Books I read in 2022, part 3
(That I have mostly nice things to say about)
Programming note: while clearning out the drafts folder as I wind the year down, I discovered that much to my amusement and surprise I wrote most of the third post on the books I read last year, but somehow never posted it? One editing & expansion pass later, and here it is.
Previously , Previously .
Neil Gaiman's Chivalry, adapted by Colleen Duran
A perfect jewel of a book. The story is slight, but sweet. Duran’s art, however, is gorgeous, perfectly sliding between the style of an illuminated manuscript and watercolor paintings. A minor work by two very capable artists, but clearly a labor of love, and tremendous fun.
The Murderbot Diaries 1&2: All Systems Red and Artificial Condition by Martha Wells
As twitter started trending towards it’s final end last summer, I decided I’b better stary buying some of the books I’d been seeing people enthuse about. There was a stretch there where it seemed like my entire timeline was praise for Murderbot.
For reasons due entirely to my apparent failures of reading comprehension, I was expecting a book starring, basically, HK-47 from Knights of the Old Republic. A robot clanking around, calling people meatbags, wanting to be left along, and so on.
The actual books are so much better than that. Instead, it’s a story about your new neurodivergent best friend, trying to figure themselves out and be left alone while they do it. It’s one of the very best uses of robots as a metaphor for something else I’ve ever seen, and probably the first new take on “what do we use robots for besides an Asimov riff” since Blade Runner. It was not what I expected at all, or really in the mood for at the time, and I still immediately bought the next book.
Some other MoonKnights not worth typing the whole titles of
All pumped after the Lumire/Smallwood stuff, I picked up a few other more recent MoonKnights. I just went downstairs and flipped through them again, and I don’t remember a single thing about them. They were fine, I guess?
The Sandman by Neil Gaiman and others
Inspired by the Netflix show (capsule review: great casting, visually as dull as dishwater, got better the more it did it’s own thing and diverged from the books) I went back and read the original comic run for the first time since the turn of the century. When I was in college, there was a cohort of mostly gay, mostly goth kids for whom Sandman was everything. I was neither of those things, but hung out in the subcultures next door, as you will. I liked it fine, and probably liked it more that I would normally have because of how many good friends loved it.
Nearly three decades later, I had a very similar reaction. It always worked best when it moved towards more of an light-horror anthology, where a rotating batch of artists would illustrate stories where deeply weird things happened and then Morpheus would show up at the end and go “wow, that’s messed up.” There’s a couple of things that—woof—haven’t aged super well? Overall, though, still pretty good.
Mostly, though, it made me nostalgic for those people I used to know who loved it so much. I hope they’re all doing well!
Death, the Deluxe Edition
Everything I had to say about Sandman goes double for Death.
Sandman Overture by Neil Gaiman and J.H. Williams III
I never read this when it came out, but I figured as long as I was doing a clean sweep of the Sandman, it was time to finally read it. A lot of fun, but I don’t believe for a hot second this is what Gaiman had in mind when he wrote the opening scene of the first issue back in the late 80s.
The art, though! The art on the original series operated on a spread from “pretty good” to “great for the early 90s”. No insult to the artists, but what the DC production pipeline and tooling could do at the time was never quite up to what Sandman really seemed to call for. And, this is still well before “what if every issue had good art, tho” was the standard for American comics.
The art here is astounding. Page after page of amazing spreads. You can feel Gaiman nodding to himself, thinking “finally! This was how this was always supposed to look.”
Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao
Oh heck yes, this is the stuff. A (very) loose retelling of the story of Wu Zeitan, the first and only female Chinese emperor, in a futuristic setting where animal-themed mechs have Dragonball Z fights. It’s the sort of book where you know exactly how it’s going to end, but the fun is seeing how the main character pulls it off. I read it in one sitting.
Dungeons & Dragons Spelljammer: Adventures in Space
Oh, what a disappointment.
Let’s back up for a sec. Spelljammer was an early-90s 2nd Edition D&D setting, which boiled down to essentially “magical sailing ships in space, using a Ptolemaic-style cosmology. It was a soft replacement for the Manual of the Planes, as a way to link campaign worlds together and provide “otherworldly“ adventures without having to get near the demons and other supernatural elements that had become a problem during the 80s “satanic panic.” (It would ultimately be replaced by Planescape, which brought all that back and then some.)
Tone-wise, Spelljammer was basically “70s van art”. It was never terribly successful, and thirty years on it was mostly a trivia answer, although fondly remembered by a small cadre of aging geeks. As should be entirely predictable, I loved it.
Initially, 5th edition wasn’t interested in past settings others that the deeply boring Forgotten Realms. But as the line continued, and other settings started popping back up, Spelljammer started coming up. What if? And then, there it was.
For the first time in the game’s history, 5th edition found a viable product strategy: 3 roughly 225 to 250-page hardcovers a year, two adventures, one some kind of rules expansion. The adventures occasionally contained a new setting, but the setting was always there to support the story, rather than the other way around.
Spelljammer was going to be different: a deluxe boxed set with a DM screen and three 64-page hardcovers, a setting and rules book, a monster book, and an adventure. (Roughly mirroring the PHB, DMG, MM core books.)
The immediate problem will be obvious to anyone good at mental arithmetic, which is that as a whole the product was 30 to 60 pages shorter than normal, and it felt like it. Worse, the structure of the three hardbacks meant that the monster book and adventure got way more space than they needed, crushing the actual setting material down even further.
As a result, there’s so much that just isn’t there. The setting is boiled down to the barest summary; all the chunky details are gone. As the most egregious example, in the original version The Spelljammer is a legendary ship akin to the flying dutchman, that ship makes up the background of the original logo. The Spelljammer herself isn’t even mentioned in the new version.
Even more frustrating, what is here is pretty good. They made some very savvy changes to better fit with everything else (Spelljammers now travel through the “regular” astral plane instead of “the phogiston” for example). But overall it feels like a sketch for what a 5E spelljammer could look line instead of a finished product.
This is exacerbated by the fact that this release also contains most of a 5E Dark Sun. One of the worst-kept secrets in the industry was that Hasbro had a 5E Dark Sun book under development that was scrapped before release. The races and creatures from that effort ended up here. Dark Sun also gets an amazing cameo: the adventure includes a stop in “Doomspace”, a solar system where the star has become a black hole, and the inhabited planet is just on the cusp of being sucked in. While the names are all slightly changed, this is blatantly supposed to be the final days of Athas. While I would have been first in line to pick up a 5E Dark Sun, having the setting finally collapse in on itself in another product entirely is a perfect end to the setting. I kind of loved it.
Finally, Spelljammer had some extremely racist garbage in it. To the extent that it’s hard to believe that these book had any editorial oversight at all. For a product that had the physical trappings (and price) of a premium product, the whole package came across as extremely half-assed. Nowhere more so that in the fact that they let some white supremacist shit sail through unnoticed.
Spelljammer, even more so than the OGL shitshow, caused me fundamentally reassess my relationship with the company that owns D&D. I still love the game, but I’m going to need to prove it to me before I buy anything else from them. Our support should be going elsewhere.
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton
Back during the mid-00s webcomics boom, there were a lot of webcomics that were good for webcomics, but a much smaller set that were good for comics, full stop. Kate Beaton’s Hark a Vagrant! stood head and shoulders above that second group.
Most of the people who made webcomics back then have moved on, using their webcomic to open doors to other—presumably better paying—work. Most of them have moved on from the styles from their web work. To use one obvious and slightly cheap example, Ryan North’s Squirrel Girl has different panels on each page, you know?
One of the many, many remarkable things about Ducks is that is’s recognizably the same style as Hark a Vagrant!, just deployed for different purpose. All her skills as a storyteller and and cartoonist are on display here, her ability to capture expressions with only a few lines, the sharp wit, the impeccable timing, but this book is not even remotely funny.
It chronicles the years she spent working on the Oil Sands in Alberta. A strange, remote place, full of people, mostly men, trying to make enough money to leave.
Other than a brief introduction, the book has no intrusions from the future, there’s no narration contextualizing the events. Instead, it plays out as a series of vignettes of her life there, and she trusts that the reader is smart enough to understand why she’s telling these stories in this order.
It’s not a spoiler, or much of one anyway, to say that a story about a young woman in a remote nearly all-male environment goes the way you hope it doesn’t. There’s an incredible tension to the first half of the book where you know something terrible is going to happen, it’s a horrible relief when it finally does.
As someone closer in age to her parents than her when this all happened, I found myself in a terrible rage at them as I read it—how could you let her do this? How could you let this happen? But they didn’t know. And there was nothing they could do.
It was, by far, the best book I read last year. It haunts my memory.
Jenny Sparks: The Secret History of the Authority by a bunch of hacks
I loved the original run on The Authority 20 years ago, and Jenny Sparks is one of my all-time favorite comic book characters, but I had never read Millar’s prequel miniseries about her. I picked up a copy in a used bookstore. I wish I hadn’t. It was awful.
She-Hulk omnibus 1 by Dan Slot et al
Inspired by the Disney+ show (which I loved) I picked up the first collection of the early-00s reboot of She-Hulk. I had never read these, but I remember what a great reception they got at the time. But… this wasn’t very good? It was far too precious, the 4th wall breaking way too self-conscious. A super-hero law firm with a basement full of every marvel comic as a caselaw library is a great one-off joke, but a terrible ongoing premise. The art was pretty good, though.
She-Hulk Epic Collection: Breaking the Fourth Wall by John Byrne, Steve Gerber, and Others
On the other hand, this is the stuff. Byrne makes the 4th wall breaks look easy, and there’s at joy and flow to the series that the later reboots lack. She-Hulk tearing out of the page and screaming in rage at the author is an absolutes delight. And then, when Byrne leaves, he’s replaced by Steve “Howard the Duck” Gerber, and it got even better,
Valuable Humans in Transit and other stories by qntm
This short story collection inclues the most upsetting horror story I’ve ever read, Lena, and the sequel, which manages to be even worse. Great writing, strongly recommended.