A eclectic collection of graphic short stories, focusing on the interior lives of a range of subjects, from the Eisner-winning author of SuperMutant Magic Academy.
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.
