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Reading Roundup, February 2024
Mar. 2nd, 2024 12:29 pmI read the collected issues of two series by Moto Hagio. Both were translated into English by Rachel Thorn and published by Fantagraphics, and I recommend those translations if you can get your hands on them!
The Heart of Thomas (1974)
Set in a midcentury German boarding school, this story follows a cast of three main boys: Juli, Oskar, and Erich. The school is reeling from the recent death of another boy (Thomas, from the title) when Erich transfers in—and Erich looks just like the deceased Thomas.
It’s not as much of a mystery as that premise sets up/as I expected from the first chapters. I kept waiting for more of a surprise, some crisis of the plot. There’s a very mild one towards the end which brings resolution to one of Oskar’s narrative threads, but Oskar has already been relegated to secondary importance by that point, so this feels more like a hiccup than a dramatic crescendo.
I loved Oskar most of the three main characters + one dead boy. He’s got a lovely fun repressed boarding school boy backstory involving an affair between his mother and another man, raised by a father (his mother’s husband) who eventually guesses the truth of that affair and effectively abandons his boy at this school. At school he plays a mild rebel, but he’s truly all of the best aspects of the prefect character (Ralph Lanyon, Frank Maddox, etc.)—he’s noble, puts his loyalty to his friends first, supports order at the school not for authoritarianism’s sake but for the ways those structures can benefit the community. It’s really no surprise that he’s been pining for his friend Juli for years, but the unfortunate shame is that he is so used to putting his own needs last that there’s no fulfillment or even much acknowledgment by the end.
Juli is the closest thing to a true main character in the series, I think. The mystery of his relationship with the deceased Thomas drives most of Erich’s issues fitting into the school, and seeing Juli and Erich interact with each other is most of the story. I think that if you connect with Juli, The Heart of Thomas is a perfect story. He also has a nicely tragic backstory (mixed heritage; sexual abuse), and his reckoning with his attraction to other boys at his school is good fodder for the genre and setting. Unfortunately, Juli left me a little cold—if Oskar wants him then I want Oskar to have him, but I didn’t connect with Juli for his own sake.
Erich, of the three, was the one I most keenly disliked. I don’t think this is unintentional! He is the newcomer, he’s hot-headed and rude, and he reacts poorly to the usual boarding school hazing/initiation milestones. All of this settles down eventually and the series explores Erich’s attraction to his mother and his interest in Juli, and both are richly characterized.
Overall my impression was that I wanted to like it more. I love school novels and this so clearly draws from them. The fact that it is openly about the romances and homoeroticism of the boarding school setting is amazing—like everything that I have to imagine for myself when I’m reading a Victorian novel’s take on the same things. And the art is gorgeous, with big splashy panels and tons of glorious shoujo flowers. This is a dream book, a beautifully-illustrated romantic tragedy at a boys’ school… except it gives most of its attention to character archetypes I just happen not to love. If Oskar had been at the center of the tension, I probably would be over the moon. But Oskar’s role is that of the resigned, wise older boy who no longer truly believes he’ll get his romantic fulfillment here, and even as that makes me love him all the more it does prevent me from being fully fannish about this series.
The Poe Clan (1972-1976)
Spanning about two centuries of time, The Poe Clan tells stories from the lives of three teenage vampires: Edgar and his sister Marybelle, and Alan Twilight, the boy they befriend and who Edgar eventually turns, as they survive by taking on many different identities across 18th, 19th, and 20th century Europe.
Although this series has an internal continuity, it’s told as a series of vignettes of varying length. Some chapters are over a hundred pages, and others are just twenty. The sequence of events is out-of-order, and Fantagraphics preserves publishing order rather than chronological, so that’s how I read it. I really love it. Its recurring theme is Edgar’s yearning/repulsion for humanity; stuck forever as a teenager, he struggles with his immortality in a way that the adult vampires we meet do not, but his actual age also separates him from the human teenagers he often lives amongst.
I read Interview with the Vampire as a teenager and the character who stuck with me the most was Claudia. Cursed to live forever in the body of a child, but aging mentally? Depending on the adult vampires who turned you for things like protection and cover? Ugh. Haunting. But Claudia’s not the focus of IwtV and her role in the story ends quickly. (Well, pending the sequels, which I never read.)
I didn’t know there was another story out there which had done it first! And with attention on the young vampires!
Edgar is unquestionably the main character of The Poe Clan, which is an interesting contrast with The Heart of Thomas—this series is named for a community but has an obvious lead; that one is named for one boy but splits its focus among a group. Edgar’s relationships/connections underpin every chapter. In the first volume, it’s primarily Edgar’s relationship to Marybelle, his sister. In the second, it’s mostly Edgar and Alan, the boy he turns after Marybelle’s death.
Alan’s turning is a mess of grief and impulsivity; Edgar clings to someone who has met his sister, despite all three of them barely knowing each other at the time of that decision. And there are so many little fancies of Edgar’s—he’s constantly meeting human children, from toddlers to teenagers, and playing a sort of fey companion to them for a few weeks or a few years at a time. Could any of them those children have been turned if they’d been in Alan’s place when Marybelle died? Alan certainly asks himself this, and Edgar’s moody nature makes it difficult to pin down an answer.
This series is less explicitly romantic than The Heart of Thomas, but I enjoyed that ambiguity. It certainly feels queer. We are not accidentally fed the idea that Edgar and Alan are romantically entwined. However, leaving the exact nature of their romance/sex vague plays into the larger themes of Edgar’s grief (for both his lost humanity and his sister) and the uncertainty of Alan’s importance to him. I mean, I would eat up fic of them together, but I’m also very pleased with what we get.
On the art front, this series is also gorgeous. Edgar is just beautiful, holy shit. And because Moto Hagio’s vampire lore includes the ability to drink rose essence as well as blood, there are probably hundreds of pages ringed with roses, rose petals, and other floral accents. Absolutely breathtaking effect.
The Heart of Thomas (1974)
Set in a midcentury German boarding school, this story follows a cast of three main boys: Juli, Oskar, and Erich. The school is reeling from the recent death of another boy (Thomas, from the title) when Erich transfers in—and Erich looks just like the deceased Thomas.
It’s not as much of a mystery as that premise sets up/as I expected from the first chapters. I kept waiting for more of a surprise, some crisis of the plot. There’s a very mild one towards the end which brings resolution to one of Oskar’s narrative threads, but Oskar has already been relegated to secondary importance by that point, so this feels more like a hiccup than a dramatic crescendo.
I loved Oskar most of the three main characters + one dead boy. He’s got a lovely fun repressed boarding school boy backstory involving an affair between his mother and another man, raised by a father (his mother’s husband) who eventually guesses the truth of that affair and effectively abandons his boy at this school. At school he plays a mild rebel, but he’s truly all of the best aspects of the prefect character (Ralph Lanyon, Frank Maddox, etc.)—he’s noble, puts his loyalty to his friends first, supports order at the school not for authoritarianism’s sake but for the ways those structures can benefit the community. It’s really no surprise that he’s been pining for his friend Juli for years, but the unfortunate shame is that he is so used to putting his own needs last that there’s no fulfillment or even much acknowledgment by the end.
Juli is the closest thing to a true main character in the series, I think. The mystery of his relationship with the deceased Thomas drives most of Erich’s issues fitting into the school, and seeing Juli and Erich interact with each other is most of the story. I think that if you connect with Juli, The Heart of Thomas is a perfect story. He also has a nicely tragic backstory (mixed heritage; sexual abuse), and his reckoning with his attraction to other boys at his school is good fodder for the genre and setting. Unfortunately, Juli left me a little cold—if Oskar wants him then I want Oskar to have him, but I didn’t connect with Juli for his own sake.
Erich, of the three, was the one I most keenly disliked. I don’t think this is unintentional! He is the newcomer, he’s hot-headed and rude, and he reacts poorly to the usual boarding school hazing/initiation milestones. All of this settles down eventually and the series explores Erich’s attraction to his mother and his interest in Juli, and both are richly characterized.
Overall my impression was that I wanted to like it more. I love school novels and this so clearly draws from them. The fact that it is openly about the romances and homoeroticism of the boarding school setting is amazing—like everything that I have to imagine for myself when I’m reading a Victorian novel’s take on the same things. And the art is gorgeous, with big splashy panels and tons of glorious shoujo flowers. This is a dream book, a beautifully-illustrated romantic tragedy at a boys’ school… except it gives most of its attention to character archetypes I just happen not to love. If Oskar had been at the center of the tension, I probably would be over the moon. But Oskar’s role is that of the resigned, wise older boy who no longer truly believes he’ll get his romantic fulfillment here, and even as that makes me love him all the more it does prevent me from being fully fannish about this series.
The Poe Clan (1972-1976)
Spanning about two centuries of time, The Poe Clan tells stories from the lives of three teenage vampires: Edgar and his sister Marybelle, and Alan Twilight, the boy they befriend and who Edgar eventually turns, as they survive by taking on many different identities across 18th, 19th, and 20th century Europe.
Although this series has an internal continuity, it’s told as a series of vignettes of varying length. Some chapters are over a hundred pages, and others are just twenty. The sequence of events is out-of-order, and Fantagraphics preserves publishing order rather than chronological, so that’s how I read it. I really love it. Its recurring theme is Edgar’s yearning/repulsion for humanity; stuck forever as a teenager, he struggles with his immortality in a way that the adult vampires we meet do not, but his actual age also separates him from the human teenagers he often lives amongst.
I read Interview with the Vampire as a teenager and the character who stuck with me the most was Claudia. Cursed to live forever in the body of a child, but aging mentally? Depending on the adult vampires who turned you for things like protection and cover? Ugh. Haunting. But Claudia’s not the focus of IwtV and her role in the story ends quickly. (Well, pending the sequels, which I never read.)
I didn’t know there was another story out there which had done it first! And with attention on the young vampires!
Edgar is unquestionably the main character of The Poe Clan, which is an interesting contrast with The Heart of Thomas—this series is named for a community but has an obvious lead; that one is named for one boy but splits its focus among a group. Edgar’s relationships/connections underpin every chapter. In the first volume, it’s primarily Edgar’s relationship to Marybelle, his sister. In the second, it’s mostly Edgar and Alan, the boy he turns after Marybelle’s death.
Alan’s turning is a mess of grief and impulsivity; Edgar clings to someone who has met his sister, despite all three of them barely knowing each other at the time of that decision. And there are so many little fancies of Edgar’s—he’s constantly meeting human children, from toddlers to teenagers, and playing a sort of fey companion to them for a few weeks or a few years at a time. Could any of them those children have been turned if they’d been in Alan’s place when Marybelle died? Alan certainly asks himself this, and Edgar’s moody nature makes it difficult to pin down an answer.
This series is less explicitly romantic than The Heart of Thomas, but I enjoyed that ambiguity. It certainly feels queer. We are not accidentally fed the idea that Edgar and Alan are romantically entwined. However, leaving the exact nature of their romance/sex vague plays into the larger themes of Edgar’s grief (for both his lost humanity and his sister) and the uncertainty of Alan’s importance to him. I mean, I would eat up fic of them together, but I’m also very pleased with what we get.
On the art front, this series is also gorgeous. Edgar is just beautiful, holy shit. And because Moto Hagio’s vampire lore includes the ability to drink rose essence as well as blood, there are probably hundreds of pages ringed with roses, rose petals, and other floral accents. Absolutely breathtaking effect.
