This recreated sketchbook is artistically masterful ... each page has all the energy of an image drawn on the spot. Kugler’s line is astute, sinuous. He pulls the main characters out with color, but lets the background details overlap and congeal. He records the half-drunk Arabic coffee, the portable heater, the eloquent detritus of camp life. At their best, sketchbooks like Kugler’s make readers feel as if they are sitting beside the artist—watching the refugees climb onto the beach of the Greek island of Kos after crossing the Aegean from Turkey, or smelling the tea sold by a vendor in an Iraqi refugee camp ... Kugler’s sprawl of testimony shows how these individual histories accumulate, blur, and shuffle.

... extraordinary ... Kugler frequently places people at the center of busy pages, their faces caught mid-conversation, arms descriptively raised in dialogue. These depictions open up to us, welcoming us into the densely packed and complex lives that the refugees relate in their stories ... This ability to put the reader in the midst of events is an essential quality of effective graphic journalism, which often makes visible otherwise invisible personal narratives ... Kugler’s style brings us back to the personal lived experiences of the families, young people, and elders whose lives have forever been displaced by revolution and relocation.

In portraying these conversations, Kugler offers very detailed illustrations of his expressive interviewees ... he's meticulous about artful head scarf textures or graphic T-shirts. His thin inked line is sometimes doubled-up, so that shadow-like outlines appear around otherwise finished renderings of his subjects’ arms and legs. It suggests motion, but it’s an effect that also recalls double-exposed photos, which is where Kugler’s journalism begins ... Kugler utilizes captions, oversized header type, and word balloons, too. While the work isn’t always labeled as such and is far more venturesome than what is being produced at mainstream comics publishers, Escaping owes as much to the tradition of comics and sequential art as it does to journalism ... The animated pages in Escaping read like composites of several images, where physical geography is represented fractionally and sitting subjects look to be in motion. The story retains a sketchbook-like sensibility rather than that of formal, finalized storytelling. It’s fitting: Everyone is on the move. Their stories are far from over, and some are still waiting to be told.

This...new book, subtitled Encounters with Syrian Refugees, brings the reader right up to the people Kugler meets, feeling present as he records their conversations, with his layered drawings capturing the gestures and movements of his subjects along with their surroundings. Although sometimes appearing complex, an increase in drawn detail and color leads the eye to certain areas of the illustrations and numbering of sections of text helps navigate the stories the refugees tell ... Kugler draws and describes the interviewees environments in absorbing detail, with elements picked out in the illustrations—a food tin used as an ashtray, a lone tea bag or a refugee’s book in the English language ... Escaping Wars and Waves is richly deserving of its Jury Prize from the European Design Awards 2018, and is a positive addition to the ever building reputation of both Kugler and reportage drawing itself.

A kaleidoscopic odyssey for the era of displaced persons and disintegrating nations, this collection of dispatches from the Syrian refugee community is a fine example of humanistic journalism ... he pages are dense and jumbled, portraits surrounded by overlapping tangles of sketches—some brightly spot-colored and others penciled—and digressive text, frequently ordered with directional arrows. This could prove a challenge for some readers, but the book’s structure also serves as a fitting analogy for the uncertainty and disorder of the lives of its subjects. All of these stories are about displacement, and Kugler’s ability to make each feel painfully unique gives this chronicle its immense power.