Blood and Rain

I read fiction, the only extant copy of a children's book and some newspaper comics. I watch a movie. A round of Roulette turns up a historical hobbyhorse, an oversight and the work of an old friend.

Literature Local

Getting back into my stop-and-lurch perambulation through the early work of James Ellroy, the only writer I have been reading and re-reading consistently from high school until the present.

I read his third novel Blood On the Moon which inaugurated what would become the Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy, collected in one volume in 1998 under the title L.A. Noir. Both the bundling of the Lloyd Hopkins novels into one volume and the refurbished title were marketing gimmicks capitalizing on the gust of popularity Ellroy was experiencing after the 1997 release of the outstanding and successful film L.A Confidential, adapted from Ellroy’s novel of the same name. (I’m zig-zagging my roughly chronological way towards a re-reading of that one too.)

I had never heard of Ellroy when L.A. Confidential was released as a film. I saw the movie six times in the theater from 1997 into 1998. (And have seen it perhaps twenty times since on VHS and DVD. As a party trick I can quote along to the dialogue with roughly seventy-five to eighty percent fidelity.) I got my adolescent hands on a copy of the novel on which the film was based, read it and then set about reading anything else of Ellroy’s that I could find.

One day in 1998 I was at the mall with some friends and saw the newly-published L.A. Noir on display at the bookstore. I bought it on the spot without so much as perusing the dust jacket flap. When I got it home I read the new introduction Ellroy wrote for L.A. Noir and was perplexed, dismayed and intrigued to learn that this was not one novel but three, and that they weren’t new but rather were composed in the mid-Eighties before Ellroy had matured as a writer, and WERE NOT set amidst the retro-noir post-War milieu I had come to perceive as Ellroy’s stock-in-trade.

But I did read them. And while I was nonplussed by some sloppy writing and unenthused by a difficulty in relating to Hopkins’s concerns as a protagonist, there was enough suspense, bloodshed and novelty to see me through.

Now I am nearly the same age as Hopkins in the first novel and reading L.A. Noir for the first time since the Nineties. The book I bought in 1998 is in a box in my buddy’s basement in New Jersey so I tracked a copy down through the public library (my first time using San Francisco’s inter-library loan system; this copy is from the public library of Oakland).

Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon predates Blood on the Moon by several years; Ellroy goes out of his way in the introduction to assert that he had not read it when he began work on his book. I suspect he doth protest too much, though he does also give Harris credit for having written the better book. I myself haven’t read Red Dragon but I have seen two film adaptations of it and I get why Blood on the Moon invites the comparison: in each story a brilliant, disturbed, trauma-addled detective with a preternatural ability to get inside the minds of killers finds himself stalking a brilliant, disturbed, trauma-addled sociopath who becomes first the detective’s bête noire and ultimately his evil spiritual twin or shadow reflection, the destruction of whom gives the detective a meaning his life has been lacking at the cost of reconciling and dispensing with some unpleasant parts of himself to which he has been clinging unhealthily.

Hopkins also has things in common with a number of other Ellroy protagonists — tall, strong, intelligent, roguish, policeman, philanderer, would-be Christian and sinner. The villain he’s stalking in Blood on the Moon was raped and humiliated by two classmates as an adolescent and has remade himself as a physically indomitable, technically proficient and ferociously lethal killer of women. And an amateurish poetaster to boot — fictional serial killers need a gimmick and this guy’s is bad poetry.

Ellroy builds the novel to intertwine Hopkins and “the poet” both characteristically and structurally, arranging their origin stories, development and clashing destinies alongside one another chapter by chapter, maintaining omniscient third-person narration (a noteworthy first for Ellroy’s career) while switching perspective back and forth from homicide detective to serial killer until they begin to circle in on one another and find out that they have much more in common than in contrast.

This was ahead of a lot of genre imitators, if admittedly not ahead of Thomas Harris. The at-first-parallel, eventually-convergent structure and the sheer bravado of young Ellroy’s grandiose ambition are the best attributes of Blood on the Moon and remain defining characteristics of Ellroy’s work, ones that he would deploy far more effectively as he honed his craft. The first installment in the Lloyd Hopkins trilogy has some things going for it but it finally falls down on Ellroy’s then-underdeveloped style of dialogue, some corny characterizations and some hurried narrative elisions that can make the story alternately too easy or too hard to follow.

Still, it’s interesting to see Ellroy ironing out a number of his ongoing fascinations and implementing some tools he didn’t use in his first two books. I remember very little from the rest of L.A. Noir, so perhaps I’ll find the next two Lloyd Hopkins novels to be superior to the first.

Moving along, here’s a nifty item for you: a One Could Argue exclusive! You gotta have cool friends like me to read There’s a Monster In My House: A Pop-Up Book for Boys because there is only one copy of this book. And don’t try to read it by infiltrating my drawing circle and making friends with Gordon Silveria because he’s mine. Get your own killer illustrator/sculptor/painter/designer pal.

Gordon is the friend I mentioned two entries back who got me to watch Double Indemnity. He is an outstanding artist, designer and craftsman working across several media. We have been hanging out and drawing quite a bit with Aaron Zonka; in fact the three of us made a zine together in a single sitting on December 8, 2022, which I will mail copies of to anyone who asks nicely.

We were at one of our regular creative conclaves with a few other friends when Gordon showed us There’s a Monster In My House: A Pop-Up Book for Boys. It was commissioned by a publishing firm for whom Gordon wrote, illustrated and constructed the pop-up book prototype only to have the publisher demand too many changes which contradicted their original request and decline to promise an advance, which Gordon rightly felt was an untenable further expenditure of his time. So it remains a covetable single-edition, hand-made, fully-functioning and beautifully-designed book with some charming and engaging pop-up illustrations of a monster, a bear, a monkey, a robot and a boy.

Generations of toddlers would have gone on to grow up with fond memories of this wonderful book if it had made it to market. Not to mention grown men in arrested states of preadolescence who are obsessed with good art and design and read a lot of children’s books anyway, not that I myself know anyone like that. I feel very privileged to have read it and can probably say with confidence that I am the only critic to have written about it, since you have to be cool with Gordon to see and hold it. He’s got plenty of other great work in various media out there and I strongly suggest everyone go look up his stuff.

Picture Pub

I was listening to Tyler Cowen’s podcast as one does and he mentioned liking some of the films where Bud Abbott and Lou Costello “meet” the various “monsters” from the stable of Universal Studios. This is that well-known thing where Universal made all these great classic pre-War horror pictures with Frankenstein and the Wolfman and all of that, you dig? The “Universal Horror” or “Universal Monsters” cycle or whatever. And at some point after Abbott and Costello had made the multiple career transitions from stage to radio to screen, someone had the idea to slap their oddball comedy duo schtick up against the darker Universal Monsters tone and make some pretty discordantly bizarre movies. I’m extrapolating because this is the only one I’ve seen and in fact the only Abbott and Costello movie I’ve ever seen: Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from 1953, directed by Charles Lamont.

It’s okay. It’s set in England I guess some time around or just before 1900, or roughly whenever the original Jekyll and Hyde story of Stevenson was set, with Abbott and Costello playing two American transplants named Slim and Tubby who have been detailed to the London police force as like police exchange students. They get kicked out and entangled with Dr. Jekyll and his evil alternate persona Mr. Hyde, played by Universal Monsters legend Boris Karloff, stumbling into madcap antics as they try to bring the villain to justice and redeem their reputations.

This was fine. Didn’t blow my skirt up. I get what their schtick is. Now no one can say I’ve never seen an Abbott and Costello picture. People are always saying to me “You’ve never seen an Abbott Costello picture!” and frankly I’m sick of it. I mean I know out loud they’re saying “Can I get a name for the order?” or “Is this bus seat taken?” or “No thank you; I have a boyfriend.” But I can read between the lines. I know what they’re really saying: “I bet you’ve never even seen a single Abbott and Costello movie in your life!”

Now any time anyone says any of those things to me, I will say “I have seen Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I had to pause it a few times to check my phone and wander in and out of the bathroom, which says something mildly unflattering about a seventy-six-minute movie, but I sure as shit watched every frame of that thing.”

That’ll show ‘em.

Comics Cantina

As per the last entry, I finished reading Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip Volume Five. The only novel insight I have is one I should have noted a long time ago — Jansson has a great hand for drawing whimsical, gracefully floating speech balloons.

I’m good on Moomin for now and my plan was to next revisit the work of a particular early master of the newspaper comics form. But some asshole still has the library book I want checked out. I get antsy if I don’t have a book of classic newspaper comics readily at hand, so on a day off I wandered over to the nearest library branch and plucked from the shelves The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book.

I grew up reading Calvin and Hobbes in book form and closely following the new installments as they came out every day in my home-area newspaper. Besides being one of the greatest strips of any time period, it has a particular resonance for Americans of my vintage who were young enough to never remember a time when Calvin and Hobbes wasn’t around and old enough to get a few good years following it day by day in the papers. This lovely era in the lives of us Nineties preteens came to an end when Bill Watterson decided that ten years was enough for Calvin and Hobbes, ended the strip decades before it would have worn out its welcome and went out on quite possibly the gutsiest and most coolly calculated high note in the history of art.

I read and re-read The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book assiduously as a kid and I’ll fucking well do it again, thank you very much. Besides comprising a highlight and lowlight reel of the strip’s run, this volume has copious notes and errata from Watterson about various aspects of Calvin and Hobbes. Most interestingly, it opens with a lengthy manifesto where the famously opinionated and articulate cartoonist discusses his concerns about where the newspaper comics business was headed at the time of writing. If anything, without an ability to anticipate the race to the aesthetic bottom in comics that has been incentivized by smartphones and social media, Watterson in his pessimism was being rather quaintly conservative in his predictions about how shitty the medium might get in succeeding decades.

Anyway, I read a lot of Calvin and Hobbes books but I haven’t sat down and read The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book in a long time and I’m having a lot of fun with it. Watterson’s comics work and a few noteworthy comments he’s made in other fora have had an incommensurately significant effect on the course of my life and he remains one of the people I’d most like to be like: a master cartoonist, a relatively anonymous worker who prefers to let his craftsmanship be famous in his stead and a man of integrity who has no problem standing up for himself and his peers. And also a guy who can grow a good mustache, the only metric by which I can claim to compete with him. Aside from the mustache, the comics and the author’s notes in The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book provide good encapsulation of all of these Wattersonian qualities.

Roulette

Gettysburg by Stephen W. Sears, read in 2017. Reading about the Civil War is a hobby of mine and so the subject comes up quite often here at One Could Argue. The last Civil War book I read before Gettysburg was Chancellorsville 1863: The Souls of the Brave by Ernest B. Furgurson, an outstanding account of the fascinating engagement in the spring of 1863 when Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia outmaneuvered a numerically vastly superior Army of the Potomac under the command of Joseph Hooker and won an astonishing victory that nevertheless presaged disaster for Lee’s own forces and for the misbegotten cause of the Confederacy itself. Furgurson outlines this point eloquently at the end of his book, pointing out that the overconfidence Lee and his subordinates acquired at Chancellorsville, not to mention the loss of the finest of them when Stonewall Jackson succumbed to fatal wounds sustained at the B. of C., could be seen as directly contributing to the uncharacteristically costly tactical errors Lee made months later at the Battle of Gettysburg.

I’m reasonably confident it was this specific argument on Furgurson’s part that prompted me to seek out a book about Gettysburg as my next bit of Civil War reading. Sears maintains a strong reputation among Civil War nerds as a chronicler of individual battles and his Gettysburg firmly buttresses that view in my mind. This book was lengthy but sprightly, thorough but engaging, informative but enthralling. Gettysburg is rightly acknowledged as a fascinating (and disproportionately bloody) engagement that, as a humbling defeat for Lee which happened to fall across precisely the same date upon which Grant forced the surrender of Vicksburg and divided the Confederacy by seizing control of the Mississippi River, represented perhaps the most militarily significant turning point in the War. Sears does a distinctively fine job of chronicling the most famous battle in the history of American warfare. Highly recommended.

Just Help! How to Build a Better World by Sonia Sotomayor, illustrated by Angela Dominguez, read in 2022. This is a children’s book written by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

This should show up in some earlier entry because I can see on the complete reading list where it fell in the order of books I’ve read and I’m supposed to at least mention every one of them in the pages of this newsletter. But I can’t find citation of it in all of the One Could Argue archives. This appears to be a significant mistake that I wouldn’t have stumbled upon if I hadn’t randomly drawn Just Help! How to Build a Better World in this round of Roulette.

I must say, this oversight on my part really, genuinely pisses me off. The whole point of this newsletter is to comment upon the books I read and leave nothing out. When I fuck up this badly it makes me feel like I’m letting myself and my readers down.

Was there a reason I didn’t include mention of this book? I could have sworn it was in there somewhere but I can’t find it and I don’t think it is. I’ve written before about acknowledging and correcting errors in this space and I take pride in trying my best but it still stings to find that I’ve made such an elemental fuck-up.

So…fuck you, me. Tighten this shit up. And — I’m sorry, reader. I will tighten this shit up.

Spring Rain: A Graphic Memoir of Love, Madness and Revolutions by Andy Warner, read in 2020. Andy and I go way back, having studied side by side as cartooning students in the early years of the previous decade and having founded, edited and published a multivolume international comics and art anthology with our friend and colleague Dakota McFadzean. Andy and Dakota have both illustrated comics stories I wrote for said anthology, which fills me with pride because both men are all-around excellent cartoonists.

This book is Andy’s most penetratingly personal work, a finely-detailed memoir of his formative experiences as a young American university student living for a time in Beirut, making friends, having personal and cultural adventures and spiraling out of emotional control. In Andy’s graphic reconstruction of his own experiences all of this risk, struggle and growth becomes deeply intertwined with the complex, beautiful and sometimes unpleasant history of Beirut itself, making the city a place of still-resounding personal significance for the author. It’s an interesting read and the artwork is among the best in any graphic novel I’ve ever read; Andy is one of the most visually-skilled cartoonists I know and his meticulously-designed drawings and sophisticated layouts reward scrutiny and revisitation.

As good as Spring Rain: A Graphic Memoir of Love, Madness and Revolutions is, page for page I have enjoyed some of his more lighthearted fare even more. But it’s to Andy’s credit that he is so versatile and that he brings the same degree of professionalism, sincerity and thoroughness to any comics genre in which he chooses to work, including the collaboration with him that I was fortunate enough to get my name on. Take my word that I’m actually being as coolly objective with Andy as I was above with Gordon: you can’t really go wrong with any of Andy’s books because he’s outstandingly good at all aspects of what he does and can find something worth studying in all corners of his corpus. Check it out and see if you agree.