About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Alan Moore
Rave The New York Times Book Review A book with a keen sense of the uncanny, has a pleasant lightness ... Paced like the kind of adventure story at which Moore so excelled in his comics scripts, and written in an urbane voice rich with jokes and memorable names and turns of phrase. It’s a sort of reversal of Waugh or Wodehouse — the witty narration is retained but instead of a realistic novel about the marriageable upper classes, we have a monster-filled fantasy about a virginal working-class sad sack.
Sammy Harkham
Rave The New Yorker Harkham is adept at establishing the graphic equivalent of a musical time signature for each passage in his book ... This book is the kind of signature achievement that was conspicuously missing from [Harkham\'s] rich body of work ... A book about the discovery that family and art require the same resources.
Kate Beaton
Rave The New Yorker Ducks is anchored by Katie’s time in the mines, but it seeks to show her experiences as typical of a much larger swath of workers who are lured to the oil sands at the cost of their health, their dignity, and sometimes their lives. The Katie of Ducks is the author’s younger self, but she is also the reader’s guide to the intricacies of an all-too-usual life ... As if to underscore the book’s distance from her old lighthearted work, Beaton has filled several of the interstices between chapters and scenes with staggering, gigantic drawings of mining equipment and aerial views of the mines themselves; the images aren’t beautiful, exactly, but they are excellent, and they suggest the scale and seriousness of Beaton’s ambition ... a work of more than four hundred pages, but Beaton has compressed its narrative in ways that make it as fluidly readable as a Hark! strip. She has also put her skill at omission to new uses. Many of the book’s important events are cropped out, into the invisible areas between pages and chapters, to be revisited later ... a rebuttal to hierarchies of silence, an attempt to draw attention to forms of suffering that are easier to ignore. The punishing and lonely experiences of the people who perform the actual labor of the petroleum industry are often withheld and concealed—they are inconvenient for employers, shameful for the workers themselves, and difficult for outsiders to grasp. They are perhaps most readily available in metaphor. Under the dust jacket of her book, Beaton has hidden the silhouette of a duck, embossed into the cover with a pretty rainbow-wrapping-paper foil that shimmers like an oil slick.
David Williams
Positive Newsday Williams might have seen fit to question whether a society where subsistence is the highest earthly good really does morally outrank the messy, doomed glory of American civilization, but doesn’t quite. He does let a number of mysteries linger: What is the Sun Storm, exactly? Why does Sadie have premonitions? We’re not told, which is a relief ... perhaps some honest wrongdoing would have given Williams’ characters a little more depth. But the totality of When the English Fall is surprisingly moving, and Jacob a sympathetic and compelling guide to a world that feels closer every day.
Emil Ferris
Rave The Guardian \"No one has ever made a comic like Emil Ferris’s assured, superhumanly ambitious two-part debut graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters ... her remarkable draftsmanship shines through, sliding into caricature when appropriate and snapping back into realism or sketch. Where Clowes is sparing and precise, Ferris is profuse, both in her stunning renderings and in her generous depictions of a huge cast of intricately depicted characters. The big-hearted, masterly book took 15 years to produce and is only the first of two volumes, but even halfway through, it threatens not merely to exceed established standards of excellence, but to set new ones.\
China Miéville
Rave Newsday There’s so much absurd beauty among the fauna in this story of surrealist art come to life in Nazi-occupied France ... The book’s wonderful strangeness is heightened by Miéville’s revelation of his weirdest weirdnesses second- and third-hand ... The finale of The Last Days of New Paris is both moving and disturbingly timely.