Swapping books for art
I have lots of thoughts about books in this edition, where “thoughts” include a WIP, too…
Neon Genesis Zine-vangelion, reprise, sorta
I very prematurely titled a previous newsletter edition “Neon Genesis Zine-vangelion”. This was premature of me because, at the time, I was aware of a developing phenomenon but forgot to share it with you: a creative essay I wrote a few years ago, one that reflected on Neon Genesis Evangelion in light of climate change and how it warps our senses of nostalgia and time, had been making the rounds online. Not in wildly high numbers, but, per my website analytics, in numbers comparable to those of the more headliner pages on my website. I have no idea how this happened, but in case you helped make this happen: thank you? In case you’d like to sustain the trend, read my essay “Cicadas, Evangelion, and Perpetual Summer”!
WIP: Book swap zine!
Another zine is in the works! I’ve written the copy to it and sketched out some simple diagrams for it. It’s about book swaps — events or processes wherein you exchange books with one or more people. I’ve done more book swaps this year than any year before, and it’s quite fun.
Any strong opinions about book swaps? Tell me! I’m curious!
Because the above image felt way too crappy, I needed to make an additional one. Let’s just say I got a little more creative with it, and as a result the drawings more strongly approach the tone I want for this zine:
Recently I went to a picnic book swap organized by Sour Cherry Comics. This was a very chill swap in which we chose books from a giant pile we all contributed books to; there weren’t a lot of “rules” for it, aside from bring something to swap (maybe). Please enjoy Kirby, the bookstore cat in-training, learning how to navigate the stacks!
Latest inspo, extended edition
First, a little intro. This month I’ve read two books I really loved, so I thought it’d be fun to dive a little deeper into them as an alternative to the quick inspo list!
To motivate this format change, I know many of us are in need of distraction right now. These two books certainly provide an escape (and are both YA, interestingly), but they also have a lot to say about some heavy topics. Additionally, the second rec was published by indie press Oni Press; I highlight this because it’s vital to support small publishers, especially in light of recent corporate events.
To shape a dragon’s breath by Moniquill Blackgoose, where do I begin? I immediately fell in love with this novel. It is a tour de force of world-building coupled with a coming-of-age magical school story…and there are DRAGONS (could you name a better back-to-school read?!). We follow Anequs, an Indigenous teen who has found a dragon’s egg near her village. The dragon hatches, and after going through the village practices for early dragon rearing, the dragon winds up choosing her as its human. But there’s a twist: her people are beholden to laws enacted by the colonizers who have taken over the continent and surrounding islands, which demand she “register” herself and the dragon and be properly trained at a dragoneer academy. (Which continent? Imagine 19th century North America but the USA doesn’t exist; there are a variety of colonizing groups resembling the English, the Nordic, and the Iberian, and there are several Indigenous groups, though they are not large in numbers because of said colonization. And “dragoneers” are people trained in the keeping of dragons.)
From here the story takes on lots of beats from a magical school novel, but in addition to rigorous study, Anequs also has to navigate a world entirely different from the one she grew up in, which often means educating her peers on the actual history and characteristics of her tribe and contending with lots of microaggressions. She has stepped into a world that has never accounted for the possibility that she could not only exist, but excel at dragoneering; let’s just say a lot of the story showcases how the personal can expand quite rapidly to the imperial scale. In other words, this is a book as much about empire — even in the absence of a USA proxy country — as it is about cool dragons and magic-meets-chemistry.
Speaking of magic-meets-chemistry, as someone with a chemistry PhD, I needed to stop myself from totally nerding out about the magic system. It shares characteristics of stereotypical alchemy with actual rudimentary chemistry that even has a periodic table equivalent (!!!!) that loosely resembles the periodic table that Mendeleev derived.
There’s poly rep, neurodivergent rep, Two-Spirit rep, bisexual rep, lots of rep. The characters are quite well developed, whether they are likable or not. This novel is for fans of Fullmetal Alchemist for many reasons. My only complaint is that there are a LOT of terms used in the book that were created by Blackgoose, and there isn’t a glossary of them (at least not in the e-book edition).Hazards of Love: vol 2 by Stan Stanley is the sequel to one of my favorite fantasy graphic novels. It’s actually a compilation of an ongoing webcomic, so you can read it for free online if that’s your speed. Reviewers have called it “noir fantasy”; I’d describe it as “jungle fae”; both descriptions highlight different aspects of the story. The author is Mexican and has stated that she draws heavily on “Mexican ephemera” for motifs in the world and story. The first volume follows a teen named Amparo, who winds up making a deal with a sphinx cat: a drop of blood to become a better person for their girlfriend Iolanthe. The cat steals their name and tricks them, which transports Amparo into a strange magical world called Bright World; the cat remains in the real world and takes on Amparo’s name and likeness while acting like a “better version” of them. Amparo spends the first volume navigating Bright World, where humans are at most servants and at worst food, it’s perpetually dark and damp and jungly, time depends on who’s measuring it, and seemingly everyone harbors secrets and motives. (If you’ve ever heard of Xibalba in Mayan mythology, there’s some resemblance between it and Bright World.) By the end they’ve become captive to El Ciervo, an enigmatic anthropomorphic deer man with sharp teeth and sinister tendencies who is feared even by the creepy residents of Bright World…
The second volume focuses more on Iolanthe and other real-world folks; several years have passed over there, and she has kicked off a supernatural investigation to find out where Amparo is. This investigation leads to more questions than answers, though Death herself has provided lots of hints (in case you were wondering, Death is a butch lesbian with a ghost dog). Overall it’s an interesting exploration of the flip side of a fairy tale: what happens to those who are left behind? Are they allowed to move on? How do we judge them if/how they move on? This investigation leads to the discovery of someone very pivotal but mentioned by name only in the first volume, and this encounter similarly asks questions of how going along with fantasy tales leaves a lot of loopholes: if you ever get back to the real world, what would that do to you psychologically? As a fan of revisionist fairy tales and other sorts of subversive spins on classic tale-telling, the second volume serves lots to chew on. 😉