*Thanks to Netgalley for a free advance copy*A fictionalized, docu-style treatment of child stars seems like a can't-miss concept, but it falls a little flat as the main character is mostly presented through the words of other people. I don't feel like this book contributed to the societal dialogue of child stars, but rather just re-made a familiar narrative in comic form.

A graphic novel 'documentary' about Owen Eugene a fictional child star. This is essentially the biography of Gary Coleman with a change of skin color and a dash of Macauley Culkin's bio for plausible deniability. '80s and '90s kids will dig the references to "very special episodes" that dotted our childhood landscape, but "I remember that!" does not make for a compelling story.

An impressively dense and thorough look at the child star phenomenon, Child Star looks at Owen Eugene and his run on a famous fictional show. Brown’s nonfiction or mockumentary approach gives the reader the perfect perspective to meet Eugene’s sidelined co-stars, greedy parents, and aggressive network executives. Each faction sits on their island with little understanding of the others except for what will get themselves the best bottom line.After a meteoric rise to popularity, Owen slides back

Quite brilliant! Told in documentary style with the main subject never uttering a word, this graphic novel is an amalgamation of the lives of TV child actors of the 70s-80s-90s; I found myself variously thinking of Gary Coleman, Emmanuel Lewis, and Mason Reese. Painfully illustrates how Hollywood is the only occupation which unfairly cancels its child actors for growing up and changing, and robs most of them of true childhoods. Tragic and awesomely executed.

A semi-fictional account of the rise and fall of a child star from the 1980s. From some reviews, certain people seem to think that this was supposed to be humorous in some ways, but the author usually takes his subject seriously - Tetris, Andre the Giant, Andy Kaufman, and so forth. The text seems to be primarily based on the life of Gary Coleman. In fact, it was so close I'm not sure why the author didn't just do one on the dead star. It's a tale we've read before. A train wreck of a life. Famo...

Thank you to first second for this advance reader copy. All opinions below are my own. Child Star depicts the absent childhood and inevitable decline of an ur-child actor who can never evolve beyond his starring sitcom role. Eugene, who stands in for all child actors who look too young/small to play as adults or those whose real appeal was cuteness and a catch-phrase, wants both to be treated as an adult and also fixates on the freedom and play of a childhood he never experienced. His parents ar...

Although the author says this is a compilation of child stars that have been chewed up and spit out by the Hollywood machine, it very heavily leans on the life of Gary Coleman, who was stunted in his growth and so could play a child much longer than most children.In the fictionalized version, Owen Eugene has something that also caused his growth to be stunted, and so can pass for much younger than he really is.The story is told in a series of interviews with his co-stars, his parents, his agents...

Meh.I absolutely loved this concept - a graphic tell-all biography of a fictional child star? That has SO much potential.Sadly, this fell absolutely flat for me. To make this work, it could have gone one of two ways: laugh-out-loud funny or convincingly emotional. Instead this read like dry nonfiction and I would have put it down without finishing had it not been an ARC. I didn't *care* about any of the people and it also wasn't funny. On top of that, I really didn't vibe with the art style.Than...

Despite the huge potential of 80's nostalgia and the trappings of child stardom, I didn't feel like the author capitalized on either. And the "off brand" references were a bit painful. So I'm just gonna go drink a Sprute and watch some Crowded House with a cameo from my favourite TV star, Mr. P. "I feel bad for the fool!"

I confess I'm surprised at how much I liked this book. It's the story of a fictional child actor done as if it is a documentary after his death. While the book isn't based on one particular real child star, there are strong parallels with Gary Coleman and others. Brown did a great job of using real incidents as a basis-- Reagan's reaction to "Day After," the cut-throat search for newer and cuter child actors, the problems of aging out of a series, and more. I was reminded of so many things-- inc...

Child Star is a graphic novel written and illustrated by Brian "Box" Brown. This savvy satire depicts the life of an eighties child star that has fallen from the worlds' consciousness.The tragicomic narrative follows Owen Eugene, a 1980s child star who is reminiscent of real-life actors Gary Coleman. Appearing younger than his age due to a congenital disorder, Eugene becomes a sitcom superstar playing a kid with a sassy catchphrase, and his life goes downhill from there – from having his face pl...

I really liked this. It was fictional, but its like an amalgamation of so many 70's-90's tropes of child stars.

“Looking into the biographies of my childhood TV favorites, I found that many of their life stories have a particular tragedy to them. The world uses them up and then tosses them out.”- Author Brian “Box” Brown in the Author’s Note for Child StarChild Star is a conglomeration of pop culture realities into one fictional tale. If you were a fan of sitcoms in the 80s and 90s, I think you will find a lot of nostalgia and several plot points that will sound familiar from actual stories of child stars...

ReRead 19 November 2020---The only problem with Child Star is waiting for Box Brown's next book to come out. This is his best work yet!

This is great.I want to address a review that says this is a whitewashing of Gary Coleman's story:This book is a definite fictional mash-up of tons of child stars with a lot of fiction thrown in. Whitewashing is taking a story featuring a person of color and changing the character to a white person to make it more palatable to a white audience. I think this may be a case of whitewashing to make a story more palatable, but in a very different way.The child star depicted in this book is...not a sy...

Wow. Loosely based on some child stars of the 80s that us kids of the 80s will easily recognize, this quick read packs a punch. Child star Owen Eugene is precocious and adorable and annoying, and it is impossible not to feel horribly guilty by association for being a part of a world that allows children to be used and discarded. There are shadows of Gary Coleman here, obviously, but it is easier to count the child stars that came out without permanent damage than the ones who either died or had

Brown whitewashes the life of Gary Coleman into a fictional character named Eugene Owen. After doing nonfiction biographies of Andy Kaufman and Andre the Giant, it seems odd that Brown decides to take a fictionalized and satirical approach here. Fear of litigation, maybe? Unfortunately, the satire is extremely tame. Instead of using the freedom of fiction to generate some over-the-top humor or drive home a big idea, the story is pretty paint-by-the-numbers, sticking so close to the format of the...

Well this was different! Box Brown's books up to this point have all been nonfiction, and I really loved his books on Andre the Giant and Tetris. I knew this one would be great as I love his style and I also am a fan of pop culture from the 1970s and 1980s, which inspired this novel.It is about a child star, a kid named Owen Eugene, who has a disability that keeps him very small (think Gary Coleman meets Emmanuel Lewis) so he's playing children much younger than his real age (although sometimes

This review can also be found on my blog: https://graphicnovelty2.com/2021/01/2...“Hollywood makes you grow up fast”.Based on true stories of television child stars of the 1980s, this graphic novel basically fictionalizes the life of Gary Coleman, star of Different Strokes, as Owen Eugene and is heavy on the nostalgia factor.Told as if this story was a documentary, we know almost immediately Owen is dead, as he is spoken about in the past tense by his family and business associates who recount h...

(originally reviewed at thelibraryladies.com )Thanks to NetGalley for sending me an eARC of this graphic novel!My love for “The Lost Boys” meant that when Corey Haim died I sat down and cried very deeply. He (and his costar and friend Corey Feldman) were two child stars who were plagued by personal demons that were brought on by fame (and all the bad things and people that come with it), so his death by overdose was tragic, but not surprising. He was just one in a long line of child stars who...