PositiveThe Comics JournalIn its gravity, scope, and personal focus, All the Answers marks a major departure for Kupperman, best known for absurdist humor comics such as Tales Designed to Thrizzle. And yet fans of those comics may still find much to like in Answers ... Most pages feature two or three tiers of wide panels, with Kupperman’s narration atop them. Within these pages, Kupperman often concentrates on a fixed image, zooming in or out down the panels. The effect is something like a comics version of a Ken Burns documentary, with mixed results. On some pages in which Kupperman repeats the same image, the second and third panels come across as a perfunctory, there to accompany lines of prose. Other pages benefit from the zoom ... With the best of these pages, the layouts function like the architecture of the reader’s experience, guiding our motions, moods, and pace ... Kupperman’s renderings of his father and himself are among the book’s most notable visuals, emphasizing the contrasts between the two men ... As a narrator, Kupperman’s tone is cool and at times almost journalistic, which gives the book’s harsher pages a kind of blunt force ... All the Answers becomes a brave piece of storytelling—not only because of Kupperman’s willingness to depart from humor cartooning but also because of his willingness to contemplate not being consistently or adequately loved ... a story about self-worth in constant doubt, good intentions falling short, and ambivalence moving down generations.
Nick Drnaso
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksEach page devotes space to silent beats and to the small motions of life ... This distanced sensibility extends throughout the novel and throughout Drnaso’s body of work ... Drnaso’s stories are tidy, unadorned, and judicious in their limited emotional range ... Another take on Drnaso is that his approach reveals, and rewards, a kind of trust. It provides for a range of feelings and allows readers to bring themselves to the work ... At its best, Drnaso’s work encourages readers — more thoroughly than might art with more explicit rendering of its characters — to recognize the interiority of other people ... Sabrina engages with the same characters, concerns, and tensions for 200 pages without denying readers interpretive latitude ... Sabrina never reads as though it’s sensationalizing the traumas of its characters. Nor does it read like a book overeager to capture The Way We Live Now. With Drnaso’s mutedness comes a kind of decorum, which is crucial for the success of a work like this ... But although Sabrina can be heavy-handed in choreographing such developments, it does capture, in a subtle, effective way, the allure of Douglas’s mindset to a vulnerable person ... Sabrina is never loud in its urgings toward empathy, but it rewards people willing to do the work necessary to achieve it.
