An entertaining and sometimes pointed look at years in quarantine.
A collection of web comics with a feline accent about life during the Covid-19 era.
Denver author/illustrator Acevedo (Steampunk Banditos, 2018, etc.) finds humor in the pandemic in 300 single-panel cartoons that show varied creatures—cats, mice, aliens, and fictional characters, such as Big Bird and the Cat in the Hat—reacting to its challenges. Introduced by the award-winning journalist and NPR contributor Peter Heller, the book begins with one of the best of its six sections: “Broken Mirror” finds its nonhuman subjects reacting to drone deliveries, Zoom meetings, social distancing, and out-of-control quarantine hair, and more. In a “Community Stress Test,” Acevedo adeptly sends up multitasking by depicting a mother cat feeding her kittens while texting on her phone. Many other entries have a similarly light or whimsical tone. In one, a cat peers out from a toilet-paper tower. Another tweaks Covid-related weight gains with an image of a cat trying to button its pants, which are now much too small. Other cartoons are more macabre, one features a cat getting its temperature taken at the Pearly Gates with a Plexiglas shield present. As with most such collections, this one seems designed to be kept on a coffee table and picked up when you need a smile, and some entries work better than others. Inspired in part by the work of B. Kliban and Gary Larson, the black-and-white, pen-and-pencil illustrations are generally clear and to the point but occasionally hard to interpret: What are we to make of a drawing of an Aztec god buying food from a taco truck? But Acevedo, who once drew award-winning editorial cartoons for a Texas newspaper, doesn’t shy away from political disagreements and civil unrest related to the pandemic. Nor does he ignore the daily struggle of sheltering in place in these cartoons, which first appeared in his daily social media posts. In short, this book has something for everyone—or at least everyone who believes that, even in a pandemic, cats can be funny.
An entertaining and sometimes pointed look at years in quarantine.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73659-647-0
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Hex Publishers
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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