Psychiatric Tales, Darryl Cunningham

You may know Cunningham as a web cartoonist. He did the excellent graphical exposé of the vaccine scare that made the rounds quite deservedly a while back.

Nonfiction in comic form was interesting enough to get a library checkout from me. Cunningham worked as a psychiatric nurse for some time and, as a cartoonist, chose to address the misconceptions and prejudices people have against mental illness by telling stories about how he found the inpatients he worked with. Each graphic story covers a particular diagnosis or theme, such as "People with mental illness enrich our lives" or "Bipolar disorder." One irritating note -- the "Schizophrenia" section begins by saying that it's not the same as "multiple personality disorder," so I waited the rest of the book to see what he had to say about multiples, but there was nothing.

His spare, slightly messy line-and-black-fill drawings look simpler than they actually are. The layouts don't add as much to the presentation as I would have liked, but overall I think the style is effective in conveying the idea that the events presented are (black-and-white) factual. Occasional reverses into white lines on black and heavily posterized photographs ranged from pointless to powerful.

Possible triggers are permanent awful self-harm, suicide, scat, vivid descriptions of mental illness.

( minor spoiler, for structure as much as anything )

If it's handy, this is worth reading, and I'm very much looking forward to Science Tales.

how to mollify me

I had a really frustrating day and was in a bad mood to start with, but now I am doing axolotl genetics for people in Australia.

The Marla Mason novels, T.A. Pratt

These are notable chiefly for being an ongoing urban fantasy series with an ass-kicking female protagonist but nearly devoid of romance. Sorcerous politics, yes; angry gods, yes; Lovecraftian horrors, yes and not always where you think. And there is no way in hell that Marla would put up with an alpha werewolf.

Marla Mason is a tough sorcerer in charge of a fictional city called Felport on the U.S. eastern seaboard, and her city-affinity is one of my favorite things about her. She sees a large, beautiful, outright magical park in her city as an interruption to the proper asphalt and concrete. She's snarky as hell about everything else, too, and her banter with her interesting sidekick is one of my favorite things about the series. (Amusing turns of phrase that actually amuse me, and nerdy pop culture references: Bonus points.)

I'd picked up the exact wrong one of these books a couple of years ago and been almost uninterested enough not to finish, but when read in order and to completion these are some good stuff. Books 1-3 each stand alone reasonably well, but book 4 is firmly a middle book and doesn't work well without setup or conclusion. Of course, that's the one I happened upon originally; glad I reconsidered when I ran across book 1. You have to go online to find book 5 (available for free), but that does end satisfyingly, and the prequel at the same page is rather good. The author's Kickstarter proposal to fund book 6 has half again as much money as it asked for, so I imagne there'll be another novel before too long.

Read these if you can find Blood Engines to start with, and enjoy the actual representative cover art with only one gratuitous midriff shot in the whole series!