PositiveThe Comics JournalThe main character’s social awkwardness is perfectly reflected in Yanow’s style. Her character designs are super-simplified, and built of the most basic shapes ... The Contradictions isn’t about seeing the sights or how travel broadens the mind, but about our ability to miss out on the world by focusing too much on ourselves. You, a grown-up, have probably already learned that. But it’s still a lot of fun to watch the young Sophie just start to realize it.
George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, Illus. by Harmony Becker
RaveThe Comics JournalThere shouldn’t be such a tangible current events hook to They Called Us Enemy, but there is ... The jumping around history, and Takei’s biography, helps contextualize the events historically, and broadens them beyond a simple memoir into a national story, but the strongest passages are those devoted to the early 1940s ... Appropriately, the book looks a bit like American comics and a bit like Japanese manga ... presents an account of an important story of official, institutionalized injustice and the struggle against it in modern America, bringing to life events most of us learn about in school, but in a more vivid, first-person account than textbooks and lectures can ever achieve ... One hopes it will be every bit as successful and widely-read as March, if not more so, due to the way the history of the internment camps seems to be repeating itself, but more loudly, more violently and more crassly.
