It’s nice to find reading material that feels specifically designed for your pleasure. I almost always enjoy Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, but Witches Abroad seemed like Pratchett sat down and wondered, “Now how can I make this more to David’s tastes?” Of all of Pratchett’s character sets, I love the Lancre witches best, and the meta-dissection of the maiden-mother-crone triad in Witches Abroad is a real treat. The book is a triptych of various fantasy landscapes, and it’s consistently hilarious. (I’m still giggling over a throw-away jab at The Hobbit.) Pratchett is quite a juggler, balancing pointed genre parody, cultural commentary, and meta-examination of storytelling tropes, while still giving readers a wonderfully strong narrative filled with interesting and varied characters. It’s fun, satisfying stuff (and the footnotes help).

The travelogue elements also weakened my resistance to a new release, The Clumsiest People in Europe. It’s a collection of horribly xenophobic travel writing from a Victorian author of children’s books, Favell Lee Mortimer, edited by Todd Pruzan. (This might have been another case of NPR forcing me to buy a book if I hadn’t read last week’s review in The New York Times first.)

I also made a bit of a dent in the manga stack, checking out the second volume of Doubt!! and the first of Tuxedo Gin (the latter thanks to Rose and Steven).

Doubt!! still isn’t clicking very well for me. After reading the second volume, I think it’s because the protagonist, Ai, just doesn’t have the force of personality required to carry a manga or to pull off the kind of personal reinvention that drives the story. There’s more guilty-pleasure fun in the second volume than the first, but I still don’t think Kaneyoshi Izumi is taking enough advantage of the premise’s darkly comic possibilities. I will admit that Ai’s friend, the profoundly tan Mina, is a treat. A strangely forward-thinking mantrap, she steals every scene she’s in with her blunt observations and twisted emotional logic. Ai’s at her most interesting in scenes with Mina, too, much better than when she’s stuck with her bland shôjo prince suitors.

As for Tuxedo Gin, I’m surprised by how trite or potentially unpleasant manga scenarios can be substantially improved by the participation of an anthropomorphized penguin. Dim gang boys, drippy star-crossed lovers, creepy girl-in-peril scenarios… all of these become markedly more entertaining thanks to the presence of a penguin in a necktie. I know these elements aren’t actually any better than they would be normally, but there’s just something about penguins, I guess. File this one under “Pleasures, Guilty.” (Incidentally, I think this notion is portable. Many, many comics that I find offensive or stupid would get gentler treatment if they would feature characters reincarnated as or randomly transformed into penguins. Sue Dibny, Wolverine, Batman, Northstar… the possibilities are almost limitless.)

Last but certainly not least was Fullmetal Alchemist. After careful consideration, I’ve decided it’s pretty awesome. But I go into that at painful length in this week’s Flipped, which should show up sometime today.

Well, those ships have clearly sailed. I got a flier in the mail for my 20-year high school reunion yesterday.

This should make me feel either decrepit or nostalgic, but it doesn’t really do either. I spent most of high school imagining myself with a good 20 years of daylight between myself and that particular experience, so I guess I prepared early.

I have no memory of either of the people who are organizing it, who are married to each other. (I find the idea of forming a life partnership with someone who knew me when I was 16 totally unsettling. I would really question their judgment, if not their sanity.) The people I’m curious about either weren’t in my class or are about as likely as I am to attend this event. I’d like to find out if anyone really unexpected turned out to be gay, but I doubt they put that on the name tags.

What’s really weird is to realize that some of current favorite reading material and television shows are about teen-agers and that I probably would have avoided them like the plague when I actually was a teen-ager. (I was more likely to be checking pseudo-literary smut out of the public library, discretely burying copies of American Flagg amidst all the Uncanny X-Men and Avengers, or speculating on plot developments in upcoming episodes of Dynasty.)

So, thanks for the invite, former classmates, but I’ll pass. I’m given to morbid curiosity, but I think I can resist in this case.

Fictional fathers don’t come in very interesting flavors. More often than not, they’re well-intentioned boobs who can’t handle the smallest domestic or personal crisis without the intervention of their partner. Sometimes they’re defined by their emotional distance from the family, absorbed with providing instead of caring. Or they’re reduced to bland heroism, saving the family from a variety of perils (often making up for years of emotional neglect in the process).

One of the pleasures of Andi Watson’s Little Star (Oni Press) is that it isn’t really about fatherhood. It’s more about parenting, and the conflicting choices and feelings any parent might face as they weigh their needs against those of their child’s.

It’s told from the point of view of Simon, a part-time ceramic painter and primary caregiver for three-year-old Cassie. His wife, Meg, is a full-time teacher. They’ve put their house on the market to look for a larger place. Cassie goes to pre-school three days a week. Simon’s heard about a possible vacancy in his employer’s full-time design team, and he’s tempted by the opportunity.

As Watson tracks the day-to-day activities of caring for Cassie – baths, tantrums, juice boxes, play dates, stories – he looks at the little turning points that seem to be cropping up in Simon’s path. Simon contemplates the balance of his own needs with Cassie’s and Meg’s. He’d like to move forward professionally, but he wonders if it’s fair to Cassie. (He’s also a little bothered by how easily Cassie adjusted to pre-school.) As Cassie seems to need him less, Simon naturally starts contemplating what’s next.

Little Star is a collection of small, telling moments. Watson doesn’t seem to want to make any sweeping statements about the parent-child dynamic, which is a relief. He’s chosen instead to focus on the specific, entirely everyday concerns of Simon, Cassie, and Meg. But despite the slice-of-life aims, Little Star is anything but dull. The familiar choices and challenges matter enormously Watson’s cast, and he’s given them real depth and complexity.

As usual, Watson’s art is lovely in its minimalism and succinct expressiveness. Facial expressions matter a great deal, and Watson excels at them, capturing frustration, bemusement, contemplation, exhaustion, delight, and a host of others. They’re supported by the varied body language of the characters, always clear and specific. Backgrounds and varied shading help create a sense of place and give the visuals added depth. And the covers are lovely flights of fancy. (It’s the covers that convinced me to pick this up in single issues as opposed to waiting for the trade.)

Given the normalcy of the subject matter, the individual issues might seem a bit shapeless. There’s an arc to each chapter, but it’s developed very gently. This is actually supported by the book’s bi-monthly publishing schedule. There’s no cliffhanger urgency to be diluted by extra time between installments, though each issue leaves me wanting to return to the characters and their world because they’re so involving. (That said, I’m guessing the six-issue series will read extremely well in collection. As each new issue has come out, I find myself reading each issue over again.)

The other benefit to reading the individual issues, at least for me, is finding an oasis of believable emotions at the comics shop on a regular basis. With so many high-profile comics predicated on sketchy, even disturbing interpersonal dynamics, Watson’s world of average people and everyday challenges is a welcome respite. Little Star is a smart and sensitive alternative in a summer of histrionics.

Though the humidity is certainly unpleasant. It’s hard to seriously contemplate anything when my thoughts are focused on my next shower. With the sporadic thundershowers, it’s like being in Florida, but without the theme parks and beaches.

I just don’t have the energy to go through Previews. The order form is sitting there like unfinished biology homework. I’m grateful to the Periatikons for sending me a copy of Blankets, but it’s too heavy to lift. It would slip through sweaty fingers and crush a cat.

Between the sultry heat and pounding rain, the yard is badly in need of attention. Everything looks battered, and I should go out and clean it up, but there’s no air conditioning out there. The thought of going to the gym makes me groan, because the air conditioning in the locker room is on the fritz. I’ll leave to your imaginations the unpleasant consequences of that state of affairs.

Even my reading habits have become sluggish. I keep going to the library and checking out books I’ve already read, because they’re comforting and don’t require mental effort. (My ambition extends only so far as looking for Discworld novels I haven’t read yet. But Terry Pratchett is very popular with the local library crowd, and my timing hasn’t been very good.)

And I can’t get that grapefruit gelato out of my mind. They were serving it at a stand in the new shopping mall at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, and I really, really wish I had some right now.

But at least I have the energy to whine.

I can’t really encourage anyone to wade too deeply into this much-discussed Usenet thread, because it’s horrifying and just gets worse as it goes along. It isn’t horrifying in any particularly novel way, but it is kind of a greatest-hits collection of obnoxious message board behavior, mind-numbing circular arguments, and stripped-naked sexism trying to disguise itself as principled opposition to political correctness (a gambit that always makes me want to vomit).

It’s hard to read through much of it without the mind starting to wander, probably in an act of self-defense. (“Cells… dying… Must reach… happy place.”) For whatever reason, mine made it back to a gag from Annie Hall, where Woody Allen’s character pulls Marshall McLuhan from out of nowhere to get an ill-informed blowhard to shut his yap.

And that just made think how great it would be if, in the middle of these message board rant-offs, posters’ parents started showing up out of nowhere. And their high-school English teachers. And their former Scout leaders and the people who taught them in Sunday School and baby-sat for them when they were five.

“I don’t know where you got the idea that it was all right to talk to people like that, but you certainly didn’t learn it from your mother and me.”

“I knew from the moment I read your disturbing tenth-grade essay on ‘Pride and Prejudice’ that you’d end up like this, spewing venom in some seedy newsgroup. I even noted it in your permanent record, which I will happily forward to interested parties.”

“I didn’t work two jobs to put you through college (which you couldn’t even be bothered to finish) to see you talk this way about women.”

“I think you should know that I’m writing the Scout Council to see if your merit badges can be rescinded. Your little treatise on ‘House of M’ should be all the evidence I need.”

Okay, I can’t say I’d want members of my family or other authority figures from my past to read every word I’ve ever committed to the Internet. And I’m always unnerved when my instincts run to establishing some kind of “eject” button in an open forum (though I think Dame Edna has the right idea with her remote control chair in case guests are unexpectedly disappointing).

But I’m still smitten with this idea. “You settle down this minute, or I’m stopping this thread right now! And don’t you make that face at me! I can see you in the rear-view mirror!”

(Edited because I liked the new title better.)

It’s a few days old, but I was pleased to see this article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about a high-school anime/manga club:

“Founded in 2002 by 2004 graduate Anna Castore, the club has about 20 members, with about equal numbers of boys and girls, and two sponsors, Assistant Principal Michael Ghilani and Japanese teacher Junko Kapples. Ghilani said the club, which meets every Wednesday, was one of the school’s most active… ‘It is as well-oiled a machine as I’ve seen for any club,’ he said.”

They have a pretty cool web site, too.

It doesn’t surprise me that Upper Saint Clair High School has a club like this. It’s in an incredibly posh community, and the school’s campus is pretty breathtaking. (It’s along the route to one of our favorite Pittsburgh retail zones, and one of us almost always mutters, “Damn, that’s a nice-looking school,” as we drive past.)

Speaking of high schools and manga, I thought the latest volume of Hot Gimmick was due out this week. Why is it nowhere to be found on The List? In fact, I seem to remember dreading a diet of tap water and saltines based on June’s solicitations. Where is everything? Are the publishers waiting until the end of the month to financially crush me in one fell swoop instead of bleeding me over a series of weeks? I need answers!

Oh, and there’s a new Flipped up.

This is clearly my weekend to contemplate difficult fictional women. I’m really fond of DC’s Huntress, Helena Bertinelli, mostly because she’s such an underdog.

She has an iffy reputation in DC’s super-hero community. Batman disapproves of her, and many of his colleagues have fallen in line with that assessment. Many fans dislike her, maybe because they agree with Batman or because they preferred the pre-Crisis Earth 2 version. (I liked Helena Wayne a lot, too.)

But whenever a writer or character trots out Batman’s objections to Helena’s methods, I can’t help but consider the source. I’ve never been able to see too much of a qualitative distinction between his methods and hers (especially since War Games), so I’m naturally inclined to side with Huntress, because at least she’s not being a hypocrite.

Huntress, like many, many franchise characters, has gotten some really inconsistent handling during her relatively short career. One of the highlights of Gail Simone’s run on Birds of Prey has been the way she’s incorporated all of Helena’s history into a coherent whole while moving the character forward in interesting, entertaining ways. That has to be a tough trick to pull off, but I’m glad Simone did, because it’s given Huntress a degree of dignity and sympathy without sanding down too many of her sharper edges.

Simone wrote Saturday’s episode of Justice League Unlimited, “Double Date.” She does essentially the same thing, in that she has to take a lesser known DC character, communicate as much as an audience needs to know about Huntress, and tell an engaging story that stands on its own. And she has to do it in 20-odd minutes.

So it makes sense that Simone would pick the aspect of Helena’s character that’s defined her for much of her time as Huntress. Simone tells a story about Huntress as the violent, vengeful, and somewhat misunderstood truant. She picks up on themes that have been explored in the comics – Huntress failing to live up to Justice League standards because of her ruthlessness – while trying to add on as many layers as time allows – calling to mind Greg Rucka’s excellent mini-series, Batman/Huntress: Cry for Blood, which introduces Huntress to the Question.

And that’s a perfectly fair approach. There’s a certain amount of distillation needed when turning long-standing comics characters into wide-release animated characters. I think Simone pulled off another tough trick. It’s just unfortunate (for me) that the way Simone did it rubs wrongly against my shameless pro-Huntress partisanship.

On a meta level, it was weird to see Black Canary be so unsympathetic towards Huntress. That doesn’t really have anything to do with the JLU universe; it’s just nerdish disappointment that a dynamic I enjoy from the comics wasn’t translated to Helena’s animated debut. (Okay, maybe it does. In Canary’s other spotlight episode, she did almost the exact same thing: manipulate a male colleague to further a very personal, morally questionable agenda. Way to empathize, cartoon Dinah!)

I’ve always liked comics Dinah, but she was further enshrined as an all-time favorite through her treatment of Helena. Instead of singing the company song (which Oracle was piping into her earpiece), Dinah decided to draw her own conclusions about Helena. She dealt with Helena on her own terms. That simple act of consideration was enough to spark a significant and positive change in Huntress, and it led to what I think is one of the great adventuring partnerships in contemporary comics. (Of course, control freak Oracle had to screw it up, but that’s been fun to watch, too.)

The obvious solution to my personal gripe is for JLU to let Simone write another episode where she picks up on Huntress and Black Canary a bit down the road. Now that Helena has been introduced and given something of a turning point, I would really like to see what her next steps are.

Speaking of next steps, I can’t get too bothered about DC’s announcement of the “one year later” mandate that’s going to tie into their next Crisis. In my experience, a lost year might be the best thing that happened to a lot of their titles, particularly if they pick up with different creative teams.

The exception, though, is Simone’s Birds of Prey. (Okay, and Manhunter is too, but that’s a different post.) One of the things that’s made this comic such a pleasure is the careful, incremental character work Simone has done with her cast. I really don’t want to miss a year of their adventures and interaction, because Simone has created the sense that important, nuanced shifts happen all the time. I’m sure she can pull off the time-jump in an effective way, but I really don’t want to miss 12 months of Helena’s life. She’s one of the few DC characters who actually changes and grows in interesting, significant ways, and it seems like a waste to skip over any of it.

As I may have mentioned, I usually wake up stupidly early. It’s not a bad thing, as I can surf the web, drink lots of coffee, and hang out with the cats. It also familiarizes me with some delightfully mixed television.

A while back, it was Friday the 13th: The Series, which was hypnotically terrible. Then it was an old favorite, Daria. Back when Cartoon Network still ran such thing, I always liked those weeks when Boomerang would feature wonderfully horrible old Hanna-Barbera cartoons like Birdman and The Herculoids.

Lately, it’s been My So-Called Life. I remember watching part of the first episode when the series was originally broadcast. It made me extremely nervous, and I intensely disliked mope-y protagonist Angela Chase. (In fairness, she probably reminded me too much of my own alienated posturing in high school.)

I’m still not crazy about Angela, though I think Claire Danes is pretty amazing. But I’m deeply, deeply smitten with Sharon Cherski, the seemingly nice, normal friend Angela dumps for messed-up Rayanne and sweet Rickie. She could have been just awful: the rigid, conformist proto-princess that Angela wisely shed in favor of her circle of damaged woodland sprites.

But Sharon, as played by Devon Odessa, is awesome (at least to me). She may have a jock boyfriend, she may be a little too invested in yearbook, but she has Angela’s number memorized. In a show where almost everyone is dedicated to propping up Angela’s morose infallibility, Sharon views Angela with frank bafflement and even pity.

That’s kind of hilarious, and it’s also strangely moving. Sharon has no idea what she did to make her lifelong friend cut her loose, and she never quite loses the sting of that betrayal. Sharon doesn’t move on so much as she gives up, trying to deal with the notion that Angela has changed materially or, worse, was never the person Sharon believed her to be. They’re smaller moments than Angela mooning over Jordan Catalano or gazing into her own navel, but I like those moments loads more because they’re spiky and specific.

And I never like A.J. Langer’s Rayanne better than in her scenes with Sharon. Rayanne is a bottomless pit of need shrouded in bohemian artifice; Sharon is grounded, pragmatic, and flinty in that over-achiever kind of way. They’re opposites who don’t quite attract, but they spark. I always prefer relationships that start from a point of mutual antagonism, and this isn’t an exception.

As Sharon circles around the lead misfits, torn between disapproval and fascination, she reminds me strongly of Charisma Carpenter’s Cordelia from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I always loved Cordelia for many of the same reasons I’m partial to Sharon. Both deflate the certainty and self-involvement of their shows’ protagonists.

Cordelia is generally more successful, as her targets are marginally less self-obsessed than Angela. Then again, they’d almost have to be. Also, Cordelia is specifically trying to deflate them, while Sharon’s approach seems more anthropological or deductive.

I like to credit the creators with wanting me to like and sympathize with both young women. I know a lot of people don’t, particularly in Cordelia’s case, but I think both Winnie Holzman (My So-Called Life) and Joss Whedon (Buffy) liked them a lot. I think that because both got to be right a lot more often than the lead characters.

Say what you will about Cordelia’s approach, her tactlessness, even her cruelty, she had an uncanny ability to think clearly and make cogent observations. Sharon may have often seemed like she was talking to a jumper on a window ledge, a weird mix of patronizing caution and self-righteousness, but she almost always had a point. These are the best kind of spoiler characters, to my way of thinking. (And Cordelia even has the ideal literary namesake for her worldview that “Tact is just not saying true stuff. I’ll pass.”)

I wasn’t really expecting much from the comic shop today… the second issues of Zatanna and Villains United. (Nothing wrong with either of those, mind you. It just seems kind of silly to go to the shop for two comics, and I wouldn’t have if the shops weren’t smack between work and home.)

I toyed with the idea of picking up the 11th volume of Maison Ikkoku, but I have some weird block about buying that book on the day it comes out. It’s a reliable fall-back title when I feel like buying something I know I’ll like but I’m at loose ends for something else to read. It’s kind of like scrambled eggs for dinner; I never really plan on eating them, but it’s always nice to know they’re in the fridge.

I don’t know how I missed the fact that the fourth volume of Hikaru No Go was coming out today. I’m delighted it did, obviously, because it’s fantastic, but it just escaped my notice that it was due. Maybe my subconscious forced me to ignore it on the new releases list, because it knew I would need a pleasant surprise as I watched other shoppers cart copies of House of M to the cash register. (Just a suggestion: if the very idea of House of M makes you feel dead inside, why not re-direct your funds to an absolutely riveting manga about a board game?)

It’s also possible that I’m beside myself with excitement over next week, which promises both Scott Pilgrim Versus the World and the next volume of Hot Gimmick.

I don’t think of myself as a particularly morbid person. I love murder mysteries, but I’m more interested in the process of detection and the exploration of motive than the gory specifics of the crime or crimes they portray. I would much rather read a dense, complex mystery by, say, P.D. James than a blood-soaked thriller that seems more like a movie pitch than a novel.

I’m not crazy about true-crime books as a rule, preferring the comforting distance of fiction. It’s a fine distinction, I know, but if I’m going to read about someone who’s been shot, stabbed, or poisoned, I’d much rather they come from a writer’s imagination than a police blotter. It might just be part of a reluctance to seem like too much of a voyeur, or a superstitious instinct to avoid bringing karmic misfortune down on myself by taking too much prurient interest in the misfortunes of others.

There are always exceptions, of course, and a significant one is Rick Geary’s Treasury of Victorian Murder series from NBM. On one hand, the crimes Geary relates took place over a century ago, so they don’t give off the ghoulish vibe of a churned-out Court TV spin-off. On the other, he tells them really, really well, which spares them the same comparison.

The Beast of Chicago traces the infamous career of H.H. Holmes, widely credited as America’s first serial killer. An opportunistic madman, he used the hubbub of the Chicago World’s Fair to draw potential victims to his nearby rooming house. Estimates on the number of people who died at his hand vary, ranging from a couple of dozen up to a couple of hundred.

I’m familiar with the story, having read and enjoyed Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America. (It’s available in paperback now, for anyone who was wondering.) Larson juxtaposes the murders with Chicago’s campaign to host the Fair and the work of the architects who designed the grounds. Some of the themes overlap – ambition, opportunity, turning points both personal and cultural – but I’ve always thought it best to view it as two really interesting books that just happen to live between the same covers.

Geary focuses on Holmes – his charisma, his bottomless, sadistic inventiveness, and the contortions of logistics required to evade capture for as long as he did. At the same time, Geary gives a sense of the times in which Holmes operated and how they served his criminal predilections. It’s a crowded story, packed with places, events, and people, but Geary’s clear, sly style keeps everything understandable and engaging.

The books in the Treasury series are great guilty pleasures. Carefully researched but sensational, richly crafted but lurid, they feel like an indulgence, but one that respects your intelligence, even as it winks at you for getting a cheap thrill. They let you stop and stare without feeling too bad about doing it.