I’ve mentioned Ben Hatke many times on this page; he’s written and illustrated many, many great books, including one just two weeks ago. We know each other from Camp, which is where I also met his wife Anna, and youngest child, Ida. They are all the best, warmest people; I was continuously impressed that a toddler could travel across the continent and be thrown in with 80 strangers and still be in a continual good humor. Joyous would be the correct word. Vivacious would be the example set by her parents.

I’ve just learned that she was injured by a horse this past Sunday and has since died. She was four years old. I cannot imagine the grief they, and their other daughters, must be feeling now. Anything I say will be insufficient to the task, but it feels like there’s a hole in the world right now.

Friends of the Hatkes have started a fundraiser to defer medical and funeral costs, which you can find here. If it is in your means to help in this tragic time, please do so. If you pray, they would appreciate that. If you don’t, keep them in your thoughts and try to do something generous, something adventurous, something good for Ida.

Hey, folks in the Greater New York City region, you know that it’s the Brooklyn Book Festival this weekend, right? And that in addition to being free, BKBF will have events and talks and interviews and discussions all over the borough, which may include not only erudite discussion of the events of the day, but also some of your favorite comics folk? If not, then let’s talk.

Comics-related people at BKBF will include Ebony Flowers (off her Ignatz win last weekend for Promising New Talent), Melanie Gillman, Sarah Glidden, Lucy Knisley, MariNaomi, Dylan Meconis, Ben Passmore, Summer Pierre, Frank Santoro, and Magdalene Visaggio. There are others whose names I don’t recognize, and some of them will show up below.

One of the great things about the BKBF bio pages is it links you direct to appearances by the folk in question, so you may want to check out the following events (all on Sunday):

There’s plenty of other events, with start times from 10:00am. There’s also plenty going on Saturday, and points to BKBF for making Children’s Day the start of the festival, instead of the end (as seen in so many events). Luminaries such as Mo Willems¹ and Jon Scieszka will be paneling, and there’s a session specifically on making comics at 1:00pm with Ivan Brunetti. It’s largely different venues from the comics talks on Sunday, so plan your travel accordingly.

And heck, I should point out that events have actually been underway all around the city since Monday (including a panel on translating Japanese, European, and Brazilian comics, tomorrow night at 6:00pm at NYU), continuing until Monday next². Much more information at the BKBF site, with a map of the Sunday venues³ available for your perusal.

Spam of the day:

Thanks for Registering at Acvark Fire Equipment

There’s a little too much Russian in this email for me to click on anything from what purports to be Jamaica’s #1 supplier of fire extinguishers.

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¹ Willems is also this year’s Best Of Brooklyn Award winner.

² When we’ll see if Lauren Duca can recover from that Buzzfeed profile wherein she pitched a major wobbly, via the occasion of her book launch.

³ Drawn and Quarterly will be at booths 234 and 235, and Iron Circus at booth 122. But please note that the Heliotrope and Baffler listed on the vendor page are not the ones you’re thinking of.

Sometimes, the stars just align and a whole bunch of stuff happens at once; today, for example, the redoubtable¹ Jim Zub sees five different comics from three publishers², including two series premieres. Zub’s an incredibly varied and skilled writer, and while I’ve generally enjoyed his original work best, you know that he’s always going to do a good job with premade IP — it’ll make perfect sense if you don’t know the characters, and have a million deep cuts for those who’re up on all the continuity. Keep him in mind as you visit the shops this week.

Also of note for your pull list today: John Allison’s latest miniseries, Steeple. While not explicitly part of the Tackleverse (it takes place in the far corner of England), there are some offhand references, and anytime Allison gets to write British characters, we’re in for a delight. By Night was terrific, but American characters don’t allow Allison to use all his powers, and with Giant Days about to wrap up for good, we can use something to fill the void. And hey, maybe this will be the latest Allison project to go from miniseries to longer miniseries to ongoing, if we’ve all been good and Father Christmas smiles on us.

• If Kickstarter thought that ditching people involved in the unionization effort³ would blow over quickly, they thought wrong. I really wanted to hear what C Spike Trotman had to say, and she’s unambiguous in her feelings over Twitter way:
  

  Kickstarter is such an inherently democratic platform. Seeing the people currently in charge of it stoop to such transparently anti-democratic measures to deny their staff basic protections is incredibly disappointing.

  And Tyler Moore (one of what we may as well be calling the Kickstarter Three) answered a question that had been going around in a reply to Spike: in addition to the creators petition, there is a second petition for creators, backers, former employees … anybody with a relationship with Kickstarter. I’ve signed this one as Gary Tyrrell, 125 project superbacker, over US$7650 paid to creators, and if you think what the Kickstarter Union is trying to do is worthwhile, I urge you to consider doing likewise.

• That being said, I want to stress one last time that the Kickstarter Union is not, at this time, asking creators to forgo or withdraw projects from the platform, or backers to withhold pledges. So you should note that Spike has a new Kickstart going for the latest Smut Peddler collection. All the usual hallmarks apply — funded quickly, a day or so in, pay raises have been secured for creators and more will surely happen, it’ll appear in your mailbox when promised — along with one surprise.

  See, the collection is themed around the idea of maturity and experience, and tell me that’s not Jeff Goldblum on the cover. It’s totally Jeff Goldblum, and if you can come up with a better way to sell the idea of gettin’ it on with hot, hot older folks, I’d like to hear it. Everybody wants sexytimes with Jeff Goldblum. That’s why the FFF mk2 is predicting a final take of US$56K to US$84K when things wrap up in just over two weeks.

• Lastly, and it was getting to be a bit of a close thing so thank glob for the end-of-campaign bump, it appears that KC Green’s print collection of He Is A Good Boy has funded with just about two days to go. It was an unusually high-goal campaign, featuring reward tiers for physical items above the US$25 most-common-pledge-level-on-Kickstarter, for a smart, sprawling work that is (to be fair) not Green’s most accessible work. I get it, people want Dickbutt and This Is Fine and the easily memeable from Green, but he has these enormous ideas that may take hundreds of pages to see the whole picture, and that’s a challenge.

  But did you notice all the cartoonists that have been supporting Green and pushing this project on the sosh-meeds? They know that if you’re going to have somebody that is untrammeled creativity personified out there doing everything from short gags to massive ruminations on identity and the nature of good/evil, it makes comics as a whole a stronger, more expansive medium.

  Plus it’s a 444 page book. In a pinch, you could defend yourself from an attacker with it, a thought which I think would amuse both Green and Crange the titular Good Boy. I’d say you want to hop in and grab his magnum opus before things close on Friday, but knowing Green, he’s got something bigger, more important, more dense with meaning on deck for next Tuesday which will be his masterwork until the one after that launches. Don’t ever think you’ve seen his best and most important comics, they’re always coming at you sometime the week after next.

Spam of the day:

After only 29 days of mental training activities, her brain scan came up clean!

This is from a spam that claims Big Pharma is suppressing news of a cheap, simple treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. Only thing is, the first paper that showed it’s even possible to see the amyloid plaques characteristic of Alzheimer’s via imaging (instead of postmortem dissection) was published on 2 April of this year.

There is no fucking way that anything resembling treatment has been developed since then. You identity-thieving assholes are playing on the emotions of people who are watching loved ones slip away before their eyes, and you can’t even be bothered come up with a plausible lie. I hope you die in either a single very large fire, or a sufficient number of smaller fires.

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¹ So don’t doubt him unless you’re also willing to redoubt him, buckaroo.

² Okay, so one title is a co-publication of two companies, don’t ruin this.

³ Although, the more I think of it, the more it seems that nearly everybody outside of senior management is in on the unionization effort.

This is going to be brief, not because I don’t have lots to say, but because what I have to say is ultimately unimportant. The words you should be reading aren’t mine.

At SPX, I had the privilege to talk to Abby Howard and to tell her how much I enjoy her work. I loaded up with all of her stuff that I didn’t already own, most notably Unhealthy, a pair of autobio stories by Howard and Sarah Winifred Searle. The subtitle is Two Stories Of Mental Health And Body Image.

It’s a gut punch courtesy of two women that are willing to lay bare their relationships with their bodies and the lies that their brains tell them, lies born from our society instructing us all to hate them for their fatness. Instructions that lead to self-hatred and destructive behavior, because as we all know, anything is better than being fat.

Fat means you’re lazy. Fat means you’re stupid. Fat means you’re obviously wrong and bad and unlovable and need to be shunned so you don’t get any on the rest of us because then we would be lazy, stupid, wrong, bad, and unlovable.

That entire paragraph is bullshit.

If you never thought about it in those terms, you need to read Unhealthy. If you have thought about it in those terms because of your own body, or the bodies of those you love, you need to read Unhealthy. Every high school health class should have copies of Unhealthy next to the nutrition posters, people should be handing out copies of Unhealthy outside Weight Watchers, and it should be required reading in medical school.

Searle and Howard have sacrificed and bled¹ to be at the point in their lives where they could tell these stories, to teach us the smallest bit of what it’s like to be them. It’s equal parts cri de coeur and selfless gift and at the risk of repeating myself: We don’t deserve them.

Oh, and today is the launch day for Abby Howard’s third Earth Before Us book, Mammal Takeover! I’ll be obtaining my copy as soon as possible for review, but I’ma go out on a limb and say it’s at least as good as Dinosaur Empire! and Ocean Renegades!, which is to say excellent.

Unhealthy is available for download via itch.io or in physical form from TopatoCo.

Spam of the day:

The price of one million messages 49 USD. There is a discount program when you purchase more than two million message packages. Free trial mailing of 50,000 messages to any country of your selection.

You’re spamming me to sell your spamming services? How very meta.

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¹ And, because a certain percentage of society can’t exist without finding somebody to be cruel to, they have likely opened themselves to further hatred and harassment for daring to point out that they aren’t lazy, stupid, wrong, bad, and unlovable.

SPX was pretty excellent this year, everybody. I saw too many wonderful folks (and forgot to include some on the list while I was waiting for a burger, like Jamie Noguchi, Boum, MK Reed, Patrick Lay, Lucy Knisley, Maia Kobabe, Britt Sabo, Lauren Davis, Kori Bing, Blue Delliquanti, Kori Michele Handwerker, and Melanie Gillman, plus I hadn’t run into George, Raina Telgemeier, and Andy Runton yet), a side effect of the concentrated nature of excellence:space that the North Bethesda Marriott engenders.

But the trip took on an actual reporting task, as the common perception of Kickstarter’s actions last week skewed nearly 100% to They’re unionbusting. The near-universal consensus of everybody I spoke to hit several repeated points:

• Kickstarter’s upper management does not reflect the community-interface folks, who were spoken of with warmth and support. It was pointed out that the Kickstarter representatives as the show were, themselves, involved in the unionization efforts.
• Creators indicated that they’ll be looking to the Kickstarter Union folks for guidance and will follow their lead. Boycotting right now has not been requested, and would very likely be counterproductive.
• Several acknowledged the difficulty of finding a platform that could serve to replace Kickstarter if the Union calls for a boycott.
• There’s a willingness to lend voices of support to the unionization effort, to the extent that personal involvement with Kickstarter might hold any moral authority or ability to sway management’s decisions.

Speaking of the second and fourth points above, Taylor Moore (one of those ousted last week) is currently tweeting a call to action, asking creators to sign on to a petition to Kickstarter management. Not being a project creator myself I am not the intended signatory, but I’ve noticed more than a few webcomics folks retweeting and stating they’ve signed, so maybe take a look.

Specific responses when I asked if there were comments about the situation for the record:

I’ll just end on a couple of personal notes: I had a couple of people come up to me on Saturday to thank me for this page³, and one woman who told me that she took a photo of me at MoCCA 2018 to use as reference for a painting, which she showed me on her phone (and which she’ll be emailing to me soon, I hope; I’ll share it when I get it). Thanks very much, Susan, John, and Qu.

Congratulations to Colleen AF Venable and Ellen T Crenshaw, who found out this morning that Kiss Number 8 is longlisted for a National Book Award.

And congratulations to Rosemary Valero-O’Connell on your three (!) Ignatzen for Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me. I told her when I met her that her already-strong work was going to become world-class; I told her on Saturday to make room in her luggage for three bricks. So far I’m two-for-two. Back her Kickstarter, which I guess brings us full circle.

Spam of the day:

Every my part are getting hot when I see you

I am a sexy, sexy man, it’s true.

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¹ They had a bunch of balloons and I saw similar critters on half the tables on the show floor. They were … yeah.

That’s mine in the picture up top. I call him Bob The Unsettling. He lives on the shelf above my computer, with my Stupid, Stupid Rat Creature. The Rat Creature has a quiche as an accessory!

² I noticed later that Evan Dahm similarly editorialized on the balloon at his table.

Oh, and that’s not a silver wang in the background, pervs. SPX has helium balloon letters of the alphabet floating above each table pod, and that’s Pod J, listing to the side.

³ One added it had been their homepage when I was in high school, which I took as a tremendous compliment. There’s all kinds of things you fixate on at that age, and a hack webcomics pseudojournalist wouldn’t make the top 1000 most popular online topics among highschoolers. Thanks for that, and for the mini — it’s good work.

This was decided a few hours prior to the news breaking about Kickstarter firing three people in the space of eight days, who all were involved in the unionization effort there. But since that happened, my trip will now be a dual-purpose wallow in some comics and awesome people trip mixed with commit some godsdammned journalism overtones.

For those that haven’t seen all of the brewing shitstorm: Clarissa Redwine asserts that she exceeded all her employment performance metrics for Q2, but Kickstarter told her she was fired for performance deficiencies. Taylor Moore says he was offered no explanations as to his termination. I’ve not seen a public identification of the third employee yet. Both Redwine and Moore have said their severance was contingent on signing an NDA/non-disparagement agreement which is both common and totally weaksauce¹.

Kickstarter, for its part, put out a statement that no employee has or will be fired for union organizing. It’s … not being received well, possibly because it reads like it was crafted in a sterile legal environment to stay on the right side of perjury laws rather than the right side of the community they’ve built.

Some webcomics (and webcomics-adjacent) folk have chimed in already, the two most significant of which are probably Andy Baio (one half of The Andys behind XOXO and the attempt to re-engineer Drip, not to mention pre-launch board member and onetime CTO of Kickstarter; Andy McMillan is the other) and George (who is probably more closely associated with Kickstarts than anybody else in the web/indie comics world).

I have some emails out to people closely associated with Kickstarter asking if they are willing to go on the record with their thoughts; one response indicates they will specifically not say anything until certain direct discussions take place, which is entirely fair. A bunch of people that have tied their business models to Kickstarter will be at SPX this weekend (including some Thought Leaders), and I’m going to ask as many of them as I can what they think, then I’m going to tell you what they said.

In advance, please do not impute motives to anybody that isn’t named in the quotes, or that you are certain you have figured out from an off-the-record comment. Just don’t. You may be very pissed at Kickstarter right now² and ready to burn them to the ground, but there is a mountain of difference between choosing to not contribute to Kickstarter campaigns, and having to suddenly figure out how — or if it’s even possible — to no longer use them as a creator platform while meeting rent. It will be difficult for more than a few of them to navigate a course between what they want to do ethically and what they are required to do practically.

Spam of the day:

Do you know that you are able to earn more than 1200 euros per day? Hurry up to be one of the first to use this method before it becomes widespread.

Take your fucking pyramid scheme somewhere else, please.

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¹ How fucking insecure do you have to be as a corporation that you can’t tolerate people you fired complaining about it? Bitching about current/past employers is an inalienable fucking right.

² I certainly am, and this is what I’ve decided: I am prepared to suspend my support of future campaigns if the Kickstarter Union calls for that, which they are not presently doing. If that changes, I’ll make my intentions public.

Regardless of the requests of Kickstarter United, I will not be canceling any present pledges, because taking back money that creators expect, money that I pledged prior to this douchebaggery, isn’t fair to those creators.

All of this is subject to revision pending what I learn this weekend, and from further verified information (including statements from Kickstarter or KRSU) in the future.

Editor’s note: During the writing of this piece, news broke regarding Kickstarter firing two of the organizers of unionization efforts in the past eight days. We will address this more fully when we have more information.

In either a tremendous case of bad scheduling, or a tremendous case of making sure nobody gets left out for being on the wrong side of the country, both Rose City Comic Con and the Small Press Expo take place this weekend (RCCC, tomorrow-Sunday; SPX, Saturday-Sunday). We’ve gone over the SPX exhibitor list — please note that Box Brown announced this morning he will unfortunately not be able to attend — but let’s take a look at their programming, and what’s going on at RCCC.

SPX’s programming is simple and to the point: everything lasts just under an hour, workshops in the Glen Echo Room require signup (and are mostly filled already), panels happen in the White Oak Room or the White Flint Auditorium, and all of them start on either the hour or the half-hour (WO on the hour Saturday, WF on the hour Sunday). Some you might be interested in include:

• Queer SF And World Building (WO, Saturday, noon)
• Spotlight: Emily Carroll (WF, Saturday, 12:30pm)
• Blurring The Visual Lines In Fantasy Fiction (WF, Saturday, 1:30pm)
• Libraries And Comics: Past, Present, And Future Trends (WO, Saturday, 2:00pm)
• Birthing Stories (WF, Saturday, 2:30pm)
• Image, Activism, And Autobiography (WO, Saturday, 3:00pm)
• Friendships, Relationships, And Chosen Family In YA Comics (WF, Saturday, 3:30pm)
• Intersection Between Comics And Animation (WF, Saturday, 4:30pm)
• Science Fiction And Social Justice (WO, Saturday, 6:00pm)
• Racial Illiteracy (WO, Sunday, 2:30pm)
• Graphic Advocacy (WF, Sunday, 3:00pm)

Rose City’s listings mostly distinguish between Artists Alley being people and Exhibitors being companies. In some cases, the same floor assignment shows up on both lists, as Helioscope Studio on the Exhibitor pages, and the studio folks/friends who’ll be there (Aud Koch, Cat Farris, Ron Chan, Steve Lieber, and more) all showing up on the AA page.

As a result, it’s easy to miss people, but in addition to the folks already listed, one may expect to find: Barry Deutsch (AA05), Haley Boros (AA01), Kel McDonald (A01), Kerstin La Cross (X11), Lucas Elliott (DD11), Molly Muldoon (JJ04), Iron Circus Comics (918), Nucleus (1008), and Oni Press (901); those exhibitors will likely host associated creators, so swing by to check on that.

Of special note: the Oregon Health Insurance Marketplace will be at booth 1070 and the Washington County Library at booth 1098. I think that public service outreach of this nature is an excellent idea.

RCCC’s programming descriptions are brief, and range from celebrity fluffings to the suddenly relevant — anybody want to attend the Kickstarter And Games panel tomorrow to ask about how union retaliation fits in with being a Public Benefit Corporation? You’ll be in Room 3 at 1:30pm. Others to consider:

• Is Phoebe And Her Unicorn The Best Comic Strip Since Calvin And Hobbes? (Room 2, Friday, 2:00pm)
  I would very much like to hear this discussion.
• MAKE IT GAY, YA COWARDS! [EMPHASIS original] (Room 7, Friday, 4:30pm)
  I just love the title.
• Tales From The Long Con (Room 6, Sunday, noon) Note that Dylan Meconis is not listed as tabling or attending outside this panel, so this is your chance to thank her for Queen Of The Sea.

The Small Press Expo will take place at the Marriott North Bethesda in Bethesda, Maryland, from 11:00 to 7:00pm on Saturday, and noon to 6:00pm on Sunday. Admission is US$15 for Saturday, US$10 for Sunday, or US$20 for the weekend.

Rose City Comic Con will take place at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon, from 1:00pm to 8:00pm on Friday, 10:00am to 7:00pm on Saturday, and 10:00am to 5:00pm on Sunday. Admission packages range from US$15 to US$140.

Spam of the day:

Would you be interested in an advertising service that costs less than $39 every month and delivers tons of people who are ready to buy directly to your website?

I would be fascinated to discover what you think I’m selling.

It might be easier to start this book review by talking about what it isn’t before we get to what it is. Dreamers Of The Day is not a biography, or an autobiography; it’s the story of a particularly meaningful week for one person, the story of finding a creative purpose that may require years before the itch is satisfied (but which, I’ll suspect, will never disappear). It’s the story of one cartoonist starting down a long path that will lead, fates willing, to a trilogy of biographies about one of the most compelling, important, and misuderstood figures of the Twentieth Century.

It’s also about the Sykes-Picot Agreement and its aftermath, but more about the author’s relationship across nearly a century’s remove with one of the few prominent (and one would argue, informed) people to loudly criticize the Sykes-Picot Agreement at the time.

Beth Barnett is a cartoonist I met in Juneau, Alaska this past April. She knows more than anybody I know, cares more than anybody you know, about a certain historical personage that we will refer to, as Barnett does, as TE. The world remembers him as Lawrence of Arabia, but as Barnett explains, he used a variety of names and legally changed his to TE Shaw. Despite these clear wishes, he was buried under a grave marker that read TE Lawrence, leading Barnett to observe I find it strange and uncaring that he was buried under a name he did not consider his own.

It’s hard, with our current ideas of identity, not to see this as a case of deadnaming, and equally hard not to see the parallels to TE’s sexuality … gay, celibate or ace? … from the few biographical glimpses (be patient, the graphic trilogy will be here one day); it appears that a search for identity and a way to describe himself was a key part of TE’s life. Compare to Barnett’s own search to find a way to describe herself, and it’s hard not to conclude that part of Barnett’s fascination with TE is rooted in a sense of finding a kindred spirit.

Dreamers Of The Day (the title being a quote from TE) is Barnett’s remembrance of a too-brief week spent in Oxford doing research for her forthcoming explorations of TE’s life. It’s a conversation with herself about what she’s undertaking, what TE’s life and experiences mean to her, and what she wishes to accomplish, It’s an outline of an outline of the work to come, a working-out of the personal feelings so that planned biographies can focus on their subject in all the detail they deserve.

The art is minimal in a way that drives focus and lends importance to Barnett’s thoughts. Figures and locations are conjured up from a blank background when they add context to the narrative, disappearing back into the aether when no longer needed. It’s not lack of skill or laziness that drives the presence of so much white space, but rather necessity — if there’s no need to ground her point in a particular place, Barnett (or TE, or whomever) can address us from that empty space that we may better pay attention to what they’re saying¹.

There is a certain, floppy-haired similarity between TE and Barnett which comes through in the art — as the book progresses (and she becomes more comfortable in her trip), Barnett’s hair becomes progressively less frazzled, and her resemblance to TE becomes more pronounced (particularly in one panel as an imagined, future Oxford-PhD Barnett, decked out in vest and bowtie). The difference between Barnett and teenage TE is negligible and even adult TE is differentiated mostly by a military jacket and a buzzed undercut. I do not suggest there is obsession or imitation here, but more of a parallel resonance … what feels right to Barnett oftentimes echoes choices TE made about how he presented himself to the world.

In the end, Dreamers Of The Day is the story of one cartoonist and the fascinating soldier-archeologist-scholar-artist-writer-book designer-diplomat-translator that has grabbed hold of her imagination. It’s the story of the thing you must share with the world, and what it’s like to stand on the brink of actually being able to do so. It’s enlightening, educational, a bit melancholy, and a lot hopeful, and I recommend it to anybody that’s ever wanted to grab another person and say Hey, look at this and maybe you’ll love it as much as I do.

A PDF copy of Dreamers Of The Day was provided by the author for review. It debuts on Saturday, 14 September at the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland, where Barnett will be at table E4A.

Spam of the day:

Garytyrrell, FedEx International Ticket No.9648 An email containing confidential personal information was sent to you

>sigh< Look, if you’re going to try to impersonate FedEx, at least get the friggin’ logo correct. It’s only one of the most recognized on the planet, and when you screw up the kerning it’s an instant giveaway. Friggin’ amateurs, I swear.

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¹ It reminds me of McCloud’s observations about the shifting presence/absence of detail in manga.

I wrote this yesterday, and a bit more besides:

There is a moment when I open a Tillie Walden book when I pause, knowing that there’s a very high chance that what I’m about to read will take up residence in my brain for an extended period of time until I am changed by the experience.

I pause not because I am reluctant, but because I’ll never again have that moment of anticipation when I have an entire new Tillie Walden story to look forward to.

For those of you who wish no spoilers, even those of the most oblique nature, take that as the review and get to a bookstore. Settle in in the place and conditions that you like to read best, and take your time. If you want a bit more, read on.

Are You Listening? is an extended two-character conversation set against an untrustworthy landscape and in that way it is like I Love This Part.

It is also about figuring out what it means to be a gay woman in Texas and in that way it is like Spinning.

It is also also about what happens when family turns toxic and has a cat and in that way it is like The End Of Summer.

It is furthermore also a story with science fiction elements that act as backdrop¹ without being an explicitly SF story and in that way it is like On A Sunbeam.

It is penultimately also an exploration of the selves we build and in that way it is like A City Inside.

It is finally also like none of those stories.

Are You Listening? is for a time ordinary, and for a time slightly odd around the edges, before becoming for a time full on hallucinatory — presaged by a pencil that refuses to continue on a map — possibly a break from reality and possibly exactly what it seems. If it were purely presented in words, it would be a classic of magical realism, probably in Spanish. If it were purely presented in visuals, it would be an endlessly transmuting Escher dream².

It is, on its own terms, the culmination of several lifetimes worth of skill at panel and story composition that have somehow been crammed into less than seven years. It is the logical endpoint of thousands of pages of masterwork level comics creation that could serve as the capstone of a half-century long career. Given how Tillie Walden threw herself into skating to the exclusion of all else for ten years or so before shifting to comics, it might well be the capstone of her comics career if she decides it’s time to shift again. It would be a tragedy to have no more comics from Walden, except for the fact that whichever next artistic endeavour she threw herself into would surely be as assured and captivating as this one. As she discovers herself, she just becomes more powerful.

It is the story of Bea and Lou, two women driving through West Texas (as in the geographic direction) searching for West, Texas (as in the specific city, which has had some hard times of late) through an endless landscape that doesn’t want to cooperate. It is the Room Of Requirement from Hogwarts³ writ large, a place becoming aware in response to the people that occupy it. It starts with reference to a diner that might not be there, or how there have been a lot of lakes coming through lately. And when you bring hurt and confusion with you, well:

West Texas is the perfect blend of giant and tiny. The land, the sky … it’s got its own mind. Its own heart.

When something horrible happens, or something amazing … really, anything big, it makes you feel like mountains could shatter, or the sky could disappear … you know what I’m talking about?

Well, most places, mountains stay put. Sky stays in one piece. Kind of cruel, really.

But here, everything is listening.

Are You Listening? is a question that Lou asks Bea in a moment of desperate grasping for safety; it’s a question that hangs over both of them and their respective hurts and losses. It’s a paraphrase of what they ask themselves, and the ghosts and memories they carry with them, and it’s implicit in the manner of the wise woman of West, Texas who Knows Things as she tells Bea some of what’s going on … and what will go on in the future. It’s the question that the book asks the reader, and the reader in turn asks of themself.

Or maybe that’s just me, but then I knew that I was going to be changed, just as I knew that the spine would naturally fall open to certain passages that I re-read and let the story’s alternate patience and frenzy wash over me. This is the book that will fall into the hands of a reader who’s not ready for it, and it will haunt them and their life will be the better for it. It pulls up emotions and banished trauma, it offers hurt and healing, and leaves us with the inescapable conclusion that all we have is we.

Your experience will be different; some of you will likely hate this book and you won’t be wrong. It’s a reflection our personal landscapes, which are no more stable than memory because we are each distinct and always changing. But if you want a book to challenge you — not just what you think about comics, or narrative, but what you think about you — then you will love it as I do, and we won’t be wrong.

Are You Listening? by Tillie Walden is available in bookstores from today. It is appropriate for readers that are willing to confront the fact that life is hell of messy, no matter how much we seem to have it together.

Spam of the day:

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¹ Although it didn’t make it into my recap, Walden talked about not setting out to do an SF story in On A Sunbeam at her spotlight session in Juneau this past April. It was much like her earlier assertion that she didn’t set out to write YA stories beyond the fact that she herself was a young adult.

Speaking of that session, there are process pages at the back that look suspiciously like thumbnails and draft pages in pencil, which is a departure from Walden’s straight-to-ink working style.

² Or possibly a vision of Inception filtered through Speed Racer. I am utterly serious.

³ Which phenomenon I believe Walden invented independently. Bear in mind that she spent every single waking moment from the age of 6 to at least 18 in perpetual crunch mode without the usual popular culture influences. She probably hasn’t read your favorite book or seen your favorite movie, but I can assure you she has excellent taste in musicals.

There’s a bunch — and I mean a metric bunch — of graphic novels in the midst of dropping, and that means it’s time to tell you what I think of them. We start out today with two from the fine folks at :01 Books, who were kind enough to send a pretty big selection of just-released and about-to-release titles over to the Fleenplex. They’re very different, but I think there’s a common thread between them that I’d like to explore, so strap in and as usual, there be spoilers in these waters.

At first glance, Stargazing (words and art by Jen Wang, colors by the incomparable Lark Pien) and Mighty Jack And Zita The Spacegirl (words and pictures by Ben Hatke, colors by Alex Campbell and Hilary Sycamore) couldn’t be more different.

Aside from the fact that they’re both written for kids 8-12 years old, Stargazing is a mostly quiet exploration of culture and friendship between elementary age girls in a Chinese-American neighborhood in California, and Jack/Zita is part rip-roaring modernist fairy tale, part space opera, with the fate of Earth in the balance. One’s a standalone inspired by real life, the other is the culmination of one trilogy and the coda to/crossover with a second trilogy.

And yet there’s this bit in both about making friends, about how your current friends react to your new friends, about realizing that you can fall short in being the friend that’s needed. There’s this bit in both about how especially girls of a certain age — from pre-teen to not-quite teen — can react to each other, a behavior that can only be described the the word meanness. There’s this bit in both about how rash decisions and thinking with your fists can make for larger problems (even if one only leads to in-school counseling and the other leads to maybe giants killing everybody you love).

Which is to say, the trappings of the story are probably less important than how they speak to their characters.

Stargazing is a welcome return to form for Jen Wang; I famously — and, given the near-universal acclaim and awards bestowed, almost singly — thought her last graphic novel suffered serious structural story problems¹. The heart and friction of how people become (and stop being, and resume being) friends was there, but the broader message failed. Stargazing, like her superlative Koko Be Good, focuses on the people at the heart of the story, and the struggles that they face are very much personal.

Christine and she’s-our-neighbor-and-your-age-you-should-be-friends-okay-Dad-fine Moon approach life in different ways — Buddhist vs Christian, vegetarian vs not, free spirited vs family expectations of excellence — to the extent that Christine wonders how much Moon actually belongs to the same tradition. Moon’s confident and funny and (in an assessment that borders on extremely sad self-awareness for a 10-12 year old like Christine) possibly not Asian.

They adapt to each other and become friends, but there’s something weird under the surface that Christine can’t put her finger on: a certainty that she’s not of this planet, and a volatility that can lead Moon to act with her fists seemingly without warning.

Which, it turns out, has a knowable, physical cause. This might have been a too-pat resolution to the story, except for the fact that it’s based on Wang’s own experiences. If the story wraps up in a happily-ever-after finish that’s a little unsatisfying, I think it’s only because the reveal and resolution take place too quickly. There’s nothing wrong with the first 160 pages of Stargazing, but the conclusion needs the space to breathe a little².

Overall, Stargazing reminds me of This One Summer (which, if you don’t know how good that book is, it is necessary reading for anybody that cares about what comics can be), and I can only think of how much more Wang could have done with the page count afforded to that book. Yeah, yeah, 8-12 year old readers vs 12-18, but I think the younger kids can handle the page count.

Mighty Jack And Zita The Spacegirl is more about the former (not to mention Lilly, occasional Goblin King, who doesn’t get title billing) than the latter, which feels appropriate. Zita’s been through her journey from untested to rookie to expert-level saver of worlds and inspirer of people. Lilly’s gotten used to being King of the goblins (maybe a little too much as her carelessness gives the giants their opening to threaten Earth from the places beyond), but Jack’s still trying to figure things out.

Sometimes he’s cautious and ends up regretting it. Sometimes he’s decisive and ends up regretting it. Sometimes he doubts he’s up to the task, but all those regrets are really stem from no more than being new to the Jack business. Recall that Jack isn’t just a name, but a title: The Jack is a protector of Earth, clever and brave. When he has the information needed to make the next decision, act on the next situation, the regrets don’t manifest. Give him as long at the Jack business as Zita’s had at the Spacegirl business and he’ll be masterful.

Heck, he’s already got the big picture thing covered. When the giants finally break through to Earth (in Jack’s backyard, no less!), he stands armed with nothing but a sword-sized key. With him are one Goblin King and a double handful of waist-high goblins, one dragon (who will only promise to take Jack’s sister to safety), a pony-sized mouse, a few assorted aliens³ and robots, a former (unarmed and somewhat hapless) Man In Black, a pair of lovable space rogues, and his Mom, all prepared to get squished⁴.

The giant king promises that his murderous band will provide the impetus for humanity united into an Age Of Heroes, just fight us. Jack’s answer is clever, and brave, and wise:

Nope. We’re not divided. We’re standing here. Now. Together. And we won’t let you bring violence and pain to this world in the hope that some good will come of it.

All we can do is what’s best in the moment before us. So we’re sending you home, here and now. You may have come to invade our planet.

But you picked the wrong backyard.

That wisdom comes at a cost — the Jack must stand on guard, and that means staying in the same small town, which will be mundane and boring unless dangers arise again. It means saying goodbye to friends who get to go on adventures in space. It means growing up.

But if there’s one thing that Hatke (juggler, acrobat firebreather, archer, I think tightrope walker, and a bunch of other things) has demonstrated in his own life, growing up doesn’t mean the end of adventures, it just means different ones most of the time. Jack’s already got clever and brave down, and he’ll continue to grow wise. The world may not have an Age Of Heroes, but it sure has one hell of a Jack.

Stargazing releases from :01 Books tomorrow, 10 September, and joins Mighty Jack And Zita The Spacegirl in being available wherever books are sold.

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¹ Her previous, In Real Life, I thought was a faithful adaptation of a story that wasn’t great, but that’s on Cory Doctorow, not Wang.

² I had similar feelings about Pashmina by Nidhi Chanani, which I loved, but which also felt rushed in the back quarter. Both books deserved a higher page count.

³ The most formidable of which has already said Strong-Strong proud … fall with friends.

⁴ Until the Spacegirl shows up with more robots, one of which is the size of a small moon, in low orbit, and has a firing solution, at which time the squishing becomes unlikely. Just work with me here.