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Recent Reviews
Derf Backderf
Positive Booklist Cartoonist Backderf meticulously recreates the events leading up to the slaughter in this graphic account based on extensive research and his own interviews ... His somewhat grotesque drawing style is reigned in here, as is befitting the somber nature of the project. The result, while remaining visually distinctive, vividly conveys the tragic events.
Danny Fingeroth
Positive Booklist Lee remains a pivotal figure in the superhero genre that’s come to dominate popular culture, and Fingeroth, a comics veteran who worked closely with Lee, gives evenhanded treatment to his accomplishments and foibles.
Ed. by Andrew Blauner
Positive Booklist It’s hard to imagine any other comic strip eliciting paeans from such a diverse and illustrious line-up of authors, whose thoughtful and heartfelt accolades attest to Schulz’s enduring vision and his strip’s abiding place in American culture.
Ulli Lust
Positive Booklist In contrast to the formal experimentation of her novel-adaptation, Voices in the Dark (2017), Lust presents her own story with a straightforward graphic approach; her two-colored drawings are loose, rough, and a bit naive, just like her younger-self protagonist. Lust’s bluntly honest account grants us a look at a courageous but alarming life that few would want to experience but are pruriently amenable to observing from a distance.
Seth
Positive Booklist Finally completed, the finished work is a quietly tragic family saga told with a reflective deliberation befitting its two-decade gestation ... Seth’s masterly two-color graphics, with their thick, expressive brushstrokes, lovingly evoke the brothers’ bygone milieu. Seth’s masterwork is an eloquent summation of his career-long themes: stultifying nostalgia for an irretrievable past and an equally crippling alienation that leads to tragic isolation.
James Sturm
Rave Booklist Sturm’s treatment of this poignant material is quietly masterful: elegantly simple line drawings toned with washed-out greys reflect the somber mood as well as the New England winter landscapes. His restrained approach uses uniform panels, two to a page, and economical character designs that depict the family members as anthropomorphized canines, which serves as a distancing device. Sturm has responded to the present-day raw nerves and sense of dislocation with an eloquently relatable work deserving of a wider readership beyond followers of graphic novels.
Jason Lutes
Positive Booklist ...[a] vividly rendered portrayal of the teeming metropolis. Lutes’ unfussy graphic approach is derived from the European ligne claire cartoon style, a geographically and stylistically appropriate technique for his complex, sprawling tale. When Lutes launched his ambitious effort in 1996, he had no way of knowing how prescient and timely its story of idealistic radicals resisting violent white nationalists in the streets would be by the time he completed it.
Riad Sattouf
Positive Booklist Three volumes into the series, we’ve grown somewhat inured to the casual brutality of Riad’s existence but continue to marvel at his resilience. Sattouf’s cartoony graphics, rather than being incongruous with the grim reality they depict, accentuate the story’s dark humor and make Riad’s harrowing tale go down a bit easier.
Ken Krimstein
Positive Booklist Krimstein makes his account engrossing and even entertaining, thanks to his breezily wispy drawing style and freewheeling layouts as well as the unexpected humor he brings to Arendt’s story.
Michael Kupperman
Rave Booklist Kupperman, known for the absurdist humor of his Tales Designed to Thrizzle series, turns serious and inward for this poignant memoir ... Kupperman’s solid, line-heavy drawings, which impart credibility to the preposterous concepts of his humorous strips, are equally effective at conveying this real-life drama. His clear-eyed yet touching portrait of his father serves as a a powerful indictment of celebrity culture.
Cullen Murphy
Positive Booklist [Cullen Murphy’s] memoir provides sharp but loving observations of the tight-knit clan that shared a strong commitment to family, a love of golf, and ‘that early-’50s Clark Kent-ish look’ ... Nearly all the Connecticut School members are gone now, and newspaper comics, like newspapers themselves, are on the wane. Murphy’s paean to this bygone era and endangered art form make the reader keenly feel what’s been lost.”