I was shocked by a series of 1 star reviews for this but I can see that for some, there will be a couple of problems. First might be that this book isI was shocked by a series of 1 star reviews for this but I can see that for some, there will be a couple of problems. First might be that this book is about the homicide department of the Baltimore police in the 1980s, so what that means is almost all the detectives are white and almost all of the criminals and victims are Black. And the white detectives all look similar, with great heavy moustaches and unchanging mournful expressions. They never smile, they never look surprised. What was it in the 80s with moustaches? And there’s no action – the cops get to the murder scene after the crime has happened, so they stand and stare and write stuff down. And of course the victim is not moving much either. There are no car chases, there are no shootouts. (Okay, one brief shootout.) Practically the only action most of these detectives engage in is getting in and out of cars.
Then there’s the concept of the “red ball”, the cops’ name for a murder that “matters”. That concept will be very offensive to some modern readers. Most of the murders in Baltimore were connected to the drug trade. Those that weren’t, those where the victim is a child, or a city official, say, are the red balls, the “real” murders. This was the way of thinking. A dead 22 year old Black guy in an alley with no witnesses was not a red ball.
And also there’s a long discussion of a police shooting in this book and how attitudes were very slow to change. Were? Still are.
If it was a cop who killed John Scott, Worden believed that the incident was not an intentional murder. It was a fight in an alley that went bad, a tussle that ended when a patrolman used his weapon…if that was the scenario, if a patrolman fled from the scene because he had no faith in his department to protect him….
Probably not how someone writing about police shootings today would phrase it.
SOME HISTORY
This whole thing has a history; it began as a series of articles by David Simon who was “embedded” as they say with Baltimore homicide for about a year. Then that became a book which is still one of my all time favourite true crime books, it’s brilliant (but very long).
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Then the book became the basis for the tv show Homicide : Life on the Street which ran from 1993 to 1999
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which dramatized most of the stuff in the book and then added lots more fictional cases. It was a real masterpiece of tv drama with a fantastic cast (Melissa Leo! Andre Braugher! Yaphet Kotto! Richard Belzer!) . After that came the famous The Wire (2002-2008) which was a kinda-sorta spinoff from Homicide and at that point many people became fans.
So now, 32 years after the original book, we get the graphic novel version. But that’s a misnomer as the original book wasn’t a novel. This is a graphic nonfiction book. I thought it was a great addition to this particular universe.
Maybe Homicide: the Theme Park will be next....more
However good and even important this long detailed memoir of working in the oil industry in Alberta, Canada between 2005 and 2008 may be, it ain’t an However good and even important this long detailed memoir of working in the oil industry in Alberta, Canada between 2005 and 2008 may be, it ain’t an easy one to recommend. You wouldn’t call it a misery memoir, but it is profoundly unhappy. Part of it is about rape: this comment by Kate Beaton on p 381 encapsulates the horror – the situation is a very common one and is surely not limited to the hyper-masculine world of the oilfields – people are getting wrecked at a party, the woman is drunk, the guy is drunk, but he’s not too drunk to push her into a dark room and assault her. Thinking back on it later Kate says to her friend
It felt like I had a second to decide and an eternity to live with it
Decide to resist, that is, to scream or to not scream. She doesn’t and when she inadvertently tells two guys about it later they laugh. We were there and y’all were both drunk as fuck, we all were. C'mon. In the afterword Kate says
I was nothing in his life but a short release from the boredom and loneliness endemic in camp life, but he was a major trauma in mine.
So this whole book is about the moral Grey Zone, how women in a 99% male workforce get constantly sniped at and leered at and drooled over and every aspect of their being commented on and fantasized about and lied about and how they find themselves going along with it and putting up with such a lot they wouldn’t ever tolerate in the “real world” back home for one tiny minute. Kate makes it clear only half of the guys are gross pigs, but that’s still a lot. It’s also a story about her own acknowledged naivete about things like the widespread use of cocaine by the guys and – a big one this – how your own brother, your own father, should he be cooped up in an oil camp for a couple of years with no other company that bored rowdy men, might very well become just like one of the leering jeering locker-room nasty-comment guys. That was a sickening realisation for her.
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Given all of the above, this graphic memoir might not be for everybody....more
Since I only doled out a meagre 2.5 stars to Gabrielle Bell’s Everything is Flammable which I understand was her Long Awaited Big One, I probably shouSince I only doled out a meagre 2.5 stars to Gabrielle Bell’s Everything is Flammable which I understand was her Long Awaited Big One, I probably should have left it there, but no, a burst of clickmania brought this earlier collection to my door. Of the 13 stories in here, it could be that G Bell would be less than thrilled if I said that the two best are “One Afternoon” and “Tobermory” because the first is based on a short story by Kate Chopin and the second on a short story by Saki. So I think that would be a case of damning with faint praise.
Otherwise these slices of my life as the odd kid of odd parents were perfectly acceptable, nothing at all to complain about, the graphic novel as room temperature. But I was always feeling an enormous restraint in these stories, and that G Bell could be telling us SO much more if she wanted to. ...more
I figured I would never read this famous socialist novel because every other review says it’s repetitive, didactic and contrived and those are its fanI figured I would never read this famous socialist novel because every other review says it’s repetitive, didactic and contrived and those are its fans talking! And it’s SIX hundred pages long. So I thought well, if I’m ever reincarnated, I’ll put it at the top of my reading list. Until then, sorry Robert. But then I saw this graphic novel version (a mere 352 pages!) and it was love at first sight – the art is really gorgeous, and proved once again that Mary Poppins was so right to say that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down in the most delightful way. In this case several pounds of sugar help gallons and gallons of medicine go down.
Five stars for the art & story editing & general spiffiness.
But only 3.5 stars for Robert Tressell’s actual story.
Even in this truncated & compressed form the characters & dialogue & painful twists of fate hammer you over the head with a pure undiluted socialist message. And then the story pauses while we listen to a ten page illustrated lecture on socialism. This is exactly what I expected but still…. Whew….
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IS IT IN ANY WAY STILL RELEVANT? OF COURSE
Written round about 110 years ago some of the bosses-grinding-the-faces-of-the-poor stuff might sound a little over the top. Because one of the developments of capitalism that RT did not foresee was the increasing affluence of Western societies. When I was a tiny infant there were only about five or six cars on the street where I lived. Kids played football in the road all day long, no problem. Now the same street is jammed bumper to bumper with cars, some 4 by 4s, and no kids ever play in the street. There is no comparison between the material wealth of an ordinary English working class family in 1910 and one in 2022*. But we just need to raise our eyes to more distant horizons to find very similar ragged trousered philanthropists working 16 hour days in other countries making stuff for Western people to sell to each other. They have not yet got their big cars. A lot of them don’t even have running water and sanitation.
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NAILS HIT ON HEAD; READER SQUIRMS
RT is very good on the painful subject of working class stupidity, meaning their limitless capacity to vote for the parties of the rich and view any leftwing socialist parties as limbs of Satan. Most of this book is made up of a series of very uncomfortable debates between a couple of goodlyhearted socialist guys and their hostile fellow workers. They say stuff like
There’s always been rich and poor, you’ll never change it.
Socialism means “What’s yours is mine”
Socialism means atheism and free love.
It’s a beautiful idea but it’s too good to be practical because human nature is too mean and selfish.
What about the jobs nobody wants to do? Who will you make do them if everybody’s equal?
RT was also not around to observe the progress of the Russian experiment in socialism. I wonder what he would have said to that.
Soundtrack :
Which Side Are you On? By Natalie Merchant
This World Is Not Fair : Randy Newman
Banquet : Joni Mitchell
Get Up Stand Up : Wailers
Dear Mrs Roosevelt : Bob Dylan
Hard Times : De Dannan
The Sun Never Shines On The Poor : Richard Thompson
Poor And Needy : Misty In Roots
We Poor Labouring Men : Waterson Carthy
and
Pete Seeger’s entire album entitled CAN’T YOU SEE THIS SYSTEM IS ROTTEN THROUGH AND THROUGH which features songs such as My Sweetheart’s the Mule in the Mines and I Hate the Capitalist System
*But on the news in the UK just now there is a constant flow of stories about energy price rises, and it’s often said that this coming winter there will be many who will have to choose between “heating or eating”. And right now in the UK we have a system of food banks which dish out free (tinned) food for those deemed as poor. RT would have said plus ca change, plus le meme chose....more
Maybe this was one glum memoir about a depressed-but-not-unsuccessful New York based therapy-attending graphic artist and her oddball also-depressed mMaybe this was one glum memoir about a depressed-but-not-unsuccessful New York based therapy-attending graphic artist and her oddball also-depressed mother too many. It had that strong indie movie atmosphere that I like* but there was just so much gloom, I think nobody smiles once in the whole 156 pages. And there were several pages of utter inconsequentiality too many
- Disposing of a bag of smelly fertilizer - Trying to figure out if they are looking at a star or a drone - Buying stuff and talking to pretty nice salesmen - Buying more stuff and talking to more pretty nice salesmen - Being slightly awkward with people - Mistaking a guy’s outerwear for camouflage gear - Asking for advice about a cucumber plant infestation
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And many more, that was just a quick random sample.
No offence intended but Gabrielle Bell paints herself as a sad person riven with social anxiety and finding everything a strain (except that she negotiates a complicated journey from Brooklyn to North California perfectly well, which I surely couldn’t do). Whilst she explores her relationship with her batty old mother (more offence not intended, but really, this mother would give anybody dangerously high blood pressure, beginning with setting herself on fire and burning down her own house) and other friends there’s a large empty space where a significant other might have been, and this is never alluded to. Well, a memoir is always partial.
I liked the bit where both she and her mother think at the commencement of this woebegone tale that she should make the complicated trip to California because it will give her some interesting material for her graphic novels. (And something to mention to her therapist.) But it turns out that burning down your own house can be quite a dull business.
Note to cat lovers : There is a horrific section where GB details the many terrible deaths of cats she has known in her life. It is like The Texas Chainsaw Cat Massacre. You have been warned.
2.5 stars rounded up because I am a nice person and I love graphic novels
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*Half Nelson, Trees Lounge, Me and You and Everyone we Know, Old Joy, Stranger than Paradise, and so on. ...more
Most beautiful and exciting book of the year so far by far. I bought this in the self-congratulatory spirit of let’s-support-our-local-comix-shop – thMost beautiful and exciting book of the year so far by far. I bought this in the self-congratulatory spirit of let’s-support-our-local-comix-shop – this is the shop –
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and okay it did look quite colourful and jazzy and interesting but I wasn’t expecting the floor to fall away almost immediately in a very Gaspar Noe Enter the Void kind of way
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but it did
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IS THERE A STORY THOUGH?
Yes. But wait!
THE THREE CATEGORIES OF GREAT GRAPHIC NOVELS
1) The ones where the story is the thing and the art is the quirky or endearing or just serviceable machinery to deliver it. This would be Alison Bechdel
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Guy DeLisle
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And that fun guy Derf Backderf
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2) Ordinary Perfection. This is where the art isn’t original at all, it’s just exquisite. Story and art in complete harmony. This would be
Adrian Tomine
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Or Will McPhail
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3) The artists who it seems out of nowhere magic an original style that transforms our vision as we read. In some of these cases the story is left far behind or is twisted into unrecognisable forms
Junji Ito
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Chris Ware
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Anna Mull in Square Eyes
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Richard McGuire in Here
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Shaun Tan in The Arrival
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So The City of Belgium is in this rarefied category.
THE STORY
Is about three characters who don’t know each other. They are out for a night on the tiles in the big bad city. They are young and they have problems. They have dangerous friends (one of whom is frightening – and hilarious). Although the art is OVERWHELMING this is a dialogue-crammed book and the dialogue is funny too – here is Victoria’s friend having difficulty getting Victoria to pick a club they could go to
World Cafe? Too much drum 'n' bass. Too many hats. The Roosevelt Room? That's a cocktail bar. And you don't like cocktails? I don't like the cocktail crowd. The Hotsi-Totsi is open... Boys with scarves yelling their poetry in your ear.
There’s a strong seen-too-much the world-is-my-oyster-but-it’s-only-a-shell feel to these lives. With Victoria Joni Mitchell’s People’s Parties is the soundtrack
One minute she's so happy Then she's crying on someone's knee Saying laughing and crying You know it's the same release
Or maybe the Stones, 19th Nervous Breakdown
Center of a crowd, talking much too loud, running up and down the stairs Well, it seems to me that you have seen too much in too few years And though you've tried you just can't hide your eyes are edged with tears
That’s just her, there are two other lovely appalling characters we are following. Round and round, in and out of taxis, through the thronged streets, elbowing the tiresome revelers to one side, clutching a bottle of Nolet’s Reserve, and fumbling for a bent credit card to try to eke out another twinkling trickle of euphoria before the horror of dawn and the new day arrives like a month in jail, our three lost souls teeter on the edge of bliss, or rage, or disintegration. Just another Saturday night in the great metropolis.
I don’t care for the expression “guilty pleasure” too much although I will say that if you enjoy watching movies from Tiers 7 and 8 from The Most DistI don’t care for the expression “guilty pleasure” too much although I will say that if you enjoy watching movies from Tiers 7 and 8 from The Most Disturbing Movies Iceberg* then yeah, that would count as a seriously guilty pleasure, but the way people often use this term is to titter about how they love to read Agatha Christie or Harry Potter instead of The Brothers Karamazov or they watch Mamma Mia Here We Go Again! in preference to the collected works of Bela Tarr, but having said all of that yeah I do acknowledge some guilty pleasurability in the consumption of this graphic delight Going into Town by Roz Chast of Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? fame, that title being a total blast and a must-read, this one, not so much unless you want 40 minutes of untrammelled fun (& you will still have time to make a cup of coffee) because this book is wee, tiny, incy wincy, slender, and the only bad thing about it is that it should be twice as long, New York being a large-ish place as everyone knows. Another element of the guilt involved in reading Going Into Town in 35 minutes is that it cost three times the price of a long novel, because even though this is a 2nd hand copy (thank you Point Pleasant Borough Branch, Ocean County Library, 834 Beaver Dam Road, Point Pleasant, NJ, thank you so much, but I just do not understand why you wrote DISCARD on the back of this pristine copy and sent it to me, there is no sense to be made from this! Are there no Roz Chast fans at all in Point Pleasant NJ?) you simply can’t find cheap graphic novels anywhere, or whatever this thing is, it isn’t a novel. Or a travel guide. But it is so sweet, like the best ice cream you ever ate.
I could wax more lyrical about this thing but I have to stop now or I might end up taking more time to write a review than it did to read it, which would be ridiculous.
*you may have been thinking The Human Centipede 2 or Cannibal Holocaust were the most disturbing movies but no, they are only on Tier 3
On every page Will McPhail pours gentle millennial satire over his characters like salted caramel over an angry lobster melt – his stand-in Nick gloomOn every page Will McPhail pours gentle millennial satire over his characters like salted caramel over an angry lobster melt – his stand-in Nick gloomily says to himself stuff like
I’m going to spend the entire day in coffee shops searching for something that I’m not emotionally intelligent enough to define
Or
I tend to work in public places partly to escape the porn in my apartment
Like in any romcom he meets a young woman and okay... I see now that maybe it is a bit groanworthy that she turns out to be a sexy oncologist...
Hmm.
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Actually this book is like a souffle, light, airy, graceful, and you better eat it quick. Could be if you think too much about it, it will deflate into a sticky mess.
The rules in this neighborhood are - in the event of a loved one being murdered - 1. No crying; 2. No snitching; 3. nearest male relative to the victiThe rules in this neighborhood are - in the event of a loved one being murdered - 1. No crying; 2. No snitching; 3. nearest male relative to the victim must kill the killer, no argument. The first two rules are not too difficult. The third rule, logically, inevitably, creates the next victim, and the next person to require revenge. And so....on.
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Jason Reynolds already had a hit with this short raw story about a 15 year old boy who thinks he has to kill his brother's murderer, so this is the graphic version. I hadn't heard of any of this but when I saw that it had just arrived in my house (not ordered by me) I grabbed it and read it before the person who did order it could get round to it (Why not? No harm done!) mainly because I haven't read a graphic novel all year and I was suffering withdrawal symptoms.
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The story consists almost entirely of a trip in an elevator lasting one minute and seven seconds. There is a boy, a gun and some other people, most of whom are already dead.
It said what should be said about such a tragedy, but I was remembering the same strong message being shouted loudly by movies like Boyz n the Hood in 1991 and Menace II Society in 1993. Thirty years ago.
A collection of short stories which have no logic except dream logic (i.e. no logic) but a whole lot of eidetic disgusting body horror and very crazy A collection of short stories which have no logic except dream logic (i.e. no logic) but a whole lot of eidetic disgusting body horror and very crazy zoned-out dialogue – I will give you a flavour
This isn’t a caterpillar – it’s an assembly of the skulls of my ancestors.
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That wasn’t a human face. That was the face of someone who lives beyond the black darkness!
Several thousand years ago, we met in her hospital room and our love blossomed!
In these stories giant faces of real people appear in the sky with nooses dangling from them, and they then try to find and hang the person whose face they have. Or people get a disease where you get holes all over.
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Or people drip their pimples over their next of kin
The pimples on my face multiplied almost before my eyes
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To a large extent this is easy stuff – we can all come up with strange or horrible ideas from dreams - I dreamed I was the last chocolate in a box and a huge hand was trying to find me and eat me; I dreamed when I went into a department store in town all the store assistants started unzipping their clothing to reveal a smaller store assistant inside; but Junji Ito’s artwork makes it nearly worthwhile ploughing through the daftness.
Got to admit that the unflinching focus on schoolgirl or teenage girl protagonists seemed very pervy, eventually (but he does draw them beautifully!)
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Anyway, my advice is, if you see this guy on the street
Guilt – more than enough for everyone. Come and get it, it's free!
For me, I feel the usual guilt when I whizz through a big graphic novel in just overGuilt – more than enough for everyone. Come and get it, it's free!
For me, I feel the usual guilt when I whizz through a big graphic novel in just over an hour knowing full well that it probably took the artist two or three years hard labour to make it.
Then there’s the guilt in sitting in my leafy suburb reading about the grinding misery of the poor and downtrodden. And kind of making a mental calculation along the way – now, is this guy and his Lithuanian family toiling in the stockyards and factories of Chicago in the 1890s worse off or better off than the inhabitants of the workhouse in Oliver Twist or the Mexican street kids in Bunuel’s film Los Olvidados or the prisoners banged up in the gulag in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich or the slum dwellers of Mumbai in Behind the Beautiful Forevers or the Okies in The Grapes of Wrath? How do they score on the miseryometer?
Then there’s the guilt of our main man here Jurgis Rudkus who can’t get a decent enough job to keep a roof over his family’s heads and when his foot gets injured by a rampaging steer in the section where he’s shovelling up intestines all day long it starts going downhill rapidly.
You can see this book is not a barrel of laughs. It’s a graphic novelisation of Upton Sinclair’s famously grim expose of American immigrant working experiences.
Typical quote :
It’s from the chemicals he stands in all day. They’ve eaten through his new boots and have now attacked his feet. The other workers say it’s a regular thing in that line of work.
Ugh!
I was shocked but not surprised to find the 1890 version of Harvey Weinstein in this story. There was a really chilling quote from one of Harvey's victims, who said that he asked her –
Why would you want to put your career at risk for five minutes of your time?
Same thing happens here to one of the young immigrant women, but in her case it was a bit more than five minutes of her time.
Ugh.
After finishing this it did strike me that the industrialisation phase of capitalism seems inevitably to include some decades of unfettered viciousness – and some countries are having their decades of misery right now, check out this Wall Street Journal headline from 9 days ago :
New Delhi Factory Fire Kills at Least 43
Many laborers died of smoke inhalation as they slept in a building where they worked; a lack of alarms
But capitalism cannot continue indefinitely like that, unions and political opposition and (we naively hope) some shreds of remaining humanity will gradually improve conditions for workers, at least from the absolutely unbearable to the just about tolerable. You may say that American and European capitalism has just learned how to outsource its sweatshops from the developing world now. As in this (one of many) headline from the Daily Mirror three months ago
Replica football shirts costing £107 made by sweatshop workers 'on 75p an hour'
EXCLUSIVE: Workers in Thailand making Manchester City shirts will be paid just £7.53 for a 10-hour day but the jerseys cost nearly £103
I knew the original Upton Sinclair novel would be too grim a read for me, so this graphic version was just what I wanted. The art is lovely – almost dissonantly, given its horrible subject matter. Could be only the pre-ghost Scrooge would be giving this out as a Christmas present, but nevertheless, this graphic novel is
There are funny nonfiction graphic novel-memoirs – Notes on a Thesis, Trashed, Can’t we Talk about Something More Pleasant? – and there are mopey nonfThere are funny nonfiction graphic novel-memoirs – Notes on a Thesis, Trashed, Can’t we Talk about Something More Pleasant? – and there are mopey nonfiction graphic novel-memoirs (Are You my Mother?, Blankets, The Poor Bastard) and there are black-hole-grim nonfiction graphic novel-memoirs (Maus, Footnotes in Gaza, Our Cancer Year).
Vanni is the black-hole grim type.
It starts with life in a little seaside village in Sri Lanka, everyone pottering around, fishing and cooking and gossiping, but on page 41 :
It’s a wave – Aiyo, it’s a huge wave!
Yes, it’s the tsunami.
Then, three years later, on page 80:
You all need to be gone in an hour. Take the western road – waste no time! Don’t leave anyone behind!
It’s the civil war. The Tamil Tigers are clearing out villages and telling them all to leg it to a safer area. It turned out there wasn’t a safer area. We follow two families through the rest of the war, and we meet with all the things we have learned to expect in wartime – starvation, bombings of civilians by accident, bombings of civilians on purpose, panic, lost family members, conscription of family members, sudden death, misery, escape finally for the survivors, mental trauma.
This book is beautifully drawn by Lindsay Pollock. Five stars for the artwork.
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(too small to give much of an idea - this is a large book)
The author Benjamin Dix is a Western guy who worked for the United Nations 2004-2008 and then did a PhD. He explained :
I interviewed hundreds of people whilst I worked in Vanni for 4 years (2004-2008) concerning the tsunami and then the war and displacement. I wrote my PhD in Anthropology on conflict and violence and the transformation of complex and traumatic testimonies and how to turn that into sequential art. The Vanni book was the foundation of my thesis. Lindsay and I then interviewed around 20 Tamil refugees in London, Zurich and Chennai. Due to security concerns of people’s identity we decided that we would amalgamate these interviews into a fictionalised family that you see in the book.
Dr Dix is now a Senior Fellow at SOAS (School of African and Oriental Studies), which is part of the University of London. He now runs a thing called PositiveNegatives. The idea is to turn academic research into comics and animations. The testimony of survivors can be anonymized and can tell parts of stories that were never - and could never be - filmed or photographed.
You can see that this is about the worthiest graphic novel in a long time. It raises two questions in my mind that I always find very disturbing.
One is – again we have a situation where white people are telling the stories of non white people because they have the wherewithal to do so. They are doing a grand job – one of their other projects, for instance, is all about sexual harassment in the garment industry in Bangladesh. I am not complaining. More power to their elbow. But I dunno, is this another version of the white savior complex? This exquisitely produced graphic novel makes me think – yes, it kind of is. But I don’t feel good about thinking that.
Much more importantly is that Vanni spotlights the horrible truth that local war crimes, however vicious, however depraved, will be barely noticed by the outside world. The civil war killed around about 100,000 people....more
Me: No. Can’t you see I’m in the middle of something? I’m dissecting a novel. You get it.
Dingdong!
HATTER: WDingdong!
HATTER: Are you going to get that?
Me: No. Can’t you see I’m in the middle of something? I’m dissecting a novel. You get it.
Dingdong!
HATTER: We’ve been through this already. I’m a cat so I have no opposable thumbs to speak of. I can’t reach the doorknob.
Me: Well, go and see who it is. You can do that at least.
Hatter runs off & peers through the front window, then runs back.
HATTER: It’s one of those door to door salesmen. He looks harmless, although he has very poor posture. I myself have perfect posture – look.
Hatter struts around the room throwing grand poses.
Me: You think a lot of yourself don’t you, for a small ginger cat.
HATTER: Mens sana in corpore sano. Anyhow, he’s got a big bag and a lanyard to prove that you should give him a fiver at least.
Me: Sigh. How tiresome. Okay, well don’t touch this novel, even if it starts whining. Don’t take any of these needles out.
I open the front door.
Salesman: Hello sir, I am totally miserable and I have a bullet lodged in my brain, would you like to buy any household requirements, I have pan scourers, flannels, hoover bags, I have doileys, carbolic soap, I have devices for getting stones out of horses’ hooves, I have saucy pictures of the latest Hollywood sensations, I have spare parts for a space shuttle, I have freezedried mammals-
Me: No, no, I have all that stuff. I bought pan scourers last week, a pack of six for £2. Yours are £12 each. Ridiculous.
Salesman: Oh sir, I drag myself 60 miles every day and me with a bad back and a bullet lodged in my brain, don’t know how it got there, maybe I was born with it. I have packet soup, I have graphic novels –
Me: What? Graphic novels? Why didn’t you say? Let’s see.
An hour later. The now disregarded dissected novel is still pinned to the table, leaking a greenish bile.
HATTER: Well, is it any good?
Me: Hmmm.
Later.
Me: Hmmm.
Later still.
Me: Done.
HATTER: So, did this “graphic novel” meet with your requirements, boss?
Me: Why are you talking in a Scottish accent?
HATTER: This is my normal voice.
Me: No, you sound like Sean Connery.
HATTER: Och, ye sassenach flatterer.
Me : Maggy Garrisson is a gorgeously drawn and ravishingly coloured novel, five stars for that; also, I loved Maggy herself, who wouldn’t. The problem was the story (stories, I should say), simple as that. They were really kind of uninteresting. Very low low level skullduggery and gangstery nonsense. Dear authors : Get rid of all the noir trappings and give us a 300 page life of Maggy and you’re guaranteed 5 glowing pulsing stars....more
The graphic novels that come my way sure turn out to be GLOOMY, BLEAK and THOROUGHLY DEPRESSING no matter how filigree the artwork may be – the very tThe graphic novels that come my way sure turn out to be GLOOMY, BLEAK and THOROUGHLY DEPRESSING no matter how filigree the artwork may be – the very titles tell you that you can leave your laughing equipment outside – Death Note Volume 1 : Boredom; Our Cancer Year; Can’t we Talk about Something More Pleasant?; My Friend Dahmer; The Poor Bastard. The title of this one – Home After Dark – isn’t too much of a downer, and the cover is kind of neutral, but as soon as you start you realise you’ve been had, and yes, here’s another 400 exquisitely drawn pages of AWFUL MISERY.
Nobody smiles in this book except the guy who's just about to administer the kid a beating.
In his big hit book Stitches (which I haven’t read) Mr Small depicted his own traumatic childhood, and in this one, according to the note at the back, he’s depicting the horrible childhood of one of his mates. So, here’s a thought - if you’ve been abandoned by your parents, beaten by bullies, branded as a thief and left for dead by a different bunch of bullies, you might think of contacting Mr Small to see if he wants to put you in a third book of grim teenage experiences. Or there again he might listen and say, nah, I’ve covered all that already. Say, did a cannibal ever try to eat you alive when you were twelve? No? Wait, were you ever kept as a sex slave for four years in a cage? No? Pity.
Anyway, a very compelling story. It took him about ten years of sweat and blood to create it and I whipped through it in an hour, which right there kinda made me feel bad....more
This is a therapy memoir and at one point Alison’s therapist says
I have the sense that you were a very sweet kid. A wonderful kid, in fact! Because, aThis is a therapy memoir and at one point Alison’s therapist says
I have the sense that you were a very sweet kid. A wonderful kid, in fact! Because, as an adult… and this will probably embarrass you… you’re really adorable.
This took me aback, because for the previous 200 pages the Alison Bechdel presented here is anything but. She’s horribly self-obsessed, self-loathing, morose, envious, morbid and really a total glumbucket. She never cracks a smile. You wouldn't want this Alison as a friend.
But that’s not the Alison I know! Which makes this review really difficult and this book impossible to rate. The Alison I know wrote one of my all time MUST-READ comedy classics The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. That Alison is wry, sharp, hilarious and moving. There’s only one thing the two Alisons have got in common – both of them can draw like a heavenly being, with every line so clear and uncluttered each character being just exactly how people are. On the level of graphic art this is a 5 star treat.
So the problem is that I don’t have any time for the therapy business. Once we have figured out how to avoid the coming ecocatastrophe, then re-framed the global economy to resolve the major issue of the one billion people on the planet living in absolute poverty, then addressed the tidal wave of recreational drugs that are killing generations in one way or another, maybe then we can turn to figuring out why the middle classes of this world have periods where it just seems like their lives are flat and their careers are going nowhere and their sex just isn’t so much fun as it used to be and it might be something to do with that evening when they were 7 years old and their mother just stopped kissing them goodnight, just stopped with no word of warning.
Yes, that particular example of bad parenting does appear in this memoir. (“When Mom abruptly stopped kissing me goodnight, I felt almost as if she’d slapped me. But I was stoic. I betrayed no reaction.” Until 26 years later, we may add.)
It’s not like Alison is unaware of this. One girlfriend is a ferocious activist & is always protesting at nuclear bases and wants to rush off to Guatemala. Meanwhile all Alison can do is wonder why she gave up writing poetry or stare at her favourite childhood teddybear Mr Beezum and realise
He’s not me, but he’s not not-me either.
Or have various dreams that appear to be very significant like the one where she is trying frantically to dial a phone number 1! 8! 1! 8! and when she wakes up she thinks ah, that means the Jewish symbol chai because
I had learned from Amy that in Hebrew Chai means “living”, and that the numero-logical sum of its letters is 18.
Good job Alison was not aware of the contemporary Nazi group Combat 18, named after Adolf (1 = A, 8 = H, you see). Imagine if someone had not told her about chai but had told her about Combat 18. She’d have rushed off to the therapist saying “I had a dream where I was trying to call up Adolf Hitler! Argh!”
The psychobabble is laid on with a trowel in this memoir. What we get a whole lot of is Alison’s growing interest/obsession in a child psychologist named Donald Winnicott. Here is Alison’s version of this guy explaining her arachnophobia to one of his patients :
I think somewhere in your early development… when you hadn’t quite separated out from your mother… you hallucinated her. That is, you hallucinated the subjective object, the breast or whatever, expecting to be met. But you weren’t. There was a gap. A dark lack… an absence. And as an infant you dealt with this in the only way you were able, by putting legs round it. And then it became a spider and you became afraid of it.
Wow. This sort of reasoning makes me want to run a long way away. But therapy has a lot of fans, I know, and this book has mostly got ecstatic reviews. So as you see, it’s really unfair for me to rate this at all. I’m copping out with three deeply troubled stars....more
I am all for biographies of oddballs. Who wants to read about an evenball? Got born grew up got a job liked it got married never cheated had several dI am all for biographies of oddballs. Who wants to read about an evenball? Got born grew up got a job liked it got married never cheated had several darling ittle kidsies whizzbang career everyone thought he was the cat’s pyjamas never got high died in his sleep angels bore his soul to paradise everyone boohooed. For 400 pages? I think not.
William Seabrook though somewhat odd only rates a 6 on the Salvador Dali scale and truth to tell only a 0.5 on the Jeffrey Dahmer scale.
He was an explorer & went to Haiti & saw zombies & sussed out that they were zombified from strong drugs not from having been dead. He introduced the word zombie to the West, allegedly. He went to the Ivory Coast and ate human flesh, as he stated in his book Jungle Ways (1930) except it came out that he didn’t, those pesky Africans had slipped him some monkey meat as they had long given up cannibalism.
Like many pop acts, Seabrook had a hot streak of around five years (books on Arabia, Haiti and Africa) and then a long undramatic decline into alcoholism. This did not make for a very compelling tale in the long run, but you could see on every page that this graphic biography was very clearly a labour of love, a pet project finally come to completion, and it’s nice. I could have done with a few less panels showing Mr Seabrook three sheets to the wind, it got repetitive. But Joe Ollmann would say it was honest. Nothing so boring as a guy who only wants to drink himself senseless.
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Aside from the booze, Mr Seabrook’s other lifelong obsession was with bondage. He liked to tie up naked women & do stuff. So he did, all the time, and his wives had to put up with it, and they mostly did! He would have a barn near his house and he would have a succession of women arriving for these bondage sessions and his wife would just mutter darkly! The tied up women were paid for their services, everything was copasetic. I understand lots of people indulge in this kind of recreation. Got to admit I find it 100% creepy, but there are worse things that happen at sea....more
Blame my daughter, now back from university with her degree and her mountain of manga. I idly picked up this volume and rapidly found my brain to be dBlame my daughter, now back from university with her degree and her mountain of manga. I idly picked up this volume and rapidly found my brain to be dislocated from normal thought processes – you may know (but I didn’t) that you have to read manga back to front, but more than that, right to left, which means, that if there are two speech bubbles in a panel you read the one on the right first – it takes a while to get fluent with that – whilst at the same time having to cope with a dreadful smell of rotting corpses caused by a gas exuded by millions of fish that have started walking, yes that’s right, on little mechanical legs, out of the oceans around Japan, on some undetermined mission that they are not in a position to be able to communicate as they are all dead, even though they are walking walking walking.
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Soon it’s not just little fishies, it’s sharks
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I like that he says “Don’t worry, it’ll go away”. That’s exactly what I would say to my girlfriend if I saw a shark walking past the window.
That reminds me – this same guy has a poor sense of urgency. He frequently comes across people who’ve been impaled by fish legs and who are convulsing or actually dead and he bawls at them
ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?
They’re in no position to be able to say “No, actually, I have a fish leg right through me and I am dying in agony, that’s why I am twitching uncontrollably” or “No, actually, I died some time ago.”
One thing I liked is the sound effects – the one above is used throughout –
GASHUNK!! GASHUNK!!
So, things go from bad to worse and soon the guy’s girlfriend has contracted a germ from the walking fish and this affects her really badly :
STAGE ONE
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STAGE TWO
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What with the dreadful death stench, the walking fish and the perpetual GASHUNK GASHUNK I guess our guy can be forgiven for shouting
ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?
to his girlfriend. But seriously. You can see she’s not all right. I mean anyone can see that....more
I think if a Shinigami gave you a death note – oh, I should say a Shinigami is a like god or spirit who controls the way HUMANS (meaning YOU) DIE (meaI think if a Shinigami gave you a death note – oh, I should say a Shinigami is a like god or spirit who controls the way HUMANS (meaning YOU) DIE (meaning DIE!) and also WHEN just by writing it down, and also this death NOTE is not a note, it’s a NOTEBOOK, just to be crystal clear – but anyway, why this becomes an issue is that this particular shinagami is really bored in the realm where he & his other death gods live – they always live in a REALM, have you noticed, never in a house or an apartment, always a realm – anyway, it turns out in the death god realm there’s nothing much to do, they get really bored writing down name after name with stroke or general organ failure or rabies or giraffe attack next to them, these shinagami don’t have much initiative otherwise they could of I dunno got a franchise to make a death realm Disneyland or play crazy golf or I don’t know what people do for entertainment, lot of the people I know just watch football, so maybe they could get Sky up there and follow the English Premier League, and see how Manchester United gets on under Ole Gunnar Solskjær, whatever, the clue is in the title of this first volume here BOREDOM, so because of that this particular shinagami leaves a death note (= noteBOOK) for this 17 year old kid to find and then he has the power to make anyone dead and that’s what you call a responsibility, I wouldn’t want that.
But I wouldn’t mind if a lower-ranking Shinigami from a lower REALM left me a SICK NOTE so I could make anyone really ill, that would be great, a lot of politicians I could name would be rolling around on Christmas Day after the turkey & not in a good way.
So is this 17 year old kid’s plan to make the world a better place by killing lots of people ethically sound or not? This is the big issue. Omelets, eggs, eggs, omelets. If Pol Pot was asked he would have said YES. Likewise Stalin. But if you asked Princess Diana or Walt Disney they would have said NO. Hmm, Stalin, Princess Diana, Pol Pot, Walt Disney. It’s above my pay grade....more
You know the expression “all dressed up and nowhere to go” – it can be applied to so many books and movies, the ones that look great, have style to buYou know the expression “all dressed up and nowhere to go” – it can be applied to so many books and movies, the ones that look great, have style to burn, grace and wit and charm, but they don’t have a thing to say, and nowhere they want to get to, they just set right there looking so pretty, and Square Eyes is one of those but SO pretty and SO charming that it is still a five star spectacular and RECOMMENDED for all graphic novelly fans out there in goodreadsland; & for the rest of you, next time you’re in a bookshop that has a copy of Square Eyes, and if it doesn’t you have no business patronizing such a lowly establishment, peruse it slowly right there in the shop for free, but don’t tell them I said so.
If there was a graphic novel beauty contest Square Eyes would win it, but if there was a graphic novel gripping story contest Square Eyes would not get into the top 1000. The barely-there plot involves a genius software developer and zzzzzzz see I already fell right to sleep. It’s the usual cyberpunk stuff we have had to put up with since Neuromancer way back in the early 1980s – I’m so plugged in my brain has become the Planet Jupiter but my sworn enemy is even now sending a fleet of enhanced Jersey cows to invade my moons – that sort of thing. Moo!
However a picture is worth a thousand words (not this little one, the adult sized one in the book)
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and
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and a whole lot more
so 5 stars who cares about the story, what’s so good about narrative anyway, there's no more time for stories, the cybercows are upon us, look out the window!...more
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