews

Superman Isn’t Jewish (But I An…Kinda) by Jimmy Bemon and Émilie Boudet

With supposedly-nonfiction books, I’ll focus tightly while reading on how true they are, looking for any crack in the verisimilitude that might imply some fiction has made its way into the mix. I think that’s pretty common: we want to know what kind of stories we’re being told, how constructed they are, to know how to respond.

But it’s not always clear how much the book is claiming to be nonfiction. This graphic novel – or bande dessinée, since it’s originally from France – is in the “Life Drawn” series from Humanoids, which I thought meant it was clearly, well, drawn from life. But I just took a look at their website, and the series is described as “Biographies and slice-of-life tales that show us what it means to be human” – and, more specifically, Wander Antunes’s adaptation of Twain’s short story Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg , which I read recently, is also included in the program. So my assumption that of course anything published as “Life Drawn” would be nonfiction has been proven to be inoperative.

In other words: this is probably close to true, more or less. But only…kinda.

Superman Isn’t Jewish (But I Am…Kinda)  is a coming-of-age story told in the first person by a French boy, Benjamin, and covers mostly his youth in the late eighties and early nineties, in a large extended family with a (now-divorced) Jewish father and Catholic mother. It was written by the film director and screenwriter Jimmy Bemon and drawn by Émilie Boudet, first published in France in 2014 (when Bemon also made a related short film with the same name) and translated by Nanette McGuiness for this 2018 English-language edition.

Jimmy is immersed in Jewish culture and history by his father’s side of the family, encouraged to believe himself part of a long, storied cultural tradition stretching back five thousand years, one of the chosen people. And he’s happy with that part.

But being Jewish also meant that he was circumcised at birth – which is vastly less common in France than it is in the US, something Bemon didn’t need to point out to his original audience but might make his histrionics come across weirdly to American readers – and so he is Different From Other Boys.

There are other issues as he grows up – undertones of how much “Jewish” means “Zionist” to a bunch of schoolboys, some of whom are Arabic, things like that – but the chopped willy is the big one. Benjamin is worried that, when he ever gets together with a girl, she will point and laugh, and then tell everyone else.

Superman Isn’t Jewish is relatively short and conversational, like a film driven by a single narrative voice. We don’t see a whole lot of Benjamin’s young life: just what matters to his possibly-Jewish identity. He has classes with a rabbi, and celebrates his bar mitzvah. There’s a moment where he’s pulled in to be the tenth man for a minyan. But he doesn’t quite feel Jewish, and eventually works up the courage to tell his father that. This is a mostly amiable, positive book, so that goes OK in the end.

I do wonder a bit how much of Jimmy is in Benjamin, and what there is of Jimmy that didn’t make it into Benjamin. But that’s the inherent question of semi-autobiographical fiction, isn’t it? In the end, this is a nice story about a good kid who figured out how he wanted to live and found happiness, in bright colored pencils and big faces from Boudet’s art – that’s a fine thing to have.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

REVIEW: Friends: The Complete Series 4K Blu-ray

In spring 1994, I was reading a series of articles in The New York Times about pilots for the forthcoming TV series, and they profiled a series featuring six twnetysomethings trying to adjust to adulthood. It sounded promising so my wife and I sampled the NBC series the following September.

And Friends has been running somewhere on television ever since. It is now 30 years old and to celebrate, Warner Home Entertainment recently released Friends: The Complete Series, debuting on 4k Ultra HD for the first time. Every episode is included along with a variety of bonus features making this an ideal addition to your video library.

What’s interesting about the series today is how it has endured despite aspects no longer appearing as fresh. The creators, David Crane and Marta Kauffman, cleverly found six types that could bounce off one another with heart and humor. With director James Burrows handling the pilot, all the elements from the first episode were there and remained in place for the next decade.

Largely set in two adjacent apartments in Manhattan, and their favorite coffeeshop, the six worked to live with running gags about their jobs (or not having jobs). They never seemed to worry about paying the rent or utilities, so their struggles were more about relationships—finding them or keeping them. They loved and lost, laughed and cried, and turned to one another for support. Over the course of ten seasons, we saw two couples form, one long-simmering and filled with pathos, while the other unexpected and funny. By the time they turned the lights out in an hour-long finale, they had become part of the national dialogue.

The show endures because the character relationships feel real and their affection for one another is evident from when Monica’s friend Rachel turns up in her wedding dress, having run away from her wedding and is immediately adopted by the others.

Wisley, the showrunners, plotted out the character arcs for each season well before writing and filming began, serving the characters first, then the gags. This may be one of the reasons why it is among the series I continually find my high schoolers watching via streaming.

The series has 23 triple-layered 4K discs and two dual-layered Blu-rays for the special features. They’re tidily packaged in a nice plastic case that fits snugly on the shelf. The 2160p transfers, framed at 1.78:1, look just fine, and as you remember, the series back in the CRT days. That said, the color is oddly saturated throughout and look just a wee bit off, enough to nag at veteran fans.

The 4K discs come complete with a fine DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio, serving the dialogue and music just swell.

The Special Features are mostly taken from previous Blu-ray and DVD editions of the seasons such as the audio commentaries with executive producers Kevin S. Bright, Marta Kauffman and David Crane.

On the first bonus disc, we get a new Friends: Through the Peephole (15:18), hosted by Warner Bros. archivist Matt Truex, examining some of the 2,000 props and costumes. There is also the less interesting trivia contest How Well Do You Know Your Friends? (6:37).

Each season carries over the other Blu-ray extras such as trailers, music videos, shorts spotlighting the series’ international appeal and other topics.

The second disc contains extras imported from seasons 6-10, so we have gag reels, Gunther’s chats about each subsequent season, and various Friends appearances on talk shows plus the Extended Broadcast Episodes – “The One Where Rosita Dies,” “The One Where They All Turn Thirty,” “The One with Joey’s New Brain” and “The One with the Truth About London.”

I suppose the Max reunion special should be here, but it isn’t, which is a shame. Overall, though, it’s nice to have the entire series in one place, so you can watch at your leisure and not worry about the show vanishing from your favorite streaming service or cable channel. As promised in the catchy title song, one of the last to chart on top 40 radio, they’ll be there for you.

Black Is the Color by Julia Gfrörer

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I often find I’m thinking about or focused on the wrong things in the books I’m reading – that I need to specifically tell myself to ignore something so I can move on.

For example in Julia Gfrörer’s short, dark, creepy 2013 graphic novel Black Is the Color , the story opens on a wooden ship, far out in the ocean, several hundred years ago. One of the leaders – not the captain, maybe the first mate or owner – tells two sailors that they are, unfortunately, running lower on provisions than expected. So he’s going to kick the two of them off the ship, into a small open boat, to die in the middle of the sea.

And my first thought was: was that a thing? I’ve heard of crews going on half-rations, or even less – stretching their food farther and farther. And I know that a merchant ship, which this one appears to be, had a small, tight crew to begin with – especially compared to a warship, which would be swarming with gunhands and marines and others. So it didn’t quite make sense that they could or would just kill two of a very limited crew at the first sign of trouble.

But that’s how Gfrörer gets to the story she wants to tell: this is about two men, in that open boat, and what happens to them. So the setup almost doesn’t matter: it’s plausible, it’s quick, it gets them out there, under a baking sun, with no food or water.

And then the mermaids come out to investigate.

Black is the story of one of those two men: Warren. He lasts longer. He’s…befriended? made a pet? visited? by a mermaid, Eulalia. We see him alone in the boat, slowly dying. We see him with her, being comforted or having sex or being a new object of interest. We see her down in the depths, among her people, callous and self-centered and flighty. We see that she and all her people view humans as amusing distractions, as entertainment – interesting in the moment, maybe, but nothing more important or significant than that.

Gfrörer’s art is detailed and organic, her lines dark black and usually thin, her borders in this six-panel grid just slightly irregular, her people with sharp defined faces, her seas a mass of lines rippling and undulating, endlessly. This is a book that’s black in multiple ways: story, theme, characters, often visually. Black is the color here.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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The Cat from the Kimono by Nancy Peña

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This graphic novel says it’s based on a folktale, and I have no reason to doubt that. Whether it’s an ancient, well-known folktale or one made up by creator Nancy Peña to fit the story she wants to tell…there I do wonder a bit.

It’s such a wonderfully visual story, one perfectly aligned with Peña’s illustrative, pattern-filled pages. It’s open-ended, with a clear beginning that turns into multiple possibilities – which also feeds the style she uses to tell this story, switching from storybook-style big images with captions for the pure folktale into comics-style grids (mostly three tiers) with speech balloons for the complications, the portions that are clearly and entirely Peña’s.

It doesn’t really matter whether she found a folktale she could adapt so well or made it up, but it does make me think about the creative impulse, and wonder which of the two it was.

The Cat from the Kimono  was published in 2020 in France – Peña is French; she works in that language – and translated into English by Montana Kane for this 2023 edition.

The legend goes that, sometime long ago in Japan – I would guess after unification, during the Edo period, but time is rarely specific in folktales – there was a beautiful young woman, the daughter of the owner of a silk mill. The best weaver in the mill was in love with her; she did not reciprocate. He made her various beautiful kimonos to show his love; she only loved the very first one he made, printed all over with cats. He got angry; things went bad, somewhat supernaturally, on the kimonos. And one cat from that first kimono ran off the silk and out into the real world.

This is the story of that cat’s adventures – perhaps somewhat later in time, perhaps meant to be right after running away. Again: folktales don’t say “and then, three days later, on the fifth of March” or anything like that.

In Peña’s story, the cat stowed away on a ship and made its way to London, where he weaved through the stories of a few Victorian-era people – a girl named Alice, a brilliant consulting detective, and a few less-obvious characters. Peña tells her story in alternating sections – first the folktale, then some comics pages, then usually a blackout page, and back to the folktale. Sometimes we get multiple comics scenes, with one set of characters and then another, and sometimes we just get one group, and then back to the folktale.

Peña tells the main folktale in full at the beginning – up to the cat running away. When she returns to it, it’s for a series of variations and questions: where could the cat have gone? what are the versions of the story? how many endings does this story have? And she closes with the folktale as well, giving – in that very fabulistic manner – mostly questions and options, before ending with a slender thread of “well, there is one version of the story that says thus.”

Peña’s folktale pages are lush and ornate; her comics pages are precise and detailed. She moves from one format into the other effortlessly, back and forth, to tell one story in both modes. Cat from the Kimono is a wonderful expansion of a fable, no matter its origins.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

REVIEW: SuperFriends: The Complete Collection

From 1973-1985, two generations of Saturday morning television were raised on the exploits of DC Comics’ stellar array of heroes on ABC’s Super Friends. While the exact title changed through the years, the Hanna-Barbera series continued to display heroes and heroines as models of truth, justice, and the American Way. There are many who, having grown up on the show, revere it. Others, those of us outgrowing that weekend ritual, found it a pale comparison to the four0-cloro source material.

I admit, I had a disdain for the series, what with its limited animation and prohibition against the good guys subduing the bad guys with their fists. As a result, you must be a fan of a certain age to find the arrival of the Super Friends complete series DVD box set a welcome treat.

There were 93 actual episodes over the dozen years, and it was a launch pad for The New Scooby-Doo Movies. Over the years, the core superheroes supported one another as they tackled terrestrial and inter-dimensional threats in the form of invading aliens and unearthed creatures.

Initially, Wendy and Marvin (and Wonder Dog) supported them for audience identification purposes, but they were quickly replaced by the teen aliens Zan and Jayna, and their pet monkey, Gleek, who had powers. They gave us the cry, “Wonder Twin powers, activate!” which caught on decades after the show ended.

Picking up where the Filmation DC cartoons left off, Ted Knight provided the initial bombastic narration, replaced by Bill Woodson. Much of the Filmation voice talent moved to the Hall of Justice. They were accomplished by the stellar array of voice artists from the day, from Frank Welker to Casey Kasem. We even got Adam West back as Batman for a season.

Most Saturday morning animated action was hamstrung by parent groups and overly worried networks, inhibiting the among of imitative action that could be depicted. You can watch the strictures loosen as we get to the end of the 1970s. By the 1980s, the series fully embraced the source material as the Legion of Doom as supplanted by the arrival of Darkseid and his Apokoliptian emissaries. (Of course, that supported the Kenner Super Powers action figures, but don’t tell ABC)

In the 1978–1979 season, we had your typical adventure coupled with Challenge of the Superfriends, introducing the Legion of Doom (Bizarro, Black Manta, Brainiac, Captain Cold, Cheetah, Giganta, Gorilla Grodd, Solomon Grundy, Lex Luthor, The Riddler, The Scarecrow, Sinestro,  and Toyman). We were also introduced to multicultural heroic additions: Black Vulcan, Apache Chief, and Samurai.

Building on the newspaper comic strip of a similar name, the series morphed into The World’s Greatest SuperFriends. Another original character, El Dorado, was introduced in 1980. These newer heroes could also be found in the E. Nelson Bridwell and Ramona Fradon Super Friends comic. After a year off, the series was back as SuperFriends: The Legendary Super Powers Show with a limited number of familiar heroes and villains.

The Super Powers Team: Galactic Guardians incarnation arrived in 1985, with Cyborg and Firestorm now in the mix. On the opposing side, we were introduced to The Joker, The Penguin, the Royal Flush Gang, and Felix Faust. This season produced its finest episode, the first televised origin for Batman.

Watching these all these years later, you can occasionally wince but also feel the same thrill kids must have felt seeing their favorite heroes band together. The episodes look fine on a DVD (a Blu-ray edition also exists).

The episodes stand alone, without any Special Features.

REVIEW: Succession: The Complete Series

Across 39 episodes, HBO’s Succession deftly explored familial dysfunction and corporate malfeasance, drawing inspiration from numerous sources, notably the Murdoch empire and its aging patriarch, Rupert. But the show went beyond that with side trips into egotism, child rearing, negotiating communication post-divorce, and the consequences of decisions, both those made and those avoided. As a result, it earned 75 Emmy nominations and 19 wins, raising the bar of television achievement.

For those who missed out, the entire series is now available in Succession: The Complete Series. You can revel in the strong performances of a wonderful ensemble, one that earned a Screen Actos Guild award for their combined work.

Where previous dramas about the ultra-wealthy dwelt in soap opera antics, here, the stakes were far more serious as the fortunes and control of Waystar RoyCo hung in the balance. Logan Roy (Brian Cox) was slow to adapt to changing fortunes but wasn’t ready to give it all up and enjoy retirement, so instead, he played one child against the other for the title of successor, as much for his amusement as to audition them for the job.

The problem was that the siblings in contention—Roman (Kieran Culkin), Kendall (Jeremy Strong), and Shiv (Sarah Snook)—wanted the chair but lacked the strong vision to keep the company viable. And what vision they offered was usually myopic or overly ambitious. As they bickered and maneuvered, Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) came, representing the future and existential threat to the company’s survival.

Apart from the family, we also saw the obsequious inner circle, each allying or betraying one of the siblings to remain relevant, out of fear their cushy way of life might vanish. Add in wives, ex-wives, girlfriends, friends, and acquaintances you have a rich bouillabaisse to work from.

More was said between the lines than most shows that had aired previously. Kendall, in particular, couldn’t string together  a coherent paragraph but managed to convey his thoughts regardless. The writing for the series was excellent, and Strong’ s performance effectively communicated the unsaid.

Some of the best scenes are when the three siblings unite. Their teasing and torturing felt natural, and they melded well together. Their casual dismissal of their half-brother Connor (Alan Ruck), who deliriously considered a run for president.

These episodes were dramatic and, at times, over-the-top until the final decision had to be made, as Shiv needed to choose between her brothers for the center seat. Ultimately, her choice was a harsh truth but also served her well, given her uneasy relationship with her husband Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen).

This is eminently rewatchable, as subsequent viewings let you catch foreshadowing while still delighting in the performances.

The 1080p high-definition transfer is crisp and well-balanced, so it looks great at home. It is well paired with the DVD lossy Dolby Digital track, the 5.1 DTS-HD MA

Unfortunately, all we get for Special Features are previously aired Inside the episode Featurettes, Character Recaps, and Cast and Crew Interviews.

The Incredible Story of Cooking by Benoist Simmat and Stéphane Douay

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The obvious thing to start out with would be a joke about how only the French would make a 250-page graphic novel about cooking.

But I don’t want to be dismissive: this is a both heavily-researched and user-friendly overview of something that’s hugely important for everybody – we all gotta eat, and the vast majority of us enjoy it and want to maximize that enjoyment. It may be too much for some readers, true. But there have been books like this in prose for decades – centuries, actually – and there’s no reason the graphic format should be less useful.

The opposite, in fact – in a prose book, you have to add pictures on individual pages or a photo insert to show what food looks like – in a graphic novel, that’s built in on every page automatically. You have to deliberately avoid showing what things look like in a graphic novel.

So I’m happy to see more books like The Incredible Story of Cooking : serious non-fiction in comics form, for people who want the details and also want to see what it all looks like, or maybe don’t want to read walls of text, or just like the organization of a comics page. (I’m all three of those things, myself, at least intermittently.)

Cooking was written by Benoist Simmat, a journalist and comics writer – he previously did a big book on wine , which has also been translated into English – and drawn by Stéphane Douay, who’s been drawing comics for twenty years but doesn’t seem to have been translated into English before. (Well, he draws the pictures, so his part of it doesn’t need to be “translated,” but you know what I mean.) It was originally published in Paris by Les Arénes in 2021; the US English-language edition (translated by Montana Kane) is from NBM and officially publishes today.

It stakes out a lot of ground: the subtitle starts with prehistory and claims to cover half a million years. The book delivers on that: the first page lists a number of hominids active in Africa between four and one million years ago, and the first chapter tells us as much as modern science knows about what those early humans ate and how they found, prepared, and kept food. I’m not sure that counts as cooking, but I don’t have a solid mental definition of what’s required to “count” as cooking, either. The book only claims 500,000 years of history, anyway, so these additional millions up front are purely lagniappe, to set the stage.

Eight more chapters bring the story, in successive stages, up to the modern world. We start with the great civilizations of antiquity – Sumer and Egypt and China and India – then Greece and Rome, trade routes and the Far East, medieval Europe, the Columbian exchange and food in the New World in general, the rise of first restaurants and gastronomy in the 19th century and then (soon afterward) the industrialization of the food business, before ending with a look at the world today, anchored by the Slow Food movement and related localization trends. Each chapter is dense with detail – there are lots of footnotes, which can send the reader back to an extensive bibliography in the back – livened up by Douay’s crisp and occasionally amusing art.

In the back, besides that long bibliography, Simmat also provides nearly two dozen recipes from representative cultures around the world – the US gets a Chicago Hot Dog, for example – which can probably be cooked from with only a small effort. (Measurements are all in metric, which may confuse some American cooks.) In case the foregoing wasn’t French enough, Simmat also gives a complexity/difficulty level for each recipe in graphic form: one soufflé for simple, up to three for difficult.

I doubt I will cook from this book, but the recipes are a nice addition. And the bulk of the book is the main comics narrative, which is detailed, backed up by all those footnotes, and includes all sorts of quirky details – starting with all of those pre-sapiens hominids up front – that I wasn’t expecting at all. It’s a book that’s both entertaining and informative: what more could you ask for?

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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Planet Paradise by Jesse Lonergan

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This is not a sequel to Hedra . There’s no way it could be set in the same universe. But they’re from the same creator, from the same year, in the same genre, with a similar feel and with SFnal technology that works roughly the same way.

So maybe it’s a companion piece, or another element in an era in Jesse Lonergan’s career. I liked both books a lot, so I’m hoping something like the latter: I’d be happy to see him do SF books like this for a while, if he and the market agree.

(Although…they’re both from four years ago, and I suspect the market has not agreed, since the comics market has been deeply disagreeable for close to a decade now.)

But let me get more specific about Planet Paradise , a roughly hundred-page standalone SF graphic novel. It’s the story of a vacation that goes wrong.

Eunice and Peter live in some medium-future multi-system society, seemingly a pretty rich and healthy and happy one. They’re off for a vacation on Rydra-17, billed as “the Paradise Planet.” The book opens with them individually settling into their hibernation pods, which will then be slotted into bays in the ship.

This isn’t a fast-FTL universe; it takes more than eleven days in transit to go from wherever-we-started to Rydra-17. The two crewmembers of this unnamed ship are the only ones awake for the journey.

There’s a cliché that says a story is about what happens when something goes wrong: that’s the case here. There’s some kind of malfunction. The ship ends up crash-landing on some unknown world. One of the crewmembers is killed; the pods are scattered across the landscape and some of them have failed or broken, killing their inhabitants.

Eunice’s pod is intact, but it pops open. We don’t know why. But there she is: unexpectedly on an alien world, in the middle of a disaster scene, the only human on the surface.

Well, not quite the only one. The captain of the ship, Wanda, also survived: she’s got a broken leg and is deep in the wreckage. Wanda yells for help, and Eunice saves her. So then the two of them can work to save the rest and call for rescue.

It’s not that simple: Wanda is demanding and injured and obnoxious and treats Eunice as just the hands to do the things she wants done. Eunice is overwhelmed and untrained and unsure. And there are unexpected large carnivores on this planet.

They do manage to find a distress beacon and set it up. An emergency service agent arrives a few days later – again, travel between planets in this universe is at least several days. That does not go exactly as planned, either.

But Eunice and Wanda do get off this planet. Eunice does finally get to Rydra-17, and her vacation with Peter. But, as we see in the last scene, her experience has changed her – unexpectedly, making her more confident and able in another dangerous situation.

Lonergan’s panels here aren’t quite as visually inventive as the wordless Hedra, but he plays with size and sequence and format a lot – there are some excellent big vertical panels near the beginning to emphasize the solidity of the ship and the old-fashioned lying-back take-off position, among other fun sequences – and his art is dynamic, great at both quiet storytelling and the more energetic action moments.

He also makes his world lived-in and specific; his characters consume soap-opera-ish media and grumble to each other about corporate budget cuts. This seems to be a pretty nice universe, all-in-all, but it’s not perfect, and the imperfections led to this story – we can imagine those same budget cuts caused a little slacking off of maintenance that caused the original malfunction.

This is not a big story: it has a small cast, a short time-frame, and a modest scope. But it’s strongly focused, has a great relatable main character in Eunice, looks lovely, and does everything it needs to do smartly, quickly, and with great style. It is a neat SF graphic novel, totally enjoyable and self-contained, and I would be happy if the world had many more books like that.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Little Josephine: Memory in Pieces by Valérie Villieu and Raphaël Sarfati

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The book is not nearly as puckish as the cover suggests. Anyone looking for a Little Nemo-inspired imaginative adventure should look elsewhere; this is a memoir by a French visiting nurse about one particular patient of hers, an old woman with an unspecified dementia-related condition.

And this is all true, as far as I can see. This all happened, to the real Valérie Villieu, and she’s telling that story to us, with the aid of artist Raphaël Sarfati. It was a little while ago – Little Josephine: Memory in Pieces  covers a few years in the mid-Aughts, with the 2007 French presidential election somewhere in the middle – and the French edition came out in 2012, to be eventually translated by Nanette McGuiness for this 2020 English-language edition from Humanoids.

Josephine was a woman in her mid-eighties, living alone in a small Paris apartment, as she had for nearly sixty years. She’d recently been found wandering disoriented in the street, and, after a brief hospitalization, was back in her apartment with daily visits from caregivers and an official legal conservatorship to manage her affairs. Villieu was working as a visiting nurse, with a roster of patients like Josephine, who she would see several times a week, to evaluate and support, administering medications and keeping track of their conditions. Villieu seems to have been part of a nursing team; she uses “we” somewhat regularly to talk about the work done, and occasionally shows what I think is a colleague also visiting Josephine.

But it’s mostly Villieu’s personal experience: how she met this woman, how they interacted, what happened over those years, how Josephine affected Valérie.

A lot of the book is the day-to-day: complaining about the often-lackadaisical work of the caregivers, battling to get the conservator to actually do something and not just complain about how many cases he was handling, and slowly gaining Josephine’s trust. Villieu writes at length about the work she does, and how she interacted with Josephine, and what Josephine was like as a person – this is a graphic novel with extensive captions, a very narrated story.

Villieu cared for Josephine for years – and I mean “cared” in both the professional and the personal sense. And she makes their relationship real here, without sugarcoating it. Josephine had a serious, unreversable, progressive mental illness, that confused her and made her forget thousands of things, that changed her moods and made her combative at times. Dementia is one of those horrible diseases we don’t like to think about – for ourselves or for ones we care for – since it turns the sufferer into a different person, bit by bit stripping away important pieces of who they were and replacing those with a pseudo-childish shell, smaller and diminished and occasionally realizing that.

(I may be biased: a very close family member is going through something similar right now, so this is more real to me than another health problem would be.)

Josephine was still a quirky, interesting person: dementia had stolen a lot from her, but a lot of her was still there, the woman who had lived in that Paris apartment for decades and still had stories of the ’50s and ’60s to tell when she could remember them.

That’s who Villieu wants to celebrate: the woman she met, behind the disease, the woman she supported and helped for a few years, giving her some more happy life at a point when she could easily have been shoved into an institution and left to decline quickly. Little Josephine is a more serious, deeper book than the cover would make a reader expect, but it’s well worth the journey.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Eartha by Cathy Malkasian

Cathy Malkasian’s 2017 graphic novel Eartha is a metaphor for social media. It’s more than that, too, but that’s the log-line: it is centrally an argument against fake “connectivity” and the addiction to bad news.

(Whether the problem it metaphorizes is even our current problem in 2024 I’ll leave as an argument the reader can have; I’m a bit dubious myself.)

Our main character is a very large woman – twice as tall as everyone around her, and notably more solidly built as well – among the gnomish happy rustics of the sleepy town of Echo Fjord. She’s the usual soft-hearted giant: we first see her saving people from a flood of water caused by her own mother’s flightiness. Most of the folks of Echo Fjord either grow crops or help to corral and progress the dreams of the faraway City Across the Sea, but Eartha has what seems to be a unique role: she’s so much taller and stronger that she’s the one to carry all the heavy things, and we keep seeing her pick up and carry the older people, as if they are babies and she is the adult.

The dreams of the city people is an important, complicated system – evocative without being quite as directly metaphorical as the didactic social media metaphor (which I’ll get to in a moment). The people of the City Across the Sea have busy, complicated lives, so their dreams separate from them quickly. Those dreams manifest in Echo Fjord, generally popping out of the soil as purple-hued people – who look mostly like their dreamers – focused on a monomania and with a brilliant beacon of light shining straight up from the top of their heads. The Echo Fjordians attach “shadows” to the dreams to keep them from flying away, and watch them as they act out their psychodramas – usually a few times – before they inevitably go through the Dream Departures area and dissipate while crossing a broad, sunny field.

The Echo Fjordians have been guiding these dreams for a thousand years – before that, they were major trading partners with the City, but they broke off contact because it was unseemly to profit from knowing their trading partners’ innermost secrets. So this is a major activity of these people, but it’s not an industry: it’s amusing and entertaining and central to their lives in the way that a church or tradition could be, but it doesn’t bring them money or anything positive other than psychologically.

And the dreams are waning. It’s been a week since there were any, and then we see a bare few of them.

Eartha, of course, is more worried than most people about the change, and goes around talking to various Echo Fjordians to figure out what to do. The aged keeper of the Archives, Old Lloyd, tricks her into taking a journey to the City to find out what happened – Eartha is uniquely right for this job, not just for the physical reasons we can see, but due to other things Old Lloyd knows that become clear later.

So she takes a small rowboat, and sets off. Somehow – this is a fable, basically, so a lot of things are “somehow” – she arrives at the City, to find it in turmoil. The average people of the city are selling everything they own, bit by bit, to a group of men in plaid jackets called the Bouncers, in return for biscuits with four-word “news” reports printed on them. The biscuit messages are all negative – HYSTERICAL JACKASS STABS RECLUSE; that kind of thing – and the point of the exercise is to be connected to the truth of the world, which is negative, and to gain that knowledge by giving up material things.

Of course, it’s all a scam, but it takes a long time for the naïve, confused Eartha to realize that. The bouncers are led by a man named Primus, a nasty twisted authoritarian obsessed with women’s breasts. Eartha runs into him, wanders through the city, is led by a talking cat who knows more than it’s willing to tell Eartha, and eventually learns the truth.

The biscuit business started out normally, but it picked up steam when they started printing messages on the biscuits. The messages are not actually true – they’re just generated randomly – but they seem true because they’re negative, and that led to the feedback loop that ended with the Bouncers controlling the whole city and close to owning everything.

There is a resistance movement – which sends rubbings of gravestone life-summaries down gutter downspouts, and is more effective in breaking the hold of the biscuits on metropolitans’ minds than you would expect – and Eartha joins it, in her confused, easily-led way. It turns out that many of the major characters – mostly ones I haven’t mentioned – are related to each other, and we learn their stories.

Eartha is a didactic story with a message to deliver, so of course it has to end well, to bring Eartha back home and underline its message. (Rural is better than urban, lives are each unique and special, murderous authoritarians should be stopped – that kind of thing.) Old Lloyd shows up again, to deliver large pieces of that message.

Eartha looks lovely – its people are quirky and odd-looking, with lived-in faces, so maybe “lovely” isn’t quite the right word – and it’s full of ideas, impressively constructed and intensely imagined. I had a vague sense that it was a long argument against something that has already shifted substantially since the book was published, but that’s not the book’s fault.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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