Reviews and Comments

(I'm putting the review and reading dates of entire series under my fave, The Score which is the third book out of four (would've been more but Cooke tragically died). I don't wanna add an entry for every single volume in a multi-volume comics set that took me shorter time to read than one prose novel. Not sure how to best go about that problem going forward so Bookwyrm advice welcome.)

Wow, what a masterpiece this is. You know how you read something from the 1960s and it's like 70% tinged with sixties and 30% is just normal universal stuff? ("Moonlight and love songs never out of date. Hearts full of passion, jealousy, and hate".) But when you read something like this which is a masterfully executed pastiche of sixties aesthetics, you're getting a lot more than 70%. There's this one image in the second book (The Outfit), an exterior shot of an apartment over a garage that I just wanna mainline. I wanna live there. I love the stair, the wall texture, the dormer windows plural, the location in the middle of a bunch of trees far from any road, and the brush and wash fashion-magazine–style rendering.

I loved reading these four books, what a treat. (CW: buckle up for heavy helpings of retro misogyny before you head in because there's gonna be a lot of that.) The three first books are almost equally good and it's by a hair that I'm gonna choose The Score as my fave. Again, this series is Cooke's masterpiece. My usual issues with him is that he's maybe the best artist who ever lived if we're talking about each individual frame. I mean maybe not some of his fill-in work on X-Statix or other earlier stuff but this, peak Cooke with a supportive editor who buys into the sixties fashion mag schtick? He's up there with my other faves like Xaime or Ami Uozumi. Maybe even number one. But panel-to-panel trying to tell an actual story? That's where he sometimes has fallen short, extremely disproportionately so given how good the dialogue and again the draftsmanship is. And for the first two books in this series (by second book I mean The Outfit; ignore The Man with a Getaway Face, you don't have to get that one, because it's a strict subset of the comics pages in The Outfit) we get to see a Cooke with storytelling that works. The third book, The Score, has a few weird situations where you're not entirely sure of the lay of the land (like how does the weird truck ramp relate to the rest of the town?) but that's very much ameliorated by a few schematic gimmicks like huge town map spreads.

So it's heartbreaking that the last book, The Slayland, both the main story and the bonus adaptation of The Seventh, are confusingly told messes. The source material for Slayland isn't very good either—all of these graphic novels are adaptations of prose novels by Richard Stark, and Slayland kinda sucks. It's cool that Stark tried a new gimmick, I'm just not into seeing the happiest place on Earth become a slasher flick.

This is a book from 1970 that was reprinted in a facsimile edition thirty-nine years later in 2009 and now it's been another sixteen years since then.

It was meant to be hope-inspiring I guess but it's a really frank and ruthless look at class (and racist) exploitation throughout human history starting with the dawn of mercantilism throughout the triangle trade and industrial era into the 1960s. They promote violent revolution and worker uprising; they fully criticize Soviet and Stalin but attribute its misteps to "okay that one failed we won't make the same mistakes next time". That's just a tiny part of the book; the main gist of the book is showing how systemic injustices and capitalism work. As per ushe from us on the left: the only ones who have a full understanding of the problem but not much in they way of solutions.

The few pages the book spends on criticizing social democracy got it into a lot of trouble which I think was too bad; even us who advocate for social democracy needs to address its problems straight on and not only are those problems (corruption and collaborationism) on full display here, social democracy has betrayed the working class again and again in even bigger ways since 1970 like the lontagarfond rug pull or the selling out of public interest or the dismantling of labor rights.

So, okay. Great book if you wanna do step one, comprehend the systematic problems fully. How to fix it is left as an exercise to the reader.

I've compared The Only One Left to a mashup between We've Always Lived In The Castle and Saint Maud but those are works of art and this is pageturner trash without merits beyond being a tense gothic read. But it's a perfect tense gothic read. Great characters, every chapter has a revelation or clue, the milieu is awesome, there's nothing superfluous, just every puzzle piece perfectly assembled, and it's simultaneously a Gothic classic and a by-the-book golden age whodunnit cozy.

The 1985 setting is perfect in how it's no tech, it's still creaky old stairs and typewriters; no Memphis Design in sight; this is 1985 as a bridge to 1929. Loved it. Maybe I ought to dock it a point because of the "when you reread it some things don't make sense" flaw. So maybe some of the jigsaw pieces were a li'l forced. But I don't care. It was a great summer read.

The translation was good too. Full Swedish rather than "svengelska" i.e. they correctly translated "so?" to "och?" and when the numbers of words in sentences and letters in words matter, they did a good job with that. Verse not so much. 🤷🏻‍♀️

I don't wanna understate how dumb the book is! But that's fine.