Today’s stack: a bunch of comics! I’ve mentioned before that I have fallen way behind in my comics in the past few years, which means I have a huge backlog that I always imagine I’ll get through because I generally read comics fairly quickly. But that still means sitting down and actually reading them! Here’s the latest batch I’ve read — a couple of older ones, and some brand-new ones as well.
Agents of S.U.I.T.: Wild Ghost Chase by John Patrick Green with Christopher Hastings and Pat Lewis
Agents of S.U.I.T. is a spin-off of the InvestiGators series, featuring various agents (often animals) solving mysteries and fighting bad guys; this is the third volume. In previous volumes, we encountered a ghost haunting an old underground base hidden in a cornfield — former General Inspector Tract. He’s been dead for a long time, but he can’t shuffle off this mortal coil until he completes … well, something. He has an idea of what his unfinished business is, and he’s determined to get it done.
Meanwhile, Agent Zeb (the sheep) seems to be the only one picking up the clues about GI Tract and nobody believes him. Oh, and there’s also a rash of missing cryptids, but surely that’s unrelated.
These books are always filled with tons of puns and visual jokes, but even with all the silliness there are still actual mysteries that the agents solve — it’s fun to see how all the apparently random threads and clues fit together when everything is revealed at the end.
Teleportation and Other Luxuries by Archie Bongiovanni, Mary Verhoeven, Lucas Gattoni
The Blamazon Teen Scientist Competition is a prestigious contest that promises fame and fortune along with scientific glory for the winning team. But the team of four teenagers that we meet at the beginning of this book definitely have their work cut out for themselves — they can’t seem to overcome their differences. Everyone expects Tyler Risley to be a genius because of his parents, but he seems more interested in his social media popularity. L.J. is his town’s jack-of-all-trades and is great at solving engineering problems, but he feels out of place at Blamazon. Allegra is insightful and brilliant but is so shy that it’s hard to get anything out of her. And Gabby seems to hate Blamazon, so why is she even here?
The team is pushed to work on something amazing because the Risleys’ reputation is riding on Tyler’s shoulders, so they decide to try the impossible: teleportation. Can it be done? Should it be done?
Though the characters and setting are new, the overall vibe is familiar: a team of misfits, distrustful of each other, manage to figure out how to get along and achieve something incredible. And, of course, learn some important lessons about friendship along the way. It’s a bit more diverse than the teen movies I grew up with — the kids here are variously non-binary, trans, and gay — but the interactions between the teens plays out largely in the way you’d expect. So while there aren’t any huge overall surprises if you’ve read any “misfit team” stories before, there are still some fun details sprinkled throughout.
Space Chasers by Leland Melvin, Joe Caramagna, and Alison Acton
Written by real-life astronaut Leland Melvin, here’s another story about a group of kids learning to be a team — this time, to go to space! Leland Melvin (who is also a character in the story) is recruiting kids to be in a pilot program at NASA that will send kids up to a space station. They won’t be responsible for anything critical, but that still requires a lot of testing and training before they’re ready.
This group includes a mechanical whiz who usually skips classes to work at her brother’s auto shop, a jock who loves science but has a hard time telling his football-loving dad, a kid with cerebral palsy who’s interested in medical research, and an arts-loving girl who also happens to love astronomy. One of the main sources of tension comes when a fifth girl joins the team as an alternate — Indira and Tia both go to the same school, and there’s some bad blood between them that they’ll have to sort out.
Of course, as you might guess, the trip up to the space station isn’t as simple as planned — things go wrong, and it’s up to the kids to Apollo 13 some creative solutions so that everyone can get home safely. As unlikely as it is that NASA will send kids up to space (especially after that 1986 movie SpaceCamp), it still makes for a fun, nail-biting story. And in case you’re wondering, yes, the kids do learn some important lessons about friendship along the way.
Tectiv Volume One: Noirtopia by Richard Ashley Hamilton and Marco Matrone
In a post-apocalyptic LA, people and mutants are mostly just trying to get by. Bingo Finder is one of the few literate people left — she loves discovering old caches of books, despite the fact that very few people will pay the scavengers for them. When her best friend goes missing, Bingo decides to take inspiration from her old books, becoming a “tectiv” and following the clues herself.
Bingo starts narrating the story herself, trying to copy the noir genre with her limited exposure to it — it reminded me a little bit of Calvin’s “Tracer Bullet” character from Calvin & Hobbes. It’s occasionally played for laughs as Bingo finds her footing, but there’s still a real mystery to be solved. In this world, there’s a deep fear of robots — though they haven’t been seen in ages. The mayor of Ellay (as its known) is proud of his post-crime, post-wealth, post-everything society, but it’s clear that there’s some weird stuff going on in secret.
I really enjoyed this one — this version of the world is bizarre, with giant talking wolves and many-armed mutants. The juxtaposition of old noir tropes with this futuristic setting is a clever way of getting inside Bingo’s head and showing how she thinks. Although Bingo solves this mystery, the ending shows this is just the beginning — there’s more tectiv work in her future, and I’m curious to see where this series goes next.
Arca by Van Jensen and Jesse Lonergan
When things fell apart on earth, the billionaires had a plan: a giant ship, the Arca, filled with everything they would need to carry them to a new planet, plus all of the luxuries they were accustomed to. All of the work was done by the so-called “settlers,” kids who would graduate and join the billionaires as “citizens” when they hit their 18th birthdays.
Effie — who has been secretly taught to read by one of the citizens she babysits for — begins to suspect that the truth has been hidden from them. Why is it that all of the newly minted citizens are sequestered away in a different section of the ship? Once her old mentor turned 18, Effie never got to see her in person again, though she has been assured that Frieda is thriving over on that other forbidden floor.
This story of haves and have-nots, and the lengths that the rich will go to so they can maintain their wealth and status, hits some of the usual notes: the indoctrination of the kids and the web of lies that keeps them in the dark, the celebrations and little boons that serve as distractions. I have always liked stories about colony ships — what happens when you have multiple generations of a population stuck on a giant ship making its way through space? It’s an entire civilization in a nutshell — what will make it crack? Arca has a few twists up its sleeves, and Effie is a great character to root for as she’s digging for answers.
Haruki Murakami: Manga Stories Volume 3 adapted by Jean-Christophe Deveny, illustrated by PMGL
I mentioned this series before last spring when I’d read the first two volumes; these are short stories by Haruki Murakami that have been adapted into comic book form. This volume includes only two stories, but they’re each a bit longer: “Scheherazade” and “Sleep.” I’ll note that these books are for adults: the stories include sex, but also I think the topics touched on in the stories would not really be of interest to kids.
“Scheherezade” is about a man who is housebound (though you never learn the reason why), and Scheherezade is a woman who comes to his house regularly to care for him — she brings him food, does various household chores, and then perfunctorily sleeps with him. And afterward she tells him stories — one about a past life as a lamprey, and a longer story about her obsession with a classmate when she was younger. Her story is strange and unsettling, as is the framing story about the man: we never get an explanation for this setup, and when the story ends it feels somewhat incomplete, like you’re still waiting for something to happen next.
“Sleep” is told from the point of view of a woman who can’t get to sleep. She’s a housewife, sending her husband off to work and her kid to school every morning, doing her chores, making supper … and then at night she just stays up. She reads Anna Karenina. She goes out for drives. She watches her husband and son sleeping. It has been seventeen days, and her family hasn’t noticed.
As I mentioned before, the illustration style is unusual, a bit ugly. Characters aren’t shiny and smiling — they have wrinkles and lumpy bodies and somewhat caricatured features. The world around them looks a bit messy and worn out. The art really fits the vibe of the stories, which is also uncomfortable, disturbing, a mix of the mundane and the surreal. These aren’t stories that wrap up neatly at the end, but instead leave you wondering what just happened.
My Current Reads
I’ve got some more comics in the pipeline, and I’ve been enjoying Luminous by Sylvia Park (which I mentioned last week) — a bit of a detective story about robots, a bit of family drama. Oh, and I’ve also been perusing The Madman’s Gallery by Edward Brooke-Hitching, a book from a couple years ago featuring weird artwork throughout history. If you like oddities and curiosities, you’d probably enjoy it!
Disclosure: I received review copies of the books covered in this column. Affiliate links to Bookshop.org help support my writing and independent booksellers.
