What I'm Reading
Wicked City by Alaya Dawn Johnson - The second Zephyr Hollis book and the last ADJ book I haven't read. She needs to write more! I just started this, so no comments yet other than that I stand by my observation about Zephyr being in denial about who she is.

Shriek by Jeff VanderMeer - I loved the Southern Reach, and this is more obviously weird fantasy than those books, which has its pluses and minuses, but I love it so far, particularly the fact that it focuses on a sibling relationship.

What I've Read
Whoops, I've built up quite a backlog. Here goes!

Charles Soule et al, She-Hulk vol. 2 - Apparently this was always meant to be as short as it was. Siiiiiggh I would read many more volumes of this kind of thing, the "how X thing or Y institution or Z non-superhero person is affected by a world of superheroes" thing is honestly more interesting to me than many superhero stories. A+, will totally seek out more Charles Soule comics in the future. Has anyone read Letter 44?

Michelle Sagara, Cast in Honor - The newest Kaylin book, and with this, I have read all but one of Michelle Sagara West's novels (except the Sundered books, which I honestly found unreadable). I enjoyed it very much, I continue to enjoy Kaylin's growth as a person and the exploits of her motley crew (found family ftw), and I am looking forward to the next book on multiple levels, not the least of which is: Aerians!

Diane Duane, Interim Errantry - This is "the Young Wizards volume 9.5," and since it's been a few years since I read A Wizard of Mars, I'd forgotten a little how much I love Duane's writing and the Young Wizards in general. The bit in the Halloween story where Dairine is a Jedi, for example--perfection. And all the characters I've loved for so long getting to do things that are slightly less "stereotypical plot diagram," particularly in the novella in the collection, Lifeboats, which I adored. (Also, how married are Tom and Carl in Lifeboats? Super married.) In many ways these three stories were like the best kind of fanfic, which expands a slice of the canon beyond what we get to see in the actual published works. I can't wait for Games Wizards Play.

Martha Wells, Razor's Edge - Martha Wells wrote the last novel in the old Star Wars expanded universe, and it's about Princess Leia, set between ANH and ESB. I liked it a lot (particularly semicompetent!Luke, lol), and you know, I love Star Wars. You can put that on my tombstone. I also love Martha Wells' writing, and I'm psyched to read more of her books. (Even her SGA tie-in novels, because in the year of our lord 2K16 I am not going to apologize for enjoying tie-in novels.)

Diana Wynne Jones, Dogsbody - More DWJ! More terrible parents and parental figures! More plucky heroines and brilliant writing! I feel like I understood this book, which is told from the perspective of a star who gets reborn as a dog, which probably means I'm missing things. The ending felt abrupt, but also completely neat and tidy; it was brilliant and painful and great.

Gillen/McKelvie, The Wicked & the Divine vols. 1 & 2 - My dear sibling introduced this to me with "This is what American Gods wanted to be," and I stand by that assessment. The art is beautiful, the story interesting, the concepts compelling, but I have to say the characters mostly left me cold. That said, I'll still keep reading, because I want to find out what happens after the Shocking Twist!™ at the end of the second volume.

Kelly Sue DeConnick et al., Bitch Planet vol. 1 - I feel like most people have probably heard of this comic by now, with its non-compliant women and its smart take on exploitation tropes and intersectionality. I liked it; like The Handmaid's Tale, it seems both a bit too plausible for comfort and also in many ways a story about what's happening now, as well as a near-future fantasy.

Noelle Stevenson et al., Lumberjanes vol. 1 - This was so great! As a Girl Scout, I got an extra kick out of the story of a bunch of young Lumberjanes at summer camp, I loved it, and I need to read more of it. (I also loved the little in-jokes of the palindromes in the cave, ngl, and also the camp chief's name and appearance. AUGH, it's so good!)

Becky Cloonan et all, Gotham Academy vol. 1 - I've liked Becky Cloonan's work for a while, and this was exactly the kind of story I like, as I said above, following as it does a group of misfit students at Gotham City's most prestigious private school and inventing some old history for the city, as well as featuring an independent take on its present. Also, important to note, the Batman in here isn't the full-on manpain Batman, which makes the whole thing more palatable--there's darkness, but there's also light, and most important of all, I love Olive and Maps and would read many more volumes about them.

Gillen/McKelvie, Phonogram vol. 1 - This feels like a dry run for The Wicked & the Divine, and given that it was about an obnoxious dude, I was mostly into it for the liner notes. Who knew so many people had so many feelings about Britpop.

Octavia Butler, Bloodchild (2nd ed.) - This is the late Octavia Butler's only (and entire) short fiction collection. Xenogenesis, fraught parent/child relationships, taboo subjects--Butler was great, and reading the back of the book talk about her in the present tense is still a wrench.

Gail Simone et al., Wonder Woman: The Circle - This volume collects Simone's first issues on Wonder Woman, telling the story of Diana's attempt to save her mother from the DC-equivalent of HYDRA Nazis invading Themiscyra, mostly. It was good! I like Diana and her friends and her sense of honor! I am still going to drink in the Batman vs Superman movie!

What I'll Read Next
Who knows. Hopefully a lot of it.

What I'm Reading
G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen - I'm falling behind on my Sirens reading challenge, but luckily this book is completely engrossing and even though I only started it this morning, I'm nearly finished. It's full of really smart observations as well as really interesting fantastical elements, and some really sharp things about politics. More when I'm finally finished, but this one is pretty great.

Urasawa Naoki, Billy Bat vol 1 - This is Urasawa's current series, and I'm kind of annoyed at how much it plays to my interests to be honest. I also really question why Urasawa has drawn all of the Japanese or Japanese-American characters with the exception of the current protagonist to look distinctly monkey-ish (it's even more noticeable given that the story opens in 1947). This may be a sophisticated point about representation or it may just be an oogie running bit. Anyway, it's Urasawa; of course it's good, though I'm not quite willing to commit to hauling home the other 15 volumes (it's still running).

What I've Just Read
Molly Gloss, The Dazzle of Day - Quakers in space! Except, well, this novel is actively trying to break the bounds of science fiction as a genre, and…I like science fiction as a genre. Well worth reading, but Joan Slonczewski is still first in my heart in terms of Quaker SF novels. (I've now read two of the four.) Partly that's because this is a very interior book, and Gloss gets at the Quakerism (and everything else) very indirectly, unlike Slonczewski, who puts her Quaker in conflict with or in contrast to other groups or even species.

Yoshinaga Fumi, Ôoku vol 11 & 12 - Immunology, gender, and power. I hope everyone's ready for what's looking to be a really grim ending. I'd estimate we have two and at most three volumes left. It's also interesting to me that Yoshinaga made the most incompetent shogun a hero for the sake of the narrative.

Arakawa Hiromu, Silver Spoon vol. 12 & 13 - Only Arakawa Hiromu could blow through an entire year of school in one volume (12) and make it feel totally fine in terms of pacing and character development. She also has a real sense of how to turn the tables on readers' expectations based on genre cliches: the team's performance at the national equestrian championships in 13 is a case in point. Sadly this series seems to be taking a bit of a backseat to Arslan Senki, but I still love it, and I'll be really interested to see where Hachiken and company wind up by the time they graduate. One thing I appreciate now that I didn't before I saw Bakemono no ko is how subversive it is--Hachiken chooses not to go to college even though he could, his brother fucking dropped out of Todai to be an independent Skype college exam tutor, Komaba drops out of high school to work odd jobs in Tokyo so he can buy a farm, Mikage only decides to go to college after she decides to not inherit her family's farm: and all of this is totally okay. That's very (and characteristically) independent-minded of Arakawa.

Bunn/Walta/Fernandez, Magneto: Infamous and Reversals - My one friend W handed me these two volumes of comics as I was basically walking out the door in Seattle on the grounds that I'm way more into the X-Men than he is, which is true, but in no way means I'm familiar with most of the comics except in broad outlines. Luckily this series, which picks up after Charles Xavier's latest death with Mags relatively depowered but still just as quick to perform vigilante justice (also bald, which I can't help but read as influenced by Charles), is actually pretty good at filling readers in on relevant events without info-dumping. The coloring is really striking, and though I thought the pacing was off at a few points in the second volume, overall the comic is asking some tough questions of just about everyone, including Mags himself, and not letting anyone off the hook. I'm interested to keep reading.

Fraction & Ward, ODY-C vol 1 - Yup, between the art and the diction, this comic is fucking trippy, and I'll be really interested to see how closely Fraction sticks to the actual events of the actual Odyssey: there are plenty of hints, even in this first volume, that things could go off the rails of the familiar narrative in really interesting directions; in some ways, they already have. The "not all men" joke was also pretty flipping fantastic. All in all, it's pretty great.

Tenea Johnson, Smoketown - I don't know if there's a name for the sub-genre that includes this book and Dia Reeves' books, but I put them together in my mind as "speculative fiction set in some version of the South, with POC characters," and like Reeves' books, Johnson doesn't pull her punches. The similarities end there, in some ways: whereas Portero is much more comparable to Night Vale, Johnson's post-climate change apocalypse city is decidedly futuristic but also just weird: the government controls a lot of things and birds are outlawed. Finding out what made the city the way it is, and working to change it, winds up being the crux of the novel, but the book goes at that widdershins, and while I really, really liked the book, I thought there were some plot developments that needed a bit more explanation, and some of the characters were much more vivid than others (but oh, when they're vivid, they're painfully alive). So, while I wanted a bit more of some parts of the book, what was there was wildly inventive and really engrossing, and I recommend it.

Yes, it's the anniversary of another trip that I have made around the sun. Here's to more of the same, but better, next year. :D

What I've Read
Ms. Marvel Vol 1, G. Willow Wilson et al - I finally got Comixology and I am hopeful that it will result in increases of the numbers of comics I actually am able to read. I loved this, but you're not surprised. What I will say is that I spotted that Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure joke, and I laughed, and what really warmed my heart above and beyond the story itself was how goddamn Jersey it all is, the actual Jersey that doesn't often make it into media. ♥

The Tropic of Serpents and Voyage of the Basilisk by Marie Brennan - These books are so great. They operate in a familiar mode (lady Victorian naturalist/adventurer) but do everything completely opposite, except what they don't, and I really enjoy Brennan's ability to pack a lot of complex undercurrents into rather pulp-y yarns, and the way that Isabella is so willing to attempt to conform to the norms of the cultures among which she sojourns, because dragons.

The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge - Hardinge's newest, and with this I'm now back to having read all but one of her books. I liked it a lot! skygiants said a thing that I agree with a lot, which is that Hardinge's protagonists are perpetually encountering women who they think are standing in their way but instead are much more complex, and that goes double for Faith. The book actually makes a great pair with the Brennan novels since they are both about the same thing (women and natural science) but are totally different. Anyway, it was great, though still not my favorite Hardinge; that will always be Fly By Night, with an honorable mention for Gullstruck Island, which I still think is her most ambitious. But this one was great too. I would read oodles of fic about the badass lesbian couple on the island, IJS.

Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer - The final volume in the Southern Reach trilogy; I devoured it in less than a day and I loved it. I think I'm nearly alone in liking how Control is a sarcastic failboat, qualities which are not on display in this final book, but I did want to say that I appreciated VanderMeer's not having every character in the story be a straight white guy, because that could easily have happened, but instead the cast of the final book is a brown career spy, a black lesbian government agent, a part-Asian scientist, a gay white man, and a white woman psychologist. I think the Southern Reach trilogy is great; it's an attempt to deal with climate change and the horrors it's unleashed and revealed, it's a way of grappling with the latest realizations in ecology and biology, namely that humans aren't special; it's some of the most interesting and critically engaged SF I've read in a long time.

Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace - I blew through this book quite rapidly too, it's post apocalyptic YA scifi with a female protagonist, the eponymous Archivist Wasp, who makes a deal to journey to the underworld in the company of a ghost who's looking for his fallen comrade. It turns out the ghost and his comrade were genetically engineered super-soldiers before the world ended, and that everything Wasp thought she knew is wrong, and you're only as trapped in the past as you let yourself be. In a weird way, this reminded me powerfully of Sabriel crossed with…a really high-tech SF book about genetically engineered super-soldiers, who have got such style, I cannot even tell you. Anyway it was great and I have no idea where a sequel would go but I am so there.

Silver Spoon vol 9 by Arakawa Hiromu - Still great.

What I'm Reading
Silver Spoon vol 10 by Arakawa Hiromu - Still great.

Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone - I don't think I'm quite as into this book as some other people have been, but I'm enjoying it a lot all the same. I really like Gladstone's determined mixing of magic and modernity, as well as how inventive he is.

What I'll Read Next
Probably some of Tanith Lee's Secret Books of Paradys, and also Michelle West's Oracle!!!

Yang, Gene Luen (art by Gurihiru). Avatar: The Promise Part One. New York: Dark Horse, 2012.

In honor of World Book Day yesterday, I sat down and read a book. This one, in fact! It was so great to just read a book. I should do that more often.

Ahem.

I had the very great pleasure of hearing Gene Yang give a book talk when this, the first of the ATLA sequel comics, was published in February. The story takes place a year after the end of the cartoon, when Fire Lord Zuko revokes his promise to Earth King Kuei and Avatar Aang to support the "Harmony Restoration Movement," which is seeking to repatriate the citizens of the Fire Nation's colonies in the Earth Kingdom to their (ancestral) home. Zuko changes his mind after the daughter of the mayor of the city of Yu Dao, the oldest and richest of the colonies, tries to assassinate him, setting up a conflict with just about everyone, including Aang, who'd promised Zuko that he'd kill him if he ever decided that Zuko was turning into his father, Ozai.

Oh, Zuko.

For a kids' comic book, this is some surprisingly heavy stuff to deal with, and I think Yang, who's clearly done his research, is handling the complexities of these issues well so far. Hybridity and rootedness and foreignness and authenticity are all complicated things, and in the eye of the beholder as often as not. I also thought Yang did a bang-up job of getting the characters' voices right - it sounded just like an episode of the show in my head, and that's high praise. I laughed out loud at multiple points. Indeed, my one complaint is that the book is too short, and the second volume isn't coming until May.

I will say, passe the protestors' signs demanding Harmony now! in characters that are written left to right and have an exclamation point at the end, that to me the hybridity of A:TLA itself - that is an Asian-American, rather than an Asian or an American, show - is itself an example of what the comics are getting into here. Yu Dao was inspired by Qingdao, the German treaty port in northeast China, and Zuko is right when he points to Yu Dao's hybridity as the source of its wealth and advancement, just as Katara is right when she points out that that wealth and advancement aren't parceled out equally within the city. But it's Yu Dao and the cities like it that become the great cities of Korra's time (the Sino-Japanese for "republic", 共和国, literally means something like "together harmony realm"), and that is just one of the painful truths of the world we live in. You wouldn't have the one without the other, injustice and all.

Tan, Shaun. Lost & Found. New York: Scholastic, 2011.

This was probably not the book to pick up to read when I was exhausted; any infelicities in the following are, even more than usual, entirely my fault, and as always, I welcome corrections and comments.

The Rabbits (1998). Words by John Marsden, art by Shaun Tan.

Shaun Tan's art is far, far more intelligent and perceptive than Marsden's text.

This is an sf-nal metaphorical story about the colonization of Australia. From the beginning, Tan's art does a wonderful job of, not just evoking, but depicting the differences between the native and indigenous perspectives on land, space, its usage: is the first panel (new to this edition) the ocean the rabbits are sailing across, or the land to which they are impending by night? A timeless scape of a wetland becomes, in the next page, a tiny watering hole against a vast desert landscape. In the next page, the water birds that stalked the wetlands are dots against the vastness of the blue sky, itself bifurcated by the crimson rocks.

When the rabbits come, they begin imposing their mathematics and their divisions and their science on the landscape almost immediately. Very quickly, it becomes hard to find the native creatures at all, in their own land. The native creatures fight back; the rabbits win. The rabbits steal the children. Might makes right, a building in the rabbits' new inhuman city proclaims. Tan brilliantly and deftly depicts the strategies of Empire, its information retrieval and its abstractions, the workings of the archive state, the all-seeing eye and the omnidirectionality of control. Who will save us from the rabbits? the final page asks, a rabbit and a native creature sitting across from each other at a dead watering hole under an ashen sky. The land is devastated. The stars have no answer.

( Cut for long discussion of racism, colonialism, attendant fail )I do know, however, that what shape "reconciliation" and "the future" may take cannot be determined one-sidedly, not and have any validity.

Ensign Sue Must Die! Story by Clare Moseley, art by Kevin Bolk.

djkittycat pointed out the existence of this comic in the dealers' room at Otakon 2010 to me, and I will be forever grateful.

So, yes. This short but hilarious and pointed comic, still being serialized on the author's website, tells the story of one Ensign Mary Amethyst Star Enoby Aiko Archer Picard Janeway Sue and how she comes to join the crew of the Enterprise in the AOS timeline. You definitely won't get the humor unless you've been around fandom long enough to spot a Sue character a mile off, but if you are conversant with fandom and its clichés about self-insert characters, you will probably laugh your head off.

In the wake of the Mary Sue debate earlier this year, the comic seems even more pointed than otherwise, and in some ways seeing Ensign Sue in full color really reinforces some of the most cogent objections to Mary Sue, namely that she's a white girl's/woman's power fantasy. Less objectionably, she's also just ridiculous, and invidious too. Unquestionably, there need to be more awesome female characters of all possible races, backgrounds, orientations, bodies, in media. Mary Sue, however, is not always the best way to go about filling in that lack.

O'Malley, Bryan Lee. Scott Pilgrim. 6 vols. Portland, OR: Oni Press, 2004-10.

Scott Pilgrim is a twenty-something slacker living in Toronto with his circle of friends, who are all generally trying to figure out what the hell to do with their lives post-college post-adolescence. Scott, who recently lost his job at an awesome Nuevo Mexican eatery, finds himself dating a high school student, one Knives Chau, after he picks up her books on the bus. Things seem perfect, in a precarious way, until he starts dreaming of the mysterious, probably American Ramona Flowers, a girl his own age who may be out of his league. But they start dating, and then things get interesting: in order to officially be Ramona's boyfriend, he has to defeat her seven evil exes. And they're not the only things that stand in the way of Scott getting it together…

Like just about everyone else, I loved these comics; they're pretty damn awesome, particularly if you're a member of its 20-something geek target market and grew up playing video games, watching anime and re-enacting Star Wars in the backyard. I think I actually liked volumes 5 and 6 best, though I think the earlier volumes are the funniest; after the slackerdom and the easy victories, I thought 5 and 6 were an awesome, hilarious take on grappling with becoming--gasp!--an adult in some sense of the word.

It took me at least a volume to realize that the comics are actually a video game, and I think it would be really interesting to try to read them as a text-based RPG, in which the reader is the player and Scott is the player character. Aside from video games, I was also reminded a bit of the webcomic Megatokyo, not because of any "anime" elements but because both MT and SP take a fairly relaxed view on what constitutes reality. Subspace highways, Sony ninja death squads: it's all good.

Scott and Ramona are cool, but I found myself liking a lot of the supporting characters best, particularly Scott's gay roommate Wallace Wells and his ex Knives Chau, who grows up fast, as well as Kim Pine, the drummer in Scott's band and his high school girlfriend. (Also, Scott/Ramona/Kim OT3, y/y? That scene in volume 5 at the end, OMG.) I also liked Gideon and Envy Adams as antagonists, particularly Gideon with his triforce T-shirts and his Utena-inspired nightclub and evil plots. So, yeah. If you haven't read it, and you like comics or video games or Toronto or being in your 20s, you totally should read it, you will not be sorry.

The Best American Comics 2006. Ed. Harvey Pekar. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Somehow I got this gorgeous book for only $3. In the spirit of sharing, I gave it to my friend K, because she will get better use of it. But I read it cover-to-cover before I gave it to her, and it's pretty awesome.

( Words and pictures in sequence )

Since I spend a good deal of my time griping about the invisibility of women in comics, it's high time that I put my money where my mouth is and become familiar with the work of female comic artists. I randomly grabbed Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return off the shelves in the library the other day--apparently Persepolis itself was at the same library, but I was too impatient to find it; it's coming to me by request.

( What does that have to do with the price of peas in Persepolis? )

One future planned Mechademia theme is actually "criminalities." I expect we'll get a lot of articles about shôjo (because girlhood in a male-oriented society is a crime), but maybe we'll get some essays tackling the recent trial of Christopher Handley, manga collector, in Iowa. To recap: in 2006, U.S. Customs opened one of Handley's packages from Japan and found a lolicon volume (I'm personally still not sure which one) depicting, well, explicit lolicon, which is child sexual abuse from a certain perspective. The D.A. went after Handley, and he pled guilty in a plea bargain about two weeks ago.

I should make it clear that there is absolutely no allowance to be made for people who actually sexually abuse children, but there's a very wide gap between Handley and actual sex criminals. Handley pleading guilty sets a very dangerous precedent that could very well be used to further roll back First Amendment protections in this country--while we pride ourselves in principle on our First Amendment rights, we are actually less free in our speech than many other countries, and this case is one more example of that. Personally I find the equation of possession of lolicon manga with "obscenity" or with an actual crime of some kind to be very, very suspect and equally perilous. The concept of obscenity itself seems to me to be a convenient euphemism for "speech those in power don't like." And if anyone is going to have free speech in actuality, everyone needs to have free speech in reality, and that goes double for unpopular speech.

I actually know one of the people who was retained by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund as a manga expert on Handley's behalf; Wired quotes her very briefly in its short piece on the case. If nothing else, this case should make it clear that the context of manga in America is vastly different from its native context in Japan: in the specific case of lolicon, for instance, Japan very much embraces a strict divide between the consumption of images depicting illegal acts and the commission of illegal acts themselves that America has never really embraced. Anecdotally, people will insist that the Japanese approach allows people to fulfill their fantasies without actually crossing the line into actual violence, and from what I know crime statistics certainly present a compelling argument for this idea (although I also know that crime in Japan is woefully under-reported, under-investigated, and under-prosecuted from an American perspective). But America (and this may have something to do with Christian approaches to sin) is quite different, and though manga may travel across borders, societal attitudes are much less fungible.

Apparently the D.A. is planning to throw the book at Handley; he faces up to 15 years in prison, up to $250,000 in fines, three years' probation, and will spend the rest of his life on a sex offender registry, all without ever having actually committed a crime other than buying a dirty comic book. Handley clearly ought to petition the judge to assign him different counsel, since even from the other side of the country I can tell that his lawyers are unsophisticated idiot hacks: this case is being used to make the D.A.'s name, and now that he has a guilty plea, he has no incentive to go easy on Handley. I also very much want to know just what it was that made Customs decide to open Handley's mail.

In conclusion, I urge people to support the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund in any way they can. Since this was such an easy win for the D.A., I very much doubt that this will be the last such case.