Black Mama, White Mama

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I know that there are readers out there who occasionally read even my non-comics related posts, and so I thought I’d let both of you know that the grindhouse flick Black Mama, White Mama is really pretty darn good. Pam Grier doesn’t get nearly as much screen time as she should, but overall the acting is really surprisingly good (Sid Haig as a maniacal wannabe cowboy is especially fine), the plot is intricate, clever and even (within limits) plausible.. The film starts off with a exploitative women-in-prison riff, complete with predatory lesbian matrons, shower scenes, and catfights, veers through a women on the run sequence, and ends up with a satisfyingly, seedily bleak vision, in which the only ones who really win are the cops — and no, that’s not a good thing. Jack Hill, who also directed “Coffy”, is in charge here, and, yeah, the more of his movies I see the more impressed I am. Quentin Tarantino worships him, I think, and with good reason — this is really fine pulp. Classic stuff.

Update: Well, and duh, as it turns out Jack Hill did not direct this; Eddie Romero is the man responsible. I know this not because I checked my sources but because…Jack Hill himself commented on my blog! To tell me I’m an idiot! OH MY GOD! I’ll have to make foolish misstatements much more often if I get this kind of payback….

Black Mama, White Mama is still a pretty great movie, though. I’ll have to try to find more Eddie Romero movies now….

AA’

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I’ve been interested in reading more Moto Hagio ever since seeing some of her work in TCJ #269 and reading the great interview with her by Matt Thorn (which is now online here.) I recently managed to get a cheap copy of the out-of-print Thorn-translated Hagio volume A A’, which remains one of the few books of hers in English as far as I can tell.

Anyway, A A’ is pretty fascinating. In form, the book is a series of three related stories, all dealing with a genetically modified red-haired race of humans known as unicorns. In content, it’s a very odd hybrid of adult post-60s sci-fi (think Samuel Delaney, John Varley) and YA fiction. So there are quite sophisticated sexual themes, especially in the last story X + Y, which involves homosexuality and gender-swapping. But where Delaney or Varley would use these themes as an opportunity for more or less prurient explicitness, Hagio’s take veers towards romance rather than sex. In some ways, the closest analogy is probably Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness (which, not completely coincidentally, Matt Thorn himself discusses briefly here.)

But again the Le Guin connection isn’t quite right; Le Guin (in Hand and elsewhere) is very interested in world building, in putting together logical societies, and in psychological accuracy. This seems much less important to Hagio, whose characters are limned fairly quickly, and whose worlds are even less specific. In some ways, in fact (and this is the last dropped name, promise), she’s more like Philip K. Dick. Like him, her worlds don’t necessarily hold together all that well — I, at least, got the sense as I was reading her that she was basically making up the parameters as she went along (the description of how Mars is going to be terraformed, using inflatable gels, kites, and maybe dust, are teasingly, intentionally ludicrous.) Her characters are often defined by lacuna, or what isn’t there — the Unicorns as a race are oddly emotionally distant and vulnerable (prone, we learn at various times, to anorexia, clumsiness, and refusing to use first person pronouns.) And all the stories center, in one way or another, on memory loss.

Where PKD uses the spaces in his narrative to show the fragility of reality, though, Hagio is working towards something else. Character, memory, world, and reality are all secondary to, and hinged upon, emotion and, especially, on trauma. The art has a open look (not a lot of blacks or heavy lines, cartoony faces, sketchy backgrounds) and the stories are really series of semi-connected incidents rather than strong singular narratives, but beneath the breezy surface, Hagio is obsessed by pain, and, elliptically by childhood abuse. Perhaps the clearest example of the way in which Hagio simultaneously evades and highlights these issues is the unicorn characters themselves. As I mentioned, the unicorns are all emotionally distant. This is partially explained as just being the way they are; they’re kind of bio-engineered Vulcan computer geeks. At the same time, though, Hagio defines all three by discussions of childhood trauma — and the implication is that the unicorn’s emotional oddness is the result of that trauma, not of their genes. The tension is most clear in 4/4, which is build around the question of whether unicorns in general, and a child-like unicorn named Trill in particular, have emotions. Trill is being experimented on by a scientist/father-figure who seems to love her, contradictorily, because she has no emotions.

Actually, though, I think my favorite of the pieces here is the one where the connections are least explicit. The first and title story of the book, “A, A’”, is about a unicorn named Adelade Lee. Sent to a distant planet to participate in a research project, Adelade is killed in an accident. A clone, prepared for just such an eventuality, is then revived, and sent to the planet as a replacement. The clone, of course, doesn’t remember any of Addy’s friends — nor does she remember Addy’s former lover, Regg. Regg tries to reestablish a connection, but fails. He decides to leave the planet for another research station, where he is killed. Addy decides she did love him after all, and prepares to try to forge a relationship with Regg’s clone, who arrives at the planet as the story ends.

Obviously, with multiple memory losses, twins, and unrequited love up the wazoo, this is one big, gloppy soap opera. But again, lurking just beneath the surface, is a painful, never quite expressed parable about trauma, memory, and the inability to escape the past. The story opens with the cloned Addy being primed with the old Addy’s memories to the time when she first went to the planet for research. She “remembers” in particular, the moment when her pet pony died by falling into a crevice. She cries — but when she wakes up she says she doesn’t remember why. Throughout the rest of the story, Addy is locked in a round of, ostensibly, trying to remember, and, beneath that, trying to forget. Her inability to remember Regg is, narratively, the result of her being a clone; at the same time, though, it is hard not to see it as an unwillingness to remember, an inability to face her past.

The climax of the narrative comes while Regg and Addy are on the surface of the planet together. Addy ( like Pony before her) falls into a crevice, and Regg slides after her. Deep underground, they discover the old Addy’s body, frozen in ice, with a sharpened piece of swordgrass through her head. Diagetically, clearly, this is pretty silly — what’s the chances of both Addy’s falling down the same hole? Psychologically, though, falling down the same hole is exactly how trauma works. Addy has to return to the crevice; the memory she denies is always swallowing her up, and she always ends by standing, affectless, before her own pierced and frozen corpse. She can’t respond to Regg not because she’s not the same person, but because she is still frozen down there, somewhere, by a past she can’t acknowledge or access.

The end of the story is nominally happy — clone Addy and clone Regg will form a bond and make new memories together. But the image of the dead Addy, upside-down, underground (which, from various angles, makes up a shocking double-page spread) seems a lot more real than the fragile, promised love-affair. Indeed, happiness in the story is either in a sun-lit, imagined past (where Regg and Addy loved) or in a sunlit imagined future (where clone Regg and clone-Addy will love). In the present there is only a dimly understood, repeated primal scene of frigidity and despair.

Again, the fact that it’s dimly understood is part of what makes it so great. In the other stories in the volume, Hagio explains more clearly what’s wrong with her two other unicorn characters; their trauma is defined, and therefore can be overcome. But Addy’s trauma is more metaphorical; the death of her pony isn’t really what’s wrong with her; neither is the death of her former self. The sci-fi tropes obscure and misdirect the narrative core of Addy’s character. The story is about self-discovery, and its deceptive darkness comes because it isn’t possible for Addy to know herself. She can’t reclaim her trauma, or deal with it, because it isn’t hers; it’s outside her, and engulfs her. Perhaps she and Regg will find happiness, but one suspects that they may, instead, repeat the cycle of death and forgetting, occasionally changing roles, but with same predetermined end.

Top 10 Things I Used to Hate

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I know I promised no more Alan Moore blogging…but I just remembered this letter I wrote back in 2000 to the Top Ten letter column, back when I was young and foolish and hadn’t figured out that the proper place for random pointless burbling is the Internet. So here we go (“Donut Shop” was, apparently, the name of the letters column.)

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Dear Donut Shop,

I’ve been a fan of Alan Moore’s since his Swamp Thing days, and for the most part I’ve enjoyed the ABC titles. Top 10, unfortunately, is something of an exception. The writing and art are both frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and the characters are engaging. But whenever I put down an issue, I tend to find myself both frustrated and depressed.

The problem I have with the series is that Top 10 portrays the police as heroes. Cops may make mistakes, but civilian charges of bias or misconduct — of shapeism, speciesism, or just general abusiveness — are clearly not supposed to be believable. Smax may beat up gang-members, or drug-users, or drunk thunder-gods, but he is a good sort at heart, and, in any case, even the drunk’s all-knowing father thinks he had it coming. Whatever their faults, the police are the good guys.

Of course, in real life, things are less clear cut. Police in New York and Chicago have shot several unarmed civilians in the past year. In Los Angeles, anti-gang units have been accused of drug-trafficking, fabricating evidence, and torture. And at the recent anti-WTO demonstrations in Washington D.C. and Seattle, police used tear gas on, and apparently even shot at, peaceful demonstrators.

All of this is not to suggest that police are super-villains or that they are “bad” (though, of course, there are bad police, just as there are bad bankers or bad teachers.). Police are just working-class people who, like most working-class people, have an unpleasant job. That job is to promote justice, as defined by the rich whites who, in general, run the country. Practically, this means keeping poor minorities in their place by, for instance, enforcing drug-laws which notoriously target African-American populations, or by intimidating protestors. In recent years, it has also meant filling prisons to bursting with non-violent offenders and, in the tried and true traditions of police states, punishing more and more minor infractions of the law with more and more draconian sentences.

Top 10’s refusal to address the actual position of police in our society is particularly frustrating because the premise of the comic seems ideal for doing so. Linking super-hero titles with police procedurals is really a stroke of genius. As Alan’s story shows, both genres share many traits in common — a belief in the ultimate rightness of law and order primary among them. But, while books like Promethea and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen are willing to deal, at least tangentially, with the questions of gender and imperialism raised by their pulp sources, Top 10 , apparently, has nothing to say about justice, except, in issue 8, that on the great grey board, white is winning. This is no doubt true. But it is of little comfort to many of the people in this country and the world, who are not white, and are not winning.
*********************

And no, this never got printed. I actually think now that Top Ten may be my favorite of those ABC titles; I think it’s politics are still suspect, but it had the most engaging plot all the way through, especially since Promethea went so spectacularly off the rails….

Comixploitation

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I’ve been watching some of Pam Grier’s classic blaxploitation movies (Coffy and Foxy Brown) for the first time, and I have to say they’re pretty great. The writing is really smart pulp. Grier’s resourcefulness reminds me of Rorscach (since I’ve just been reading Watchmen), with extra bonus points for clever use of the Afro as storage device for lethal weapons. The ambivalent embracing/cynical disappointment in black power politics is nicely done too, and I also like the way in which the standard race stereotypes are reversed — white people are pretty much all thugs and villains (though I was a bit surprised at how many white people there were; the movies really are integrated, not all-black). Of course, the movies are also super hip and stylish; great music, fabulous clothes, just a great seedy seventies look overall. And Pam Grier is charismatic and distinctively, achingly sexy, whether she’s got her clothes on or not.

I was listening to parts of the DVD commentary by director/writer Jack Hill. He talks a bit about how much the actors contributed to the films, in terms of ideas and dialogue and knowledge — especially important since Hill’s white, and he was making a movie about black people for black people. He also discusses how happy the actors were to work, since obviously Hollywood at the time didn’t have a lot of roles for black actors, and how these movies opened the door for more black participation in film.

It got me thinking a little bit about how comics have done, and continue to do, so poorly in this regard. Why wasn’t there ever a blaxploitation equivalent in comics during the seventies — a series of titles starring and aimed at black people? Why are there still so few black comics professionals, and so little black representation in the industry in general? I know it’s not because black people don’t like comics — every time I go into my local bookstore, I see black folks sitting in the comics section, reading away. So what’s the deal?

I don’t really know the answer, but here are some possibilities. First of all, comics have always had a dicey relationship with black representation — the comic strip really took off as a form during the 20s, which was probably the worst moment in the country’s history for racism, especially in the north. Great comics creators from McCay to Crumb have had a lousy record of racism. But that’s true for movies as well (Birth of a Nation), and they’ve managed to do better at moving beyond it, at least on occasion. Maybe it also has to do with the fact that comics creators seem to have been overwhelmingly white from the get go, in a way that wasn’t really true of, say, musicians or actors (George Herriman, light enough to pass, is the exception that proves the rule.) This may have had something to do with the fact that music and acting have always been somewhat disreputable occupations, which means that there has tended to be less impetus to segregate them (segregation usually works by keeping black people out of high status jobs; low status jobs are at least somewhat open to them.) Anyway, I don’t think cartooning for a newspaper had the same kind of seedy reputation, which perhaps meant that segregation was more thoroughly enforced.

Maybe more important that this older history, though, is the fact that, by the time the Civil Rights movement took hold, comics had already ceased to be a widely popular medium. It was already something of an insular, cultish phenomena. Marvel codified that clubbish atmosphere, even if the actual direct market clubhouse didn’t materialize until the 80s. Blaxploitation films found a niche despite the cowardice and racism of the studios because they could be made cheaply — there was a big enough audience for movies to support tiers of product, and alternate venues for distribution (like drive-ins) which could cater to down-scale viewers. Starting out cheap allowed black movies to create buy-in, audience, and reputation over time. It also allowed for the establishment of needed skills — Jack Hill mentions, for instance, that there were basically no black female stunt people, and very few stunt people period, when he was doing his movies.

My sense is that in comics, there wasn’t really enough of a market to support this kind of approach. If a black hero couldn’t support a regular title, there wasn’t much else to do with him or her. It didn’t help that there still were hardly any black creators, either, so the characters that did show up tended to look like parodies of blaxploitation. If there had been a down-market comics equivalent of blaxploitation — cheap, lots of sex, lots of violence — it probably could have sold, but the comics code and the general kid-oriented nature of comics made that impossible. The undergrounds played by different rules, of course — but those folks weren’t a whole lot less white than the mainstream, really, probably in large part because their influences were the very white commercial comics that preceded them. So you get stuck with the odd, not particularly well-imagined black character in your team book, and that’s about it. By the time you did get an actual line of books by black people, for black people, the direct market was in place and the audience was getting ever more insular. It just didn’t work.

My point here isn’t that American comics aren’t racist or segregated; I mean, clearly they are in terms of who you see in their pages, who works on them, and, in general, who reads them. It’s just kind of interesting to try to figure out why comics are so much worse about race than other media (movies, television, music.) It’s also interesting to think about what the consequences have been. I think that in ways big and small the lack of black people and themse in the industry has indisputably been bad for comics. Black culture is a hugely important part of large sections of the entertainment industry — black contributions have been hugely creative, thoughtful, and exciting. It’s a loss for comics that there’s no blaxploitation equivalent that isn’t kind of embarrassing.

In addition, black style and culture is popular; it’s kind of the measure of coolness in the arts in a lot of ways. Comics whitebread image is a big part of why it’s perceived as uncool and lame (kind of like country music.) As just one for instance, a big part of the coolness of Quentin Tarantino’s movies is his reference and familiarity with blaxploitation films. But contemporary comics creators don’t have any black traditions or past to draw on in that way. That makes the medium poorer.

I’d be curious to hear other people’s thoughts on this, if anyone wants to comment….

49ers and the black dossier

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I’ve pretty much accepted at this point that the four favorite mainstream comics writers of my youth have all pretty much passed their peak. Neil Gaiman hardly writes comics of course, which is a shame; his super-hero/fantasy crosses were innovative and interesting, but his novels look pretty much like just straight fantasy, without the same spark (I haven’t read them, admittedly, so perhaps I’m being misled, but they sure don’t appeal on the surface.) Frank Miller’s hard-boiled approach is now such a cliche that when he does it he seems to be imitating his imitators. Grant Morrison is still entertaining, but I’ve given up waiting for him to attempt anything as ambitious or graceful as Animal Man and Doom Patrol (or as his first couple of fantasy/erotic short prose stories, for that matter.)

And then there’s Alan Moore. Over the last week I read Top Ten: 49ers and tried to read The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier. The first is inventive and entertaining, though nowhere near as good as the Top Ten series, much less Watchmen or Swamp Thing or Halo Jones or Miracleman or any of Moore’s classic work. The Black Dossier isn’t so much a train wreck as a train that doesn’t ever start; simply put, it’s boring, in the way that the Silmarillion is boring, but without the excuse of never being intended for publication. Basically, Moore is trying to create a single continuity for every book he’s ever read to exist in the same world. It’s an incredibly sophisticated puzzle, and an impressive intellectual achievement on the level of solving an immensely difficult crossword — but watching someone solve a crossword is, unfortunately, neither especially entertaining nor especially profound. I couldn’t get through it; even the Wodehouse/Lovecraft crossover pastiche was a lot less fun than it should have been (for all his skill as a mimic, it turns out that Wodehouse’s studiously vapid effervescence is a bit beyond Moore, who has always been, even at his funniest, a bit heavy-handed).

I’ve talked elsewhere about why I think Lost Girls is both disappointing and pernicious. I don’t think I’ve ever discussed Promethea, but I’m not a fan. Douglas Wolk claims that those of us who chafed at the series’ plunge into plotlessness didn’t get it — that Moore was just trying to teach us about cosmology and magic in an entertaining way. Alas, it wasn’t entertaining, and the art, which was clearly supposed to carry the day, simply wasn’t anywhere near worth looking at on its own. And, frankly, while Moore has many talents, cosmologist is simply not one of them.

But and still, compared to Miller, Gaiman, and even Morrison, Moore still seems like the one most likely, at some point, to be able to repeat his glory days. Where Gaiman has abandoned the medium, and Miller and Morrison seem unable to do anything but compulsively repeat themselves, Moore has kept trying, and when he fails it tends to be in new and inventive ways. Not that he doesn’t have his series of tricks, or that his body of work isn’t consistent. But in numerous ways, he seems to keep challenging himself. He works with new and interesting artists for one thing — I’m not a big Melinda Gebbie fan, but you can’t argue that she draws like Steven Bissette. And, for another, you can see him, over time, trying to wrestle with new material and new ways of approaching his art. He’s tried, for example, to respond to Grant Morrison’s critique of Watchman’s downer grittiness; to loosen up his dependence on massive structure; to incorporate some of Chris Ware’s approach to layout; to use more explicit material; to move away from super-heroes, to write prose. His success has varied widely, but it certainly doesn’t feel like he’s in a rut. And as long as he’s not, it seems possible that he’ll scale the heights again…or at least keep producing flawed efforts that are worth thinking about and arguing with.

All Star Fan Scruff

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I just went to visit my brother, and was able to read all the comics he buys that I’m too cheap to get. Among those are All Star Batman, All Star Superman, and Grant Morrison’s Batman run. These varied a good bit in quality — Frank Miller’s All Star Batman is a completely embarrassing self-parody; All Star Superman is a workmanlike nostalgia exercise which has been denuded of the ambivalence towards super-heroics which characterizes Morrison’s most interesting efforts; Morrison’s Batman is quite entertaining, despite the obligatory and atrocious grand crossover efforts.

But, whatever their merits or demerits, finishing the pile I was struck by (A) how completely uninterested I am in spending my own money on any of them and, (B) how thoroughly repetitive and kind of pointless they all seem. Miller isn’t just rewriting Dark Knight; he’s rewriting his own rewrites of Dark Knight (like Batman: Year One and Dark Knight Returns 2) and his own oeuvre in general (Wonder Woman’s characterization is particuarly painful, not so much because he reflexively dumps the pacifism and wisdom which is a big part of the character, as because his decision to turn her into a ball-busting fetishized dominatrix with a thing for strong men is at this point such a cliche in his own writing, from Sin City on down.) Morrison isn’t just rewriting the Weisinger era Superman; he’s rewriting Alan Moore rewriting Weisinger, and, indeed, 15 years or so of hip fetishization of the goofiness of old Superman stories. And Morrison’s Batman stories — obsessed as they are with the replication of Batman and alternate possibile Batman — seem to just be reworking, with a good deal less zip, similar concerns in the Animal Man stories that Morrison put out there twenty years ago.

Of course, any genre thrives on repetition — but you also need variation, and while American mainstream comics are good at the first, they haven’t been able to deliver consistently on the second in quite a while. Many people blame super-heroes themselves, but I don’t really think that’s the problem. For example, Cardcaptor Sakura combines Judy-Bloomesque girl Bildungsroman with a video-game fantasy tropes and comes up with something which, while not necessarily great art, is certainly a fresh, and even bizarre, take on super-heroics.

So personally, I don’t think it’s the super-hero genre that’s the problem, but rather that, in American comics, the super-hero genre has largely degenerated into fan fiction. Though, really, that’s kind of unfair to fan fiction, which, is usually motivated by real love for the material and a willingness to do all sorts of ridiculous and counter-intuitive things with it (see this sex-changing slash effort by Vom Marlowe for example.) Mainstream comics are actually the worst of all worlds — corporate fan fiction. Often, there’s little love or respect for the original vision and, conversely, a whole set of arbitrary rules in place about what can and can’t be done with them. The result has been a shrinking of the comic audience (fan fiction is always going to have a fairly limited appeal, whatever its virtues) and a stifling of creativity.

Grant Morrison’s one of the genres great writers — why put him on Superman, a character in which, as far as I can tell, he has little interest? And yes, I enjoyed his runs on X-Men and JLA, but wouldn’t it make sense, if you have a talent like that, to give him a chance to create something new? Wouldn’t that, if promoted correctly, create the possibility of new marketing possibilities, new movie tie-ins, and so forth? Similarly, why make Frank Miller go back again and again to the Batman when he’s clearly said all he has to say about him? Wouldn’t it be better to get him to do something new? I mean, it’s not like Sin City and 300 weren’t successful. Surely he could make up a marketable super-hero if he tried.

But, of course, forty or fifty years of this fannish, clannish, corporate bullshit has taken its toll. Super-hero comics are now hopelessly uninteresting to everybody outside of the tiny fan community. Distribution and marketing is aimed at this insular group who wants the same thing over and over, and the opportunities for new creations which might appeal to a broader audience are limited indeed — you can be successful with a television show like Hero, but it’s really unclear how something similar could work with comics. Still, I think that maybe the best thing the big companies could do for themselves is just stop with the endless Superman, Batman, Hulk, Spider-Man, ad nauseum. If people want to read that stuff (as they will), look at reprints of the stories that made them famous. Start investing instead in new creations…and for god’s sake, give the creators ownership, so somebody has some interest in quality control.

Update: Jason points out in the comments that Morrison is in fact interested in Superman, and hand-picked the project.

Halo Jones

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As long as I’m rereading Alan Moore, I thought I’d look again at the Ballad of Halo Jones. I first read it a few years ago, and really liked it. And I still like it a lot on rereading. I like Ian Gibson’s art better than that of many Moore artists, I think — he’s not a super-tight illustrator or anything, but the he’s got a range from cartoony to more naturalistic which works for the varying moods, and the layouts are nicely varied. I just opened up to a very deft sequence where Halo tries to grab a rat, which gives her a withering look and then darts off-panel, its tale quivering behind it. You get the sense that Moore hadn’t necessarily taken over every aspect of panel movement and layout at this point; the art seems more spontaneous and freer than in some of the later projects; everythings not mapped out to within an inch of its life.

I like the writing a lot too. It’s nice to see Moore working in a pulp idiom that doesn’t involve super-heroes; all the pseudo-Nietzsche overman-savior stuff which is so important to a lot of his later writing just isn’t here. Halo’s not a mover and shaker; she’s one of the moved and shook, and while there is an epic sci-fi story of sorts going on here, Halo’s more or less at the periphery of it; just one random person bobbing along as events wash over her. It’s not a new concept exactly (Joe Haldeman’s “Forever War” is a probable influence, for example). But it’s handled very deftly.

And, again, the lack of artistic control is refreshing. In his ABC titles, Moore went again for a more breezy, seat-of-the-pants, lighter tone, but it always felt a little bit like he was slumming — the lack of deliberation just seemed awfully deliberate, and the sense of fun a little forced. Halo Jones seems much more natural; you can feel him discovering what he’s going to do on the fly, building up the world as he goes. There’s a lot of humor (one of the early episodes focuses on a shopping expedition; a zenade that bombs you into oneness with the universe….) but, right from the beginning, it’s also surprisingly dark, and the combination is both unsettling and very affecting. The whole story is structured like a movie in which the comic-relief-best-friend gets killed — over, and over, and over. The last book is a quite effective war story, and Halo comes out of it recognizably older and more bitter than the young girl we started with. The story’s end is haunting, and not exactly paraphraseable without introducing a big fat spoiler, but basically Halo realizes that in her youth she wasn’t nearly as innocent as she thought, after which she murders the last person in the book who she cares about.

So, yeah, I know it’s not generally supposed to be, but I think it’s one of his best (way better than V or Lost Girls, for example, and maybe up there with From Hell, though very different, obviously.) Makes me wish he’d try a straight science-fiction story again….