Ronald Reagan

"After nearly eight years of neo-conservatism, the Reagan years seem a distant age of clarity, confidence, and certainty. The contenders are right to hanker after a little of Reagan's magic dust. There is genuine and continuing demand for information about how the Gipper changed the political landscape at home and began to redraw the maps laid down by the victors at the end of World War II. That desire is behind an unlikely and novel means of discovering the facts of Reagan's life: Ronald Reagan: A Graphic Biography. To portray the story of Reagan's road to and life in the White House as a comic strip may seem a trivial means of imparting a grand political message, but the effort turns out to be both ingenious and fair minded, showing with admirable impartiality how a poor boy from Tampico, Illinois, became president via commentating on football matches, acting in Hollywood pictures, as a celebrity spokesman for General Electric, and becoming governor of California. Comic strips have come a long way since DC Comics gave birth to Superman and the other pulp fiction superheroes. From the moment Roy Lichtenstein elevated the form to the highest art, comic books in the guise of 'graphic novels' have attempted to be taken seriously both as art and as literature, with mixed results. The Reagan biography lifts the ambition of the form to a new plane . . . The book is eloquent. To illustrate Reagan's reach to a wide variety of differing audiences, three similar frames are run one on top of the other, with Reagan making identical points to a group of blue collar urban workers, to a party of black-tied rich Americans, and to a gathering of mid-Western cowpokes. What the book achieves above all, however, is to clearly demonstrate that, whatever they may hope for, no single Republican candidate comes anywhere near aping Reagan's natural political genius."—Nicholas Wapshott, The New York Sun

"Looking for insights into the phenomena of the Reagan presidency, its resilience in the face of imbroglio after another disaster? Turn not to Edmund White's authorized whimsy, but rather to Andrew Helfer's graphic biography, which wraps astute political reporting in brightly entertaining artwork from Buccellato . . . Helfer paints his own keen portrait of the Great Communicator with a tight narrative that speaks of Reagan's political savvy . . . Helfer tells a smooth story washed with facts."—Kirkus Reviews, Graphic Spotlight