[Plura-list] Weinersmith and Boulet's "Bea Wolf"

[Cory Doctorow]

Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/24/awesome-alliteration/

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On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth Hackers On Planet Earth, in Queens, NY:

https://www.hope.net/talks.html

On July 20, I'm appearing at Chicago's Exile in Bookville:

https://exileinbookville.com/events/39808

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Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

https://clarionwriteathon.com/members/profile.php?writerid=293388

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Today's links

* Weinersmith and Boulet's "Bea Wolf": An absolutely delightful retelling of the bardic masterpiece.

* Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.

* This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019

* Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.

* Recent appearances: Where I've been.

* Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.

* Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.

* Colophon: All the rest.

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😤 Weinersmith and Boulet's "Bea Wolf"

*Bea Wolf* is Zach Weinersmith and Boulet's ferociously amazingly great illustrated kids' graphic novel adaptation of the Old English epic poem, which inspired Tolkien, who helped bring it to popularity after it had languished in obscurity for centuries:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

Boy is this a wildly improbable artifact. Weinersmith and Boulet set themselves the task of bringing Germanic heroic saga from more than a thousand years ago to modern children, while preserving the meter and the linguistic and literary tropes of the original. And they did it!

There are *some* changes, of course. Grendel - the boss monster that both Beowulf and Bea Wulf must defeat - is no longer obsessed with decapitating his foes and stealing their heads. In *Bea Wulf*, Grendel is a monstrously grown up and boring adult who watches cable news and flosses twice per day, and when he defeats the kids whose destruction he is bent upon, he does so by turning *them* into boring adults, too.

And Bea Wulf - and the kings that do battle with Grendel - are not interested in the gold and jewels that the kings of *Beowulf* hoard. In *Bea Wulf*, the treasure is toys, chocolate, soda, candy, food without fiber, television shows without redeeming educational content, water balloons, nerf swords and spears, and other stuff beloved of kids and hated by parents.

That substitution is key to transposing the thousand-year-old adult epic *Beowulf* for enjoyment by small children in the 21st century. After all, what makes *Beowulf* so epic is the sense that it is set in a time in which a primal valor still reigned, but it is narrated for an audience that has been tamed and domesticated. *Beowulf* makes you long for a never-was time of fierce and unwavering bravery. *Bea Wulf* beautifully conjures the years of early childhood when you and the kids in your group had your own little sealed-off world, which grownups could barely perceive and never understand.

Growing up, after all, is a process of repeating things that are brave the first time you do them, over and over again, until they become banal. That's what "coming of age" really boils down to: the slow and relentless transformation of the mythic, the epic, and the unknowable and unknown into the tame, the explained, the mastered. When you're just mastering balance and coordination, the playground climber is a challenge out of legend. A couple years later, it's just something you climb.

The correspondences between the leeching away of magic lamented in *Beowulf* and experienced by all of us as we grow out of childhood are obvious in hindsight and surprising and beautiful and bittersweet when you encounter them in *Bea Wolf*.

This effect owes a large debt to Boulet's stupendous artwork. Boulet brings a vibe rarely seen in American kids' illustration, owing quite a lot to France's bande dessinée tradition. Of course, this is a Firstsecond book, and they established themselves as an exciting and fresh kids' publisher in the USA nearly 20 years ago by bringing some of Europe's finest comics to an American audience for the first time. You can get a sense of Boulet's darker-than-average, unabashedly anarchic illustrations here:

https://www.comixtrip.fr/bibliotheque/bea-wolf-weinersmith-boulet-albin-michel/

The utter brilliance of *Bea Wulf* is as much due to the things it preserves from the original epic as it is to the updates and changes. Wienersmith has kept the Old English tradition of alliteration, right from the earliest passages, with celebrations of heroes like "Tanya, treat-taker, terror of Halloween, her costume-cache vast, sieging kin and neighbor, draining full candy-bins, fearing not the fate of her teeth. Ten thousand treats she took. That was a fine Tuesday."

Weinersmith also preserves the kennings - the elaborate figurative compound phrases that replace nouns - that turn ordinary names and places into epithets at you have to riddle out, like calling a river "the sliding sea."

These literary devices, rarely seen today, are extremely powerful, and they conjure up the force and mystique that has kept Beowulf in our current literary discourse for more than a millennium. They also make this a *super* fun book to read aloud.

When Jim Henson was first conceiving of Sesame Street, he made a point of designing it to have jokes and riffs that would appeal to adults, even if some of the nuance would be lost on kids. He did this because he wanted to make art that adults and kids could enjoy together, both because that would give adults a chance to help kids actively explore the ideas on-screen, but also because it would bring some magic into those adults' lives.

This is a very winning combination (not for nothing, it's also the original design brief for Disneyland). Wienersmith and Boulet have produced a first-rate work of adult *and* kid literature, both a perfect entree to *Beowulf* for anyone contemplating a dive into old English epic poetry, and a kids' book full of booger jokes and transgressive scenes of perfect mischief.

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😤 Hey look at this

* 1/25-Scale Cray C90 Wristwatch https://www.chrisfenton.com/1-25-scale-cray-c90-wristwatch/ (h/t Waxy)

* WHOA US Treasury Dept just sanctioned leadership at 🇷🇺Russian #antivirus company #kaspersky https://mamot.fr/@jsrailton@mastodon.social/112656256339461820

* The first use of any new technology... https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/the-first-use-of-any-new-technology

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😤 This day in history

#15yrsago Consumer groups around the world demand transparency on secret copyright treaty https://web.archive.org/web/20090627012359/http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2009/06/23/eu-us-consumer-groups-issue-resolution-on-enforcement-demand-role-in-acta/

#15yrsago Asking sf writers to imagine terrorist scenarios is stupid https://www.wired.com/2009/06/how-science-fiction-writers-can-help-or-hurt-homeland-security/

#15yrsago Lancaster, PA: the most spied-upon town in America https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-jun-21-na-spycam-city21-story.html

#15yrsago US Department of Defense classes protests as “low-level terrorism” https://web.archive.org/web/20090616112119/http://open.salon.com/blog/dennis_loo/2009/06/14/dod_training_manual_protests_are_low-level_terrorism

#15yrsago Nokia and Siemens provided surveillance tools used to bust Iranian activists https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/apr/13/europe39s-telecoms-aid-with-spy-tech/

#15yrsago AOL CDs make great shims for home carpentry projects https://web.archive.org/web/20090625023007/http://antfarmjournal.com/AF-Journal/AOLshim9-21-9/index.html

#15yrsago Some Kindle books have secret caps on the number of times you can download them https://memex.craphound.com/2009/06/22/some-kindle-books-have-secret-caps-on-the-number-of-times-you-can-download-them/

#15yrsago Germany gets its first Pirate Party lawmaker https://www.thelocal.de/politics/20090621-20093.html

#10yrsago CS Lewis explains why you should be proud to read children’s books https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=9117

#10yrsago Watch a Texas lawman’s pathetic scramble for a reason not to record him https://www.techdirt.com/2014/06/20/texas-deputy-displays-ignorance-laws-hes-enforcing-while-trying-to-shut-down-citizens-recording/

#10yrsago Podcast: How Amazon is holding Hachette hostage https://ia804509.us.archive.org/35/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_277/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_277_How_Amazon_is_holding_Hachette_hostage.mp3

#10yrsago Illinois State Cops blew $250K on “terrorist-catching” Stingray surveillance gadgets https://www.muckrock.com/foi/illinois-168/harris-corporation-11372/

#10yrsago 50,000 march against austerity in London, BBC doesn’t notice https://tompride.wordpress.com/2014/06/21/bbc-and-press-ignore-massive-demonstration-against-austerity-in-london/https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2019/06/23/thanks-uncle-sam-after-tax-cuts-texas-instruments-spent-5-billion-on-stock-three-times-more-than-rd/

#5yrsago Man-Eaters Volume Two: Fleshing out the world where girls turn into lethal werepanthers when they get their periods https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/23/man-eaters-volume-two-fleshing-out-the-world-where-girls-turn-into-lethal-werepanthers-when-they-get-their-periods/

#5yrsago In a bid to avoid climate vote, Oregon Republican Senators cross state lines, go into hiding, threaten to murder cops, as white nationalist paramilitaries pledge armed support https://www.vox.com/2019/6/21/18700741/oregon-republican-walkout-climate-change-bill

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😤 Upcoming appearances

* HOPE XV, Jul 14 (Queens, NY)
https://www.hope.net/talks.html

* Exile in Bookville, (Chicago), July 20
https://exileinbookville.com/events/39808

* American Association of Law Libraries keynote, (Chicago), Jul 21
https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/

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😤 Recent appearances

* Living Your Principles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTfqxF5KyCc

* Reimagining the Internet
https://publicinfrastructure.org/podcast/102-cory-doctorow-enshittification/

* Circulating ideas
https://circulatingideas.com/2024/06/11/261-the-bezzle-by-cory-doctorow-summer-reading-spectacular/

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😤 Latest books

* The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

* "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

* "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

* "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

* "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

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😤 Upcoming books

* Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

* Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025

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😤 Colophon

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

* Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Friday's progress: 783 words (16091 words total).

* A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

* Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025

* Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

* Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

Latest podcast:
  My 2004 Microsoft DRM Talk https://craphound.com/news/2024/06/16/my-2004-microsoft-drm-talk/>

This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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"*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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