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
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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