All The Answers

"Cartoonist Michael Kupperman’s father attained an odd and uniquely American kind of celebrity status in his youth: He was a precocious regular panelist on a televised trivia game show called Quiz Kids. His son’s attempts to understand his father’s youthful experience – and the man’s subsequent refusal to acknowledge that time of his life – form the backbone of All The Answers, which is given a sense of urgency by the fact that the father is slowly sinking into dementia. Kupperman uses archival photos and news clippings to evoke the button-down blankness of midcentury America, and he invokes the cultural status of American Jews in the postwar era to provide enlightening context. But the graphic memoir’s true subject is the frustrating unknowability of others and the tendency for our parents lives to hover perpetually beyond our reach."