ericfheiman's review
5.0
Wonderfully designed (by the wonderful Helene Silverman) collection of Mark's nutty inspired work.
xterminal's review
3.0
Mark Newgarden, We All Die Alone (Fantagraphics, 2005)
I was in my late teens during the glory days of RAW, and many of my friends were huge fans of the magazine. I was always sort of ashamed to admit I never quite got it. But then Maus came out, and I could grok Art Spiegelman, who was one of the driving forces behind RAW, so I figured I'd just missed something.
Now comes We All Die Alone, a full-length from one of RAW's other seminal contributors, Mark Newgarden. And while there are some pieces in here that really hit me right, I have to say that a lot of the time I still just don't get it. This despite Dan Nadel's fantastic introduction, which demystifies the Newgarden canon, as it were. And really, some of this is great stuff. The Little Nun? Genius. Em is endearing, in an odd way. There's a great deal of it, however, that just doesn't strike me as funny. It's not that I don't get it; twenty years on, this stuff makes a lot more sense to me than it used to (and at the time, shamefully, I didn't recognize a lot of the archetypes and stereotypes against which Newgarden was working). It's just that, well, I don't find some of it funny. Your mileage may vary, of course. But there's no denying that when Mark Newgarden is in the zone, he hits them out of the park on a regular basis. ***
I was in my late teens during the glory days of RAW, and many of my friends were huge fans of the magazine. I was always sort of ashamed to admit I never quite got it. But then Maus came out, and I could grok Art Spiegelman, who was one of the driving forces behind RAW, so I figured I'd just missed something.
Now comes We All Die Alone, a full-length from one of RAW's other seminal contributors, Mark Newgarden. And while there are some pieces in here that really hit me right, I have to say that a lot of the time I still just don't get it. This despite Dan Nadel's fantastic introduction, which demystifies the Newgarden canon, as it were. And really, some of this is great stuff. The Little Nun? Genius. Em is endearing, in an odd way. There's a great deal of it, however, that just doesn't strike me as funny. It's not that I don't get it; twenty years on, this stuff makes a lot more sense to me than it used to (and at the time, shamefully, I didn't recognize a lot of the archetypes and stereotypes against which Newgarden was working). It's just that, well, I don't find some of it funny. Your mileage may vary, of course. But there's no denying that when Mark Newgarden is in the zone, he hits them out of the park on a regular basis. ***
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