PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewDauber has written a scholarly survey that is both opinionated and frequently funny ... The book is most fun when Dauber turns up what Greil Marcus called history’s \'lipstick traces,\' illuminating the hidden sources of modern culture ... Dauber is particularly nuanced in dealing with the many controversies buffeting comics past and present ... Although the book doesn’t include images, Dauber packs in names and titles as fiercely as Kurtzman and Wood once packed gags in Mad panels; readers will want to tally up a list for future reading. But it’s not all here. Nast aside, Dauber generally doesn’t include political cartoons in his survey. All histories are subjective, but it’s jarring not to see a name like Herblock in a book that begins with Thomas Nast ... The biggest miss, however, is in newspaper comic strips. Dauber trips up on early newspaper history at times ... Dauber ably demonstrates that comics, as much as or more than any other art or literature, can handle the most serious of topics, including one of the most serious of all: our ability to laugh at ourselves.
Reid Mitenbuler
PositiveThe New York TimesWild Minds is at its best when minds are at their wildest, during American animation’s dawn ... Like the animators he celebrates, Mitenbuler, the author of a history of bourbon, is able to sum up a character with a couple of quick strokes ... Wild Minds is not a groundbreaking work of research ... Story comes first in Wild Minds. Anecdotes from artists with fanciful minds and perhaps an ax or two to grind are mixed into accounts based on hard-earned historical work. Wild Minds is a highly readable overview, perhaps most useful in animation scholarship for sending readers to the memoirs and biographies it is largely based on, and of course to the cartoons themselves.
David Small
PositiveChicago Tribune\"[The book] owes its deeply affecting mood to Small’s distinct brush and wash techniques ... Small shows this journey in a visual style that is tempting to call \'cinematic,\' panning wordlessly across both landscapes and characters’ faces much as Andrei Tarkovksy once rolled his camera over bleak worlds in search of flashes of beauty ... Small doesn’t flinch from such scenes of depravity, and by the time a cheery light finally seems to arrive to Russell’s darkening world, its fragility is heartbreaking.\
Liana Finck
PositiveChicago Tribune\"Finck’s line in Passing for Human is so fine and delicate it seems as if it will unravel altogether, like the thread of a previous night’s dream. Her story is also unconventional: It often stops and restarts, drifting into and out of interludes ... Between prologue and epilogue appears a series of first chapters. And yet it all holds together so well that any other telling is unimaginable ... Passing for Human has such a reeflike structure: Finck has succeeded in creating her own twilight zone, a land the artist herself seems to inhabit, a place of both substance and shadow.\
Michael Kupperman
RaveChicago Tribune...a complex and deeply moving graphic memoir ... Kupperman is using the language of comics to tell a very different kind of story ... All the Answers is told in nine chapters with a pacing that nearly insists on the book being read in one sitting ... in its refusal to quit the search, All the Answers achieves a devastatingly beautiful portrait of a family and offers ample evidence that a child’s quest for understanding is anything but a trivial pursuit.
