#firstsecond

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Bowen McCurdy and Jordan Morris’s “Youth Group”

NEXT SATURDAY (July 20), I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

Youth Group is Bowen McCurdy and Jordan Morris's new and delightful graphic novel from Firstsecond. It's a charming tale of 1990s ennui, cringe Sunday School – and demon hunting.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250789235/youthgroup

Kay is a bitter, cynical teenager who's doing her best to help her mother cope with an ugly divorce that has seen her dad check out on his former family. Mom is going back to church, and she talks Kay into coming along with her to attend the church youth group.

This is set in the 1990s, and the word "cringe" hasn't yet entered our lexicon as an adjective, but boy is the youth group cringe. The pastor is a guitar-strumming bearded dad who demonstrates how down he is with the kids by singing top 40 songs rewritten with evangelical lyrics (think Weird Al meets the 700 Club). Kay gamely struggles through a session and even makes a friend or two, and agrees to keep attending in deference to her mother's pleas.

But this is no ordinary youth group. Kay's ultra-boring suburban hometown is actually infested with demons who routinely possess the townspeople, and that baseline of demonic activity has suddenly gone critical, with a new wave of possessions. Suddenly, the possessed are everywhere – even Kay's shitty dad ends up with a demon inside of him.

That's when Kay discovers that the youth group and its corny pastor are also demon hunters par excellence. Their rec-rooms sport secret cubbies filled with holy weapons, and the words of exorcism come as readily to them as any embarrassing rewritten devotional pop song. Kay's discovery of this secret world convinces her that youth group isn't so bad after all, and soon she is initiated into its mysteries, including the existence of rival demon-hunting kids from the local synagogue, Catholic church, and Wiccan coven.

As the nature of the new demonic incursion becomes clearer, it falls on Kay and her pals to overcome these sectarian divisions over the protests of their guitar-strumming, magic-wielding leader. That takes on a special urgency when Kay learns why the demons are interested in her, personally, and a handful of other kids in town who all share a secret trait.

I confess that as someone who lived through the 1990s as a young man, there is something disorienting about experiencing the decade of my young adulthood through the kind of retro lens I associate with the 1950s or 1960s. But while the experience is disorienting, it's not unpleasant. McCurdy's artwork and Morris's snappy dialog conjure up that bygone decade in a way that is simultaneously affectionate and critical, exposing the hollowness of its performative ennui and the brave face that performance represented even as the world was being swept up in corporate gigantism.

McCurdy and Morris are really onto something here, implicitly asking us why the 1990s gave us Buffy and Sabrina (and The Coven, etc etc) – what was it about that decade in which Reaganomics and globalism consolidated the gains of the 1980s, where the climate emergency took on its undeniable urgency, where media monopolies mastered the art of commodifying counterculture faster than it could mutate into new forms?

Morris's writing really shines here. If you enjoyed Bubble, his earlier outing based on the post-apocalyptic comedy podcast of the same name, you will love this one:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/21/podcasting-as-a-visual-medium/#huntr

Morris is also half of Jordan, Jesse Go!, the long-running podcast where he and Jesse Thorn do a weekly ha-ha-only-serious goofball schtick that never fails to smuggle in really clever and insightful ideas amidst the poop jokes.

https://maximumfun.org/podcasts/jordan-jesse-go/

John Hodgman calls nostalgia a "toxic impulse." Church Group deftly avoids nostalgia's trap, managing to be a period piece without falling prey to the Happy Days pathology of ignoring the many flaws and problems of its era. And of course, it's a hoot and a blast.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/16/blight/#the-dream-of-the-nineties

[librarycomic]

Plain Jane and the Mermaid by Vera Brosgol. First Second, 2024. 9781250314864. 364pp. Includes an author's note, sketches, beat boards, and two wonderful pages on the coloring process at the end. (The book was colored by the mighty Alex Longstreth.)

Jane's parents have just died, and her awful male cousin is set to inherit everything. He also intends to kick Jane out of her home. She has nowhere to go, but if she gets married, she'll receive a sizeable dowry.

Jane secretly loves Peter. He works with his father, a fisherman who enjoys his son's manner as little as Jane's parents liked how she looked. Jane works up her courage, though, and proposes to Peter. He's more than a little rude about it, and then he's kidnapped by a mermaid. With a little magical help from a woman in town, Jane sets off after him.

What follows is an adventure involving selkies, a mighty water demon, undead sailors, and the quest for eternal youth. Throughout, Jane is brave and kindhearted and the kind of person I wish I had more of a chance to root for. This may be my favorite of Brosgol's books, which is saying something considering how much my daughter and I love Anya's Ghost; her art and storytelling get better with every book.

Worth noting: This graphic novel uses spot gloss perfectly on the cover. Hats off to Kirk Benshoff, the cover designer.

[grickle14]

I'm so thrilled and flattered that my horror graphic novel "Eerie Tales from the School of Screams" has made the School Library Journal's BEST Graphic Novels of 2023 List! This is such an honor and I am beyond words!

[siflshonen]

While I'm at it:

Practice what you preach, Izuku Midoriya!

Practice what you preach, Izuku! He's his own man, you egoist!

[genderqueeradrien]

in my school study lounge going thru my liked videos and watching miraculous animatics i watched in like may . so as you can see the studying's going well

[lapdogchase]

i need . gum or like chewelry or something fuck my dumb gay life

[winningthesweepstakes]

Weirdo by Tony Weaver, Jr., illustrated by Jes and Cin Wibowo

Weirdo by Tony Weaver, Jr., illustrated by Jes and Cin Wibowo. FirstSecond, 2024. 9781250772862 Rating: 1-5 (5 is an excellent or a Starred review) 4.5 Format:  Paperback graphic novel Genre: Realistic fiction  What did you like about the book? Tackling heavy topics, including bullying, depression, and suicide, Tony Weaver’s debut autobiographical outing still manages to send an uplifting…

[shieldfoss]

D:

My rpgs! My FirstSecond editions! My reference collection!

Ok some of my reference collection is Bad maybe I should get rid of ...

... I can't find it lmao, maybe I already did get rid of my java book. I should probably also get rid of my Absolute C++ (Absolute garbage).

---

I have also considered getting rid of my "Introduction to data structures and algorithms with C++" but honestly, looking at it? Maybe not.

The C++ in it is hot garbage and I've been doing that thing where you assume that, if the author is bad at the thing you know (C++), the author is probably also bad at the thing you are trying to learn.

But.

I may be unfairly maligning the author's C++ skills and so, maybe the data structures and algorithms are good anyway?

On my re-check while looking for the Java book, I suddenly realize the fault is with the university, not the author (probably.)

I got this book for a class in... I want to guess 2010 so let's. I got this in 2010, C++ was standardized in 1998 and yet somehow this book used pre-standard C++

But my recheck revealed:

Ok so Prentice Hall should have stopped offering this for sale without an update to standardized C++

But I can't exactly judge the author's skill on the fact that he didn't have a time machine.

Maybe the data structures and algorithms in this book are Fine Actually if I can just

No google translate, I'm pretty sure those are not equivalent sentences, on account of one of them is idiomatic in Danish and the other is not idiomatic in English. I need you to help me not sound like I don't know the words.

I want to do a fundamental rearrangement of my furniture

I do not want to lift what is, conservatively, one ton of books.

[marinscos]

Belle of the Ball -- The Origins

These were my original designs for my upcoming graphic novel hoo!!

[elrevel]

Another reminder that the other book that I illustrated last year (written by @ronaldwimberly) is also currently in stores and available to buy! It’s called Now Let Me Fly, and it’s about the first black fighter pilot in WWI. But really, it encompasses so much than that. It’s a true-life adventure that flies you around the the world, from the boxing rings of Paris to the trenches of World War I. It’s being published by @01firstsecond so I’ll let them tell you more. - NOW LET ME FLY From author Ronald Wimberly, creator of the viral comic Lighten Up, comes a soaring graphic biography that casts new light on the first African-American fighter pilot. On the eve of World War I, Eugene Bullard was a refugee of the Jim Crow South who was determined to find a place where a Black man would be treated as a fellow human being. His search took him from rural Georgia to the streets of Paris, from the vaudeville stage to the boxing ring, and finally, from the muddy trenches to the open skies. In 1914, Bullard joined the fight to defend France—and made history as the world’s first African American fighter pilot. In this candid but sensitive portrait of Bullard, author Ronald Wimberly balances the personal and the historical to interrogate concepts of cynicism, idealism, fear, glory, and the pervasiveness of anti-Black racism. - Unfortunately it’s not coming out until January 3, 2023. For more information, and to pre-order, check out the ‘Now Let Me Fly’ link in my bio. - #ronwimberly #eugenebullard #wwi #ww1 #biplane #boxing #blackhistory #graphicnovel #warcomics #firstsecond #illustrationsketch #sketchbook #characters #charactersketch #comics #comicartist #comicartwork #comicartists #comicartistsoninstagram #digitalsketch #photoshop #cintiq https://www.instagram.com/p/ConO1bMqI5Y/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[drawjereldraw]

Fame in the 20th century was a lot different than it is today. The monoculture was everything.  What would it have been like to become so famous that your name is synonymous with genius? Einstein comes out Nov. 15. Pre-order https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626728769/einstein.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Weinersmith and Boulet’s “Bea Wolf”

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

Bea Wolf is Zach Weinersmith and Boulet's ferociously amazingly great illustrated kids' graphic novel adaptation of the Old English epic poem, which inspired Tolkien, who helped bring it to popularity after it had languished in obscurity for centuries:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250776297/beawolf

Boy is this a wildly improbable artifact. Weinersmith and Boulet set themselves the task of bringing Germanic heroic saga from more than a thousand years ago to modern children, while preserving the meter and the linguistic and literary tropes of the original. And they did it!

There are some changes, of course. Grendel – the boss monster that both Beowulf and Bea Wulf must defeat – is no longer obsessed with decapitating his foes and stealing their heads. In Bea Wulf, Grendel is a monstrously grown up and boring adult who watches cable news and flosses twice per day, and when he defeats the kids whose destruction he is bent upon, he does so by turning them into boring adults, too.

And Bea Wulf – and the kings that do battle with Grendel – are not interested in the gold and jewels that the kings of Beowulf hoard. In Bea Wulf, the treasure is toys, chocolate, soda, candy, food without fiber, television shows without redeeming educational content, water balloons, nerf swords and spears, and other stuff beloved of kids and hated by parents.

That substitution is key to transposing the thousand-year-old adult epic Beowulf for enjoyment by small children in the 21st century. After all, what makes Beowulf so epic is the sense that it is set in a time in which a primal valor still reigned, but it is narrated for an audience that has been tamed and domesticated. Beowulf makes you long for a never-was time of fierce and unwavering bravery. Bea Wulf beautifully conjures the years of early childhood when you and the kids in your group had your own little sealed-off world, which grownups could barely perceive and never understand.

Growing up, after all, is a process of repeating things that are brave the first time you do them, over and over again, until they become banal. That's what "coming of age" really boils down to: the slow and relentless transformation of the mythic, the epic, and the unknowable and unknown into the tame, the explained, the mastered. When you're just mastering balance and coordination, the playground climber is a challenge out of legend. A couple years later, it's just something you climb.

The correspondences between the leeching away of magic lamented in Beowulf and experienced by all of us as we grow out of childhood are obvious in hindsight and surprising and beautiful and bittersweet when you encounter them in Bea Wolf.

This effect owes a large debt to Boulet's stupendous artwork. Boulet brings a vibe rarely seen in American kids' illustration, owing quite a lot to France's bande dessinée tradition. Of course, this is a Firstsecond book, and they established themselves as an exciting and fresh kids' publisher in the USA nearly 20 years ago by bringing some of Europe's finest comics to an American audience for the first time. You can get a sense of Boulet's darker-than-average, unabashedly anarchic illustrations here:

https://www.comixtrip.fr/bibliotheque/bea-wolf-weinersmith-boulet-albin-michel/

The utter brilliance of Bea Wulf is as much due to the things it preserves from the original epic as it is to the updates and changes. Weinersmith has kept the Old English tradition of alliteration, right from the earliest passages, with celebrations of heroes like "Tanya, treat-taker, terror of Halloween, her costume-cache vast, sieging kin and neighbor, draining full candy-bins, fearing not the fate of her teeth. Ten thousand treats she took. That was a fine Tuesday."

Weinersmith also preserves the kennings – the elaborate figurative compound phrases that replace nouns – that turn ordinary names and places into epithets at you have to riddle out, like calling a river "the sliding sea."

These literary devices, rarely seen today, are extremely powerful, and they conjure up the force and mystique that has kept Beowulf in our current literary discourse for more than a millennium. They also make this a super fun book to read aloud.

When Jim Henson was first conceiving of Sesame Street, he made a point of designing it to have jokes and riffs that would appeal to adults, even if some of the nuance would be lost on kids. He did this because he wanted to make art that adults and kids could enjoy together, both because that would give adults a chance to help kids actively explore the ideas on-screen, but also because it would bring some magic into those adults' lives.

This is a very winning combination (not for nothing, it's also the original design brief for Disneyland). Weinersmith and Boulet have produced a first-rate work of adult and kid literature, both a perfect entree to Beowulf for anyone contemplating a dive into old English epic poetry, and a kids' book full of booger jokes and transgressive scenes of perfect mischief.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/24/awesome-alliteration/#hellion-hallelujah

[librarycomic]

Squire & Knight: Wayward Travelers by Scott Chantler. First Second, 2024. 9781250846907. 156pp. (more) Fun Extra Stuff at the end, including a bit about the origin of the story, sketches, and a few notes about Chantler's process.

At the end of the book, Chantler talks about how easy it would have been to just repeat the first book in the series with a new problem -- I assume he meant the boastful Sir Kelton would again have needed his clear-thinking Squire to save the day (though he would not have admitted it). I would have enjoyed that book, but I like this one much better. Seeing Squire realize he doesn't know everything and then have to deal with that is very satisfying.

The graphic novel opens with Sir Kelton and Squire traveling through the woods. Sir Kelton is entertaining the young goblin child they're taking to the School of Wizardry with a story. Sir Kelton admonishes Squire for reading on the trail, saying he lacks a sense of adventure. But Squire wishes the knight would pay more attention to their surroundings; they're lost, and Sir Kelton's disdain for reading extends to maps as well. Things look up (to Sir Kelton at least) when he has to fight another knight who also isn't good at listening. Then Squire heads up a tree to try to figure out where they all are, and ends up being captured by hungry gnolls. (Throughout Squire recalls meeting the beautiful Queen Marley, and eventually what she told him about his duty to Sir Kelton.)

Worth noting: Chantler works with a limited color palette again, though it's different from that of the first book; it's stunning, and it works particularly well in clarifying which are the flashback scenes. The monsters are just terrifying enough and the battles are entertaining.

[grickle14]

Just a gentle reminder that I created a horror graphic novel "Eerie Tales from the School of Screams" published by FirstSecond. I'd love to know your thoughts on it out there! If you haven't read it yet, why not pick yourself up a signed copy? Right here: https://gricklemart.com/eerie-tales-from-the-school-of-screams-signed/

[thegorgonist]

The countdown to my book release date begins--7 days till No One Returns from the Enchanted Forest will be on shelves in in people's hands! (You can order one here!)

[natalie-andrewson]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Natalie Andrewson (@natandrewson)

Look what I just found on my doorstep!! Just in time for the official release tomorrow!!! Having this finally in my hands after waiting a year for the release is so satisfying- and the colors are so perfect! 😭😭🙏🙏 ✨✨✨This book would have never happened without my amazing agent Jen Linnan, my extraordinary editors @calistabrill & @_syntactics_, and the talents of @DoingThePigeon @dezinpub @andyru12 and the whole team at @01FirstSecond!!! THANK YOU!!! I’m so proud of this book thanks to you ❤️ ✨🐭🎄✨ And not to mention the SUPURB flatters that helped me throughout the many stages of this book: @claredezutti @barbara_bot @kristenacampora @oceanfruit @beaupirrone and @andyalexandy. They’re all highly recommended if you’re in need of flatters (and if they’re still available)!! #thenutcrackerandthemouseking #thenutcracker #comics #graphicnovel #firstsecond #bookrelease https://www.instagram.com/p/CE2l3tchOCb/?igshid=1s2fje0v59xxh