The Complete Jack Survives by Jerry Moriarty

The Complete Jack Survives Reviews

• 
  Matt

  A beautiful, haunting, humane collection of short, sometimes surreal vignettes of everyday life. Recommended for fans of Richard Maguire, Seth, Chris Ware and others.
• 
  Denise Kruse

  I have lived an uneventful, miserable, selfish, uncool life and can only hope you have also.
  
  So says Jerry Moriarty in this graphic novel before graphic novels were a thing. This book of his art has big bold lines, a decidedly masculine story that is mostly about his father. His art is fabulous! My favorite part is the section that included his mother, Esther, Mom Climbs the Attic Stairs.
  
  He considers himself a paintoonist and this is the kind of book one can look at again and again.
• 
  Kim

  Derik Badman's review of the work is well written.
  http://www.du9.org/en/chronique/compl... Although I agree more with Ware.
• 
  Rayn

  zwart wit!!
• 
  Fredrik Strömberg

  This is a book I've long wanted to read, and today was the day I picked it up from one of my book cases with unread books, which glares at me every time I walk past ...
  
  Anyway, this was just as good as I had hoped. This book comes with the highest possible recommendations from both Art Spiegelman, who originally published these comics in Raw Magazine in the 1980s, and from Chris Ware, who has written an interesting foreword to this edition.
  
  The comics are one, two or four pages long, often without any traditional narrative, following an old man in a world that is seemingly in the 1950s. The images are beautiful, with lush black and white artwork and the stories, though not exciting in themselves, slowly form a narrative that is very intriguing.
  
  There are three texts in this book. First a short one by the publisher, then the really insightful one by Ware and finally a text by the artist, detailing his relationship with the character Jack, which turns out is a strange amalgam of him and his father. Rarely have the texts in a comic book have such an affect upon my reading of said book. The last time I felt like this was when reading said Ware's hardcover collection of Quimby the Mouse. I had to go back and reread several parts of Jack Survives after the revelations that the artist himself gave at the end.
• 
  Egle

  I found Jerry's cartoonish paintings on the internet and fell in love with them right away. They have something simple yet captivating and existential so I decided that I needed the book.
  Jack Survives is pretty much about the life. About those moments when your arms feel so asleep that they seem to be a dead meat and yet you have to carry on through this grayness, and you do, without a single complaint. His narratives are minimalistic accounts of the beauty and strangeness of ordinary which makes them pretty extraordinary.
• 
  Genevieve Tyrrell

  Jerry was my professor in summer of 2012 for a continuing ed class at SVA. Writers and artists alike have a lot to learn from him. This book is one of my inspirations.
• 
  Joey Dhaumya

  Jack Survives because he survives each day, with its minor disappointments and minor victories. This is the most human comic I've read.