Bookblog #65: The Book Group

I originally posted the following to the original version of this blog on 22 April 2004. I’m resurrecting it nearly 20 years later because my book group is currently reading another Sebastian Barry novel.

Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way (Viking 2005)

I missed the last meeting of my book group, where they discussed, among other things, Barack Obama’s Audacity of Hope and Stephen Carroll’s The Time We Have Taken. I was saved from the embarrassment of admitting that I hadn’t read either of them by an invitation I couldn’t refuse: to see Zack Snyder’s Watchmen with my sons on the giant iMax screen. But I arrived at last night’s meeting with a clear conscience. I had struggled with the first third or so of A Long Long Way.

There’s a huge field out there of First World War novels, and I know some people can’t get enough of them, but the déjà vu was a bit much for me: from Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, which I read an awfully long time ago, to Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, they all tell the same monstrous story. The fact that the cover design of my library copy of A Long Long Way uses the same photograph as one of Pat Barker’s books only added to the turn-off. And then there was Sebastian Barry’s prose: not at all a transparent vehicle for the story, but calling attention to itself by its Irish musicality, asking to be read slowly, even aloud. Here’s a random paragraph from the early pages:

Willie Dunne’s father, in the privacy of his policeman’s quarters in Dublin Castle, was of the opinion that Redmond’s speech was the speech of a scoundrel. Willie’s father was in the Masons though he was a Catholic, and on top of that he was a member of the South Wicklow Lodge. It was King and Country he said a man should go and fight for, never thinking that his son Willie would go as soon as he did.

All that repetition and inversion and balance and general quirkiness is beautiful, but when you start reading a novel that’s written in such prose, on a subject you feel may have been done to death, you’re not necessarily enthusiastic.

Resistance proved futile. The subject, I confess, is huge enough to generate a potentially infinite number of novels, each with its own urgency and richness, its own take on things, its own ability to compel. The First World War may yet turn out to be the war to end wars if we can only learn its lessons. There’s a powerful story, well told here, in the situation of the Irish who fought for the King of England in Flanders while their compatriots were battling the forces of the same king in the streets of Dublin. Worse – and I trust completely that Sebastian Barry didn’t make this up – there were Irish recruits among the army units that fired on the Easter Uprising rebels in 1916. The novel tells the story of Willie Dunne, one of those recruits.

There was no controversy at the group. The book had touched us all. Someone said that books such as this were very important to counter the nationalistic garbage that comes at us in Australia as Anzac day approaches, obscuring the reality of modern wars. One guy arrived late, having read the wrong book, Birdsong by the wrong Sebastian, surname Faulks. Apart from giving rise to much merriment, this threw a different light on my déjà vu response: we would mention some detail from ‘our’ book, and he would exclaim, ‘That’s in this one too!’

As an added extra, someone had recently rediscovered a cache of his childhood reading, and gave each of us a comic from the early 1960s. Here’s mine:

Different war, different propaganda.

Posted: Wed – April 22, 2009 at 08:01 AM

Staples and Vaughan’s Saga 11

Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan, Saga, Volume11 (Image 2023)

On Christmas morning, I found my granddaughter lying on the bedroom floor exercising her new reading skills on this book, a gift to me from her father.

‘Um,’ I said, ‘that book is really for grown-ups, not for kids.’ She took the hint, and went out to play with her tiny beads and figurines.

I did a quick check for any of the grossness that occasionally featured in the previous ten volumes. The elliptical text of the first chapter would bemuse any newcomer to the world of Saga, however practised at reading, and the one obscenity is tucked away discreetly at the bottom of a page. So far so good! And the are they’re mostly no cause for alarm: conversations among odd-looking people (horns, TV screen faces, wings, a beak, a pig-snout, that kind of thing), a green cat, stars and planets, sundry science-fiction paraphernalia. But oh dear: a full-page nightmare figure with a horned skull and a hole blown through his chest; a naked man and woman side by side on a bed, the woman full frontal, the man face down, then more images of the woman as she gets up and dresses.

I don’t expect any lasting damage was done, but the Saga series is not for small children.

On the other hand, if you’re an ex-child looking for an introduction to the joys of comics/graphic novels, this series would be a great place to start. (Not if you’re looking for evidence that the comic form can be deeply serious. For that, you could try Art Spiegelman’s Maus, or Joe Sacco’s Palestine. Saga does have serious themes, but mostly I read it for fun. Even those moral-panicky images in the first chapter turn out to serve a comic narrative – the nightmare image really is someone’s nightmare, and the naked couple are about to be sprung by a young person who scathingly disapproves of their hooking up.)

Don’t start with this volume. The series has been going for more than a decade, over 66 single issue magazines. What started out as a kind of space-operatic interspecies Romeo and Juliet story, as narrated by Hazel, the daughter of the forbidden union, has expanded to include a vast gallery of weird characters, and at least half a dozen locales and plot lines that progress in parallel. This volume doesn’t bother with a Story So Far. I did remember major plot points such as the death of a main character and the destruction of a home, and I recognised most of the characters, including Hazel herself and her immediate family, the cute but lethal Ghüs, and the dangerous green cat that calls out any lie. Before I read Volume 12 (may it come soon), I’ll make a point of reading all the preceding volumes. But Hazel’s narrative voice is strong, and the sense of her jeopardy keeps me emotionally engaged in the midst of all the bewildering complexity, the occasional violent spectacle, and by this time almost safe-for-work sexual scenes.

Brian K Vaughan is a brilliant storyteller, and Fiona Staples, who does all the art (pencils as well as inks and lettering), is equally brilliant.

The pages aren’t numbered, but here’s what I take to be page 76*.

There’s a lot that’s not on this page: no Hazel, who is now a teenager, and none of her laconic, hand-lettered commentary; none of Hazel’s immediate family; none of the TV-faced characters whose screens reveal their true thoughts and desires if they’re not careful; no sex and only the implied threat of violence; no spectacular space vistas.

It’s the second page of chapter 64. You can see how it moves the story along: the dark-winged character, clearly some kind of vampire, is hunting for Alana, Hazel’s mother. Though we don’t learn for sure that the smart-mouthed frog is who the winged man thinks he is, Fiona Staples’s creation of the characters is so distinctive, and for that matter so is Brian K Vaughan’s dialogue, that we can be confident that he is lying when he denies being him. He’s one of the good guys, one of the many creatures who have Hazel’s wellbeing at heart. We guess, correctly, that his yarn about ‘the other guy’ will lead somewhere interesting.

There’s something fabulous about a frog complaining about racism, and Saga as a whole can be read as a fable about racism: Horns and Wings must not mix. It’s not one of those comics that panders to the readers who complain when there’s a Black character in Star Wars or Captain America is a woman, any more than it kowtows to the moral guardians who clutch their pearls at the sight of a naked penis.

And look at that glorious artwork. First we’re inside a diner out of 50s US television, then the outside ‘shot’ has us back in the space opera. The setting doesn’t distract from the action, but roots it in a particular place. There are details that raise narrative questions. For instance, whose is the backpack and almost empty plate opposite the frog, and why is there a trunk under the table? One of those questions is answered two pages later.

Saga may not be suitable for six-year-olds, but I recommend it for anyone at least three times that age.

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* That’s my age. when blogging about a book, I sometimes focus on page 76 to see what it shows about the book as a whole.

Staples and Vaughan’s Saga 10

Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan, Saga, Volume10 (Image 2022)

It would be overstating it to say I was devastated when Saga went on hiatus ‘for a year’ after volume 9 in 2018 and then stayed out for three years. But delighted is not too strong a word for my reaction when the Comics experts at Kinokuniya told me the hiatus had ended and monthly comics Nº 55–60 had been collected to make Volume 10.

I won’t try to summarise the Story So Far. This Romeo and Juliet space opera has been going for nearly ten years and you’re welcome to read my previous blog posts. (This link should give you a list.)

Sadly, it looks as if the story has run out of puff a bit. A Terrible Thing happened at the end of Volume 9, and though the characters have had three years to adjust, it feels as if they all have that much less spark. The villains have less venom. The good guys have less vitality. The gratuitous naked breasts are more perfunctory. Hazel, the child at the centre of it all, is three years older, and less interesting because of it. One major plot point just … happens, though maybe I missed some subtle foreshadowing.

There’s another Terrible Thing on the last pages of this volume, which gives me hope for a revitalised Volume 11.

My general policy, when blogging about books, to pay attention to a single page (usually page 76, chosen arbitrarily because that’s my age) probably makes even more sense when the book is a comic, given my lack of visual vocabulary. As far as I can tell, the pages aren’t numbered in this book, so here’s what might be page 76 to give you some inkling of the book’s style. Our young heroine Hazel and the remains of her family have been captured by space pirates, and are about to forced back into their former outlaw ways. The junior members of the pirate crew have just given a concert for Hazel and her adopted brother-from-another-species. Hazel is the small person in blue with cute horns:

This page doesn’t illustrate is the way Saga’s text and image often play off against each other in tantalising counterpoint. But it might give you some idea of Fiona Staples’s gloriously playful artwork, and Brian K Vaughan’s gift for dialogue.

It’s a classic Saga moment of light relief, when Hazel has more or less ordinary child-to-adult interactions and the other main players, for good, evil or ambivalence, are offscreen. The pirate band members are each of a different species: the first speaker is from one of the story’s main species, the ones with TV sets for heads, the others are less significant. The frog-like creature is representative of a whole strand of illustration that owes something to children’s comics: not quite as cute as some of the animals that befriend Hazel, but getting there. Hazel’s enthusiasm for the guitar reminds us that she is growing up, and introduces a minor plot strand.

To be continued when Volume 11 arrives.

Rick Remender’s Fear Agent 1 & 2

Rick Remender, Tony Moore, Jerome Opeña and others, Fear Agent, Final Edition Volume 1 (Image Comics 2018)
––––––––––– Volume 2 (Image Comics 2018)

Heath Hudson is an old-fashioned, hard-drinking, hard-fighting, constantly beaten-up hero. His adventures as told in the Fear Agent comics amount to one spectacular action scene after another, as at least three, no four, alien species battle each other with Earth’s inhabitants as appalling collateral damage. Heath’s ultra-masculinity – some would say ultra-toxic masculinity – comes up against the acerbic insights of the women he loves, and who almost plausibly love him. It’s a rip-roaring roller-coasting, swashbuckling space story (and yes, there are actual pirates). There’s romance, betrayal, monstrous revenge, guilt, heroism, sacrifice … and a lot of splatter.

The artwork, if you’re into this sort of thing, is brilliant. I often couldn’t tell what was happening, but usually on closer inspection it all made sense, though I wish I hadn’t looked so closely at some of the dismemberments.

Regular quotes from Samuel Clemens (never named as Mark Twain) hint at depths to Heath’s character that we otherwise don’t see because he is too busy saving everyone and being beat up. They also hint that Rick Rememder, Heath’s creator, may be more widely read than you first suspect.

The adventures in these two volumes first appeared in a series of monthly comics. Volume 1 comprises the contents of issues 1 to 10, which were published in 2005 and 2006. Volume 2 comprises issues 12 to 15, and 17 to 21 (Issues 11 and 16 evidently weren’t part of the longer story arcs.) Final Edition volumes 3 and 4 are out there somewhere waiting to play their part in our father–son gift-exchange system.

As with most comic collections, these pages are unnumbered, but here’s a scan of page 75 by my count. Sadly, it doesn’t include any of the grotesque alien life forms, but if you look closely you’ll see that no sooner has Heath pulled off an impossible rescue (of Mara, who is no slouch herself when it come to a fight) and allows himself a moment to gloat, than a terrible thing happens. (Spoiler: the harpoon thing that pierces him actually kills him, but luckily someone makes a clone from his dead body and he can continue almost as good as new. Equally extreme things may be happening to him at the end of the second volume. – only the third volume will tell.)

Pencils Tony Moore; Inks Sean Parsons & Mike Manley; Colors Lee Loughbridge

A film or TV show may be on the way. I’ll give it a miss, but I’m enjoying the comics, especially as I’ve got a particularly nasty non-Covid cold, and my immune system is being just as heroic and taking just as many hits as poor old Heath.

Joe Sacco’s Palestine

Joe Sacco, Palestine (1993–1996, Jonathan Cape 2003)

If, like me, you quail at the thought of reading Amnesty International’s recent report, Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians, subtitled Cruel system of domination and crime against humanity (downloadable as a PDF at this link), you may find the information easier to absorb in comic-book form. Joe Sacco’s Palestine is one of the classics of comics journalism, aka graphic non-fiction.

Sacco spent two months in Israel’s Occupied Territories – Gaza and the West Bank – in the northern winter of 1991–1992, during the first intifada. He produced a series of comics about the experience, which were collected into a single volume in 2001, with an introductory essay by Edward Said. This London edition came two years later. More than 20 years after publication, and 30 years after the events he recounts, the specifics of the situation in Israel and Palestine have changed but the book is still urgently relevant.

Edward Said’s introduction speaks of his childhood love of comics and how this book brought that love together with his lifelong advocacy of the Palestinian people. Here’s part of his description of the book:

As we also live in a media-saturated world in which a huge preponderance of the world’s news images are controlled and diffused by a handful of men sitting in places like London and New York, a stream of comic-book images and words, assertively etched, at times grotesquely emphatic and distended to match the extreme situations they depict, provide a remarkable antidote. In Joe Sacco’s world there are no smooth-talking announcers and presenters, no unctuous narrative of Israeli triumphs, democracy, achievements, no assumed and re-confirmed representations – all of them disconnected from any historical or social source, from any lived reality – of Palestinians as rock-throwing, rejectionist, and fundamentalist villains whose main purpose is to make life difficult for the peace-loving, persecuted Israelis. What we get instead is seen through the eyes and persona of a modest-looking ubiquitous crew-cut young American man who appears to have wandered into an unfamiliar, inhospitable world of military occupation, arbitrary arrest, harrowing experiences of houses demolished and land expropriated, torture (‘moderate physical pressure’) and sheer brute force generously, if cruelly, applied … at whose mercy Palestinians live on a daily, indeed hourly basis.

Page iii

I’d only add that Sacco doesn’t portray the Palestinians as saintly victims. At times he recoils from an antisemitic remark (he doesn’t correct his informants when they talk of ‘the Jews’, but his own narrative refers meticulously to ‘Israeli soldiers’, ‘the Israeli government’ and so on), and you feel how strongly he hopes the voices of despair are wrong. He’s also unsparing of himself as the visiting US comic-making journalist who wants to see real suffering because that’s what he needs to make his comic dramatic. He squirms for a whole page when he colludes with sexism. And he manages to find glimmers of humour, mainly in the endless cups of tea he has to drink in order to hear people’s stories.

Here’s a page, sadly without an image of gawky and bespectacled Sacco himself, to give you an idea:

Sacco returned to Gaza in 2002–2003 to investigate a massacre that happened in 1956. The resulting book, Footnotes on Gaza (2009) is almost as hefty as Palestine and definitely worth reading alongside it (my blog post at this link).

Vaughan and Harris Ex Machina

Brian K Vaughan and Tony Harris (creators), Tom Feister (inks), JD Mettler (colors) and Jared K Fletcher (letters), Ex Machina, Book One (Vertigo 2013) – originally published in 11 single magazines in 2004 and 2005

Having decided – several times – not to read any more superhero comics, here I am again. But this one is written by Brian K Vaughan, who was to go on to write the wonderful comic series Y: The Last Man, Paper Girls, and Saga (currently on hiatus).

What if the world’s first real superhero had been jetting around New York City on 11 September 2001, and had managed to intercept the second plane, saving thousands of lives? What if he realised that superhero vigilantism was of limited effectiveness and decided that he could probably do more good by running for Mayor of New York City? And what if he won the election as an independent candidate?

Ex Machina begins when civil engineer Mitchell Hundred, having decided to end his brief career as superhero The Great Machine, has indeed been elected New York’s mayor, bound by promises not to discuss publicly the origins of his superpowers (biggest of which is the ability to communicate with machines) an not to use those powers to do things best left to the police.

It goes without saying that things don’t go smoothly. Hundred inherits the New York mayoral burden of being blamed for everything. (Seth Meyers made hay with this tradition in his first Closer Look after Eric Adams became Mayor earlier this month.) He also has to deal with the burning issues of the early 2010s: terrorism, of course, but also same sex marriage, racism and the ongoing culture wars. And it wouldn’t be a superhero comic, even a retired one, without an overall arc involving mysterious possibly-alien graffiti and hideous serial killings … to be continued.

I don’t know that I’d recommend the book to serious lovers of fine literature, but I enjoyed it, and look forward to the subsequent five volumes. If nothing else, I enjoy Brian K Vaughan’s regular info-gems. For just one example, when his chief of staff points out that by officiating at a same-sex marriage he has alienated a huge segment of the population, he answers: ‘When Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, he turned to one of his aides and said, “I believe we’ve just lost the south forever.”‘ This isn’t the Marvel universe.

Lemire Endings: Gideon Falls 6 and Ascender4

Among my welcome gifts of comics this Christmas are the final instalments of two series that have been going for a couple of years. Though they share a principal author, they evoked vastly different responses in me: I was just relieved that one of them was over at last, and the final pages of the other had me welling up.

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Jeff Lemire (writer), Andrea Sorrentino (artist) and Dave Stewart (colorist), Gideon Falls, Volume 6: The End (Image Comics 2021, originally published as issue 27 of the comic)

This has been a brilliant piece of complex story telling, matched by superbly challenging art work. There’s a kind of zombie apocalypse with hideous grins, happening in at least three time periods but all in the same place. There’s endless confusion about which people and institutions are on the side of good, and which in thrall to evil. There’s a weird blend of scientism and the occult, and an abundance of surgical masks that belies the story’s pre-Covid-19 beginnings (and don’t make any obvious sense without the Covid–19 reference).

Horror is a genre whose appeal is lost on me. That, and the sense on page after page that I had to work hard just to figure out what was going on, means I was pretty cool about the series, and this final instalment didn’t warm me up. The occasional page is upside down, for a start, and to my eye at least the characters never take on clear individual qualities. Interestingly, among the included extras is the script of the original comic: reading it would be an ideal way of sorting out who everyone was, and what was happening on the pages where the images were indecipherable to me. I was tempted, but in the end I decided I’d rather live with being too stupid to follow the story than expend any more effort on it.

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Jeff Lemire & Dustin Nguyen (storytellers), Steve Wands (lettering and design), Will Dennis (editor), and Tyler Jennes (assistant editor), Ascender Volume Four: Star Seed (Image Comics 2021, from issues 15–18 of the comic)

This volume brings an end to six years of space opera – the six-part Descender. and the the four-part Ascender. This also has been a brilliantly complex story-telling, whose visual complexity sometimes tipped over into incomprehensibility. Here too several distinct stories have occupied the same space in a vertigo-inducing manner.

But at the heart of this saga are two small children under threat, one of whom is a robot, so the reader has an emotional grounding. We know who to barrrack for when they flex their great powers (the robot), and who to fear for when the forces of empire and magic and machinery are out to destroy them (the flesh and blood girl).

Dustin Nguyen’s watercolour paintings, which I didn’t care for at all at first, turn out to serve the story beautifully. The scenes of violence are just as chaotic as anyone could wish. The bad guys, rather than being softened by the pastel colours, take on a kind of deliquescent vileness. And the children stay softly vulnerable throughout.

Among tying off of narrative threads, there’s a twist in the final moments that got to me. It takes real genius to set up a narrative tension that the reader is barely aware of, to let it simmer for years (years in the telling, and decades in the story itself), to lay careful last-minute groundwork for a resolution that the reader (this one anyway) sees as pure decoration, and then spring the resolution in just a single frame. I hope that’s abstract enough to leave the story unspoiled should you choose to read it.

Given my own widely divergent responses to these two series, I hesitate to recommend either of them without qualification. But if I was running a comic shop and you walked in off the street asking for recommendations, Jeff Lemire’s name would spring to my lips.

Brian Azzarello’s 100 Bullets

Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso, 1OO Bullets, Book 1 (DC Vertigo 2014)

A man calling himself Agent Graves approaches someone and gives them an attaché case containing absolute proof that a particular person has done them a great wrong. The case also contains a gun and a hundred bullets, which Agent Graves asserts can be used with complete impunity to kill the one who has done the wrong.

Will the person receiving the case take revenge, or will something other than fear of the legal consequences stop them?

That’s the set-up for the first issues in this series of 100 comics that were published from 1999 to 2009.

This book is a compilation of the first 20 issues, and it turns out, as you would expect, that this fairly crude moral dilemma broadens out in unexpected directions. Is Agent Graves a supernatural figure and does this turn out to be in the horror genre? Well, no, at least I don’t think so at this stage. This is one of those stories where a hidden cabal wields huge power in the world, and Agent Graves is somehow either their enemy or their enforcer. A group called the Minutemen is involved and perhaps the attaché case is a recruitment device …

It’s stylishly done, with too much traditionally ‘sexy’ female flesh on display. For my taste, it’s more interesting than superhero comics, and I may read on …

Bitter Root One and Two

Chuck Brown, David F Walker & Sanford Greene (creators), Rico Renzi & Sanford Greene (color artists), Clayton Cowles (letterer), Sanford Green (cover artist), Heather Antos (editor), plus backmatter by John Jennings, Kinitra Brooks, Regina N Bradley, Qiana Whitted, Stacey Robinson, Ceeon D Quiett Smith and fan artists, Bitter Root Volume One: Family Business (Issues #1–5, Image Comics 2020)

Chuck Brown, David F Walker & Sanford Greene (creators), Sofie Dodgson & Sanford Greene (color artists), Clayton Cowles (letterer), John Jennings (backmatter), Shelly Bond (editor), Joe Hughes (editor), plus Daniela Miwa, Lisa K Weber, Kelly Fitzpatrick, Daniel Lish, Chris Brunner, Rico Renzo, Khary Randolph, Matt Herms, Dietrich Smith and Anthony George as artists and color artists for individual stories, Bitter Root Volume Two: Rage & Redemption (Issues 6–10, plus Red Summer Special, Image Comics 2020)

You probably have to be a horror fan to enjoy this Eisner Award winning comic series. I’m not one. I find the award-winning art by Sanford Greene repulsive, as I’m meant to, but I’m also meant to enjoy it, which I don’t. I’m not the target audience.

But there’s a lot to appreciate. The storytelling is richly complex.The opening spread shows a nightclub in Harlem, 1924, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, where a crowd of African Americans are dancing exuberantly to jazz. A young couple head home across a park. In the final frame of the spread they are terrified by a pair of nasty claws looming over them. And we’re away.

If you plan to read these comics and prefer to let them unfold the story for you in their own intriguing way, stop reading now.

In this world, when people are infected by greed and hate, especially race-based hate, they become monsters called Jinoos. The central characters, the Sangeryes fight them, try to subdue them and where possible use compounds prepared by Ma Etta to cure them. There are other monsters, perhaps even more dangerous, created by pain and misery, and demons that come outside this world. We have no doubt of the goodness of the Sangeryes, but they too are vulnerable to infection, and one of them, a huge man with a penchant for big words, is flicking back and forth between being a monster and a decent human by the end of this book.

So there’s complex play of good and evil, characters you can feel for, plenty of violent action and horror gore, and underlying it all a non-too-subtle perspective on racism. Then there’s the ‘backmatter’. John Jennings, a Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside, kicks it off with a learned article on Afrofuturism and the EthnoGothic, placing this comic in a context that includes Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Jordan Peele’s Get Out. There are articles on African American history, folk traditions and popular culture, and on key figures from the Harlem Renaissance, Alain LeRoy Locke and Zora Neal Hurston. Some might find this serious discussion to be awkwardly inappropriate for a comic – you know, ‘Can’t we just enjoy a bit of gore without being told how worthy it is?’ Tastes will differ. For me the backmatter made the gore almost enjoyable. John Jennings’s first piece ends:

The Bitter Root team should be very proud. Not just because they’ve created this ‘cool’ cultural artefact but because they’ve created a new thread in the ever growing and evolving tapestry of the American story, as told through the veiled and weary eyes of the black American citizen.

I find it reassuring that among the fan art that proliferates on the back pages is a powerful image of the matriarch Ma Etta by the scholarly John Jennings. He’s not writing from arm’s length.

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I persevered with Book Two mainly because I’d been given these books as a birthday present and felt a kind of obligation to the giver.

I’m still not enamoured of the story, and I still find the artwork and colouring almost unreadably horrible. (The awards that these things have won indicate that my distaste says more about me than it does about the books.)The back cover informs us that there’s a movie in development with Ryan Coogler and Zinzi Evans, who have Black Panther in their show reel. Maybe the movie can transcend the horror genre just as Black Panther pretty much transcended the superhero genre. Maybe I’ll even go to see it.

Again, this volume has copious backmatter, thanks to which I know that the fantastical world of this comic has its basis in historical events: the Red Summer of 1921 and the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. These events included not just lynching, arson and general violence against African Americans, but the destruction of 35 city blocks in Tulsa when incendiary devices were dropped from planes. The unleashing of hideous demonic forces makes a lot of sense as a metaphor for those events, and the struggles of the Sangerye family to deal with the consequences. (In this volume, Chinatown in New York City has a similar demonic invasion.)

I can imagine a horror devotee picking up these books and being launched on a journey of discovery by the historical and literary information packed into the back pages. They might explore rootwork and conjure; Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Hamilton and W E B DuBois; the Harlem Renaissance and the Tulsa Race Massacre. That can’t be a bad thing.

Jeff Lemire’s Ascender Vol Three

Jeff Lemire & Dustin Nguyen (storytellers), Steve Wands (lettering and design), Will Dennis (editor), and Tyler Jennes (assistant editor on issues 13 and 14), Ascender Volume Three: The Digital Mage (Image Comics 2020, from issues 11–14 of the comic)

A quick Duck Duck Go reveals that Volume 3 was published in December, so it may well arrive in Sydney in time to be a March birthday gift.

That was my January wish. In March it was granted.

I don’t have a lot to say about Volume Three of this space saga that wouldn’t be simply repeating what I said about the first two volumes (here, if you’re interested).

Suffice it to say the forces of evil become more formidable, and close in our fugitive bands; more of the original group of bickering good guys are reunited; new good guys turn up and spill a lot of vampire blood; the quest that has animated these three volumes is completed; and at the heart of it all is a vulnerable little girl. What’s not to like?

Among many good things, Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen have a great gift for final moments. At the end of this volume, the little girl and her companions arrive in a new place, and one they have recognised the people they find there, this dialogue happens in the last three panels:

You're just in time?

Time? Time for what?

Time to save the universe

It will probably be at least six months until Volume 4 appears. Maybe I can wait until Christmas.