About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Tillie Walden
Positive The Comics Journal Walden’s pace and productivity continue to astonish ... a good midpoint between Walden’s previous two books. It’s not as abstruse as On a Sunbeam, not as simple as Spinning ... There’s plenty of shimmery weirdness ... The story is more effective in darker spaces, when weird magic seems more possible ... Is Walden slowing down? It doesn’t feel like it; instead, it seems like she’s figured out a way to keep the same intense pace but balance herself to avoid spinning out.
Ulli Lust
Rave Paste ... the new book is significantly different and, in many ways, better ... The title isn’t made very clear until the book is done, and even then it’s more of a feeling than an obvious statement. How did she try? Did she fail? What’s coming next? You could call this a weakness, that she doesn’t really like to spell things out—it’s not a very reflective book, even though it’s written looking back at an older self—but it doesn’t feel that way. Maybe it’s that it’s not a conspicuously reflective book. Lust lets those feelings that she evokes do a lot of the work ... One of her great innovations in How I Tried to Be a Good Person is her use of full-page splash pages to break up the story. They don’t advance the narrative, but they change your reading of the book by messing with the pace at which you would otherwise go through it ... It’s hard to translate personhood into an abstracted form like comics, which naturally simplifies the complicated edges of things, but this book does it.
James Sturm
Positive Paste Sturm draws his characters with soft, Snoopy-type dog faces and human bodies, making them both automatically sympathy-generating and opaque. There’s a bit of the texture of watercolor paper remaining in the background ink washes ... There’s something genuine and lovely in the way he puts down the contemporary suburban landscape on paper, rendering strip malls and power lines without judgment. And, yes, one does feel for his protagonist ... the kind of stress he feels is palpable, almost shimmering off the page. If anything, the book is more about the bubbling rage our economic system produces than about a specific flare-up of it in November 2016, and it’s valuable in that way.
Pénélope Bagieu
Positive Paste ...the kind of book that will give liberals warm fuzzies about giving it to their daughters, and something pricklier and trickier than that ... Bagieu has always had a talent for presenting complexity in a seemingly simple package ... Bagieu’s line is finer and more scribbly here than in some of her other work ... What it allows her to do is sneak in that heavier subject matter because the look of the pages is light and joyful ... It’s also intersectional without being preachy.
Lisa Hanawalt
Positive Paste [Hanawalt] is appreciative of weird foods without coming off like a dilettante, and she expresses a love of junk without seeming like a glutton. She can even be directly autobiographical without being annoying ... her comics on food are no different from her comics on anything: the product of a mind with a marvelously weird perspective ... Some drawings are almost a series of comics symbols: small, simple, heavily outlined in black and colored in flat blocks. Others are lyrical, bright, wildly colored and emotive. It’s nice to see her exploring her range visually as well as just being amusing. The best comedy and maybe the best art, period, straddles the id and the superego—that’s the zone where Hanawalt exists in Hot Dog Taste Test.
Chester Brown
Mixed Paste Brown returns to the style of his early work, Louis Riel, which featured larger-than-life characters rendered with exaggerated features, most notably very enlarged hands ... Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus is not lewd or meant in any way to diminish its source material, much as more conventional Christians may hate it. Nor is it a cynical entertainment, like The Da Vinci Code, which dabbles in similar material. Brown’s ability to meld honesty with argument might be unique, and his gifts in the medium have not weakened. This book is surely not for everyone, and it will convince few, but it sure is a special graphic novel.