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Reviews and stuff

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Andrew Joseph White’s You Weren’t Meant to Be Human is everything wrong with transmasc fiction and more

Back in the ancient times of 2015, when I first came out as a trans male, back when conversations about representation were (or felt like th

[...] Andrew Joseph White’s success isn’t a result of the quality of his work or of the accuracy with which he portrays matters pertaining to transgender life, but merely a reflection of White’s willingness to play to the tune of what cisgender publishers wish to see in a trans male character: neutered, subservient, victimized, ready to be gawked at by self-identified allies who want the pathos of transgender suffering to renovate their feelings that they’re good people for caring, and they can carry on with their lives after reading this book reassured in the belief that a trans man truly is just a woman you call a man for the sake of being polite.

Wrote a longer version of my Goodread review of You Weren't Meant to Be Human where I air out the rest of my grievances proper both with this book and what I feel it says about the state of transmasculine characters in publishing currently. This took a while because I hate this book and didn't wanna think about it and also was busy with other stuff but now it's here and it's done. Let me know what you think!

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Monika Kim’s “The Eyes are the Best Part”, the book about eating eyes, has a shockingly low amount of eye-eating (review/critique)

(read it on Wordpress)

Believe me when I say by the time I originally finished this book it was still fairly relevant and had I written this right away I might have struck the iron while it’s hot, but then I got sidetracked by several other things, because I lack any sense of self-discipline and probably have debilitating ADHD, so in the midst of being distracted by a million other projects that I also didn’t finish, this one was left by the wayside to the point I now had to more substantially revisit the book to even write any of this. In any case, if you check my Goodreads rating of the book you’ll notice I gave it 4 stars, but the truth is that of the books I’ve read this might be the most illustrative example of the inadequacy of its 5 star rating system — or for that matter any kind of number rating at all, a topic I intend to possibly elaborate on at a later post. For now it suffices to say that The Eyes are the Best Part is one of those books that is hard to summarize your feelings on: A book where you like all or most distinct elements of it, but when they come together it makes for less than the sum of its parts.

I should disclaim at first that although I would soon learn this book got popular on BookTok and is all-around a Goodreads darling, therefore that is (or seems to be) where most people who’ve read it know it from, my first contact with this book was actually a little unorthodox. I stumbled upon it while doing market research on certain genres and niches that I think my fiancée’s current project would fit into, while browsing through the r/PubTips subreddit to see what kind of books people have been pitching as literary horror. The Eyes Are the Best Part easily stands out: It’s pitch was highly praised in the forum and was also quickly picked up by an agent and equally so by a publisher, becoming a hit with readers upon release. With a book so successful at every stage, I figured I’d find no more illustrative example of what readers are currently looking for in matters of literary horror.

I mention this not only as a stupid tangent but because I feel that my approach to this book means I had different expectations to it than the ones held by many of the reviewers on Goodreads, who came to this story looking for what I would like to call a “good for her” style narrative: stories about women being slighted against, typically but not necessarily by one or more men, and lashing out in violent, dangerous and/or unpredictable ways, not always directly against the perpetrators of their suffering but always in a way that’s supposed to invoke empathy. Meanwhile, I was looking specifically for the literary part of it, and how it was used to talk about the suffering of women and the callousness with which it is disregarded (again, for market research reasons). To be clear, most people who read this book enjoyed it, me included; but the issues that arose in some people’s critiques often hailed either from having too little or too much of either one of the aforementioned aspects, and I believe that is because the novel does both of the things it sets out to accomplish, but the problem is that they were almost entirely segregate from one another. The novel feels less like one complete novel and more like two different novels mashed together with some very poor stitching in the middle.

When I say that I do mean literally that it’s half one thing half another. More specifically, the first half feels almost entirely literary fiction with only the second half feeling like a horror/thriller. The book opens with a family meal that immediately contextualizes the title of the book (which gets dropped in the first line; corny but cool) as referring to eating fish. This is where the protagonist, Ji-won, first tells us that her family is in shambles ever since her father left, and from then on the story concerns itself with explaining how we got to this point: how Ji-won’s parents both grew up in poverty in Korea in the 1970’s and moved to the US in search of a better life; how her father (or Appa, as she refers to him in Korean) had big dreams but poor fortune, and worked hard to move up in life, eventually acquiring a small business that allowed the family to fulfill the dream of home ownership; how the dream went up in flames when the family loses the business and the house after being swindled out of their money; how his dissatisfaction leads her father to eventually leave the family to live with another woman, and how ever since her mother hopelessly awaits his return. All this is told with a preciously delicate sense of melancholy. Each of the characters in the family is trapped in this tragically palpable sense of inevitability, and the shackles of poverty that trap them in their predicaments are ever present in tangible ways throughout the story: Ji-won’s mom (or Umma)’s retail job, fixtures of their tiny apartment like cracked walls and a scratched-up coffee table, and most persistently, Ji-won’s internal pressure to excel at school, being that the family’s only ticket out of poverty. That is to say that the first part of the book excels at depicting this well-rounded view of a broken family’s issues and dynamics.

One thing I particularly enjoyed that, although it seems minor, I feel is important for the kind of book this is, is that it mentions a lot of food, and all of it sounds very delicious. Monika Kim shares this ability of authors whose writing I’ve enjoyed before like Gabriel García Marquez and Martha Batalha, in part because of their capacity to depict meals in a way that makes them sound delectable regardless of whether or not you like the actual food being described.

The apartment was hazy from smoke. I’d heard my mother moving back and forth from the kitchen to the living area, but still I was surprised to find that our small rectangular dining table—every inch of it was covered with food. In the middle, there was a big stone pot filled with braised beef short ribs, my father’s favorite. Next to it was an entire fish, deep-fried, the napkin underneath it spotted with oil. I saw soy-marinated soft tofu and steamed egg speckled with bits of green onion, which jiggled when the table was touched. There was also a colorful array of side dishes, all homemade: wilted spinach, deep green in color, completely drenched in sesame oil; seasoned soybean sprouts with their little yellow heads peeking out; and garlicky fiddleheads, cooked to an earthy brown. Umma had even made fresh kimchi, the crisp white cabbage flecked with bright red gochugaru flakes. There was hardly any space to rest my elbows, and I imagined the table sagging under the weight of our dinner.

This is important because the presence of food makes for a strong thematic axis that represents various tensions and dynamics throughout the book. Both here and in the very first scene of the story, food is Umma’s duty to provide for the family, and the way through which she hopes in vain to recuperate the affections of her husband. This scene also takes as much care as Umma herself did in cooking it to depict a very Korean family meal, which will stand in stark contrast to a later scene, where we meet Umma’s new white boyfriend George, who takes them to a Chinese restaurant in accordance to both his agnostic fetishism of Asian women — we soon learn his preference for the restaurant is exclusively rooted in the chance it provides for ogling the Asian waitresses — and his disregard for the difference between varying East Asian ethnicities.

Meanwhile, the abundance of food on the table could be said to stand as through-line for the story the protagonist Ji-won later tells us about her mother growing up in abject poverty in 1970’s Korea — in narration, Ji-won draws instead a parallel between this moment and now in regards to how accustomed her mother is to waiting for people to return: just like she hopelessly waits for her husband to come back, so too did she wait for her parents to return when they leave her and her siblings alone for months in search of a better means to provide for the family, right before an especially harsh winter befalls the region. Poor Umma is left desperately reliant on eating bark, snow and the odd rat or rabbit to survive, as she refused to follow her siblings who’d also left in the hopes of finding better means of survival, determined that her parents would eventually come back.

“Why?” I asked. My voice shook, betraying my thoughts. “Didn’t you worry that Halmeoni and Harabuji would never return?” “Never. I never doubted them for a second.” “But how were you so sure?” “They were my parents,” she said softly. “I knew they were going to come back.” […] […] Her eyes were unfocused. She was lost in her thoughts and had no idea how awful she was making me feel. But I knew where she was, and what she was remembering. She was back in that little tin house, the hail clattering noisily against the walls. It was winter, and she was alone, her cries lost to the wind. There are some things that you can never truly escape. Not really. Maybe that’s why, even now, she’s stuck in the past, long after everyone else has moved on.

The picture Ji-won paints of her mother is of a woman permanently stuck in time, who is impervious to learning from new developments of an evolving situation, her poverty and passivity so deeply etched into her being from her traumatic experiences as to render it impossible for her to ever be defined by anything else. Her apathy towards the abundance of food in the present, then, reflects as much; this sense of helplessness and inescapability despoils all meals, as if the hunger Umma felt then is an unshakable one because the food of the present cannot reach her in the past she’s made permanent residence in. It is further impossible due to the inherent connection between the meal and the family, as just like she could not afford to shake her hunger before her parents returned, so in the present she cannot stand to take a bite before her husband has joined them. A meal is not just a meal but the most fundamental of all family engagements — it is a husband’s duty to provide and wife’s duty to prepare — and in this sense it represents the value of the family and in return the family is the only thing that gives it value. Without the father and thus without the family, there is no value to be found in the meal. His absence renders the family inherently dysfunctional, and by extension all meals are rendered inherently unappealing.

This all ties to the fact that, of course, the book is about eating eyes, so what eating looks like and how it’s represented is important. It’s a wonder to me however why is it that at the same time that the author presents the family meals like this — carefully toeing the line between delectable and repulsive as to evoke the necessary interplay of both aspects to the meals — this level of finesse isn’t extended to the act of eating eyes, which is only ever described in rather repugnant ways. Of course at first it is meant to be so, Ji-won’s narration confirms that impression. But when she acquires her obsession I honestly expected the narration to be able to make me feel the appeal of eating eyes. I expected to be invited to empathize with this level of her experience and thus, yes, be convinced that eating an eyeball sounds delicious, and I was very disappointed when that wasn’t the case.

Before I can talk myself out of it, I squeeze my eyes shut and shove it into my mouth. The eyeball is cool from being under the faucet for so long. A salty liquid trickles down my throat. The outside is crunchy cartilage. I jam it into my left cheek and bite down with my molars; jellylike matter explodes within my mouth. It’s delicious. The flavor is rich and full. It’s not like the fish eyes I’ve tried. Not at all. If anything, it’s more like organ meat, with a slightly metallic, beefy taste. I chew and swallow until I’ve eaten the whole thing. All that’s left behind is the aftertaste of salt and brine.

Maybe it’s just because I’m exceptionally susceptible to discomfort regarding eye and finger/toe mutilation but as much as the narration is trying to depict this act as pleasurable I really can’t imagine a world where I would find “crunchy cartilage” that “explodes” into a “salty”, “slightly metallic tasting” liquid to be a thing I would eat on purpose (even proofreading this now these descriptions makes me scrunch up my nose). For starters the first thing that comes to mind when I try to conceive of such an outrageous combination of textures is what I imagine eating tide pods must be like (very topical, I know), or perhaps a very firm grape, which doesn’t help because I don’t like grapes. And it makes me wonder what was the author’s priority between trying to be as accurate as possible about what eating a human eye actually feels like (I wouldn’t even know where to look for such information, personally), or, as I found to be of most importance, trying to depict the experience as to make it seem as pleasurable as possible, and I’m not pleased with either possibility of this line of questioning — if the first that would be an outright mistake, if the second it would be an observable failure.

Sensory shortcomings of the text aside, the book, much like the collective self-awareness quotient of any room in real life, starts to stumble when white men enter the scene. Which is to say, this book has two major white male characters, both in distinct antagonistic roles: one is Umma’s aforementioned white boyfriend George, a run-of-the-mill racist conservative who objectifies women in general and fetishises Asian women in particular. He is blatantly crass, condescending, disrespectful of Asian cultures and their differences and openly stares at other women, including Ji-won’s underage sister, Ji-hyun. On the first scene he shares with the family, he is introduced thusly:

George has picked a Chinese restaurant that we’ve never heard of. When the three of us arrive, it’s a little after 12 p.m., and the parking lot is empty. The only other car there is a Ford truck that my mother points at. “George’s car,” she says. The truck looks new, and as we walk by it, I see a bumper sticker on the back: I’M REPUBLICAN BECAUSE WE CAN’T ALL BE ON WELFARE.

The other character is Ji-won’s college “friend”, Geoffrey, a character meant to stand in for untrustworthy liberal men who disingenuously adopt feminist beliefs to appear and/or feel more self-righteous than other men without actually bothering to live up to those ideals once they start impeding them from reaping their own benefits from the patriarchy. Everything he says is transparently try-hard to set up his inevitable turn into secretly just as entitled and dangerous as the men he looks down on.

Geoffrey waves and jogs over to me. Today he’s wearing round wire-rimmed glasses and holding a small book in his arms. He’s dressed in a neatly pressed button-down shirt with a sweater wrapped around his waist. His sneakers are shiny and new. I peek at the cover. It’s Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists. He notices and offers it to me, his hand outstretched. “Have you read it?” I shake my head. “You should check it out. It’s fantastic. If you want, I can lend it to you after I’m done. We’ve been discussing it in my women’s studies course. The author is amazing. She is such a brilliant mind.” He taps the spine of the book with his fingernail.

In case it’s not clear from the way I described them, I don’t like these characters at all. Not as people, but as characters and what they do for the text, because these are less so characters and more so caricatures. That is not to say that there aren’t men who are more-or-less exactly like either of them, with all the shamelessness that it implies; nor do I believe there’s no value in taking a closer look at the effect this kind of overt awfulness causes from the perspective of the women being harmed. Rather it is the disparity between the seriousness of the narrative and the depth of the remaining characters compared to the Facebook meme level of how easy it is to dunk on these guys that makes their presence so jarring. Especially when compared to Ji-won’s Appa, whose psyche and reasoning behind the harm he’s caused is fully examined without ever absolving him, the fact that Geoffrey and George are presented as the most stereotypical version of their respective archetypes points to either a lack of confidence that the reader might not get behind the inevitable revenge taken against them, or a lack of imagination for depicting the white male drive behind their racism and misogyny, and the more interesting and insidious aspects of it. As a result, Ji-won’s confrontation with either men is not particularly satisfying, because it almost comes across as a person beefing with a cartoon — and much as I loved Looney Tunes Back in Action as a kid, that doesn’t mean I want to see Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck goofing around right next to Lizzie Bennett in Pride and Prejudice (I watch too few movies to make a closer comparison. It feels out of place, is what I’m saying).

The other problem that becomes apparent as you make your way through this book is that, as alluded to earlier, despite this book being largely advertised as a thriller, very little in the way of “thrilling” happens in the first half of the story. I personally would call what it’s doing interesting, but “thrilling” specifically would be quite low on the list of adjectives I would use to describe it. In fact I find it quite understandable that people who came to this book looking for “thrilling” were bored out of their minds reading this, and I don’t blame them if they dropped it early.

All this also means, regrettably, that this book strongly advertised as a book all about a girl going feral and eating men’s eyes actually has very few instances of eye-eating for a full 50% of its length. In fact, the only real world eye-eating is entirely fish-eye-eating: the actual total of human eyes consumed up to the exact halfway point of this book is exactly 0. I say “real world” eye-eating because the author, perhaps identifying this issue, attempts to correct this by inserting many scenes of Ji-won eating eyes within dream sequences. Unfortunately, these scenes do not provoke the desired effect and are instead really boring. Dream sequences are generally speaking a poor idea for accomplishing most purposes, and in fact I personally would be hard-pressed to think of any task they accomplish well. The issue is that dreams are inherently stakes-free and have no real impact on the story, so they provide no meaningful shock or catharsis or tension at the idea she’ll get caught because, to be blunt, nothing actually fucking happened. Even if you trick the reader into thinking it’s actually happening only to twist-reveal it was a dream all along all that accomplishes is eliciting frustration and apathy from the reader, although for this book that is a moot point, given that all of its dream sequences are very clearly delineated as such.

This is up until, as I said, almost the exact halfway point of the book, when something extremely weird happens. The writer, by what I can best surmise, seems to have decided that she has spent enough time establishing what are the struggles Ji-won is experiencing and what the men in her life are putting her through. So far, so good. But more bewilderingly, what appears to be happening is that now that the main character has reached the limit of what she can put up with and is ready to blow a gasket, it is time for her to have what feels like a very sudden radical transformation culminating in an entire “scene” — more like a speech? — of Ji-won delivering some kind of lecture about the way men are and the things they put women through and how they need to be dealt with, most of which feels a little redundant with what we’ve read up to this point. This speech includes two memories she compares with one another: one of her watching her father be humiliated by a white male customer from when her family ran a laundry store, a man of the same sort George is, who delights in the power he holds over people. This flashback, which itself is quite nice and rather insightful, is followed by the other flashback which is also the worst scene in the entire book, Ji-won recounting the time she was at a restaurant and saw a white man and a white woman on a date. The man makes a sexist joke, to which the woman responds by totally #pwning him about it in a way reminiscent of a “and then everyone clapped” type story you’d see on Reddit.com.

Every time he tried to argue, to insult her, she looked him in the eye and laughed and was so perfectly pleasant that it was obvious she had the upper hand. By the time the man finished ranting, he was flushed and sweating and clearly embarrassed. He slapped a handful of bills onto the table and said, “What are you, some kind of feminist or something?” “Yes,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I am.” “Bitch,” he muttered, before stalking off. She smirked as he walked away.

This bizarre moment of enlightenment is seemingly all the main character needs to become calcified in her convictions of what is she to do next: From here on out, the thriller promises of the novel are finally fulfilled, as Ji-won proceeds to systematically make her home environment intolerable for George, all the while eating some people’s eyes and trying to avoid Geoffrey on the side. She has a, no offense, mostly superfluous relationship with another girl from one of her classes, but truly, the fucking-with-George stuff constitutes most of this part, and it culminates in Ji-won tricking George into meeting her under false pretenses in order to drug him and try to scoop out his eyes. The meeting goes awry and a scuffle lands them both in the hospital, but Ji-won adapts to the situation and executes a brilliant plan where she manages to kill him and eat his eyes when no one is looking and pin the blame for it and all her other killings on Geoffrey. It is, quite frankly, genuinely thrilling. The whole thing plays out with a lot of drama and high stakes, with meaningful tension when she is trying to carve out people’s eyes throughout the book and afraid of being caught, which is what I mean when I say that each part of the book is great on its own, but together they are less than the sum of their parts. Because throughout this whole business there’s virtually no space left for the introspection of the first half. It almost feels like the author decided that once the protagonist has drawn the conclusion she needed to draw from her experiences that there’s nothing more she needs to say or that is worth saying about the dynamics at play.

Ultimately the most frustrating thing about this book, which is a frustration I hold for a lot of this particular kind of fiction that’s been getting popular on Goodreads recently, is its eagerness to allude to the idea of moral complexity without ever fulfilling that promise in the text. That is, the book is in dialogue with a larger conversation of flawed female protagonists, of “I support women’s wrongs”, of “God forbid women do anything”, which on its surface appears to be about empathizing with the morally objectionable behavior of female characters and to reflect on our treatment of women who we perceive to be in the wrong, perhaps at the same time acknowledging the times we ourselves have done wrong in the same way. In practice, and in the texts that spring from this framework, it’s more about constructing textual justifications for why it’s acceptable for the female character to act in a way that would be objectionable otherwise so we can enjoy her wickedness by proxy. It’s a revenge fantasy, put simply, which is not illegitimate to write, but is frustrating to read if you are promised a level of actual moral quandary that you find out isn’t there.

Moreover, the tonal whiplash between the extremity of her actions and the relative triviality of the slights she experiences results in the thriller/revenge fantasy aspect and the social commentary aspect feeling at odds with each other rather than complementary. I can see the general idea at play: the offenses build up to the point of driving you to an extreme breakdown (the whole point of coining the term “microaggression” after all). The problem isn’t proportionality; rather the literary tone of the first half of the book is far too emotionally muted to carry this level of hyperbole, as though the characters are just exiting a breakdown rather than primed for one. The belated introduction of the eye-eating does little to present it as a natural, if drastic, reaction to those negative experiences, and the suggestion at the end that her new obsession may-or-may-not-who’s-to-say have been caused by a brain tumor serves only to dilute thematic intention, seemingly for the benefit of an audience that would ask for a logical explanation to cannibalism. This points to a radical shift in the priorities of the book halfway through, away from thematic cohesion and towards action intrigue. It is perhaps the most apt book to be described by comparison — “Crying in H-Mart meets My Sister, the Serial Killer“, reads the description. It does very literally feel like the depressing introspection of Crying in H-Mart stitched wholesale to the irreverent debauchery of My Sister, the Serial Killer without much integration of one into the other.

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The Asiri #1 is a design document that more or less resembles a story (spoilers)

I know I don’t tend to review a lot of comic books – by which I mean, I don’t think to write comic reviews like I think of writing reviews for other stuff which I never write – but something about The Asiri #1 feels unusually compelling for me to address, possibly because I’ve had an interest in its creator’s YouNeek Studios’ whole mission statement for a while – an expanded superhero/fantasy fiction universe centered around African characters and inspired by African culture, spanning across centuries of history, something that I went actively looking for when I was hunting for any non-American or European made superheroes I could read. But it could also be that a lot of my impressions of it let me elaborate on some more general opinions and thoughts I have about things beyond itself like comics in general, fiction in general, etc.

In any case, I have to say that interested as I am in the overall goal of the studio’s output as a whole, unfortunately my impression of the book, at least as of #1 is that it’s rather lackluster, I might even go as far as to say it’s kind of bad, which is pretty disappointing. I don’t want to rag on it too much when it’s such an indie, underdog project, setting out on the pretty portentous mission of single-handedly carrying the torch for African and African-inspired superhero stories, so for this review I’ll be adopting a more constructive tone than the much more mean spirited way I would adopt for something I genuinely despise – and oh do I have fun being mean spirited about things I despise, but today I don’t feel so spiteful in my heart so let’s have an easier time for this one.

To summarize briefly, The Asiri is an afrofuturist book about the West African civilization of the same name, that develops highly sophisticated technology with the use of some type of techno-spiritual power called Inkra, and that eventually colonizes Mars, and we start the story at a point at which they have to defend it from an old enemy. The book centers around a group of ten heroes called The Ascended, which is your superhero team for this book; they each have their own powers, role in the group and generally things they’re “about”. That’s a bit deceptive as a premise, however, for what we’ll see the most of, at least in the first volume of this series, is a lot of politicking: the main characters are not just legendary heroes, they also comprise the ruling council of the Asiri society and because the book is set during a major political crisis, naturally there’s a lot of discussion about political strategy and scandal and so on.

My issues with this book already start with the premise. Not because of the political drama, mind you. In fact, in theory, I should be fully on-board with this book’s entire deal, because I actually love political drama, and I’ve seen it integrated well into superhero stories before. Rather, my grievance is that I have kind of ambiguous feelings about afrofuturism as a genre. In theory, the idea of exploring advanced technology in an African setting with such focus on the African aspect of it invites an opposition to, perhaps direct defiance of, popular socio-historical narratives surrounding Africa that aim to present it as technologically void, its people savages and simpletons who cannot really build anything sophisticated, simply scavenge and steal from their betters; it potentially questions also popular truisms around technology itself, especially the apparent belief there is in people’s minds and in sci-fi of some kind of manifest destiny for technology that is the inevitable shape for it to take through an inevitable progression, rather than shaped by the circumstances and needs of the people who develop it.

In practice, of course, the term can be and often is used to designate what is really just any sci-fi with black people in it, at which point the use of a separate category that sections off black characters and artists away from all the, presumably, “normal” sci-fi starts feeling a little condescending. Not only that, but laying it on thick enough that the civilization in question is super duper advanced like no other runs the risk of coming across as a little petulant and insecure. It can somewhat feel like you do agree with the general notion that black people are less “advanced” if the only way you can imagine them/us excelling at technology under is blatantly unrealistic circumstances. That’s merely an aside, however, and not actually the trouble I have with the genre. It’s more so my general problem with the “futurism” part of afrofuturism, because I don’t like sci-fi in general. I tend to find its fixation with technology boring at best and ideologically objectionable at worst. Aside from specific subgenres like cyberpunk, sci-fi as a whole tends to be very uncritical of the notion that technological advancement is always good and desirable, and capable of solving humanity’s problems; I’m an anti-civ; I don’t much care for any of that.

The other immediate concern I have with the book is the amount of characters, a problem easily illustrated by the cover of the book. This thing is absolutely crowded. Ten is a lot of characters for the readers to instantly take in and internalize as on equal footing with each other, which you have to assume you should do given how equalized they all are – they are more or less all lined up in just such a way that none of them stands out or at least seems like they’re supposed to stand out.

Consider for a moment that the characters on the very end of the line on both sides, king Kafan (left), and general Ankor (right) are the first ones to have a dialogue scene and be introduced in these character profile pages that open each chapter. The overall impression you get is that they will be more focused on than some of the others, but the cover gives you no such indication – at most, they are shown as taller than the rest, and that is simply because they are, physically, taller than the rest.

(Admittedly these look really sick.)

They also made the, while kind of cool, mostly misguided decision of having their normal selves looking up at their koraa forms (aka when they have their superpowers turned on) so while there are only ten characters on the cover, at first glance it appears to actually have twenty main characters. It doesn’t help that some of them don’t quite look like their activated equivalents when seen as normal and from behind. It also doesn’t help that the koraa form design, well, it looks pretty damn evil – when I see silver skin I tend to think of Bizarro Superman first and Captain Atom second – so you might instead assume that figures facing you are the antagonists of the story, which is also a pretty bad first impression.

Not only that, the visual design of the characters themselves is not sufficiently distinctive, and that’s almost entirely to blame on the coloring choices: even though their costumes appear to look different from each other from their back poses, the coloring has averaged out everything in such a way that it feels very minimal. It just looks like a sea of purple and yellow with very little to distinguish between shapes. And beyond that, their frontal poses display even less difference in overall design. There are quite literally two men wearing the same armor, and with the same haircut and beard style.

Compare and contrast with this cover of Justice League International, a very iconic one that’s been recreated and reused for trades about a dozen times so I can’t for the life of me find the original.

Despite being apparently blander, it does a better job than The Asiri #1 at conveying and distinguishing the characters in the team: first, by arranging them in a way where your eyes focus on only some of them and not all of them at the same time – Guy Gardner is smack dab in the middle and in front of the group, and is the only one saying something: you can tell he’s going to be more prominent than the other ones. Also particularly centered in this image are Blue Beetle and Batman, right behind Guy. The rest of the characters, most of which are less known, are surrounding them, not taking up as much space. Some are even partially cut off. There’s a much more natural flow of attention.

And then crucially, of course, the characters themselves look different enough. Now, don’t get me wrong, I would never be one to accuse comics of having a flourishing level of body or ethnic diversity – or any – but superheroes have thus far fared off pretty okay by having characters distinguishable at least in costume, which I think you can say this cover does a decent job at. All of the characters have designs which are simultaneously simple while still maintaining major marked differences: varying levels of face coverage, type of coverage, garment shape, and, of course, most of all, color. The characters each have a very consistent, very distinctive color scheme, which the colorist for the cover bothered to convey.

This pastiche of it made years later further reinforces the point. The most important characters are generally taking up a more privileged space on the page, and now there are more of them, with Guy seemingly remarking on it, as if to say that no, you don’t have to be on board for every single one of these nobodies right away, you can stand to focus on the ones you know. Which, incidentally, is a luxury that The Asiri #1 doesn’t share: all of its main characters are brand new to this book; the reader is not expected to be familiar with any of them. Which only makes it more important to distinguish them right away than for the average superhero book that utilizes preexisting characters.

I’m much belaboring the point of the cover here, and its because these art direction and design problems are present in the rest of the book as well. The first real scene of the book is an all out battle between our main characters and an opposing force we have yet to make sense of (the start of the story skips ahead).

Something about the way it’s presented feels very jarring, and it took me a while to identify that it’s because the coloring is so inadequate. It’s a clear, normal looking sunny day and the scene is made up of bright colors that convey no tone in particular, but especially not the tension supposed to be conveyed. It is full of yellow in everyone’s armor and weapons and the lighting, which gives it a weirdly upbeat look. It has pretty much the same palette as the next scene, which is a pretty lighthearted scene of a teacher giving a lecture to some very excited children.

It just doesn’t feel right. I feel like a scene like that, in comparison, would be more suited to a more red tint, as is very common to see in comic scenes depicting war or large-scale conflict – hey, it may be cliché, but it’s cliché for a reason.

(Although, try not to let it get to Teen Titans: The Culling levels of red, please.)

The lighting is also flat in general, which makes the characters and backgrounds themselves look bi-dimensional, and it clashes heavily with the many places in the art where there is texturing that doesn’t feel well integrated with the shapes they’re on top of. Gives it a little bit of a Chowder effect, except, well, static. It’s not like it never works, in some places the textures are integrated better than others, even if clearly through use of liquify tools and the like. I understand this is a bit of necessary corner cutting because hand drawing your textures and patterns so that they always fit the physical shape they’re applied to is very time consuming, and probably unfeasible given how prevalent complex patterned/textured fabric is in African clothing. It just works better in some places than others.

(Various levels of integration here.)

Furthermore, I feel the need to point out (perhaps a bit late for how long I spent focused on the negative aspects) how once the action pauses and the characters get talking, and we get a good look at their faces up close, it’s clear that their designs are actually quite distinctive, which is something very worthy of praise in a comic book.

(Even if it’s obvious for some of them what celebrity they’re faceclaiming.)

It may not have the most expert design principles in the industry for the costumes, but in terms of what the actual people look like, it far exceeds the standard set by the average superhero comic coming from the big two – one need only to see a panel of Batman and Superman together whenever a writer has the brilliant idea to have them interact outside of costume to feel like someone is pulling a prank on you because yes, the two main characters of an enormous universe made up of hundreds of superheroes and super-villains are two guys who happen to look the exact fucking same as each other.

Now that’s all well and good but what about the funny words that go in the funny books to accompany the funny pictures? What’s the story like? And that’s when I feel I have to be disappointed again. The story doesn’t get off to a good start, and it continues to kind of aggravate me in some ways after that too. For starters it does this thing that a lot of sci-fi does that really gets on my nerves and doesn’t help me warm up on it where it renames a normal thing from the real world to something different and probably stupid, like changing the name of “days” to “cycles” (super basic one to do, too, I feel like I’ve seen that replacement a hundred times over), and then it just tells you anyway what it is so there’s no real reason for why the name’s changed.

(Seriously what is even the point.)

What is also apparent from the get go about this book is that it will proceed to do a lot of exposition to me, and I guess this is a good time to mention that when I call something exposition, be assured that I mean it as a bad thing. because I have the fairly esoteric belief that exposition is not actually a real thing, and where it is, it is necessarily bad. Because what exposition is, wherever it is defined, is “conveying information” to the reader that they “need” to know.

(These children clearly already know all this information. This is the writer telling me information they feel I need to know.)

Now, I don’t make aspersions on what people are looking for when they read a comic book, but on my part when I sit down with the latest issue of Gotham City Sirens or what have you I know I’m not looking to get well informed, and I would hardly call it necessary either. Whenever I read a comic book I expect it to make me feel something – in fact, necessarily, I will be feeling many different things over the course of it – and maybe also make me think about something which will make me feel a certain way. And in essence everything in a comic book, in any story, for that matter, should have a purpose of giving me some kind of sensation, which will make me care about that aspect of the story.

(Somehow I don’t feel like I’m supposed to be emotionally invested in how their communicator thingies work.)

And this is a particularly large disparity I find because most of what I read, at least when it comes to novels, is realist and literary fiction, while most of the people who believe in what I will call “exposition theory” are fans of so-called speculative fiction: stories of which setting have certain aspects of its own world and how it works that the audience won’t be aware of because it’s not set in the real world, which they’re familiar with. But this disparity is not for the reason an SF/F reader might assume. The mistaken implication seems to be that if its set in the real world the reader will simply already know everything there is to know about the setting, which is of course, ridiculous: notoriously, nobody knows everything there is to know about the universe we live in.

Rather, realist fiction does not need any notion as ridiculous as exposition because it draws no distinction between what it is telling you because you “need” to know it to understand the story and what is actually the story. When a realist book narrates about the setting, about what the houses in the town look like, what bird species is flying by, what time of day it is, that is not “exposition”, it is the story. It is telling you these things assuming that you already care about them for their own sake because you are supposed to. If you don’t, that is not because the story is “expositing” about the setting, it is because its narration failed to be interesting. In Inés of my Soul, Inés doesn’t tell you about Pedro de Valdivía’s wife that he abandoned in Spain so that you’ll “understand” why her romantic entanglement with him is scandalous, or for that matter, all manner of colorful characters whose presence in the book is minimal, but whose impression on the narrative is meaningful and exciting; you’re supposed to care about their brief tenures on it for their own sake.

And I simply don’t believe SF/F has any excuse to treat itself any differently in that regard, because much like I don’t need Chinua Achebe to tell me about how trials work in igbo culture for any other type of infraction than the one he depicts happening in Things Fall Apart, which in turn he need not tell me about before it happens; so too does this book not need to tell me about how their spaceships work unless those specific mechanic details happen to matter for the characters at the time that it tells me about it. Because otherwise it doesn’t feel like they are telling me a story, it feels like they are relaying information that they feel I’ll “need to know for later”.

And that’s what a lot of reading this book feels like. Not like I’m being told a story, but that I’m being relayed information so that I can understand a story that might eventually happen later, and in a lot of ways it feels like it never does. Because some 100 odd pages into this 140 page juggernaut the characters still say things in a way that feels very little like they are living a story and very much like they are discussing something simply for the benefit of informing me about something. The impression that I get is that even when the characters are talking about themselves, about their backstories, their feelings and their relationships, they do so in an unnatural matter-of-factly manner such that I feel more that the writer is trying to inform me about them rather than let me know them.

(This feels more like it’s telling trivia about their marriage than characterizing either of them as the type of people who say stuff like that.)

Now a wise reader may recognize my argument here and think “isn’t that just a flamboyantly overdrawn way of saying the story fails at ‘show don’t tell’?”, and in a way it is indeed my own insufferable contrarianism that sours me on the use of the term, but I also have principled opposition to the “show don’t tell” cliché because I think its framing is backwards: it’s not that you should “add” emotion and a sense of something actually happening to the “information” you give your reader so you can make them care about it, it’s that if you’re seeing a story as information in any way in the first place you’re already going about it the wrong way. If you find whatever you’re telling interesting and exciting, you should just get on with it. If you are telling them something that isn’t interesting, and you just feel that it “needs” to be there because of something else that comes after, it should not be there.

(Although it is pretty ironic that they wrote this in.)

And this endless stream of information devoid of emotion, ironically, makes the story very confusing and hard to follow, because while I’m caught in the midst of trying to memorize what amounts to context-free trivia about an overwhelming amount of characters very quickly, I soon find myself realizing that I don’t actually understand what any of them is presently doing and why, or how exactly one scene follows from another. I can get the general gist of what the story is about and how the characters are involved in it, but the progression itself is difficult to ascertain, and there’s little sense of narrative tension (again, much information and little emotion) to make me feel like we’re going anywhere at all.

It’s only really around page 110 that I start feeling like the book is telling a story rather than relaying information. Characters finally start feeling and thinking things in the present for their own sakes, rather than retroactively for my benefit. And by then, I kind of feel like it’s too little too late to make me care about the majority of what it spent all those previous pages expositing about to me rather than telling me a story about.

I feel like there is somewhere here the hints of an actual story. There were a handful of scenes that worked, in the sense that they made me feel something; but overall the book feels less like a story and more like a design document for one. There are a lot of concepts I can imagine someone wanted to fit in a story, and a lot of character outlines, but it’s like they didn’t quite finish incorporating those into a story proper. They started doing it, but then some kind of natural disaster happened and they published under-construction steel beams of it instead. In which case, I guess I’ll see if I can channel my interior “old man stopping in the street to watch a construction site” and check back in come volume #2 to see if they managed to get some walls raised up in here.

[bimbinisrevinis]

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