Great collection of Ruben Bolling comics going back to 1990. The chronological format confirmed my feeling that the Trump era was a huge blow to political comics & political humor in general. Reductio ad absurdum & the absurd itself have been co-opted by the fascists & other enablers of Trump. Hyperbolizing such people is almost impossible. This is also why many of the most absurd Tom the Dancing Bug strips from the 90s & 2000s were almost prophetic of our moment now. I was sad that the collection didn’t include the “Everything’s Normal Now” comic from late 2001, or the “So You’ve Been Declared a Terrorist” comic from sometime in the 2010s. I’m glad the Super Fun Pak Comix are all collected in their own book. To me they’re kind of the heart of Tom the Dancing Bug comic. It would be fun to see collections of all of the other recurring comic formats (e.g. God-Man, Billy Dare, Harvey Richards Lawyer for Children, etc.), but I can see how it’s more in the spirit of Tom the Dancing Bug to mix & jumble up all of the different recurring features. 

 Wake is about the central role of women in resistance to slavery, and how that role has been overlooked, either because women were ignored in the historical record, or because later historians couldn’t perceive that women could be historical actors. The book is mostly about how to look between the lines of historical records to reimagine the historical narrative. In this way reading Wake reminded me of the Dawn of Everything.  I like the visual juxtaposition between the present-day settings and the historical scenes of enslaved people who built those places. While Hall’s research being obstructed by the various institutions who held the historical records was infuriating, in a way the fact that many institutions are sensitive about historians accessing their slavery records it at least means they fear some sort of consequences for their institutions’ criminal involvement in slavery. 

 Page-turning SF fantasy novel featuring a lot of plot & a lot of world building. The ending suggests a sequel, which I would read. The idea of the supernatural guardian of a city reminds me of the premise behind N.K. Jemisin’s short story “The City Born Great”. Makes me want to read Journey to the West, & maybe re-read American Born Chinese (which also featured Monkey King). Similar to Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, Monkey Around hints at, but never shows weird supernatural/alien/animal sex, & I couldn’t help but think that Ocatvia Butler would have shown it, & Walter Mosely would show a LOT of it. The story was fun & moved along smoothly enough that I don’t really feel like picking the whole thing apart, which is definitely a plus. 

 Memoir/detective story about a Korean adoptee growing up in Sweden & then looking for her birth family. The first part of the book is about the difficulties of growing up as an Asian adoptee in a racist society. The rest of the book is about the author & her partner’s sleuthing to find her birth family & to find the circumstances of her adoption. This memoir is intense & pretty scathing of the institution international adoption. 

 For me this book slowly built up tension like a pot of water slowly coming to a boil, much like the time period covered in this memoir. The cut-out art style reminds me a little bit of Get Your War On or maybe This Modern World. (The “can you believe this shit?” attitude of GYWO & TMW also resonate a bit with parts of Good Talk, but there end the similarities.) I like the way Jacob uses photographic backgrounds in most of the frames. Makes me want to read Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, and also “Bree’s” novel that Jacobs was writing. I feel like the book took on a sadder tone after the encounter with “budding author Bree”. 

 A likeable-character-driven sci-fi journey-through-space novel. Kind of like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with the snarky to heartfelt ratios inverted. This book exemplifies the adage about the importance of the journey rather than the destination. More space western than space opera. Reminded me of Larry Niven’s Known Space novels/stories (with less cynicism) or maybe David Brin’s Uplift series in that Long Way to a Small Angry Planet was about a motley crew on a business journey through space in a galaxy with a more or less rules based civilization, populated by various alien species. Similarly to Known Space & Uplift, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet also feels very of the 21st century, with very post-90s cyberpunk influences & anthropological attitudes. This book felt very optimistic & escapist & I’ll be requesting the sequels from the library once I return some of the books I have checked out. 

 Extremely readable re-framing of human pre-history. The goal that the Davids set out for Dawn of Everything is less to create a new narrative of human history, and more to propose a new lens through which to consider pre-history, early history, archaeology, & anthropology. The main points are mostly covered in the first and last chapters, but in between are lots of interesting examples & fun asides. One of the big revelations for me was the ancient prehistoric cities in Ukraine. Also, I’d never before heard about mass graves being evidence for ancient state formation  (makes me think of a line in The Stand about the endpoint of rationalism being the mass grave; Graeber & Wengrow would seem to suggest that it’s actually the other way around) .  The tone is both conversational & reminiscent of educational miniseries (if the narrator also loved anthropology drama & told you just what he thought of others in the field), which makes me want to watch the Carl Sagan Cosmos. Reading this also perversely makes me want to play Civilization, which is fun, but based on both the faulty stages of development model of civilization, & a settler-colonialist world view, which form the exact framework for understanding human society that Dawn of Everything is trying to break out of (Not a Nation of Immigrants also gave me a similar feeling). Many of the anthropological examples reminded me of reading some Ursula K LeGuin stories (especially the Left Hand of Darkness’s discussions of kingship & authority, & Always Coming Home’s depiction of an anti-hierarchical society), to the point that I wondered if the Davids & LeGuin were looking at some of the same anthropological works. The endnotes are very worth reading, to the point that they can probably just be read on their own, if you feel like you don’t have time for such a long book (although Dawn of Everything is a quick read for its length). While not as life-changing as Graeber’s Debt: the First 5000 Years is, I highly recommend Dawn of Everything. I’d really like to read some detailed reviews of it, especially from an anthropological perspective. 

 Darker, more painful follow-up to Hyperbole & a Half. Deals with loss, loneliness, grief, existentialism, in addition to the previously addressed topics like weird childhood, depression, & general dysfunction. Solutions and Other Problems can possibly be seen as a good example of how weird you can get when very alone. This book somehow felt both more disjointed & more unified than Hyperbole & a Half. Parts that felt like non-sequiturs also felt very deliberate. The parts with the kid reminded me of the Joe Frank Story “Landing Strip in the Jungle”, where a street kid pesters Joe until he buys some Hashish off him, which Joe thinks is fake & so spitefully devours all of, precipitating an existential crisis. I rate Solutions & Other Problems as more disturbing than Joe Frank (especially if it was in the form of a late-night radio drama). 

Memoir of Machado’s relationship with an abuser, also going into the history and historiography of domestic violence in the lesbian community.  Machado made her life & experiences feel very familiar to me, despite my being a cis straight white guy who’s never been in an abusive relationship (maybe it was her use of 2nd person; I can be very suggestible). Also like a good horror story, Machado made the abusive relationship seem very appealing at first (thinking of the relationship as the Overlook Hotel). I was completely unprepared for In the Dream House. I think I was expecting it to be more painful & difficult to read, but instead it was very accessible & for me, it was a page-turner. While Machado’s memoir is painful to read, there is also a lot of humor in it. Now I’m curious about Her Body & Other Parties.  

 A great micro-history of the world of trashy comics of the 1930s-50s from the perspective of Black artists who worked in the industry. Provides much info about the lives & work of various Black early comics creators. So many of these artists possessed great talents but were forced into the margins of the publishing industry like so many artistic Kilgore Trouts. I really like the comics that were included, & wish Invisible Men included more. Something about the ever-present self-satisfied look on the Blue Beetle’s face made the Blue Beetle Comic by E.C. Stoner one of my favorites in the collection. Cal Massey’s “Absent Minded Professor” (“Horror From the Tomb #1”) is a great horror comic example & another favorite. I like how the author waited until the Afterward to drop on the reader the fact that teenaged Captain Marvel fans succeeded in petitioning Fawcett Publications to drop a racist caricature sidekick from the comic in 1945!