Poor… Tired… And Depressed on Planet Earth — Evan Dorkin’s Hectic Planet

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This is it. From Hectic Planet: Checkered Past this is the most Gen X comics panel ever created:

Hectic Planet: when you are so poor you cannot afford a glass of Nesquick

When you’re so poor, tired and alienated that the only thing you can think of to bring a little light in your life is a shitty overpriced chocolate milk substitute drink and you can’t even afford that. Welcome to Reagan’s America, except this is 2074 and what you’re reading is supposed to be a light hearted space opera sci-fi comic about underground Pirate Corps sticking it to the man. Instead it’s a series about twentysomething slackers with no jobs, no money, no future, living from day to day adrift in a world with no use for them. They survive on a diet of insipid pop culture references, underground zine culture and ska. Mix Clerks with Repo Man and 2-Tone and you sorta get what Hectic Planet was about.

Hectic Planet: the covers of the collected editions

Hectic Planet was Evan Dorkin’s first series and it shows. The beginning is a bit rough but can see his art improving as the series progresses. Everything that he would later put in Milk & Cheese or Dork! is already here in an embryonic form. The density of the writing and art, the pop culture trivia, the background of quiet ennui & depression that’s present throughout brought on by the knowledge that there’s no place for you in the real world nor do you want one: this is perhaps the most Gen X comic ever created. Written in the late eighties, it anticipates the pop culture of the nineties, the depression after the false dawn of Reaganomics failed to turn into a mushroom cloud and a whole generation had to get used to the idea that they would have to become adults after all.

Trust him, he’s a doctor — Monster Musume No Oisha-San

Anime, video
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I admire the efficiency with which Monster Musume No Oisha-San establishes its setting and let’s you know exactly what kind of anime it is in its first two scenes:

Remember the Monster Musume no Iru Nichijou anime that came out in 2015? Hapless nerd gets saddled with a veritable harem of monster girls living at his home through a combination of government incompetence and his own abnormal kindness. It was hugely popular at the time, but sort of got buried under the isekai boom a little later on, so we never got the flood of monster girl knock-offs I’d expected. Until Monster Musume No Oisha-San that is. It’s not that both are monster girl harem series, but that the exact same monster girls show up. Main girl is a lamia, her biggest rivals are a centaur and an arachne, while there’s also a mermaid and a harpy knocking about. Where it differs is in giving its protagonist, doctor Glenn Litbeit, a better excuse to meet monster girls, by making him a physician in a fantasy city who specialises in treating monsters. Also a good excuse for having him fondle, sorry, ‘examine’ all the monster girls he comes in contact with, most of which are presented with the same sort of soft core porn presentation as in the scene above.

So why should you watch this if you don’t think adolescent sex jokes like this are hilarious? Even if I personally don’t mind this, had light harem antics been all this series had to offer I wouldn’t be writing about it. What makes it interesting is the setting: ten years after a war between humans and monsters, in a city build to encourage human/monster cohabitation, ruled over by Skaldi, a literal dragon lady. She’s the one who forced the end of the war and settled Lindworm as a town where both humans and all kinds of monsters could thrive. It’s her health, after she suddenly collapses through a speech, that is the subject of the series last four episodes. What I immediately thought of, as I’m sure you did too, is Yugoslavia and the death of Tito. When Tito died in 1980, there were fears it could tear Yugoslavia apart; in the process it took another decade of nationalism, but you can see how it sprung to mind. Without lady Skaldi, would the town of Lindworm remain peaceful or would both factions fall back in their ancient hatreds?

No of course Monster Musume No Oisha-San doesn’t go anywhere near that. Instead, the plot is all about finding a way to handle her illness as well as convincing her she should not accept it as her fate to die just yet. But while it’s not explicitly mentioned, what that last story arc shows is the entire city, monster and human both, pulling together to save their beloved leader. It’s not a case of Glenn pulling a miracle out of a hat and saving the day all alone. Instead, he gets his old mentor, an octopus woman to do the difficult parts of the operation, trains an arachne woman to assist them both and gets a centaur girl he treated earlier in the series to make a set of needles that can actually handle dragon flesh. In the end, the dragoness who ended the war and created the city is saved by the people she did it for.

Ultimately, Monster Musume No Oisha-San remains a light hearted harem series slightly too fond of jokes too corny even for an eighties teen movie. For me however it manages to avoid most of the sleaziness of other fanservice oriented shows. I liked the various haremettes and it helps that all of them clearly have lives outside of their love/lust for Glenn, even managing to be friends with each other. an enjoyable way to waste an afternoon watching anime.

Towa — Planet Loop — Hololive Showcase

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It can be hard to remember the Hololive girls are supposed to be idols, but then you see a clip like this:

The first time I watched Tokoyami Towa singing I wqas blown away by her voice. She has such a deep, confident, almost masculine voice, so different from her usual voice. She immediately became my favourite Hololive singer; just check out her version of Error. It’s not that I dislike cutesy idol singing, but the way Towa sings just hits differently. A little bit of gap moe perhaps, as she’s usually a bit goofy, which makes her confident personality whenever she’s singing stand out all the more. Though even here you have a little goofiness coming through in her dancing.

A clip I can put on whenever I’m feeling depressed and which never fails to cheer me up.

Rereading: Trilobite! — Richard Fortey

books and books review, Sandra, Science
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Despite the oodles of spare time allegedly freed up by being forced to work from home thanks to Covid, I haven’t actually managed to read all that much this past year. Whether it’s lack of interest, lack of energy or something else I don’t know, but I’m lucky if I managed to get into the double digits this year of books read. To be honest, it has been a bit of a trend for me the last few years. Having kept a booklog since 2001 and having been deeply involved in science fiction and fandom in 2010-2015 just caught up with me. As I got into anime I spent less time reading; when covid hit I thought it would give me time to read again, but so far it hasn’t. Until yesterday, when I felt the need to read something comforting, something I hadn’t read in a long time and my eye fell on Richard Fortey’s Trilobite.

Richard Fortey is a writer I got to know thanks to Sandra, who was a huge fan of his. One of the advantages of being in a relationship with somebody who’s as big a reader as you are. Whereas I was always interested in history, science fiction and the like, she was more into the natural sciences, sociology and detective fiction. Our tastes overlapped in places — after all we first met in a Terry Pratchett related IRC channel — and where they differed there was always an opportunity to get to know a new writer. Thanks to Sandra I read a hell of a lot more classic detective novels than I otherwise would’ve had, but also a lot more of pop science books like this one. She always had an eye for interesting, entertaining science books. Trilobite
I last read and reviewed in August of 2004, so high time to reread it. Below is the original review, warts and all:

Cover of Trilobite!


Trilobite!
Eyewitness to Evolution
Richard Fortey
269 pages, including index
published in 2000

I’ve always liked trilobites, but never as much as Richard Fortey liks them. He is genuinely enthusiastic about them, which comes through on every page of this book. For a subject which could easily be made dull, this is a good thing, though at times his enthusiasm is slightly wearing. Never mind though, if you have even the slightest interest in trilobites, he will suck you in. Fortey has a knack of describing the various species of trilobites with such clarity that even somebody like me, who didn’t know a pleura from a glabella was able to picture them in his mind and understand the differences.

Trilobite! is not just about trilobites however, as the subtitle, Eyewitness to Evolution indicates. Fortey uses trilobites to illustrate the larger story of evolution and the workings of science. His book not only tells of the evolutionary history of the trilobite, but also of the history of their discovery and the evolution of our understanding of them.

Popular science books, especially those written by non-scientists, often have a tendency to focus on those areas of science in which a dramatic story can be told, either because the subject matter itself is so dramatic, or because the story behind the science is. At first glance, trilobites offer neither. The animal itself is so common a fossil, existing in so many variations as to have been dubbed “the beetle of the Paleozoic”. Fascinating in its anatomy to be sure, but without the vicarious thrill of the dinosaurs. Furthermore, the history of trilobite research, as detailed by Fortey, is one of gradual discovery and steady progress. There are no heroic tales of young, brilliant scientists with outlandish but correct theories fighting the hidebound establishment to get them accepted here.

Since that is not the way most science works anyway, that is probably a good thing. Anything the subject might lack in conspicuous drama, it more than makes up for in the enthusiasm Fortey brings to his trilobites. The history of both trilobites itself as well as the history of our understanding of them comes alive through it.

Take for example how Fortey starts Trilobite!. The first chapter mixes personal reminiscences with a short overview of where trilobites come from and what the book is about and manages to refer Thomas Hardy, who used a trilobite to great effect in his novel A Pair of Blue Eyes. It is at once both interesting and warm, an appealing jumble that’s neither pedantic nor pretentious. Most of the rest of the book is the same way, somewhat less structured than others may have thought wise, but none the less interesting for it.

Halfway through the book, Fortey partially abandons his trilobites to examine how the abundant presence of trilobite fossils has helped our understanding of evolution. Since trilobites fossils are so common and trilobites existed for such a long time, they make it easy to trace evolutionary processes.

One part of this diversion has Fortey butt in to the ongoing arguments about the socalled “Cambrian explosion”, that time when life, according to Stephen Jay Gould and others, exploded into an incredibly array of forms and designs, most never seen again afterwards. (Gould’s version of this event is explored in Wonderful Life.) Fortey himself is somewhat skeptical of this notion and shows how this theory has changed since the publication of Wonderful Life.

After this diversion, Fortey goes back to his trilobites, with a general description of the lifes and times of trilobites. He ends it with an impassionate crusade for scientific curiosity and its importance, even if it doesn’t bring anything of immediate applied value.

In all, Trilobite! is everything a good popular science book should be: interesting, enlightening and humane. Recommended.