#zach weinersmith

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Weinersmith and Boulet’s “Bea Wolf”

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

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://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250776297/beawolf

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. Weinersmith 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). Weinersmith 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.

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

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/24/awesome-alliteration/#hellion-hallelujah

[thenib]

Zach Weinersmith.

[dukegreymon]

Law, journalism, academia, economics, finance, book-writing...

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[zenosanalytic]

So I've been reading through A City on Mars(it's engaging, well-written, and Funny. If you have any interest at all in space exploration and settlement, I thoroughly recommend checking it out) and, beyond everything else, I just want to say how Fucking Gross space-travel is. Just absolutely Disgusting. My God: why would anybody do this? Why would ANYBODY want to Put Themselves through this?? Zeus above it's So Vile. Don't worry, I'm not going to share the details here, you can read the book yourselves if you want to know but, Sincerely, Yuck :| Yuck Yuck Yuck :| :| I'll wait until we've mastered the Amenities, thank you very much X| X| X|

[toooldforthisbutstill]

Boulet lit son nouveau livre, Béa Wolf, une adaptation “enfantine” de Beowulf scénarisée par Zach Weinersmith.

[beartrice-inn-unnir]

Hello! Number 4 and 6 of the book asks, please?

4. What are your top 3 comfort reads?

For me, a comfort read is something that helps me feel at home in my own skin and/or remind me of things that are important to me and/or make me laugh. Three of my top choices are probably:

Komarr by Lois McMaster Bujold (or a Civil Campaign, or Memory; all are in her Vorkosigan Saga and all are DELIGHTFUL) - this series is deep in my brain. Quotes from it have helped me make hard decisions and supported me during times of change. But also, Bujold is a great writer and these books are funny and witty and honest. These three are from the middle of the series, when the protagonist is facing down more domestic issues than he has in his military past, and he’s struggling more than ever.

The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard - I was hesitant to list this one because I’ve gone off on this one before and there are so many good books out there, but this one is comforting because it makes me believe that better worlds are possible. In a 900+ page book about love and identity and culture, Goddard also managed to fit a beautiful depiction of what universal basic income can do for a society. It’s really hard to make something happen in real life if we can’t vividly imagine it first, and she’s done a great job making that imagination possible. This book helps me sleep at night.

For a fun third, I’m going to pick Bea Wolf by Zach Weinersmith. I’m a low-key Beowulf nerd (never formally studied it, wasn’t my language or region of focus) but I have a lot of affection for it and actually own 4+ translations into modern English. And while I love the rhythms of Headley (“made sashimi out of sea-monsters”) and the steadiness of Heaney (“in the night-sea/slaughtered sea-brutes”) and the straightforwardness of Raffel (“hunting monsters/out of the ocean”), Weinersmith is playing a very different piece of music on a whole new kazoo, and it’s FUN.

6. What is your favorite book to recommend?

I am basically an evangelist for Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers. I have bought copies just to have it on hand so when I talk to someone who I think should read it, I can just hand it to them. It’s short, it’s about the meaning of life and pursuing purpose and what it means to be a person. It’s also about making tea and being in nature and valuing comfort.

[osmiumpenguin]

It's the solstice tonight, and a good time to reflect on my favourite books from the past year.

I'm making very little attempt to rank these titles. They're simply the books that I enjoyed most, and they're presented in the order I read them. • "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet," by Becky Chambers (2014) • "The Galaxy, and the Ground Within," by Becky Chambers (2021) • "Locklands," by Robert Jackson Bennett (2022) • "Beloved," by Toni Morrison (1987) • "Exhalation," by Ted Chiang (2019) • "Fugitive Telemetry," by Martha Wells (2021) • "Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future," by Patty Krawec (2022) • "The Vanished Birds," by Simon Jimenez (2020) • "The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family," by Joshua Cohen (2021) • "Utopia Avenue," by by David Mitchell (2020) • "The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium & Discovery," by Amitav Ghosh (1995) • "Moon of the Crusted Snow," by Waubgeshig Rice (2018) • "Bea Wolf," by Zach Weinersmith; illustrated by Boulet (2023) • "Fighting the Moon," by Julie McGalliard (2021) • "The Empress of Salt and Fortune," by Nghi Vo (2020) • "The Glass Hotel," by Emily St. John Mandel (2020) • "New York 2140," by Kim Stanley Robinson (2017) • "When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain," by Nghi Vo (2020) • "The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Omnibus," by Ryan North et al; illustrated by Erica Henderson & Derek Charm & Jacob Chabot & Naomi Franquiz & Tom Fowler & Rico Renzi et al (2022) • "Buffalo Is the New Buffalo: Stories," by Chelsea Vowel (2022) • "Greenwood: A Novel," by Michael Christie (2019) • "The House of Rust," by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber (2021) • "Children of Memory," by Adrian Tchaikovsky (2022) • "Jade Legacy," by Fonda Lee (2021) • "A Deadly Education: A Novel: Lesson One of the Scholomance," by Naomi Novik (2020) • "The Last Graduate: A Novel: Lesson Two of the Scholomance," by Naomi Novik (2021) • "The Golden Enclaves: Lesson Three of the Scholomance," by Naomi Novik (2022) • "To Be Taught if Fortunate," by Becky Chambers (2019) • "Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution," by Carlo Rovelli (2020), translated by Erica Segre & Simon Carnell (2021) • "A Psalm for the Wild-Built," by Becky Chambers (2021) Ah, but I said I'd make "very little attempt" to rank them, not "no attempt." So here is that attempt: my favourite five books from the last solar orbit — the five I enjoyed even more than those other thirty — also presented in the order I read them.

• "Nona the Ninth," by Tamsyn Muir (2022) • "Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands," by Kate Beaton (2022) • "Record of a Spaceborn Few," by Becky Chambers (2018) • "Briar Rose," by Jane Yolen (1992) • "Babel, or, The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution," by R.F. Kuang (2022)

[typezerostudios]

Came out in 2006. How we feeling about the funniness

[sleepyzane]

[smashpages]

Out this week: Bea Wolf (First Second, $19.99):

Zach Weinersmith and Boulet team for a different take on the Beowulf legend, where “a gang of badly behaved kids who must defend their tree house from a fun-hating adult who can turn children into grown-ups instantly.” What a monster!

See what else is coming to a comic shop near you this week.

[algusunderdunk]

Bought Zach Weinersmith's book Bea Wolf for my little cousin because I thought it looked adorable, sat and read it (best part about buying books for folks), and realized about halfway through the gorgeous prose that it's...

BEOWULF! The ancient epic, adapted in the vein of Codename Kids Next Door, hitting all the major story beats. A terrific book, gorgeous art by Boulet, and lovely prose. If you like classic epics, or things like KND, you'll get a kick out of this.

[batgovernor]

Opinion: 'Rhymes' by Zach Weinersmith

John Milton was perfectly capable of expressing himself in rhyme, as in his Petrarchan sonnet on his blindness, When I Consider How My Light Is Spent. Paradise Lost attracted a lot of criticism for its boring lack of rhyme (as well as a lot of unthinking religious approval for its wretched matter). At the front of the second edition of his Paradise Lost in 1674, John Milton defends his books-long…

[sithbelle]

I'm pretty sure I needed that linguistics book during finals week a few times back in the day...

[diet-poison]

https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=847#comic

[eltristan]

Yay! Zach did an SMBC about me!