Chicago

...Glenn Head [uses] a flowing, sometimes loopy style to accent works grounded in austere reality. ... [Chicago] provides an entertaining autobiographical ride...--Hillary Brown "Paste"
Chicago by Glenn Head is a true rarity: a modern graphic novel that could hold its own with many titles from the heyday of the Underground. With unsparing honesty and sometimes disturbing imagery, Head charts a trajectory spanning three decades. The work is cut from whole cloth, in that his intense visual style owes zilch to the abundant style books and polemics that inform much contemporary work. His writing is obviously informed by authentic experience, so it has a consistent verve. That live current throbs through the whole panorama: it's a coming of age story; a dangerous psychic battle; a love story; a scary urban survival saga; a career overview and a reflection on fatherhood. At least, I know it's about those things. The elusive author/artist voice outside of all this varied experience is the true subject. It's well worth hearing!--Justin Green (Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary)
Chicago is also an intricate, literary story, with a protagonist whose motivations are often opaque and with outcomes that are anything but expected. ...Head's vibrant lines, richly detailed, panoramic splash pages, and deep, painterly blacks are in a class unto themselves, with certain sequences practically popping off the page. ... In producing his first long-form work rather late into his career, Head has made the most of the opportunity. Chicago is a well crafted, impeccably rendered, and mature book, an amalgamation of different underground and alt-comics traditions blended into something fresh, gripping, and elusive.--Rob Kirby "The Comics Journal"
Cartoonist Glenn Head is a comics lifer, with a sensibility filtered through the undergrounds and decanted into the best of 90s alternatives. And how he's crafted a autobiographical comic called Chicago that... is quite a statement from a creator who hasn't gotten the attention he should in today's comics-loving world. But Chicago... will change that.--Heidi MacDonald "The Beat"
Glenn Head is as close to underground comics royalty as can exist in a scene that openly scorns hierarchies. ... [Chicago] has won praise... around the comics world for its honesty, and for Head's typically hyper-detailed, stunning art.--Jim Dandeneau "Topless Robot"
Glenn Head is one of the strongest artists I relate to later-period underground comix... He has style to burn, and his comics are always a highlight wherever they appear. In Chicago, ...the art is a joy and the voice appealing, but Head gets at some ideas and states of mind that aren't the common fodder of issue- or event-oriented memoir writing. I was most impressed with how he wrote about the growing realization you have as a young man that life is mostly arbitrary and the result of an accumulation of decisions from those you can't remember to the most recent.--Tom Spurgeon "The Comics Reporter"
Head does not scrimp on mortifying detail, and that is where Chicago excels.--Tim O'Neil "The A.V. Club"
In Chicago, Head's graphic memoir, he nakedly airs out his struggles as a teen living on the street, his insecurities, and his transition into adulthood. It's a blunt take on growing up and finding one's identity.--Andrea Towers "Entertainment Weekly"
In his breathtaking new semiautobiographical graphic novel, Chicago, Glenn Head is the best kind of emotional-smut peddler, offering a mouthwatering medley of humiliations, obsessions, jealousies, and poor decisions. ... This kind of unflinching self-observation is gripping, admirable, and indelible. ... And the artwork is wonderful. ... Every scene is just a few extra lines away from becoming surreal, and it's hard to take your eyes off a style that stands on the threshold of nightmarish-ness.--Abraham Riesman "Vulture"
Mr. Head's work as an editor and creator has earned him well-deserved Harvey and Eisner-award nominations and it's easy to see why. His time contributing to Weirdo magazine and Bad News was at times funny, entertaining, and enlightening--but always worked to make the reader experience something.--Jed W. Harris-Keith "FreakSugar"
Staggeringly personal, Glenn Head's Chicago is a storytelling triumph. ... Chicago is an intimate voyage of personal discovery along the jagged edge between reason and madness that so often defines major turning points and permeates our daily struggle with life, death, and meaning.--Karen O'Brien "Broken Frontier"
This quasi-memoir is so straightforward and digestible that you might not even notice how subversive it is. The history of sequential art is littered with autobiographical stories about impetuous and misunderstood young men on journeys of self-discovery, but Chicago is a subtle dismantling of that overdone subgenre. The protagonist certainly thinks he's searching for authenticity and inspiration, but Head crafts him as an infuriating narcissist who squanders every opportunity and alienates every friend. Luckily, since Head is (mostly) talking about himself, it remains grounded in a humanely sympathetic tone of grudging self-acceptance.--Abraham Riesman "Vulture"
With an unabashed underground comix feel, Chicago is the counterculture hit of the year and a courageous bit of well-crafted storytelling.--Karen O'Brien "Broken Frontier"