Arsene Schrauwen

One of the very best graphic novels of the decade.--Dan Nadel

This is a book of imagination and tale-telling.--Joe McCulloch

[Schrauwen's] work, strange and surreal, bears the influences of many 20th Century comics, but with a distinctly contemporary voice. They're strange and moving, full of delusional characters, and show Schrauwen's skills a master storyteller.--Alex Dueben

Best narrative comic of the year, no questions asked.

Occasionally, a creator kicks the comics-medium football not only over the goalposts but into another stadium entirely. Schrauwen's off-the-wall ode to his grandfather's life, love, and virus-induced mental walkabout -- rendered in burnt orange and cornflower blue -- is artistically simple but deeply symbolic. The whole book has the hallucinatory feel of a curious found item that inspires an uncanny anxiousness.--John DiBello

As the book continues, ...[it] becomes less an ironic comedy than a reflection on the distance of forebears from their descendants, and the absurdity of expecting one's legacy to not become absurd, especially when your story winds up being told by some noodly cartoonist. Sympathy for the devil? A final dodge into white romanticism? The duty of art to seek nuance? Alas, this excellent, declarative book cannot define everything for us.--Joe McCulloch

While reading this graphic novel, I kept thinking, 'I can't believe how smart Oliver Schrauwen is.' Every page reveals an eccentric and original cartooning mind at work. ... Taken together, [his] artistic choices make for an oddly moving way to tell an uncanny story, an epic surrealist adventure in architectural modernity, European colonialism, social idealism, and sexual perversion. One of my 'Three Best Books of 2014' -- if not the best.--Ken Parille

This is a staggering career achievement: a ramshackle, scatological, apocalyptic, scathingly satirical, and above all else hilarious story about the artist's grandfather and his experiences in South America. ... Schrauwen somehow manages to top himself from chapter to chapter while adding in biting critiques of colonialism and gender roles.--Rob Clough

...Schrauwen's canny project ... masterfully slips between recognizable emotions and genres.--Jeff Jackson

Arsène may or may not be a stand-in for the reader, but we certainly enter into his world through the book. Perhaps the point of the story is only to teach you how to read it. Is this what life is? That is what the sort of jokes Schrauwen tells seem to suggest.--Brian Nicholson