What to read this weekend: A visual history of Futurama, and more

There’s a lot about Haruki Murakami’s latest novel that will sound familiar to readers of his work: an unusual other world that exists in parallel to the real world; a strange, walled town where people are cut off from their shadows; unicorns; dream readers. When I first read the summary for The City and Its Uncertain Walls without having any other context, I was like, “Is this Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but different?” In some ways, it is. In The City and Its Uncertain Walls, a man reminisces about a girl he fell in love with as a teenager, who once spun a story of a walled town where she claimed the real her resides and disappeared. He’s never really moved on from it. Then one day, he finds himself in the town.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland was Murakami’s first attempt to rewrite a novella he’d published years earlier. But he now feels that “the timing was off, that it was too soon then to do a rewrite,” he recently told The New Yorker. Some forty years later, he again returns to the concepts from that novella with The City and Its Uncertain Walls. “As the years went by, I understood that I wanted to make it a calmer, quieter type of story,” he told The New Yorker. And here we are.

As a longtime Futurama fan, this one feels like a real treat. The Art of Futurama is a behind-the-scenes look at the development of the first seven seasons, with concept art, commentary and all that good stuff, which we’ve somehow never had compiled in a book until now. It opens with words from Futurama creator Matt Groening and showrunner David X. Cohen, and there’s an episode guide within its pages to walk you through the full history. I absolutely love seeing things like early character designs and storyboards, so books like this are always a lot of fun, especially in a case like this, as Futurama marks its 25th anniversary this year.

I just found out about Standstill halfway through its run, and all I can say is that it’s a wild ride. Buckle up? Standstill opens with chaos — a man walks into a biker bar and it quickly becomes evident that he’s just there to stir the pot. And that seems to be the case pretty much everywhere he goes, each stop hinting at some grand revenge plan. Bloodbath after bloodbath ensues. But the man, a sociopath named Ryker Ruel, has a handy little tool to get him out of any situation in a pinch: a device that can stop time. He moves through life asking the question, “If you could stop time, what wouldn’t you do?”

Of course, the device is some top-secret project that he’s stolen, and the government really wants it back. When its creators catch wind that it’s gone missing, they get started on their own secret plan to make a second device to stop whoever took the first. It’s a really fun thriller with some incredible art, and there are still four issues left to go before it all wraps up, so now is a good time to jump in. It debuted at the end of the summer, and issue #4 was released this week.