A lot of comics and then not Twain
Mark, that is
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You never know when you'll just be living your life, minding your own business, when suddenly a bunch of comics leap in front of you like suicidal time-travelers.
Anyway, I also read the most important American novel of the 2020s if you're snobbish about comics. But you shouldn't be. These were all pretty good. Except for the one. But other people liked it so.
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058) Gilt Frame by Matt Kindt and Margie Kraft Kindt, finished August 2
An email sent me looking for this and I read it on Hoopla. It's about an older lady and the great-nephew they raised. They live in a mystery-a-week world—everywhere they go someone dies and they figure it out. This time they're in Paris with some fancy chairs and someone ends up dead.
But, ends up, that's not the kind of mystery this is at all. It's another kind entirely.
And in the final moments, the great detective figures it out.
Will there be a sequel?
one afternoon
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059) Monkey Meat: The First Batch by Juni Ba, finished August 3
I was not as enamored of this grotesque satire of consumerism and (especially) corporate malfeasance as most reviewers seem to be. The art was cool but at times so cool as to be illegible. The targets tended toward the deserving but the arrows were at times so warped as to miss the target.
Still. The powerful deserve all the knocks they can get.
two sittings
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060) Abbott by Saladin Ahmed and Sami Kivelä and Jason Wordie, finished August 4
I'm kinda done with comics does in the dark supernatural, but somehow I picked up Abbott anyway and I'm glad I did because it's terrific. Not because of its dark and supernatural elements but because our title character and her community.
Abbott is a news reporter in 1972 Detroit. She's hardboiled, sure, but she's got friends in the town and the respect of her colleagues. There's plenty of scumbag racism around, sure, but her eyes are open and her soul is pure. She is a soldier of the truth. Like any good journalist.
Ends up however she's also a Chosen One of some kind which is lucky because a dark supernatural evil is raising its head in Detroit. Blah blah blah.
She saves the day and there are sequels set in 1973 and 1979 wherein, I assume, she works to save her dead boyfriend from the powers of evil whilst keeping her city safe and writing good copy.
Anyway, it's all worth it because Abbott is good company. You'll like hanging out with her.
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061) Mendel the Mess-Up by Terry LaBan, finished August 9
This charmer's about a kid in the shtetl who was cursed in utero to always be a mess up. And so he is.
But when the Cossacks come to town, maybe he can use his powers for good?
This is a genuinely funny and actually moving comic. I hope it finds its way through the crowded marketplace to find a readership among today's kids.
one day
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062) Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees by Patrick Horvath, finished August 9
This is neck-and-neck with my favorite serial-killer fiction of the year and for similar reasons: take the horror and play it at full volume but defamiliarize it with things that are pleasant or charming or classical or cute.
Samantha has one rule—never kill in town. Keep town wonderfully halcyon. But when another killer shows up murdering townsfolk, how long until the cops discover the wrong killer? She's got to find the competition before they do.
one night
063) James by Percival Everett, finished August 13
I have a copy of Good Lord Bird I haven't read, I checked out I Am Not Sidney Poitier from the library but didn't read it, and I've felt anxious to watch American Fiction since it came out but haven't managed to pull it off. But now I've read James! (So I suppose I should read the Alta interview I have lying around too.)
I haven't read Huck Finn since 2000 so I can't say for certain how closely James is following it. Certainly some of the set pieces overlap and, of course, in both books then Jim and Huck get separated and we don't really know what happens to Jim in those times.
What I'm most glad about—and assume spoilers from here out—is that Everett abandoned the (what I remember being) hoaky New Orleans conclusion and instead gave James a heroic ending of his own creation. And it's a killer ending.
(Incidentally, how is it exactly zero people have told me that one of the most zeitgeisty novels of the last five years engages a parallel rhetorical trick of my own novel of the last five years?)
In the opening paragraphs of James I could immediately tell I was in the hands of someone who really knows how to write. There was just something about the way word moved to word, sentence to sentence, that was correct in a way books usually are not. Of course that doesn't mean that the novel on the macro level would be perfect and the, mm, second fifth of the book dragged a bit as Everett was more concerned with scoring point via his alternate America, but perhaps that was necessary work because once the world is established, it sings.
In short, I get why people loved the book and I get why they admired it. I'm curious to see if (slash how) we're talking about it thirty years for now. I rather hope he are.
twelve days, but not most of them