Paul Constant

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  • A Masterful Graphic Memoir By Someone Who Was Never Interested in Comics

    A Masterful Graphic Memoir By Someone Who Was Never Interested in Comics

    When I was reading Emil Wilson’s debut graphic memoir, The Nightingales, I kept wondering about Wilson’s experience as a cartoonist. I ultimately finished the book with two assumptions, either of which could be equally true: Either Emil Wilson was a voracious reader of comics and graphic novels and had a mile-deep understanding of the history of the medium, or Emil Wilson had never read a graphic novel before in his life.

    I say this because The Nightingales violates multiple rules of the comics medium—especially the forms of American comics. Rather than boxing actions out sequentially in a series of panels, Wilson presents the story in a series of sketchbook pages. And while actions are the propulsive energy in most of the comics we read, the emotions are the verb that pull our eyes across the page in the Nightingales.

    There’s one page early in the book when our protagonist meets a new houseguest, and Wilson portrays their faces as a jumble of rough sketches spread across the page, layered on top of each other with no panels to get in the way. The characters make eye contact and look away. They eye each other skeptically and they smirk before smiling warmly at each other and then shyly averting their eyes. I’d never seen such a nuanced, wordless encounter portrayed so honestly and so clearly on a comics page.

    Wilson, I decided, was either someone who deeply understood all the rules of comics and chose to break them in an inventive way, or he was someone who never became accustomed to the rules of comics—and so wasn’t imprisoned by that knowledge.

    Last week, I interviewed Wilson onstage at the Elliott Bay Book Company and the first thing I asked him was his experience with cartooning and comics. His answer was clarifying: “None,” he said immediately. Aside from thumbing through a couple of Peanuts paperbacks in an extended family member’s bathroom, Wilson had never felt drawn to the medium at all.

    So how did Wilson wind up deciding to tell a deeply personal story in the form of comics? After a career in advertising, Wilson gathered with some friends of roughly the same age to contemplate turning fifty and the loss of someone in their friend group. He decided that he wanted to take his skills with words and pictures that he had learned in advertising and turn it into a different kind of storytelling career.

    So Wilson got into the Center for Cartoon Studies

    in Vermont and took a crash course in comics. (During our talk, he bragged that he was the second-oldest enrollee the institution ever accepted.) Eventually, he decided to adapt a family story into comics form. And I call it a memoir, but Wilson actually writes himself out of the book within the first ten pages—the story is told by and stars Wilson’s sister, Lou.

    Talking with Wilson was an illuminating and inspiring experience. It’s the only author interview I’ve ever done that made me want to immediately open the book and read it all over again, armed with the understanding I’d just gained.

    One of my big complaints about modern comics is that some of the biggest and most popular creators are only familiar with comics. It’s hard to picture some of the most popular graphic novelists of our time reading a prose novel, or attending a play and absorbing lessons from the experience that they then incorporate into their work. The field has gotten incestuous in a dangerous way.

    Wilson’s total lack of familiarity with the medium has paid off for all of us. The Nightingales is a touching, tender, and inventive graphic memoir that’s unlike anything else I’ve read. I’m so glad Wilson upended his life and launched into this bold second act.

  • When a Body Meets a Body

    It’s not the catchiest title in the world, but it certainly knows what it’s doing.

    You can tell from its Dick-scented title that Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep isn’t the kind of sci-fi novel that hides its ambition. Paul Tremblay’s latest novel is full of all sorts of literary tricks, from authorial intrusions to House of Leaves style text art. I expect it will gather a huge and ardent following online devoted to parsing all the references and solving all the mysteries in the text.

    What’s most interesting about Dreaming is that while the writing is packed with experimentation, the plot is incredibly straightforward. It’s about a gamer who gets hired to transport a corpse, only the catch is that the body is still alive (albeit braindead and comatose) and the mind has been wired up with all kinds of technology that lets her pilot the body through the world with a high-tech joystick.

    Rarely have I read a book with such a simple narrative drive—literally, the goal is to get from point A to point B—paired with such a complex execution. And I’m not entirely convinced the two halves of Dreaming actually work well together. I was so invested in the story that I desperately wanted to skim some of the more highfalutin experimental tricks of the book, though I’m glad that I resisted the urge to jump ahead.

    On a narrative level, Dreaming left me a bit frustrated as the taut story grows flabby and weird at the end. But on a stylistic level, I want to read the thing again to see what kind of mysteries I can solve. This was the first Tremblay novel that I’ve ever read, and it was so technically accomplished and inventive that I’m excited to read another from him very soon.

  • Park and Re-Creation

    I have two new pieces up at the Seattle Times:

    First is an interview with the novelist Ed Park about his fascinating new memoir, Three Tenses, which he wrote a decade before his first published book and which he re-typed by hand during the pandemic. Park is such an honest and intelligent interviewee that our conversation—about the passage of time, the rediscovery of lost work, and the span of a writer’s career—was bracing the whole way through.

    Book Shucker, as seen from across the street.

    And second is a profile of a bookstore up in Edison, just north of Mount Vernon. It’s called Book Shucker, and it’s one of the prettiest new bookstores I’ve seen in a long time. Based out of a former one-room schoolhouse (where Edward R. Murrow went to school and played basketball,) it’s intended to be a gathering space for the Edison community. I can’t recommend this store enough if you happen to be on your way north on I5 to Vancouver or Bellingham.

  • Don’t Call Me Ishmael

    Don’t Call Me Ishmael

    I can’t recall the last time a blurb inspired me to read a book that I wasn’t already going to read. Blurb culture has gotten so safe and inoffensive that blurbs are basically white noise—some distracting lines on book covers that might, if you squint, give you some idea where the author went to university.

    I was already going to read Stephen Graham Jones’s historical vampire novel The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, but the one blurb on the cover of the book actually caught my eye. It was only three words and a website attribution:

    “Horror’s Moby Dick.”

    —Vulture

    How the hell can you ignore that blurb? That’s a gigantic promise, right there. And the book has received enough raves that the blurb seemed credible—it might not just be rampant hyperbole. Buffalo Hunter Hunter was, the cover of the paperback edition helpfully informs us, a New York Times Notable Book of 2025, and the first page informs us it was also near the top of the list for honors as varied as the Bram Stoker Award, the Nebula Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and Barack Obama’s summer reading list. So maybe this centuries-spanning story of an undead wanderer seeking justice for a Blackfeet Indian massacre actually was Melville’s second coming?

    Friends, that blurb stuck in my head so badly that it actively worsened my reading experience. The whole time I was reading, I wondered, “is this passage what that reviewer thought was Moby Dick-esque? What’s so Mellvillian about this?”

    This is a silly complaint to hold against such an impressive book. I thought The Buffalo Hunter Hunter had a lot to say about American history, about the treatment of indigenous peoples, about wars and tragedies and how we collectively move on from tragedies and wars. The book was full of clever touches and compelling characters. While the story never completely won over my heart, I was impressed by nearly every aspect of storytelling.

    But every time I opened or closed the book, I had that telltale blurb staring me in the face and I just couldn’t shake it.

    What were they thinking? Did the blurber ever even read Moby Dick, or is it just their generic stand-in for a Big Important Book? There’s no way to tell. I can’t find any review or roundup or interview that includes those words on Vulture. Searching Vulture’s archive for “Horror’s Moby Dick” or “Buffalo Hunter Hunter” brings back zero results.

    Who wrote the goddamned blurb? What did they mean when they wrote it? I guess we’ll never know. But wherever they came from, I hope whoever first wrote the words “Horror’s Moby Dick” in reference to The Buffalo Hunter Hunter will understand that I hate them for tainting my reading experience so badly that I will never be able to even look at that book again without thinking of their goddamned alluring, misleading, distracting blurb.

  • Here’s My July Playlist

    (You can read about my playlist-making methodology and philosophy here.)

    I didn’t find as much great new music this month as I usually do; this month’s playlist is less than 20 songs and one hour long.

    But this playlist does kinda stretch in many different directions, including a variety of country music (a rare duet from Beck, weird folky country from Angela Autumn, pretty sad honky tonk from Hannah Juanita, gay cowboy longing from Andrew Sa, and funny novelty country from Michael Prewitt;) slow jams from Mary Sue and Yaya Bey; some good Afrobeat funk from Owelu Dreamhouse; and a couple of certified bangers (“BOOMPALA,” “Kia Boy.”)

    And it must be said that I am positively on tenterhooks waiting for Carly Rae Jepsen to come to my rescue this September with her new double album.

  • Second Verse, Same as the First

    I hate myself, but I read Regime Change, the Trump tell-all from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. I usually try to avoid these kind of books because I don’t believe newspaper journalists should “save” their best scoops for months and years, until after the sweet book-deal check cashes. And also, I think books about Trump administration palace intrigue are the lowest form of #resistance-bait, a lurid soap opera for liberals desperate for shocks.

    But I chose to read this one because I genuinely have no idea what it’s like behind the scenes of the White House in this second Trump administration. They all behave so oddly, and seem so divorced from reality, that I was hoping Haberman and Swan might have some insights as to what the fuck is going on, because I sure have no clue.

    The answer, I guess, is they did have some insights. But Regime Change is still not a good book. And it’s probably not worth your time—it’s just as disposable as all the first-term Trump books were.

    One of the few insights this book delivered is the fact that JD Vance is an Extremely Online Conspiracy Theorist. In the days after his friend Charlie Kirk was shot and killed, Vance reportedly fell down such a conspiracy rabbit hole that his wife had to intervene. This is truly bizarre—I can’t understand how a man so close to the levers of power somehow still believes in shadowy, elaborate conspiracy theories. Either Vance is a total idiot, or he’s experiencing a mental health crisis.

    But in the end, Regime Change is just more of the same. Did you know that the president is an addled, moronic narcissist surrounded by some of the most damaged and evil human beings living in America right now? If you didn’t know that, welcome to Hell and here’s your copy of Regime Change to get you up to speed.

    Everyone else: Please disregard. As you were.

  • Psst—Need a Paperback?

    At the Seattle Times, I wrote about some of August’s most exciting new paperbacks.

  • There’s No Jumping This Wall

    Frank Miller is an important figure for nerds my age. He created dark Daredevil and Batman stories that changed superhero comics forever. And look, it’s not really Miller’s fault that his influence changed superhero comics for the worse. Lesser creators took the wrong lessons from his work, assuming that people wanted nothing but cruelty and cynicism in their comics.

    But more importantly, when Miller moved into creator-owned work, he pulled a lot of us superhero fans away from Marvel and DC and into independent comics along with him—a genuine change for the better. So it was crushing to see Miller swerve into conservatism with 300 and, most of all, the Islamophobic hate comic Holy Terror. In a handful of decades, he veered from young punk cartoonist to a champion of anti-corporate comics to a moral monster who seemed irrevocably broken by 9/11.

    So I’m sad to report that Miller’s new memoir, Push the Wall, isn’t as introspective as I’d need to change how I feel about the man. He addresses Holy Terror a bit, but I found his reasoning shallow and ineffective. And in fact the book is remarkably shallow—Miller’s thoughts on his old work feel bland and perfunctory, and his recollections of important life events are vague and anodyne.

    Miller is most alive when he’s talking about the process of making the Sin City movies with Robert Rodriguez, which is to me perhaps the least interesting part of his career. I’d rather hear more than a handful of sentence about the making of the Martha Washington series of comics with Dave Gibbons, or some thoughts about his contemporaries and how their careers have panned out.

    Sadly, this book isn’t even a good resource for artists looking to break into comics. Aside from a few observations about the utility of tall vertical panels and the controlled chaos of using a toothbrush to spray the page with ink, there are not enough artistic lessons here to be useful. The whole time, Miller feels reluctant to share his story, giving the impression of a fawning convention panel with a tired old professional who just desperately wants to get back to his hotel so he can leave San Diego and get back to what he was doing before all this bullshit pulled him away from the drawing board.

  • Because Pro Wrestling Is a Metaphor for Politics, You See

    I’m a big fan of Ben Fountain’s novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which was a political satire that understood exactly what it was targeting and how to target it for maximum efficacy. So I’m immensely disappointed to report that Fountain’s newest novel, Rasputin Swims the Potomac, is maybe the worst political satire I’ve ever read—and I’ve read John Lithgow’s anti-Trump poetry.

    This sputtering cough of a novel is about the Trump administration. Many of the names of principals including Elon Musk are tossed into the narrative unchanged, but Trump himself is presented in the prose with a censor bar (“*****,” or “bleep” in the audio version) in place of his name. But the loping cadence and psychological hangups are clearly, unmistakably Trump, so the name gimmick feels too cute by half.

    The premise is that Trump becomes intertwined with a professional wrestler who is mentioned as a VP pick or perhaps a potential opponent for Trump’s fourth presidential campaign for his third term. And I guess the joke is that only a professional wrestler can beat Trump at his own game? Except the wrestler also believes he’s a reincarnation of Rasputin and he talks in a Russian accent. And there’s a former country star in there, and a Black reporter named Clarence Thomas (no relation,) and some other stuff. But it just kind of thrashes around for a while until it finally ends in the middle of nowhere, and it ultimately feels so impotent and pissy.

    Maybe the only other political novel that’s disappointed me this much in my lifetime is Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint, which was a furious little novel about two guys having a conversation about whether it would be a good and moral idea to assassinate George W. Bush. That book similarly sputtered, feeling powerless and lost. It hasn’t been mentioned by anyone in decades, and rightfully so. I suspect Rasputin Swims the Potomac will meet a similar fate.

  • Anywhere They Go Is the Saddest Place on Earth

    Wallace Stegner’s novel Big Rock Candy Mountain has always hovered at the edges of my attention. I recall stocking it as a bookseller at Elliott Bay Book Company, and I liked the title. (The song of the same name, about an imaginary hobo paradise “where they hung the jerk who invented work,” is one of my favorites.) I always figured I’d read the book one day, and last month I found a nice copy sitting in a Little Free Library on Beacon Hill. This, I figured, was my sign.

    I’m glad I finally read Big Rock Candy Mountain, but it is by no means an easy or enjoyable reading experience. In fact, it is 500+ pages of beautifully composed misery porn, telling the story of an American family on the edges of society in the dawn of the 20th century. The husband is an abusive loser who keeps coming up with and abandoning get-rich-quick schemes, and his family helplessly orbits around him as he travels from North Dakota to Saskatchewan to Utah, leaving nothing but heartbreak in his wake.

    I learned near the end of Big Rock Candy Mountain that it is loosely based on Stegner’s own life and childhood, and that made me appreciate the book more. As an act of processing the misery that he experienced, writing Big Rock Candy Mountain must have been a consequential experience. But it’s not the first Stegner book I would recommend to anyone—Angle of Repose or Crossing to Safety are both better for neophytes. But if you’re looking for an American saga full of desperation and hope and heartbreak, you’re in the hands of a master with this one.