Why Larry Niven, you ask? Because in junior high and high school, it was a time for plentiful reprints of old ’60s SF stories, and I read pretty much everything that Niven wrote in that time period. One short story, about a protagonist named Richard Mann¹, has stuck with me. It involved ancient living artifacts of a long-ago stellar empire, trees genetically engineered to act as solid-fuel rockets to power spacecraft to explore the solar system. Also, how bad things happen when you use them to make bonfires.

So I had Niven on the brain as I sat down to read three of the recent Science Comics which were kindly sent to me by the fine folks at :01 Books: Trees, Rockets, and Solar System. Let’s take ’em in order.

Trees, by Andy Hirsch (who contributed the volume on Dogs last year) was the book that I learned the most from; biology was never my strong suit, and I learned a great deal about the gross (and cell-sized, for that matter) anatomical structures of trees, expanding my vocabulary by quite a bit; given the age range the books are intended for, pronunciation guides in the text might have been useful (my wife, the trained biologist, corrected me on several occasions).

Hirsch starts with the general nature of the tree’s lifecycle, then carries the POV character (Acorn, who doesn’t want to plant himself, because trees are boring) through an exploration of the mechanics of tree growth, adaptation, reproduction, dispersal, forest-level impacts (on individual trees, entire species, and whole ecosystems), and ends up on the truly freaktabulous network of fungi that connects basically every tree in a vicinity to every other tree, allowing for energy and resource exchange, information transfer, and a whole lot more. By the time they’re all done, a tree looks no different, but a stand (or a copse, or perhaps a forest) starts to look an awful lot like a collective intelligence² and I am resolved to be nicer to trees in the future.

I didn’t learn as much from Rockets by Anne and Jerzy Drozd, but was impressed at the level of scientific detail included; this book is likely to be the one most challenging to the target audience, if only because it’s got math³. It also jumps around history a bunch, following different threads of the development of rockets (not unlike the seminal Connections series by James Burke, who knows a thing or two about rockets); it’s a nice addition at the back of the book that the history of rockets is laid out in chronological order, with references to pages in the story.

The story of rockets is conveyed by animals that have intersected rockets throughout history — a mechanical pigeon that flew in 400 BCE; a chicken, sheep, and duck that took the first artificial flight; Russian cosmodogs Belka and Strelka, and a pair of bears (a grizzly, who was involved in ejection seat development, and a polar bear … to talk about the Cold War). They all do a great job teaching the basics of physics (Newton’s laws, etc) and the fundamental paradox of rockets: to fly, you need fuel, but fuel adds weight, so you need more fuel to lift the fuel, so you need even more fuel to lift the first additional fuel…. And while I started this section by pointing out that I didn’t learn as much, I at least learned that Tsiolkovsky, the great theorist of rocketry, was largely self-taught because he was deaf and left school to take up residence at the Moscow State Library.

I was also pretty well-versed in the history of our Solar System, but Rosemary Mosco and Jon Chad did a nice job of bringing what could have been a rote recitation of facts-n-figures to life, electing to set up a framing story of a young girl home sick, her friend trying to stave off boredom, and pets recast as heroic explorers. There’s a snake with glasses, and a spacesuit pocket protector with pens in the pocket! There’s literally no way not to love that.

Also well done — expressing the scope and scale of things in space in ways that young readers can understand. The asteroid belt is largely empty space, contradicting every movie ever to show an asteroid belt. The immense size of our largest planets are well-explained, as well as some surprisingly small sizes. Did you know that Saturn’s rings are only about the height of a three story house? Or that Uranus smells like rotten eggs and cat pee? Or what the dance of a binary star system looks like? Or that Tycho Brahe got in a math fight and had his nose chopped off? That’s not a space fact, but it’s awesome nonetheless.

Mosco & Chad’s emphasis is not only on what we know, but how much we’ve discovered recently, and how much we don’t yet know … kids are going to absolutely be convinced that the world above (not to mention the one right outside the door) is one they can explore and discover themselves.

All three books are well situated for your tween-to-early-teen reader (with Rockets maybe on the upper end of the range and Solar System maybe on the lower end), and all come highly recommended. Solar System releases on 18 September, and the other two are available now.

Spam of the day:

Bettie Carbonara: Let us pick up the check =)
Sadly, not an offer to buy me dinner. Why are spammers obsessed with the costs of kitchen garbage disposal repair?

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¹ Rich Man, who was very poor and trying to make his fortune.

² I also have the SC volume devoted to The Brain but haven’t read it yet; I might have gotten in a review four-fecta if I had.

³ All the way up to and including Tsiolkovsky’s rocket equation; there’s also a math error that looks to be the result of a copy/paste mistake at the lettering stage. 1 kg at 1m/sec does not equal 0.5 newton, and hopefully it doesn’t confuse kid readers too much.

It’s a long weekend, and I’m going to try to put a dent in the stack o’ review copies. I’ve got one Science Comic down (Solar System by Rosemary Mosco and Jon Chad) and have three to dig through (Trees by Andy Hirsch, Rockets by Anne Drozd and Jerzy Drozd, and The Brain by Tory Woollcott and Alex Graudins).

Oh yeah, and also the third and fourth Cucumber Quest collections by Gigi DG, the third Delilah Dirk adventure by Tony Cliff, and the concluding Nameless City book (The Divided Earth) by Faith Erin Hicks¹.

I was going to say that :01 Books has been very good to me — and make no mistake, they’re very generous with the review copies — but really, they’re very good to us. They’re providing significant career development for more indie- and webcomics folks than anybody this side of C Spike Trotman.

Who, speaking of, wrapped up her latest Smut Peddler Kickstart (that would be the fourth) at more thatn US$106K in only 15 days; it’s not the top-funded Iron Circus effort, but it was the shortest, and with 17 pay bump increments reached, it wound up paying its contributors US$85/page bonuses on top of the base rate of US$75/page. The bonus was bigger than the base, people.

And with that off her plate, it’s been a flurry of announcements, with one, two, three new books announced. Note to self: email Spike, ask if they’ve got a review copy list yet.

I’ll see you on Tuesday — enjoy the weekend and I’d consider it a personal favor if you read some awesome comics.

Spam of the day:

Cure for Diabites(secret method reavealed)

Control your weight, control your sugar, exercise? I’m mean, I’m just spitballing here.

_______________
¹ Who is a machine. I literally can’t tell how she can crank out a book a year.

There’s not a lot to say about Check, Please (don’t forget to click the > in the upper left to open the menu that will get you to the archive and other features) by Ngozi Ukazu that hasn’t been said — it’s about gay college hockey bros, it’s incredibly full of heart, only those who hate joy dislike this comic¹. The Kickstarts for the first three books have raised a collective US$826,574, and that’s before :01 Books decided to release a pair of collections to encapsulate the entire run.

So when they sent me an advanced copy of the first, subtitled #Hockey, I didn’t think I’d have much to say beyond I enjoy this work a great deal.

Then I read the first two years worth of story, no clicking, and the sheer joy that Ukazu has for her characters, for the narrative she wants to tell, and especially for the game of hockey, came charging at me. Her skill at creating clearly distinct personalities, her command of casual shit-talk, her flair for writing scenes where the characters are interleaving three to five distinct conversations at once — jumping between argument threads and back to earlier points just to bust on each other — are all top-notch.

But none of that would work if it weren’t clear that she is crazy about this game and the people that play it. From the foreword, on the topic of a screenplay she wrote in college:

But being a Texan, a woman, and a first-generation Nigerian, I knew that writing about a white, Boston-born hockey bro would require weeks of anthropological study…. And when I emerged not only was [the screenplay] done, but I had suffered an unintended side effect.

I had become obsessed with hockey.

The minute I began research, hockey suddenly transformed into this fast-paced, explosive, wild, and beautiful game, with a culture filled with strange rituals and cute nicknames and intense yet stoic men and women who strap knives to their boots and chase around slabs of vulcanized rubber.

I get the feeling; I know nothing about hockey², but this story makes me feel like I have a fly-on-the-wall perspective on the culture. Mostly because it takes that degree of love to not only celebrate hockey (and those that play it), but to mock them ceaselessly³.

Only a writer in love with the sport could casually mention hockey’s glories in the same breath as its crippling unpopularity in most of the United States. It takes affection to dig down to the soft mushy center of these characters beneath their squalid exterior:

Ransom: What the fuck is that smell? Goddamn! It’s like my aunt’s house but with more love and innocence.
Holster: Bro, I’ve been to your aunt’s house? And no offense, but compared to this, her house smells like a shithole.

It’s no coincidence that both those links feature Ransom and Holster; I love those guys. They are best friends, they bust on and celebrate each other, they’re occasionally idiots, loyal to the end, and hilarious. Anybody else would make them the center of the strip, turn it into a goofball fest; they’re not supporting players, per se (everybody gets their time to shine on this team/family), but they aren’t the central focus.

That’s Bitty and Jack, and the ways they learn to deal with who they are (individually and together), who the world expects them to be, and how to be okay with themselves. They didn’t get a meet-cute, but their journey from the object of ironic, secret shipping to main couple would be the envy of any rom-com.

For those that are familiar and thought about skipping the book, it’s got some production cleanup that improves on the original. The book features new lettering, and tighter word balloon placement (shorter, more direct tails, better choices about what to cover up) than the online strips. The first few strips are now in color, and the ever-delightful Hockey Shit With Ransom & Holster strips now form something like a narrative. We also get a complete collection of Bitty’s sophomore year tweets (Ukazu occasionally locks the account, when it gives away things happening in the strip), and they add an additional perspective to what’s happening in the book.

Check, Please! Book 1: #Hockey releases on 18 September from :01 Books; it is highly recommended for anybody that likes any or all of hockey, sports bros, romance, queer stories, and fun.

Spam of the day:

your Ductwork repairs are covered (And then some!)

This is not only giving me nightmares about Brazil and form 27B/6, it’s also making me scratch my head because it came to my Fleen email, not the general purpose Gary The Homeowner email.

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¹ Okay, one negative thing, and it’s purely my hang-up. The updates encompass enough pages to make up a full story scene, and they come out at irregular intervals. But my brain only makes sense of longer stories either a) via regularly predictable updates, preferably three or more times a week, b) via big huge chunks. As a result, I read Check, Please once every 4-6 months, taking in big chunks of updates and that’s too long to wait.

² Other than the fact that I met my wife at a hockey game. It ended with a brawl in the last 10 seconds that resulted in every player on the ice other than the home (that would be RPI) goalie being sent off, and the visiting team (that would be Brown) having a snit-fit and refusing to finish. They were losing 4-1 anyway.

³ Similar to the Biblical studies that judge the authenticity of purported scripture by looking at how much it describes Jesus in glowing terms. Those that have a critical or mixed view are more likely to be true observations by contemporaries, goes the thinking, instead of later writings by believers that emphasis divine perfection.

Let’s talk Kickstarts for a moment, yes?

• Up first, Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett has started the campaign for the second Drive hardcover, and it’s burning up the charts.

  Well, kinda. It’s true that the funding is (as of this writing) at nearly US$34,000 of a US$25,000 goal, and LArDK only announced it about six hours ago. But! LArDK is also known for giving his Patreon backers first crack at things, so there’s every chance that it was up for a period of time before we got word. Which is to say, the early soft launch messes with the FFF mk2, so no predictions on how it will do. It doesn’t even show up in Kicktraq yet.

  Regardless, the strip is great¹, the books are pretty (and are offered in a more-affordable softcover from the get-go this time), and I’m hoping when fulfillment time comes around, I’ll be able to add on the Drive Corps challenge coin, on account of I don’t need the rest of the non-book stuff in the tiers that feature it.

  Like the first time around, stretch goals will mean including the Tales From The Drive guest stories² and likely fancifications of the books — spot gloss, ribbon bookmarks, embosses, etc. But the appeal is really the story, which is probably hitting the 50% mark by the end of Act 2. You’ve got a month to get in on it, and best of luck to LArDK!

• Secondly, we’re down to the final hours on the latest Smut Peddler collection, just over 26 hours to go as of this writing, and US$402 from a fifteenth stretch goal³.

  Each stretch goal means an additional five bucks per page to the creators. Fifteen times five is 75 smackeroos, and if you’re putting together a ten page story or so? Not chump change. It also means that each creator will be paid twice what they originally contracted for. Only Iron Circus Supreme Leader For Life C Spike Trotman knows exactly what the breakdown on her various anthology costs have been, and what percentage of the more than a million dollars she’s Kickstarted has gone to creator bonuses.

  But if I were a betting man? I’d say a third. Aside from the recognition that creators have gotten from appearing in such a high-profile project, apart from the cases of books they can sell themselves, aside from the work that they’ve gotten as a result, it is all but certain that Spike has introduced a sum well into the six figures to the indie comics community. That makes an impact in a rent and groceries for dozens of creators.

  There’s a lot of talk from terrible wannabe creators who, in between shitting on other people, are now bragging about how they’re remaking the industry. Aside from the fact that I’ve been reading self-published comics as far back as my high school days (that would be the first Reagan Administration), nothing these dipshits claims to be doing is going to have the impact on the industry that Spike’s had by following a simple formula:

  Find work you want to publish
  Pay people for it
  Pay them more when it’s a success.

  Have fun playing catch-up, dipshits. Y’aint getting in front of the black lady from Chicago and those who’ve been smart enough to learn from (and work with) her instead of trying to pretend she never existed. Smut Peddler: Sex Machine finishes funding around 5:00pm CDT tomorrow, 29 August. Get in now or miss out.

Spam of the day:

Studies performed at leading universities around the world revealed that tinnitus is actually a brain problem that destroys the auditory cortex. tinnitus doesn’t fry just the auditory cortex. It sends ripples out across the entire brain which over-stimulates neurons. This leads tinnitus sufferers to develop life-threatening diseases such as Alzheimer’s, dementia, diabetes, hypertension and even cancer.

You might have stuck the landing on the brave researcher reveals what they don’t want you to know bullshit if you’d stopped after dementia — that would have still been bullshit but still vaguely related to brain things — but over-stimulated neurons don’t cause diabetes, hypertension, and cancer. And if it’s not an ear problem, why does my mild tinnitus manifest when I undergo pressure changes, and largely resolve when I perform the Valsalva maneuver (not to be confused with the Jendrassik maneuver)? But no, you reached too far and clowned yourself. Sucks to be you.

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¹ And yes, the campaign features a blurb by me, as did the back cover to Act 1. I never agree to receive anything of value for that blurb, and although LArDK sent me a copy of the Act 1 hardcover, it was after I’d received my copy from the last Kickstart. The extra copy had some adventures, but eventually wound up given to my local library. I’ve already backed Act 2 at the hardcover level. I think that’s all the disclaiming that’s needed.

² For which LArDK pays top-tier industry rates. Like, Marvel-and-DC page rates; one creator told me that their contribution was the single best-paying job of their freelance career, which now includes high-profile graphic ovel gigs and multiple Eisner nominations. More on page rates momentarily.

³ I’m pretty sure with the usual last-day bump, stretch goal sixteen will happen. And that’s in just two weeks of funding.

First up, the nominations hit in the last hour or so, and Fleen congratulates not only the nominees for Outstanding Online Comic, but also the web-type folks who are peppered throughout the other categories. OOC first, then:

Woman World by Aminder Dhaliwal (originally on Instagram, now most easily read on Webtoon), The Wolves Outside by Jesse England, A Fire Story by Brian Fies, Lara Croft Was My Family by Carta Monir, and A Part of Me is Still Unknown by Meg O’Shea. I’m not familiar with England’s work, and I know I’ve read Dhaliwal’s but don’t recall all the details; I remember reading Fies’s, Monir’s, and O’Shea’s and am pleased to see them here.

Other nominations of note include Say It With Noodles: On Learning To Speak The Language Of Food by the Sawdust Bear/Space Gnome/Paul Bunyan fetishist, Shing Yin Khor (for Outstanding Minicomic and How The Best Hunter In The Village Met Her Death by Molly Ostertag (who is having such a good year) for Outstanding Story, both of which appeared online originally, but which will be available from their respective creators at SPX on 15-16 September at the Bethesda North Marriott.

Right, books:

• If you’ve got a kid in the house, they undoubtedly know Gene Yang already; if they’re even a little geeky, they’ve probably been reading the Secret Coders series by Yang (words) and Mike Holmes (pictures), which wraps up with its sixth installment in a few weeks.

  Along the way they’ve followed the story of Hopper, Eni (whose name turns out to be … no, no, you’ll just have to wait) and Josh as they’ve learned some fairly sophisticated programming in LOGO¹, solved a mystery, and dealt with … let us say a romance of many dimensions. Highly recommended for the budding problems solver in your orbit, and since book 6 (Monsters & Modules) doesn’t drop until 2 October, you’ve got time for them to make their way through the first five books².

• And another book, one that you can read, I’ma say in the next week, week and a half. Longtime readers of this page know that I am fully, 100% in the tank for KB “Otter” Spangler’s A Girl And Her Fed, and particularly the associated novels. I mentioned AGAHF last week, in conjunction with a turning point in the story, and Spangler’s got more to say on the topic today (I’m linking to the crosspost at her writing blog, because the comic’s newsposts don’t have permalinks), and especially about the book in question:
  

  In fact, the next Hope Blackwell book comes out this week! It’s the story of what happened after Thomas Paine showed up in Mare’s kitchen and told her about the Afterlife. There are chupacabras.

  I’m not naming the novel in question because Spangler hasn’t released the title publicly, but she did let me read an advance copy and if you are a fan of words, you’ll find something here to love. Yes, monsters, and yes what happens when a nun with very proper sensibilities butts head with an ADHD-afflicted narrator with a potty mouth. There’s odd bits of history that really happened, and the most intelligent person in the world is an asshole for shits and giggles, and trustfund ghost-hunter wannabes.

  But mostly it’s a story about trauma. About the hurts — some physical, some not — that we shove down and try to forget, and how they come screaming back to the surface when our defenses are down. You can laugh and deflect and delay, but trauma finds a way. You have to grow through it, and Spangler’s subjected her characters to more growth — kicking and screaming, in most cases — than anybody this side of Randy Milholland or Meredith Gran.

  Spangler doesn’t always have a lot of sympathy for her characters, but there’s empathy in spades. She specializes in damaged, quasi-terrible people doing the right thing despite the costs, people who have no fucks left to give but plenty of damns³. Plus, we send each other Sharktopuses. Anybody that you can send a Sharktopus to is by definition a quality person.

  Title To Be Revealed: A Hope Blackwell Novel releases sometime this week, maybe next — there’s cover artwork to be finished, final passes on the various e-book encodings to do, all the last minute stuff. When it’s out, you can find it on Spangler’s book page for a ridiculously reasonable sum, and I’m sure she’ll make mention in her tweets.

Spam of the day:

Dear Gary, You are invited to attend Passionflix’s World Premiere of New York Times bestselling author K. Bromberg’s Driven series [date redacted]. [In attendance will be] Tosca Musk ?(Passionflix co-founder, director), Maye Musk (COVERGIRL® supermodel)

Not really my beat, but FYI, that director and supermodel in attendance? They are, respectively, Elon Musk’s sister and mom. I just found that interesting.

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¹ And really, it’s less about the coding language and more about learning to think in a problem-solving manner. The language could have been entirely made up and it would have had just as much impact.

² As always, thanks to the fine folks at :01 Books for the review copy.

³ Hat tip for that turn of phrase to Helen Rosner, whose brilliance at Twitter is surpassed only by her brilliance at The New Yorker.

It looks like this, plus a bunch more. Here’s the latest from Rosemary Mosco, Faith Erin Hicks, Gene Yang and Mike Holmes, Tillie Walden, Ngozi Ukazu, Gigi DG, and more. That’s not to mention the books I’ve already got from Drew Weing, Tony Cliff, Jerzy Drozd … and all of that is only from :01 Books. I’ve also got the new boo from David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc), Minna Sundberg, and more.

What I am saying here is two-fold:

1. Expect a lot of book reviews for the next while.
2. There is no way to keep up with this pace.

I read a bit of commentary from about TV not long ago — I can’t remember where, but it was probably from either The AV Club or Film Crit Hulk¹ — that noted with the many, many original series on broadcast, cable, and streaming, it becomes literally impossible to not only watch all of it, it’s impossible to even watch just the good stuff. I would suggest that comics and graphic novels are in the same place.

Which is why the persistent presence of bad-faith actors who insist that comics are in dire need of protection from those who would sarcastic-air-quotes ruin them is baffling. I have got literally thousands of pages of backlog to get through, and these dipshits are worried that somebody who’s less cis-male, less straight, less melanin-deprived than them will get a chance to write something? So much so that they have to try to silence and ostracize those that they perceive as standing in their way?

I’ve spent most of the time that this blog has existed working from a POV of celebrating work I think should be seen rather than giving brainspace to work I dislike. I think you can count the number of negative reviews I’ve run on one hand. But I’ve also spent the the past year and a half going on record against terrible people who think the world is bettered by shitting on anybody different from them, and while a lot of that has been critiques of those in power, I don’t see any reason to sleep on those who are trying to climb their way to positions of power.

So this is on the record: the disingenously named “Diversity And Comics”, the inexcusable sealioning Comicsgate crusaders², the excreble individuals like Ethan van Sciver and Cody Pickrodt (no links on any of them, look ’em up if you haven’t heard about their deals) have already failed. The vision for comics that they want has already been swept away. If they’d just kept making, buying, and reading the comics they like in silence, none of us would have ever noticed their absence from our discussion because there’s so much left over for us once they isolate themselves in their own corner of the culture.

But that’s the point of all their noise. It’s not that we have this cornucopia of work, big enough for anybody to find something that they love, it’s that they can’t just ignore stuff that isn’t for them. It’s that they can’t tell us, no you are only allowed to read and like what I like and it’s driving them bonkers. They can stand anything except not being the center of attention.

Well, congrats, fuckboys. You’ve got our attention, now you get our scorn and dismissal and contempt, but some day you may work all the way up to our pity. You’ll excuse me if I don’t spend any more cycles on you, but as you can see, I’ve got comics to read.

Spam of the day:

your Garbage Disposal repairers are covered (And then some!)

Man, I love it when repairers are covered, but I don’t actually own a garbage disposal. Is that a problem?

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¹ Yes, yes, I said TV and Hulk mostly talks about film, but Hulk is also a deeply insightul writer about all kinds of media, including the single finest piece of GN analysis I’ve ever read, on Hope Larson’s adaptation of A Wrinkle In Time.

And for those who prefer FCH to both write in all-caps and Hulk-speak, may I recommend HULK WATCH EAT, PRAY, LOVE FOR YOU ASSHOLES, which would be the best piece of movie writing since Roger Ebert died, except Ebert was still alive when it was written?

² That almost makes them sound like a small-town high school sports team, but is way too grandiose for what they’ve accomplished. I imagine they’ve got a banner out front that reads Home Of The Brigading Sockpuppets.

Editor’s note: Using book reviews here at Fleen are marked with copious spoiler warnings, but not this one. The book in discussion (and its prequel) are so convoluted (and I mean that in a good way — convolution is part of the story and its visuals) that to given enough detail to be spoilers would make this review about 23 times longer than it is.

So no spoilers, except the bit about the creepy doll, but come on — it’s a horror story. There’s got to be a creepy doll in there somewhere.

What do you do when your town — your world growing up, and to some degree the rest of the world in any event — is broken? Not metaphorically, actually broken by the intrusion of another dimension into our own. Scott Westerfeld used the horror underlying the destruction of Poughkeepsie, NY (and to a lesser degree, a village in North Korea) to explore the idea of nostalgia getting the better of us in last year’s Spill Zone (illustrated in a jumpy, almost schizophrenic energy by Alex Puvilland), where things within The Zone are defined by how they used to look and their present wrongness.

So what happens when it’s possible to communicate with the entities that have taken up residence in our world, post-Spill? What happens when humans become (I’ve been trying to think of another way to put this and I just can’t) cross-pollinated with the substance of that other world that broke into ours? What happens when you learn that the (relatively contained) apocalypse that destroyed your town and took your parents and upended your life wasn’t some cosmic accident, but the consequence of otherworldly politics and a little girl’s desire to help?

Spill Zone: The Broken Vow is what happens. It’s the intersection of disaster, grief, memory, art, family squabbles, and a dash of geopolitics thrown in for good measure. It’s what happens when good intentions meet bad outcomes, where being unable to let go of pain becomes an act of rebellion, sustenance, and creation all at the same time. Where the kindest thing that can happen is to cut loose the past, and to (maybe) save your own world by (maybe) forcibly upending another. Where the act of observation¹ can force physics to obey their usual rules again.

There’s a creepy doll in it, too, and it may or may not be entirely evil. A better word is probably indifferent, or possibly subject to a system of morality so distinct from our own that terms like good and evil don’t really pertain.

But strands that were frayed can be joined together again; chaos can have order imposed again, and if the acts that precipitate the closing of the breach between worlds resemble the acts that caused the breach in the first place, well, it’s nice to have a bit of symmetry again. When you’ve had a reality foisted on you that insists that 1 + 1 = giant slavering cat from Hell, the predictability of laser rangefinder + missile + time = boom is a relief sometimes.

Fleen thanks :01 Books for the review copy. Spill Zone: The Broken Vow by Scott Westerfeld (words) and Alex Puvilland (pictures) is available now wherever books are sold, and is highly recommended for readers that dig on horror movies, but maybe not younger folk that get hell of creeped out and can’t sleep.

Spam of the day:

Gary, An Announcement of EPIC Proportions!

It’s a PR blurb that involves the videogame producer that’s named Epic, I get it. That’s not a lame pun at all.

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¹ Observation at a distance, in a clear-eyed manner, via mechanisms that both document things as they are and provide no rose-colored visions to look upon with nostalgia. Not letting go of How Things Used To Be is the cause of a lot of misery for characters from both worlds².

² By both worlds, I meant Poughkeepsie and the other world that crashed into it, but given the North Korea is so different from Poughkeepsie, I may as well have said all three worlds.

The Adventure Zone: Here Be Gerblins is maybe the book that is least for me that I’ve ever looked forward to. I believe that I’ve mentioned that I don’t listen to any of the McElroy-related media empire — not because I’m not interested, but because I know that I would get sucked into listening to every. single. damn. one. they do, or are associated with. Every month or so I can go by YouTube and see which bits are attracting all the new animatics, and I quite enjoyed their guest turn on Bubble, but that’s as far as I can go. I have work, people.

But TAZ:HBG has brought me right up to the precipice. If I fall into a McElhole, it’s because of this book.

Which is weird, because it shouldn’t have worked. A story made up on the fly (and remade) by four different people (brothers Justin, Travis, Griffin, and dad Clint), and adapted to story form by two (Clint and artist Carey Pietsch) should be a mess. Griffin surely knows the pain of every dungeon master who’s ever lived as the players derail everything you’ve planned and go off in a million directions … and when those players are known for digressive goofery and several thousand tangents per second? There’s no way to get a single, coherent narrative from that starting point.

Except they do. Credit to Griffin for clearly having an idea of where he wanted the story to go and accounting for all the fuckery his family could throw at it. Further credit to Clint and Pietsch for finding a way to pare down to that story, while still coming up with means to include the best fourth-wall breaks, character introductions, scene shifts, and the flavor of the gaming sessions¹. It’s straddled the line between playing a game and what the lives of the collectively-created characters are like in the game rather nicely.

But that’s not why you should read the book. You should read the book for one exchange, during the last of the increasingly-difficult boss battles, when who the McElroys are comes through. They’ve spent 200 pages playing characters who are willing to tolerate each other, but who range between self-regard, self-delusion, self-interest, and self-aggrandizement.

Magnus (human, fighter, played by Travis) is cocksure, rushes in without thinking, and generally makes things worse. Taako (elf, wizard, played by Justin) full of himself, not above a bit of thievery, and generally makes things worse. Merle (dwarf, cleric, played by Clint) is grouchy, doesn’t like his family or the mission, and generally makes things worse.

Then the Big Bad threatens a town that they don’t care about at all. Taako’s fled to a place of marginal safety and for once, Magnus hesitates.

Magnus: I’m not leaving with all these people here!!
Merle: Magnus … you can’t save everybody.
Magnus: Maybe not — but that doesn’t mean you can’t try.

And there it is. Despite playing a blundering jerk for hours and hours, Travis can’t help but find a place to inject the fundamental decency for which the McElroy boys are known. It’s going to cost Magnus his life, it’s going to derail the game (and the podcast series)², and Travis’s dad reacts the only way he can.

Merle: Well … shit.

And then they’re off, transformed from adventurers to heroes. Even Taako finds a way to to care — despite insisting that he doesn’t care — and act to help Magnus and Merle. They’ll still be jerks, they’ll still try to scam their way through life, but they’ve turned a corner without really intending to. Griffin may have set the conditions that made it possible, but when Magnus, Merle, and Taako could have cut and run, Travis, Clint, and Justin decided that they wouldn’t.

It would be a hard thing for one author to pull off — heck, it’s taken masters of character growth like Randy Milholland and Meredith Gran hundreds of strips over years to accomplish such redemptive arcs — and four people working occasionally in parallel (but just as often at cross) purposes pulled it off in the space of a minute. Pietsch conveyed the entire thing in three pages, and the centerpiece, that emotional turn from Magnus and Merle in three panels.

And that’s why this book that isn’t for me, one that I looked forward to from a remove, was ultimately worth it. Because in and around all the goofs and sniping and shit-talking and messing with the DM and each other, little grace notes pervade. You can be a bit of a dick, and still want to save the helpless. It’s a hell of a message.

Oh, and the whole thing with the sshhkxxx? That’s one great story hook you came up with, Griffin. Nice one.

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¹ My favorites, in no particular order:

• DM Griffin appears in inset panels when he interacts with the story; on his first appearance, the players panic and he has to calm them.
• Scrolls appear to introduce new characters and their defining abilities.
• What must have been wildly looping, heavily descriptive role-playing (Well, I say ______. Okay then, I say _____ in response, and suck it!) is constructed into naturalish dialogue.
• Running gags about game mechanics appear, as do repeated hints by Clint about popular songs; at first, the boys mock him out of character, but by the end, they’re referencing Oklahoma and The Girl From Ipanema in-character and it works.

² Unless Griffin can make with the DM magic, fudging rules and consequences to keep the story going that is.

See that? That’s a stack of review copies from :01 Books, who remain the best folks in whatever cohort or clade you care to name. Summer convention season, a ramping-up to a 50 book/year release schedule, and the shifting of people to cover Gina Gagliano’s former responsibilities allowed a backlog to develop for a bit, but now I’ve got ’em, I’m gonna read ’em, and I’m gonna let you know what I think of ’em. Speculation: they’re great.

For those not on the reviewer list for a top-flight publisher, there’s still ways to dive into the wonder of an amazing graphic novel. For instance, those on the West Coast in general, and the Bay Area in particular, have the opportunity to look at the making of one of the more acclaimed books of the past year: The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui.

The story of her life as a refugee and immigrant, and the effects of those times on her life, is getting the spotlight treatment by the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco; as part of CAM’s Emerging Artist Showcase, a selection of Bui’s original artwork will go on display on 30 August (two weeks from tomorrow, as I write this) and remain until mid-January.

At the same time, The Best We Could Do is the San Francisco Public Library’s One City One Book selection for 2018, with discussion groups, exhibits, and author events to come in October. Even if you can’t make it to CAM, if you’re from the Bay Area, you probably aren’t too far from a library, and can get in on the reading, experiencing, and learning.

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Families, plural? How did you know? Yes, I need to cover my family’s future, and also the future of my secret families in other cities that nobody knows about!

Not terribly hard, but after yesterday’s downpour, there’s a lot of groundwater. Like, a lot a lot, and I’m hoping that today’s drive home is not a crapshow. In the meantime, there’s two books you should be aware of.

Firstly, the latest Iron Circus Smut Peddler iteration, this one about gettin’ it on with robots. If you followed ICC Generalissimo For Life C Spike Trotman on the Twitters last night, you know it funded out in the first four hours, will be going for only 15 days (pretty sure that’s a record for brevity), and has already passed the second creator’s bonus level. And if you didn’t know all that, now you do.

Secondly, Abby Howard’s new book releases today, and she celebrated by illustrating a comic for Zach Weinersmith (I really love their collaborations). A sequel to last year’s Dinosaur Empire (which was great), Howard sends Ronnie and Ms Lernin to before the time of the great lizards, to the Age Of Fish and beyond, when the seas were alive with critters curious and lethal.

Ocean Renegades¹ looks at the Paleozoic Era, when water was where it was at, evolutionarily speaking. From soft-bodied jellies to sailbacked dimentrodons, Howard takes you through a few hundred million years of nifty critters, and I can’t wait to obtain and devour this great book.

How can I be so sure it’ll be great? Because I got to speak to Ms Howard for about two minutes in San Diego this year, and thanked her for all of her comics, especially Dinosaur Empire, and thanked her in advance for Ocean Renegades which was surely going to be awesome. If it wasn’t going to be awesome, she would have had to tell me — it’s like they have to tell you if they’re a cop, it’s the law. Anyway, Abby Howard knows more about prehistoric beasties than you do² and lucky us, she’s willing to share.

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¹ Not to be confused with the occupants of OceanRenegades.com, a Jersey shore basketball team.

² Man, I hope she gets to do a book on the post-dino mammalian periods. Ever see the ridiculous things that lived in the Age Of Horns? Hippos, rhinos, pigs, deer, rabbits, horses, sloths, all with horns growing up out of their snouts. Probably fruit bats, too. It was a weird time.