RaveNPR... you can see the cartoonist\'s sensibilities — that penchant for slamming the manic and mundane into each other, to see what happens — coalescing into an aesthetic that belongs to her and her alone ... She started producing the I Want You minicomics back in 2009, when she was in her twenties, which might explain their disjointed quality. They\'re by turns funny, filthy, horny, gorgeous, grotesque and violent (the best of them are all of these things at once). She\'s still trying out forms and approaches, as you\'d expect — smudgy pencils here, laser-precise inks there ... Viewers of Bojack or Tuca & Bertie unfamiliar with Hanawalt\'s previous books might be unprepared for just how earthy her work can get ... a clear-eyed, open-hearted and honest addition to the collected work of a young artist who, it becomes clear, has always divided her attention between the abstruse and the immediate, the fantastic and the all-too-feasible. Hanawalt\'s world is one that\'s as resolutely real as our flawed and hilarious bodies — yet that\'s always a bit feathery at the edges.
Chris Ware
RaveNPRWare fills his pages with meticulous architectural detail and diagrammatic flourishes, producing what amount to cross-sections of sadness, floor plans of the broken heart ... The medium allows us to adopt a perspective that is not merely omniscient but truly godlike: Ware\'s characters remain trapped in their tiny panels, but we are above them, looking in, and can see what they can\'t—the travails that await them—with a simple flick of our eyes across the page ... It\'s not subtle, but it is ruthlessly effective, and...it gets at something essential and truthful about our tendency to self-obsess ... [a] precise, colorful, intricate and ultimately beautiful book[.]
Sam Lipsyte
RaveNPR... sentences you can bounce a quarter off of; pleasantly shaggy plotting that makes only a dutiful nod toward the notion of narrative urgency; and jokes. Good ones, that land ... You can count on Lipsyte to sculpt sentences of muscular prose loaded with solid, old-fashioned gags, and thank God for that. He\'s determined that the comic novel must be comical, not simply humorous. Not for him, that now-pandemic species of light, supercilious literary irony that inspires in the reader a knowing smirk. Lipsyte aims instead for the gut laugh of rueful recognition ... Lipsyte\'s language is beautifully crafted stuff, yes, but he employs it in service to a larger, coherent purpose that makes his many narrative digressions worth the detour ... It\'s biting stuff, but there\'s heart here, too, especially in Lipsyte\'s depiction of the relationship between Milo and his young son Bernie. There\'s heart, but not schmaltz ... What\'s singular about the novel—what inspires the laughter of rueful recognition, page after page—is the sharply observed way Lipsyte shows us a man so like our ordinary, unheroic selves: A man who doesn\'t so much triumph over adversity as find a way to broker a deal with it
Michael Kupperman
PositiveNPRWe can never see our parents lives the way they did, or feel what they felt. The only way to string together anything that approaches understanding is by studying whatever trailing wisps of memory persist ... That reconstruction is precisely what All The Answers sets out to do, through Kupperman\'s assiduous attention to detail, his beleaguered sense of compassion and, ultimately, grace. There\'s urgency here, too, as over the course of compiling this memoir Michael realizes his father is steadily sinking into dementia ... Kupperman\'s photorealistic black-and-white art is deliberately and artfully un-realistic here; his panels float on the page like lingering afterimages burned into your retinas. The details have vanished, but the contours of faces, the silhouettes of bodies, persist. This effect heightens the book\'s tension by visually reinforcing the frangible nature of his father\'s story—both it, and he, are fading ... What it can do, and very well, is evoke the culture of mid-century America, and Joel Kupperman\'s place in it. It can also document Michael Kupperman\'s sense of his own place within his family—in his father\'s eyes, in particular.
Zack McDermott
RaveNPR...more intimate and personal... McDermott's Gorilla and the Bird is the earthier read — warmer, more garrulous and ingratiating. It's less interested in the history of mental illness and the culture of treatment around it, and more concerned with how his bipolar disorder affects those around him — his mother, especially ... McDermott brings an vivid and unsettling degree of intimacy to his descriptions of mania's onset ... He uses that empathy to construct a deeply compassionate portrait of his mother — a resilient woman whose love helps ground him in the real, even in moments when his reality is at its most friable ... Gorilla and the Bird looks outward, at the many interpersonal connections that bipolar disorder tests, and sometimes breaks forever.
Bruce Campbell and Craig Sanborn
PositiveNPRThis second, loosely structured collection of stories and production notes and rants includes more of the same, though its tone is markedly different. That's because the arc of Campbell's career, over the years this book deals with (roughly 2000 to the present), stopped being an arc and became a plateau. In the years since 2000, Campbell went from being a working actor to a successful working actor – not a star, perhaps, but a recognized face and a staple of the convention circuit...That is perhaps why the hungry edge of Campbell's first book is somewhat blunted, here; a sense of urgency is lacking, and rushing in to fill that vacuum is a relaxed penchant for sardonic bloviation. That's perfectly fine, insofar as the book's prospective readers want to imagine themselves bellied up at some musty dive bar with Campbell's garrulous, opinionated storyteller.
Bill Goldstein
PositiveNPRIn letting these four writers speak in their own words — their own witty, gossipy, often waspish words — Goldstein neatly avoids a dutiful chronicling of anything so weighty and abstruse as The Rise of Modernism. Cannily, he sacrifices historical sweep and gravitas for something much more grounded and intimate. In his hands, these literary lions prove surprisingly — and bracingly — catty ... The book comes alive in the ceaseless churn of these intersecting egos, as they turn their withering writerly gazes upon one another — and, less eagerly, upon themselves. Their professional and personal jealousy, spite, anxiety and outrage — the familiar hallmarks of the writer's personality — become a kind of humanizing background noise, drawing us in and allowing us to see them more fully ... enumerating how the year transformed their work proves the heavier lift, and Goldstein finds more success with some writers than others.
Guy Delisle
RaveNPRThe account of André's experience, dictated to Delisle years later by the man himself, would be powerful enough, if depicted in prose alone. But Hostage is a comic, and it's Delisle's art — his character design, his use of page and panel layout to underscore the mind-numbing sameness of solitary confinement while controlling the story's mood and pacing — that makes us feel André's plight so deeply ... It's a testament to Delisle's gifts that we remain so deeply invested in André's situation, seeing and feeling only what he does, that this knowledge never registers; we keep turning pages fearfully, hungrily, plowing on along with him, vibrating in the tension between word and image, terror and hope.
