Soft Apocalypses by Lucy A. Snyder

I review Lucy A. Snyder’s books a lot, and that’s for a very good reason — I love horror, and she writes extremely good horror. She has a new collection out — let’s take a look at it.

This is a nice mix of new material and (slightly) older stuff. We start off with “Magdala Amygdala,” the story for which she won the Bram Stoker Award for last year. It starts out looking like a revisionist zombie story — until it suddenly isn’t a zombie story at all. After that, we get “However…” which originally appeared in a Hellraiser anthology in significantly altered form — the editors thought the original version was too extreme even for the Cenobites. Luckily, the original is what we get here. We get “Repent, Jessie Shimmer!” — a short story featuring the star of Snyder’s “Spellbent” novels.

We also get science fiction, steampunk, shorter slice-of-life tales, comedy — all of them shot through with Snyder’s special brain-skinning style of literary shock-and-awe. A couple of rednecks discuss corporal punishment — but they’re not talking about spanking. A serial killer stalks a new victim, unaware that he’s in more danger than she is. A future apocalypse means bizarre life changes for a woman and her bestial sister. We get plant monsters, haunted paintings, weightlifting vampires, zombie tigers, and much more.

Verdict: Thumbs up. This is gonna end up being a fairly short review, ’cause sometimes, all you need to say is, yeah, it’s a really good book, and maybe you should shell out some dough so you can read it.

We hear a lot about edgy writers, and they generally come off like preschool kids who shock their classmates by repeating out-of-context cuss words. Snyder doesn’t do grade-school shocks. She doesn’t just tell you stories that get under your skin. She tells stories that start out under your skin, tunnel in deeper to chew on your nerve endings and hollow out a few organs, and only crawl back out into the sunlight after they’ve laid eggs inside your spinal cord.

You like horror? You like horror for grownups, willing to delve into the deeply forbidden corners of our psyches and societies, while still indulging in the occasional fun of exploding vampires? Yes, y’all are going to want to go pick this up.

Turbulence by Samit Basu

If there’s one thing we’re accustomed to in American comics, it’s that most superheroes are Americans. Sure, you get the occasional nod to superheroes from Canada, the UK, Russia, Japan, or China. But we always focus on American superheroes. And we always consider it a triumph for diversity when a team of heroes has more than one person of color. But if we went by total population, who’d have the largest populations of super-powered people? China first, obviously, but after that would be India — and that’s the setting for this book.

Our setup for the novel comes when everyone aboard a plane traveling from London to Delhi ends up getting powers, some grand and earth-shattering, some modest and barely noticible, but all exactly the powers that suited each person’s personality and greatest desires.

So we meet Aman, who gets vast powers over telecommunications and decides he wants to save the world from itself. Vir, a pilot in the Indian Air Force, gets flight, superspeed, and super-durability. Aspiring actress Uzma becomes superhumanly likeable. Harried housewife Tia can clone herself as many times as she wants. Sher is a tiger-headed super-warrior. Princess Anima is a schoolgirl with massively powerful anime-inspired combat abilities. And Jai is entirely indestructible — and he wants to conquer the entire world.

And they’re not all heroes. Jai is certainly the most powerful being on the planet, and he gathers most of the other really powerful people to his side really quickly. He kills the people who aren’t useful to him. The pitifully few heroes don’t tend to have the most combat-worthy abilities, and they’re generally outgunned and seemingly doomed. What chance do they have to save India, much less the rest of the world?

Verdict: Thumbs up. It’s a novel with a setting that’s surprisingly refreshing — it’s fun to get better acquainted with India and its gigantically diverse population through this book. But it’s not just a geographical lesson plan — because that would be no fun at all. This is a superhero story, and it really excels.

The characters are amazingly fun — I really couldn’t pick out a favorite. Aman and his pigheaded naivete, Uzma and the way she slowly grows out of her shallow egotism, Tia’s maternal kickassery, Vir’s stubborn and frequently stupid heroism. Sher and Princess Anima are both terrifying in different ways and also hugely charismatic in equally different ways. And Jai is so despicably dislikeable — but you really wouldn’t hate him so much if her weren’t such a gloriously created villain. And there are plenty of minor characters who you wish had larger roles in the story just so you could get to know them better.

The action and fight scenes are fantastic, harrowing, horrifying, and everything you’d want from a bunch of super-battles. And the story continually grows more and more exciting, with the stakes being continually raised higher and higher. The further along you go in the story, the less likely you are to want to put it down for very long.

Is it a good superhero story? Heck, yes. It may be one of the best I’ve ever read. Should you go pick it up. Yes, seriously, go pick it up. You’ll love this.

Alabaster: Pale Horse by Caitlin R. Kiernan

Hopefully, you enjoyed Dark Horse’s “Alabaster: Wolves” miniseries that came out two years ago. I figured I’d never get a chance to read Caitlin R. Kiernan’s original short stories about Dancy Flammarion, the weird Southern monster-hunting possibly-crazy albino girl who starred in the series. But as it turned out, Dark Horse decided to collect Kiernan’s previous tales in this nice softcover.

So we get a series of six stories, most of them fairly well connected to each other, covering the weirdness and terror of Dancy’s life from her childhood to her monster-stalking young adulthood. She meets up with were-creatures, vampires, angels, demons, and things that are so much worse. And for the most part, she’s very, very lucky. Things are just not very easy for Dancy Flammarion. She’s an albino walking around in the hot Georgia sun, every monster in the state knows who she is and wants revenge on her because she keeps killing monsters — even though everything she meets tends to be a lot tougher than she is.

Dancy’s the star, but a very strong supporting character is the Deep South atmosphere. It’s blazingly hot everywhere, even in the shade. Almost every location is run-down and filthy and corrupted and falling apart, aside from the occasional vampire-infested mansion. Everyone’s a monster, especially the people. In fact, just about the only really decent people are animals who Dancy may be hallucinating.

Verdict: Thumbs up. I really was kinda overjoyed when I saw this in the local shop. I’d never dreamed there was a chance I’d get to see all the Dancy Flammarion stories all in one place, and I loved the comic series so much, this one was kinda a zero-hesitation buy.

Dancy’s an outstanding character — quite clearly insane, except for the fact that she keeps fighting monsters and talking to dogs and angels. Unless those are just normal people she’s killing. She comes across as low-grade white trash, broken inside, wandering aimlessly and miserably around the South, getting screamed at by the voices inside her head. But she’s got a weirdly hyper-moral core of her personality — she doesn’t seem to particularly hate monsters — in fact, she generally acts like she’d just as soon leave them alone, especially because they keep trying to kill her.

But she keeps going, partly because her angel keeps screaming at her, partly because she’s on a holy crusade. Dancy’s a doomed character — you just can’t imagine any way she could ever get out of this life or find happiness or even survive much past the next year or so. But it’s absolutely clear that she’d keep right on going, no matter what, because she can’t imagine life without her crusade.

And one more point to recommend this one — it ends with a fantastically creepy afterword from Kiernan recounting a moment of her life along a Georgia highway that helped inspire the horrors of the Dancy stories. Don’t skip the afterword. It’s very good and very spooky.

If you like wonderfully visceral, grim, dirty horror with a sweet Southern twang, starring an amazingly, awesomely weird female protagonist, you’ll definitely want to pick this up.

Tales of Zo, edited by Andrew Byers and Chad Underkoffler

So there’s this cool roleplaying game that came out a few years ago. It basically lets you roleplay in a world that’s a cross between your generic fairy-tale setting and L. Frank Baum’s various “Wizard of Oz” books. It’s called “The Zantabulous Zorcerer of Zo” — which is an entirely awesome name — and it was written by Chad Underkoffler on his Atomic Sock Monkey Press. It’s a fun game — pretty rules light, with more emphasis on characters and setting, which is how it should be.

Anyway, a little earlier this year, Underkoffler put together this book of short stories set in the Land of Zo. The authors include Andrew Byers, Michaelbrent Collings, Michael Hill, Scott Kane, Jon F. Zeigler, and Underkoffler himself, who contributes the most stories to the collection. They lead us through the adventures of characters like the Blue Tailor, the greatest tailor in the world, the Gingerbread Knight, the Horse Prince, the Bespectacled Boy, the Wooden Pirate, and many more.

And facing almost all of them: Shaykosch, the Deathless Wolf, the Gray Wind, Death-on-Four-Legs, a hellish fusion of the Big Bad Wolf, Koschei the Deathless, and Darkseid. Endlessly hungry and a diabolical shapeshifter, he rises to threaten the Land of Zo every few years, only for brave heroes to foil his plots. But he always comes back…

Verdict: Thumbs up. There are no bad stories in this book, and several that are really pretty world-class awesome. My personal favorites include Underkoffler’s “The Wooden Pirate” (simultaneously tragic and fairy-tale awesome) and “The Horse Prince” (for the very unconventional fantasy hero), Zeigler’s “Galen and the Golden-Coat Hare” (an outstandingly clever story with one great reveal after another), and Kane’s “The Wolf Trap Picnic,” which is anarchic and hilarious.

The characterization is strong in almost every story, but the settings are particularly wonderful. The Land of Zo wears its Oz inspirations proudly, and every country within is quite clearly visualized — while also leaving some up to the imagination of the reader. These settings started out, after all, in a roleplaying game, where it always pays to leave something up to the players’ and the readers’ imaginations.

Definitely the strongest character is the Adversary himself, Shaykosch, who seems to be the rare fairy tale foe who gets charisma, overpowering intelligence, and an aura of real menace all at once. When he appears, you always know the heroes will win out over him — but you also worry that maybe this will be the one time he wins out. And even if he doesn’t win, he might kill or maim several innocent people. He’s a rotten, nasty customer, and you really end up looking forward to seeing him in as many stories as possible, because he’s so much fun to hate.

If I’ve got a quibble with this collection, it would be with the fairly small number of female heroines. I counted only three major heroines, and two of them had to share their stories with male heroes. Considering the large number of female protagonists in fairy tales in general and in fairy tale-inspired stories like Oz, Wonderland, Narnia, etc., there should’ve been more girls in this book vanquishing evil.

Still, only a minor quibble for a collection as stuffed full of fun as this one is. If you enjoy fairy tales, and if you enjoyed the Zorcerer of Zo game, this is definitely something you’ll want to check out.

I don’t have a lot of time to write a review, so we’re going with something that we’ll be able to talk about pretty quickly.

Super Graphic: A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universe by Tim Leong

Infographics are great for folks who have trouble grasping complex data analysis — which really means they’re great for almost everyone. It’s really hard to look at a column of statistics and be able to make hide nor hair of them. A good infographic makes data more clear to the layman, and if designed well, they can actually make data fun.

Tim Leong is a very good designer, a very good number cruncher, and he really likes comic books. And so we get “Super Graphic,” a book full of infographics about comic books.

It’s really difficult to show you how good most of these infographics are, because the book is really stiff, and it’s hard to get it set down on the scanner. Still, I found this one online, so here ’tis:

(Click to embiggen)

Among the other infographics in the book are graphs analyzing manga, the heights and weights of various superheroes, the histories (and mergings) of many comic book publishers, the ingredients of pizzas preferred by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a comparison of superhero-themed roller coasters, the political leanings of comic book characters, the stats on Charlie Brown’s baseball team, the influence of comic books on hip hop, a flow chart on how the Punisher determines who he kills, and much, much, much more.

Verdict: Thumbs up. It’s an incredibly clever book, beautifully designed, and grand fun to read.

My primary quibble with this book is that I kinda wanted all of the graphics to include useful data, and some of them are just there for the sake of silliness or showing off Leong’s design chops. For example, “A Personal History of Saying ‘Good Grief’ ” is just a black zigzag on a yellow background — in other words, the pattern on Charlie Brown’s shirt. It’s cute, but that’s about all it is.

But again, that’s a quibble. I had a blast reading the book, pored over all the stats, gloried in the graphic design, and found plenty of things to laugh about and learn from. If you love comics — not just superheroes, but all kinds of comics — and you love the statistics and data and minutiae of hardcore comics continuity study, go pick it up.

Still so many great gifts I wanna recommend, and I really don’t think I’ll have time to review them all. But for today, let’s talk about Wearing the Cape: Young Sentinels by Marion G. Harmon.

I love all the “Wearing the Cape” books. I get enjoyment outta them that I don’t get from any other superhero novels — and from only very few comic books. So I always look forward to a new one.

In the latest novel, Hope “Astra” Corrigan is settling down into her role as one of the leading heroes of the Chicago Sentinels. There are a lot of familiar faces — Blackstone, Watchman, Harlequin, Chakra, Seven, and Astra’s best friend, Shelley, whose completely digital status allows her to upload herself into the robot body of Galatea.

There are a lot of new crises — a new villain called the Green Man periodically tries to destroy the city with out-of-control plant life, and a new villain group called the Wreckers are targeting anti-metahuman organizations. And there are lots of changes in store for Astra, too — chiefly, she’s being put in charge of a new junior branch of the Sentinels.

And that means we get to meet a bunch of new young superheroes, including angsty exploding kid Megaton, shapeshifting teen monster Grendel, arrogant aerokinetic Tsuris, and Ozma, a magic user who claims to be the actual Empress of Oz. Can she mold them into a serious team, especially with the colossal personal changes going on in her life?

Verdict: Thumbs up. I love the stuffing out of this series.

The characterization and dialogue are first-rate. The personalities of almost every character are incredibly strong and distinctive, and most of them are charismatic enough that you want to read more about them. When things are going well for them, you want to celebrate — when things are not going well, you wanna commisserate with them. When they’re in danger, you get worried about ’em, because they all feel like real people.

The action is fantastic, too — it always feels desperate, painful, panicked, and exciting, and that’s really perfect for this series. Superhero action should be above and beyond anything in any other genre, and the action in the “Wearing the Cape” series is breathtakingly great. And it’s not just the superheroic crises and disasters — the personal crises that come up genuinely feel like crises, too. When an injury to a sibling feels just as terrifying as a wave of killer vegetation preparing to destroy Chicago O’Hare International Airport, you’ve definitely got the Superhero Angst-and-Crisis Meter pegged in the right direction.

Maybe my favorite thing about this series is that it’s realistic without being boring or depressing. There are a lot of superhero stories that opt for realism that kills the superheroic mood and turns into gritty military sci-fi, but Harmon realizes that you can have realism in superhero fiction as long as you give your story permission to ignore realism and just let superheroes testify in court while wearing masks, let superheroes get into super-fights without killing everyone, let fictional magic items from Oz show up and work just like they did in Baum’s novels. These books are realistic and fun, and we need more of those, in every possible genre.

My lone quibble with this novel — I wasn’t a big fan of the alternate narrators. The previous novels have been entirely narrated by Astra, so it took a little time to catch on that she wasn’t going to be the sole focal character this time out. And while I liked Megaton and Grendel just fine — and while I kinda wanted to see some of this story from Ozma’s viewpoint — I still wished we could have more Astra.

But that’s a very minor quibble, because this is a seriously fantastic novel. If you haven’t read it — or if you want to get it for a friend who enjoys superhero novels — you should definitely pick it up. And if you haven’t read any of the “Wearing the Cape” books — well, you should probably read all of ’em.

Mask of the Other by Greg Stolze

Man, it’s getting closer to Halloween, and I’ve barely reviewed any good horror stories yet. So here’s this fun novel, a keen mixture of military fiction and the Cthulhu Mythos, by Greg Stolze.

The story jumps around a lot in time, though we follow a small team of soldiers/mercenaries — Rick, Dirty John, Hamid, Doug, and Bandit — for most of the tale. We follow them throughout the Middle East, Japan, Australia, America, and Turkey as they come into contact with the powers and horrors hidden where no one knows to look.

Among other things, we discover Saddam Hussein’s secret occult weapons program. We watch over a monstrous being buried in Turkey, completely immune to every attempt by the Turkish army to destroy it and perfectly content to look for a way to seep out of its underground prison.

We tag along as an American rock band visits an isolated Japanese island to film a music video — and is quickly devoured by something hidden in the ruins. We witness the destruction of an Afghan village and a company of private security consultants because of a single unorthodox, terrifying weapon.

And we get to see what happens when the things hidden in the dark corners of the world meet the terrors from beyond space — and who survives the chaos.

Verdict: Thumbs up. It’s an outstanding book, exciting, terrifying, bizarre, and just plain fun to read.

Gotta give a lot of credit to how great the characters are in this book. Our team of mercenaries are wonderfully appealing characters — Dirty John is probably the most fun, but you feel a lot of affection for all of them. And even the minor characters are strong, too. The doomed rock band, as well as their entourage, are outstanding, as are the star-crossed lovers in Turkey, the crusading investigator tracking the soldiers, and pretty much everyone else we meet.

We get three different monstrous threats — I won’t spoil who they are, because it’s more fun to see how they get introduced. But they’re presented in such unique ways that you may not immediately recognize them — in fact, there’s one that I suspect may be completely original to Stolze’s fiction. I don’t remember reading anything like it in H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction, but perhaps it’s just disguised very well. But it’s great to look at these Mythos monstrosities through less jaded eyes. It’s makes them stranger, more original, and scarier.

And the terrors here aren’t limited to the supernatural. These guys are soldiers, and they have to deal with IEDs, snipers, ambushes, and most terrifying of all, bureaucracy. It’s a great blending of otherworldly scares with gritty, real-life perils.

It’s a vastly fun book, perfect for anyone who needs some offbeat Halloween chills. Go pick it up.

Prepare to Die! by Paul Tobin

I finished this one quite a while back, and I’ve just got such a huge backlog of books, it’s taken me this long to get a review written.

Y’all know Paul Tobin, right? He’s written so many comics. And here’s his superhero novel!

Steve Clarke went from 14-year-old rebel to first-rate superhero during a freak chemical accident. As Reaver, he’s superstrong, super-fast, and every time he punches someone, it literally takes a year off their life. But now, Reaver is one of the last superheroes on Earth, and after an encounter with the diabolical Octagon and his team of super-powered psychos, Steve gets beat down pretty hard. As the Octagon prepares his killing blow, he tells Reaver “Prepare to die!” So Steve says, okay, I’d like to have a month to prepare to die. He doesn’t get it — the Octagon gives him just two weeks to put his affairs in order, then he’ll be back to kill him.

So Steve goes back to his old hometown to find Adele, the girl he loved when he was 14. He starts up a (probably really short-lived) relationship with her, hangs out with Adele’s sister and her lesbian lover, and remembers all his old superhero friends, including Paladin, Steve’s best friend and Earth’s greatest hero, and Kid Crater, the sidekick who Steve failed. Can Steve face his death with dignity? Should he fight to survive? Will he be able to save Adele when the villains find out about her?

Verdict: Thumbs up. It’s a good, fun book, full of humor, great characterization, absolutely terrifying action, at least one genuinely shocking plot twist, and a killer hook that’ll draw you in for the entire rest of the novel.

I loved the characters so much, and that’s what a good superhero novel needs. Steve is dark and conflicted… and depressed. He wanted so much to be like his best friend Paladin, and when he finds out that life isn’t all roses and glory for his friend, it breaks him pretty hard. Adele is a pretty great character, too, though I think I’ve got some quibbles about her, too. The Octagon and all the villains are amazingly scary — give deadly powers to a bunch of lunatics, and you’d get something like these guys. No wonder all the superheroes are dead.

The major quibble with this book is that it’s pretty neanderthal when it comes to women. Every woman Steve encounters, he either remarks on whether or not he wants to have sex with her — or he reminisces about previously having sex with her. Well, fine, Steve is a bit of a neanderthal anyway, right? Maybe so, but there are also a few weird things with Adele’s characterization — she apparently stayed obsessed with Steve after his accident and years-long coma, long after he’d completely disappeared from her life, to the point of becoming an alcoholic because she couldn’t stop thinking about him. That’s kinda sorta crazy, because most people get over even the worst heartbreak in time, especially heartbreak from when you were 14 years old. But the great male fantasy is that the girl you loved and lost would still love you today, right?

But there’s a lot of stuff to love about this book. The action is scare-the-pants-off-you good — Reaver is in over his head in almost every battle, and you’re always left wondering if even his healing factor will be able to keep up with all the damage he’s taking.

And I believe I’ve mentioned the plot twist already? I’ll mention it again. It’s very good. It’s very, very good. It’s really a bit of a masterwork of a plot twist.

It’s not at all bad, guys. Y’all should go pick it up.

Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It by David M. Ewalt

It’s a nice time to be a fan of pen-and-paper roleplaying games.

Granted, there aren’t quite as many games out there as I’d prefer. Too many great games are basically out-of-print, sustained only by online PDF sales. I can find more RPGs at the local used bookstore than I can at any other store selling games. There are a lot of my favorite games that I haven’t bought any new material for in years — either they aren’t selling, they aren’t producing anything particularly good, or they’re selling stuff on the down-low. The comic shops I go to sell some games, but not as many as the great game stores of the past used to. They have D&D and Pathfinder and Munchkin and board games — but no GURPS, no Call of Cthulhu, no Mutants and Masterminds, none of the greats. Heck, you gotta go a far piece just to find a store specializing in roleplaying games.

But it’s still a good time to be a gamer, because RPGs are having a minor renaissance, thanks to a combination of gamer nostalgia and more people realizing it’s fun to get together and play games.

So here’s David Ewalt (billed on the cover as a Level 15 cleric) and this cool book he wrote, essentially a bit of pop-sociology, examining the history of Dungeons & Dragons, and the culture of D&D players. Most of this information is not new — many hardcore gamers have known and memorized the history of how Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson created D&D, but it is very nice to have the story recorded in a nice mass-marketed book designed to appeal to gamers and non-gamers alike.

So we start in the ’70s wargaming scene, with Gygax and Arneson both adding interesting elements that moved gaming away from mass combats to a focus on individual characters — something that either freaked the grognards out or completely thrilled them. Gygax and Arneson had conflicting philosophies and styles that nevertheless merged neatly — if only temporarily — to create roleplaying’s greatest success. And for many years, times were very, very good — but good times never last forever, even if D&D might.

Scattered throughout the historical narrative are short profiles of regular gamers — some of them friends of the author, some of them just people he met while researching the book. We also visit a unique LARPing weekend event, watch the initial stages of the development of the new edition of D&D, get a short pilgrimage around the holy sites of the game’s creation, and much more.

Verdict: Thumbs up. There is so very much here that I never knew. Not just how Gygax and Arneson created the game, but how it was funded, how it was often not funded, how TSR came about, all the lawsuits that flew all around during the early years, how GenCon slowly grew.

And the whole thing never gets dry or boring or weighted down by historical facts. There’s tons of humor, winking nods to gamers’ obsessions and to the minutiae of D&D’s rules. We get to meet a ton of interesting people, watch them create their characters, play their games, and tell their stories, both in-game and in real life.

It has a few failings. Some of the darker periods of the game’s history, particularly the reign of RPG-hating Lorraine Williams at TSR, are given short shrift. And almost the entire focus of the book is on Dungeons & Dragons. Very few other RPGs are even mentioned. Magic: The Gathering is discussed a little, mostly because Wizards of the Coast ended up buying D&D.

For the most part, that’s okay — it’s a book about Dungeons & Dragons, not about every other RPG out there. But there were some points where other RPGs should’ve been mentioned — when the discussion is about how much people liked D&D version 3.5 and how many disliked version 4, it might be worth mentioning that Pathfinder was basically created as a way for gamers to keep playing 3.5, and that it ended up dethroning D&D as the most popular RPG as a result.

Still, those are mere quibbles. On the whole, it’s an outstanding book, well worth reading for anyone who grew up playing D&D and wishes they could return to the hobby. Go pick it up, read it, pass it along to your friends and family, if you think you can trust ’em to give it back. Hopefully, you’ll be able to expand your gaming group to a few more people.

The Lexicon of Comicana by Mort Walker

I’m feeling a bit under the weather, so I’d like to get a quick review done, rather than something long and involved. So here’s this book. It’s not a new book at all, or even within spitting range of being new. It was published way back in 1980 by Mort Walker, creator of the “Beetle Bailey” comic strip, as his own personal glossary of cartoon symbology.

It’s not a particularly serious book at all. It’s filled with cartoons and jokes, some of them really overwhelmingly silly. It’s definitely not as scholarly and exhaustive as Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics.” That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though.

Again, this is a very light-hearted glossary of comics symbology. We all accept that comics and cartooning have their own special language that doesn’t really have anything to do with the real world, right? When people are nervous, giant beads of sweat don’t really go flying off their heads. Pain doesn’t really cause stars or birds to appear. Bombs nearly never resemble a black ball with a fuse on top. Criminals don’t wear domino masks; reporters don’t wear fedoras with their press passes in the brim; professors don’t wear their mortarboards to teach classes. But these are all part of the common language of cartoons.

This isn’t controversial — everyone accepts it as obvious. What Walker does here is compile them in one place, give them some invented names, and discuss them a bit, usually making a few jokes about ’em. And it’s really, really fun to read about.

For example, here’s Walker talking about what he calls emanata:

And here’s a bit about the lucaflect:

Honestly, that last one really kinda blew my mind. Yeah, when we draw round, shiny things, we put a reflection of a window on them. Even if the items are located outside or away from windows or before the invention of windows. Why? Because that’s how our language says round, shiny things look. It doesn’t make logical sense for the same reason the word “bow” can mean a ribbon on a package, an archer’s weapon, the front of a ship, or bending forward at the waist. Because language grows organically, in crazy ways that make perfect sense when you’re using these symbols, but don’t make a lot of sense when you think about ’em very hard.

Verdict: Thumbs up. This was a vastly fun book. It’s basically the goofball uncle of McCloud’s more serious “Understanding Comics.” It’s sometimes silly to the point of being complete nonsense — and to be honest, if you don’t care for Walker’s terminology (I don’t — words like “plewds,” “grawlixes,” and “briffits” just seem like gibberish to me), you can just ignore them. There’s still a lot of interesting stuff to learn here.

It’s a really fast read, and it’s perfect for kids — or for grown-up kids, or for regular grown-ups who love comics and cartooning. And it’s still in print, so it won’t cost you a whole lot to get it. Go pick it up.