Boundless uses a constantly varying visual treatment that keeps readers on their toes and mixes and matches artistic styles with a proliferating set of genres, from speculative fiction to domestic drama to magical realism. If a reader comes to Boundless with assumptions about visual storytelling, Tamaki will confound them ... Boundless continues her efforts to explore the full lives of women and, subtly, the societal expectations placed on them ... In Boundless, Tamaki tackles subtle shifts in emotion, identity, and power. Her visual talent has long been obvious. This solo collection now proves her strength as a storyteller in her own right and that, of course, the drawing is central to that process.
Tamaki’s short comics, as they appear in her aptly titled new collection, Boundless, all have this surface lightness; they’re never anything less than droll. But something sharper and darker is simultaneously at work below. Fleeting as they are – most can be read in as long as it takes to order and receive a latte – each one is as indelible as it is singular ... Each one is so beautifully told that after a while you begin to feel that Tamaki, whose last book, SuperMutant Magic Academy, was a New York Times bestseller, is capable of almost anything. And perhaps she is ... these are models of the form.
The easiest way to read Tamaki’s title is formally: Boundless is a book that plays with the malleable conventions of graphic storytelling ... The stories contained between these bookends require the same readerly dexterity ...layouts are kinetic, fluid, and unexpected. Her style is similarly mobile, as each of these nine stories articulate their own distinct idioms of color and line ...eddying images and narratives visually enact the thematic questions of personal boundary and boundlessness that Tamaki’s half-melancholy, half-funny prose explores powerfully — namely, what crosses the margins between the internal and external self? ...even after this cheekily literal act of closure, Tamaki’s inextricable tones of dark humor and oddly bright sadness linger with the reader, uncontained by the arbitrary limits of the book’s covers. Both, it seems, are infinite.
In every story, Tamaki’s artwork is a treat. Her confident line work alternates between bold, thick outlines and finer, jittery pen strokes, and she often expands scenes to fill whole pages ... In these marvelously odd, sf-tinged packages, Tamaki captures deep truths about the human experience. Even animal characters, as in the titular story, have the petty, hypocritical, overanalyzing tendencies of her human characters. And yet, nothing ever seems grim: despite the disappointments, there are moments of satisfaction in breaking free of the expectations that weigh down her characters. It’s a profoundly honest, bittersweet picture of human nature, made all the more haunting by her enchanting artwork.
[Tamaki is] familiar with the complicated business of writing about trendy topics but she insouciantly shrugs off trepidation. The comics in Boundless incorporate of-the-moment phenomena...But though such elements drive these stories, they never seem to shackle Boundless to the present. Instead, Tamaki's existential wistfulness lifts text messages and memes into the realm of archetype ... Her playful experiments with the space of the page range from spreads that seem to overflow the edges to changes in orientation requiring the reader to turn the book on its side.
While Tamaki’s ability to write well is on full display in these stories, it is her strength as an illustrator that makes the stories special. Each story has a unique and distinctive art style, reflecting and elevating the content of each piece ... Tamaki’s work, both in her new collection and in her collaborations with her cousin, shows a distinct flare for displaying the humanness in our constantly changing world. Her work regularly confronts us with situations, settings, and behaviors that we recognize, but may never have seen before in a work of art or literature. In 2017, you’d hardly believe this was possible ... Tamaki draws her inspiration from people, from what is real. She is a student of 'now,' and seeks to explore the humans that are still present in the thick culture-cloud of media and technology that envelopes us today.
When it comes to beautifully illustrated, formally inventive comics, it doesn’t get much better than the work of Jillian Tamaki ... Her ambition is on full display in Boundless, a new Drawn & Quarterly collection that shows off Tamaki’s range as an artist and storyteller. You never know what direction Tamaki is going to go with her layouts, rendering, and story structure, and that unpredictability is a major part of this book’s appeal. She knows how to adjust her style to enrich the content of whatever narrative she’s trying to tell, and it brings a lot of depth to her work, particularly when she’s doing more introspective character building.
...[a] revelatory collection of short stories ... A surreal, dreamlike sense of dread and sadness pervades many of these stories, but wry sympathy for the often lost characters takes Tamaki’s already formidable cartooning skills to a new level. Artistically, obsessive-looking rendering juts up against spontaneous, sparse line work, mirroring the disorientation the narrators experience. Tamaki has delivered an essential collection of truly modern fiction in comics form.
