Comics Daze

Merde! I’ve totally messed up my sleeping again, after being so good for yonks. That was a very late New Years Eve, and I guess I’m still working my way through that. Even so, getting up at one in the morning isn’t ideal, eh?

So let’s see… if I read comics all night long, then take a nap around eight, and then read comics until midnight, that should fix things, right? Yeah, doesn’t sound like a viable plan to me, either, but let’s give it a go.

And I see there’s a new temperature record in the surrounds here, but where I am, it’s just -20C, as you can clearly tell from my brilliant shot of that outdoors thermometer. Brr! But I’ve got a blanket and a couch, so I should be OK.

But since it’s so cold, I’m going to listen to music only from 1970. (And perhaps 1971, if I run out of albums from 1970.) You know it makes sense.

Art Ensemble of Chicago: Les Stances a Sophie

01:38: The Great British Bump Off by John Allison, Max Sarin and others (Dark Horse Comics)

I’ve never seen The Great British Bake Off, so I’m probably not the intended audience for this, but on the other hand, I like murder mysteries so…

Oh, it’s the same concept as The Great Canadian Baking Show? I’ve seen that. (Well, I’m guessing that the Canadian show is a version of the British show…)

Neil Young: After The Gold Rush

So you’d think this book was for me after all, but eh. It’s amusing, but it’s not actually funny? They go for Silly To The Max All The Time, which can work well, but it doesn’t here. And the artwork does nothing for me.

But it’s OK — I can totally see lots of people enjoying this.

Vashti Bunyan: Just Another Diamond Day

02:25: Red Ultramarine by Manuel Fior (Fantagraphics)

This is more like it.

I’m not quite it totally works, though — you’ve got a mash-up of Icarus and Faust and stuff, and told in this very dynamic way… It’s pretty good, but it creaks a bit under its own weight.

Fotheringay: Fotheringay

02:41: Power Button 1 by Zack Soto (Graphic Universe)

I’ve always liked Soto’s artwork, and I’m happy to see that he hasn’t straightened it out too much for this children’s book.

That’s excellent skin care advice!

The book is fun — if I have one criticism, it’s that things perhaps take a bit long to get started? But we get a lot of character development, and we get hints towards a bigger storyline (like — what’s up with that Uncle Cat guy anyway?), and it’s an enjoyable read. And perhaps it ends without much of a resolution — it feels rather a lot like the first episode of a TV series? But it’s fine.

03:15: Blah Blah Blah #4 by Juliette Collet

This is great — the book is a mix of shorter and longer pieces, but it has such a good flow: It’s almost stream of conscious-y the way the stories flow in an obsessive way.

And there’s a number of different approaches to the artwork, but it’s still cohesive.

And this story was just flabbergastingly amazing — a heartbreaking sucker punch of a story, really. And look at this artwork! Just fabulous.

Shirley & Dolly Collins: Love, Death & The Lady

03:37: Qualification by David Heatley (Pantheon Books)

This was part of the latest Mystery Box, and it’s from 2019. I’m just shocked that I don’t already have this book? So weird, because I was a big fan of his back when, but I guess I just didn’t know that this existed? Well, I guess like most people, I was impressed with his early work, but underwhelmed by his first Pantheon book, so perhaps I just didn’t want to read more…

This is a book about being addicted to Alcoholics/Debtors/Sex Anonymous, and it’s borderline incomprehensible at times. I mean, not what’s happening, but why. Like… his mother fell over at a skating rink (haven’t we all done that?) and that’s her “lowest moment”? That is, nothing that happens to these people seem to be very er hard, but Heatley dramatises it up to the max?

Shelagh McDonald: Let No Man Steal Your Thyme (1)

But I guess it’s all part of having religious damage. I mean, if you’re apt to depicting your mother calling you on a phone with dodgy battery as “it was a miracle”, then it’s just hard to take it all seriously. On the other hand, Heatley portrays much of this in a way as if he wants you to come to the conclusion that he’s perhaps insane, anyway…?

Hm! I think I must have read this before after all. It’s now seeming extremely familiar to me. Or were parts of this published in a different format before?

Anyway, reading this can be pretty exasperating, but the storytelling is pretty good? The artwork is effective, and it’s oddly propulsive: Even if I can’t claim to actually like the book, I didn’t feel like putting it down either?

It’s an oddly unfocused book, though. I didn’t much enjoy reading the bits from all the AA meetings (which is most of the book (and I can’t really imagine how Heatley justified over-sharing on behalf of these people (although he says that the characters are composites))), but the sequences like this are more interesting, right? But they’re scenes any good editor would have edited out, because they don’t have much to do with anything beyond “this also happened”.

So what did the critics think of the book? Here’s The Comics Journal:

Heatley’s great sin isn’t that he is a sinner, a horrible, petty, carping mess of a human dominated by urges and appetites he will hardly account for. It’s that he is a boring sinner who offers neither aesthetic pleasure nor insight only to then demand sympathy for unveiling his wriggling ego.

I get a vague feeling he didn’t really enjoy it.

Indeed:

David Heatley writes a way, way over-long narcissistic study of his own narcissism through the potentially humorous lens of his own addiction to 12-step programs.

Right:

A narcissist creates a monumentally narcissistic work about his narcissism.

Harh!

This book needs a sequel from the wife’s pov. Hopefully it will end with her leaving him.

OK, that’s enough time spent on this not very compelling book. I guess I didn’t hate the book?

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: Déjà Vu

06:20: Clamp #5

This is great — it’s an anthology of mostly short pieces, with different approaches but feeling cohesive.

I do wish they’d put the artists’ names on the pages, because I have no idea who did what.

But it’s all good stuff.

Very nice.

I thought I was the only one that did that with plastic straws!

John and Beverley Martyn: Stormbringer!

06:46: Roxane vend ses culottes by Maybelline Skvortzoff (Tanibis Editions)

Heh. Fun how the French title is a lot more direct: Roxane Sells Her Underwear.

It’s an oddly traditional plot…

It’s basically “woman starts selling sex, descends into depravity (including obligatory Eyes Wide Shut scene), before going back to her true love”. I didn’t think these books were legal to make any more! (I.e., it’s not “sex work positive”.) But it’s pretty good.

Sudden Joe Matt reference!

07:06: Mini Kuš #1119-122 (Kuš)

Latest batch arrived in the mail the other day…

Weng Pixin does a really compelling story about anger and stuff.

Nuka Horvat is more abstract.

Gary Colin goes geometrical.

And Anu Ambasna does a very appealing (and amusing) story about the secrets of DJ-ing.

Kraftwerk: Kraftwerk 1

07:22: Don’t Go Without Me by Rosemary Valero-O’Connell (Shortbox)

This book collects three stories that are similar in tone, and two of them seem to be slightly connected (both are about memories as currency/energy, I guess).

It’s really good. The stories have this elegiac, tragic quality to them, and the storytelling is rather dissociated — it’s pretty unique.

And dramatic.

OK, perhaps I should take a nap now to try to get myself back on a more reasonable sleeping schedule… I mean, it’s getting light out, after all.

Jimmy Lyons: Other Afternoons

14:53: Gristle by Lily Blakely (Shortbox)

Oops! That was way too much napping! Wow, I must have been tired or something…

Hm… this seems very familiar. Hm. Oops! I’ve already read this a couple years ago! Oh well; I’ll just read it again.

It’s still really good. It’s body horror, and it’s really creepy. And rather affecting.

The Pentangle: Cruel Sister

15:12: Milky Way by Miguel Vila (Fantagraphics)

Wow, the storytelling on this one is something else. Very Chris Ware, of course, but used for a very different effect than Ware uses it for.

Simon & Garfunkel: Bridge Over Troubled Water

It’s a difficult read not because of the storytelling, though — it’s really kinda horrifying. It’s the squishiest book I’ve read in a while. It reminds me of what was happening in American indie comics back in the 90s? Renée French, Dave Cooper, etc — i.e., there’s a lot of very unattractive sex in this book. Or perhaps attractive! It might all be a fetish book! I don’t know — there’s a disgust that pervades the book, but I’m not sure what Vila thinks of it all, but I get the feeling that Daniela is Vila’s viewpoint character, sort of. (He’s the dorky friend of the woman being wronged.)

What I’m saying is that the book is really accomplished, but it’s a really depressing read.

I guess this is a pretty ambivalent review:

Vila’s English-language debut swirls the erotic and the grotesque into a tart tale about the perils of sexual obsession.

Various: Amchitka (1)

16:12: Unended by Josh Bayer (Uncivilized Books)

This book has gotten a lot of buzz on the interwebs…

Wow. This is so full on from the very start — this is the first thing you see when you open the book.

This introduction, though, had me confused for the first, like, thirty pages of the book?

Because Bayer says that the book adapts his father’s unfinished play, and I thought that this was that play, or wasn’t sure whether it was the play or was Bayer talking about his father. It was confusing, is what I’m saying.

Various: Amchitka (2)

But perhaps the confusion is what Bayer is after. I mean, I like being confused when reading a comic — it makes you more involved. Like this bit — is it fiction, or is Bayer this much of a dick?

Archie Shepp: Live in Paris

But we do get to the play about halfway into the book, and everything becomes clear.

Anyway, this book is great. The storytelling is almost overwhelming, the artwork is exciting, the story is interesting, and I really enjoy how he ends the book by upping the ante on fictionality. It’s something really special. I’m surprised that it wasn’t on more people’s “best of” lists — just four, if I count correctly? But it was released late in the year, and perhaps (like me) they hadn’t read it yet.

Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & The Trinity: Jools & Brian

18:57: Pill Hill by Nicholas Breutzman (Uncivilized Books)

This reminds me a lot of Tom Kaczynski, so it makes sense that it’s published by Uncivilized…

King Crimson: Lizard

But then again, it doesn’t really.

Joni Mitchell: The Reprise Albums: Ladies of the Canyon

It’s a really harrowing book, but it’s also funny in parts. It’s about a nightmare of a divorce, and the struggle to save his kids from a meth addicted mother. While it’s totally gripping in parts, it’s also frustrating: The flights into fancy with the lizard people didn’t really bring anything to reading other than a slight blizzard of dandruff from scratching my head so much. What did he want to achieve with those bits? Add a distancing effect? Make us doubt all of the story (i.e., pretty forcibly telling us that the narrator was insane)?

It’s just very odd.

But OK, it’s really very well done otherwise — it’s propulsive and gripping. Except for the lizard bits.

Hm… I googled a bit, and it doesn’t seem to have gotten much attention? That’s weird. Is it too straightforward to be appreciated by the art comics crowd, and too odd to be appreciated by mainstream outlets as the next Nick Drnaso? Dunno. It’s a good book, anyway.

Led Zeppelin: III

20:50: Haruki Murakami: Manga Stories by Jean-Christophe Deveney (Tuttle Publishing)

Ah, I assumed that this was going to be comics stories written by Murakami, but instead if just a collection of adaptations of his short stories.

It’s pretty good? These are (of course) slightly mysterious stories, but the adaptations are extremely straightforward. So — not very exciting, exactly, but pretty entertaining.

David Bowie: Hunky Dory

21:46: The End

Well, I think that’s enough comics for this er “day” — I’ve been reading for *counts on fingers* 21 hours, with that “little nap” in the middle.

The Books of 2023

I haven’t read that many books in 2023… what you see in this lil’ bookcase are all of them. (I empty it out every year and then watch it fill up slowly…) I guess there’s about *guesstimates* 60-ish? I guess it’s been more of a comics year than a book year.

Below is a list of the ones I found er either interesting or annoying, I guess? At least I found them memorable.

Oh, and I’ll snap pics of the first three pages, because that’s how I determine whether to read a book or not: I start reading and see whether it seems OK. (I never read the back cover because what’s the point of reading an ad anyway?)

The Last Days of California by Mary Miller.

I read a short story by Miller in the Paris Review, and it was awesome. So I got this novel, and it wasn’t. I guess I found the subject matter slightly boring (an evangelical family making a trip to California before the world ends), but it was just kinda meandering… Not in an unpleasant way — I rather liked the book — but I was underwhelmed.

Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston.

I saw the movie, and it was so much fun. So I got the novel, and it’s … tedious? Yeah, tedious. I mean, I guess McQuiston can string sentences together, but that’s about it. It goes on and on and on and I got fed up with it toute de suite.

Hawkmoon by Michael Moorcock

I bought a bunch of fantasy books recommended by China Mieville, and this was one of them. It’s horrible! Just the worst. Perhaps Mieville read it when he was 10 or something? This book collects several novels, but I bailed after the first.

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore

I absolutely love Moore’s short stories (I mean — absolutely), but her novels are slightly more… uhm… I dunno. Not as awesome? I mean, she’s so brilliant at writing on a word for word basis (always inventive, always witty) that it almost doesn’t matter? I’ll always buy her books.

The Grip of Film by Gordy Lasure by Richard Ayoade

I’ve been on an Ayoade (and related) binge the past few years — I’ve read all his books and seen his movies and watched the TV series he’s contributed to (like the Garth Marenghi series). He’s a smart cookie, and he can be very funny, but this book — which is a parody of a “book on film”, “written” by somebody who only likes 80s action movies — was a slog. I think I bailed about halfway through.

Iron Council by China Miéville

Hm… am I picking mostly books I wasn’t that impressed with for this blog post? I guess I don’t have anything to say at all about most books, but if they annoy me, I remember them better? Anyway, Miéville has written some good book (Perdito Street Station and The City and The City, for instance), but this was a pointless slog: They build a railway line for half the book, and then they return for the other half of the book.

The Book that Wouldn’t Burn by Mark Lawrence

This is hugely entertaining. It’s much harder to find well-written fantasy books than just about anything else, and this is well-written and exciting. So I got some other Lawrence books as e-books after reading this (the Red Sisters trilogy), and you get the feeling that Lawrence’s main motivation for writing those books was to write endless scenes of torture. So… I don’t think I’ll be reading any further Lawrence books than the ones in this series, because that shit’s just tedious.

Clockwork Boys by T. Kingfisher

This is a series that I see recommended All The Time on the Intertubes — is Kingfisher some kind of internet celebrity or something? Anyway, it’s awful — badly written, badly printed, stupid and boring.

Garth Marenghi’s Terrortome by Garth Marenghi

This is part of my Ayoade binge, but I guess he’s not involved with this one? It’s pretty funny, but goes on a bit too long.

The Book of Dust v1 and v2 by Philip Pullman

I quite enjoyed the His Dark Materials series, and these new ones set in the same universe are quite entertaining. They’re not flawless, though — the plot in one of the books is creepy to the max (and it’s not meant to be, I think). But still, very entertaining.

Answered Prayers by Truman Capote

My god, Capote’s tone could be really grating, couldn’t it? Reading this is like being at a gossipy party where somebody keeps gossiping at you about people you don’t know, don’t care about, and that don’t seem that interesting.

Remain Silent and Persons Unknown by Susie Steiner

When I’m hung over, I read mysteries, and finding well-written mysteries is almost as difficult as finding well-written fantasy books. But these are quite good.

Tsalmoth by Steven Brust

I love the entire Vlad Taltos series, and this was another banger.

Crosstalk by Connie Willis

Willis has one simple trick when plotting: People run around a lot and can’t find each other. That’s it. That’s what 85% of her books are about: People who can’t find each other. The rest is mostly people who don’t tell each other what they need to know, so that there’ll be more running around. This book was obviously written after Willis was stung by the critique of her previous novels: People have cell phones now. There’s no need to run around and not find each other. So she’s finally introduced cell phones, but it turns out that people forget to charge them and stuff, so she still has them running around and not finding each other.

The Last Supper by Rachel Cusk

The Outline novel was amazing, so I’ve been picking up her older books, and they’re mostly really interesting, too. This one is a travelogue about being in Italy, and Cusk’s writing is witty and thought provoking.

The Trees and Dr. No by Percival Everett

I read Erasure the other year, and I thought it was pretty amazing. The Trees is pretty good, but Dr. No is… er… OK, it starts out swell — it’s about a professor who specialises in nothing. That is, the physical concept of nothing. So we get lots of jokes about people misunderstanding him when he talks about nothing, and then there’s an evil billionaire and things are going swimmingly. Then it seems like he loses interest about half way through, and just starts piling on the silliness in the hopes that the novel will resolve itself, but instead it just kinda gets boring. Because silliness is a tough thing in a novel: Too much, and you lose faith in the novel.

(And I’m starting to think that Everett is a bit of a dick.)

Happy Trails to You by Julie Hecht

I think I’ve read all of Hecht’s fiction now, and I love it all. And this short story collection (which mostly feature the same character as from her other two books) is wonderful. And there’s an added bonus with Hecht’s books: You can read the Goodreads reviews and find several people horrified that somebody would write about these characters that they can’t identify with at all. Hilarious! Like this one:

The characters are completely foreign to me. More than halfway through the book I could not find a single aspect of either main character that I could relate to. Moreso, these characters just made me sad. Their idiosyncrasies are impenetrable, unrelenting, and just plain weird.

Beyond the Reach of Earth by Ken MacLeod

MacLeod continues his new space opera, and it’s great. So exciting.

Season of Skulls and Quantum of Nightmares by Charles Stross

And I guess the same can be said of Stross’ new books, too — they’re really entertaining. But perhaps not as exciting as they used to be.

Er… is that it? I guess it is.

Well, the ones I had something to say about, even if it was just a couple of sentences…

But there you go:

Bookcase emptied for a new, fresh year. And perhaps I should read more good books this year…

On Caching

Have you ever thought about caching? I mean, for web pages?

This isn’t going to be a rant, and there’s certainly not going to be a “call to action” here, but this is just something I’ve been going “*sigh*” about for decades, and I thought perhaps it might be time to ruminate a bit. Don’t feel obligated to read this! If this is an area you work in, you already know all this, and if you don’t, it’s not going to be of interest.

OK?

OK.

Since the beginning of time (i.e., the mid 90s) web browsers have been caching data to make web page rendering faster. (And in those days, to keep your modem bill down, I guess.) Caching is a good idea, but it makes development slightly more complex.

Let’s take an example web page, index.html, from my web site Mrs. Kwakk Wakk, purveyor of purported particulars to prince & proletarian:

<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset='utf-8'>
    <link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='kwakk.css'>
    <script type='text/javascript' src='kwakk.js'></script>
    <link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/png" href="favicon.png">
  </head>
  ...

After loading this page, your browser (and any caches in between, like Cloudflare) will cache the kwakk.css and kwakk.js files. If I do any changes to these files, a normal reload of the site won’t reload them — you’ll still be using the old versions of these files. Some browsers have a “hard reload” function (in Firefox, it’s Shift-Control-R), but some don’t (mostly mobile phone browsers). And if you have Cloudflare in front of the site, that won’t help: I’d have to empty the Cloudflare cache before you’d see any changes.

“*gasp*”, I’m guessing you’re saying ironically now. “How does the web even survive with those shortcomings!”; laying it on really quick, aren’t you.

Well, things fix themselves after a while — these resources are usually only cached for a couple of hours, so “eh, whatevs” is the approach taken by most people who make simple web pages.

People who make “real” sites don’t have these problems, because they have a build step somewhere in their deployment scripts: They probably have a Javascript minifier, and they generate the CSS from whatever, and the HTML (if it’s even a static file) is generated from something else again, and the build script takes care to name each resource with a unique name, so that you get all the resources at the same time. This is why if you look at a major site, you’ll find that it loads Javascript files called things like u8bp0J-3GNE.js…

But! I still stumble upon web shops here and there where I go “well, that looks odd”, and then I hit Shift-Control-R and everything magically looks better. Admittedly, a lot less often than I used to in the olden days (a lot!), but it happens, and then you know that they don’t have a deployment script that takes care of these things.

And this stuff is confusing to people who are just tinkering with their own little sites, and it makes for a frustrating development situation. I’ve seen people actually do things like this manually:

<link rel='stylesheet' href='kwakk.css?ver=1034'>

That is, they bump a number in their HTML files when they push a new version. That’s a miserable thing to have to do, and it’s error-prone, and it makes your VC history sad.

So what most people end up with (except for the majority that just ignore the thing, thinking “well, I don’t update my hobby site that often anyway”), is some sort of deployment script that does this automatically. For instance, just a simple sed script that replaces ?ver= with a timestamp or something. And that’s OK, except for Cloudflare not wanting to cache URLs that have query parameters (at least not on the free plan), so you have to put the versioning string somewhere else, but if you put it somewhere else, you have to keep changing the file name, or… you have to do some URL rewriting on your web site.

As an example, the kwakk.info site has:

<link href='/res/0/kwakk.css' rel='stylesheet'>

See that /res/0/? It’s rewritten by the deployment script to have a timestamp, and then I have an .htaccess file that says:

RewriteEngine On
# Versioned versions of JSON/JS/CSS.
RewriteRule res/([0-9]+)/([^.]+[.](json|js|css)) /$2 [L]

Now Cloudflare caches the files properly, and users get the proper versions of all the resource files.

So why am I writing this blog post anyway? This caching behaviour has been a problem for almost three decades, and nobody has come up with anything better than to make each individual web tinkerer come up with their own hacked-up solution. Would it be possible to come up with something that would just, like, work?

Probably not. But here’s a thought I had while trying to fall asleep the other day — what if the web server and the browser could cooperate a bit more?

OK, back to the original HTML:

<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset='utf-8'>
    <link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='kwakk.css'>
    <script type='text/javascript' src='kwakk.js'></script>
    <link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/png" href="favicon.png">
  </head>
  ...

Now, the web server could parse this HTML and check the timestamp of the included files. I mean, I say “could” in a kinda hand-wavy way — there are problems if the HTML is generated on-the-fly: The server would then have to do some caching before parsing, and… But if it’s an actual file, then certainly convenient, efficient parsers exist, so…

Anyway, my sleepy-time idea would then be to output the information as a series of HTTP response headers. Perhaps something like:

Resource-Last-Modified: kwakk.css;Sat, 16 Dec 2023 17:58:38 GMT
Resource-Last-Modified: kwakk.js;Sat, 16 Dec 2023 12:52:45 GMT

Or whatever. And then the browser (and Cloudflare) could use this information to decide whether to reload the resource or not? And for other resources that may be loaded later dynamically, you could declare them like:

<meta rel="resource" "menu.svg">

And they’d get the same treatment…

I dunno. There’s probably a reason somebody hasn’t developed something like during the previous 30 years. I’m just typing this here so I don’t start thinking about it again the next time I go to bed.

And like I said, it’s a problem only for those people who like to tinker with their personal sites: People that have a build step somewhere (writing their entire site in Typescript with Tailwind, for instance) don’t have these issues that much. (Although I saw a newspaper site with an image of odd proportions the other week, due to somebody cropping an image after it was published or something… (Which reminds me of a thing I was thinking back in the 90s — why don’t web servers include the sizes of included images automatically somehow, and that could basically use the same mechanism as the one I sketched out here — but it would be more resource intensive. But just imagine: No more web pages where everything moves around after the browser loaded the images! (Yes, yes, I know about height and width in image tags, but that’s apparently still too hard for about half the web sites out there to include…)))

All computer stuff consists of cobbled together things, and things still somehow kinda work.

But in annoying ways.

Anyway. There you go.

So here’s a GIF of a cat.