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Recent Reviews
Kate Beaton
Rave The Washington Post ... powerful ... Beaton’s soulful masterwork ... Eschewing the distancing irony that characterized many of her Vagrant comics, it is the most gripping graphic memoir of 2022, offering an unblinking tale of personal trial set against a nation in economic flux ... Beaton expertly depicts the complexities of operating in misogynistic spaces, where sexual harassment is common ... Beyond her own difficulties, Beaton provides a wider lens on a brutal makeshift culture that leaves some workers stressed, depressed and lonely. In the afterword to Ducks — which she began creating in 2016 — Beaton considers camp life with profound empathy, weighing how the individual can get ground down by the methods and machinery of Big Energy ... Mining ever deeper into her own experiences, Beaton poignantly captures how she and her colleagues shouldered the burdens of work in the oil sands ... Throughout “Ducks,” Beaton’s pen conveys a sense of moody displacement. Camp life can feel as bleak as the book’s monochromatic grays, and we encounter so many stoic faces that we begin to question what lurks behind the sudden smile of a co-worker. She also occasionally pulls back, drawing sweeping panoramas of the landscape that remind us of the natural beauty (ah, the northern lights) amid the towering cranes and smokestacks — an aesthetic tug of war over what will survive ... provides a complex picture from a specific era, not a simple critique.
Christopher Clarey
Positive The Washington Post Clarey makes the most of more than 20 years of journalistic access to Federer across six continents ... highlights some of the more publicly undersung but crucially influential members of Federer’s long-evolving team ... The book also deftly peels backs layers on some of the biggest matches of Federer’s career.
Ellen Stern
Rave The Washington Post Ellen Stern...trots out a trove of breezy anecdotes—her present-tense prose at times galloping to keep up with Hirschfeld’s travel-happy younger years—to capture the colorful life behind his quill-pen line that, in its light and fluid grace, has summoned metaphoric comparisons to Fred Astaire ... Stern deftly reflects Hirschfeld’s warmth and wit in recollecting these heady decades ... Hirschfeld: The Biography fizzes along merrily when describing his life as a bon vivant and slows the pace appropriately when times grow more difficult ... as fertile as Hirschfeld’s life is, Stern’s stories are most engaging when the focus returns to the art ... Mostly, though, Stern paints a thoughtfully textured portrait of the man in the blue jumpsuit who sat in his Koken barber chair...and drew most days from morning to dinnertime, at peace alone while re-creating the world as a poetic flow of India ink.
Ed. by Andrew Blauner
Positive The Washington Post ... often-engaging ... The unspoken game afoot here, when assembling so many assessments, is: How many facets can be found in a single gem, created daily across 50 years, sprung from the inspired mind of one man?....Inevitably, some of these contributors cover the same terrain, but The Peanuts Papers is not edited with worries of overlap in mind. Blauner organizes the essays (a couple are in comics form) under five broad headings, but each work is permitted to breathe in full, giving the authors room to reminisce...Which is another way of saying: You often must indulge writers telling their origin stories — how they came to love Peanuts ... At their best, these origin stories remind us that part of the genius of Peanuts is how such soulful characters also function as warmly identifiable archetypes ... perhaps best read piecemeal, lest absorbing the whir of thoughtful observations becomes like trying to appreciate a spinning diamond ... This anthology supports the idea that we return to Peanuts for the depth and the recognition and the truth — and sometimes simply because, as Powell writes in reference to his own depression, Schulz and Peanuts still have the capacity to bring us \'tremendous happiness to this very day.\'
George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, Illus. by Harmony Becker
Rave The Washington Post ...a riveting graphic novel-memoir ... Enemy deserves to be a popular recommendation at school libraries across the land — humanizing a brutal chapter in U.S. history that even many adults seem to understand only vaguely ... At 82, Takei has evolved into an increasingly powerful voice for oppressed communities, and Enemy finds him at peak moral clarity — an unflinching force in these divisive times. Young readers would do well to learn his story of a childhood set against a historically racist backdrop, told in clear and unmuddled prose. As our politicians trade semantics, They Called Us Enemy calls upon readers to see past the walls, cages and words that divide us.
Malaka Gharib
Positive The Washington Post Gharib strikes an adroit balance between her internal questions and external realities, which are appealingly presented ... And she presents her mostly linear story in a flat, loose-line style that nods to the kinetic art of the New Yorker’s Roz Chast. Some of Dream’s most appealing scenes involve her travel abroad—so much so that a fan of this debut might wish that Gharib has an illustrated travelogue in her future.
Lucy Knisley
Rave The Washington Post ... poignant, as painful experiences are interspersed with moments of humorous and tender truth ... Part memoirist, part journalist, Knisley maintains an exquisite dance between the personally idiosyncratic and the medically relevant. From ultrasound visits to epidural shots, Knisley builds expertly to a dramatic labor — even enlisting her husband to recall one episode she has no memory of. That scene’s visual effect is rendered without color, lending it a power distinct from all the bright, \'clean-line\' art. Readers can hope that Knisley — also the author of the charming Relish — will follow up this brilliant work with memoirs about early parenthood and beyond.
Brian Fies
Positive The Washington Post ... elegant ... Breakout stories spotlighting some of [Fies\'] neighbors deepen the book’s emotional tug ... Fies weighs just what \'home\' and \'tradition\' really mean when your life has been leveled; piecing together his story reflects the act of reconstructing his existence ... the veteran cartoonist again displays a gift for pacing. Subtly and gradually, Fire Story lures the reader into his trauma, till one feels as keenly vulnerable as its victims.
Mike Reiss and Mathew Klickstein
Rave The Washington Post Mike Reiss pulls back the curtain in his new book, cheekily titled Springfield Confidential. Cheeky, because as a behind-the-scenes peek at a long-running Hollywood production, this is no kiss-and-tell tome. Even at its most dishy, it is closer to a sketch-and-kvetch. Yet don’t let that dissuade you, because Springfield Confidential—a title that nods, of course, to the Simpsons’ unmappable home town—offers a wealth of great anecdotes, all peppered with punchlines that make Reiss’s memoir as hilarious as whichever season of The Simpsons you recall most fondly.
Pénélope Bagieu
Rave The Washington Post The effect is that each profile is akin to a lovingly stitched story quilt, the bright panels unfolding with exquisite precision and inviting visual pacing ... Also enlivening these comics is Bagieu’s playful, clear line work, which practically dances through each profile, from expressive close-ups to vivid full-body physicality ... But really, the highest praise I can give Brazen is that it belongs in most every girl’s — and boy’s — hands by middle school. The book reminds you that too many great women’s stories have been lost to history — and that for the greater good, that must never happen again.
John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell
Rave The Washington Post In word and in image, Lewis, Powell and co-author Andrew Aydin have successfully hit a literary height ... In Powell’s stunning near-photo-negative effect, we suddenly are placed within Lewis’s hazy point of view ... rattles you viscerally even as it propels you visually ... In illustrating a must-read history book, Powell has also provided a graphic novelist’s textbook ... March: Book Three is an achievement on many fronts, including a narrative that builds like the arc of a long bridge. And among the highest accomplishments here is profoundly virtuosic art that measures up to the content of the characters, and the import of the story.
Glen Weldon
Positive The Washington Post What Weldon ultimately achieves here is a character and comic-franchise history that is itself flexible enough to become what the reader needs it to be. If you’re a Bat-neophyte, this is an accessible introduction; if you’re a dyed-in-the-Latex Bat-nerd, this is a colorfully rendered magical history tour redolent with nostalgia.