This is a really odd comicbook. I'm not really sure what to make of it. The plot is straight-forward enough to begin with. The protagonist is a young, religious boy - and I think his characterization is accurate enough, he's quite strange. The boy's older brother goes to a strange country to teach English to the natives that will begin working at a theme-park tourist destination. The book was interesting to me specifically because I was looking into teaching English in China this summer (a frien...

I wasn't to keen on this. The aesthetics didn't really help the story for me.

The use of colour was the only good thing about this, which was behind the bad drawings that looked like they were done with a Sharpie.

Look I know Dash Shaw is a master of his craft and an innovative user of color and a teller of weirdness in stories to perfection but I feel so eh about his attitude to the world and his colonial tweeness that I just come away with a less than great taste in my mouth -- shares some of the ooh foreign land these guys are jerks but hey, identify with them anyway, business that characterized Arsene Schrauwen. Feh, boys. That's all I have to say.

This book is carefully crafted, very funny, and extremely unique. It was one of the most fun books I have read in sometime, and the elements some seem to have found frustrating I found refreshing and well utilized in building layers into the story. I have never seen anything like it, and it is a wonderful example of boundary pushing in graphic storytelling. If you are interested in this medium at all I highly recommend at least trying this book

What an odd and wonderful book! Perhaps Danny's motivations are unclear, or seem to not warrant his actions, but then again, there's nothing very clear about being an adolescent. It's one of the craziest and most confusing experiences in many peoples' lives. At an intuitive level, the various themes and characters and things-left-unsaid/discovered...of of this works very well for me. And damn, I love that art.

I had a lot of trouble comprehending this story. I would guess that Shaw is heralded as a genius of the medium but I felt like this book was way over the top arty for my tastes. The actual illustration and colouring are powerfully rendered but I just couldn’t get into the story. Sorry. I may try reading this again sometime because the high quality of the art makes it worthy of a second attempt.

I love how Dash Shaw has always managed to cross the borders of what defines a comic book, meanwhile telling a captivating story. While 'New School' is, again, a book full of surprises, I feel a bit underwhelmed in comparison with his former work.

Yeah... Uhm... Weird. Hated the dated way in which Danny spoke. Sounded weird and pretentious. Maybe that was the point. Being a strange person in a strange land doesn't mean you have to be an asshole.

The coloring in this book gave me a headache and was really disorienting. That may have been intended, but it did not make for something I could read more than half of. I was excited to read this because I loved Bodyworld so much, but I felt disconnected from the story, annoyed with the colors, and unimpressed with the smudgy, child-like artwork.

This book was just so. weird. I think the idea behind it had interesting potential. The artwork is gorgeous BUT the coloring makes it hard to read or even see what is going on in the panels, which hampers the storytelling.

I read Dash Shaw to stretch my brain.His aesthetic is pretty out there. Most of his illustrations are clumsy, thick-penned drawings, and occasionally he prints (screen-prints?) a color, or even a photograph, in the background. His work is cerebral, and trippy, and makes me think. It's occasionally hard to follow, often twisted, and generally self-pleasuring. THIS book is about a pair of brothers living in a world where Theme Parks are A THING. One mogul has created a time-travel-themed park on a...

This another strange and heavy artifact by Dash Shaw. I am intrigued by the highly mixed reviews it drew from fans and new Shaw readers alike. People seem to respond strongly to him in one way or another. "New School" is at times very writerly, at times filmic, at times has the condensed fury and release of an exploding graffiti masterpiece enacted in the middle of the night. There is a wild immaturity that turns angry and mean and there is a lot of coming of age soulfulness. Though the story is...

Dash Shaw -- officially the Handsomest Comics Artist in the World and writer of one of my favorite doorstops, "Bottomless Belly Button" -- may have lost me on this one. On the surface, "New School" is about a young man whose parents send him on a mission to the amusement park Clockworld (located on the mysterious island of X and run by a potential madman) to retrieve his brother, who went there to work a couple years ago and never returned. But why do the young protagonist and his parents speak

This is a re-read and a new review. The first read, two years ago, was ONE star, because I wasn’t impressed with it. Didn’t get it. Experimental comics. But I think it was Chris Ware who said Dash Shaw is the future of comics, and he might be right, but that is the struggle, to see the future, eh? To try and get the new and nto see it as just dumb, but insightful and new? Do I understand David Foster Walllace as well as I did Joyce? Did I understand Pynchon at first? (No.) Dash Shaw tells of two...

--Can't understand all the bad reviews for this one. Especially the ones mystified by the straightforward & entertaining story. Anyone who's a fan of Dash Shaw's "Bottomless Belly Button" or "Body World" should enjoy this. --It's partly set in a slightly alternate reality where people talk in stylized exclamations! They're easily excitable!!!--Avant garde theme parks. An idea whose time has come. --The most unique color design I've ever seen in a graphic novel - layering paint and collage over t...

Mind-bending!!

New School felt purposely random in order to test the limits of artistic expression. I felt as though the point was to leave the reader feeling confused and disappointed as a way to highlight the almost stream-of-consciousness, childishly crazed, sharpie graphic art. At times, the font was very difficult to read due to the crazed sharpie action. Hasn't edgy art been done for the sake of trying it a long time ago? This book was on NPR's list of the best books of 2013. Sometimes I get the impressi...

I'm going to have to think about this book for awhile. And reread it. It's certainly a unique approach to comics storytelling, and I'm sure there are things I did not get the first time around. Most prominent, and possibly most challenging to reading, is Shaw's use of color and background patterns throughout the book. Again, I have to go back through and read his coloring to better understand it.

I hate to keep bringing attention to Shaw's straightforward drawing style with each book of his I read, but it remains both what makes his work appealing – and helps him release material more frequently than many of his peers – and what keeps it from reaching the next level.As with the narratives of Bottomless Belly Button and BodyWorld, the story of two brothers and their experiences at a foreign theme park called ClockWorld moves with an enviable nimbleness. Shaw aids his Sharpie-like illustra...