... wrenching ... Divided into 13 emotionally stunning chapters, its gorgeous blue-gray ink washes evoking the New England winter, Off Season is a revelation ... a seamless contemporary take on economic despair, political confusion and the challenges of parenting.
Off Season combines a blue-collar setting with a prose style so pared down, it comes almost as a surprise to feel a lump suddenly rising in your throat as you turn its pages ... Sturm...has many gifts, but perhaps greatest among them is his ability to capture the sudden crosscurrents that come with any intimate relationship ... I cherish many things about this book, from the way it deals so delicately with the (often toxic) issue of masculinity in Trump’s America to the many shades of blue-grey in which it is drawn (every scene, whether in a diner or the offices of a marriage counselor, comes with a hint of darkness) ... There is a sweetness here—trace it back to Charles Schulz—that both mitigates against the story’s existential sadness and deepens it, somehow. It democratizes Sturm’s characters and, in doing so, reminds the reader at every turn that the U.S. is growing ever less fair almost by the minute.
Sturm draws his story in a largely realistic style, with simple black lines filled with a gray-wash of details that give events a real-world solidity. Except for one intentionally glaring inconsistency: all of these humanly proportioned people have dog heads. The choice is a familiar one, but unlike, say, in Art Spiegelman's Maus, Sturm's characters are visually fuller, with even their dog facial features sometimes drawn with naturalistic contours, making them teeter between real-looking dogs and Snoopy-esque cartoons. The effect is intriguingly odd, especially when characters are grounded in utterly human actions ... Despite its fragmented, episodic structure, Off Season is artfully plotted, but ... I felt betrayed by this ending. Fortunately, four panels can't erase the pleasure of the 220-some that precede them. Off Season is an emotionally insightful reflection on the challenges of marriage and parenthood, as paralleled and reflected by the turmoil of contemporary politics.
Mark’s blue-collar dissatisfaction has much to say about contemporary America — but where Off Season excels is in its representation of the achingly sad breakdown of a couple and an extended family. Sturm handles Mark’s narration with painful precision; rarely able to articulate feelings other than anger, when he does, Mark’s spartan thoughts are doubly effective ... At times Sturm is less delicate — five panels of Mark upturning his house in search of his phone feel like a thin excuse to illustrate the squalor of his lifestyle. But the majority of Off Season rings true with natural (and depressing) ease ... The unadorned style of Sturm’s drawing contributes to the book’s emotional tug, focusing our attention on the characters rather than the world around them.
Sturm’s treatment of this poignant material is quietly masterful: elegantly simple line drawings toned with washed-out greys reflect the somber mood as well as the New England winter landscapes. His restrained approach uses uniform panels, two to a page, and economical character designs that depict the family members as anthropomorphized canines, which serves as a distancing device. Sturm has responded to the present-day raw nerves and sense of dislocation with an eloquently relatable work deserving of a wider readership beyond followers of graphic novels.
... moving, disturbing, magnificent ... isn’t a book with a political axe to grind, in which ideology stands in for our personal problems; it’s a book that illustrates how politics is inextricable from our emotional lives, and functions as both an influence on and a reflection of our interior lives ... drawn with all of James Sturm’s potent strengths. Its simple layout belies the great sophistication of the panel composition, and his use of shadings within the gray palate is absolutely stunning. While there isn’t the dynamic range of action that characterizes his 2001 masterpiece, The Golem Mighty Swing, he can still infuse the simplest movements with an incredible sense of motion.
Sturm draws his characters with soft, Snoopy-type dog faces and human bodies, making them both automatically sympathy-generating and opaque. There’s a bit of the texture of watercolor paper remaining in the background ink washes ... There’s something genuine and lovely in the way he puts down the contemporary suburban landscape on paper, rendering strip malls and power lines without judgment. And, yes, one does feel for his protagonist ... the kind of stress he feels is palpable, almost shimmering off the page. If anything, the book is more about the bubbling rage our economic system produces than about a specific flare-up of it in November 2016, and it’s valuable in that way.
... a moving story about families and politics in the era of Trump as well as a powerful demonstration of the effectiveness of the graphic novel ... Sturm's cartooning technique is particularly effective in conveying this story ... Sturm accompanies the internal dialogue in Mark's head with panels that show simultaneous action, not always matching up exactly with the dialogue in time or space. This makes for a continuous up-and-down eye movement as the reader follows Mark's thoughts and examines the panels. But what could have been annoying, or at least distracting, turns out to be quite effective ... This is a fine book, filled with sadness but ending on a hopeful note. The repeated readings that the graphic novel format encourages allow one to more fully appreciate its artwork and its all too human story. One hopes that Sturm will continue to turn his sensitive and compassionate eye towards other elements of our challenging contemporary world in future graphic works.
... a deeply introspective character study ... feels like a stretch to call this book a love story when it’s so heavily focused on one man’s anger and frustration ... by using animal characters for his graphic novel, Sturm is able to openly engage with painful material ... Sturm understands the value of contrasting text with imagery.
Trump’s guy is our narrator which feels good to this reader. I want to hear from those characters, I want to make sense of it ... It’s a sad book, obviously, a book that teeters between the kind of wistfulness you see in, say, John Porcellino’s From Lone Mountain to the kind of raw, drunken foolishness you see in a Ray Carver short story or Richard Ford’s Bascombe novels ... Sturm’s book also does that thing that Guy Delisle’s slim parental guides do – helping you feel less alone, less ashamed and less beaten up for every time you maybe shouted at your kid, or went overboard, or got too angry over too little a thing ... Big thumb’s up from us.
The dialogue is clipped and astute, threaded neatly into delicately steely art by Sturm, whose naturalism is so pronounced that it takes only a few pages to forget that he has drawn all the characters as dogs ... This finely wrought, politically agitated graphic fiction recalls Raymond Carver, and speaks almost too painfully to the personal strife in today’s political climate.
