Tagged: You Know: For Kids

Superman Smashes the Klan by Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru

A note to copyeditors of the future: the radio story from 1946 is “The Clan of the Fiery Cross,” styled in roman within quotation marks and spelling Clan with a capital C. The 2020 graphic novel loosely based on that radio play is Superman Smashes the Klan , in italics and spelling Klan with the K used by its namesake.

One suspects the relative political power of that real-world Klan, and possibly of the corporate entities that owned (then) National Periodical Publications and (now) DC Comics, are responsible for the switch from C to K. But that’s outside my remit here.

That radio story has been mentioned as a major factor in the waning power of the real-world Klan in the post-war years. I’m not a historian, but it makes sense to me — they are not generally called out as strongly active during the main civil rights era beginning the next decade, so the timing, at least, makes sense. And it’s a comforting message to superhero fans: See! we can do good work in the world, and not have to make any effort at all! Just being a fan of Superman makes the world better!

This graphic novel is not driving that message. Stories themselves generally don’t; stories are about action, not feeling good about yourself for liking those stories. The active verb in the title is there for a reason: this Klan of the Fiery Kross needs to be smashed, and it will not go away quietly by itself.

And, while Superman is the subject of the title sentence, he’s not alone here: Superman alone cannot smash the Klan. That takes more people: a Black police detective, some familiar reporters named Lois and Jimmy, the members of the Lee family at the center of this story, and even a local white kid at first hostile to his new neighbors. One might even say it takes a city, or a village.

The Lee family are moving to a leafy Metropolis neighborhood in 1946 at the beginning of Smashes the Klan, moving out of Chinatown largely because the father, Dr. Lee, is taking a job as chief bacteriologist of the Metropolis Health Department. They meet their new neighbors, who are mostly friendly — especially once it’s clear son Tommy will be a big asset to the baseball team fielded by the local interfaith Unity House. But our viewpoint character in the Lee family is daughter Roberta, who is less sure about their new neighborhood and home.

Tommy’s rocket arm dislodged Chuck Riggs, previously the star pitcher, from that position, which does not leave Chuck happy. Chuck’s Uncle Matt is also coincidentally — this is a Superman story — the local Grand Scorpion of the Klan of the Fiery Kross, so he seizes Chuck’s grievance and the Lees mere presence in their neighborhood as reason for an old-fashioned cross-burning and fire-bombing.

The Lee’s house is saved by quick action by Tommy and by neighbors, including that Black detective, Inspector Henderson. (Whose help Dr. Lee at first does not want, when he thought Henderson was just a random local Black man.) Daily Planet reporters arrive the next morning to report on the situation — of course it’s Lois Lane and Clark Kent, since the Planet has never had any other reporters in seventy years of operation.

But Superman is dealing with assimilation issues of his own. The day before, he fought a Nazi would-be supervillain, Atom Man, and kept him from destroying the Metropolis Dam. But Atom Man is powered by a strange green crystal — anyone who has ever consumed any Superman story is nodding right now — and that gives Superman first a strange wave of nausea and weakness, and then continued hallucinations of two figures who claim to be his real parents, aliens who rocketed him to Earth from  the doomed world Krypton. (Well, they’re not that succinct and specific to begin with. But we know the story, and it is the same story.)

Tommy gets in more danger, the Klan continues to foment violence, and that green crystal will of course come back. Dr. Lee’s employer, and some of his co-workers, turn out to be quite different than what we had expected.

In the end, Superman Smashes the Klan. But he can’t do it alone. And he can’t do it without confronting his own past and understanding who he is: without publicly claiming his place as an immigrant and alien. His story — an immigrant, coming to a new place, and wanting to be friendly and helpful — is explicitly twinned with Roberta’s, and with all of the other people the Klan hates.

This is a story for younger readers, and a story about Superman, so you can be assured everything will work out for the best, and only the most unredeemable will be smashed — anyone who can be brought around will be. Writer Gene Luen Yang will make sure of that, as he also makes his story deeper and more resonant than a Superman tale for pre-teens had to be. Art team Gurihiru gives it all a modern, clean, manga-lite look — easily readable and dynamic.

This is a book a lot of Americans should read: there are far too many Chuck Riggses out there, unthinkingly racist and led by family members or friends or media to believe evil things and, in far too many cases, to do evil things. This story says that most of them are redeemable; I would like to believe that. But they have to want to be redeemed. They have to want to smash the Klan.

For those who do, this book is there for you. And if you’re in a position to put this book in front of a Chuck Riggs, someone who might be amenable to it but does not, right now, want to smash the Klan — doing that would be a very good thing. 

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 7 by North, Henderson & Renzi

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 7 by North, Henderson & Renzi

 

This is volume seven of something, I’m coming to it about two years later, and I’m typing this on Christmas day between other festivities. [1] So I expect this will be a short and perfunctory post — those of you who care about Squirrel Girl likely read this book a while ago, and I don’t have high hopes of convincing any of the rest of you at this point.

So, first up, this comes after the previous collections of the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl comic: one and two and three and four and five and six . And also the OGN , which slots in around volume four or so.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 7: I’ve Been Waiting for a Squirrel Like You  is written by Ryan North (except one short story in issue 26), drawn by Erica Henderson (except issue 26, though she wrote one story there) and colored by Rico Renzi (who only did part of issue 26). It collects issues 22-26 of the comic of the title and something called A Year of Marvels: The Unbeatable #1 — which is actually written by Nilah Magruder with layouts by Geoffo and final art by Siya Oum — that I think was part of some series of one-offs (maybe to introduce new talent?) that I have never heard of before and which is unconnected to the main story.

The Unbeatable is a perfectly OK sixteen-page story in which Squirrel Girl’s sidekick Tippy-Top (a squirrel) teams up with Rocket Raccoon (from the Guardians of the Galaxy) to defeat a villain in New York’s Central Park, who has brought trees to life and intends to Conquer the World! So, yeah, that’s a thing tacked on the end of this book.

The aforementioned issue 26 is a jam issue — I suspect it was also the “help Henderson stay on track with monthly deadlines” issue, since drawing twenty-plus pages of girls and squirrels monthly is relentless and time-consuming — featuring stories drawn by Madeline McGrane, Chip Zdarsky, Tom Fowler, Carla Speed McNeil, Michael Cho, Razzah, Anders Nilsen, Rico Renzi, and Jim “Garfield” Davis. It has a lot of clever stuff, but — since it’s all officially stories told by characters from the Squirrel Girl comic — it’s also pretty inside-baseball, amusing and fun but slight and entirely for fans.

The main bulk of the book, though, is a five-part story in which Doreen Green (also known as the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl) and her best friend and roommate Nancy Whitehead win a computer-programming contest to go to the Savage Land, the alien-created area of Antarctica where dinosaurs still roam. Complications ensue there, not least the discovery of “Ultron, who is a dinosaur now.” (One might be surprised that it took North, famously creator of Dinosaur Comics, to get dinosaurs into this book.) If you are wondering if Doreen and her friends — including a supposedly-unfriendly programming team from Latveria, Doctor Doom’s homeland — defeat Ultron and save the world, please see the title again.

As always, this is fun and zippy and does not take itself entirely seriously. It is a comic set in a superhero universe featuring a young woman who is a bit zaftig, has sensible hair and a reasonably sensible costume, and prefers to talk to people rather than punch them. Of course it ended: how could such a thing last? (Has she been rebooted with peekaboo cutouts and a tragic backstory yet?)

 

[1] Not a whole lot of festivities, since it is 2020, but small, sensible, socially distanced festivities.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Guts by Raina Telgemeier

Several hundred thousand people — mostly girls, mostly under the age of fifteen — already have very strong opinions on this book in particular and Raina Telgemeier in general, and it’s unlikely that anything this One Old Guy could say will shift any of them in the slightest. (And most of them love it and her — not everyone, since nothing is universally beloved, but close.)

Raina Telgemeier is the pre-eminent maker of comics in our time: the crest of the YA graphic novel boom, the reigning queen of the Scholastic Book Fair, author of some of the most circulated books in thousands of libraries. A whole lot of comics fans have no idea who she is, though: the dismissive explanation is because they think only superheroes (or maybe the slightly larger pamphlets-on-Wednesday* market) count as comics, the more reasonable explanation is that everyone focuses on the stuff they like and care about, and comics is now big and capacious enough (like books, or movies, or TV) to have entirely separate, disjoint worlds within it.

But, yeah, Raina is huge. When she had a new book out last year, it was a massive publishing event. It was called Guts ; I got to it this week.

Telgemeier started her comics-making career by adapting four of Anne M. Martin’s perennially-popular “Baby-Sitters Club” books into comics, and then, just about a decade ago, had her first comics memoir, Smile , about dental troubles she had starting in middle school and how that affected her life. It was a massive bestseller, and was followed by the similar memoir Sisters  and the fictional GNs Drama  and Ghosts  (both about tween girls not unlike the way Telgemeier portrayed her younger self).

Guts is in the same vein as Smile and Sisters: starting from a moment in Young Raina’s life and moving forward through the months after that to show her dealing with a medical/personal issue. This time, it’s a stomach flu or something similar when she was in fourth grade: probably the first time she vomited since she was a toddler. That led to more worry about intestinal issues, which led to anxiety-induced stomach pains, and so on — the whole spiral, at the age of about ten. (And that’s not uncommon, actually — especially for relatively smart, sensitive kids of that age, even more so for girls.)

Of course, anxiety is never just about one thing, and it doesn’t stay compartmentalized: Young Raina’s school work suffers, and it causes trouble with her friendships (and one definitely-not-a-friendship, with Michelle, who starts off bullying Young Raina) as well. Young Raina eventually starts talk therapy, because her parents are worried about her. (And Telgemeier has an afterword, frankly about the fact that she’s in therapy even now, and that her anxiety is more controlled, but never “went away.”) That’s the story: how Young Raina started an anxiety/stomach spiral, and how she started to deal with it. Like a lot of things in life, dealing with it is ongoing and continuous.

Guts is personal and true and specific, and I’m sure a lot of librarians and teachers are happy to put in the hands of other kids going through something like Young Raina did. But Telgemeier’s work is more than just that: we were all kids once (some of us still are), and we all had and still have things that make us anxious and worried. Guts is about that feeling, that process — understanding what makes us concerned, what can lead into that spiral. And it’s also a good story — Telgemeier draws open-faced kids whose emotions are all right there (as they are at that age) and shows us what it’s like to be those kids, whether they’re named “Raina” or not.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

The Unsinkable Walker Bean and the Knights of the Waxing Moon by Aaron Renier

My first reaction to this book is idiosyncratic and petty; it may also come off as a minor spoiler. So flee now if you need to.

If you call your organization the “Knights” of something, it implies certain things: people chosen for specific qualities, organizational structure, a martial bent. Calling the family that survived a cataclysm “the Knights of the Waxing Moon” does not check any of those boxes, or any of the other boxes that people think of when they think of knightly orders. The family can be the equivalent of a secret society, they can keep ancient mysteries and protect the treasures of the ancients — but they are in no way knights.

But here we are, in Aaron Renier’s graphic novel The Unsinkable Walker Bean and the Knights of the Waxing Moon . It continues the story of the original Unsinkable , picking up almost immediately after the events of that book and continuing to add more complications and dangers for young Walker and his friends.

I didn’t enjoy this one as much as I think I liked the first one: maybe I was in the wrong mood, maybe I didn’t remember the details well enough ten years later. This time out, I kept thinking too much of Knights was vague and unfocused: the shipwrecked pirates are divided into factions, sort of, but don’t have clear leaders and also don’t seem to be jockeying to create leaders. Their goals are equally vague or unclear: getting off the island they’re shipwrecked on feels like it should be a bigger deal than it is, or there should be a “we want to settle here” faction. The aforementioned Knights are mostly just living where they live and occasionally repelling people who wander in, without any larger plans. There’s a creepy family that clearly has some goals — riches and power, most clearly — but also already has a lot of unexplained power and abilities, no clear leaders, and underpants-gnomes-levels of fiendish plots. (Send more family members to the place where our family always dies…something something…we get the secret metal that controls the world!)

All in all, Knights felt like a book with a lot of people running around in circles for a couple of hundred pages. Sure, they found some Neat Stuff, and battled over that, but why they were doing any of it was always muddy. It looks great, and the characters are interesting and specific — but the ways they interacted didn’t quite click for me. To be brutally honest, it’s like a combination of me not paying enough attention this time and forgetting what I read in the first book. This is likely what we call a Me Problem, so check out the first book if you haven’t already (and which I loved at the time), and then maybe move on to this one if you like Walker’s first adventure.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Be Prepared by Vera Brosgol

Unhappy childhoods make for more interesting books than happy ones: can we agree on that? I’ve seen several Boomer nostalgia vehicles that were basically “everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds when I was free, white, male, and seven years old,” and they’re all deadly dull at best.

Unhappiness leads to better stories: writers don’t have to suffer, but it definitely gives them better material.

Vera Brosgol has some pretty good material; she off-handedly mentions things both at the beginning (growing up poor among spoiled rich girls in Albany, NY) and the end (moving suddenly to London at the age of ten) of this book that look like they could be full graphic novels of their own. But Be Prepared  is the story of one summer at camp…well, a little about the months leading up to that summer, and how she got to that camp, but all focused on ORRA.

Maybe I should back up slightly — Be Prepared is the story of a girl named Vera, but Brosgol’s afterword explains that it’s not purely autobiographical. The general outlines are correct, but she went to the ORRA camp for two years, not one, and events have been shaped here to make a better story — including details from other campers, such as her younger brother. Readers who demand absolute factual accuracy will be crushed; those who like stories about people will be much happier.

I fall into the second camp.

(Hah! “camp”. Pun not intended.)

Brosgol is not a new hand at this — her previous graphic novel Anya’s Ghost also drew on her being-an-odd-Russian-kid-in-America childhood, but in a clearly more fictionalized and fantastic way. (The title is not a metaphor.) That was also a damn good graphic novel, just like Be Prepared. Brosgol is creating stories aimed at younger readers — my guess is upper elementary school, maybe shading into middle, since the rule is that kids hate reading about anyone the slightest bit younger than themselves — but they’re smart, well-told stories that can only come from adult distance, and that makes them just as good for adult readers.

Anyway, young Vera feels like an outsider — her friends are more affluent and “American” than she is. But there’s a summer camp affiliated with her family’s Russian Orthodox church, and so she thinks she wants to lean into being Russian — that will be where she finds girls just like her, and the best friends of her life, right?

Unfortunately, wrong. Young Vera is introverted and a bit quirky — like all the best people — and the ORRA camp is cliquish in its own way, with traditions and history and skills she knows nothing about. Plus an outdoor latrine, which is a whole different kind of reality check.

So she’s quickly writing letters home begging to be saved from the camp she spent so much time begging to go to. But her mother is busy, so that’s not going to happen. Young Vera is just going to have to make it through camp — find a friend on her own, find things that make her happy, find things she can be good at. She does: it works out.

It turns out this isn’t the kind of unhappy childhood caused by outside events — well, it is, partly, because being poorer than people around you is never a happy thing — but mostly because young Vera is the kind of person who has trouble being happy. (I know that kind of person well; I’m one, myself.)

And, again, Be Prepared is published specifically for kids, and in particular kids who are their own flavors of weird, unhappy, different, and introverted, but Brosgol is a great storyteller. Her drawings have life and verve to them, with lots of clear emotion in her kid characters, and she structures the story well. I might even give this the highest praise: Be Prepared is a book even for those few bizarre kids who enjoyed camp.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Book-A-Day 2018 #357: The Adventures of Tintin, Vol. 3 by Herge

I still feel like there’s something wrong with a forty-nine-year-old man reading the Tintin books for the first time, but it’s not like I can go back and read them any earlier now, can I?

The Adventures of Tintin, Vol. 3  collects three WWII-era Tintin stories: The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Shooting Star, and The Secret of ‘The Unicorn’. I say “WWII-era,” but there’s no indication at all in the stories themselves that a global war was going on. It’s the same world of adventure and derring-do as the earlier books (see volumes one and two ), full of smugglers and pirates and ruffians, all of whom must eventually fall to the legitimate authorities (though the villains of Shooting Star are state-backed; it’s a fictional South American state and they’re explicitly nasty capitalists).

These books came in quick succession: serialized one after the other (1940-41, 41-42, 42-43); and all were published in color book editions by the end of 1943. Herge was clearly a powerhouse — remember this was in Belgium, in the middle of the war, with all of the related shortages and controls.

But, again, none of that shows in the stories: they’re adventure tales about criminals: drug smugglers, sharp-elbowed capitalists from fictional countries, murderous hunters of lost treasures. And they are after strange and mysterious things, mostly: a strange meteor that crashed in the North Atlantic, a pirate’s treasure. (Though Golden Claws, and from Tintin’s side Unicorn, are both cases where he gets caught up in something and has no idea what nefarious plot is going on, just that something is obviously wrong.)

Golden Claws introduces Captain Haddock, who I gather becomes a major supporting character from that point forward. His character has not aged well, and it takes the previously wince-inducing scenes of Tintin or his dog Snowy “accidentally” getting drunk and sloppy in the earlier books and makes them even bigger, more violent and stereotypical when it’s a big, bearded guy doing the drinking. I hope that he develops a character other than “alcoholic who is stupidly combative when drunk” in later books.

This omnibus series makes an interesting — that word here means “inexplicable” — choice by ending with Unicorn; that book apparently leads directly into the next book, Red Rackham’s Treasure. Or maybe the publishers figured their readers would be hooked anyway by volume three, so a little cliff-hanger wouldn’t hurt anyone. In any case, this book ends very obviously with a “buy the next book” message.

The Tintin stories have been the formative adventure tales in comics form for several generations of young people by this point — more in Europe than on my side of the pond, obviously, but he’s still a treasure of world literature. And the stories do still mostly hold up, aside from the comic drunkenness. If you have young people in your orbit, they might still find this exciting: it’s got all of the good stuff.

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Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Book-A-Day 2018 #353: The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 6: Who Run the World? Squirrels by North & Henderson

Some people read The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl for the girl power, the body positivity, the overall positivity, the young-readers friendliness, the focus on computer science, or the kooky take on the Marvel Universe. Not me, though.

(Other people may read it because they are crushing hard on Koi Boi, obsessed with Eric Henderson’s art, or totally in love with writer Ryan North’s bottom-of-the-page notes. But those aren’t what does it for me, either.)

No, I’m all about Brain Drain. Give me an existential brain-in-a-vat-in-a-robot-body, teetering on the edge of total nihilism and trying to live in the modern world, and I’m happy.

This sixth book of Doreen Green’s adventures, titled (not all that compactly) The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 6: Who Run the World? Squirrels , has a whole bunch of Brain Drain in it, and so I like it very much. I trust the creators will take this to heart and choose in future to exclusively please this one random Internet dude who gets these books two years later from the library, instead of listening to everyone else who they are actually trying to reach and who pay money up front. [1]

(How did we get to volume six? Good question — check out volumes one , two, three , four, five and the hardcover OGN .)

The five issues reprinted here (#s 17-21 of the ongoing series) include, as has been the norm for the last few volumes, one big epic story (four issues) and then a smaller story (the last issue). The big story is fun and all, with a new villain who has a nefarious plot and a very sneaky way of getting around Doreen’s defenses. But it’s the same kind of thing as most SG stories: new threat seems unstoppable, but then she stops it.

No, the single issue is where it’s at, with a concentrated dose of Brain Drain action. While SG is off visiting her evil twin in the Negative Zone (see the OGN if that sentence makes no sense), Koi Boi and Chipmunk Hunk and my man Brain Drain have to stop crime in Manhattan single-handedly. [2] They do succeed in the end, of course, but along the way we get great moments like this:

I would be firmer, for my part: I won’t apologize for my cool dude protocols at all.

This collection is obvious pretty deep into Squirrel Girl-dom; no one should start here. But the series is still doing the stuff it does well, and even if you’re way outside of the target audience (girls 5-15, I guess, particularly those with an interest in science) it is quite swell and a lot of fun. I am still surprised Marvel allows North and Henderson to be in the MU but not of it, but I suppose I shouldn’t be looking gift horses in the mouth, should I? They could ruin this in a second any time they feel like it, and probably will, eventually.

But it’s here for now: enjoy it.

[1] This argument is used straight-faced by a lot of other white guys on the ‘net, so why shouldn’t it work for me, too?

[2] Because even though there’s a Marvel Universe, with Spider-Man and several Avengers teams and the Fantastic Four and Doctor Strange and Daredevil and several dozen other heroes in the same place, in any specific comic all of the crime is the responsibility of the title hero, to foil directly or delegate said foiling as she sees fit.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Book-A-Day 2018 #332: Crush by Svetlana Chmakova

Some media are better for some stories than others. I’d like to think that’s obvious, but the way mass culture obsesses about adapting everything into movies and TV shows makes me think it’s either a minority opinion or that a lot of people are just dim.

For example: you can do a strong, mostly silent type in a filmed format (moves, TV, animation), and give him hidden emotional depths by turning his thoughts into a voiceover. But a novel is a much more natural and obvious way to tell that story. Comics, too,  has less obtrusive ways to incorporate narration — the old thought bubbles, or the more modern narrative captions.

Which brings me to Jorge Ruiz, narration and central character of Svetlana Chamakova’s third graphic novel about the kids of Berrybrook Middle School, Crush . (It follows Awkward  and Brave ). He’s the kind of kid who’s better at doing than talking, who doesn’t entirely understand his own motivations and feelings — and that’s all very normal, since he’s all of thirteen.

He’s just started crushing hard on Jazmine Duong, a girl in his class — I don’t know exactly why, and Jorge certainly doesn’t, like most crushes. That makes him even quieter when he’s around her, because he’s so tongue-tied hardly any words can even come out.

Worse, she has a boyfriend. And she’s the BFF of Olivia, one of Jorge’s two long-term best buds. So she’s always around, occasionally with that boyfriend.

It gets more complicated — bullies, Jorge’s role as “sheriff” of the school to stop same, preparation for an Athletics Ball thrown by the Athletics Club [1], and several imploding relationships (friendly and proto-romantic) leading to a very nasty group chat with added hacking-fakery sauce. But, as the title promises, this is mostly the story of Jorge’s crush on Jazmine, and how it turns into more than that.

Jorge has a steadier moral compass than many of the people in this story, and a better one (as far as I can remember) than the protagonists of the first two books. But he’s also a tongue-tied thirteen-year-old mush-head, which is totally endearing.

As before, Chmakova makes books that I think actual middle-schoolers like and find to be reflective of their own lives. But Crush is also great for older people who remember being at the opening curtain of puberty, being totally into someone, and having no clue what to do about that.

[1] Neither of which, in my experience, are Things in American schools. The places that are particularly sports-nutty don’t have one club for every jock: each different sport has its own season and structure and teacher-coach and attitude about why their sport is the best possible one. I suspect Chmakova writes Berrybrook as so club-besotted because a) she’s not American by birth and 2) she really likes manga, where the club is an overwhelming trope.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Book-A-Day 2018 #328: The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang

There was an era in books for younger readers where the standard message was to conform, to become just like everyone else was supposed to be, to follow the prescriptions of life and fit your feet to the path. And we all make fun of those books now, when we see them or think about them.

We’re in the opposite era now: the standard story is that what a person wants must be right, because that person wants it. And putting it that baldly obviously shows up the inherent problems, but we generally don’t worry about them. Tell kids they can do anything, we say. They’ll figure out all of the ways that isn’t true for themselves eventually; we don’t need to crush their dreams directly.

Those stories are also regularly about exceptional, unique people — coddled princesses and lost princes, prophesied heroes and fated liberators. Is that because we all believe we are princesses at heart, or because those are the people whose dreams aren’t crushed in the end?

Don’t get me wrong: it’s good to tell kids they have options, that they can aim for the stars. But I don’t think we’re telling them that 99% of them will fail, that the stars are out of their reach, and that they’ll, at some point, need to trim their sails to catch a wind that actually exists. And so I wonder about the diet of stories we’re giving them.

Jen Wang is telling a “be who you feel you need to be” story in her new graphic novel The Prince and the Dressmaker . And, in that Oscar Wilde sense, it’s fiction, so they can become those things. One of them, of course is a prince at the start, which gives one a certain leg up in the world: it’s easier to find your perfect self when you’re not struggling to put food in your belly and clothes on your back.

It’s also easier when you’re in something like a fairy tale, which this is. It’s set in “Paris, at the dawn of the modern era” — maybe the middle of the long quiet 19th century, maybe later, maybe earlier, but those “maybes” are the point. The Prince is Sebastian, of Belgium, who you will not find on the family tree of the actual Belgian monarchy. He’s in Paris for the summer with his aunt, a French Countess, and will have the usual round of balls and events for his sixteenth birthday.

The underlying reason why he’s in Paris: to choose a wife. His royal parents are fictional/modern enough to let him pick his own match (within reason, and from a carefully curated list of the right young European noblewomen), but they’re traditional/realistic enough to want to get the betrothal settled before much more time goes by. Sebastian isn’t terribly interested in this — is any fictional prince or princess ever happy to engage in the round of who-should-I-marry? — for reasons that will be very obvious very quickly.

Frances is a young woman from outside Paris, driven to become a dress designer. She’s working, at what seems to be a low level, in a high-end shop, and gets her chance with a last-minute design for the Prince’s first ball: the willful Lady Sophie Rohan ruined her dress riding and in a fit of pique asks Frances to make her “the devil’s wench.”

Frances is too green to realize actually doing this would be horrible for her fledgling career, and does it. The dress causes a scandal, and Frances is about to be fired when a mysterious man comes around, looking for the designer of the scandalous dress. He has an equally mysterious client who wants to hire that designer exclusively to design for her, and Frances jumps at the offer.

Of course, despite an initial attempt at anonymity, she soon learns her new client is Sebastian. But she wants to design, and Sebastian wants to wear exactly the kind of flashy, exciting dresses she wants to make. And, at first, it all goes well: Frances gets experience and confidence, and Sebastian gets to go out in public as Lady Crystallia and become a minor celebrity.

But Frances can’t advance professionally as “Lady Crystallia’s” dressmaker, because that would connect Crystallia to Sebastian. And Sebastian’s parents are demanding he spend more time wooing all of those young women, who he has no interest in or time for. (He’s spending his nights as Crystallia, and his days sleeping and recovering.) It all is going to smash, and it does.

Wang finds her way to a happy ending, and one that’s more in keeping with the time and her protagonists’ very different social positions than I expected. The Prince and the Dressmaker is much more successful than I was worried it could be; it is a book that tells the you-can-be-whatever-you-want lesson, but it doesn’t skimp on pointing out the hard work and sacrifices needed along the way. (Plus a fair bit of luck, a sympathetic creator, and no small bit of wealth and position — but that’s what makes it fiction.)

I should have expected that from the author of Koko Be Good , which had a similarly complex central male-female relationship that didn’t resolve in conventional ways and a more nuanced view of success and the pursuit thereof. Wang is also a fine cartoonist, particularly good here with crisp, openly emotional faces drawn with few lines and big expressive eyes. This is a book telling that currently-popular story, and in a way designed to appeal to young readers who want to believe that they’ll get all of their dreams — but it’s a fine book despite that.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Book-A-Day 2018 #326: Lumberjanes, Vol. 5: Band Together by Stevenson, Watters, Leyh, Allen, Nowak & Laiho

There’s a point where, as a reviewer and critic, you either need to engage fully with your material or just walk away from it. Holding it at arm’s length doesn’t do anyone any good.

And I’m very aware that all of my posts about the great female-centric comic Lumberjanes — see my posts on volumes one and two and three  and four  — are about how I really can’t engage that deeply with a comic that is so centrally about being a girl and having friendships with other girls in a very girl-positive environment.

So I think this is the last time I’m going to read a Lumberjanes thing: they are good, and entirely a positive thing to have in the world, but I really don’t have a way into this material, and five books of searching is long enough.

Also, the stories collected in Lumberjanes, Vol. 5: Band Together  see a big shift in the creative team — Noelle Stevenson leaves as co-writer, to be replaced by Kat Leyh, and Brooke Allen hands over illustration duties to Carolyn Nowak. So this a a transitional moment anyway, which makes it better than most moments to transition myself quietly in the other direction.

Band Together starts with a single-issue flashback to the first day of camp, showing all five of our intrepid campers arriving, in the company of their various families, and pretty much immediately becoming best friends. It is fun and nice and sweet and very fluffy.

The rest of the book collects the three-issue story that introduced Leyh and Nowak as creators, in which our five intrepid best friends discover that there’s an entire civilization of mermaids in their local lake. (Lumberjanes has a lot of the qualities of a good animated TV series, primary among which is that the world is big and full of wonders, including ones that really should have been honkingly obvious before the point they appear.) Since Lumberjanes is about all-friendship-all-the-time (for female-identified persons), this story must of course be about our heroines mending a broken friendship among the hard-rocking merwomen.

That longer story is less fluffy, but it’s still very Lumberjanean (Lumberjaneite? Lumberjaneicious? Lumberjane-aroonie?) in its core positivity and sunny disposition. Even when one character becomes obsessed, she can be talked down (and mildly shamed) by her friends by merely mentioning that she wasn’t thinking enough about everyone else’s feelings.

Again, I think I’m going to leave Lumberjanes behind at this point. It is a very good thing with almost no points of congruity with my life or interests, and I’m trying to teach myself that I don’t need to worry about everything. Let’s see if I can learn.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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