dhampyresa

What did you finish reading

A whole bunch of comic books in French! here they are, because I feel like talking about them:

Magnéto: Le Testament, by Greg Pak (scenario) and Carmine di Giandomenico (art): I don't know if this is areedition or just my comic store who unearthed a stock of them (because lol, Panini, lol), but either way it is super timely, given the subject matter and the fact that I spend all Friday watching the D-Day celebration with my grandma and listening to her talk to her time in the French Résistance/life in France during the war. My grandma's a badass, but I'm not here to talk about her.

Despite the fact that this comic is named after Magneto, there is zero reference to the Marvel Universe and no mention of mutants at all. In fact, there are exactly three points where you might say it's Max Eisenhardt (this comic falls on the Eisenhardt side of the Erik Lehnsherr/Max Eisenhardt as Magneto's real name debate) uses metal-controlling powers, but a) it's never stated outright that it's what's happening, b) because if it is Max certainly doesn't realise it and c) it's all explainable in other ways. The first incident is Max being super good at picking up his father's watch piece (his father is a watchmaker, which, to me at least, brings to mind Einstein's probably apocryphal quote on Hiroshima that "if [he] had known, [he] would have become a watchmaker"), which is explained by Max just being super good at picking up small watch pieces because of not having shaking hands. the second incident is Max throwing a javelin very far, but maybe he's just good at throwing javelins, and the third incident is when his whole family gets shot by Einsatzgruppen and Max survives, which could be luck, as much as waking up in a mass grave containing your whole family can be counted as being lucky.

All this to say, it's a very powerful comic about the life of Max Eisenhardt, German Jew born to a WW1 veteran father, in the 1930s and 1940s. Having said that, ou might think you know how bad this is going to get. Wrong. It gets worse. The Eisenhardt family flees Germany following Krystallnacht, to Poland. More precisely, to warsaw. When they finally manage to escape the Warsaw ghetto, the whole gets shot, yet Max manages to survive, only to be shipped off to Auschiwtz, where he's assigned to burning bodies, after having lied bout his age to stay alive. Silver lining, if you can call it that: in the Gypsy inernment camp right next door, Max finds Magda again, the girl he was in love with back in Germany before the war. I won't spoli anymore of it, but it is an excellent book and you should all read it. I know that, even though I'd read it already, re-reading it still felt like a punch in the gut.


Mauvais genre, by Chloé Cruchaudet (scenario and art): I was drawn to this by interplay between the cover and the pun in the title, which rightly lead me to believe it was going to deal with gender themes. (The pun, if anyone's curious is that "mauvais genre" in French usually means something like "bad boy"/"bad girl", but can be literally translated as "wrong gender" too.) It's about a WW1 soldier who consires with his wife to dress up as a woman and avoid going back to the frontlines, then to avoid the death penalty for desertion. This takes place for a period of over ten years, then the death penalty is waived and he goes back to living like a man, except... Except he has regrets about going back to being a man and at the same time he's becoming more and more violent and his wife and him are fighting more and more and also he's getting hallucinations (from alcohol withdrawal? I think) and then she shoots him and her trial for his murder frames the story. I liked the early parts, about gender between both World Wars, but not so much the ending. Still a good story.


Oracle, T1: la Pythie, by Olivier Peru (scenario) et Stefano Martino (art): I felt like I knew where this was going when I read the back cover and I was (sadly) right. I am getting sick of rape as a motive for women's revenge and as a way to rob women of their power (literally, in this case, because she needs to be "pure"/a virgin for her fortunetelling to work). I did not expect Apollo to be the one to do the deed and the narrative does acknowledge that it is super fucked up, but I still ragequit the book.


Funérailles, T2: Pain In Black, by Florent Maudoux (writing and art): This series is supposed to be a prequel to Freaks Squeele, by the same author, except that Freaks Squeele is set in modern day + superheroes, but this is second world fantasy. It's a good second world and the whole issue of (almost) every pregnancy being of murderous twins and the social consequences of it are (so far) fairly well done, but I have no idea how it fits in the world of Freaks Squeele, or why they get deliveries by the devil. The plot in this volume felt very interstitial, like it was building up to something other than the fight against the mountain dudes, not helped by the timeskip in the middle. (I'm getting a bit tired of the brushing aside of LGBT themes in this author's work, but that's a rant for another time, as is the one about maybe dialing it back on some of the kinks, seriously. And I haven't read Rouge yet, so.) Also, I have no idea how Séraphon is back, because he was quite clearly supposed to be dead last volume and now he's back and wants to be king, like wtf? I don't mind that he's back, because I like Séraphon (he's a doctor!), but I thought his return was poorly handled. Given that it was all-but-stated last time that he was her husband's twin, you'd think Luciane would think it was him she was seeing, not Séraphon, especially given that she saw Séraphon, what, two times, ten years apart for a total of ten minutes? So I'm not buying that. Still liked it a lot.

Les Quatre de Baker Street, T5: La Succession Moriarty, by Jean-Blaise Djian & Olivier Legrand (scenario) and David Etien (art): STILL THE BEST SHERLOCK HOLMES ADAPTATION BAR NONE. This issue deals with Holmes coming back after the Reichenbach Falls, which the kids take with varying degrees of joy/anger. Give them a break, they spent all last volume mourning him. It is super super great, like always, but I really don't want to spoil it because it is super great. (Charlie is still the best.) I really should do a promo post for this series at some point.


On the English side of things, just:

"We Have Always Fought": Essays on Fiction, Craft and Fandom, by Kameron Hurley: It was great! There were a few essays I hadn't already read, so that was cool and even the ones I had already read were a nice re-read. Hurley makes a lot of really good points.


What are you reading now


The Gospel of Loki, by Joanne Harris: Still working my way thorugh it and grinding my teeth at some things. It's becoming more and more apparent that harris and me don't agree on the characterisation of some of the Norse gods. her Loki and Odin are usually spot-on, but even here we have our differences (see my tangent on the bloodbrother bond from two weeks ago.)


What are you reading next

Almso definitely the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. I'm going to need audiobooks in the near future, so let me see if I can find these ones.

In the mean time and because I have a sudden craving: does anyone have any good biography of Tomoe Gozen they would reccomend? Failing that, any good biographies?

What did you finish reading

Nothing.


What are you reading now

The Gospel of Loki, by Joanne Harris: I'm only about 5 chapters in (Svadilfari just cam on the scene, for those familiar), but it's great so far. I love the Loki voice between the humour ("I sat up and tried a winning smile. No one around me seemed to be won.") and the contrast between young!Loki the story is happening to and old!Loki telling it to us and the way old!Loki's venom occasionally peeks out from under young!Loki's:

Who needs friends when you can have the certitudes of hostiity? You know where you stand with an enemy. You know he won't betray you. it's the ones who claim to be your friends that you need to be aware of. Still, that was a lesson I was yet to learn.

I like Loki's "never trust X" rules, although they are sometimes heartbreaking: "So, until then, remember this: Never trust a friend." Oh, Loki. I like the insights into Norse mythology ("Still, you'll notice that history doesn't reveal what happened to Odin's other brothers, the legendary Vili and Ve.") and the clever way it gets played with ("My father was a lightning strike and my mother was a pile of dry twigs (no that's not a metaphor) which, to be fair to Yours Truly, made for pretty poor parenting."). I loved the beginning of the "Odin and Loki become bloodbrothers" scene

'It seems to me that someone like you could be a big hit in my camp.'
'I bet they could. What's in it for me?'
'Well, freedom, to begin with. Freedom and opportunity.'
'Freedom? Do me a favour. Do you think I'm not free?'
He shook his head. 'You think you are?'

but I hated the way it ended, because OMG NO WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK? If there's one moment in all of Norse mythology where Odin and Loki are truly equals, it's that one. I mean, I know the myths don't give us the story, but I can't think of that moment as anything else. If Odin forces Loki into being his brother, like here, then their relationship looks completely different and makes them both look like idiots, frankly: Odin for placing even the smallest measure of trust in someone he has no reason to trust and Loki for just going with Odin on it. Take the rune and run, Loki, you'll save yourself a world of trouble.

Other than that, I still have my familiar problems with Harris' Runemarks series that this is a prequel too, but maybe that'll change by the end of this book.


What are you reading next

I don't know yet.