Time slips past a house in different ways, different when a house is a home than when it lays empty in the middle of an overgrown lot. A home can expect to pass its days one after another in a peaceful kind of slumber. The old yellow house out on Country Road No. 2 hasn’t slept well in a long, long… longer than it could remember. It shifts uncomfortably when rain falls in huge, heavy drops, or when frost chases across its windows, barely held in by rotting frames. Its pipes moan when the ground freezes hard. Small animals scurry through its walls, build nests in forgotten piles of unclaimed mail. The house hasn’t gotten used to these sounds yet.

When the afternoons are warm and a slight breeze blows across its faded shutters, it might remember better days. Mr. Malone coming to watch the house being built, wearing dark slacks and a pressed white shirt under his army jacket. Mr. Malone planting rose bushes under the kitchen window. Pouring drinks in the living room for his friends, other men in pressed shirts and slacks, or barbecuing in the backyard. Soft music from the old record player, drifting out through open windows into the night.

Now the house is both thinner and heavier, its joints too dry to fight against the downward pull of gravity. It tries to sleep to pass the time but every noise startles it awake.

One day, Mr. Malone was taken away, and he never came back. The house had hoped his ghost would walk through what remains of his home, a flicker of old moments like the curling photographs in the hallway, though it doesn’t know where the thought came from. It isn’t a comfort.

The newspapers keep coming, though. Some times it’s a child riding a bicycle, with a sack slung across their chest, who throws without looking and only by accident manages to hit the front porch. Other times, it’s a team in a pickup truck, with one person sitting in the bed, tossing out newspapers with bored precision, while another drives. They might not be the same child or the same truck, not after all this time, but none of them come up to the house so it isn’t sure.

It takes time and repetition for a house to learn about its people, after all.

The house is falling apart. The ghost of Mr. Malone is just a memory, the house’s memory. Snapshots of different moments in time, that’s all. The house doesn’t have a person anymore. It doesn’t even have a ghost to haunt it.

Maybe this is how it’s supposed to go, the house begins to think. Let gravity pull down its rafters. The porch swing already lost one of the hooks that kept it suspended. It scraped against the porch floor when the wind was up. Time and the elements should finish the job. Let the heat strip the rest of the yellow paint from its siding, the house thought. Let the steel rust and the wood turn to dust and just settle into the earth, at first a mound of debris but over time, a place for creeping vines and crawling things to roost.

Maybe then, the house could rest.

One afternoon, a young man wanders into the yard. Hello? he calls out. Anybody home? He doesn’t have a newspaper in his hand.

The house’s screen door slaps softly against its wooden frame. The latch fell out a few winters before, and the hinges are rusted.

All right then, the man says, his voice softer now, warmer. I didn’t really expect anyone to be here but I don’t want to startle you if you are. My dad lives next door, you might have seen him? We’re neighbors.

The house couldn’t remember what neighbors were, or if neighbors were a thing a house should have.

Well, I haven’t been around in a while, the man was saying aloud and he walked slowly around the front of the empty house, peering at it from different angles. I’ve been stuck at home for months. Honestly I’ve started talking to myself and I should probably stop but who knows, because there’s no one listening to this anyway.

The young man comes back the next day. At first, he clears the newspaper from the porch, raking it into plastic bags before carting it away. A fire hazard, he says out loud. Sorry, he says also. I don’t even know who I’m talking to. My dad lives next door, you know? I can’t have you catching fire with him so close. The man laughs at himself for talking to the house.

The house creaks a little, quietly.

The man clears the plants growing around the house, talking all the while. These roses can still come back, he says at least once. They just need a little care. And another time – I should oil the hinges on this screen door, since I’m here.

It’s too bad you aren’t lived in, he says later. To be lived in is to be loved, right?

In the middle of the night, when the bats flutter overhead, the house starts awake. Then it remembers there is such a thing as neighbors, not here at home but somewhere close, and it settles down again. Just… waiting.

The man comes back the next day, and fixes the porch swing. He starts to collect the more recent newspapers – which still come, but instead of thudding against the house’s walls, they land softly on the driveway a few steps from the garage door. The man piles them in a plastic crate near the front door.

The young man brings a cup of coffee over, early one morning, in time to catch the paper as it’s headed toward a rose bush. He sits on the porch swing, gently balances his cup on one knee while he pulls the elastic band from the paper, and flips it open. Then he takes a sip of coffee, leans back on the swing, and looks out over the yard.

I put in an offer yesterday, he says. I want to be near my dad, in case anything happens. And I want to fix you up, get you back to the house you used to be. So, I guess I’m saying I want to be here for you, too. If you’ll have me.

The sun is warm against the house’s walls. The porch swing squeaks a little as it moves under the man’s weight, a familiar sound. The young man drinks his coffee in silence, and the house can’t remember if this is happening for the first time, or the hundredth. It doesn’t matter. By the time the house figures it out, it’s already fast asleep.

Note: I decided to post a new story on June 20th before I realized that it would be Father’s Day here in the US. This story isn’t a Father’s Day story, not intentionally, but if you need a soft and comforting tale to end your day – especially one that hints at nice things about family and friendship, since not all Father’s Days and not all fathers are good for everyone – I hope reading this helped you.

Want more? You can read the rest of my free fiction here. Plus: A frequently-updated list of my professionally published work is collected on this page. Many of those stories are online too, and are often free to read at the publisher’s site.

I’ve gone back and forth about when to post this for a couple of months now. On one hand, I’m impatient and excited to talk about this project. I originally got the contract in 2019, and the finished novella was accepted by my editor last November, so I’ve been waiting over a year to share the details. I couldn’t even tell people I’d worked on this specific game – inXile’s third installment in their foundational post-apocalyptic video game series – until it was released at the end of August 2020. But that was 3 months ago, so why did I keep waiting?

Spoilers, and an NDA.

In order for me to talk about the writing part of this writing project, I have to talk about the games themselves, the lore and history, which means potentially spoiling the game for people who hadn’t played it yet. Because my novella is set between W2 and W3, I have to talk a little about the game that just dropped and a lot more about the game that came before. Wasteland 2 was released in 2014, which should be plenty of time to ensure that most people who want to play it have played it, right? Well, maybe not. See, there’s some people who didn’t grow up with Wasteland, who learned about it when they heard game 3 was coming out, and who just this year started playing game 2 to prepare.

Plus, Wasteland 2 has multiple endings. I’d played it through different ways before I was even hired to write for inXile, but I still hadn’t gotten the exact ending the studio considers to be canon history for going into Wasteland 3. So when I talk about that – which I will, in this post – it’s likely to surprise at least a few people, even on a game that’s been out for six years.

I love gaming. I wouldn’t want to anyone to ruin all the surprises on a new game for me, so I definitely don’t want to do that for anyone else. Plus, I signed an NDA when I was being considered for the job, which means I can’t say anything that isn’t public already. Because of that, I had to wait until certain plot points became public knowledge, or risk breaking my contracts (which I’d never ever do). To be safe, I waited three months after the newest game became available, and when I do talk about possible-spoilers later in this post, I’ll warn you first.

The original Wasteland game came out on computer in 1988. It’s a post-apocalyptic shooter based on tabletop RPGs, giving it a turn-based fight system and experience-based stats. You play a member of the Desert Ranger’s, a ragtag militia based out of Arizona, telling yourself that you’re the last remnants of the official US Army… even though you’re acting as judge and jury out in the wasteland…

I got my hands on a copy in the early 90s (including a print-out of the game’s “lore book”, a literally book of the encounters and dialog that you had to refence as you played the game). I’d grown up on arcade games and the original NES my mom got for me and my sister to share. I loved Castlevania, Gauntlet, Galaga. Compared to those, Wasteland was dark. It was violent and depressing; you could gain NPC teammates but they were just as likely to ignore your orders as they were to die, leaving you short on whatever essential skills only they had mastered.

And of course, the game was hard to beat. Resources were scarce, the desert was a tough place to be, and once you got into what’s left of Las Vegas, the scale of devastation post-nuclear war was obvious. Your goal was to stop a madman from helping a rogue AI to finish off the remainder of humanity, but even if you managed that, there was no happy ending. Just more desolation.

It was great.

It also lead to one of my all-time favorite console game series: Fallout. Short version of the story is that Interplay – who’d re-released Wasteland in the 90s – couldn’t get the rights to the Wasteland name from EA – so they created Fallout instead. (There’s a ton of hints and references throughout the series to back this up.) EA ended up selling the name back to Brian Fargo’s new company inXile in 2013, which let them restart the Wasteland series… Fallout is still going, so while they games are no longer connected, they’re like cousins in a way. If you like the story and themes of one, you might like the other.

Even though I’d long moved to Xbox as my console of choice, I got Wasteland 2 on PC in 2014 because I had to have it right away. Once again, you’re playing as part of a team of Desert Rangers – in fact, you’re working with some of the Rangers from Wasteland 1. Vargas is now the group’s leader, Thrasher took over as librarian/historian, Angela is guiding new rangers through the basics, and Ace is running missions… until he’s murdered, just before the start of the game. You play as a new Ranger, guided by Angela as she helps you find Ace’s killer. Along the way you discover a new AI threat, deal with local problems, travel to Los Angeles, and get yourself caught up in all of their problems too.

SPOLIERS AHEAD

No matter how you finish the game, at some point Angela gets sent out to LA to investigate ahead of you, and her copter gets shot down. When you arrive, it’s too late – bad guys have already gone and there’s casualties. There’s no version of the ending where you get Angela back; her gravestone appears in the final scenes. There’s multiple ways to defeat the last boss, but all of them end with one person sacrificing themselves for the greater good.

This is where I came in. inXile was finishing up Wasteland 3, which is set 2 years after W2, and they wanted to put out of a set of tie-in novellas to go with the game, same as they did when they released W2. I got a message from a writer friend who knew I was a big gamer – was I interested in applying for this job? Of course, yes, absolutely. By the end of the day, he’d passed my name on to the editor, who was able to find samples of my writing on my website, and contacted me to set up a meeting.

Friends, you should always have samples of your work on your website. I have free fiction here, a page with links to all of my published non-fiction here, and published fiction here (most of which is free to read at the publisher’s site). It saves time and lets people know you’re experienced and professional, before they even meet with you.

By the end of the video call, I had the job. I got it because he liked my writing, I had a reference, I had played the game – it wasn’t just one thing, and it maybe didn’t need to be all of those things, if I had more experience in writing for games. (Because I didn’t, I think I needed all the help I could get to book the job. Your mileage may vary.) I still didn’t know much about what I’d be writing. I got an NDA, a contract, and another meeting with my editor…

Over the next few weeks we worked out the story. I bought the Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut edition for Xbox, to play through the exact timeline I needed to have the right backstory. There were going to be three novellas total, and the other two focused on giving a history to the new game. Mine was to be the bridge between them, picking up after the events of W2 and getting certain characters to where it’d make sense for them to be in W3.

My editor gave me the canon history of Wasteland 2, and told me where my novella needed to end. Bookends aren’t a story though, so I had to figure out the rest.

BIG SPOILERS AHEAD (seriously, stop reading if you don’t want to know)

In the official ending of W2, General Vargas sacrificed himself to save everyone and end the game. The Mannerites are revealed to be cannibals and disperse. Veronica took over Hollywood. By the start of Wasteland 3, Lt. Woodson has taken over the Arizona Rangers; Pistol Pete and Brother Thomas (among others) have put together a Los Angeles version of the Rangers, though the two groups lost touch with each other. The 3rd installment of the game was taking place in Colorado, a state most folks in Arizona weren’t sure still existed.

And Angela is still a prisoner of the remaining synths down in Seal Beach.

My job was to get her out alive and help her build a team to take to Colorado.

Luckily, I knew the game. I knew the map. If it’s Angela’s story, I wanted to start with her. Not just a damsel in distress, but an older, experienced, battle-hardened soldier – with a major physical disability that she didn’t have at the end of Wasteland 2. If she was going to get out of Seal Beach, I wanted her to have a hand in it. So she needed to escape, not just be rescued. And if that happened, if she had to get from Seal Beach to reinforcements in the greater LA area, across the desert, and back to her Ranger friends in Arizona, I had a pretty good idea of the path she’d have to take.

I wrote up an outline and sent it to my editor. He got back with some notes, I revised, sent it back, rinse and repeat. I only had a couple of months to write the book so the bulk of feedback came in the outline stage. I’d suggest ideas, and sometimes they were brilliant. Other times, they directly contradicted a bit of canon plot that hadn’t been true for me when I played through the game (since there’s so many paths to the end). And once in a while, I’d suggest something my editor didn’t think was possible, until he went back and checked with other writers on the game to find out I knew some bit of lore he’d forgotten or never knew.

After I had an approved outline, I started writing. To move as quickly as possible, I sent my editor every chapter to begin with. He’d come back with notes or questions, or ask me to insert another character from the game, and I’d keep writing. As we went along and he trusted my work, I could send a few chapters at a time. I still got notes, mostly when I’d inadvertently write in a conflict for some secret in the new game that I didn’t know. (A lot was on a need to know basis, revealed only when I hit the point where I, you know, needed to know.)

Every time my editor sent me a note, one of two things happened:

1. I explained why I wrote it that way. If it made sense in the context of what happened in the next chapter, for example, or if my editor verified that I was right about a bit of game history, it could usually stay. If he didn’t want it though, I changed it. Or…
2. I just changed it without discussion.

That’s it. There wasn’t a 3rd option where I pouted or flounced or insisted. It wasn’t my book. I wrote it, but No Way Home belonged to inXile (and their parent company, Microsoft). My editor even came up with the title before I got the job, and part of my job became making that title work. I didn’t have the total creative control that comes with writing for yourself. I didn’t have “final say” over anything.

I did have a nice paycheck, and if anyone reading this wants to hire me to write this kind of thing again, please note that I am very happy with a nice paycheck, thanks.

Ultimately, I did write my book the best way I could, and no one else could have written what I did. I loved the final product. I got to write a kickass 40 year-old woman in a post-apocalyptic setting, who doesn’t get sexually assaulted or fridged, who’s allowed to have messy complex feelings, who isn’t always likeable or easy to know. Horrible things happen to her because her whole life is war, but she not only survives them, she decides how she wants to live her life (particularly with regard to her disability & prosthetic.) She’s awesome! As a disabled woman in my 40s who’s also sometimes messy but definitely awesome, I was thrilled to write Angela’s story.

And I got to expand on a world I’ve known from video games for a couple of decades. I got to humanize and give depth to characters that otherwise only existed as some admittedly-cheesy lines of dialog on a screen. I was allowed to make sense of a few plot points that never quite connected in early versions of Wasteland, to revisit characters I liked from W2, and I really did feel like I had a lot of freedom along the way.

In the end, No Way Home doesn’t read like a collected of plot points forced together to connect two different video games. It could have, if we weren’t careful. But you can read my book without having played any of the games, and I know you’d still enjoy it. I’m proud of this project, I’m glad I did it, and I would absolutely do something like this again.

Sherla was lying on her belly on her bed, one of the two tiny singles in the tiny cabin she shared with one of the research girls that just came on board. “Mattie,” she said without looking up from her nail polish, “you can keep talking if you want but I don’t really care about any of that.”

“But the tests are conclusive,” the other woman replied, waving her tablet in the air. “I’ve got it all right here.”

“Don’t care,” Sherla repeated. She applied another strip of opaque black polish to a blank nail and watched as it slowly expanded to cover her nail perfectly. The backs of her hands were criss-crossed with faint scars, leftovers from much worse damage the regen machines back at the base had almost finished repairing, before she got called up to the ship. Still, they were good hands, she thought.

Mattie wasn’t giving up though. “You don’t care that the ruins we found on Planet X are actually older than any known civilization on Earth?” she asked.

“Nope.”

Mattie sat down on the edge of her own bed with a heavy sigh. “I mean… that’s a big deal to me.”

Sherla turned her head to look Mattie in the eyes. “I care that you care, honey,” in between blowing on her nails to set the polish. “But I think we just see this two different ways.”

Mattie shook her head, barely ruffling her close-cropped curls. “How’s that?” she asked.

“Well, as you and most of the scientists on board see it, this expedition has proved that Earth was some kind of colony, right?”

“Yes, I think that’s got to be our working theory going forward from here,” Mattie said, relaxing a little. “We’ll have to go back and revisit all of the old site maps, build a new history of human civilization. New textbooks, new arguments. Oh no, those ancient alien crackpots are going to have a field day!” she added with a sudden grin. “I don’t envy the folks back home who’re going to have to listen to all of that nonsense on the off chance there’s even one hypothesis that matches up with what we’ve found here.”

“Right,” Sherla said, “because you’re not going back to Earth.” She blew on her nails one last time.

“Well, no, I – the expedition is moving out of our solar system to follow the star charts we found during the excavation.” She frowned a little, her dark eyebrows drawing closer together. “That doesn’t make our find less important. It’s actually the whole reason we’re still on the ship.”

Sherla pushed herself up off her elbows, turned, and sat down on the edge of the bed facing her friend. “No, Mattie, it’s why you’re still on the ship. And I’m glad for that, ‘cause you’re a whole sight better than the girl they stuck me with in my last barracks.”

“The snorer?” Mattie asked, sympathetic.

“The snorer,” Sherla agreed, and for a moment, they both smiled. Then Sherla leaned in, put her hands on Mattie’s knees, and said with a serious face, “I’m not a scientist, honey. I’m enlisted. They didn’t put all us soldiers on this ship to help dig, and we’re not all heading out into the great unknown for anything other than one reason: someone with more brass than me decided I might have to kill some things.”

Mattie bit her lip. “I know that,” she said after a moment, “but that’s statistically unlikely, you know. Whatever might have been out there has probably been dead for half a million years, and Earth has what remains of its refugees.”

Sherla sat back. “Maybe. I hope so, really. I’d love to spend the next couple of decades learning new things and staying pretty instead of developing any serious holes in parts of my body that I can’t live without. But I have to wake up every day and train for the possibility that what’s out there didn’t want us to find it. Which is why I need to enjoy the good times when they come around.”

“I’m not really much for parties,” Mattie said quietly.

“Well I asked you to introduce yourself and instead I got a 20 minute lecture on the ruins of Planet X,” Sherla said with a grin, “so you aren’t afraid to talk. At its heart a party is just that – some nice people, standing around each other, talking. You’ll be fine.”

All around them – the floor, the ceiling, the beds – began to shake, and a quiet hum started. It grew louder. as Sherla stood up.

“That’s ignition,” she said cheerfully, “and you know that means we’re officially under way, so the last party we’re ever going to have in this solar system is about to start. Come on, honey, tell me how pretty I am.” She put her hands on her hips and posed.

“You’re very pretty,” Mattie replied earnestly.

“Which means you’re drop dead gorgeous,” Sherla told her, “and it would be unfair to deprive the folks in Aft Lounge 6 of the chance to see the two of us in all our glory.” She held her hands out.

Mattie took them and let herself be pulled to her feet. “You’re going to be a terrible influence.”

“I do plan to be, honey,” Sherla said with a grin. She kissed her roommate on the cheek, leaving a faint red stain behind in the exact shape of her lips. “There,” she said. “Now you’ll look like you started the party early, and everyone will be dying to find out just how fun you are.”

“I should get back to monitoring the digital reconstruction of the dig site,” Mattie said, but didn’t sound certain.

“Tomorrow,” Sherla said as she put her arm around the other woman and steered her toward the hallway. “Tomorrow you can worry about how to find our celestial ancestors and I can worry about how to fight them.” She tapped on the side of their door, which slid into the wall. In the distance, faint music played.

“Tonight…” Sherla paused, and squeezed Mattie gently.

“Tonight,” Mattie finished for her, “we’re going to say goodbye to Earth, and drink until we forget that we’re never going home again?”

“That’s my girl.”

Want more? A frequently-updated list of my professionally published work is collected on this page. Many of those stories are online and are often free to read at the publisher’s site.

If you want to help fund future stories or buy me something useful from my Am*zon wish list (usually books and art supplies) you can use these links:

PayPal

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Am*zon wish list

As always, thank you for reading.

This week has been the sort of week that really tests one’s sense of linear time, especially since it’s been going on for almost a month already. Luckily I’ve had three more Atomic Robo collections to see me through it.

Book 4, Atomic Robo and Other Strangeness, is a collection of one-shots and mini comics. There’s a bunch about the Vampire Dimension, a “biomega” kaiju in Tokyo, a ghost (sort of)… but none of that matters because it also has the 2009 Free Comic Book Day story Why Atomic Robo Hates Dr. Dinosaur. Dr. Dinosaur.

DR. DINOSAUR.

I love Dr. Dinosaur. As much as I adore Robo, and I really do, Dr. Dinosaur is just a fucking delight. In a comic that’s already bulletproof, this mad genius of a reptile feels like he was written just for me. Like a little treat for being a faithful fan. In this issue we get to see the moment Atomic Robo meets our superior science raptor, immediately hates said science raptor, and in return the good (bad?) doctor hates him too.

Book 5, Atomic Robo and the Deadly Art of Science, goes back to the beginning, telling the story of young Robo training with his mentor, Jack Tarot, while still learning the ways of action science with Tesla. There’s a little more Vampire Dimension and a bit more of Tesla and Edison’s Current War, with a whole lot of bullets in between.

Also a very large robot. And some kissing.

Book 6, The Ghost of Station X, once again takes Robo’s story in a different direction. This time, he’s got to solve a mystery while also fighting against the laws of physics to save a space station from falling out of orbit. There’s fewer jokes and a lot more of Robo’s serious face, but it’s a solid collection that doesn’t disappoint.

As a bonus, you’ll also get to read the 2010 FCB story, “Flight of the Terror Birds”!

Call up your local comic book shop and order a bunch of Robo books for yourself today!

If you’re feeling a bit cooped up and restless, call up your local shop to order yourself Atomic Robo V1, “Atomic Robo and the Fightin’ Scientists of Tesladyne”. Written by Brian Clevinger, art by Scott Wegener (with color by Ronda Pattison and letters by Jeff Powel) the series jumps back and forth through time, telling different pieces of Atomic Robo’s first 83 years of existence. It has everything you’d want from a retro-style modernist comic: video game jokes (Megaman, Jenkins, etc.), Nazis, mummies, steampunk, Carl Sagan being awesome, Stephen Hawking being a bastard, and a wise-cracking intelligent robot swinging his way through it all. It’s sarcastically funny, it’s got a hipster sensibility that perfectly meshes with the crisp, clean art – exactly the kind of thing you’d expect to translate well to t-shirts and messenger bags. It made me happy, and genuinely happy is a little harder to come by these days.

But these are slim volumes, these Robo books, and if I’m going to get through every comic I own in the next few years I have to group smaller issues in these reviews. Which means I also get to talk about the second and third collections!

Vol. 2, Atomic Robo and the Dogs of War, collects the five-issue mini-series, complete with cover gallery, pin-ups, and bonus stories. It shows more of Robo’s adventures in World War II, introduces a plucky British heroine, and there’s some evil genius-designed weather cannons.

It also has a brief appearance by James “Scottie” Milligan, a Scotsman and a hero. He was Scott Wegener’s grandfather. (How cute is that?)

That the creators of this comic wrote in Wegener’s grandfather, in order to allow him to live again in Atomic Robo, is the biggest part of why I adore this book. It’s written and drawn by people who want to be a part of this world, so much that they will populate it with their favorite things, their joys and sorrows and loved ones. This is the one great power we have as writers and artists: the ability to remake the world in whatever image we want, to fix its flaws, to resurrect the dead, to make it right. When it’s done right, as it is in this case, even when it’s silly it’s breathtaking.

Vol 3, Atomic Robo and The Shadow From Beyond Time, combines AR with my other great love: HP Lovecraft. I did tell you they write this series just for me, didn’t I? Let’s start with the fact that “Tesla Heavy Industries” had, in 1926, a storefront office with “Science While You Wait!” painted on the window. Throw in the Tunguska blast, Howard P Lovecraft babbling like a mad man, Carl Sagan, lightning guns, tentacles, and … I don’t want to give away the rest of the story but if you like that sort of thing, this is the book for you.

Oh, and Robo’s wearing argyle socks. I’m just saying. <3

Notes and References:

• You can find all of my recent comics reviews here.
• If you’re in Ithaca like me, our LCS is taking orders via phone and email.
• The Robo folks are currently running a Kickstarter campaign for Atomic Robo and the Dawn of a New Era. I backed them!
• There’s also an Atomic Robo timeline, in case you want to know When Things Happen and Where To Find Them In the Books (but be warned: it’s got spoilers).

After a quick but clear recap, Kindt drops us right back into the action. When last we left our heroine Meru*, she’s still chasing Henry Lyme and MIND MGMT, still missing memories and still not sure why she’s doing what she’s doing. We see more of Lyme’s perspective this time, which Kindt is better at, giving the second collection a more solid footing. Like the first set of issues, this book is action-packed and a quick read; there’s toothy issues for your brain to gnaw on, but they’re delivered on the fly as Meru and Lyme run through scene after scene.

We also get to see more of Kindt’s world with these issues, which brings back other agents the first six issues hinted at. Initially MIND MGMT (the agency, not the book) is presented as an evil shadow government, always out to get the good guys, always wrong. It’s MIND MGMT’s fault that Lyme ruined his own life. It’s the agency’s fault. They’re the bad guys… Except, maybe not? Sure, they’ve got powers beyond that of mere mortals, and mostly we’re shown how to they manipulate the public into overlooking the government’s wrongs, but – whether intentionally or not – by the end of book two, Kindt’s allowed Lyme to reveal enough about himself that it’s obvious he wants to see the worst in MIND MGMT. An evil shadow agency without nuance or context is an easy thing to blame for your own mistakes.

I am really enjoying all the marginalia. Kindt lets his art bleed over to the edge of the page with little notes and doodles that add another faint layer to the story. He’s thinking about the ways comics are presented, pushing the boundaries with format, and I love that.

Finally, in a “plot twist” you definitely do see coming, Meru realizes the extent of Lyme’s lies. She pulls away from him just enough to find herself caught between both sides, beholden to neither. There’s nowhere safe for her anymore, but really, was there ever?

When my local comics shop opens again, I’m going to pick up Book 3. It’s not perfect, but I’ve got enough investment now to want to see where it goes.

Notes and References:

• She’s still not the hero since she’s not the active party but the acted upon, manipulated into chasing after a guy who wants to be found but … ah, fuck it. I said all this last week.
• MIND MGMT on Wiki, if you want spoilers.
• There’s going to be a board game! They successfully funded off Kickstarter, and though the game’s designed by Jay Cormier and Sen-Foong Lim, Matt Kindt’s still doing all the art. Learn more here.

Tom Gustafson’s low-budget, independent, gay musical, Were the World Mine, arrived in 2008, swathed in lace and glitter and hot boy-on-boy action. Interspersed with the traditional Shakespearean scenes, acted out on a prep-school stage, are musically-enhanced fantasies that are some of the best moments of the film. Even when the film’s fairies aren’t in costume, the boys are still by turns argumentative, mischievous, aggressive, and tricky. Exactly as the Bard would have wanted them to be. How does the play – and more importantly, the mischievous fairies – fare as a small-town tale of homophobia and love?

Beautifully.

A quick read of the play reveals that the film, though slightly out of order and with some actors playing characters who embody more than one of Shakespeare’s roles, the essence of Dream is presented in its entirety. The play has two main settings; the town, at the beginning and end, where the humans live in real life, is found in WTWM’s small town reality, where the film opens and to which it returns when it ends. Boys dressed as girls are a staple of traditional Elizabethan-style Shakespearian plays, and in this regard WTWM stays true, creating an all-boys school as the setting for it’s all-boy staging of the play within the film. The bulk of Dream is set in the “wood”, with various locales and “bowers”, and this can be seen in WTWM’s dream sequences, including actual woods.Just as Dream is presented as a mix of fairy magic, theater, and restless dreams, Were the World Mine is a musical, and so naturally features a few interludes of the sort where people start singing and dancing when this would otherwise seem insane. Luckily for us, Timothy doesn’t question these moments too strongly, and the lovely daydream sequences continue right up to the movie’s finale.

When Shakespeare’s play begins, the lovely Hermia is supposed to marry Demetrius, who she does not love, because tradition and her father demand it. The film begins with Jonathan, the star rugby player, dating a girl, fitting into his expected roles, and quietly eying the only gay boy in town. Instead of marrying Demetrius, Hermia runs off to the woods with Lysander, and if we can accept that Timothy is both Puck and in this moment Lysander too, then it makes sense when the smitten Jonathan runs off to the woods with Timothy to hide from an angry world. Demetrius follows, along with Helen who loves him. In one scene they are acted out by Jonathan’s girlfriend and her friend, who chase after the newly-coupled boys, and in another, Timothy’s friends Max and Frankie (a girl) fill their shoes. Puck is solely the purview of Timothy in the film, no matter how other roles may drift, for it is he who finds the love-flower spell, he who casts it, in his own sparkly closet “bower”, he who sprinkles the juice in future-lovers eyes, and he who begs forgiveness in the end. The Demetrius as Max parallel works again later with Frankie as Hermia in the scene where a potion-drenched Max has accidentally fallen in love with Timothy (here playing out Helen’s role) – Frankie accuses Timothy of stealing her love interest, when Timothy has no love for Max outside of friendship. Promising to correct his error, he leaves Max behind, but the play’s fight scene between Demetrius and Lysander appears, as Max battles Jonathan for the lover they both want – Timothy as Helen again, with both her suitors magically smitten.

If we accept that Gustafson seems to have simply switched the genders of all the major roles in the play, it is obvious that Oberon is personified by the enigmatic drama teacher, the only woman working at the school. It is she who gives Timothy the role as Puck, she who leads him to the potion, and she who has something to gain when Timothy’s spell enchants the locals. In the play Puck explains that Titania was doused as the acting troupe, “were met together to rehearse a play,” fitting because Timothy uses the potion while the students are rehearsing their version of Dream. When the homophobic rugby coach bursts in on the love-doused boys, he too is changed by Timothy’s potion. His eyes open upon who will be his love: the principle of the school. At that moment it becomes clear that the coach is Titania, and the principle is playing the part of the ass. Because of Titania’s infatuation with the woodland creature, she gives up her interest in the Indian Boy, whom Oberon desires. The drama teacher, too, desires something – the hearts and minds of the young male students – and in his lovelorn state, the coach, gives up his tight grip on them, even going so far as to support ballet movements in practice.

At the end of the film, just like at the end of the play, the dream ends with a happy audience released from its spell. The boys are allowed to perform their version of Dream, though we as viewers only see snippets, since we’ve already seen the play acted out as the movie up until that point. The one scene shown in its entirety is what the drama teacher calls, “an incredibly hip song,” a musical version of Dream’s own play within the play, Pyramus and Thisbe. Just as Hermia’s father is relieved to find the lover’s relationships satisfactorily sorted out, the schoolboy’s parents are relieved to find that, for the most part, they’ve gone back to being socially-acceptable heterosexuals. Lysander and Hermia are given permission to be together, just as Jonathan and Timothy find approval from their previously homophobic friends. Titania gives up her love for the ass, who’s allowed to return to his old life, just as the coach realizes he cannot chase the principle, who happily returns to the waiting arms of his wife.

 The lyrics for most of the music were adapted from Shakespeare’s original text. Again, the powerful writing of the original play shines through its adaptation, even when WTWM is at its best. Jennifer Fogle crafted the numbers from her knowledge as arguably the most experienced member of the crew, since she’d produced, directed, and written musicals for the stage before working on the film. Interestingly enough, Fogle is the one person who shares space with Shakespeare in the credits. Her songs are not the only place that direct quotation appears; the title of the film, Were The World Mine, is taken from Helena’s conversation with Hermia in Act 1, Scene 1, wherein Helena says that if she had her way, Demetrius would love her instead. One of the most oft repeated lines in the film, “The course of true love never did run smooth,” also appears in the first scene of the play, yet neither language nor plot points from the play are apparently enough for Gustafson to credit Shakespeare with being anything more than an “inspiration.”

I enjoyed the movie, both for the very modern treatment of one of my favorite plays, and for the hot boys singing and dancing all over the screen. I mean, c’mon. Hot boys! Dancing! And there’s kissing! I like movies that are lighthearted and fun, even when the dialogue strays from time-tested poetry into campy retro attempts at courtship. (“I’m with the best fella in town”? Really?) The set design is gorgeous, while staying within the boundaries of what’s possible for a high school theater department. One of my favorite moments is when Timothy, adorned in silver face paint, serenades a sleeping Jonathan, bringing in the rugby team to do a ballet dance with pink balls and shiny boy shorts. Though Jonathan, upon waking, sings as well, his voice doesn’t have the strength of Timothy’s, but that works too, blending together to create the vocals the other fairies dance along with. And oh, the fairies dance! And rock! Another favorite scene comes at the end of the film, where we see the “Pyramus and Thisbe” play enacted as a hipster anthem. A rugby player, dressed as a fairy with bright orange dreadlocks, head-bangs pretty enthusiastically as Timothy’s friend Frankie sings the story.

In the end, all is put right again, and we’re left with a good two-hours worth of entertainment. I’d recommend this film to anyone who’s a fan of puckish sprites, Shakespeare, cute boys, or musicals.

I got this and the second collection as a Christmas present a few years ago. The person who gave them to me had read and loved them, which is the best kind of present: not just something they thought I’d like, but a gift of getting to know them better too, but seeing what matters to them.

Reading this again made me realize that most of the comics I have are by dudes. I mean, I knew that… Everyone knows that most professionally published comics artists and a great number of writers are cis men. Every time the parity starts to shift toward something diverse and equitable, a bunch of insecure dudes starts screaming about “ruining comics” and “SJWS” and on and on, which keeps those numbers artificially inflated. In general, I do think it’s getting better, but considering that it was better before, then got worse again due to the agitation of brittle boys who suddenly decided the thing they loved had to be hoarded and guarded and viciously restricted (hey, just like video games!) “getting better” is a long fucking process.

What does this have to do with MIND MGMT? If you read the blurbs, reviews, etc, you’ll mostly see people saying this is Meru’s story, the tale of a true crime writer hunting down an mysterious government agency and an elusive rebel. Meru is a woman, therefore the story is centered on a woman, she’s the main character, yay! Except… no. It’s a story about Meru, certainly. It’s just told by Henry Lyme, is centered on Lyme, and is about the ways Lyme has manipulated everything and everyone around him, including Meru. Whatever happens to her, she’s a puppet tossed about on the wind, and Lyme is the unsubtle on-the-page eye of the storm.

Same is true of the other women in Lyme’s life. Everyone lives and dies according to Lyme’s (often immature and selfish) desires.

There are some great stories about women written by men. And I do think MIND MGMT is a great story, so familiar as to feel it’s treading on the same old ground, until it slides into new territory so fast you didn’t even feel the shift. It’s a single creator’s vision, which I tend to favor when I want to get to know a writer/artist, nothing but some editorial cleanup between vision and the page. I don’t love the sketchy watercolor style Kindt uses here, but it’s solid and consistent – even if it’s not my thing, he’s obviously good at it. There’s a difference between writers who can’t draw, and artists choosing to work with their strengths to produce a unique style, and I think Kindt’s in the second class. The more you see of his art, the more you can tell it’s on purpose.

I’m just tired of straight dudes with unimaginable cosmic power literally thinking they’re the center of everything, and writers who think “flawed man” are somehow tragically endearingly. It’s done so much, everywhere, that it’s boring.

All right. Moving on.

What great about this book? The imagination. The way Lyme’s own power weighs him down, fucks him up, and ruins everything he cared about. (I wish it wasn’t revealed as a side note to telling Meru’s story – it felt like neither side of the story had as much impact as they both could have if it had been a little more honest about centering Lyme to begin with.) Meru’s sadness, the way she’s broken and messy without it being cute – Kindt sidesteps the usual manic pixie dream trope. The whole psychic espionage thing; who among us hasn’t wondered if that sort of thing was really going on? The other agents we see too-briefly. The way Kindt takes his idea to their logical ends, building a world which makes sense, so you can drop into the story without fighting your lizard brain over the “possibility” of it all.

Whatever you think of who gets to tell the stories and whose stories we get to see, MIND MGMT takes Kindt’s story all the way.

Next week, book two: “The Futurist”.

Notes and References:

• You can find all of my recent comics reviews here.
• Dark Horse’s digital comics page for MIND MGMT.

First, let’s all remember the hotness that was Toshiro Mifune:

If you were expecting to see him in film-faux samurai garb, sorry to disappoint you. Mifune appeared in nearly 170 films as an actor, including 16 of Kurosawa’s, and most of them weren’t period pieces. He was an extremely versatile, expressive, and talented actor, with a wide range — which included dark, murky, detective film noir like Stray Dog.

Mifune originally worked as a photographer; he grew up in his father’s camera shop, and when he was drafted during WWII, he served in the Aerial Photography unit. Afterward, he got a job as an assistant cameraman for Toho Productions (home to Godzilla, and hundreds of other movies). It was there that he was “discovered” as an actor, first for his looks, and then for his ability to throw himself into a role, drawing on his wartime experiences, and general disregard for propriety during a performance.

He wasn’t afraid to be everything he possibly could, as an actor. You can see that onscreen, and Stray Dog is no exception.

Kurosawa saw Mifune during a screen test and immediately hired him. Mifune’s first role was in Snow Trail (1947), the story of three bank robbers who hide out on a snowy mountain lodge with an unsuspecting family; though Senkichi Taniguchi directed it, Kurosawa wrote the screenplay. The next year Mifune starred in the Kurosawa-directed Drunken Angel, and in 1949, they did Stray Dog together.

The short, spoiler-free description of the film is this: A rookie detective loses his gun, which is later used in a crime. To recover it, he teams up with a veteran detective on the verge of retirement. They traverse the darkest parts of Tokyo looking for it.

(If you’re thinking Kurosawa’s plot was “borrowed” repeatedly by Western filmmakers over the last 68 years, you’d be right. But he borrowed from Western directors too, especially John Ford. There was a lot more conversation – purposeful and acknowledged – between Eastern and Western cinema than most people realize.)

The longer description is this: Kurosawa used Stray Dog, Mifune, and another of his favorite performers – Takashi Shimura – to act out the complexities of the father/son dynamic within a noir story, just as he did with Drunken Angel, Rashomon, and Seven Samurai.

Here, Mifune is “Detective Murakami”, the son saved by his wise old mentor, “Detective Sato”, played by Shimura, while “Yusa Shinjuro” (the bad guy in the film, played by Isao Kimura) shows the negative alternative of how Murakami could’ve ended up.

After a long, hot, day, Murakami loses his gun to a pickpocket, which sets off a string of crimes he feels responsible for. His supervisor, seeing his determination to retrieve the gun, puts him together with Detective Sato in hopes that the older man can cool Murakami’s obsession. Sato has children of his own, and slides easily into the role of Murakami’s surrogate parent.

During the film, these characters talk about Yusa, whose first name literally means “second son,” as if the young criminal were a wild animal, a “stray dog” in danger of becoming a “mad dog”. Murakami, too, is in danger of this, having come from the same background as their criminal; both men even had their backpacks stolen when returning from the war.

In the end, Yusa, feeling trapped because the police are closing in, shoots Sato with Murakami’s gun, making the younger detective responsible for wounding his own surrogate father. His quest for redemption leads him to a muddy struggle with Yusa, where Murakami is wounded himself, but does not submit until the criminal is cuffed. In the end, he’s left to wonder how close he got to darkness, and if he’ll ever recover.

In addition to exploring the father/son relationship on a personal level, it also works its way through the traditional (at the time) Japanese “father as imperial authority” dynamic, altered forever by so many anchorless young men coming back from the war, who struggled to regain their place in society. It shows us parts of Tokyo society that weren’t often seen in films from before WWII, too: actors and criminals, broken households, and the often-degrading ways women survived alone in a hard world.

Plus, the cinematography is technical perfection. Look at these stills!

Stray Dog is heartbreaking and violent, frenzied and gorgeous, visceral and thoughtful, all at once. Just like real life.

I have the Criterion Collection version and recommend that.

It’s a weird time to pick up Brian Wood’s Vertigo series, DMZ. Normally I wouldn’t think too hard about recommending it. When I read it the first time time, DMZ was exactly the kind of series I like: dark, gritty, urban, bleak, yet full of hope. Long enough I could spend a day binging dozens of issues, and collected into graphic novels so it’s easy to pick up. I looked forward to reading it, and when I finally did, it was everything I was told to expect.

Now, though, with our real NYC under lockdown from a very real threat, fictionalized versions struggle under an extra weight, and I’m not sure DMZ holds up the way it used to.

The story begins with Matty Roth, photo intern, being dropped into the middle of a war zone. As if being left behind weren’t bad enough, he’s got people shooting at him and strange girls pointing guns in his face and an alarming tendency to faint under pressure. Poor Matty. He can get out or he can hunker down and turn his misfortune into a chance at the big time, a chance to be the only working journalist in the DMZ. Which just happens to be Manhattan, caught in the crossfire between what’s left of the USA and the “Free States” currently occupying New Jersey and points west.

Long before the pandemic hit, Wood showed a NYC we could imagine without having to squint too hard. It’s a brilliant premise that several other writers had before him: turning a city with as much cultural weight as NYC has into a hotly contested battle zone. Familiar territory transformed into a whole new world, an alternate history two steps to the right of where we are now.

To say that Wood loves New York is probably an understatement – it serves as both backdrop and character for other books, New York Four/Five and The Couriers, and he lives in Brooklyn – but in DMZ it’s the macho jungle, the glistening wasteland, that so many dudes expected. And sure, he’s talking about 9/11 and Afghanistan and how media is intertwined with terrorism. Those things needed to be talked about! But you have to wonder why the paramilitary murder cult version of NYC is the one we so often see.

Because that’s not the New York that’s making its way through disease and isolation, the New York now facing a higher death toll than the terrorist attack that’s hung over us all for the last 19 years. What we’ve actually got is a city of friends and heroes, stepping up, going to work even when it might kill them, checking in on neighbors and posting TikToks of their parents dancing. NYC under quarantine is taking a serious look at who’s the worst off right now – the people who are left behind or kept down by racism and poverty – and actively working to help them up. Right now, people are dying, and instead of descending into lawlessness or martial law, New Yorkers are clamoring for help for those who need it and calling out injustice whenever they see it. It’s not perfect, but it’s real.

There are all kinds of little bits of fun in the book though, meant for people who have a vague idea of what New York is, as both a historical landmark and a place where the cutting edge is sharpest. Central Park? The Zoo? The Flatiron Building? They’re in the books. Art installations and vegan restaurants and Chinese gangsters and tattooed girls whose thong underwear is visible over their low-rise jeans? Here. All the bits of truth that become ideas when they filter out of the city and into popular media can be found, eventually, in DMZ, but they serve as anchors, pulling the book back into our world, and giving us landmarks to guide us along the way.

And of course, there are punks and thieves and sex workers. It is still a white man’s idea of New York.

To be fair, Matty’s friends and neighbors are almost the people you’d expect to see living in New York today. To have completely whitewashed the city would have been an unforgivable sin, and one I’m glad Wood didn’t make. I can see him trying to give us the full range of humanity’s potential, so that it isn’t just the white men who save the day, but the black architecture student, the Latina med student, the elderly Chinese “grandfather”, and so on. But like most white dudes, he can’t help centering his idea of those people, as archetypes, and misses little bits of depth I think another writer would have realized they deserve.

Even when someone finds their people, it, uh… usually doesn’t end well. Every bit of hope (and there are good moments, I promise) comes with an equal helping of cynicism.

What will make DMZ work for most readers is that while there is a big war going on, and Matty, as the “outsider” does have to reflect on why it started and where it’s going, the bulk of the people in the story don’t have time for that kind of philosophizing. It’s not a book where people sit around a diner talking out their big ideas on long swathes of dialogue. There’s running and hiding and exploding bombs and dying children and conspiracies and fucking and making mistakes and trying not to die. A lot of simply trying not to die. It gives the story a frenetic layer of action on top of which can be thrown a little heavy thinking, if there’s time.

Maybe that’s what you need right now. If so, please call your local comic shop and place an order.

Notes:

Updated April 8, 2020 – If you’re in NYC and want a treat – or if you want to send food to a friend, there’s “Iconic” food you can order right now. If you have hospital-grade masks, gloves, or other PPE (even a single box), please check out how to get those to healthcare providers in need. And if you’re in NYC and need help feeding yourself/your family, this page lists resources for you.

Stay home, and stay safe.