June 2025

 

	John Layman & Karl Mostert: The Man Who F#&%ed Up Time

I do love time travel stories— see here. And this is a fun one.

The timeline here is infinitely malleable, and thus Rule 1 is don't fuck up time. Sean Bennett is only a lab assisstant at the time travel startup, and even he knows that. But he's bullied by one of the scientists, Dr. Cooke, and when a future himself meets him at a bar and suggests that a very few changes to the timeline would help him a lot, he agrees.

Then time gets f#&%ed. A lot. There are dinosaurs in the streets, a descendant of Abraham Lincoln is emperor, and the Future Police are after him. And then things get weird.

None of that is a spoiler— it’s on the cover. But I can’t say much more without revealing more of the story’s twists and surprises. Suffice it to say that Sean always has something to do, or if not, something to figure out. It’s fun, not too deep, and also completely over the top.

The art is good— Mostert has a lot of fun drawing dinosaurs and alt-historical cityscapes. It doesn't wow me like, say, John Cassaday, but it works.

This isn’t an ongoing series, by the way— it’s just one graphic novel. Almost seems quant these days, but there’s a lot to be said for a story that does what it has to do and then ends.

There’s also an interesting lesson about genres and conworlding here: time travel stories are now a subgenre, and don’t have to be explained. We don’t bat an eye when Sean changes the timeline and still remembers his personal timeline— that’s just how malleable-timeline stories work. So that lets the author concentrate on creating a fun story in a baroque timeline.

	Makee: Call Me Emma

This is approximately the complete opposite: a memoir by a girl who came from China to America at the age of 14. She has a lot to face— language problems, American racism, her parents not getting along, her sister’s depression. Plus first love and the fascination of being in a foreign country.

At the end she states her theme openly: "When immigrants come to America, it’s often easier to survive if you abandon your own accent, traditions, and heritage, and even your name. But I want people to know that it’s OK to just be who you are.” So 逸萱 Yixuan becomes Emma, and finally becomes Yixuan again.

I found some online reviews that thought the book was a little unfocussed, but it’s obviously autobiographical, and people’s lives often refuse to form clear character arcs. The book ends with some revelations from her mother, which provide some explanations if not closure, and Yixuan heading to art college.

I particularly enjoyed the little tidbits about growing up in China, and what struck her about New York. One amusing bit: she finds high school easy, because she was taught all of that stuff in middle school— so she can treat it as an extended education in English. The book touches some heavy themes but also takes time for very everyday observations. Teenage Yixuan is very teenage, which means she often feels angry or frustrated and acts out. But going to art school rather than something academic is about as rebellious as she gets.

Makee has chosen a thick-lined cartoony style, not at all manga-style but with manga-influenced highlighted emotions. The backgrounds are very well drawn when she wants to emphasize them or slow down the action.

By the way, I endorse Makee's lesson, but I understand the difficulty. A lot of humans, maybe the majority, are basically benign: they can deal with cultural differences and don’t want to make things harder. But sometimes the hosts have to do some work too. I’ve heard people saying that they don’t care about race— great, that’s better than racism, but that doesn’t mean the friction disappears. E.g. anglos have trouble hearing Yixuan‘s name; a nursing home resident gets mad because Yixuan’s mother (a caregiver) doesn’t know the term “maple syrup"; Chinese immigrants and Blacks have mutual misunderstandings. All these things pile up. (And all these issues were faced by European immigrants a century ago.)