2026, Q1 - The Same Book Twice On Accident

I was lent a printed copy of _If I Must Die_ (2025) by Refaat Alareer around Christmas last year. At the time, I was still struggling my way through _Anti-Dühring_, so I only got around to actually opening it in the new year, but it was a quick read. Not an easy one, but linguistically not as challenging. I was already familiar with Alareer's work as an independent correspondent for the Electronic Intifada, and I was made aware of his murder by the occupation through those channels. As someone not particularly versed in poetry, I fear I can't make a coherent statement on the poems printed between the excerpts of his work here, but it gives a close, personal account of the conflict, which I assume would be quite effective in combatting propaganda. If I could, I would make it required reading, before making as much as a public statement on that prolonged human rights violation. 161. End the occupation.

The first volume of DC's _Creature Commando_ is not so different from the cartoon series that I stumbled over in the last quarter of last year. It has somewhat less heart, I feel, which I suppose isn't entirely its fault, since it's competing with James Gunn's writing. However, I want to put my finger on why I didn't enjoy it as much as its animated... cousin, I suppose. It features a new cast, which feels like it has somewhat less heart. Part of it is perhaps the tendency for comic books to lean on edgy dialogue to characterize, especially when dealing with anti-heroes. It's not in principle a problem to have a racist vampire - and I mean old-school racist - but flaws like these need to be addressed in a way that justifies the reader spending time with them. It's just the first volume, but some of these problems kinda just go away after a while. I never saw much of an arc in the characters to justify the point where they end up by the time the volume concludes. Having been conscious enough to understand the appeal of Suicide-Squad style setups by the time the first Movie came out, I fear that this title would have had to do a lot more in the way of writing, because the setup just doesn't have the novelty that the much less edgy comic-book landscape of yesteryear would have afforded it. Perhaps tie-ins with other parts of the shared universe might have helped put them into context.

_Swimming at Midnight_ (2025) by Valentina Grande is a graphic novel about belonging, and about how we're never quite done growing up. It tells a down to earth, perhaps even familiar story of women whose past standing up for the right things has cost them l, and who have now been settled mostly with the costs. It's a beautiful, if sobering read. The art feels reminiscent of cartoonists' drawings, and the colours are subtle, painterly, if at all present. Stories like these, that are simple in plot, but heavy and facetted in theme, don't often lend themselves to this medium naturally, but in this instance, it works. The work lives off the quiet, wordless moments, that would rarely even be written about, if this were prose. Looking up at a Halloween mask stuck in a tree, or even watching people swim, for instance. It gives the point of view character a melancholy, accentuated by the choice to include her neitral expression in the frame.

_This Soviet World_ ( ) by Anna-Louise Strong was an enlightening read. She makes a good case against the Great Man Theory of History by highlighting the actual processes that happened within the USSR. Her writing itself is perhaps a little prone to grandeur, considering her journalistic background, but it only really took me out of the read a couple of times. The way the work focuses on the common citizen takes away the weight of the admittedly many failures of the Soviet experiment and places them as the errors of a state trying to govern, and not as the malicious attempt of tyranny that it's often portayed as. I consider this a more healthy analysis of any state, not just the socialist ones.

_Menace of Our Times_ (2025) by Aaron J. Leonard is a detailed play by play of various American factions - some governmental, some not - chronicaling the attempts to weed out communists in North America. It feels comprehensive, though it's likely not, but the granularity of its sub-chaptering and the highly focused retelling of the aspect of the story each subchapter addresses makes it a good reference book. I didn't personally retain very many details of this book, but it's left me with impressions, enough to probably find my way back to it, if I need to look up something. The four rough categories it decomposes into are legislation, press, BoI operations and popular (as in emerging from the general population) fascism. They have been the classic parts of manufacturing consent for many other cases since then, but it's not often that, outside of the McCarthy years, the cruelty of this collaboration is highlighted beyond cases of "history's losers".

_The Killer_ (2023) starring Michael Fassbender is an adaptation of a graphic novel that I haven't read, and tonally follows the tradition of movies like _Drive_. It's not particularly plot-heavy, and provides a very dry outlook on the human condition. It's almost a miserable watch, since I don't really like the action much, which put movies like _Monkey Man_ into the enjoyable territory for me. What saved this one, is the genuine moments of humour in the performance. There's also a very stark difference between what the in-character narration describes as the central world-view of their protagonist, and what ends up happening. It kept me on my toes while watching what was essentially a scavenger hunt as a revenge movie. For those moments, the watch was entertaining enough. It's admittedly not a wordy movie, so it's very unsuited for second-screen watching. That's OK, just not what I was going for at the time.

_I Am Their Silence_ (2025) is a fun mystery graphic novel centering an erratic psychiatrist that gets very involved in the lives of her clients. One of her (former?) clients, who is several positions down the line to inherit the land of her family that has been rich off the production of premium brand champagne, invites her to a reading of the relevant will. There is a murder, of which she is the prime suspect, and her license to operate is temporarily revoked. It also turns out, over the course of the framing device, which takes place in a therapy session with what I assume is a court-appointed shrink. She also has a family history of bipolar disorder, and is advised by the women that raised her. It's overall a fun, if simple read. The protagonist is charismatic, and one of those chaos gremlin-types that personally appeal to me, up to the bisexual messiness and the inability to put up respect for authority figures. The art style is also very reflective of that fun tone, with exaggerated facial expression and vivid colours. There's a minimalism in the style, which is almost reminiscent of comics for a younger demographic. The shading is minimal, and there's a very traditional cartoon design aesthetics to some of the people in the work. It conveys movement really well, even if some of it is meant to be slinky or a little stilted. I've not seen this in a while, and it really does a lot for characterization.

_The Bad Guys 2_ (2025) is the sequel to the Dreamworks animation heist movie of 2022. I remember quite liking the first movie, on account of the animation style and my interest in heist stories in general. As far as sequels go, this one makes sense to do, and it builds heavily on the first movie. It's nice to see sequels that seem to acknowledge that they need some reason to exist. The general tone of the movie is a little less charming than the first one, at least to me, since they upped the scale of everything a little, and I find it's usually difficult to keep the laid-back tone while dealing with planetary threats. What worries me slightly is that it seems like they're gearing up to turning the movies into a franchise and I'm not so sure that's going to work for even another movie without turning very literally into _Cars 3_ (is that the one with the secret agents? I've not seen any beyond the first one).

Naomi Klein's _Hot Money_ (2014) is a fairly short collection of three essays centering the intersection between climate politics and capital influence. It's doesn't exactly live up to _Doppelganger_, which has started me on a search on Klein's works, but it's also not a fair comparison. It reads like a primer to the concept that capitalist climate politics will run into challenges built into the system itself, but also not necessarily advocating for politics that are radical enough to dispense with those challenges. I don't feel the need to make my own stance on the issue clear here, but suffice it to say, most essays (I think) are sourced from Klein's _This Will Change Everything_", which I'll read in the near future.

_Love Through a Prism_ (2025) was a different series than I thought it'd be. Anime is failing to capture as much of my attention these days as it once did, and in my younger years, I might have enjoyed it more as well. It's a love story cebtered around people attending an art school, but as is typical for the medium, it inspects many different themes on the side. I personally missed the insights into the artistic process that other works with similar premises could showcase, but in the end, it seems to be interested primarily with the relationship the discipline has with its artists. It becomes a split presence in the roles it fulfills in the characters' lives. It's aspiration, outlet, hobby, obsession, bonding medium and trauma, and I suppose in a way it makes sense to treat it as such. Through this treatment though, the series turns slightly into a less high-energy sports anime. It's not what I'm personally interested in, but it's an honest portrayal of the topic.

_DC's Finest: Catwoman - Vengeance and Vindication_'s first volume deeply confuses me. I had somewhat hoped that it would be something akin to the Hawkeye collection I read last quarter, but it's very much not. It seemingly goes through various iterations of the character across time, which is fine, but I really don't like any of them in this volume. Some of it - well, most of it, really - is the writing. It's just how DC comics were written at the time, I suppose, which to me is a little bit cringe, and a little too willing to partake in the insensitivities of the time. There's also no real through-line between the chapters, so it reads like an anthology, but I suspect that it will be a lot more legible for people that already know what happens before and after the issue printed in here. Perhaps it's because Catwoman is not as central a character as the hero whose story she's spawned from, meaning that perhaps she genuinely only shows up in peripheral issues to move one mcguffin from A to B. Also, I genuinely hope that these aren't the fan-favorite issues or storylines of the time, because it features genuinely the worst attempt at heavy stylization I've ever seen. I'm gonna try again with a trade book for this character, I'm sure, but I'm not going to check out the second volume.

_Olympos: Nullhunter_ (2025) is a retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Hercules, set in a cyberpunk, interstellar future. I get that there are many versions of the cyberpunk aesthetic that are decidedly maximalist, but this work envisions its environments in a level of detailed that to my eye is always a little uncomfortable. I'm not sure why, but most of its graphical presentation feels a little off, or at least not to my taste. Even in its maximalism, the aesthetic can appeal to me, as proven by the time I spent with Cyberpunk 2077, and the Shadowrun pen and paper. On the one hand, there is some very traditional cartoony character design touches to the visuals - exaggerated size in defining features, but simplified faces, which are somehow drawn with too much detail. I found it genuinely difficult to tell some of the characters apart sometimes, especially when they had similar hairstyles.

_Scarlet Witch: The Omnibus Volume 1_ is almost cozy in the way it's structured. I feel that it's probably not amazing story-telling to have a protagonist more than able to deal with any issues they encounter, but it works decently well with the monster of the week storytelling that this volume is structured around. I'd probably rank it solidly in the middle in terms of engagement. There were issues I found pretty boring, others that were interesting. I'm beginning to think that certain powers just don't lend themselves well to drawn choreography, especially when canonically it's just red energy doing stuff. The art style is modern and pleasant to the eye, much more so than the previous two comic books I read, but also not so expressive that I'm likely to remember it in the future. I'll read some more later down the line, but more because I thought it was passable.

Emma Goldman's autobiography _Living My Life_ is an account mostly of the struggles of anarchist organizing in the late nineteenth century, and into the early twentieth one, including a detailed evaluation of the early Soviet Union. It's not a difficult read on the surface, but it is a long one, even if I happened to come across a copy that had been truncated by about half its length. I found it more than lengthy enough though, fot now I will have to remain content with the fact that I missed a lot of the words that Goldman penned. My edition was a modest 1700 pages, and - coupled with the other book I picked out for myself - I decided I eventually to move on.

The main impressions of Goldman's writings on her experience organizing obviously has the two different back drops of Euro/US political landscapes, which were hostile to her cause in most accounts, but her early life is also marked heavily by forming relationships that would last a lifetime. Often, tragically, not hers. The most impactful of these relationships is what would become a partnership with Alexander "Sasha" Berkman, whom I wasn't at all familiar with until reading this, and whose writings I might want to check out for myself on occasion. Her organizung efforts in the US certainly take up most of her life's time, and with what I think might be somewhat mixed results. However, looking into the index for chapters, the reader will find a 200-some page chapter, entirely focused on Goldman's experience after being deported from the US to the newly established Soviet Union. Arguably her writing and descriptions in this book reach a zenith here. Goldman is highly critical of the USSR, the Petro-Soviet's detachment from the proletariat, and the unchecked authority of the Cheka. I'd argue that the chapter might have been shortened if one wanted to be concise, but the descriptions stretching the wordcount give a very immersive view into the parts of the proletariat left behind by the revolution. Still, knowing how these things would be perceived and reproduced, Goldman did explicitly mention in a later chapter that her disappointment was in the state and the bourgeois reproduction of the ruling class that emerged from the Revolution, not with the revolution itself. I, personally feel a little torn over the account, since, while I don't suppose that the memoir captured any of the chapter incorrectly, I'm not so sure it paints a complete picture. It's certainly not Goldman's responsibility to do so, but I can see how anything on these topics could be used - and in fact was used, even during Goldman's life - for overt propaganda purposes. I probably wouldn't go so far as to call Goldman's expectations for the Soviet Union utopian, but considering the context of the previous tsarist state, from which the Bolshevik revolution emerged, and the fact that a project like this was being attempted by a vanguard of intellectuals with little to no experience in statecraft, I fail to muster the same disappointment in Lenin and his contemporaries. That's not to say I'm excited to read of their failings or am willing to dismiss them. Not unlike Goldman herself seemed to regard the US as overall not ready for sweeping social change, I find their failures lamentable, but not entirely surprising.

_This Changes Everything_ (2014) is arguably the Naomi Klein I should have read instead of _Hot Money_, mostly because the latter is fully contained in the former. It probably did something for me to skip all the chapters that already appeared in _Hot Money_, but I had just finished reading it not too many days prior, so I decided to truncate the otherwise slightly lengthy work to one of the size of my usual reads. It is fair to have published the pieces twice though, as through the surrounding chapters in _This Changes Everything_, the environmentalism does gain a more holistic understanding that wouldn't be complete without the capital-criticism that made up _Hot Money_. In essence the topic of environmentalism is broached through two main roads: anti-capitalism and decolonialism, each is fundamentally incomplete without the other. While Klein acknowledges this throughout several places in the book, the book aims to illustrate why a complete environmental protection policy requires a heavy focus on both. I feel I'm getting a sense of why Klein is such an interesting author. She manages to place anecdotes in places where they aren't counterproductive to the narrative or rhetorically inappropriate. Her experiences, while intensely personal, tie into a larger dataset that have effectively the same experience. Rhetorically, this is a very clever structure, and her execution of it is so effortless that it's not always apparent that this is what she's doing, until one tries deconstructing the argument.

The book is a somewhat bleaker read, because it deals much more heavily with the consequences that performative climate protection has had on disadvantaged populations, mostly in the Americas, but that makes the threat of exploiting the environment to its breaking point more material than might be initially apparent when the term "climate change" is used. Environmental protection policy touches on a lot more than just the changing of weather patterns or a year's average temperature, and we tend to forget that, not the least because often the most immediate and jarring consequences of policies like fracking and extraction of rare earths for profit or (over)production tend to hit completely people that have little voice in the debate. Cancers, hits to reproductive capabilities, generational ailments and a whole host of toxicities accompany what was deemed necessary for a colonial, capitalist system to thrive. The book doesn't provide a bottom up approach to the issue, and it doesn't have to. Arguably, if it did, it might have found less resonance, both with me, and with general audiences, but to a reader not immersed in actual "Blockadia" organising spaces, having the image of what climate protection is at the fronts of the actual oil drilling sites, is undeniably a powerful one. Whether it can convince those who don't really want to grapple with the issue, I couldn't tell. Part of me fears that it's too late for the centers of capital production, and indigenous groups have been successfully kept away from the nexus of power with impressive reliability. Perhaps it does require an organizing manual, once someone has figured out a way that works and isn't coopted by the alphabet boys given enough zeal and money.