cartoon dialectics and one dirty tree

Noah Van Sciver and Tom Kaczynski | Best Comics 2018 Lists

We’re delighted to find some of our books on several Best of 2018 lists. So far Noah Noah Van Sciver’s One Dirty Tree and Tom Kaczynski’s Cartoon Dialectics Vol. 3 made the cut. Noah’s One Dirty Tree is present on two lists:

First up, One Dirty Tree is on Boston Globe’s list:

A painful, moving memoir about [Noah Van Sciver]’s troubled, mostly absent, parents, impoverished Mormon upbringing (the title comes from the nickname his siblings gave to the family homestead) and its impact on his creative work, family, and personal relationships.

Kent Worcester

Second, BOTH of Noah’s 2018 make The Comics Beat list:

One Dirty Tree is a family memoir that is, at times, absolutely heartbreaking and viscerally shocking. In conveying the early part of his childhood, Van Sciver is stark, frank, and bleak. Interwoven with vignettes of his childhood and adolescence, One Dirty Tree also examines the pivotal time when Van Sciver left his twenties and a long-term relationship.

Noah’s A Perfect Failure: Fante Bukowski 3 (Fantagraphics) also makes the list:

On the flip side is Fante Bukowski 3, the final arc of the Fante Bukowski saga, is one of funniest and most pointed satires of the year.

And finally, Cartoon Dialectics Vol. 3 by Tom Kaczynski & Clara Jetsmark made the list on Daniel Elkin’s YCE comics blog:

What Tom Kaczynski and Clara Jetsmark provide between its covers is powerful, invigorating stuff, connecting the dots between our society’s retromania and the rise of neo-fascism, while also acknowledging how easy it is for anyone to fall prey to the dangerous allure of nostalgia. 

[…]
The written content itself is sharp and refreshingly clear, but it’s the contrast of Kaczynski’s architect eye and Jetsmark’s borderline cubist approach to design that makes the material triumph the way it does. Even the most detailed and complex analysis in Cartoon Dialectics goes down easy because of how eye-catching and blunt the art is, like a lecture carried out by performance artists.

Nick Hanover

Congrats to them both them for making the 2018 Best comics & graphic novel lists!

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