RaveMultiversity Comics... one of the year’s best and most important comics ... Hannah is a hero who neither needs to fill up the room or the page with the noise of her own personality, nor dissolves into the flame of whichever charismatic character she’s with. You’d think such full fledged mutuality in comics characters should be common, but don’t overlook how finely balanced Eleanor Davis manages to keep every key character dynamic in this book ... Davis is brilliantly efficient at bringing Hannah’s community to life in quick but lively strokes ... isn’t light pop fluff, as the touches of Cinéma vérité and the incredibly artful chiaroscuro dramatic climaxes prove. But the effervescence of that pop music is a key to the simple fortitude that makes Hannah astounding and makes The Hard Tomorrow powerful ... the most beautiful thing about The Hard Tomorrow is that Eleanor Davis, who dedicates the book to their at-the-time-unborn child, seems to insist that we should enter the future neither with ignorance nor with despair ... cements [Davis\'s] place as one of comics’ most important voices.
Seth
PositiveMultiversity ComicsThe reviewer’s folly in trying to capture what Seth’s Clyde Fans is about: it’s about what cannot be captured ... In keeping with much of Seth’s work, everything in this graphic novel reeks of the dull pain and sharp pleasures of nostalgia ... If you’re familiar with Seth’s work, one fascination of the book is a subtle shift in his drawing style over the twenty-five years of the book’s creation that to me is reminiscent of one of his influences, Charles Schulz, towards a more iconic sureness of line and impressionistic rendering and framing ... Along with those art shifts, the narrative style also seems to age with Seth, as poetic longing and rhythmic rumination marks the movement from an Abe-framed view of the world to a Simon-sounding reverie ... What the complete Clyde Fans gives us is the prospect of the narrative Seth has always meant to tell, through the portions we saw in drips and drabs in Seth’s Palookaville but revised substantially and made into the whole that is closer to Seth’s intent ... To me, it’s an open question whether Seth’s theme of restless longing, that obsessive itch of nostalgia and its lifetime fallout, means the same thing to a comics readership of 2019 as it did to one of 1997. Seth seems to know this, too.
