PanThe Comics JournalI know the defense of this comic is that it is not for me. It’s not intended for an audience of cishet white men; theoretically, it’s meant to be for everyone else...But I don’t think anyone would find the book’s extended metaphor useful ... Beyond humor, just from a general writing perspective, I don’t understand why this book begins the way it does, with a few pages of fake encyclopedia entries, that are then interrupted by a character saying it’s boring ... I truly don’t understand the decision to spell out a bunch of straightforward ideas one has failed to communicate, by listing a bunch of topics the author thought characters could explore but admits she didn’t really get around to. This is labeled as an appendix, but it’s also what reaffirms the encyclopedia format that’s been ignored for hundreds of pages, and which is the source of the title ... the jokes in the book, relayed over the course of two-page strips, don’t really build on each other or hew to an established logic within the world so much as they provide observational comedy riffs on situations recognizable to a middle-class audience ... How a gag that treats unexpected genitalia as a punchline twice within a book’s opening pages reads to audiences who are trans or intersex is probably not great, which is itself an issue when you’re trying to create an all-purpose metaphor for minorities who don’t feel represented within the larger culture ... What is accomplished, on a structural level, after being unbearably cloying for hundreds of pages of anecdotes, to conclude by affirming the value of simplistic children’s books, besides admitting that’s what the author’s been writing the whole time? ... Mind-numbingly bad. Maybe the librarians offering their approval think only prose counts as reading; if this was the first comic I’d read, I would probably not read any more.
Kuniko Tsurita, Trans. by Ryan Holmberg
RaveThe Comics Journal... the peculiarities of Tsurita’s stories finds them strange and compelling. Coincidentally, they’re also also abstract enough they often move more like music in how they develop and digress, rather than seeming to follow a plot and a three-act structure. Compiled here, they play off each other like songs an an album, or suites in a symphony ... Though the level of ornamental detail feels European, Tsurita’s approach to drawing faces feels closer to the masks of Kabuki theater than celebrity models, and the rest of her drawing follows an approach that favors a neutral distance that allows the reader to consider what is being conveyed without feeling the author’s trying to seduce them ... There’s so much life and so much to love in Tsuritisa’s panel-to-panel transitions, where an engraving-indebted approach to black and white drawing renders light shifting from one moment to another, investing slightly shifts in perspective with gravity, while other panels depict the act of flipping a fried egg with both perfect grace and the implicit humor of a non sequitur. These tones existing alongside one another accrue an unforced beauty. Despite the association with realism, for a stylist like Tsurita, there’s no real distinction between detail and the decorative flourish. Any intensity is rendered exquisite. And yet it still feels loose, cartooned, moving from one panel to the next as naturally as you exhale after an inhale.
Yoshiharu Tsuge, Trans. by Ryan Holmberg
RaveThe Comics JournalAn American audience, subject to an economy hollowed out by a recession and the rise of the gig economy, will find much to relate to here ... [much] distinguishes Tsuge’s artistry that make it resonate on a deeper level than simply being relatable, and marks the work of someone incredibly talented ... In The Man Without Talent, the backgrounds remain drawn with a high level of detail, even as the protagonist is not cute at all, and actually fairly repulsive ... By rendering the outside world in such textured shadowy detail, Tsuge is able to capture the overwhelming quality of reality that is such a crucial aspect of the helpless loser experience ... While modernity in America has its discontents, what enters into the book at the end is the idea of a haiku’s focus on the passage of time, and perhaps it is coming from a culture of Buddhism that enables the book to so skillfully meditate on the basic impossibility of simply existing.
