Softcover, b&w & color, 160 pages
“I loved these so much!” —Lisa Hanawalt, My Dirty Dumb Eyes, Bojack Horseman
"Nothing encourages a little healthy reflection and self-assessment like having a kid. The cartoonist Mike Dawson has two, and in recent years he's been publishing searching, honest short comics about the doubts and worries that parenting provokes. The comics are unique in their willingness to interrogate many of the tricky issues around modern family life: How responsible can a parent be for his children's safety? How much can a feminist father do to change the way others treat his daughter and son? How honest should we be with our children when that honesty fosters new fears? Dawson doesn't claim to have the answers, but watching him wrestle with the questions is more satisfying anyway."
—Dan Kois, Slate Book Review
“There is nothing worse than a parenting book in which the writer presents themselves as a perfect parent with all the right answers. Mike Dawson doesn’t pretend. Raising kids in the modern world comes with more social, political and religious complications than it did in decades past, and Mike is just as confused and anxious about them as every parent is, or should be. The struggle makes for an entertaining and heartfelt read. This book isn’t just for parents, it’s for anyone who wants to ponder the influence our world has on youth, and frankly, that should be everyone.”
—Julia Wertz, New Yorker cartoonist and author of The Infinite Wait and Museum of Mistakes
Mike Dawson uses visual storytelling to offer original, compelling, and funny commentary on fatherhood, gun rights, the gender of toys, and staying sane in a world where school shootings and Disney princesses get equal billing.
Simultaneously political, philosophical, and humorous, these first-person cartoon essays all seek to answer the book’s central question, Am I Good?
Mike Dawson’s work includes the graphic novels Freddie & Me and the Ignatz Award winning Troop 142, as well as the YA basketball graphic novel, The Fifth Quarter. He has published humor comics and strips examining issues of parenting and politics at The Nib, Slate, The New Yorker, The Comics Journal and Upworthy. His comics have been nominated for multiple Eisner and Ignatz Awards as well as the Slate Cartoonists Studio Prize. He lives alongside the scenic Jersey Shore with his partner and two children.
Praise for Mike Dawson:
“[ Angie Bongiolatti ] gently examines the complications in issues that can seem black and white while being anything but.” —Hillary Brown, Paste Magazine
“Dawson captures truths about what it is to be young and free, with an intimidating world of possibilities stretching out into a possibly exciting but also quite possibly disappointing, or even terrifying, future. Conceived and executed with acute anthropological detail, rich in ideas and sure to inspire discussions.” —The Comics Journal
“Charming, sincere and, above all, expressively drawn, in an uncomplicated way it has much to say about what remains after we’ve gone” —The Sunday Telegraph
“Undeniably contagious” —Entertainment Weekly
- Author:
- Mike Dawson
