THE BEST COMICS OF 2016
"Gabby Schulz’s unfairly overlooked and singularly upsetting Sick (Secret Acres) deserves mention, a painful and highly intimate look at depression from the inside out." – A.V. Club
BEST GRAPHIC NOVELS OF FALL 2016
"Schulz’s art is as good as any independent cartoonist working today—grim and graphic, but also frank and penetrating. With plenty of anatomical details and ailments shown and described, Sick isn’t for the easily grossed-out or offended. But those looking for a vital, independent voice to follow in the footsteps of Robert Crumb and others should give it a try—some of Schulz’s images and ideas will linger, like a stubborn infection, long after the book’s cover has been closed." – Foreword Reviews
"Schulz uses the book to explore topics as broad as class inequity in the United States and as specific and personal as his own psyche. You may have seen Sick online when it was first serialized a couple of years ago, but in this new edition, Schulz seems to have repainted the artwork to give it a more rich and visceral feel. He is probably the most inventive cartoonist working in comics that many readers still have never heard of, and this is his most masterful piece of cartooning to date. Gabby Schulz’s unfairly overlooked and singularly upsetting Sick (Secret Acres) deserves mention, a painful and highly intimate look at depression from the inside out." – mental_floss
"Schulz captures the experience of sickness with uncomfortable accuracy: the woozy slipping in and out of consciousness, the sense of health and wellness becoming but a distant memory–and of pain and illness defining all of one’s existence. Sick joins other books in the growing genre of graphic memoirs dealing with health issues, among them Ellen Forney’s Marbles, John Porcellino’s The Hospital Suite, and Jennifer Haydn’s The Story of My Tits. While those books offer stories of people who navigated through their physical and mental problems to the point of reaching new possibilities for their lives, in Sick, Schulz’s illness is the avenue that leads him to simply confirm all of his worst fears about himself and the world surrounding him: 'The sickness had become me.' This is uncompromising work by a brave and powerful artist." – The Comics Journal
★ 09/15/2016
"To be or not to be?" Channeling Shakespeare's Hamlet via Hunter S. Thompson, Schulz (Monsters, as Ken Dahl) expands the premise from a focused pessimism of personal illness into a rumination on the futility of human life. In bed alone for weeks with high fever, bloody diarrhea, and gut spasms, the uninsured nebbish of a narrator obsesses in brilliant graphic metaphors about suffering, U.S. social inequities, his legacy of exploitative male privilege, and humanity's planet-wide destruction. And every self-critical memory comes boiling out as monstrous, dribbling faces that talk back to him. Primal doom has been done before in comics, but probably only rarely so glorious in grotesque detail. The squishy, viscerally reddened balls-to-the-wall horror draws wry fascination as well as dread—think cartoonist Gahan Wilson not being funny. Schultz's art must be his own personal answer, for to create such a gorgeous, sardonic work of real-life terror is surely reason to live. VERDICT Schulz tears down the curtain shielding us from the often nasty realities behind our joys with fabulous beauty. Those interested in social justice, horror themes, and art styles will find much here to stimulate thought.—MC
