Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant? (Bloomsbury, 2014).


My father's gone, my mother just had back surgery and is looking for a smaller house, and Roz Chast's Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant? scared the heebie-jeebies out of me.

I haven't read any new Chast in a little while now, and came to this new book - which is an absolutely gorgeous hardback, all purple and beautiful - expecting her usual light whimsy. Now, don't get me wrong. This book is terrific and funny and lovely, but it also accomplishes something that Chast has not done before. It left me sobered and worried and troubled. Her parents lived into their nineties in a very small apartment home with few friends and contacts and hit a massive, downhill deterioration. They refused to consider their futures, leading to a lot of poor decisions and a huge financial burden on her family.

This memoir of their final years is really amusing in places, and heartfelt and warm throughout, even when she's detailing her loudmouthed mother's "blasts from Chast" or her father's decline into dementia and amnesia. I can't recommend it strongly enough, but it also reminds me of how very much I'd prefer to talk about something more pleasant myself. So if you'll excuse me, I'll go write about barbecue somewhere else now.

Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, Health Inspected Cartoons by Roz Chast

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded, and maybe you'd like to think about reading them as well. This time, a review of Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, Health Inspected Cartoons by Roz Chast (Bloomsbury, 2006).



Here's a book that I was actually going to write about a week ago, but I felt that was too close to the Jack Ziegler piece I did for my Reprint This! blog, and figured I could wait a few days before I went gaga over another New Yorker cartoonist. Heaven knows I wouldn't want people to think that the Hipster Dad family of blogs were all obsessed with a single topic or anything; that just wouldn't do!

This may seem like the strangest thing to say about an artist whose work you love, but I really enjoy the way that Roz Chast's work just slips completely under everybody's radar, even my own. I don't remember whether I first saw one of her cartoons in the New Yorker or in some other magazine, but I recall being really surprised by it. Her art just wasn't like anything I'd ever seen before, and whatever the piece was, it wasn't overtly funny. I remember just looking at the page and wondering whether it was supposed to be there at all. Was this intended as a cartoon, or was it some strange 1980s ad or something.

Clearly, I don't give Chast the credit that she's due. If I had any sense, then when I went to the humor section of any good bookstore, I'd be hoping to find something specific by her. Instead, I simply stumbled across this mammoth, wonderful hardcover collection at Eagle Eye a few months ago and was every bit as pleased at my find as I was to learn such a great-looking book existed at all. This is a genuinely terrific collection, meeting most of my obsessive-compulsive desires for size and weight. I don't like skimpy 120-page paperbacks which fit in your coat pocket; I like a big, satisfying chunk of comics and cartoons, and this 400-page doorstop is exactly what this customer would have ordered, had he the brains to put such a request together in the first place. This is a book that I should have demanded many years ago, except that my demand would probably come with page numbers. Their omission here is genuinely odd.

If you're not familiar with Chast, you really are missing out. I think she's one of the most mercurial cartoonists working today, since her work can vary so wildly in tone. Normally, she has a playful, winking sensibility, and enjoys tweaking stereotypes. I've only had the great pleasure of driving between Burlington and Middlebury just once, but that was enough to tell me that Chast's cartoon about the shops in New York's newest neighborhood, Little Vermont, is absolutely true. There's so much truth behind the cartoons, however, that there must be some delightful (to the reader, anyway) neurosis driving her humor. How else to describe the contents of "Bad Mom" magazine, if not the sort of thing that the artist secretly dreads people might be thinking about her?

While her panels are really entertaining on their own, it's in the occasional, far-too-infrequent strip work where Chast really excels. There are some great pages of marital arguments and nagging mothers that spiral absurdly out of control, but I think the standout might be a four page strip investigating the airlines' unclaimed baggage depot in Scottsdale, Alabama. It's a surreal, intelligent and occasionally macabre set of terrific cartoons, and certainly a welcome addition to anybody's New Yorker library. Highly recommended.

The Thurber Carnival

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded. This time, a review of The Thurber Carnival (Harper, 1945).



Isn't it strange and sad how James Thurber has been slowly slipping out of the public consciousness? I can recall in college having a stapled photocopy of all his "Male Approach" drawings, and could identify a friend or acquaintance who matched the behavior of each one of the cartoons in the set. And yet, a couple of months ago, I came across a much-loved and cared-for umpteenth edition of The Thurber Carnival and realized I had not thought about Thurber in years.

At one time, this book was probably a resident of most of the bookshelves in this country. Originally published in 1945, it's a large omnibus which compiled the entirety of the earlier My World and Welcome to It and selected essays and stories from six previous anthologies, along with some of his cartoons. The scattershot approach sort of makes you glad that publishers don't really assemble books in this fashion much anymore.

Of course, it's all wonderful stuff, with the quiet observations of people's public, and occasionally over-the-top behavior contrasting the actions they repress. Thurber was every bit the equal of America's greatest humorists, and I was really amused to consider that no matter how much our culture homogenizes, no matter how much we bury ourselves in technological geegaws, the middle-class male is much the same as he was seventy years ago. And dogs, well, they never change. This very funny book deserves to once again be a resident of most of the bookshelves in this country.

(What? You mean when you were in college, people didn't carry stapled photocopies of Thurber in their backpacks? How strange!)

The World of Charles Addams

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. Today: a review, of sorts, of The World of Charles Addams (Knopf, 1991).



I've been in a New Yorker mood for many months now. I've been slowly working my way through that mammoth Complete Cartoons book and CD-ROM collection that Marie gave me since Christmas, and I'm saving myself the treat of looking at all of the great, underrated Jack Ziegler work on the disk for when I'm finished with the book itself. But seeing some of Charles Addams's earliest material - not that there was any apparent learning curve, he arrived, fully formed, as one of America's greatest cartoonists - reminded me that I had been meaning for years to get myself a copy of this brilliant Addams coffeetable book.

It's a huge, wonderful collection and while I'm sure it could prompt any number of long dissertations about Addams and the macabre and bizarre settings of his weird, funny cartoons, I think those essays have already been written. What I can tell you is that this giant book is more than 300 pages long, with two color sections and a fascinating little biographical essay. The reproduction of all this old material is very nice, and it's a great package which should have been kept in print. That said, you should be able to find a secondhand copy for not too much money, and I recommend you do so. Also, the one about the husband snatched from his picnic by a giant bird is the funniest comic panel ever.

Bond and Tobey

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews, of sorts, of James Bond: The History of the Illustrated 007 (Hermes, 2008) and B. Tobey of The New Yorker (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1983).



This is a very interesting overview of James Bond's lengthy career in comics, ranging from the newspaper strips to cameo appearances to adaptations of the films. Alan Porter has done an exemplary job tracking down stories from all over the world and interviewed many of the writers and artists who've worked on the character to flesh out the backgrounds behind the stories.

The book is gorgeously presented, with dozens of illustrations on very nice paper, but I found the layout occasionally aggravating. The bulk of the book is comprised of a list of stories, with creators, plot points and reprint details, arranged into two columns of text per page. This might be dismissed as a nitpick from a frustrated wannabe designer, but this leaves an awful lot of dead white space on many pages, and starting each entry with the title of each story in nondescript Impact font doesn't strike me as the best solution. I really enjoyed kicking back and following the presentation of stories throughout the 1970s, popping from British newspaper strips to Swedish comic books, but I wonder whether the book might work better as a secondary research source had each thread of Bond continuity been given its own section.

If you're not like me, and are able to avoid second-guessing the presentation of everything you read, you probably won't find these sorts of quibbles. Those aside, it's a genuinely fine book. If you really like James Bond, you're probably enjoying Titan's reprint series of the newspaper strips already, and this is a fabulous companion to those volumes. Porter's commentary is honest and informed. He doesn't hesitate to point out when some of the storylines get eyebrow-raisingly silly, and the background commentary to Bond's occasional truncated adventures-in-progress (such as the Thunderball strip or Topps' aborted adaptation of Goldeneye) is very interesting. In all, this is a perfectly good addition to any Bond-lover's bookshelf.




Barney Tobey, who passed away in 1989, specialized in dry panels where middle-management suburbanites were confronted with modern art, or visited Europe as baffled tourists. I might say that very little in this collection of 120-odd cartoons is on as consistently a knockout level as Tobey's New Yorker colleagues Charles Addams or Jack Ziegler, but I don't think potential readers should view that as a dismissal, either.

I read this yesterday during that agonizing weekly visit to the allergy clinic, and at one point turned a page and laughed so loudly and for so long that we had the full attention of every bored, suffering person there, much to the absolute, acute embarassment of my son, who was chuckling all the way through the latest Dr. Slump volume with much less noise.

Every decent library should have at least one New Yorker collection. I wouldn't pay an exorbitant price from an out-of-print specialist for this, but it certainly shouldn't be passed up if found in a good used bookstore, either.

(Originally posted February 04, 2009 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

Nightmare Edition with the Addams Family and Justice League

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. Today: reviews of My Crowd (Fireside, 1970) and Justice League of America: The Lightning Saga (DC, 2008).



I found a new copy of this great book, an edition issued in 1993 with oddly revised artwork to tie-in to the Raul Julia/Anjelica Huston film, and happily found it a new place on my shelves. My previous edition was lost in some move or divorce or something. Anyway, the Amazon listing erroneously says this only has 96 pages. There are actually twice that number, and around 100 have the gleefully macabre bunch that became known as The Addams Family and were turned into the best comedy of the 1960s. But the whole book's a treat of dark humor and things you probably shouldn't chuckle at. Recommended, but, in all honesty, The World of Charles Addams is certainly the superior choice.



"What manner of diseased beast died to produce this thing, I wonder?" That's not my line. I don't recall the writer, the periodical where it first appeared, nor the album it described, but it was in one of those Rock Yearbooks you used to see in the '80s and it stuck with me. And boy, is it ever apt.

I must explain to newer readers that I have a stupid weak place for the Justice League. JLA was my first "favorite comic," back in 1975 or so, and like a weakling, I occasionally go back to this stupid, stupid thing even after it's stabbed me in the back too often. I finally thought I swore off the damn thing and removed it from my pull list, but the combination of the classic Legion of Super-Heroes and a 40% off coupon from Borders sucked me back in for some agonizingly bad comics.

This is the second of two JLA books written by some novelist called Brad Meltzer, who's written some political thrillers of the sort I never read, and who DC would have us believe brings some industry cred to funnybooks. He wrote six of the eight issues reprinted here, and the inexplicably popular Geoff Johns wrote the others. I believe it was Alan David Doane who noted that Johns' approach to comic book writing is akin to a small child playing in the bathtub with action figures, and so with Meltzer and Johns collaborating on a three-superteam-get-together, readers can expect some very bland comics, with the only dramatic notes being sounded by the arrival of a new character to the narrative.

The result of their collaboration is an overlong, repellent mess of tangled continuity, half-remembered references and subplots that don't go anywhere. The principle deal of the Legion of Super-Heroes' presence in the present is to facilitate the resurrection of the Flash, a character who was killed off about two years prior to these stories. Now, admittedly, it's been several years since I reread the old Paul Levitz run on LSH, but I'm pretty certain that Jeckie didn't adopt the Sensor Girl costume until after Karate Kid was killed. Maybe they brought him back, too. Or maybe Geoff Johns and his ilk just don't care; these are the action figures they assembled for the evening's bathtub play. I mean, among the characters assembled in this story is a girl with wind powers who is Ma Hunkle's granddaughter. Either you have no idea what that means, or you know that it's retarded, or you're Geoff Johns and think that's super-wicked-awesome-cool that DC has such a proud history of tradition and lineage and then you shit on other people's stories anyway.

Then there's another issue, by Meltzer, where two characters that nobody has ever cared about are trapped in a hole under a collapsed building. Twenty-two pages of that. I suppose that's what passes for character development. I'll accept that in M*A*S*H because we cared about Pierce and Houlihan, and this was a show where characters genuinely might die. But Meltzer, nobody gives a shit about Red Arrow and Vixen apart from Nightwing fanfic writers, and if they did get killed, Johns would just resurrect them in nine months so he can play with them in the bathtub with Kingdom Come Hawkman and the great-nephew of the Anti-Matter Universe's Sinestro-Prime of Earth-2.

Then there are the glimpses of the future shown in JLA issue 0, which preceded Meltzer's run and which is appended to the back of this volume. Apparently at some point in the future - it's been two years and I don't think they've written this story - Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman kill Lex Luthor's son, and he puts on a kryptonite ring and beats the shit out of them. Well, get back to me when that story does appear. Like eight or nine other "flashforwards" arranged around the flashbacks, they're hints at subplots that Meltzer personally has no plans to write. This point isn't a complaint about the material, but honestly, how the heck far forward do they plan these things, I wonder.

At any rate, I know better than to buy JLA comics, and I want my 40% off coupon back to buy something good. For more than twenty years, Justice League of America has only been a worthwhile purchase when the editors and publishers have allowed proven talent to write the book. In the hands of anybody other than Keith Giffen or Grant Morrison, JLA hasn't been worth the paper it's printed on since the mid-80s. I had my girlfriend dump a giant stack of early 90s JLA comics at a hospital in Athens for kids to read. This, however, is culled from a beast so diseased that it might make kids even sicker, and should be discarded with greater care.

(Originally posted May 27, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)