Only revolutions

The Chicago Tribune reprints—free of charge!—my Astral Weeks column on Matt Kindt's Revolver. They lopped off mention of Alice Sola Kim's story (understandable, I suppose, since the issue of Asimov's is no longer on the stand)...but they also lopped off the last graf of the Kindt review. It now ends on this rather non-end-y sounding note:

“Revolver,” on the other hand, unfurls at breakneck speed, with an unhinged, almost drunken vigor to the deliberately rough drawings. Though the plot is fairly involved, it never feels claustrophobic. Thanks in part to Kindt's unadorned, noir-inflected writing, Sam's existential dilemma is as exciting as watching him and Jan kick in doors and elude snipers.

Here's the ending as it appeared in the L.A. Times:

As I read "Revolver," I couldn't help thinking of the more famous "Revolver," the Beatles' landmark 1966 album. Devin McKinney's description of it, in "Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History," as a sort of pop schizophrenia, seems not irrelevant to the subject at hand:

"'Revolver' is multicolored music in a black-and-white wrapper, terse pop songs of dream, escape, cynicism, forebodings. … By its exploratory nature an affirmation of life and possibility, a bold and radical advance upon the new horizon, the album was at the same time fourteen kinds of oblivion served on a Top 40 platter: nostalgic about what had been, and paranoid about what it saw coming."