The current, intense political climate allows us to immediately pair each character’s situation to a very real physical and psychological human experience, which Dhaliwal constantly contrasts with old-world ideas and norms ... The simple, quick line-art style partners really nicely with the colouring by Nikolas Ilic. Prior to publication, the novel was serialized on Instagram. The nature of Instagram’s aesthetic, with its daily panels, as well as the ideas it brings up against fake vs. real life, make the platform a perfect museum for the story. It’s fun to imagine this story coming out as a newspaper comic in earlier times. Reading the comics over breakfast, taking a look into how hypocrisy and prejudice can affect people, would have been a great meditation before the workday started. Today, it’s an all too relevant reminder that we should get to know our neighbours.

As they follow this extended Cyclopes crew, Dhaliwal’s episodic comics, expressive and nimble line drawings that she first serialized on Instagram, entertain with relatable scenarios and clever twists. They also point to deeper meanings of existing outside of a powerful majority and the importance of telling one’s own story. An appendix summarizes characters, their mythological inspirations, and Dhaliwal’s insights into creating them.

Dhaliwal’s art is charming and expressive ... Dhaliwal places funny, surprising details ... The struggle of the cyclops unfolds in metaphors for race, sexuality, gender, and disability, tangling with ideas about fetishization, interracial relationships, passing, and representation. But it also can slip, frustratingly, into didactic tendencies ... despite these missteps, when it works, it works ... I challenge any marginalized person to say that they haven’t had the exact same conversation about a book or film or television show created by someone with their shared identity—the overwhelming sense of responsibility placed on glass-ceiling breakers, yes, but also the desire to be seen as you truly are, and on your own terms.

Every page of Cyclopedia Exotica resonates with the perspectives of people who live on the margins ... It is an undeniably clever approach, because Dhaliwal’s characters can comment on everything from that position as society’s underdogs; the outliers peeping in at the rest ... Most of the panels come from Dhaliwal’s posts on Instagram, where she has been serialising these episodes for a while. There are some obvious pros and cons to this approach. On the one hand, it compels her to get to the point, as it were, by relying on pithy dialogue to highlight racism or throw daily microaggressions into sharp relief. On the other, this leads to a series of hits and misses, where some panels nail their targets and others clearly belong more in the realm of content meant for an app one scrolls through ... Having said that, the whole clearly is bigger than the sum of its parts, and Dhaliwal does manage to make some strong statements on what life as a second-tier citizen can feel like, from the inadvertent humour to subtle or overt discrimination, and the rank hypocrisy of those who pretend to engage with the other side ... Dhaliwal used her powerful debut, Woman World, to ask some intriguing questions about society and the place of women in it. With Cyclopedia Exotica, she brings her formidable skills as a writer and artist to ask more probing questions. At a time when more and more of us are beginning to evaluate our established values and question long-held belief systems, her work seems more relevant than ever.

The hit rate for jokes isn’t as high as Woman World, and Dhaliwal returns too often to a joke structure where someone misinterprets a simple question and overshares their deepest feelings. But Cyclopedia Exotica has a stronger narrative through line with distinct emotional arcs for the cast, building to some beautiful moments of catharsis ... Dhaliwal has grown as a visual storyteller in the last few years, and the opening sequence does some very cool things with the form as Etna literally emerges from her encyclopedia entry, pulling the white space around her like a bed sheet and warping the words on the page ... ends with an appendix in which Dhaliwal breaks down her intentions behind each character, illuminating the book’s key themes. It also reinforces how well Dhaliwal tackles the complicated subject matter with empathy and humor, offering ample social critique while keeping the focus on how these characters connect with each other—and learn how to love themselves.

All these heavy concerns might seem overwhelming, but in reality, Dhaliwal presents a book of heartwarming vignettes that are gag strips in their execution: setup, example, punchline. This structure helps to soften some blows, but more importantly, it cements these moments of minor, humorous transgression as commonplace, everyday, both external and internal ... Dhaliwal’s style, artistic and emotional, exhibits a deep and caring understanding of human nature, a sort of joy at life’s complications. There’s an honesty to the work that transcends the fantastic premise and begins to feel real, intimate peeks into a culture so easily understood that it’s hard not to feel at home. At other times, the magical nature of the fictional world expresses itself just enough to remind us not to take the book–or ourselves–too seriously ... a great time, a book that feels not just prescient but almost relieving, a pleasant reminder that frustrations, while frequent, are not the final word.

Dhaliwal also exploits the reader’s expectations to great comedic effect, as many a punchline names these social categorizations (and fodder for prejudice) outright as a reason for strife, instead of going for the obvious joke ... For a text that is so visually rooted, both in medium and content, Dhaliwal also pays close attention to how language can be weaponized against marginalized groups in passive-aggressive ways ... Dhaliwal’s charming line work is enhanced with vivid pops of colour from Nikolas Ilic, present in product advertisements and character portraits. Cyclops identity politics, it seems, are never black and white, but Dhaliwal covers a lot of ground with characters who see themselves, and each other, as fully human and worthy of community.

When lulled into a sense of complacency, people often accept harmful stereotypes when only a fraction of a story is told. Cyclopedia Exotica challenges this by parodying the archaic compendium, delivering broader messages on the complexity of race, gender, and identity. We are introduced to a full cast of multidimensional characters ... Dhaliwal is not interested in singular narratives of violence, especially since a prevailing stereotype about cyclopes is that they are monsters. Instead, she navigates the hardship with humor, focusing mostly on the interior lives of her characters. Cyclopes and eye puns are plentiful and moments of embarrassment or doubt are shared openly. There is a community, Dhaliwal reminds us, even if the characters feel alone sometimes ... Through her contemporary characters, however, she challenges fixed boundaries and narratives ... In this sense, Dhaliwal frees them from the static confines of myth and, perhaps, even their own beliefs about who they are supposed to be.

I know the defense of this comic is that it is not for me. It’s not intended for an audience of cishet white men; theoretically, it’s meant to be for everyone else...But I don’t think anyone would find the book’s extended metaphor useful ... Beyond humor, just from a general writing perspective, I don’t understand why this book begins the way it does, with a few pages of fake encyclopedia entries, that are then interrupted by a character saying it’s boring ... I truly don’t understand the decision to spell out a bunch of straightforward ideas one has failed to communicate, by listing a bunch of topics the author thought characters could explore but admits she didn’t really get around to. This is labeled as an appendix, but it’s also what reaffirms the encyclopedia format that’s been ignored for hundreds of pages, and which is the source of the title ... the jokes in the book, relayed over the course of two-page strips, don’t really build on each other or hew to an established logic within the world so much as they provide observational comedy riffs on situations recognizable to a middle-class audience ... How a gag that treats unexpected genitalia as a punchline twice within a book’s opening pages reads to audiences who are trans or intersex is probably not great, which is itself an issue when you’re trying to create an all-purpose metaphor for minorities who don’t feel represented within the larger culture ... What is accomplished, on a structural level, after being unbearably cloying for hundreds of pages of anecdotes, to conclude by affirming the value of simplistic children’s books, besides admitting that’s what the author’s been writing the whole time? ... Mind-numbingly bad. Maybe the librarians offering their approval think only prose counts as reading; if this was the first comic I’d read, I would probably not read any more.

... the comic is at its core science fiction, but its focus on the characters makes the story transcend genre. It has all the charm and draw of a slice-of-life in a modern world; it just happens that that world has a minority population of cyclopes ... The best part of Cyclopedia Exotica is its rich cast of characters with each cyclopean name pulled from mythology ... a masterful portrayal of being a minority in a society that may no longer be actively trying to kill cyclopes, as Odysseus did in days of myth, but certainly does not know how to relate. Dhaliwal's imagination is perfected with the attention to detail, showing the little things that would be overlooked in a glance at the story-world. The emotional touches with the engaging characters brings the reader along through quick comic stories, always wanting more even after the final page.