About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Chris Ware
Rave The New York Times Book Review Ware lets his readers follow the gnarled paths memory takes as it builds and rebuilds stories ... Ware has an extraordinary command of time and pacing: one bravura page depicts the florist and her husband dealing with her father’s decline over several months, every panel a perfectly composed little square ... Every visual observation of bodies or nature is ruthlessly adjusted to the level of symbol, rendered in a minimal number of hard, perfectly even, perfectly straight or curved lines. Elaborate strings of micro-panels explode scenes’ components outward through time or through a character’s thought patterns; mandala-ish page compositions arrange associative chains of text and pictures around a central image ... Ware is remarkably deft at balancing the demands of fine art, where sentimentality is an error, and those of storytelling, where emotion is everything. He rejects the possibility of showing his hand in his (notably handmade) artwork, but that watertight visual surface lets him get away with vast billows of existential torment ... it’s also slow, demanding and melancholy. Ware has earned the right to make demands of his readers, though.
Neil Gaiman
Mixed The Los Angeles Times \"As always, Gaiman’s a charming raconteur. The project itself, though, seems oddly superfluous ... Unsurprisingly, Gaiman recognizes a ripping yarn when he sees one. The bits of the \'Edda\' material he’s plucked and fleshed out here are pretty entertaining on their own, and Gaiman\'s takes on them play up the characterization that the extant sources only hint at ... Gaiman can be very funny, sometimes so much so that his own voice\'s commentary upstages the story he\'s telling ... For the most part, though, the diction of Norse Mythology is that of someone telling a story to children while entertaining the adults sitting with them ... As charming as Norse Mythology is, it\'s still a little perplexing that it exists. Why would the world need Gaiman\'s particular, straightforward take on this material.\
Alan Moore
Positive The New York Times Book Review Brilliant and sometimes maddening ... Books this forbiddingly steep need to be entertaining in multiple ways to make them worth the climb, and Moore keeps lobbing treats to urge his readers onward ... The only way to endure Jerusalem is to surrender to its excesses — its compulsion to outdo any challenger in its lushness of language, grandness of scope, sheer monomaniacal duration — and confess it really is as ingenious as it purports to be. What redeems the relentless spectacle, though, is that it’s in the service of a passionate argument. Behind all the formalism and eccentric virtuosity, there’s personal history from a writer who has rarely put himself into his own fiction before.
Sonny Liew
Positive The New York Times Book Review a hugely ambitious, stylistically acrobatic work by the Singapore-based cartoonist Sonny Liew ... Charlie Chan Hock Chye is Liew’s invention, and his fictional life story is the vehicle for both a political history of Singapore’s past seven decades and Liew’s visual homages to comics’ most commercially successful innovations ... Visually, the book is a mercurial delight, constantly switching between Liew’s invented narrative (in a relatively neutral nonfiction style), images of Chan Hock Chye’s works in progress over the course of his career and mock-weathered clippings from his printed creations ... The final sections of the book are somewhat scattered; Liew seems to be driving at some point about modernity in both Singapore and comics, and doesn’t quite get there, although the witty visual allusions keep flying by.
Evie Wyld & Joe Sumner
Positive The New York Times Book Review To read their collaboration, though, is to experience Sumner’s artwork at least as much as Wyld’s sparse, reflective narration ... Sumner’s artwork here is mostly as broad and plain as a woodcut, black lines augmented with nothing but pale sand-yellow and sky blue; he draws Wyld and her family with circular heads and blunted triangles for noses. But when the sharks and other scary sea creatures turn up, he renders them in detail, and sometimes with a full spectrum of color ... Her sentences — often just two or three of them on each page — are clean and subdued, with an occasional poetic swerve.
Chester Brown
Positive The New York Times Book Review As biblical scholarship goes, this seems fairly iffy. As art, on the other hand, it’s pretty wonderful ... His evenhanded pace of four small panels on each page keeps the tone understated, and he gets a lot of comedic mileage out of rendering biblical dialogue into modern vernacular ... But Brown zeros in on the human drama in each story — his images of David silently regarding Bathsheba make very clear the way power flows between them — and his visual craftsmanship is as sharp as it’s ever been.
Riad Sattouf
Mixed The Los Angeles Times The climax of this volume is a blackly over-the-top scene...But the book isn't all overstatement, and Sattouf also has an eye for grimly funny details...