Tagged: Foreigners Sure Are Foreign

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness by Bryan Lee O’Malley

This is the one where things become both more and less complicated. On balance, probably less overall, by the end, which is unusual for the mid-point of a series.

For any Gen Z readers coming to Scott Pilgrim for the first time (or, I guess, older people who managed to miss it): this is a six-book graphic novel series by Bryan Lee O’Malley, in a manga-inspired format and video game-inspired world, about a twenty-something slacker from Toronto and his friends, mostly about how he meets a new girlfriend and has to defeat her seven evil exes, but also partly about his band and some related stuff. The six books all came out in the back half of the Aughts, so I guess they’re core Millennial culture, if you want to generation-type them, but Scott himself is such a stereotypical slacker that this Gen X guy found him and his world instantly recognizable.

Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness  is the third book; the first two were Precious Little Life  and Vs. the World . Current editions have color by Nathan Fairbairn; original publication was in black and white.

This one is the all-exes-all-the-time volume: Scott’s new girlfriend Ramona Flowers (the quirky, cool American with a mysterious past) had a previous boyfriend, Todd Ingram, who is the bassist in the hot new band The Clash at Demonhead. And Scott’s ex-girlfriend, Envy Adams, is the leader of that band. So there’s bad blood all around with TCaD – even more so because Envy’s band is more slick, successful, and success-oriented.

TCaD is in Toronto; they’re playing some shows, and Scott’s band Sex Bob-omb is opening for them. Which is just as awkward – for Scott in particular – as it sounds.

So there’s a lot of scenes here of Scott uncomfortable around Envy – she basically kicked him and Steven Stills out of the band the three of them founded, back in high school, and Scott is not known for being comfortable with conflict and ambition and stress in the first place. And there’s a fair bit of flashback, to show those older relationships – Ramona with Todd, Scott with Envy, and even Envy with Todd, since they’re together now. (Well, relatively together – Todd is a cheater there as well as on a level that will affect his fighting abilities later in the book.)

On the positive side, Scott’s most recent ex, the teenager Knives Chau, is less obsessed with him here and more with Envy. She’s maybe growing up a bit, and, as of this point, seems to be over Scott and settling into a new relationship with Young Neil.

And, of course, there are some fights. Scott is at first utterly incapable of fighting Todd – who has superpowers because he’s a vegan, in one of the best-known and most amusing minor plot points of the series – and there are other small and large battles throughout, including the quick bit where Knives gets the highlights punched out of her hair.

The whole Scott Pilgrim saga has a wonderful control of tone and an infectious joy in its own fictional structures – there’s a lovely sequence early in this book that runs through nearly the whole cast, during the first tense meeting with Envy and her band, with captions to say what everyone wants at that moment. There’s a lot of similar moments, where O’Malley is playing with the comics form and with his video-game references, both to make jokes and to quirkily underline serious moments. (When Scott tries to run to access a “save point,” we can feel his flop sweat and panic.)

In some ways, this book is the core of the whole series – sure, it’s not all resolved here, and you can see O’Malley setting some of the hooks for the back half – but this is where the Scott-Envy-Ramona-Todd broken quadrangle happens, and that’s one of the major foci of the whole story.

But, of course, even after getting past Todd here, Scott knows: there are four evil exes yet to fight.

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

The Eyes of the Cat by Alexandro Jodorowsky and Moebius

I don’t have the highest opinion of the work of Alexandro Jodorowsky, to put it mildly. (See my post on the Moebius/Jodorowsky product Madwoman of the Sacred Heart  for a fuller rant.) I tend to think Moebius had massive tendencies towards self-indulgence at best, and that Jodorowsky fed into those, adding a soupy Euro mystic vagueness on top, like a light fog that makes everything unclear.

But I like books that I react strongly to – even if that reaction is not actually positive. The point of art is to make people feel, and revulsion and disdain is a feeling, he said somewhat puckishly. So I keep giving Jodorowsky chances, in large part because other readers – people who I otherwise respect – said consistently for decades that there really was a there there.

Thus The Eyes of the Cat , their 1978 collaboration – I think the first time they worked together, a couple of years before The Incal began. It’s published as a comics album these days, but it’s more experimental than that, and a slimmer, smaller thing – it was originally a giveaway in France, which is oddly appropriate. 

It’s about fifty pages long, alternating full-page illustrations and pages with a single tall minimalist panel – that panel seems not to change for most of the length of the book – and a few words. It’s more like a picture book than a comic: not quite words on one side and image on the other, but almost that.

The words are all in one voice, and we realize eventually it is the boy we see in the tall panels speaking. The boy is speaking to a bird of prey, Meduz, as it stalks – well, you can guess from the title and see from the cover. And the title will tell you what Meduz is looking to take from its prey.

This is a book of mood and atmosphere, one that implies things rather than saying them, creating a tone of horror and creepiness rather than telling a fuller story or describing a world. The boy is deeply creepy: that’s the point. But it takes a little while for the reader to realize it: that is also the point.

The Moebius art is from his prime period, detailed and precise, from the vertiginous ruined cityscape to the intricate crosshatching on Meduz’s feathers. And Jodorowsky’s words are few enough and allusive enough that they work perfectly well – for me at least.

And, before I forget and end this post, the edition I read was the 2013 Humanoids English-language edition, which was translated by Quinn & Katia Donoghue.

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

Tentacles at My Throat by Zerocalcare

You know how, when you’re a kid, there are rigid rules to life that just seem to be there: generated by the kids themselves, random, unquestionable and bedrock?

Zerocalcare’s graphic novels are set in a world – well, they’re memoirs, officially, so it’s the world inside his head, the real world as he sees it or the way he thinks it’s more entertaining to pretend he sees it – based on that logic. It’s a world full of internal voices – society, peer pressure, desires, the weight of kid opinion – demanding that the main character must do X or Y in this situation, and must never do P or Q, no matter what.

Most of us grow out of that kind of thinking, or at least build different obsessive-compulsive structures in our adulthood. But Michele Rech – the Italian cartoonist who works as Zerocalcare – is not most people.

Tentacles at My Throat  was his second graphic novel, after The Armadillo Prophecy ; it was published in Italy in 2014 and this edition, translated into English by Carla Roncalli di Montorio, came out in 2022. I’ve also seen Forget My Name , which I think was his third book. They’re all that sort of thing: mining the mindset of an obsessive, inward-focused childhood and young adulthood, a life intensely examined.

Of course, Zerocalcare constructs each one of these books carefully and deliberately; this isn’t just a rush of “how I really feel.” One major clue to that construction is that the specific internal voices are very different in each book – the internal voice, the superego if you will, of Armadillo was, yes, an armadillo. But here basically the same role is played by “David the Gnome,” the main character of the TV show based on the ’80s illustrated books. And the internal voices are much less central this time – they pop up to stop Zero from doing things, but aren’t the everyday companion the armadillo was.

So this one is a more typical memoir, made more dramatic and serious – in the way that kids do, when telling stories about their own lives – but mostly realistic and grounded. (There is what I think is a burst of fiction at the end, to tie off one loose end that I suppose Zero never learned the real history of, but nothing like the dive into pure fantasy at the end of Forget.)

Tentacles is a three-part story, centered on his school. The main characters are a group of kids, most centrally Zero himself, his friend Slim – who I suspect may be a composite; he’s appeared in every book so far and has been central in all of them – and their friend Sarah. The three sections are of equal length, taking place when Zero is seven, sixteen, and twenty-seven. The first two center on sneaking out of the school to do something – both in that vaguely transgressive and somewhat ritualized way kids have: “prove you’re brave by sneaking under the fence you’re never supposed to cross, and doing this specific thing to prove you did it.” And the third section is the usual reason former students come back to their old school: someone has died.

Of course Zero obsessed about what happened for years afterwards; that’s what he does. The fact that he “betrayed” one of his friends at the age of seven – as always with Zero, his internal dialogue obsessively focuses on that, on how horrible and unreclaimable he is, how everyone would hate him forever if only they knew the truth, and on and on and on.

And, of course, it’s never as bad as he assumes. That’s the point of this spiraling: it can’t possibly be as bad as the person spiraling worries. I do wonder if the “Zerocalcare” of his stories is going to move forward into that realization at any point, or if they’ll stay stuck in that childhood/young adulthood nexus of fear, doubt, and shame. My understanding is that he’s shifted formats over the past few years – moved from telling these stories in graphic novel form into telling them in animated TV-show form, so he can run through them all again and do the same thing over – but, eventually, the character of Zero will have to move out of the conflicted, neurotic twenty-something life, right?

As always with Zerocalcare, I find it’s a bit too overwrought for me. I want to reach into the page, shake Zero, and tell him to just mellow out – nothing is as earth-shaking or as central as he’s sure every last bit of it is.

(Or maybe he’s right, because this is the world he constructed. As far as I can tell, his group of friends have already utterly ruined the lives of two of their schoolmates, and that’s played for laughs. Ha ha! Lifelong trauma because they happened to be there, and aren’t the heroes! It’s funny!)

I guess I’m saying that I appreciate the skill and craft and energy of Zerocalcare’s work, but I hope he’s massively exaggerating a lot of this stuff, because otherwise he and his buddies come across, frankly, as a bunch of horrible little monsters. More than most kids, even.

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

Proxy Mom: My Experience with Portpartum Depression by Sophie Adriansen & Mathou

Babies are hard. I think everyone knows that intellectually, but maybe not emotionally. My own first child was a needy, demanding, unhappy baby – I don’t want to claim too much; this was a quarter-century ago, and I wasn’t the main caregiver, either – so I have some insight but nothing like expertise.

The mother in Proxy Mom: My Experience with Postpartum Depression  has a fairly typical, average baby: no more needy than most, no specific problems, nothing out of the ordinary. Just crying every hour or few hours, all day every day, needing something that’s often not clear. Just an ordinarily demanding, life-altering baby, on top of everything the pregnancy and birth already did to her body.

This graphic novel is loosely a memoir – writer Sophie Adriansen and artist Mathou both lived through versions of this story, the same year, each having a first baby with a man who already had older children. And, from the story, I guess they both had problems attaching, with feeling “motherly,” at least at first – that’s a lot more common than people realize.

A baby is a wrinkled, red-faced, crying lump, capable only of wanting things. That’s not inherently lovable. It takes a lot of hormones hitting just the right way to forge that connection, and sometimes it takes quite a while – sometimes it fizzles at first.

Sometimes, like with Marietta in this story, it’s more overwhelming and painful than wonderful and special. And the realization that life is not going to be “like before, but with a baby” but instead “completely different, in ways you didn’t expect” is frightening and unnerving: there’s now this tiny person that is utterly dependent on you for everything, needy in a way no other human being has been for you before.

This is the story of about those first six months, the toughest time, for Marietta and her husband Chuck and baby Zoe. How she was overwhelmed by the pain at first, in the hospital, after a tough labor and pain during breastfeeding. How Chuck was the experienced one – but not the one whose body was battered by the birth, and not the one there all day every day with tiny needy Zoe. How she wanted that deep connection with her baby, but it wasn’t there at first – how she found it, how she got there in the end.

There are no huge problems. This is not the kind of memoir subtitled “how I got through This Horrible Thing and it made me a better person.” Birth is natural. Babies are natural. Crying babies and post-partum pain and being overwhelmed are entirely natural. It’s huge for the woman going through it. It feels too big too handle: being responsible, every second of every day, for another person, a person who can do nothing at all for herself.

But Marietta made it through. She didn’t get back “her old life, but with a baby” – she got back a new life, with a lot of the pieces of the old one, plus a baby, transforming everything else as a baby always does. Adriansen and Mathou have lived this, and they tell that story naturalistically and realistically, always through Marietta’s viewpoint, always focused on how she feels about herself and her baby.

They tell that story in a lovely, immediate way through cartooning. Mathou’s style is warm and inviting, big eyes and rounded bodies and slightly exaggerated expressions. Adriansen keeps the captions short and focused – this is the kind of book that could have a blizzard of expert opinions footnoted on every page, but she smartly knows they’re not needed. Marietta’s situation is natural: millions of women go through it every year, and need support and love and attention to get through it.

This US edition was translated and Americanized by Montana Kane from the original French, including, I assume, some facts and figures Adriansen includes along the way. I noticed the numbers were about the USA, but nothing else about the translation, which is the best reaction to a translation: if you don’t notice it, it’s done right.

This is the kind of book that says “you’re not alone” to a huge number of women struggling with what is usually the biggest, hardest, most exhaustingly wonderful thing that they’ve ever had to deal with. It says that clearly, lovingly, from the point of view of another woman who has been through it.

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

One Hundred Tales by Osamu Tezuka

It’s tough to be a fan of someone when you’re not quite sure what aspect of their work you’re a fan of. I read a big bunch of Osamu Tezuka books, mostly published by Vertical, more than a decade ago – MW, Ayako , Ode to Kirihito, Apollo’s Song, a few others – and liked them all a lot. They were smart, sophisticated, serious books for adults, with a striking depth of expression and focused imaginative power.

Vertical might have published everything Tezuka did in that vein; I really don’t know. But I haven’t seen anything else similar from Tezuka in my scattered reading since then. The latest attempt was One Hundred Tales , originally published in Shonen Jump magazine in installments in 1971 under the title Hyaku Monogatari and translated by Iyasu Adair Nagata for this 2023 Ablaze edition. (It was part of a series called “Lion Books” that some awkwardly-worded backmatter in the this book attempts to explain, but doesn’t do a great job of – they don’t seem to have been “books” in the first place, but multiple-segment manga stories published in SJ; the narrative slides from talking about this series to other manga projects to anime projects without a whole lot of clarity; and there’s no explanation of what “Lion” is meant to mean in this context.)

Tales is, I think, part of the main flow of Tezuka’s career, the huge flood of stories mostly for teen (and younger) boys that he created for so long at such volume. There are elements that resonate with adults, but it’s mostly an adventure story with minor pretentions of philosophical depth, with the usual random Tezuka comic relief and contemporary cultural references thrown in willy-nilly.

The title makes it sound like a retelling of the Arabian Nights, but it’s actually a loose retelling of Faust, set in a vaguely historical-fantasy Japanese setting. The main character is a mousy accountant/samurai (shades of “Office? Submarine!” ), Ichiru Hanri, sentenced to commit ritual suicide for his very minor role in a coup plot against his feudal lord. He doesn’t want to die, and offers his soul if he can survive – so a demon (yokai, more accurately) in the form of a beautiful woman, Sudama, offers to buy his soul in exchange for three wishes.

Ichiru wishes to live his life over again, to have the most beautiful woman in the world, and to rule his own country and castle. And so the episodic story moves forward – first Sudama makes Ichiru young and handsome, then he visits (in his new face and under an assumed name) his horrible wife and lovely young daughter, then he chases his choice for most beautiful woman (Tamano no Mae, a powerful yokai) with no good result, then has the requisite training montage to become a stronger and better sword-fighter, and finally spends the back half of the story working for another minor feudal lord, massively enriching that lord and then overthrowing him.

It’s all pretty zig-zag. It does add up to a coherent story, but it only maps to the wishes fairly loosely. Sudama is also vastly more “helpful attractive supernatural woman” than she is “powerful scary demon” – the Faust parallels are mostly superficial, and drop away for the required happy ending.

Tezuka was an energetic cartoonist – sometimes too much so, to my eye, since this book starts off with Ichiru in full comic-relief mode, all goofy panic and silly faces, and the tide of comic relief comes in several more times as the book goes on. But, if you think of this as an adventure story made very quickly for publication in a massive weekly comics magazine for boys – which is exactly what it is – it’s admirable and pretty accomplished in that context.

Whether that context is enough to overcome the negatives is up to every reader to decide. Tezuka is a world-renowned creator of stories in comics form, but his standard mode is very idiosyncratic and very tied to the specifics of the Japanese market and audience at the time.

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

Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls

We are all haunted by history, one way or another. For some, it’s personal; for others, it’s public. After the 20th century we had, for all too many it’s both, intertwined.

Tessa Hulls is in her thirties, the second child of two first-generation immigrants to the US, brought up in a tiny Northern California town where she and her brother were  the only people at all like them. Her mother Rose is mixed-race, born in tumultuous 1950 Shanghai to a Swiss diplomat who had already run back home before the birth and a Chinese journalist, Sun Yi, who thought she could weather any storm.

Hulls tells the story of all three women, over the last hundred years, in Feeding Ghosts , a magnificent, impressive first graphic novel all about the ways Tessa and Rose, and Sun Yi before them, are haunted by history.

Hulls is the one telling the story, and that frames it all: she has those core American concerns of “who am I?” and “where did I come from?” Making it more complicated, she’s here exploring her Chinese identity as the daughter of two generations of Chinese women who had children with European men, and as someone raised in America entirely in the English language.

One more thing: one very big thing. Sun Yi was moderately famous: she escaped China for Hong Kong in the late 1950s, when Rose was a child, and wrote a scandalous memoir of her life under the Communist upheavals of the previous decade. She got her daughter, Rose, accepted into a very highly regarded boarding school in Hong Kong, despite not really having the money to pay for it. And then she mentally collapsed. Sun Yi spent the next two decades in and out of mental hospitals and was eventually cared for by her daughter in America starting in 1977, when Rose was 27. Rose spent her teen years in that boarding school, alternately worrying about her mother’s care and being molded to be part of an internationalist elite. And then Rose fled to America, first for college, then for a brief nomadic freedom that her daughter would eventually emulate.

Let me pull that all together: Tessa Hulls, whom a lot of Americans would cruelly call “one-quarter Chinese,” grew up in a town with no other Chinese people. Just a mother, quirky and specific and tightly controlled, the kind of mother who has Rules for everything that are rarely said explicitly, never explained, seemingly arbitrary, and core to her concept of the world. And a grandmother, trapped in her own head, scribbling every day as if she was eternally re-writing that famous memoir, and speaking only the smallest bits of broken English. That mother and grandmother spoke a different language together – I think mostly the dialect of Shanghai – which they never taught Tessa. “Chinese” was that language, that mysterious past, the symbol for all that was hidden and frightening and different for Hulls growing up.

Hulls has a lot to get through in Feeding Ghosts: a lot of family history and related world history, a lot of nuance and cultural detail that she learned as she was researching her family’s past. She tells it all mostly in sequence, after a brief prologue, but “Tessa Hulls” is present throughout, our narrator and filter, the voice telling us how she learned the story almost as much as she tells the story itself. This is a story unearthed and told, not something pretending to be purely dry and factual. It’s not an exaggeration to say it’s primarily about Tessa’s journey, how she decided to figure out this tangled knot of her family history, to do it with her mother as much as possible, to reconcile the two of them and try to come to a place here they could better meet and understand each other.

Hull’s pages are organic, specific, inky. She uses swirling white outlines on a black background as a visual element regularly – the pull of all of those ghosts, if you want to be reductive – to open and close chapters, and more subtly in the backgrounds of fraught moments.

One of the hallmarks of a great big book is that it leaves you wanting to know more. I was enthralled by the stories of young Sun Yi and Rose, and how Tessa learned what they did and what it meant. (The latter is the more important thing, in an ancient, rule-bound, formalistic society like China – maybe even more so in a time of such transition and upheaval as the early Communist years.) But I felt that she was less forthcoming about her own youth. This is very much a story of these three women, but I wondered about other figures: Hulls’s father is almost entirely absent, signposted as a British man with a thicker accent than Rose and seen only a handful of times. And Tessa’s brother, just one year older, growing up in this same house and environment, is even less present – did he feel any of these pressures? Or was this so much a matrilineal thing, tied into those cultural assumptions of what men and women do, that he was able to “be American” in ways more closed to Tessa?

But that’s not the story Hulls is telling. And every story casts shadows: the story that-is dimly showing flickers of other stories that could have been, or might yet be. The brightest, most brilliant stories cast the clearest shadows – that may be why I wonder so much about Hull’s father and brother; they’re dark, mysterious shadows just outside the circle of these three women, brilliantly illuminated and seen in depth.

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

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