Strangers In Paradise Pocket Book 1 (Strangers in Paradise (Graphic Novels)) (Bk. 1)
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Terry Moore, Strangers in Paradise Pocket Book 1 (Abstract Studio, 2004)
Terry Moore's "pocket books" for Strangers in Paradise are anything but, and I mean that in the best of ways. They're a bit larger than manga as far as height and width dimensions, and could probably be slipped into a large pocket (assuming you have one) if not for the breadth. Strangers in Paradise Pocket Book 1 clocks in at 344 pages and is a few inches thick. If you've got cargo pants, the pocket thing might work for you, but otherwise, ain't happening. This is a good thing because Moore packs a whole lot of punches into those three hundred forty-four pages; I think the last first volume of a series I was this impressed with was Black Hole.
Katchoo is an artist. She's been in love with her best friend, Francine, forever, but has never quite been able to work up the guts to tell her that, while she watches Francine stumble through a series of unfulfilling heterosexual relationships. Just when she's almost kinda-sorta ready to unburden herself, however, Katchoo meets David, who's instantly smitten with her. Cue the romantic comedy. Yes, it's a pretty stock plot (and the throwing in of a same-sex angle to the triangle isn't even edgy anymore), but Moore is concerned more than most writers of this sort of romantic comedy with building strong, complex characters and putting them in believable situations (okay, until the final third of the book, but by then I was completely smitten and willing to roll with it). The best thing a romance writer can do, in my estimation, is to hand the reader characters he or she not just cares about, but empathizes with. Moore does so far better than most of the non-graphic rom-com novelists I've read recently. Or ever, for that matter.
Fantastic stuff. You want this. ****
Love, Lust, and Revenge
This is the first collected volume of Terry Moore's love/crime story about two women living in Houston who become involved in mafia intrigue even as they are dealing with their feeling for each other and for a young man with a mysterious past.
Terry Moore ratchets up the melodrama to some pretty extreme levels here. The characters and situations are way over the top, but the result is a fun, funny, and in places intensely tragic story of love, lust, and revenge.
The two main characters are Katina "Katchoo" Choovanski, a man-hating former call girl, and Francine Peters, a quiet brunette who is dealing with her own insecurities with food and poor choices in boyfriends. The third side of the love triangle is David, a quiet art student who hides some sinister secrets.
The book has a great intensity and Moore's stark b/w art style captures the variety of characters nicely. Bits of songs and poetry complement the story, along with two extended prose segments (one of which is a nice noir bit featuring Detective Walsh, who was my favorite supporting character).
The plot is convoluted and (intentionally) improbable, and some of the characters degenerate into caricature for the sake of humor, but when Moore goes for the serious stuff he can really tug at the heartstrings.
If you're looking for a comic book that is not kids stuff, superhero fantasy, or manga, this is a pretty good one to check out.
Like Harry Potter, it starts out as a cute little story, and before you know it, it becomes an epic
The first story arc is a cute little story, and frankly the lead characters seem a bit annoying and cliche. By the time I got into the second story arc, I realized that this was something special and I had never read anything like it before.
I think it is perhaps the best example I've ever seen of how the comic book can be the ideal medium for telling a narrative. This series is just an amazing story, but it's hard to imagine how it could be captured in another medium (perhaps a long running television show or series of movies).
The major strengths include:
1. Terry Moore's artwork- clean, crisp, clear, fun. Does an amazing job with facial expressions. The women in the series are sexy but of realistic proportions (well, except for Tambi and Bambi, but they are out of proportion in a way that is atypical for comics)
2. A great, complex back story, intermixed with enough small stories to keep the pace moving. It reminds me in many ways of the first two seasons of Veronica Mars, which now that I think of it is probably the most comparable narrative I've come across
3. Interesting characters. By the time I finished the series, I had a real sense of not just Francine and Katchoo, but also Tambi, Casey, David, Freddie, and even more minor characters like Griffin and Francine's parents. I came to care about these characters like old friends.
Just an amazing series.
Didn't quite mee my (perhaps excessively) high expectations
I had heard a string of great things about Terry Moore's STRANGERS IN PARADISE have long harbored hopes of reading it. But given that there are only so many hours in the day, I had kept putting it off. I recently have really enjoyed Moore's story for the latest installments of THE RUNAWAYS (if not Humberto Ramos's artwork), so I was finally prompted to give his most famous work a read.
My reaction was both very positive and somewhat negative. The parts focusing on Katchoo and Francine were delightful and I especially enjoyed the almost grotesque (in the earlier sense of the word) characters, like Francine's tippling uncle or the peeping Tom neighbor. Every bit of the first volume dealing with somewhat mundane, everyday life affairs was a joy. But a lot of the story ruined parts of the book for me much like the way that an accidental killing of an attempted rapist marred some of the otherwise extraordinary Season Two of FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS. Just as the killing lessened the overall quality of the television series, so the entire organized crime angle of STRANGERS IN PARADISE really distracted from the overall story. This was only the first volume and my hope is that the more sensationalistic elements will drop out after this, but I won't know until I get there.
All that aside, I have to admit to very mild disappointment at this point. I had heard so many great things about STRANGERS IN PARADISE that I was expecting something truly outstanding. I found it good, but not truly great. I really hope that changes as I go further into the series. I have Volume 2 on order. My expectations for Volume 1 were perhaps a bit too high. Hopefully Volume 2 will fulfill them.
Very Disappointing
On the cover of this book there is a quote by Neil Gaiman. It says, "What most people don't know about love, sex, and relations with other human beings would fill a book. Strangers in Paradise is that book. I don't want to get in the habit of disagreeing with Neil Gaiman, but Neil Gaiman has written sentences that contain more about love, sex and relationships than were in 344 dense pages of Strangers in Paradise.
The book itself is about a love triangle between two women and...the copy's supposed to say "man," but I really can't bring myself to use any form of masculine descriptor for the third character. Katchoo (a girl) is blonde and angry. Francine (also a girl) is raven-haired and ditzy. David (also possibly a girl but bravely attempting to portray some sort of man/boy) is clingy and pathetic.
I keep trying to pin down the main reason why Strangers in Paradise fails so miserably, and I can't do it. There's too many big, big issues. So let's do it this way:
The problem with Strangers in Paradise is that it is a character driven story where the characters are two-dimensional stereotypes. They're not even very likeable stereotypes. Francine's ditziness is taken so far that I began to think of her as being mentally disabled. That's not a joke per se, there is a point in this book where she starts acting so dependent and unconsciously addled that I began to wonder if the car accident that she suffered earlier in the book wasn't supposed to have inflicted long term consequences. Katchoo is supposed to be a Strong Independent Woman, which seems to translate as Crazy B****. She's actually a psychopath. Again, no hyperbole here, she's pretty unrepentant. I think the reader is supposed to warm to her because her violence is of the humorous variety and because her heart is in the right place. The violence isn't funny. It's not because it's violent, it's because it's not funny and we've seen the same sort of thing hundreds of times before, generally with footballs on America's Funniest Home Videos. Her heart's not in the right place as she's trying to manipulate her best friend into forced lesbianism, and doesn't seem to care about anyone who can't directly impact her well-being. David is supposed to be a good guy, but he's actually the penultimate example of a Nice Guy (Google that if you're wondering why it's capitalized). After idealizing some woman he doesn't know just because she's pretty, he then proceeds to stalk her and worm his way into her life until he can catch her at her most vulnerable. You might be beginning to notice a pattern here. Near the end of this book, I began to wonder if the joke wasn't on me. I began to wonder if the author intended for me to believe Francine to be mentally disabled, if he intended me to think that David was a whiny, passive-aggressive jerk, if he intended me to think that Katchoo was the female version of a ruffie-carrying frat boy. But eventually I had to conclude that he was just so in love with his characters that he didn't recognize how serious their flaws were. Those flaws outshine any potential positive points the characters (are supposed to) have and overshadow whatever the true theme of the book is supposed to be.
The problem with Strangers in Paradise is that the plot is tacked on and doesn't really feel all that important to the story. There's some sort of plot/sub-plot that involves mob money, but it doesn't do really do anything except to complicate the romantic triangle. There's a lot of exposition and at one point a lot of guns and about three to four different and indistinguishable blonde characters flopping around. There's a Sellyckanthrope, which is a person who was bitten by Tom Selleck during a full moon and now sports a spectacular mustache and some really outdated hair. A lot happens without anything really happening. The love triangle is really the main plot and there's some grudging attempt at action for action's sake.
The problem with Strangers in Paradise is that it feels really divorced from the world. Around page 150 or so, I started wondering what any of these people did for a living (or pretended to do for a living). Around page 250 or so, apparently the author had the same thought, because he shows Francine going to work (spoiler alert: she doesn't make it). If you've ever worked in the medical field there's a particular funny scene involving paying a hospital bill. Nobody ever goes to court despite being involved in a fairly major Mafia action. This is all nitpicky stuff, but it adds up. Good characters inhabit the world and are firmly grounded in it. Bad characters are so self-involved that nothing else exists except them and their own problems.
The problem with Strangers in Paradise is that it's just not very well written. On occasion the book will switch from the panel and word balloon into straight prose. This is generally hilarious. At one point in the book the following line is written: "Somewhere around the corner, Walsh could hear the muted whirring of someone waxing the floors of the sleeping hospital, removing the tracks of yesterday." Removing the tracks of yesterday. Folks, that's not just bad, that's Bulwer-Lytton-winning-entry bad. Most of the rest of it isn't much better. The dialogue is heavy-handed. There's a lot of unnecessary exposition. Characters' lines tend to ramble on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. Everything is overwrought. Given the opportunity to use a scalpel, Moore brings a chainsaw, and possibly some heavy earth-moving equipment.
The problem with Strangers in Paradise is that it doesn't have a very good sense of humor. There are a couple of smirk moments throughout the book, but there's also a lot of badly-executed and hackneyed slapstick that just plain doesn't work. There's a very strong flavor of the kind of thing you see in anime, where embarrassment is the focal point of the humor. Maybe I'm seeing things. Maybe it's a matter of taste. Whatever the case, most of the jokes fell pretty flat for me, and humor seems to be a central issue for this comic.
The problem with Strangers in Paradise is that it reinforces a lot of really dumb and reactionary stereotypes. You can tell if a character in the story is going to be good by how attractive they are. Katchoo and Francine are especially noxious female stereotypes. Katchoo in particular is awful, as she's supposed to be a smart, independent woman with everything going for her. I'm not putting words in anyone's mouth here; that's what the cover says. But she's really just a bundle of awkward stereotypes, the female as a crazed man-hater who can't control her emotions because she was sexually abused. And incidentally, I can't believe this series won a GLAAD award seeing as the primary motivator for Katchoo's sexuality seems to be abuse. Let's not forget David, who's reinforcing a pretty common brand of male behavior which isn't doing either gender any favors. Furthermore, the entire point of the book seems to be that you can make anyone love you as long as you keep sniffing around until they hit a really rough patch in their life. That may be a particularly pathetic way of getting sex, but if that's what the author knows about "love, sex and relationships," he can keep it to himself. Maybe I missed out on some subtlety here, but I don't think so. I think if the author had been intentionally trying to impart the opposite lesson we would have gotten something along the lines of: "Katchoo, that's BAD and you shouldn't DO that cause it makes you a HORRIBLE person and now I'm going to go eat an ENTIRE Oreo pie!!!!%^&@!"
There are a few positives. The plot, as it were, did manage to surprise me a couple of times, possibly just because I wasn't paying that much attention, but I give credit where credit's due. The art can be nice--even good, as long as the artist is concentrating on pin-up girls. Anyone who isn't an attractive twenty-something female tends to look strange at best. There's some neat things done with words and pictures that are Frank Miller-esque. There's a shot at Rob Liefield, which is always appreciated.
I'm giving this two stars because the art would have to be terrible for me to one-star it, and also out of respect to the people who recommend this thing so highly. It's possible that over the course of several thousand pages, this series gets better. However this particular collection is just plain bad. If you're really looking to check out this series even after this review, start with a later volume. I can't guarantee that it will be any good, but for crying out loud, it can't get worse. Better yet, try something by Gilbert or Roberto Hernandez, Allison Bechtel or Adrian Tomine. They all know something about human relationships, and if anyone in their books is a simpering, half-wit eunuch, it's because they're supposed to be a simpering, half-wit eunuch, and not just because they're "really nice."
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Price: $12.21
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Product Details
- Fettle: New
- ISBN13: 9781892597267
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Description
Katchoo is a beautiful young woman living a quiet life with everything going for her. She's smart, independent and very much in love with her best friend, Francine. Then Katchoo meets David, a gentle but persistent young man who is determined to win Katchoo's heart. The resulting love triangle is a touching comedy of romantic errors until Katchoo's former employer comes looking for her and $850,000 in missing mob money. As her idyllic life begins to fall apart, Katchoo discovers no one can be trusted and that the past she thought she left behind now threatens to destroy her and everything she loves, including Francine. This is the first edition in the series - don't miss it!Customer Reviews
Phenomenal.Terry Moore, Strangers in Paradise Pocket Book 1 (Abstract Studio, 2004)
Terry Moore's "pocket books" for Strangers in Paradise are anything but, and I mean that in the best of ways. They're a bit larger than manga as far as height and width dimensions, and could probably be slipped into a large pocket (assuming you have one) if not for the breadth. Strangers in Paradise Pocket Book 1 clocks in at 344 pages and is a few inches thick. If you've got cargo pants, the pocket thing might work for you, but otherwise, ain't happening. This is a good thing because Moore packs a whole lot of punches into those three hundred forty-four pages; I think the last first volume of a series I was this impressed with was Black Hole.
Katchoo is an artist. She's been in love with her best friend, Francine, forever, but has never quite been able to work up the guts to tell her that, while she watches Francine stumble through a series of unfulfilling heterosexual relationships. Just when she's almost kinda-sorta ready to unburden herself, however, Katchoo meets David, who's instantly smitten with her. Cue the romantic comedy. Yes, it's a pretty stock plot (and the throwing in of a same-sex angle to the triangle isn't even edgy anymore), but Moore is concerned more than most writers of this sort of romantic comedy with building strong, complex characters and putting them in believable situations (okay, until the final third of the book, but by then I was completely smitten and willing to roll with it). The best thing a romance writer can do, in my estimation, is to hand the reader characters he or she not just cares about, but empathizes with. Moore does so far better than most of the non-graphic rom-com novelists I've read recently. Or ever, for that matter.
Fantastic stuff. You want this. ****
Love, Lust, and Revenge
This is the first collected volume of Terry Moore's love/crime story about two women living in Houston who become involved in mafia intrigue even as they are dealing with their feeling for each other and for a young man with a mysterious past.
Terry Moore ratchets up the melodrama to some pretty extreme levels here. The characters and situations are way over the top, but the result is a fun, funny, and in places intensely tragic story of love, lust, and revenge.
The two main characters are Katina "Katchoo" Choovanski, a man-hating former call girl, and Francine Peters, a quiet brunette who is dealing with her own insecurities with food and poor choices in boyfriends. The third side of the love triangle is David, a quiet art student who hides some sinister secrets.
The book has a great intensity and Moore's stark b/w art style captures the variety of characters nicely. Bits of songs and poetry complement the story, along with two extended prose segments (one of which is a nice noir bit featuring Detective Walsh, who was my favorite supporting character).
The plot is convoluted and (intentionally) improbable, and some of the characters degenerate into caricature for the sake of humor, but when Moore goes for the serious stuff he can really tug at the heartstrings.
If you're looking for a comic book that is not kids stuff, superhero fantasy, or manga, this is a pretty good one to check out.
Like Harry Potter, it starts out as a cute little story, and before you know it, it becomes an epic
The first story arc is a cute little story, and frankly the lead characters seem a bit annoying and cliche. By the time I got into the second story arc, I realized that this was something special and I had never read anything like it before.
I think it is perhaps the best example I've ever seen of how the comic book can be the ideal medium for telling a narrative. This series is just an amazing story, but it's hard to imagine how it could be captured in another medium (perhaps a long running television show or series of movies).
The major strengths include:
1. Terry Moore's artwork- clean, crisp, clear, fun. Does an amazing job with facial expressions. The women in the series are sexy but of realistic proportions (well, except for Tambi and Bambi, but they are out of proportion in a way that is atypical for comics)
2. A great, complex back story, intermixed with enough small stories to keep the pace moving. It reminds me in many ways of the first two seasons of Veronica Mars, which now that I think of it is probably the most comparable narrative I've come across
3. Interesting characters. By the time I finished the series, I had a real sense of not just Francine and Katchoo, but also Tambi, Casey, David, Freddie, and even more minor characters like Griffin and Francine's parents. I came to care about these characters like old friends.
Just an amazing series.
Didn't quite mee my (perhaps excessively) high expectations
I had heard a string of great things about Terry Moore's STRANGERS IN PARADISE have long harbored hopes of reading it. But given that there are only so many hours in the day, I had kept putting it off. I recently have really enjoyed Moore's story for the latest installments of THE RUNAWAYS (if not Humberto Ramos's artwork), so I was finally prompted to give his most famous work a read.
My reaction was both very positive and somewhat negative. The parts focusing on Katchoo and Francine were delightful and I especially enjoyed the almost grotesque (in the earlier sense of the word) characters, like Francine's tippling uncle or the peeping Tom neighbor. Every bit of the first volume dealing with somewhat mundane, everyday life affairs was a joy. But a lot of the story ruined parts of the book for me much like the way that an accidental killing of an attempted rapist marred some of the otherwise extraordinary Season Two of FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS. Just as the killing lessened the overall quality of the television series, so the entire organized crime angle of STRANGERS IN PARADISE really distracted from the overall story. This was only the first volume and my hope is that the more sensationalistic elements will drop out after this, but I won't know until I get there.
All that aside, I have to admit to very mild disappointment at this point. I had heard so many great things about STRANGERS IN PARADISE that I was expecting something truly outstanding. I found it good, but not truly great. I really hope that changes as I go further into the series. I have Volume 2 on order. My expectations for Volume 1 were perhaps a bit too high. Hopefully Volume 2 will fulfill them.
Very Disappointing
On the cover of this book there is a quote by Neil Gaiman. It says, "What most people don't know about love, sex, and relations with other human beings would fill a book. Strangers in Paradise is that book. I don't want to get in the habit of disagreeing with Neil Gaiman, but Neil Gaiman has written sentences that contain more about love, sex and relationships than were in 344 dense pages of Strangers in Paradise.
The book itself is about a love triangle between two women and...the copy's supposed to say "man," but I really can't bring myself to use any form of masculine descriptor for the third character. Katchoo (a girl) is blonde and angry. Francine (also a girl) is raven-haired and ditzy. David (also possibly a girl but bravely attempting to portray some sort of man/boy) is clingy and pathetic.
I keep trying to pin down the main reason why Strangers in Paradise fails so miserably, and I can't do it. There's too many big, big issues. So let's do it this way:
The problem with Strangers in Paradise is that it is a character driven story where the characters are two-dimensional stereotypes. They're not even very likeable stereotypes. Francine's ditziness is taken so far that I began to think of her as being mentally disabled. That's not a joke per se, there is a point in this book where she starts acting so dependent and unconsciously addled that I began to wonder if the car accident that she suffered earlier in the book wasn't supposed to have inflicted long term consequences. Katchoo is supposed to be a Strong Independent Woman, which seems to translate as Crazy B****. She's actually a psychopath. Again, no hyperbole here, she's pretty unrepentant. I think the reader is supposed to warm to her because her violence is of the humorous variety and because her heart is in the right place. The violence isn't funny. It's not because it's violent, it's because it's not funny and we've seen the same sort of thing hundreds of times before, generally with footballs on America's Funniest Home Videos. Her heart's not in the right place as she's trying to manipulate her best friend into forced lesbianism, and doesn't seem to care about anyone who can't directly impact her well-being. David is supposed to be a good guy, but he's actually the penultimate example of a Nice Guy (Google that if you're wondering why it's capitalized). After idealizing some woman he doesn't know just because she's pretty, he then proceeds to stalk her and worm his way into her life until he can catch her at her most vulnerable. You might be beginning to notice a pattern here. Near the end of this book, I began to wonder if the joke wasn't on me. I began to wonder if the author intended for me to believe Francine to be mentally disabled, if he intended me to think that David was a whiny, passive-aggressive jerk, if he intended me to think that Katchoo was the female version of a ruffie-carrying frat boy. But eventually I had to conclude that he was just so in love with his characters that he didn't recognize how serious their flaws were. Those flaws outshine any potential positive points the characters (are supposed to) have and overshadow whatever the true theme of the book is supposed to be.
The problem with Strangers in Paradise is that the plot is tacked on and doesn't really feel all that important to the story. There's some sort of plot/sub-plot that involves mob money, but it doesn't do really do anything except to complicate the romantic triangle. There's a lot of exposition and at one point a lot of guns and about three to four different and indistinguishable blonde characters flopping around. There's a Sellyckanthrope, which is a person who was bitten by Tom Selleck during a full moon and now sports a spectacular mustache and some really outdated hair. A lot happens without anything really happening. The love triangle is really the main plot and there's some grudging attempt at action for action's sake.
The problem with Strangers in Paradise is that it feels really divorced from the world. Around page 150 or so, I started wondering what any of these people did for a living (or pretended to do for a living). Around page 250 or so, apparently the author had the same thought, because he shows Francine going to work (spoiler alert: she doesn't make it). If you've ever worked in the medical field there's a particular funny scene involving paying a hospital bill. Nobody ever goes to court despite being involved in a fairly major Mafia action. This is all nitpicky stuff, but it adds up. Good characters inhabit the world and are firmly grounded in it. Bad characters are so self-involved that nothing else exists except them and their own problems.
The problem with Strangers in Paradise is that it's just not very well written. On occasion the book will switch from the panel and word balloon into straight prose. This is generally hilarious. At one point in the book the following line is written: "Somewhere around the corner, Walsh could hear the muted whirring of someone waxing the floors of the sleeping hospital, removing the tracks of yesterday." Removing the tracks of yesterday. Folks, that's not just bad, that's Bulwer-Lytton-winning-entry bad. Most of the rest of it isn't much better. The dialogue is heavy-handed. There's a lot of unnecessary exposition. Characters' lines tend to ramble on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. Everything is overwrought. Given the opportunity to use a scalpel, Moore brings a chainsaw, and possibly some heavy earth-moving equipment.
The problem with Strangers in Paradise is that it doesn't have a very good sense of humor. There are a couple of smirk moments throughout the book, but there's also a lot of badly-executed and hackneyed slapstick that just plain doesn't work. There's a very strong flavor of the kind of thing you see in anime, where embarrassment is the focal point of the humor. Maybe I'm seeing things. Maybe it's a matter of taste. Whatever the case, most of the jokes fell pretty flat for me, and humor seems to be a central issue for this comic.
The problem with Strangers in Paradise is that it reinforces a lot of really dumb and reactionary stereotypes. You can tell if a character in the story is going to be good by how attractive they are. Katchoo and Francine are especially noxious female stereotypes. Katchoo in particular is awful, as she's supposed to be a smart, independent woman with everything going for her. I'm not putting words in anyone's mouth here; that's what the cover says. But she's really just a bundle of awkward stereotypes, the female as a crazed man-hater who can't control her emotions because she was sexually abused. And incidentally, I can't believe this series won a GLAAD award seeing as the primary motivator for Katchoo's sexuality seems to be abuse. Let's not forget David, who's reinforcing a pretty common brand of male behavior which isn't doing either gender any favors. Furthermore, the entire point of the book seems to be that you can make anyone love you as long as you keep sniffing around until they hit a really rough patch in their life. That may be a particularly pathetic way of getting sex, but if that's what the author knows about "love, sex and relationships," he can keep it to himself. Maybe I missed out on some subtlety here, but I don't think so. I think if the author had been intentionally trying to impart the opposite lesson we would have gotten something along the lines of: "Katchoo, that's BAD and you shouldn't DO that cause it makes you a HORRIBLE person and now I'm going to go eat an ENTIRE Oreo pie!!!!%^&@!"
There are a few positives. The plot, as it were, did manage to surprise me a couple of times, possibly just because I wasn't paying that much attention, but I give credit where credit's due. The art can be nice--even good, as long as the artist is concentrating on pin-up girls. Anyone who isn't an attractive twenty-something female tends to look strange at best. There's some neat things done with words and pictures that are Frank Miller-esque. There's a shot at Rob Liefield, which is always appreciated.
I'm giving this two stars because the art would have to be terrible for me to one-star it, and also out of respect to the people who recommend this thing so highly. It's possible that over the course of several thousand pages, this series gets better. However this particular collection is just plain bad. If you're really looking to check out this series even after this review, start with a later volume. I can't guarantee that it will be any good, but for crying out loud, it can't get worse. Better yet, try something by Gilbert or Roberto Hernandez, Allison Bechtel or Adrian Tomine. They all know something about human relationships, and if anyone in their books is a simpering, half-wit eunuch, it's because they're supposed to be a simpering, half-wit eunuch, and not just because they're "really nice."
