Category Archives: Books

At The Circulation Desk

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Serious About Serials: Eat The Rich, vol 1
a Review for the horror-comic reader

(c) 2021 Sarah Gailey
   Audience: Mature
    Publisher: BOOM! Studios (May 24, 2022)
    Length: 128 pages
    ISBN13: 9781684158324
Spoilers below! Read at your own risk.
6 minute read

Gailey’s implications are in changing a system from something that has never had to resort to cannibalism to an actual system which did.

By James Johnson

Sarah Gailey, 2018 Hugo Award For Best Fan Writer, pens this latest horror series from Boom! Studios. Eat The Rich has middle class Joey, a law school student, visiting her boyfriend’s parents at their family home, Crestfall Bluffs, in the land of the 1%. Schmoozing with the upper class is not something Joey’s comfortable with, but if she want’s to join the elite and start her life, she’s willing to swallow a little social anxiety for the sake of her beau, and his connections of course. Joey thought she could handle the eccentricities of the rich and the famous, but what’s in store for her is a stomach churner, with a side of bizarre hope, topped with a ham-fisted helping of socialist revolutionary sentiments.

Kudos

Pius Bak’s illustrations ask us to return to the pulps of the 70’s, with his edging and panelling focused on the characters and their engagements with one another. With a stylized retro feel, Roman Titov’s decision to use sepia and a perpetual dusk (or is it dawn?) as majority lighting, adds a level of displacement from the plot, as though one were either waking from – or falling into – a dream. Gailey’s plot has the engine to make this a true page turner. While not perfect, this title fits well on your Pride Month reading list.

Peeves

This book has problems. Though Gailey’s story has the potential to strike fear in the reader, she misses her mark in several categories. It’s clear that Joey is an awkward, nervous weirdo that we’re supposed to relate to. Her stress and erratic thinking in the initial pages indicate an internal struggle, whether brought on suddenly at the sight of the luxurious Crestfall Bluffs community, or by something mulled over ever since buying Astor’s drunken, freshman charm. The relationship doesn’t fit naturally with the story.

With sparse retail space for exposition in the panels, Gailey needed to do a better job of convincing us Joey belonged with, and was therefore willing to sacrifice her soul to, the uppercrust of Crestfall Bluffs.

We learn that Joey and Astor are starting law school, and Astor’s major challenge during this intense summer family vacation (aside from avoiding his slipping into old habits with his bender-enabling hometown friend “Bump”) is popping The Question to our anxious heroine. As for the credibility of this affair, with post-graduate studies and marriage in the works, we’re led to assume she’s been with Astor for a reasonable length of time. This makes the concept of Joey meeting Astor’s parent’s for the first time, at a most vulnerable moment, difficult to appreciate. Even more so, as this time of the year appears to be crucial to their ritualistic contract fulfillment, and the premise of the plot.

Your challenge will be accepting the this twenty something, lower-middle class law student with the social-emotional skills of a 13 year old, has the desire to bed and wed the Chadliest of Chads in order to rub elbows with the elite and “swing an internship at a major firm”, all under the pretext of a moral dichotomy. Bak’s portrait of Joey matches her constant anxious language, but the character development through Gailey’s writing makes it all the more contradictory. The audience is left asking: “why this path for Joey?” She’s meek, unsure, and entirely out of her element while vacationing with these people. Imagine working legal cases with them! Again, with sparse retail space for exposition in the panels, Gailey needed to do a better job of convincing us Joey belonged with, and was therefore willing to sacrifice her soul to, the uppercrust of Crestfall Bluffs.

Sinking our teeth into the main plot, Joey discovers that the lavish lifestyle of the 1% includes personal staff with bizarre dedication to the service of their masters and mistresses – Even unto Death! For the wealthy have discovered that employing the most vulnerable and hard-pressed people, and throwing cash at their problems, will have them signing their own death certificates. It’s not explicitly explained why the rich eat their employees at end of service (retirement). In fact, we’re shushed into quiet compliance with the classic “it’s tradition” explanation.

Honestly, if you’re an adult with a basic understanding of 20th century world history, you’ll come to understand fairly quickly that the brutal cannibalism undertaken by the elites in Eat the Rich is a clumsy allegory of the industrialist-worker dynamic, and the union revolutionary ideology which shaped the entirety of the last century. If socialist subtext wasn’t clear in the panelling, Gailey discusses it in an author postscript, answering the singular plot-hole seemingly posed to her: why would anyone willingly sacrifice their lives, their actual flesh and blood, for money?

Explaining that this is the life cycle of the working class, minimum wage earner in America, Gailey argues that the poor strive for the services the rich so easily attain, particularly regarding medicine and therapeutics. While private and public health care options in America are certainly a modern concern perhaps requiring a fresh perspective, signing your remaining healthy years away in pursuit of wealth – however meagre and with the goal of it becoming generational – is actually the most believable plot point of Eat the Rich. One could say it’s easy to swallow.

The author chose to neglect this harsh truth. They chose not to acknowledge the results of the system for which we are support razing. That is, there has never been a time where the quality of living, nor the likelihood of human potential fulfilled, been greater than now.

Some reviewers of Eat the Rich have shared their feelings that the Joey-Petal love affair was a cultivated relationship over the course of the events leading to the climax, approximately five weeks. We aren’t shown this, as a blackout panel wipe is applied. This proves nothing. Rather, it makes the actual blossoming event of their “new love”, as the notion appears to persist, unbelievable. The reality is, Petal and Joey had bashed Astor’s brains in, passionately kissed, then cannibalized him. It is erotic, violent, and certainly a shift in power dynamics. But it’s inorganic, post-traumatic, and hardly something to be celebrated. Under different circumstances, Petal and Joey would be great together. Now, as victims(?) of this Hunger, are we to believe they will perpetrate the same horrors out of necessity, and not the exuberance of their former masters?

It’s the same fulfillment every utopianist pontificates in public but practices privately. Sure the wealthy fall, become supplanted with alternative systems, but the poor are those who inevitably suffer the greatest. The author chose to neglect this harsh truth. They chose not to acknowledge the results of the system for which we are to support razing. That is, there has never been a time where the quality of living, nor the likelihood of human potential fulfilled, been greater than now. Like it or hate it, we are and continue to be, much the better under the imperfect economic capitalist system.

Perhaps this sentiment came through in the final panels of Eat the Rich, where we are treated to a portrait of a bloody, insatiable Joey and Petal, staring at us, post-revolutionary coitus, posing the metaphorical question: “are you with us or against us?” Any potential for this lesson is lost immediately in Gailey’s postscript: “If you take enough away, its easy to get workers to accept jobs that ask for too much and don’t give enough back . . . jobs that feed on human lives to nourish profit margins.” It’s hard to imagine Gailey is talking to her audience of North American English speakers. A message to the sweatshop worker in Communist China, okay, but the eighteen year old making $16 per hour (with health benefit options) at insertcorporatemachine? That is perhaps the hardest to swallow. One can’t help deduce that Gailey’s implications are in changing a system from something that has never had to resort to cannibalism to an actual system which did, and doing so boldly and unironically. While not perfect, our world is a far cry from the grinding serfdom and enslavement implied in the pages of Eat the Rich.

2.5 out of 5 stars. Check it out and support your local comic book sellers.

Memoria, Oratio, Scriptura: Truth and Method in Local Histories

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By James Johnson

It would seem that History, in subject terms, from every culture and ethnic group, has memory as its precursor to contemporary method, utilized for documenting and understanding linear time, ancestry, and even ethnographic boundaries in retrospect. Memory can externally form in expressive traditions through song, chant, verse, and other articles of art and culture.

Spiritual, artistic, or physical articles of importance manifest a People’s group or individual memories. Transcribed in coastal red cedar totems by some aboriginals of the Pacific Northwest, or in tribute to nature and death carved upon neolithic cairns of some of the first Irish, these exist as tangible artifacts. Artifacts arguably at the crossroads of extinction and resurgent significance.

Oral history, unique to no ethnic group, appears as a cataloguing schema of the natural world, familial genealogical group-sets, and ritual spiritualism. Often perceived as an inferior form of historical collection and dissemination, Oral methodologies are the probable human default. Oral history can serve a culture of “illiterates” with no written language just as well as the culture where class structure dictated one’s likelihood of literacy. Where invention and technology arose to become the barrier breakers to monograph making and acquisition, literacy rates increased. There was an undeniable drive within the medieval peasantry to attain and share knowledge in this new way. Why? Written word, painfully transcribed by hand and in various languages – an ordeal obviously suited to the patience of priestly monks – long predated the German inventor’s newfangled printing press. Of course the sentiments of an illiterate European peasantry furnished with enough gumption to avoid utter despair will permanently be beyond my knowing, but I am willing to make the presumption that literacy was purpose-driven in the pursuit of Truth.

Truth, for some reason or another, is a core ethical tenant embedded in the institutions which I value. Truth in justice, truth in marriage. Truth in the knowledge that I’m buying beef and not man-meat from the grocery store. So imagine now the dichotomy of literate and illiterate groups sharing consensus as to what is Truth based on writ of law. How could anyone expect the disenfranchised not to seek this levelled plane? In the Western Hemisphere, this inequity has been routed with functional literacy rates increasing over time. The proficiency with which the growing or diminishing number of individuals developing critical analysis skills through literacy is a topic for another time.

Truth is a value in the bones of the rural community. The importance of reporting on the dull or exceptional true lives of people is evident in the abundance of early newspapers under various monikers: gazette’s, gleaners, standards, dispatches, and heralds. Keeping and distributing journals of record shared the union of clans, civil administrative machinations, and vociferation’s of the mourning. These isolated publications, those few issues salvaged by forward-thinking preservationists of their respective times, provide for us now an avenue of exploration much deeper than any oral tradition could aspire to. If you wanted to know the price of a pound of bacon or stew chuck in 1841 Upper Canada, and I were to share anecdotally that my great, great, great Grand Pop told his kid, and he told his kid, and so on and so forth, that it cost $0.10 cents a pound, how would you or anyone else know it for truth? Or that coinage wasn’t dollars or cents but pounds, sterling, and pence at that time?

Obviously, written and oral history share a common aspect. They are subject to the experience and subsequent opinion of scribe and speaker alike. The confounding nature of this truth, obfuscating the notion of Truth itself, remains an area of personal interest. However, preferring to adopt a First Nations approach to challenge this hypocrisy; listening to the speaker’s (or writer’s) experiences and respecting their stories as lived experiences. Or some version of it, if you like.

European settlements have a longstanding practice of recording their lives in minute detail. A direct impact of written versus oral histories is evident in the range of volumes produced by counties, townships, and historical societies throughout North America. This abundance of record serves a community in many ways, provided a community acknowledges that it may not represent all contemporary subgroups, a fact apparently less self-evident the more our mindsets shift progressively. It is apparent to most sincere researchers that written records, including census documents, were apt to inconsistency or outright error. This is a reflection of the relationship between oral and written traditions, rather than a condemnation of either. Whether reciting from memory or recalling events in testimony, the potential for error appears for both. Nevertheless, I could tell you the tale of the Sandyford Mystery, a cold blooded Scottish yarn of greed, betrayal, and murder! I might even get half the story right from off the top of my head, and that might be enough for some. For others, there is the near 500 page court proceedings, digitized from microfiche and available here. I value this information, and the method it is presented by, due in great part to my general distrust of strangers. Acknowledging biases in printed opinions, the factors of information processing in person are just as impactful, if not more. These include body language, intonation, level of voice, language or accent barriers, and physical location apprehension. Not to mention the challenge of returning to the materials for clarification.

Nevertheless, regarding either as inferior or superior is not the point. I remain convinced that the two methods are connected by progression. Spoken words become written. Ethnographers and anthropologists embark on fieldwork collecting and cataloguing oral histories and myths as a matter of survival, not some misplaced sense of superiority, though I’m sure the latter sentiment exists, however limited it may be. These oral histories aren’t necessarily the mythological origin stories of the Indians in North America either. Diminishing language and culture in some groups in the British isles is a growing concern for their respective Governments and local leaders.

The banner image for this article displays a collage of local history monographs. Township councils, historical societies, and sometimes impassioned local members, collect records and primary source material to tell the tale of their community’s past. Photographs and land purchase agreements, birth, marriage, and census data. And of course, the stories. Oral stories, parallel the hard data, adds the human element, and in many case confirms doubts or supports beliefs. These books and more like them are critically endangered. The growing ranks of rural ghost towns supports this prediction of doom. Young people can’t write local histories if they aren’t living the reality of them.

I suppose in a way that should be my pitch to counsel. That little town comically presented on the brink of insolvency, victims of Tommyknockers or invading body-snatchers, needs an archivist. A town preservationist, with ties to the community and desire to maintain stories, engage youth, and advocate for funding from all levels of government. Is that the solution to the ghost town epidemic? Not in and of itself but in revitalization efforts, paramount.

Find these old books if you can, while you can. Primary and secondary source material like no other. Specifics will vary by location so ask a Librarian in the geographical area you are interested in researching. For Ontario researchers, listed society websites often sell their own publications or provide tips on where you can find them.

At The Circulation Desk

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Cancelled? Banned? Out of Print? The why behind a title’s demise

“Dr. Seuss Celebration at Seven Trees” by San José Public Library is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Estimated reading time of article: 4 mins

By James Johnson

The corporation responsible for preserving the legacy of the late Dr. Seuss’s books has come under fire for ending the print run of six controversial titles. Supporters of this decision celebrate the removal of what many consider to be offensive and racist depictions of minority groups, while critics have slammed this move as yet another overreach of progressive wokeism and cancel culture.

As library professionals, one of the most important jobs we have is collection development. This work usually goes on behind the scenes, and users generally remain blissfully ignorant of it. Developing a library’s collection requires a deep understanding of not only the needs of the reader, but also the needs of other departments and what considerations, if any, are requisite for policy adherence.

Depending on the size and type of library, there may be several departments that operate within the organization. Each of these department’s has there own requirements, budgets, and even users. Departments can work independently of one another in service of the whole. Take the children’s section of a public library. It’s not often an adult library user checks out the latest Diamond Willow winner. In some cases these departments share budgets with other departments. In smaller cases there is only one budget for the system, and each department allocated a limited set of funds, do with it what they can.

In every case, collection development policy is key. Within the idea of developing a collection is the concept of selecting new titles and removing damaged, irrelevant, or unused ones. This latter process is known as weeding, or de-selection.

Library staff have a difficult job on their hands in weeding. Such a crucial step in developing a collection requires a robust and clear policy so that, no matter the individual conducting the task, a specified path to success can be followed.

The elements of a library policy are unique to the system it serves, however, there are principles that generally guide library professionals in developing good policy. Depending on the particulars of a library’s mission statement or goals, providing access to resources for the purposes of learning, entertainment, and discovery is almost always the prime directive of a publicly accessible library system.

Publishers choose to stop printing their property for many reasons. I believe Dr. Seuss Enterprises actively believes their policy of encouraging inclusion and support of reading and seeks to meet and exceed the expectations it sets forth, but don’t for a minute think this act of removing “wrong or hurtful” titles is solely in response to a policy of inclusion and support of reading. Dr. Seuss Enterprises makes money. That will always be theirs and every other for-profit business’s primary motivator. Whether you agree or disagree with the move, Dr. Seuss Enterprise will benefit from this. Their image and bottom line.

When library’s weed it serves a few purposes. We look at the items use (has it circulated well), condition, whether it has remained relevant or has been superseded, and whether alternative copies can be acquired or accessed easily elsewhere (frees up much needed shelf space in tighter quarters.

What effect does a publisher’s decision, like Dr. Seuss Enterprises, have on a library? Hopefully very little. A library should not base their development criteria on any outside sway. A robust and clear policy created in-house represents their unique users better than any third party influencer could ever establish.

The New York Public library said it well. They’re not in the business of determining what people should read. Removing an item from the collection on the grounds it has been challenged (for accuracy, relevancy, or negative attributes) takes careful consideration. As part of a healthy library’s collection development policy, new titles must be selected on the basis of relevancy, accuracy, and user need. Old titles, equally, require reflection when considering their place (or not) in the collection.

A publisher’s decision to end a print run is their prerogative, however they choose to spin in. Take a closer look at the parent owner of this subsidiary and you’ll find they choose to print material many people find offensive, hurtful, and wrong. I may not agree with the decision Dr. Seuss Enterprises made with this move, but it was a business decision first and foremost. Sure they support reading, so does Chapters Indigo. That doesn’t make them a library, and they don’t have to follow the same democratic principles that guide them.

Alternatively, a library has no place in determining the right and wrong of an item based on someone’s feelings. There is plenty of stuff I can’t stomach, content I find offensive and demoralizing. What authority do library professionals possess in removing access to such works, particularly those of publicly funded societies? We may as well claim rightful mastery over the contents of peoples skulls.

Library professionals have politicized the field far longer than I’ve been alive. Whatever side of the “battle” you find yourself on, I hope the purpose of the fight remains relevant to you. That you think for yourself, read what you wish, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Happy reading/streaming.