If you’ve read Marjorie Liu’s wonderful adult comic with Sana Takeda, Monstress, you’ll already be familiar with her knack for lush worldbuilding, moral dilemmas, and road trip banter. Zuli is a gem of a heroine, and her newness to the “real” world makes her an ideal reader stand-in for this road trip. Some things Frowly knows and can explain to her, like the fact that birds and humans have bones (“I’d rather not think about it,” he says), or what hunger and thirst might feel like. But though Frowly once lived in the real world, he’s been absent from it for generations. His memory is patchy, and of course he’s missed out on years of history.

Of course, if you’ve read Monstress, you also know that two things she is very good at are found family and road trips. (If you know me, you may also be aware that I LOVE ROAD TRIPS. I would go on a road trip right fucking now. I would hop in a car this instant minute with just a backpack and a fully loaded e-reader. I don’t even care.) So naturally, Zuli acquires a second real-world explainer in the form of goblin scavenger Orien. He also has an animal sidekick, because that is what the people want. Honestly, nothing made me want to spend time in middle grade — a genre that forms an insignificant portion of my reading diet — as much as the presence of animal sidekicks. Please drop some recs of books with animal sidekicks in the comments. I always forget how much I like them.

When I was rereading Orien’s opening scene in preparation for writing this review, I was freshly delighted with Liu’s craft. Orien is an immediately recognizable character – the rogue guy who helps Our Heroes reluctantly — of a type that you’re never not going to be excited about. But Liu weaves in the worldbuilding seamlessly around Orien’s introduction. He mentions a winged people called the Siric, who lived high in the mountains. “If you have wings,” he says, “you live as high as you can.” When Zuli asks where Orien’s mountain is — he has wings, after all — he says, curtly, that he’s not allowed to live anywhere high, then changes the subject. In the next two-page spread, Frowly is anxiously warning Zuli about all the terrible things goblins do to other winged creatures. Has he ever seen goblins do any of those things, Zuli asks. “No,” says Frowly. “Not that I can remember.” It sets the scene wonderfully and tells us a lot about Orien’s past and present.

(As a small note here: The goblins of Wingbearer obviously do not eat children, and I’m sure the arc of the comic as a whole will be about how goblins have been wronged, and ultimately they will get to live in a lovely high place where they can use their wings to fly anywhere they want. Even so, I really would prefer that the stereotypes of fictional goblins should avoid alignment with antisemitic conspiracy theories, not only because antisemitism is on the rise globally, but also because the alignment of goblins with Jewish people is of long standing. We were, like, just having this conversation about the Gringotts goblins.)

Zuli and Orien are just the right pairing for a book like this. Orien is street-wise and a little cynical, while Zuli possesses the kindness, optimism, and confidence that come from having always been loved. In any given encounter, Orien and Frowly are the ones advocating for caution or schemes, while Zuli is the one who thinks that Just Telling the Truth will net them the best results. Each side is right about half the time. Sometimes Zuli’s sweetness is enough to carry the day, and other times it’s the exact quality that makes people think they can take advantage of her. She’s right often enough that she leaves in her wake a stable of variously dependable allies who can pop back up later on in the way of all good quest stories.

Though Zuli doesn’t begin her quest with a high level of interest in Where She Came From and Who She Is, those questions are at a constant low hum throughout the story. We get hints early on that she’s connected to the Siric — a winged people commemorated in ruined statuary — but Frowly isn’t eager to talk more about them, and Zuli of course doesn’t have wings. If you’ve read a book before, and I HAVE, MY FRIENDS, it’s obvious that Zuli’s identity will prove to be central to the mystery of what’s happening to the birds. From a starting point of complete trust in Frowly and the guardians of the tree, Zuli slowly begins to question what she’s been told (or rather, not told) about herself. It’s one of those tropes that’s kind of inexhaustibly good and pleasing, the beloved child being forced to reckon with her parents’ imperfections as she goes out into a world beyond them. This first volume leaves us on a cliffhanger that answers a big question while leaving the reader with about fifty more.

I can’t close out this review without a few words about Teny Aida Issakhanian’s art because whew is it gorgeous. Every panel is a swirl of colors and light, and Issakhanian has a knack for when to slam an emotional moment with a close-up on the characters’ faces and when to zoom way out and give the reader a sense of how massive this world is and how tiny Zuli and Orien are within it. If you’re in the market for a good fantasy road trip / coming of age story that’s also a visual pleasure, Wingbearer is absolutely your guy. I can’t wait for the next volume, or for my niece and nephew to get old enough that I can give them this book for their birthdays.

(Please do not ask me any follow-up questions about how many gifts I have on tap for these kids when they get just slightly older. Those would be rude questions. Also, I don’t have to answer you. So there.)

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After numerous sightings of Mariko Tamaki’s latest, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, I broke down and bought it from an indie bookstore near the beach. Endcaps work! Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me is about a girl called Freddy whose extremely cool sort-of girlfriend, Laura Dean, keeps breaking up with her. No matter how many times Laura Dean proves herself to be an unreliable jerkface, Freddy carries on wanting her, even at the expense of her other relationships.

I love this book so much that it’s going to be difficult for me to describe it dispassionately, but I shall try. My primary memory from reading This One Summer is that the Tamaki cousins, unlike very, very, very many adults, have not forgotten what it is like to be a kid. Having read Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, I stand by that position. It’s one of these universal being-a-teenager stories done with extraordinary sensitivity and loveliness: Freddy is in love with someone flighty and unavailable, and she keeps on thinking that if she does everything just right (or maybe is a slightly different person), the relationship will become what she wants it to be.

(Spoiler for that relationship: It won’t.)

Rosemary Valero O’Connell’s art for this book is exceptional and contributes so much to the mood and texture of the story, including my position that these creators remember being a teenager. She makes use of numerous stage-setting panels in between those with dialogue, so we get a sense of these kids, the things on their bedroom floors, their diner orders, their small gestures and mannerisms. Here’s a panel of Freddy and her best friend Doodle sitting in class, preoccupied.

The cat pencil case? The clock in the corner? Doodle chewing on the end of her hoodie’s’s drawstrings? I remember this so much.

Laura Dean is, if I may say so, an actually perfect character in a high school novel. The story is framed in letters that Freddy writes to a national advice columnist, and those letters frame the art to show us the lens Freddy’s viewing Laura Dean through. Oh my God it’s so good, how vividly the art and voiceovers show you that Freddy’s always, always got her eye on Laura Dean, whether Laura Dean is flirting with someone else at the opposite end of the cafeteria, or smooching Freddy casually in the hall between classes. There’s some shit Laura Dean pulls at the very end that I won’t spoil because it’s the most perfect un-operatic high-school-asshole careless shittiness imaginable. But just to give you a sense, here she is blowing off Freddy with style and charisma (click to embiggen):

The hardest thing about teenagerhood — if you set aside all the regular-life hard things that happen during high school, which are the same regular-life hard things that happen after high school (illness, family illness, death, money troubles, friend troubles) except you’re too young to have context for what’s normal and you have virtually no power to affect outcomes so you’re just fucking swept along by every tidal wave that happens by — is learning to set aside what everyone else wants you to be, and sorting out what you want you to be. And that’s fundamentally the story of Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, told with compassion and insight and not an ounce of condescension for these characters as they try to figure out their shit. I loved it. I laughed, I cried. I recommended it to everyone. I bought it for someone. I started a Best of 2019 post just so I could put this book on it.

In case you are not convinced yet, let me add that I skimmed through looking for a couple of images that would illustrate what I loved so much about the art and writing, and whilst doing that I read the end, and it made me cry again. Even without the rest of the book! What a great fucking book. Do yourself a favor and read it straight away, and you can thank me later.

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The premise of The Wicked + the Divine is a little strange, so bear with me. Once every ninety years, twelve gods become manifest on earth, taking over the bodies of twelve humans. They have a variety of supernatural powers; they are loved and famous; and within two years, they all will die. Our protagonist is teenager Laura Wilson, who wants nothing more than to be around the Pantheon at any cost. Also, someone is murdering gods.

If you are interested in The Wicked + the Divine based on what I’ve just said, but nervous about the comics problem I mentioned in the first paragraph, I can wholeheartedly recommend the first four volumes of this title. The fourth volume, Rising Action, wraps up the major storylines that we’ve been following since the first issue, and then you can be on break until the next arc wraps up. (You probably won’t want to, though, because this comic is really fucking good.)

Writer Kieron Gillen and author Jamie McElvie have worked together on a number of projects before, including a run on Young Avengers, and they’re a well-oiled machine. The third volume of WicDiv has guest artists (presumably to cut McElvie a break because good God drawing a monthly comic seems like a lot of work), and they are all talented people, but there’s just a really great marriage of writing and art when these two dudes are working together. The character design is great, and each volume opens with cameo pictures of the major players (which I always appreciate because I’m a goldfish for faces) so you won’t forget who’s who.

(Has anyone here read Phonogram? Would I like it?)

If you do decide to continue past the fourth trade paperback, there’s a special issue mocked up like a magazine that is just a delight. Gillen and McElvie got a series of real journalists to conduct interviews with Gillen in character as various WicDic characters, then write up profiles with those characters. So Laurie Penny interviews Woden, Ezekiel Kweku interviews Amaterasu, and so on. One of the things I love about the comics format is that creators have room to do special issues like this where they take a break from the main story and just play around with characters or worldbuilding.

tl;dr, it’s been a minute since I checked in with The Wicked + the Divine, and I am thrilled to report that it’s still one of the weirdest, best-plotted comics out there. Much recommended.

A spoiler here follows under the cut.

Dead Jenny Watch

I don’t know if y’all have heard my gripe about Jennys in books, but what I have found is that Jennys in books are mostly dead. Especially, for some reason, in comic books. This year alone, out of eight comics titles I have consumed, two have contained dead Jennys. And The Wicked + the Divine is one of them:

Boooooooo.

The post The Wicked + the Divine Is Still Just a Really Terrific Comic appeared first on Reading the End.

It’s about a guy called Yaichi who lives in Tokyo with his daughter, Kana. But their lives change when a large, bearded, lumberjacklike Canadian called Mike shows up at their door, claiming that he is the widow of Yaichi’s recently deceased twin brother, Ryoji. Though Kana falls for Mike immediately, Yaichi struggles with his distaste for homosexuality and his initial disinterest in having a relationship with Mike.

I fell for this book at the immediate point that Yaichi’s delightful-as-hell kid falls for Mike. Her reasoning is that Mike’s from Canada, which sounds like her name, Kana. What an adorable angel — and I say that as someone who hates kidfic (usually) and resents the hell out of adorable moppets on most TV shows in which they appear. But Kana’s easy affection for Mike helps to show Yaichi a path towards having a relationship with his brother-in-law, and even reconsidering the relationship he had (and the one he could have had) with his brother. A grudging respect forms!

What I’m saying is, 2017 was garbage, and maybe your 2018 hasn’t started out perfectly quite yet. (Mine hasn’t because my neck is broken GOD DAMN IT.) If you want something to read that is primarily fluff with moments of sadness mixed in because for God’s sake Ryoji is dead, My Brother’s Husband (vol 1) awaits you.

And if I may slightly brag for a moment here, I find manga extremely intimidating, and My Brother’s Husband was perfectly readable even for me. It was a bit of an adjustment to train my brain to read the book right-to-left, but I MANAGED IT. What I’m saying is that maybe 2018 would be a good year for me to get into manga, as I have experienced such early success. N’est-ce pas?

If you’re a manga enthusiast, give me some recs! What are some good titles for manga beginners?

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(WordPress’s SEO analysis feature right now is like WHY ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT SOME OTHER COMIC IN THIS POST ABOUT STRONG FEMALE PROTAGONIST yes yes good point WordPress, I’ll get down to business so you can relax)

Strong Female Protagonist is an ongoing webcomic the first volume of which my library recently acquired (yay!). It’s about a superpowered girl named Allison Green who has given up on the superhero life and wants to be a normal girl attending a normal college (well, normalish — she goes to the New School). In the aftermath of her life as a superhero, she’s begun to question the very concept of superheroes, whether her work made the world better in the old days, and whether she has the capacity to make the world better now.

(The full run of Strong Female Protagonist is still available for free online, or you can buy the trade paperback.)

The grounding point for Strong Female Protagonist¹ is its belief in the fundamental decency of human beings, which is something I need right now, even if at times it seems hopelessly naive. It’s been hard this year to keep looking for the helpers, and hard to keep being a helper or even believing that there continues to be value in being a helper. Allison faces these same fears, and she continues, throughout the book, to try to find the good in people and to be the best version of herself.

Also, there are jokes! And the comics creator have done something very sweet, which is to retain the hover-over text from the webcomic in tiny captions at the bottom of each page. When Nimona became a book, some of the little extra-features that came from being a webcomic were lost, and I was sad about that. Yay for Strong Female Protagonist for retaining them.

But seriously, please tell me how to keep on top of webcomics. Help me, Obi-Wan Ke-Internet. You’re my only hope.

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If you’re not au courant with what was happening to the X-Men around the time this series came out (early 2010s), there’s kind of a lot to catch up on, and I definitely wouldn’t recommend this series as a starting place for the X-Men if you don’t have a baseline familiarity with the characters. However, Liu does a good job getting you up to speed, and I generally felt like I had a good grip on things: Laura, X-23, ended up on an X-men fighting force that made her feel like she’s good for nothing but murder. Wolverine got ?possessed? by a ?demon?, an issue that’s settled in the Wolverine comics but touches on these comics too (given that Laura’s a clone of Wolverine’s).

The baseline story here is that Laura’s trying to learn how to control the darkness within, and for Reasons(tm), in order to do that she has to go on a road trip with Gambit. Why Gambit? Who cares! Why road trip? Who cares! The comic gets into these reasons but I love Gambit and I love road trips so it would literally be impossible for me to care less about what pretense Marjorie Liu uses to make those two things happen. Gambit’s a character I have, ah, complicated feelings about,¹ and it was nice to see him in a Wolveriney big-brother role with Laura.

My favorite of the mini-arcs, however, occurs in the third trade paperback (if you’re reading this in trade paperbacks): Laura agrees to babysit for Reed Richards and Sue Storm’s kids, and world-hopping dragon-fighting hijinx ensure because Valeria and Franklin are trouble trouble trouble.

Sana Takeda’s art is detailed and lush and adorable as it continues to be in Monstress. I’m thrilled these two creators connected while making X-23 and continued their collaboration, because I love the work that they create together.

The final issue of Marjorie Liu’s run on X-23 is….not great. If you are reading this series and you want to end on a positive note, close the book after the penultimate issue, the one that ends with Laura riding away on a motorcycle. It is for your own good and you will thank me. The final issue is this weird wordless, like, vision-quest story where Laura stays the night with the family of an American Indian family, and overnight she has this whole encounter with wolves and a shamaness in the forest. To have your only Indian characters throughout the whole series be wordless is not great, and to take a tourist spin through another culture’s religious traditions is not great, and I really wished this issue didn’t exist. As a sea of critics have said over and over again, Marvel would reeeeeally help themselves when writing about characters from marginalized groups to hire writers from those groups.

I am feeling very positively about minor X-Men characters right now, y’all! Please get at me in the comments and let me know what series runs with lesser X-Men I should be reading.

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The premise: Jerrica, Kimber, Shana, and Aja want to submit a video application to the “Misfits vs” competition, where a bunch of unknown bands get to compete against The Misfits in live performance. But Jerrica (their lead singer) has such terrible stage fright that she can’t get through a single song without choking. So instead they USE A HOLOGRAM OF HER and pretend the hologram lady (Jem) is their real lead singer. Hijinks ensue.

I dunno, if you enjoyed the first act of The Parent Trap or want to read about ladies tearing it up in the music scene with excellent eye makeup, I feel I can recommend Jem and the Holograms to you in good conscience. This volume mainly focuses on Jerrica and Kimber, but it’s clear that the background characters have their own desires and stories to tell, which I hope we’ll see more of as the comic progresses. It’s A+ to see Kimber’s budding romance with a lady and Jerrica’s budding romance with a dude treated with the exact same tone and respect; I am rooting for love all around!

Another wonderful thing about this comic is that when artist Sophie Campbell came out as trans over the course of the comic’s run, publisher IDW reprinted every issue to get rid of her deadname. That is absolutely putting your money where your mouth is, and I think it’s great that the publisher supported Campbell. Also great: Trans ladies being lead artists on comics! Woooooooo!

(Note: Sophie Campbell finished her run on Jem and the Holograms after the 17th issue and moved on to other projects. But that still gives me two (ish?) more trade paperbacks of this marvelous comic to look forward to with her art.)

So if the Trump administration is backing up on you and you need some pure, bright-colored joy in your life, check out Jem and the Holograms.

The post Review: Jem and the Holograms, Kelly Thompson & Sophie Campbell appeared first on Reading the End.

Gail Simone’s run on Batgirl follows Barbara Gordon as she’s getting back into the game of fighting crime on the streets after several years away. My main takeaway here is that Batgirl cannot cut a break. Every time she arrests one criminal who’s determined to murder her, another one pops up, like the world’s most sinister game of Whack-a-Mole. (Is that the game I’m thinking of? Where you whap the things on the head and they go back down into their hole but then another one pops up somewhere else on the board?)

A recent miracle cure (I know) has given Barbara back the use of her legs after a years-ago attack by the Joker. Though Barbara’s physically able to return to the work of catching criminals on the mean streets of Gotham, she still struggles mentally. Her reflexes aren’t what they used to be, and more significantly, the trauma of her attack by the Joker continues to affect her day to day. Simone’s excellent on Barbara’s ongoing feelings about what happened to her — she’s angry about it, and angry with herself for what she perceives as letting it happen, and memories of the assault flash into her mind at inconvenient times, leaving her frozen and stunned when she most needs to be up and fighting. But Barbara also refuses to be defined by her worst day, and she continues to get back up and keep on fighting evil.

Holy hell, Gotham is the worst. Is this typical of street-level comic books? I have most often read the mid-level ones, where the Avengers or the X-Men are saving the world from things, and I miss out the street-level fighters like Luke Cage and the Punisher. But goddamn, in Gotham it seems like nobody ever has a good day. Not the superheroes, not the villains, and for sure not the civilians. Everyone gets nonstop murdered. I prescribe a rousing course of trauma-focused CBT for the entire citizenry of Gotham.

Look, this is my first significant read of a DC comic, and I don’t want to overgeneralize here. But you know that perception that like, Marvel has the jokes, DC has the grimdark? Reading Batgirl did not shift that perception for me. It isn’t just that Barbara constantly has people gunning for her, although she does, and it isn’t just that Gotham is an unbearable violent shithole with no redeeming qualities, although it is. Reading this comic, I got so tired of Barbara facing mastermind villains who were specifically, personally targeting her trauma history, manipulating her into super-triggering situations, and then taunting her at great length about her inability to save her loved ones. Are there no villains in the DC universe who just want a whole bunch of money or to experiment on innocent civilians without involving superheroes? Do all the DC villains devote upwards of half their time to specifically ruining the lives of the heroes of Gotham?

These are not rhetorical questions. Please answer them in the comments. If the answer is yes I may need to rethink this DC reading project and also not buy that one shirt I wanted to buy.

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You see that cover? Every page of Monstress is of equivalent, if not greater, beauty to that cover. Sana Takeda’s art is beautiful and dreamy and gives this work of fantasy an extraordinarily epic feel. The detail on every page is incredible, her characters feel lived-in, and with all of that, she doesn’t elide the brutality our main character, Maika, both faces and dispenses in just about every issue. I was hard-pressed not to screen-cap every page for y’all, because the art is just that gorgeous.

Monstress has received a huge amount of attention, deservedly, for the art, but the writing is also wonderful. I was warned repeatedly that Monstress was quite violent, and it is, in the manner of a lot of the secondary world fantasy I’ve encountered in my life. At the same time, it’s — can I say really fun? Is that glib? Our protagonist, Maika, is fighting against something evil that lives inside her, all the while trying to escape the many forces in her world that will stop at nothing to find her; and yes, that’s a recipe for violence and mayhem in secondary world fantasy. Maika is searching for answers about her own past and her mother’s, and she has a thing many people want and she is a thing many people want, and she has to find the answers before the bad guys find her. So when I say fun, I mean that this is a familiar type of story, which I enjoy, and it’s wonderful to see it played out so skillfully, with such superb worldbuilding, with end-of-issue surprises that make me gasp yet still feel completely earned, and with characters whose arcs over the course of the series I’m excited for.

Marjorie Liu has said that she has deliberately written a book of only women — and as soon as she said it, I was like, “…Oh yeah. Oh hey. There are no men in this book.” Not actually zero, but very, very few. The soldiers are women, the slaves are women, the witches are women. It’s part of what makes this story so incredible, because what we see are a multiplicity of women with different ideas and motives and values — you know, a whole bunch of women portrayed as full people. Many of them women of color. In a comic written by two women of color. Doesn’t it make your heart grow three sizes? It does mine.

AND SERIOUSLY, THIS ART.

Particularly when you remember that Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda do not share a language and have to communicate with each other via a translator, this is an extraordinary marriage of the vision of art and writing. I love this comic to shreds and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

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How to not be a dick to women who write comics criticism. (Good news: It ain’t even that hard.)

Yes, Lovecraft was a product of his times. That doesn’t mean we have to be okay with his racism.

A thoughtful response to the recent “I don’t want to be Black Spiderman” issue of the Miles Morales Spiderman comic (by Brian Michael Bendis, a white dude).

I’ve seen a couple of pieces lately arguing that Hamilton uncritically props up the American dream (as in opposition to, one of them really weirdly argued, Ta-Nehisi Coates? it was a strange article), and I think this NK Jemisin post about fantasy in Hamilton does a good job of explaining why that claim is kinda beside the point.

BUT WHAT WILL YOUR MOTHER SAY? The questions women (but not men) who write about sex get asked.

On JK Rowling and appropriation of Native American cultures.

Neila Orr on the myth of upward mobility. For best results, pair this with Gene Demby’s piece about the Republican party turning on its core voters.

Charlie Jane Anders sums up the storytelling lessons she learned from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

And finally, because we live in a world run by a benevolent God, Anne Helen Peterson wrote a piece about Jennifer Garner’s transformation from sexy spy to ultimate soccer mom. Then, as we were basking in the glow of that, she wrote another piece about Sad Affleck. They’re both fire.

Have a fantastic weekend!!

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