Any self-respecting family story needs a flashback. Whether it’s a Ross Macdonald novel finally explaining just what horrible thing happened twenty years ago in Canada or a family saga that stops in the middle of Chapter Two to explain just how Sadie McGuffins first came to the Maritimes from Scotland as a teen domestic servant so many years ago, before too long the narrative needs to roll up its sleeves, dive into the past, and dramatize the things that are still casting a shadow over the present-day cast.

(It’s even required if a family story has no connection to Canada, though I’m not sure if that’s even possible.)

Jeff Lemire’s currently ongoing comic Royal City is a family story. And this second volume, Sonic Youth , is the big flashback — to 1993, when Tommy Pike was still alive.

(See my post on the first book, Next of Kin , if you’re not familiar with it.)

Lemire is either writing for the trade or his publisher (Image) is matching the books to the plotlines — either way; the first book was one “chapter” of this story, introducing everyone in the present day, and this whole second volume is set in 1993, in what the back cover calls “the last week of Tommy Pike’s life.”

This isn’t a spoiler for anyone who’s read the first book: we all know Tommy is dead, he know he died in 1993, and we basically know how he died. But now we get to see him alive, when we only saw him as a ghost or a memory in Next of Kin. The parents circle the main plot this time but are less connected to it, which is only to be expected in a story about teenagers. It’s all about the four Pike siblings: aimless recent grad Patrick, hell-raiser Richie, secretly pregnant Tara, and thoughtful, clearly doomed Tommy.

Tommy’s been having severe, debilitating headaches — more and more often, complete with hallucinations. He sees a doctor, has a scary giant machine scan his head, gets the “there’s something here that we need to explore more” speech, and is given a prescription for pills to take when his headache is bad. He’s told to absolutely avoid any drugs or alcohol wile taking those pills, but he’s only fifteen, so that shouldn’t be a problem, right?

But that weekend is the big blowout party — with most of the teenagers in town, in an abandoned factory outside this decaying industrial town. All of the Pikes will end up there, eventually. And will Tommy take other intoxicants on top of his medication?

Well, we know he dies, don’t we?

Lemire is telling a single longer, complex story here: it’s being broken up into single-issue comics and then collected into these books for cash-flow and market-need purposes, but it’s clear that Royal City has an overall shape and structure behind it. Unlike some creators, he’s not spinning out a single issue of complications at a time, or even one plotline. It’s difficult to say, at this point, how long that will be, but I’m confident that Lemire basically knows — he may have already written the last scene; he strikes me as the kind of writer who might do that.

I try to avoid predictions, mostly because I turn out to be wrong more often than not. But I don’t think we’re done with the flashbacks in Royal City. The next volume might return to the modern day (or maybe not), but I’m sure we’ll return to 1993 eventually, to see what happened after Tommy died.

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

I don’t want to oversell my expertise here: I’ve never worked in a law firm, and my professional work is generally marketing to attorneys within companies rather than firms. So I may be just saying that one thing I’ve never experienced personally matches another thing I’ve never experienced personally. [1]

But Hartley Lin’s Young Frances  is a remarkably nuanced, detailed, smart look at the pressure cooker that is a major Big Law firm, smart about office politics and full of off-handed details about both how bruising and all-consuming it can be and about how it used to be so much worse. Ever more exciting, that’s not the point of Young Frances: that’s the world she lives in, and the work she’s doing and trying to make meaningful, but the story of this graphic novel is about her personally.

Like all of us, her work life is not her whole life — but it’s a huge piece of that life, and influences everything else. She struggles with insomnia, and worries about what she should do with her life, and has a complicated friendship with her roommate Vickie, a gorgeous actress on the verge of a huge career breakthrough. In lesser hands, Young Frances would be a “quarterlife crisis” book — yet another story about someone young and aimless.

But Frances Scarland is not aimless. She just doesn’t have much confidence in her aim, and wonders if the life she’s building for herself is worth what it costs. We all wonder that, at least now and then, and I think most of us are not as confident as we look, either. She’s a hard worker, focused on details, and cares about what she’s doing — and she’s also embedded in an organization that is designed to bring in large groups of young, hard-working people every single year, run them ragged, and then spit out most of them within three to five years. A big law firm is a brutal place to work, even if you’re not an attorney — maybe even more so, since shit proverbially flows downhill. Frances is support staff, a law clerk: she’s very far downhill.

But firm politics also lead to alliances and schemes and favoritism. At the beginning of this book, Frances is given the kind of thing that can pass for promotion in an organization like that: asked to support another practice group and given more work as others are let go. So she’s soon working mostly for the chilly rainmaker Marcel Castonguay, head of Bankruptcies — and he seems to favor her, to want to further her career.

But the core of Young Frances is that question: is this her career? Is this really what she wants to do, or is it just what she happens to be doing now? How does it affect the rest of her life? And does any of that matter?

Her roommate Vickie pulls her in other directions — sometimes frivolous, work-shirking ones, sometimes scarily major, change-your-life-entirely ones. Frances Scarland needs to decide who she is and what she will do. Like all of us do. And, like all of us, it’s not a one-time decision: every day is another choice, another step in one direction or another.

Lin tells this story in quiet comics panels, three tiers to the large pages and a precise semi-ligne claire style. This is a book full of words — these are lawyers and their support staff, with a subset of actors! — but his open pages and crisp lettering makes it all flow smoothly and evenly throughout.

Young Frances is simply astonishing as someone’s first book: Hartley Lin has arrived, fully-formed, as a mature artist with a strong story to tell and a deft hand at handling characters. We’re only halfway through 2018, but this will be really hard to beat as the debut of the year.

[1] ObligatoryReference: “So, what you’re telling me, Percy, is that something you have never seen is slightly less blue than something else you have never seen.”

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

Why does someone go on a pilgrimage in modern Europe? The obvious reason would be religion, but that’s rarely the central purpose these days. It’s not part of general cultural life for Christians — not the way the hajj still is for Muslims — and many of the people who make those journeys aren’t particularly Christian to begin with.

But pilgrimages continue. People find a reason to walk, and find something for themselves at the end of the walk. The Norwegian cartoonist who works as “Jason” trekked the 500-mile Camino de Santiago in northern Spain in 2015, soon after his fiftieth birthday. And he made a book out of it, On the Camino . He doesn’t say why he went; it’s not clear he knows, or has a single “why.” And he doesn’t tell us what he found out, for the same reason.

What he does is tell us the story of the trip, placing us in his head and shoes for that month-long walk, and to let us feel what it was like to be Jason on the Camino. (Well, his real name is John, and that’s what he tells people his name is in the book. But you know what I mean.)

It’s all told in a very Jason way: matter-of-fact, almost affectless, with animal-headed characters moving through a world depicted fairly simply. He works entirely in black-and-white for this book as well. Jason himself is at the center of the trip, obviously, and is the viewpoint the entire time. This is what he saw and did in thirty-three days of walking, told like a Jason graphic novel. He even gets in his abrupt shifts of points of reference, as when he sees a giant slug on the trial — first drawing it “giant” and then it’s actual size.

The story is inherently different from Jason’s fictional works: there’s no twists to the plot, obviously, and he can’t throw in genre elements for complications or interest. On the other hand, how do we know this is all true? We think it is because Jason tells us so, and because it has the everydayness and banality of real life — but that’s justification rather than proof. That’s the case for any non-fiction story, of course: how can we believe the teller and the tale? If there’s no reason not to tell the truth, we assume it is the truth — we’re all lazy, both as storytellers and listeners.

Jason is an introvert, most comfortable alone — as you would expect from someone who spends his life sitting in a room to think up stories and draw them — and much of On the Camino, starting from the very first page, is his struggle to be more open, to come out of his shell and engage with the other pilgrims and the locals. He has no gigantic epiphanies — we wouldn’t expect them from Jason, anyway. His hopes aren’t dashed, either, which would be more in keeping with his fiction.

Instead, he walks. He meets some people, and runs into some of them repeatedly. He has some good conversations and interesting thoughts while walking alone. He also has blisters and bedbugs and food that doesn’t agree with him. Every life and journey has good and bad, yes? It’s a cliche even to mention it.

And he tells that story, in his four-panel grid, with his stone-faced characters with animal heads — this is a Jason book, and it looks like one. He will not tell you what to think of it in the end; he’s never told you what to think of any of his stories. But you can take the trip with him. I think it’s worth the time.

(Note: this book does not credit a translator. And, in the story, “John” speaks English much of the time. So my guess is that Jason translated it himself, or wrote a text for this edition in English. I think I’ve found the original French edition, Un norvégien vers Compostelle , published only four months before the US edition.)

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

I don’t read enough books aimed at kids to really know the shapes of subgenres these days, and so it’s dangerous for me to speculate. But I’m pretty sure the 5 Worlds series is not the only graphic novel series these days marching down the trail that Kazu Kibuishi’s Amulet  series blazed.

I’m not saying that to point a finger: the opposite, in fact. I think there’s a whole bunch of books like this: fantasy adventure stories for middle-grades readers, told in graphic novel form, with groups of spunky kids and their quirky adult allies racing to save their entire, weirdly-constructed worlds from some manner of Dark Lord that particularly resonates with kids.

What I am saying is that I won’t be able to explain the places the 5 Worlds series breaks away from that subgenre, and what ways it’s faithful to it. I can only say that I see a dim territory stretching out behind this book, full of other wonders, and then describe what’s right in front of me.

What is right in front of me is the second book in that series, The Cobalt Prince . (I didn’t see the first one, The Sand Warrior.) It’s co-written by brothers Mark Siegel (Editorial Director of First Second and cartoonist of the excellent graphic novel Sailor Twain ) and Alexis Siegel (writer and translator of various things, including Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat), and drawn by a team of three: Xanthe Bouma, Matt Rockefeller, and Boya Sun. Neither the book itself nor the cover letter explained how the three divide art duties, so insert a graphic of me shrugging here. Maybe it’s the old pencil-ink-color, maybe it’s figures-backgrounds-finishes, maybe they all work in the same style on different pages, maybe something entirely different.

Our Chosen One this time is Oona Lee, a preteen girl who is one of only two Sand Dancers — the particular kind of magic used in this universe — who can call the Living Fire. Our universe is made up of five worlds: it seems to be one large planet and four moons, all habitable. (I don’t see how that can be possible, but this is not hard SF.) Each planet has a magical beacon which can only be lit by the Living Fire, and Oona believes the beacons of all five worlds must be lit to make everything right. (It is not hugely clear in this book exactly what was not right, though there is a big evil thing called the Mimic lurking around and threatening everyone.) In the first book, she lit the beacon of Mon Domani, the central mother world.

So, at the beginning of this book, she’s off to the next world — Toki, the blue one, seat of a militaristic blue people — to light the next beacon, along with her friends Jax Amboy (a popular professional athlete who is secretly an android) and An Tzu (who is slowly disappearing because of some mystical disease which will definitely be plot-important).

Possibly new in this book is Oona’s long-lost older sister Jessa, who went away with the Toki people when Oona was very young, Jessa has since become blue, like the Toki people, lost her ability to call the Living Fire and may have been ensnared by a body-possessing spirit of evil called the Mimic (the Dark Lord of the series).

There are shocking revelations, several Everything You Know Is Wrong moments, lots of magical and physical battles, at least one noble sacrifice, and one character coming back from what seems like certain death. It’s a good adventure story in this middle-grade mode, and will be very appealing to fans of Amulet or The Last Airbender (which seems to have seriously influenced the magic system here). Its appeal to adults is not quite as strong; we’ve seen things like this many times before. But it’s good at what it does, has nicely rounded, attractive art, and delivers on what it promises.

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