Bill Watterson knew, or at least captured better than anyone, the private derangement of the average 6-year-old boy. Imagination is one thing: Monsters lived under the bed, dinosaurs roamed the Earth, teachers were misshapen alien monsters in disguise, Tracer Bullet charges $50 per day plus expenses. But somewhere beyond those fairly standard fantasy worlds lies the grisly id of the artist, and the snow is his canvas.
But we were bound for some confusion, Ursa and I. She turns the corner and observes, with some surprise, the crowd of people in fly cosplay outfits streaming in and out and all around the Ernest C. Morial Convention Center: Two little boys dressed as Squirtle and Wartortle, a tall white woman in Misty’s denim coochie cutters and suspenders, a Black-man Brock with his broccoli-green vest, and a woman in a one-piece Eevee costume, collar fluffy as a mink, like one I’d seen this waiter wearing at the Clermont Lounge a couple years ago. No longer the fringe performances they were in the ’90s or even early 2000s, these cosplay fits are popular enough that any normie can find lesser versions of them at Target or Walmart as a last-minute Halloween pick. Such objects are the cultural materials of the present, a superstructural enterprise that keeps on giving, even as it exhausts our collective time and patience; and yet there are more of us than ever, waiting for the next game or trading-card set to activate us, the sleeper agents of Pokémon fandom, many of whom happen to be here at the largest international Pokémon championship in history. Only some of us are players, but most all of us are fans.
It is the year 2004 and I take a seat at the counter of the Koreatown Denny’s, just three blocks from my apartment, and for a little while, I watch as a blonde waitress with makeup the colors of a tropical fish smiles at me every time she walks by. Her path is constant: she arrives from one side, departs from the other, grabbing or leaving pots of coffee on the warmer. She leaves a cup with me at my request and, in this way, I become part of the ritual.
Hideous Kinky married the cocktail of unvarnished truth and inherent unreliability that marks the best child narrators, and Freud invokes a similarly fragmentary, often hazy style of narration here. The chapters often feel more akin to short stories — interlinked, but ultimately discrete units. But once I acclimated to the tone, I was swept up into this world of visceral intimacies, the fraught but powerful relationships between the main characters more than gripping enough to carry me along.
With the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima attack approaching next month, “The Hiroshima Men” is a potent reminder of the extreme human costs that were wrought by the first atomic weapon employed during warfare.
By profiling some key players, MacGregor pulls readers into their personal stories with visually enticing description and lively dialogue.