I’ve long said that my favorite of Kate Beaton’s work is her next, because she keeps getting better; none of her works have been easily surpassed, but when the stars go cold and the final account of capital-A Art is taken, I think DUCKS: Two Years In The Oil Sands will stand at the peak not just of Beaton’s work, but of autobiography, of comics, and of explorations of what turns people into their worst selves. It is in all things a masterwork, as I knew it would be since those five very tall strips were posted back in 2014. There are spoilers ahead, so if you want to go in cold maybe stop reading now. But if you do go in cold, know that DUCKS is at times a tough read that both clearly tells you where it’s headed and also catches you by surprise. Survivors of any kind of trauma take note.

I’ve been privileged to know Kate Beaton for more than a decade; she has done me many a kindness in that time, in addition to creating some of the best comics ever made and allowing us all to share in them for absolutely free. Sometime in the last decade I was standing in the Webcomics Pavilion at San Diego Comic Con when the word got out that she had posted new comics featuring her mom — what I’ve always called Kate’s momics — to Tumblr and we all stopped what we were doing to read them. I said out loud that I would sacrifice the careers of everybody in that enormous building if it meant momics every day, and I meant it.

Something in those sometimes very simple drawings is the singularly most efficient expression of emotion and emotional truths, whether it’s a confrontation of the myths we tell ourselves to make the right person the hero (with squats), a surgical dissection of fake feminist tropes in comics (sometimes with squats, sometimes without), or a discussion of little known historical figures that we should revere (no squats this time). And they’re never more emotionally resonant than when she’s talking about the life she’s lived.

Which brings us to DUCKS, the story of the two years that Beaton worked in the Alberta oil sands to pay off her students loans; she’s one of a multitude of Maritime Canadians that had to leave home to find work, torn (as she tells us in the opening pages) between the pull of the home that begs them to stay and the need to leave to support themselves and their families as industry after industry has closed up shop and left an entire people behind. If all the Cape Bretonners that had to leave came back, she tells us, the island would sink. As befits Beaton’s very personal approach to comics, DUCKS opens with Beaton introducing herself and her situation; she’s drawn a little less loosely in this narrative interlude, a bit of reality before her usual style asserts itself and her face becomes a little less specific.

Scott McCloud famously taught us all talked about visual accuracy and identification in comics — a more photo-realistic representation of a person, place, or item will give it distance, and one that’s more abstract or cartoony invites the reader to see themselves and their experiences in that representation. The little extra verisimilitude in the opening pages introduces us to somebody else; the little extra abstraction in the remaining 400 pages means that increasingly large numbers of the characters portrayed could be us, or people we know.

So when we follow the story of the oil sands — a place where the dirtiest petroleum in the world is somewhat easily accessible from the surface, which sufficiently high oil prices make it economically viable to rip it from the earth¹ and ship it halfway across the world² so that enormous sums can be made by people removed from those that bear the costs — we are following the story of people in various stages of desperation and need, far from their homes, being paid to do dirty, dangerous work in some of the most inhospitable land on the planet. If one were forced to find but one overarching message in DUCKS, it would be how living in extreme duress changes people, exploring how they became the people they are in the camps and work sites, and the degree to which they became different from who they are at when they’re at home.

Throw a few thousand people together in a place where it’s 50 below in the winter, hours from anywhere, where boredom is often met with drugs and alcohol, where the men outnumber the women by an extreme degree³, where the default state is one of hypermasculine aggression and posturing, and it’s no surprise that things are going to take a bad turn. From almost the moment of her arrival in Fort McMurray, Beaton is subjected to shameless sexual propositioning and the kind of attention that serves as a reminder that she’s not really a full person, she’s a distraction, a novelty, some thing that exists to relieve the boredom of the men in camp and in town. Either that or she’s a humorless bitch and you don’t want to be a humorless bitch, right?

It becomes the inescapable background radiation of her days, just trying to do a job and get through another overtime shift, page after page reducing it to Just How Things Are, so ordinary that although you know it can escalate, you can see it coming a hundred pages off, it’s still going to catch you by the throat when the rapes happen. Knowing the circumstances that she’s in, seeing it coming narratively is not the same as watching Kate disappear from view behind blacked-out panels and reappear with a thousand-yard stare.

The oil sands leave scars, the scars on the earth translated to the bodies of the men that work there, passed along to the women that don’t measure up as independent people with agency. Some find ways to confront the scars and try to heal from them; most take no notice of them or how they were changed. Beaton confides in coworkers, men who don’t get it and react with laughter, women — including her sister, Becky — who share their own stories of rape from life before the camps.

DUCKS won’t let the reader off the hook with the grimly comforting thought that the oil sands are a unique place of danger to steer clear of and you’ll be okay, not when we’re told about what happened back home or at university where the men are supposed to be themselves and not who the oil sands made them. Trauma and regarding others as not full people is everywhere, it’s just thrown into sharper relief some places.

After a reprieve working at the Maritime Museum of British Columbia in Victoria — a time when she started creating comics, just before the wider world learned of her work — Beaton is back in the oil sands, watching the balance on her student loan debt tick towards zero entirely too slowly, finally making her way home only to find that the oil sands don’t relax their hold on you that easily. Or, as she put it on the page where the original stories that became DUCKS were first posted, the story … is about a lot of things, and among these, it is about environmental destruction in an environment that includes humans.

DUCKS is, by turns, heartbreaking, enraging, courageous, a call to witness, suffused with small moments of grace and kindness, and the hardest read that you can’t put down once you pick it up. It’s a singular story that belongs to one person and is also shot full of universal truths that we may not want to acknowledge but must. It will, without fail, be attacked by those that don’t want to acknowledge those truths. It is a masterwork, the best book that I wish had never needed to be written, and should be the next item on your to read list.

DUCKS is published by Drawn & Quarterly, and is available wherever books are sold. Kate Beaton is presently on book tour, and if at all possible you should attend one of the events.

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¹ In circumstances that run roughshod over any sense of environmental responsibility and the treaty rights of various First Nations.

² Ditto.

³ In the book, Beaton gives a ratio of 50:1, but has since noted that it was highly variable. Suffice it to say, it’s a highly imbalanced gender situation.

There’s some combinations that are always going to work; individual item is incredibly wonderful on its own, and each immeasurably made better when combined with the other. Gin and lime. Bob and Ray. Bugs and Daffy. Jim Henson and Frank Oz.

Hope Larson and Rebecca Mock.

Larson is a writer and illustrator of comics that has spun many a quality tale. Mock is a comics artist and illustrator that has worked with everybody from Archie to The New Yorker Radio Hour. Together, they made the wonderful Four Points books in 2016 and 2017, and since not long after have been working on their next collaboration.

Salt Magic is what The Wizard Of Oz might have looked like if it stayed on the sod-rich prairies instead of flitting off to a fairy kingdom. Based on character designs that Mock has posted over the years, I said it looked like a Hayao Miyazaki collaboration with Jeff Smith’s BONE; I was talking purely about visual aesthetics, but hell if that comparison doesn’t actually work on the story as well. Mild spoilers ahead, but not too much.

There’s a formula to a Miyazaki story — the protagonist (usually a young woman, 10-12 years old) gets swept up in the larger world outside her home. Magic and mundanity both exist but usually there’s a boundary between them, or the two domains are otherwise separate (for example, Spirited Away), or with one ascending the other fading (for example, Princess Mononoke) but some crossover still possible. BONE opted for a world where the fantastic and the ordinary exist and can be travelled between if only you’re willing to walk far enough¹, likely through some inhospitable terrain.

And in Miyazaki’s tellings, at least, the denizens of the magic lands aren’t malicious, per se, but may be misunderstood or have priorities and mores that are different enough at to make them seem antagonistic to the main character. Conflicts are more likely the result of ignorance or misunderstanding that actual aggression. Yes, this is oversimplified, but work with me.

Salt Magic is the story of an Oklahoma at the end of the Great War where there are still witches with very specific domains — the salt witch that wields the titular magic, a sugar witch, the mention of crystal witches — that most people seem to have just forgotten exist. Or maybe they’re just too isolated, to disinterested in the affairs of the ordinary world. To stray into their lands is to encounter risk, perhaps none greater than if they like you.

Which is what’s happened to multiple generations of twelve year old Vonceil’s sod-busting family, though nobody quite figures it out until she does. In her eyes, the greatest crime is that her beloved older brother is returned from war and settling down with a wife who commits the greatest crime Vonceil can imagine: she makes him ordinary. Why couldn’t he have stayed in glamourous Europe and fallen in love with a beautiful nurse and stayed there and she could visit him in that far-off, nigh-magical place?

There’s a saying about getting what you wish for. Vonceil’s brother, Elber, would be the classic hero that leaves home for adventure and returns, but he didn’t find adventure; he found two years of grinding hell in the trenches and carries scars (both visible and invisible) for his troubles. Unlike the Campbellian hero, he hasn’t returned home having achieved a great quest and saved anything or achieved great wisdom; you could say he descended to an underworld of sorts. But as it turns out he did cross paths with a witch, a salt witch, and she loves him though he has spurned her, and the spring that sustains the family farm will run only with salt water until he loves her again.

Did Vonceil’s wish kick all of this into gear? Was it her that caused this to happen? Whether that’s the case or not — and to my eye it’s nicely ambiguous — she figures it’s her job to fix it, as she’s the only one that can see it’s a curse in play and not bad luck. She’s young enough, starry-eyed enough, focused on the horizon enough to slip into the territory of witches and find a way to bargain, to free her brother and maybe unravel her family’s history with witches in the bargain. She pays a price and learns the meaning of sacrifice along the way, but nobody ever quite realizes what she did to bring about peace between the two worlds.

Larson’s writing is sharp and subtle, creating characters in broad strokes and then filling them in with quirks and slowly-revealed detail until they are as complete any any of the great characters in the famous stories. Dorothy, Gawain, Peach Boy, Anansi, the Witch Of The Waste, Ged, Granma Ben, Nausicaä, she’s all of them and more.

Mock’s artwork is the best of her career, with clean, engaging character designs with magnificently expressive faces. They sit in their environments with a sense of heft, and both motion and the effects of magic move about on the page in a manner that’s instantly understandable. Mock and Larson were a formidable team on Four Points; they are five years better here. The only question left when you finish Salt Magic is when they will work together again, and how much better they will be individually and together.

Salt Magic is published by Margaret Ferguson Books and is available wherever books or comics are sold. It’s a magnificent read for anybody old enough to keep their attention through a 200+ page story.

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¹ Which Miyazaki dabbled in with Kiki’s Delivery Service, where witches just exist in this Europe where World War II never happened and to a lesser degree Laputa where the magic is actually a secret, forgotten technology that proves Clarke’s Law.

Have I mentioned how very, very much I hate the fact that the comic book industry allows itself one (1) distributor, and they suck in every conceivable way there is to suck? Trick question, as I’ve been on about Diamond more times than I can count, and they continue to suck, particularly in holding onto books for weeks after they’re supposed to be out, which is why I’m only now getting around to The Dire Days Of Willowweep Manor by Shaenon Garrity (Narbonic, Skin Horse, etc) on words and Christopher Baldwin (Little Dee, Spacetrawler, etc) on pictures.

If you have read this page to any appreciable degree, you already know what I’m going to say just based on those two names. For everybody else, read on and spoilers ahoy.

Here’s what I love about Garrity (Tiki Queen of the Greater Bay Area and Nexus Of All Webcomics Realities): as good as she is drawing her own stuff or with a writer, I think she’s even better as a pure writer of comics. She has a knack of writing to the strengths of her collaborators, and with Baldwin on board, that means deliciously over the top facial expressions and physical overreactions.

Here’s what I love about Baldwin: no matter how silly or serious the premise, he knows how to compose a panel for maximum effect. Need a moment’s pause to build up the joke? Or perhaps to make the incipient horror land three millimeters closer to the exact center of your brain? He’s there. Need a reaction panel or an environment-establishing shot that’s practically a splash page? Nobody better.

So take a topic that’s rich with visual possibility and which rewards over-the-top genre savvy like whoa, and you’ve got a winner. The genre, in this case, is Gothic Romance novels. Brooding manor lords, dank tarns, empty halls echoing footsteps and secrets, taciturn housekeepers, storms that steal your breath and stop your heart? Haley knows, loves, lives, and breathes them all. It’s all she wants, to be swept up into a grand narrative that involves both heights and wuthering.

She, uh forgot about the lack of indoor plumbing. And how the feckless youngest brother would, in real circumstances, get everybody killed.

All of that is furthest from her mind, though, when she happens to see what appears to be a stranger drowning in the river, and finds herself pulled through the crack between the worlds that she didn’t know to look for. Turns out our universes, plural, are kept apart by kludges and pert-near indentured labor, and these jury-rigged maintenance microworlds have themes. And our world is about to be crashed into and destroyed by a far worse one if she can’t get the gears of reality working again.

Gears which are found in a pocket dimension filled with every cliche, every trope, every element of Gothic Romance. She’d be having the time of her life if everything weren’t trying to kill her (and, by extension, everybody back here on Earth). Fortunately, she knows how to make the rules of gothic romance work for her (declaring at one point she’s not a maiden — a weak, helpless, an agencyless plot point — but a heroine). She knows the rules of how the stories work¹, and she’s going to save everybody at Willowweep Manor and multiple worlds with that knowledge.

She’s also going to watch a taciturn housekeeper punch a bear in the face because it’s Garrity writing. And it’s so rad for us to watch happen because it’s Baldwin drawing.

The story kicks into gear almost immediately, and careens swiftly from near-disaster to damn near-disaster with barely a pause. The threat is consistent within the rules of the story, the action scenes clean and easy to follow, and the gags land lightly on tip-toe, delivering their laugh-chuckles with precisely the right amount of gravity.

Get The Dire Days Of Willowweep Manor (available at book and comic stores everywhere, hopefully) for the teen-and-up in your life, but especially for those that have fallen into a Gothic Romance hole and needs to be reminded that stuffy, over-serious stories can be silly, too.

Spam of the day:

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For these and surely myriad other crimes, you are my nemesis.

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¹ For example, the villain, in his moment of triumph, must ascend to the highest point available, the better to gloat on the precipice.

This book review is a bit different than most that we at Fleen run, and so I’m going to do something I pretty much never do — I’m going to tell you that we are pretty much entirely spoiler free. There’s less spoilage here than you’d get reading the blurbs in the book flaps.

Now that’s out of the way, I want to start out here by saying that if you haven’t listened to the Maximum Fun podcast Bubble, you should do that. It’s funny, it’s smart, it’s got a lot to say about unfettered capitalism and the gig economy, the voice acting is great (particularly Tavi Gevinson’s narration), and MaxFun are the audio equivalent of webcomics — they even do their merch via TopatoCo.

That said, if you listen to Bubble and then give a read to the graphic novel Bubble (story by Jordan Morris — creator of the podcast — and Sarah Morgan, with Tony Cliff on art and adaptation, and Natalie Riess providing colors), you’re not going to think it’s the same story. There’s so much missing! Characters, subplots, even the famed Laser Dong¹. It’s so very different.

And that’s okay.

Because this isn’t Bubble the podcast, it’s Bubble the graphic novel, and some things won’t fit with the page count that has to be worked with, and some things won’t work in another medium. There’s a reason why Cliff isn’t credited just for art, but for adapting one kind of story into another kind.

We don’t have tolerance for adaptation, collectively, a lot of the time. There’s a reason why I maintain that the only good Harry Potter movie is #3, because they gave it to a director with a personal vision and style and let him do a movie that was not just a straight recitation of the book. Those first two movies? You could practically hear the studio execs screaming at Chris Columbus to make the movies exactly like the books, don’t screw this up, there are billions at stake here, give the kids what they want. And he did, and they were okay, but only okay. Literalism in adaptation is creative death.

Bubble (comic form) works as a graphic novel because it was designed to be one, not a transliteration of a podcast. It’s different, and either version of the story may be your favorite, and either version may seem to be lacking in comparison. That’s okay, too, because the version you prefer is still there, waiting for you to go back to it at your leisure².

And that’s what’s key here — Morris and Morgan have brought a story that if you aren’t familiar with the podcast version, stands on its own with no problems. Cliff has constructed terrific character designs, and his environments³ and action scenes are easily the equal of anything from his Delilah Dirk series. Riess brings an aggressive normality to the color palette of Fairhaven, then kicks it into otherworldly colors during fights and time in the monster-infested Brush.

Anybody looking for an older-teens-and-up romp should pick up Bubble, but as one annoyed looking father in the story says when told that his gig workers had a pretty fun conversation about cum, Well, that’s inappropriate. We have kids. That’s actually pretty typical of the tone, so you can calibrate the ages of who you want to give the book to from that exchange.

Spam of the day:

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¹ It’s exactly what it sounds like, and it was a key enough part of the story that MaxFun made a pin.

² Alan Moore, once asked if he was upset about a movie version ruining of one of his stories pointed to the bookshelf and remarked that the story was still there.

³ Including dead-on logos for soulless corporate offerings and some really clever visual gags.

Mike Holmes has been doing a lot of work in comics, from illustrating graphic adaptations of Tui Sutherland’s Wings Of Fire series to collaborating with Gene Luen Yang on the six-part Secret Coders graphic novel/programming primers. But he hasn’t yet done a full story of his own, until now.

Holmes has produced one of the most affecting portal fantasy stories I’ve ever read in My Own World; as is common the story type, the hero (a not terribly bad off but disaffected youth) finds a way into a fabulous world away from his problems. You’ve seen it a million times before, the Narnia series being the ur-example.

But protagonist Nathan isn’t in a world of fantasy beasts and people and great quests. In his realm there’s him and … not much else, really. Time doesn’t pass, others aren’t there, there’s a primordial goo he can shape into constructs or even facsimile life, but it’s basically all him. He’s not escaping to adventure, he’s escaping from the tedium and drudgery of not fitting in and (although he maybe doesn’t realize it) an incipient tragedy about to befall him. He has absolute mastery of everything that exists in his pocket universe — think hard-light Minecraft responding to his hands and thoughts — but there isn’t anybody there except him.

Before the actual magic, Holmes does maybe an even better job of portraying a different kind of magic — the everyday magic of a time a few decades ago when kids could roam as long as they were back when Mom said, there a trail through the woods might lead to a secret spot with gathered detritus to make it cool; Illicit fireworks or nudie mags a bonus. But secret hangouts in the woods only work if you’re there with friends and Nathan’s kind of short on those.

The tough kids and sorta-friends of his older brother, and the older brothers of his sorta-friends don’t really have time for him. His parents don’t really understand that setting him up on playdates doesn’t really work any more. And so he’s back to his own world, where everything stops except his hunger, leaving to make snack runs and return and heedless of the fact that he’s not where he’s supposed to be and returning anyway. There’s a sense of addiction to a place where reality is subject to whim that I don’t recall seeing before. Nathan’s not processing it in those terms from his POV, but it’s there.

And because Holmes is very, very good at storytelling, he’s not afraid to make Nathan a bit unpleasant, as surely almost all pre-teens are¹. He’s self-focused, worships his older brother (while ignoring Very Large Truths about him), and heedless of the feelings of others. Almost pure impulse and resentment at not getting to do what he wants to, Nathan rings true for anybody that remembers what they were like at nine or ten years old with an honest eye.

The escape has its cost once Nathan ends up back in the real world — the timeless time has to be paid for, and unpleasant truths he didn’t know (or tried to didn’t know) are still there. He can’t put them off, he can’t stop the wheeling of the world, he’s going to have to confront it and grow up.

My Own World is a deeply melancholy story, one best suited for readers that can look back on being Nathan’s age rather than actually being Nathan’s age. All of the awkwardness and discontent you remember feeling when much younger are brought to the fore and laid out for you to remember your own escapes into your own worlds, and how the things you sought to escape were still waiting for you when you returned.

My Own World is published by :01 Books, with words and pictures by Mike Holmes and color assists by Jason Fischer. It’s available wherever books and comics are found.

Spam of the day:

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¹ Teens bring their own unpleasantness to the table, but they aren’t the focus here.

This review is going to be a bit briefer than many of my past reviews; it’s because of other stuff in my life, not because the book doesn’t deserve more words. In fact, I’ll say that it deserves all the words (some of which are spoilers), but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Jukebox is the sophomore graphic novel from Nidhi Chanani; full disclosure, she’s a friend of mine and we have spent time at Comics Camp in the past and hopefully will do so again in the future. When her first graphic novel, Pashmina, came out, I said:

[W]hen the worst I can say of a book is that I wish it had another three dozen pages to spend on its protagonist, you’re doing pretty damn well, and debut stories aren’t given the resources of proven creators. I expect that Chanani’s next book will reflect an increase in confidence from the market and the pages that will come with it.

I’m going to modestly declare, called it; Jukebox gets the pages needed to let the story breathe and as a result it’s a more satisfying reading experience. It’s also got one of the most unusual structures I’ve ever seen in a complete story, in that there isn’t really an antagonist¹.

Let me back up.

Jukebox is the story of Shaheen, San Francisco tween who’s relationship with her father Giovanni is defined by music. He’s a vinyl collector with eclectic tastes and determined that his daughter grow to love the depth and breadth of music as he does. Every song has a story, and a backstory, and context and history and details and, and, and … and Shaheen thinks that maybe Dad could take a bit of interest in what she likes. Anything other than the latest, timeless acquisition. It’s a point of friction between them.

Until he disappears. As does his vinyl dealer. They’re traced to a room with a mysterious jukebox that’s been designed to play whole albums rather than singles, and Shaheen finds herself and her cousin Tannaz flung through time and space as she plays her Dad’s favorites. He was lost somewhere relevant to whatever was playing on the jukebox when he was whisked away, and has no way to return unless Shahi and Naz can find him.

So if Shahi’s the hero of this story — which isn’t afraid to make her alternately timid, stubborn, scared, and a bit selfish — and Naz is the sidekick and Dad is the princess to be rescued, who’s the villain? Earl, the vinyl store owner who created the jukebox and has been using it to plunder the past of valuable first pressings to sell? Not really, he’s misguided.

The real antagonist is the overly obsessive focus that both Earl and Giovanni have for their music collections, which their lives revolve around in different ways, which alienate them from others. It’s not greed so much as it is excessive fanboyism, and if that’s not a lesson for the modern culture, I’m not sure what is². It’s only by loosening up, finding other interests, becoming broader people that Gio and Earl can put their lives back in balance. Their health, too, as the jukebox carries a cost to use it — it steals your hearing in one of the great ironic punishments. Seriously, this is the genie in the lamp ironically fulfilling your wish territory, which never turns out well unless you’re a sociopath.

Uh, maybe don’t share that last link with any of the 10-14 year olds that you give the book to. But definitely give them the book and an afternoon to devour it. They’ll learn about some key points in history (that don’t revolve around white dudes — that’s part of why Shahi and Naz don’t find Gio in their first four or five jaunts), about taking care of vinyl, and about how you can love somebody and still be totally exasperated at them at the same time.

All of it is wrapped up in Chanani’s open, inviting, slightly cartoony and very vibrant art that shifts color palette a half dozen times to portray a half dozen different moods. You’ll finish reading and want to put on a favorite playlist — just don’t go so loud you hurt your ears.

Jukebox, with words and pictures by Nidhi Chanani, is published by :01 Books and continues their long streak of excellent graphic novels. It’s available at book and comic shops everywhere, and maybe even a record store or two.

Spam of the day:

When the Ring Won’t Stop, Eat this Brain (Nutrient Removes Tinnitus)

Rarely do the spams and the post content line up so neatly. Not sure you want to be telling people to eat brains, though. That’s how you get zombies.

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¹ To those confidently stating a compelling story must have an antagonist I have one word: Totoro.

² Honestly, it reminds me a bit of the heedless interest in food that Chihiro’s parents have at the start of Spirited Away. Her journey to redeem them has more than a few parallels here. Miyazaki’s influence reaches far.

Readers of this page will recall that on more than one occasion I have noted how Diamond (until recently, the only distributor that the comics industry allowed itself to have) absolutely refused to get me books that had been on order. Sometimes, the better part of a year would go by, much to the consternation of myself and the staff of my local comics shop (who I hold blameless in this fiasco).

Thus, somewhat recently, books that have been in release for a really long damn time have come into my possession and I’d like to talk about some of them. Since they’ve been long out in the world and other people have talked about them, these will be somewhat briefer reviews than normally found here. Oh, and spoilers may abound.

• Evan Dahm’s The Harrowing Of Hell first came onto my radar in the summer of 2018, and I made a habit of asking Dahm about it at MoCCA each year. It was delayed by COVID for some months from the appropriate Lenten season last year¹, finally releasing about eleven months ago.

  Given that it’s a 2000 year old story — accounting for those days between the Crucifixion of Jesus and the Resurrection — maybe waiting not quite a year isn’t such a big deal. On the other hand, it’s such a gorgeous book, I reserve the right to be annoyed. Dahm’s taken what is often a triumphant story — various apocrypha tell of Jesus tearing things up in Hell, rebuking the fallen angels, and redeeming the souls of the righteous — and turned it into a cautionary tale.

  The mocking of demons echoes the cries of Jesus’s own followers: Blessed, Hosana, this is the Son of God. Their message is one of twisted praise, predicting how his message will be corrupted in the years to come: he will be remembered not as a teacher and storyteller, but as a conquering king, bringing punishment and retribution rather than redemption. The greatest damnation that the fallen can offer Jesus is to grant his name power and glory rather than humility.

  The book is done in stark black-and-white (with the occasional splash of red in the robes of Sanhedrin or the uniforms of Roman soldiers) in the scenes of Jesus’s ministry, and given a lurid blood-red fill during the descent; there’s not a bit of white on the Hell pages, except to depict Jesus’s figure. It’s a first-rank mood-setter, as well as drawing the eye to exactly where Dahm wants it.

  Regardless of one’s own belief system, it is not possible to move in Western society without acknowledging the influence of the Christian faith; here’s a story that even many Christians don’t know, and those that do will find a very different interpretation, one that casts a very different light on that historical and pervasive influence.

• Dahm also released Island Book 2: The Infinite Land this year, a sequel to a quiet, contemplative story that’s reminiscent of The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz. In that review, I noted that in the many sequels Dorothy would return to Oz and get her companions back together to meet the next challenge, and in Island Book 2 Sola does the same. Like Dorothy, Sola is hailed as a liberator in a way that isn’t really warranted (witch-killer in Dorothy’s case; monster slayer in Sola’s), and given power and authority (Dorothy as a Princess of Oz, Sola as a leader of her people in a new nation, one that is rapidly moving forward in technology²).

  But Dorothy didn’t find one of her peers hellbent on turning Oz into an empire, determined to sweep all unknowns away in case they became threats later. She didn’t have one of her companions fall into the dream of empire. Dorothy remained an innocent, Sola is nothing but doubts and wondering if she’s unleashed a great plague upon the world in the form of her own people.

  We’ve left Oz behind and found ourselves in a place more like the Empire of Sahta, and it’s going to take Sola a hell of a lot of work to stop what is starting to look like colonization, pogroms, and genocide. Island Book 3 is going to have a tightope to walk, and I know that Dahm’s up to the challenge.

• There might not be anybody better suited to adapting an elliptical, almost Möbius-shaped story like Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five into graphical form than Ryan North. He gets nonlinear storytelling and the sometimes counterintuitive way that something that happens here/now can be intimately linked with something that happens there/then. Billy Pilgrim is unstuck in time, and having pictures (by Albert Monteys) to navigate the branching paths is a tremendous aid.

  One of the first page spreads shows Billy Pilgrim at the various key stages of his life, and the way he looks at each age on this timeline go a long way to demystifying when Billy lands as he jumps back and forth within his life. We know where the story is heading, because Vonnegut, North, and Monteys tell us almost from the beginning (after, as it turns out, a brief few pages where North notes that much of what occurs in the book actually happened to Vonnegut), but the journey is still full of surprises and despite that.

  Slaughterhouse Five is rightly regarded as one of the most brilliant, most important novels ever written; this new version of Slaughterhouse Five for a different medium can stand next to the original with head held high.

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¹ You got a horror book, you want that out in October. Book about what happened when Jesus threw down the gates to Hell? You want that out at Easter.

² The better analogy might be the leap from agrarianism to an industrial revolution between Avatar: The Last Airbender and Avatar: The Legend Of Korra.

As we get started, a disclaimer. Shing Yin Khor is a personal friend of mine, and I’ve had at least the outline of this story rattling around my brain for years now, ever since we talked about it as a work in progress over some surprisingly delicious Tex-Mex in Juneau, Alaska. So when I picked up my copy of The Legend Of Auntie Po from my local comic shop last week, I had high hopes and even higher expectations.

Because one should never count out Shing Yin Khor when it comes to a) lumberjack culture; b) foodway stories; c) immigrant tales; and d) delicate, gorgeous watercolors. Combine all of those into nearly 300 pages of story, and throw a little adolescent queer longing in on top, and you’ve got an absolute winner. For those that don’t want the spoilers ahead, get a copy or three, read it until it falls apart and then read it some more.

Actually, the spoilers are going to be kind of light — it’s the 1880s, a logging camp in the Sierra Nevadas, at a time when Chinese workers were both valued for skills in large undertakings (building entire logging infrastructure, or running railroads through the tallest mountain range in the hemisphere) and simultaneously regarded as a plague upon the land, despoiling a nation out of its natural white purity.

Don’t look too closely at everybody that isn’t white, particularly those that the land in question was stolen from, or those whose parents and grandparents were stolen from overseas to work the land. The country has a myth of manifest destiny to construct here.

And that’s really the core of Auntie Po — that myth belongs to anybody that’s trying to make sense of their circumstances, whether it’s in the service of oppressing everybody that doesn’t look like you, or in trying to find a little hope at the end of the day that somebody powerful might be in your corner. Nearly everybody in the story is trying to find that bit of footing, and even the white folks haven’t been around long enough for some to count them as real Americans¹.

So they make up stories — Paul Bunyan was revered by the northwoods loggers? Hao Mei, 13 and full of imagination and stories, knows that Po Pan Yin and her blue water buffalo Pei Pei were even bigger and better. Auntie Po doesn’t just stay with Mei; when need strikes, the other children in the camp — none of the Chinese — call on her and see her, really see her. And if this newer Auntie Po is Black rather than Chinese? Well, myths take on their own lives, adapted by the people that need them and make them their own. And that carries on past the children; by the end of the book the loggers in the bunkhouse argue whose crew cut more lumber — Paul Bunyan or Auntie Po.

Mei’s father, Hao Ah, doesn’t need Auntie Po because he knows who he is — the only cook that can keep the loggers satisfied², and twice the man of the white guy that tries to replace him. Mei learns who she is eventually, too — a girl with dreams of university and learning, and also the best pie maker for miles around — and so she lets Auntie Po go, but others take her up and make her their own. Hels Andersen insisted that the Haos were family to him, and over time he changes that from empty platitude to reality, and so a little of the myth of white supremacy crumbles, at least within one logging camp in one corner of the Sierra Nevada.

It takes a long time for myths to completely die, though — and those that don’t have anything else to rely on (whether that’s true or just what they tell themselves) can fan a myth back to life if even a spark of it remains. There’s not so many loggers out there that might call on Auntie Po, but there are echoes of her, in every burned paper memorial to a Chinese logger that fell at his work, every sealed bottle with a name and birthday inside to give proper identity to an unmarked grave.

She still lives on in whispered stories that Mei let out into the world, and instead of stories of Auntie Po, Mei gets to tell her own story, which is another form of myth. Folk heroes and gods, they say, exist as long as they have believers, and even if nobody believes in Mei but Mei, that’s a big, bright blaze of belief and she will bestride her world like Po Pan Yin towers over the tallest pines. Giant blue water buffalo optional.

The Legend Of Auntie Po by Shing Yin Khor is a deeply researched³, beautifully illustrated story of a difficult time and place. Any reader that’s willing to learn about/acknowledge the origins and legacy of white supremacy at a tween-age-appropriate level will find a lot to love and a lot to think about here. Find your copy at your local bookstore or comic shop.

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¹ Logging boss Hels Andersen isn’t more than a generation and a half from Scandinavia, and undoubtedly looked down on my the moneyed class that funds his operations. Hell, I guarantee you that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s saintly Ma looked down on the Andersens and other recent arrivals; if you don’t remember her snotty opinions of recent immigrants, maybe don’t give the Little House books to the kids in your life because yeesh, Laura, her Ma, and her daughter Rose were serious nativists and Pa Ingalls was the definition of a failson locust, gaming the system and displacing humans from their land and lauded for it.

² His schnitzel is legendary.

³ If admittedly incomplete; in the afterword, Khor acknowledges the lack of indigenous characters and recognizes that the story of their presence in the logging camps is a story that needs to be told, but not theirs to tell.

Boy howdy, I have determined that if there’s one thing in this world I do not want, it’s for Abby Howard to be mad at me, since it’s obvious that her mind works in ways that could devise — as Benedick would have it — brave punishments for any that crossed her.

I’m getting ahead of myself a little.

Received this week after considerable delay¹ in fulfillment of its Kickstart, was Howard’s latest book, The Crossroads At Midnight. It was supposed to have been in backers hands and stores at Halloween time², as one would expect for a horror anthology, but honestly? Waiting for the Spring and the beginnings of hope that the Great Plague may finally be receding from our shores³ probably put me in a better brainspace for reading it, particularly because I opted to do so right before bed.

Genius move, Gary.

The stories range from mildly creepifying but ultimately affirming (wherein an old woman who has always been alone by choice becomes friends with some reanimated corpses from the local bog) to emotionally damaging (a classic come-away-to-Faerie tale, only at the seashore, with sisterly love and regrets) to modern fears that are literally skin-crawling (just don’t — repeating, do not — take a stained and possibly murderous mattress home from the sidewalk, no matter how much it appears to be free to a good home).

The two that stuck with me, though, were the ones that dipped into splatter territory — if Howard ever gets a job storyboarding a horror movie, they better do her dismembering eviscerations justice — because they both dealt (in a roundabout way) with the same theme: what happens when your friend is something monstrous? In a moment of crisis, will they use their monstrosity to protect, or act according to their nature in ways that to human sensibility are an unimaginably cruel betrayal? And who is at fault then, the monster or the hubris?

Howard’s characters encompass a range of ages, genders, types, and personalities; nobody is a victim because of who they are, but rather because of what they choose to do. Sometimes it’s foolishness, sometimes it’s love that precipitates the fall. Sometimes, it’s a salvation of sorts, as the ordinary evils of people who are human contrast with people who are … not. Howard lets you know who each and every one of them is, with just a few lines of dialogue or a panel’s worth of expression⁴.

If you didn’t back the Kickstart, you can get The Crossroads At Midnight from major retailers, and I imagine it’s just a matter of time before it shows up in Howard’s store and that of publisher Iron Circus. It’s decidedly not for kids, but if you’re up for a good scare, Howard’s damn near unmatched at spookification.

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¹ Fucking COVID.

² Ibid.

³ But not all shores. Help out the people of India if you can, as they suffer from the malicious incompetence of an authoritarian leader who has better things to do than deal with the death befouling his land, just as we did.

⁴ My favorites: the grabby hand and the eyes. The first is the protagonist’s roomie who deals with sickness in the apartment by getting out the mechanical grabby hand to maintain three feet of distance at all times; the body language instantly tells you this isn’t the first time. The second involved the girl who sacrifices herself and later comes back with distant, disinterested eyes to show how indifferent she now is towards the sister she protected so fervently.

About two and a half months ago, I noted that a new book was a-bornin’ and to be with us soon: one on possible futures, featuring a dozen comics creators (or creator teams), talking about what the World Of Tomorrow might be like. I’ve now had a chance to read Flash Forward: An Illustrated Guide To Possible (And Not So Possible) Tomorrows by Rose Eveleth¹ and a murderer’s row of comics talent, with editing by Matt Lubchansky and Sophie Goldstein; many thanks to Maya at Abrams Books who was kind enough to send me a hardback copy.

On first glance, Flash Forward looks a fair amount like Soonish by Weinersmith & Weinersmith, which is unsurprising as Zach Weinersmith is a contributor here (with old stomping buddy Chris Jones on art), talking about Fake News and the death of The Real. The key difference is that Zach & Kelly Weinersmith were looking at specific technologies and looking as what stands between us and them; Eveleth, et al, are looking more at societal trends, and extrapolating out what culture might look like if they continue to their logical conclusions.

Eveleth has provided a outline of the direction of travel, and left it to the comickers to determine what they want to talk about; different people would focus on different aspects, and Eveleth, Lubchansky, and Goldstein have done a great job of matching up the particular cartoonist with a topic they could really sink their teeth into.

Case in point: Ben Passmore, whose work explores the reality of being Black, looks at the future of smart homes integrated with smart cities (with damn few civic services, but everything available for hire, with a convenient monthly bill) and asks who gets to participate. The inability of facial recognition systems to distinguish nonwhite people necessarily poses the question: what happens when your car hire/grocery store/home/city decides that it doesn’t know who you are, so you don’t get a ride/banana/place to sleep/right to exist?

Other creator/topic pairings include:

• Julia Gfrörer on algorithmic art and art for algorithms
• John Jennings on the cost of pharmaceuticals leading to IP piracy in order to live
• Sophia Foster-Dimino on animal rights, and the slope between the abolition of meat, the abolition of zoos, and the abolution of pet ownership²
• Box Brown on the implications of absolute, measurable truth
• Maki Naro on dealing with legal conflicts in space, which has no law
• Kate Sheridan on uploaded consciousness and delaying the sting of death
• Ziyed Y Ayoub and Blue Delliquanti on gender being as changeable as hairstyle
• Amelia Onorato on living and working on/under the sea
• Lubchansky on how eliminating the need to sleep would upend work and leisure
• Goldstein on how entertainment personalities (already subject to parasocial relationships) could become entirely personalized to the individual audience member via data, personality modeling, and AI³

Eveleth provides an essay to accompany each vignette, providing context and reinforcing the central conceit of Flash Forward: none of this is written in stone; it’s a series of possible futures (some likely mutually incompatible), and identifying possibles is the first step to determining which are undesirable so that we can work now to avoid then. For all the grimness of some of the possibilities, the idea that we can shape the future — surely the radical difference between the modern era and all prior human history — remains somewhat hopeful.

Flash Forward: An Illustrated Guide To Possible (And Not So Possible) Tomorrows releases on Tuesday, 20 April. It’s a thought-provoking read that just happens do most of its provocation via comics. Some of your favorite creators are here, and likely you’ll find at least one or two that are new to you that you’ll want to keep an eye on.

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¹ Host of the podcast of the same name.

² This one was a surprise to me — I didn’t know that there were folks who truly want to abolish family pets, but then I remembered PETA running an animal shelter with sky high kill rate within 24 hours of intake and exhibit an attitude that leads me to conclude they believe any animal is better off dead than in human care. Any PETA types that come for my dog had better be able to run.

³ No humans need apply, as they’ll never be fine-tunable to the precise desires of each and every consumer.