Friday night is bookpost night

Well, uh, everything is pretty fucked up right now, buuuut I feel like I'm not going to benefit the dozen or two people who read this journal by hollering about it. But I can at least validate your parking: the amount of cruelty, greed, and chaos in America right now is absolutely off the chain, and if you're feeling stressed about it, IMO that's rational and normal. I don't have anything to suggest that you haven't already heard, tho.

What I DO have that you haven't heard are some recs of rad stuff to read, so that's what I'll go ahead and post.

Sylvan Migdal — Carboniferous (comics)

May 17, 2024

Readable online!

This (completed, GN-sized) sci-fi comedy webcomic is an order of magnitude smarter than it looks, while still being exactly as fun as it looks. A squishy galactic federation nepo-baby blunders into a backwater lost-colony planet and instantly re-inflames a botched first-contact detente, an infinite number of local power struggles, and a weirdly lethal AR game that no one remembers signing up for.

I almost never saw anyone talking about this one, and I think it's heinously underrated! Peak webcomics, tbh!

Heads-up for workplace comic-readers: this series is perfectly SFW, but it shares a domain with a whole bunch of good-natured porn by the same author, so be careful where ya click.

Zito Madu — The Minotaur at Calle Lanza

Nov. 13, 2024

A mostly realistic memoir with a lone surreal episode. A brutal practice of self-knowledge? Traveling “wrong” in order to claim a place more thoroughly? The meaning of labyrinth for its denizen?

^^ That was meant as notes for a later expanded review, but on reflection I don’t think they can be improved, so I present them as-is. No refunds.

Valerie Halla — Curse/Kiss/Cute, episode 0

Jan 27, 2025

Readable Online!

If you do everything I tell you to as a matter of sensible policy, then you may remember Valerie Halla as the cartoonist of Goodbye to Halos, a gentle and queer fantasy webcomic that looked fresh to death, seemed like it wanted to go somewhere real exciting but didn’t quite know the way yet, and eventually ran aground and wiped out. (By the way, a halted-unfinished webcomic is never a true failure, in my book. It was always worth sharing that thing shouting from your heart, and for us it was always worth watching. Every wipeout expands the possibility space and teaches us something new to want.) You might also be aware that she was the colorist on the last 1/4 or so of Octopus Pie, speaking of looking fresh to death.

This is not a comic; it’s the “pilot episode” of a horny urban fantasy illustrated prose serial. But formally speaking, it does a couple real interesting things that draw from the modern English-language strain of “visual novel” video games, which in turn are heavily influenced by the formal/narrative tendencies of 00’s–10’s webcomics. So it’s not a hard break, if you get me.

Ok, listen: it feels a little risky to push this on even my treasured gayer-than-baseline readership. It is ever so slightly closer to the furry lane of the freeway than most people vibe with, and it’s not porn but it is kinda rowdy and rude. But I formally recommend that every one of you take a chance on it anyway, because!

ITEM 1: It’s plain fucking good!! It’s witty and sly and cute, the characters are fun as hell, the prose is a delight, and I love the illustrations.

ITEM 2: It’s formally interesting! Give that sound-cue feature a try, see what it does to the scrolling-fiction experience and see what it makes you feel. IMO it’s part of a unified whole with the distracted and evasive narrative voice, contributing to a particular ludo-mechanical reading experience that feels fresh and raw.

ITEM 3: In its own soft and oblique way, this might actually be the most inherently and irreducibly transgender thing I’ve ever read, and IMO that is good and urgent and intensely exciting all on its own. The central themes of “monstrosity” and self-answering questions are incredibly potent, and the whole thing is suffused with the joy of expanding possibilities and the removal of constraints. I trust you to already know why someone might be desperately thirsty for that in this present historical moment; I'd like to suggest that maybe you'd benefit from it too, even if you weren't actively looking for it prior to reading this.

Sarah Webb — Kochab (comics, re-read)

Feb 10, 2025

(readable online! Or, grab the book.)

Previously reviewed, this is a standalone (web-serialized) graphic novel about a free-spirited village girl and an immortal ifrit imprisoned by her own memories (girl-by-force-of-will) who tentatively fall in love while traversing the wreckage of a dead arcology-palace in the arctic.

This re-read was via the beautiful Hiveworks paperback edition that kickstarted a while back. The story benefits greatly from the collected format; I remembered it feeling a bit circular and oblique during the middle, but it turns out that was just the serialization delay, and everything feels clear and speedy without it.

Anyway, I love this comic.