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Holiday Break Comics Reading Reviews

Why Is Everybody Yelling? by Marisabina Russo

Crumbs by Dante Stirling

Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese American by Laura Gao

Cheer Up!: Love and Pompoms by Crystal Frasier, Val Wise, and Oscar O. Jupiter

Will Eisner Reader by Will Eisner

Master Keaton Vols. 2 and 3 by Naoki Urasawa, Hokusei Katsushika, and Takashi Nagasaki

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The plus side of sitting around for a week of vacation is that I get a lot of comics reading done! I was lucky enough to receive a lot of interesting books for the holiday. Below are some pocket reviews: Why Is Everybody Yelling? This is a graphic memoir about Marisabina Russo’s childhood growing up in Queens in the late 1950s and 1960s. Her Jewish mother had converted to Catholicism to marry her father before their divorce, and then moved to NYC to raise her […]

“Everyone’s oil sands are different, and these were mine:” A Masterful Graphic Memoir

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton

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I’ve been waiting several years to read this as Kate Beaton has been working on it and I’m super happy to say that this was well worth the wait. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is a graphic memoir that covers two years that Beaton spent working in the Albertan oil sands. I got Maclean’s for a long time (back when it was weekly!) so I have a good base knowledge about the oil sands and their attendant environmental and social problems. Her nuanced […]

“…if you’re gonna fail anyway, you might as well fail as your true self.”

Improve: How I Discovered Improv and Conquered Social Anxiety by Alex Graudins

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I love autobio comics so have been following Alex Graudins’ work for a few years and seeing her work on this book, so it was exciting that it is finally available in the world. I pre-ordered it but it got returned to B&N for some reason by USPS, so I bought it at an indie bookstore randomly yesterday and read it on the train home. I think since I really like her work, the idea of writing this review was hard because this book didn’t […]

Coming of Age When Your Parents Are in the CIA

Passport by Sophia Glock

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CBR14Bingo: Gaslight (I wouldn’t say her parents purposefully gaslight her, but they keep a lot of information from her and live in a cloud of secrecy that she never fully gets answers about) This is a well done book in a technical sense — the art is accomplished and clear, I like the use of a muted and restrained color palette, the story has a clear arc — but there’s something hollow about it that didn’t click for me. I think it might be because […]

“This – not any particular piece of Vietnamese culture – is my inheritance: the inexplicable need and extraordinary ability to run when the shit hits the fan. My refugee reflex.”

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui

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On 2022’s Read Harder Challenge Task 6 is to read a non-fiction YA comic. Each year when the Read Harder tasks are unveiled, I go through my over 600 book deep to read list on Goodreads looking for books to fulfill each task. I knew this one would be difficult, there just isn’t much in the way of non-fiction graphic works on my TBR, which is an area I could do to grow in (thus, doing this reading challenge each year since 2015). I was […]

“From that point of understanding, you begin to move on, no matter what.”

How to Be Ace by Rebecca Burgess

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This is another winner from Jessica Kingsley Publishers, which I’ve become increasingly aware of in the last year as a great specialty publisher. How to Be Ace is both a good coming of age memoir and a great primer of what asexuality is and how the social pressures to have sex and find a romantic partner can be very damaging. It also covers OCD, anxiety, and touches a bit on autism, so it manages to cover a lot of ground in 208 pages. I’d been following Burgess’s […]



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