My friends give the best Christmas presents (and also have the cutest babies). Those are just scientific facts.
Solutions and Other Problems, by Allie Brosh (new hardback): Ah, Allie Brosh. The patron saint of Depressed People on the Internet Who Like to Doodle. Of course I love her and Hyperbole and a Half, and of course I’m super glad she’s gotten through the seven-ish years she disappeared off the www.s in tact.
They were apparently very rough. Her sister died from completing suicide, one of her dogs died, her own marriage and her parents’ fell apart, she went through a big personal medical scare, and she basically melted into a puddle of semi-permanent anxiety crisis because everything happened so close together and all of that left the door wide the fuck open for all her ideations and other depression symptoms to go HAM on her poor brain.
So she retreated from her blog and people got worried. But she came out the other side okay with a 500-page graphic memoir that reads like the wind and made me laugh and cry because she’s able to tap into the inherent weirdness and sadness of life with humor that’s somehow frank and encouraging at the same time.
And she talks and draws about lighter things, too. Like how she has to get past a five-year-old every time she goes out of her apartment and how relentless and impervious to logic the five-year-old is.
I really like the style of her book. It’s not structured solely in panels like other graphic memoirs, but has a paragraph or a couple sentences sandwiched between her trademark Microsoft Paint drawings. She says she draws when things get too complicated to explain, and it works especially well for showing abstract thought processes and jokes.
I do that too, and as a writer I find it a lot easier to use for personal memoir stuff than just words, because you need certain aspects of your story to combine and hit the reader all at once to explain how it impacted you so they get the same sensations. Sometimes words aren’t enough. I said it.
And Brosh is great at keeping her squiggly style while noticeably improving on it; there are shadows and forced perspectives and all kinds of clues that make you realize how much she’s put into this, it’s not just an afterthought scribble to keep a gimmick going. And it stays hilarious and unexpected, too.
Would definitely recommend this to anyone who suffers from a depressive mental illness, or who’s been feeling super lonely in quarantine, or who likes graphic memoirs but is getting tired of their regular formulas. Brosh also wrote an earlier book, Hyperbole and a Half, and her blog is back up and has years of back material to appreciate if you haven’t already.
Adventure Time: Princess Bubblegum, by various (new paperback): Another enjoyable jaunt to the Candy Kingdom, courtesy of my favorite princess scientist. This is a collection of stories that vary in length, from single-page vignettes to what feels like a full storyboard or two for the TV show. They’re also drawn in different art styles, although the majority of them hew pretty close to the look of the animation, and we get a wide variety of Finn and Jake’s heroics as well as some girl time with Bubblegum and Marcelene, as they all fight monsters, try to tame Bubblegum’s science projects when they get out of control, and figure out how they want to fill their days.
The Adventure Time comics universe is somewhat daunting to keep track of at this point, but fortunately, you don’t have to worry that much about continuity. Some of the trades are grouped by character, like this one, and I appreciate that the overall tone of the book is consistent while allowing space for stories that are too short to have other homes and thus shed more light on the character.
Princess Bubblegum is the ruler of the Candy Kingdom, which is the dominant but not only area in Adventure Time. She’s a gentlewoman experimenter with the soul of Frankenstein and the theoretical physics knowledge of Einstein, plus a coating of sweetness all her own. Her vampire slacker musician best friend Marcelene comes over to help and hang out, and when something gets too big for them to handle, they call on Jake and Finn. Who sometimes just come over to hang out too.
The basic formula for a Princess Bubblegum storyline is: either one of her experiments goes horribly wrong and gains some sort of destructive sentience (like when she was trying to clone a child of herself and it turned out to be a layer of bubblegum that coated the whole kingdom and brainwashed everyone into joining it), or she has to deal with a snooty other head of state, who is revealed to be evil and tries to take over.
Marcelene helps, outwardly reluctant but always there to back her up. (In one two-pager, she groans about going with Bubblegum to a mining area but sneaks help in when Bubblegum’s asleep.) There is definitely some LGBTQ+ fanfiction (and at least one gorgeous cosplay out there) of Marcelene and Bubblegum, but as far as I know that’s not cannon, so in page they just seem like good friends.
Jake and Finn are enthusiastic but can be overbearing, and Bubblegum is always saving their rescue missions with her own innovations that they could not do without. It’s a great fun portrayal of not a damsel in distress but a Damsel Who Could Sometimes Use Backup.
Very fun, extremely cute, will be reading more.
Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders (new paperback): I appreciate Saunders for a number of things, including his awesome short stories (that sell well for their mainstream publisher!) and the general cohesive weirdness of his writings. It’s one thing to be avante garde and push boundaries; it’s a whole other level to do it in a way that doesn’t obscure the story.
And he brings all that to Lincoln. I hadn’t picked this up on my own yet because I’m not super into historical fiction, but at the same time, this is about how the Lincolns tried to supernaturally get in touch with their son who died right as the Civil War was starting. Which, fuck yeah. The spiritualist years when nobody *quite* had the science figure out to prove it wrong are super interesting and a great dive into humanity’s collective psyche just as the bloodiest war in history was making them all the more desperate to know if there was something after death.
Plus Saunders is funny. That’s definitely an underrated necessity for both literary and sci fi writers, and of course it must be used deftly and with a subtle blade, which Saunders does.
This book is about Lincoln’s son Willie right after he dies and goes into a graveyard full of other spirits who have not passed on yet. Most of them are in denial (although one former priest has seen a harrowing vision of what’s to come and fled right back to his “sick-box,” as another insists on calling their coffins) and are waiting around for revival, meanwhile performing exaggerated rituals that mirror their worst worries and regrets from life.
Three men — the aforementioned priest, an older man who was just getting to know his young wife in intimate ways, and a young gay dandy — decide to help out young Willie, because he seems more confused than the rest of them and is desperately trying to reach his father, who comes to visit his body one night in deep despair.
They try to get Willie to move on to the next phase of the afterlife so the boy’s not trapped like a previous resident, who has grown into the cemetery’s gates as a permanent horror show monstrous hybrid. Tendrils from Willie’s mausoleum threaten to entrap him in the same way.
Eventually, the three men-spirits manage to get Willie free and he moves on from the bardo. When he does, Lincoln feels newly at peace, and he heads out, but not before the spirit of a slave jumps into him and rides off sharing Lincoln’s body, presumably for the rest of his life.
All of this is told in a Greek chorus of the bardo’s spirits; technically second person I think, but told in short individual snippets as if each spirit were taking turns talking in a play, not in the collective “we.” There are also snippets from contemporary media coverage of the young Lincoln’s death, woven together with news of the war. It takes a bit of getting used to, reading-wise, but Saunders eases you into it, and when you figure out what’s going on, it makes complete sense and adds a supernatural dimension to the story that deepens the theme of the absurdity and unnatural tragedy of death.
Which is why Saunders’s sense of humor is so important. It’s a grim story of a tragic time in history, not just because Willie died but in general, and if Saunders hadn’t woven in funny bits (such as the new husband dying with an enormous hardon that he’s embarrassed about but can’t get rid of), it would’ve been a nonstop weep fest. I teared up anyway at points, and I didn’t read it as fast through as my time permitted me because I had to take breaks from both the heavy meditations on death and the unusual structure.
But that made the hope at the end shine brighter, yet not too much that it rendered the book schmaltzy. Saunders is really good at walking the fine line between naturally evoking universal human emotions and plunging them into melodrama.
And that’s why I loved this book. It shows death as the final absurdity, which is what I’ve always considered it, and posits how to let that absurdity set you free, in a way that includes sex jokes, a vision of the afterlife that melds together a bunch of beliefs into something completely new, and a bunch of old coots trying to elbow each other into place.
For a hornier version of a group voice trying to make sense of death, but on the other side of it, The Virgin Suicides is a lovely read with an ethereal voice that disguises a lot of the horror until you really think about it. Eugenides’s best, in my opinion.