All the Answers

Starred review from April 2, 2018
An artist races to uncover and understand his father’s unusual childhood before his memories are lost to the onset of dementia in this striking and tragic memoir. Self-presenting as a neurotic mess, Eisner Award–winning Kupperman (Tales Designed to Thrizzle) dives into the (for him) unknown story of how his father Joel, a math whiz turned philosophy professor and author, had once been “manufactured” as the marquee child star of the hit World War II–era radio show Quiz Kids. The show made Joel a star, but it was also a traumatic experience that turned him into an emotionally distant man and an uncommunicative parent. The narrative pivots between Kupperman’s reconstruction of stranger-than-fiction moments unearthed from his father’s repressed memory—including the time Joel, a Jewish child on a show developed in part to combat anti-Semitism, met with rabid anti-Semite Henry Ford—and his present-day attempts to get the story straight in the shadow of Joel’s encroaching illness. Kupperman’s varied angles, thick line work, staring seriocomic facial stylings, and sharp prose help turn an already incredible story into an electrifyingly fast-paced, yet intimate memoir about family secrets and the price children can pay for their parents’ ambitions. Agent: Scott Mendel, Mendel Media Group.

June 1, 2018
Kupperman, known for the absurdist humor of his Tales Designed to Thrizzle series, turns serious and inward for this poignant memoir. As his father descends into dementia, Michael begins interviewing him about the past he had always sought to conceal. As a child during WWII, Joel Kupperman gained fame as a prodigy on the phenomenally popular Quiz Kids radio show. After Joel aged out of his once-appealing cuteness and the show ran its course, he became a figure of derision, caught up in the quiz-show-rigging scandals of the 1950s. He retreated into a career in academia, but his experience left him an emotionally repressed adult and distant parent. After learning his father's story, Michael comes to view him as a trauma survivor rather than the absent-minded egghead he'd believed. Kupperman's solid, line-heavy drawings, which impart credibility to the preposterous concepts of his humorous strips, are equally effective at conveying this real-life drama. His clear-eyed yet touching portrait of his father serves as a a powerful indictment of celebrity culture.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from June 1, 2018

Eisner Award-winning Kupperman (Tales Designed To Thrizzle) is best known for his deliriously funny, absurdist humor comics. Here the author/artist breaks away dramatically from that tradition to present a powerful and decidedly serious volume that doubles as a memoir of his relationship with his father, Joel, and a biography of his father's life. In the years surrounding World War II, Joel Kupperman was the star of hundreds of episodes of the game show Quiz Kids, becoming wildly famous as a child prodigy. Urged along by his domineering mother, as well as a brilliant producer eager to fight anti-Semitism by manufacturing a lovable Jewish child celebrity, Joel traveled the country, met seemingly every major Hollywood star of his day, and even spoke as a representative of American youth at the first-ever UN assembly--all of which thoroughly emotionally crippled him. Author Kupperman explores his father's experience with a mixture of melancholy and awe, as well as something between grief and rage at the way Joel was treated and in turn behaved toward his family. VERDICT A heartbreaking, deeply affecting story about fathers and sons that asks questions with no easy answers. [For more on Gallery 13, see the interview with the editors on p. 69.--Ed.]--TB

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