The Realist collects the weekly strips made by Asaf Hanuka, whose autobiographical comics fall into the tragicomical genre. The strips touch on a variety of concerns, family, money, day-to-day life, etc. The collection showcases his strips as well as single panels and is a nice art book

I've been reading the Hanukkah twins' work for well over a decade. This series of comic strips are beautiful, chilling, and hilarious, sometimes all in the same page. I loved reading it as much for its eye-witness look at life in a war-ravaged city as for its day-to-day domestic issues. As much of a fan as I already was, I can't believe how good this collection is.

A collection of Hanuka's weekly comic strip for the last several years. It's a series of one page musings on life in Tel Aviv, family, and money, sometimes surreal. The ones I liked best were the one panel stories that used metaphors to tell the story. Hunaka's art is fantastic. I'd love to see him do a monthly book.

Just a fantastic book. Equal parts personal and universal, wry and melancholy, deep and trivial. I love it.

Thought provoking... a little bit of everything sprinkled within: humor, the realities of struggles, juggling parenthood, politics & social commentary. There were some that I didn't understand but I could still appreciate the artistic style. Asaf Hanuka explodes with talent.

It's always interesting to read biographical comics and from an Israeli comic book maker no less. The Realist consists of strips that center around Hanuka's life, but there's hardly any plot or even a theme. Mostly it's just slightly vague and sporadic, which kind of eats the value of interest. Mostly I was interested in the political setting of Israel, but sadly so the comic avoids it almost totally unless you count the probable looming war and what happens in the news. The comic is more about Hanuka's own life, his work, family and crisis that is hard to define. I'm not saying this isn't a good approach, but I felt that lots of potential was lost. Another juicy part was his wife and kids, who look Western and how that works against Hanuka's own looks in Israel, but he barely scratched the whole thing. Perhaps I had too many expectations that weren't based on anything, really, and thus the disappointment was bigger.

The art is a mixture of reality and wonky ways. Thus there are more than one color theme and all in all, it so much depends on the story Hanuka wants to tell. I actually enjoyed this, since it shifted the angle with every new setting. Sometimes the comic felt like it was made on acid though, and trying to find the meaning was hard be it story- or art-wise. The comic is interesting, if you don't expect too much, but it would be better to read it in parts instead of like this. The structure just isn't all that great for something like this.

There are some great entries here to this compendium of weekly, full-colour cartoons. But there are also – to be another realist – too many stories that just begin and go through their nine panels to grind to a pointless halt, too many that are so Israeli-specific they're impossible to really understand, and too many that are too left-wing anti-Israeli for my taste. The creator often shows a great eye for visual metaphor, but the snapshots of real life are where the side is let down the most.

While translation into English may be partly to blame for some challenges, the anti-blackness, sexism, misogyny, fatphobia, slurs, etc took away from the possibility of enjoying his commentary.

The Realist collects the weekly strips made by Asaf Hanuka, a tragicomical autobiography where the author shows his concerns about life, family, money need and so on. Some pages contains single images, very powerful for illustration style and metaphorical meaning.
I like this kind of book (collection of strips) and I think this is a very good one in this genre.

'The Realist' by Asaf Hanunka is a graphic novel. It's a series of weekly strips he created for an Israeli paper called the Calcalist.

The strips are about Hanuka, his wife, and their young son. It's their life in Tel Aviv as they look for a new place to live. Some strips have a surreal quality. There are strips about people worried about bombings and leaving the city. There are strips about marriage and raising a child. There are also full page drawings, like one that shows the apartment they are looking at with a mirror reflection of the apartment they are idealizing. Or a broken down car oozing with human organs at the mechanics shop.

The artist is a commercial illustrator and also a contributor to the animated film Waltz With Bashir. His look at the city he lives in is funny at times, and strange. I really enjoyed reading this graphic novel. The art is really great, moving between more cartoonish and more realistic and weirdly surreal. I liked the strips, but the full page drawings were my favorites.

I received a review copy of this graphic novel from Archaia, BOOM! Studios, and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.

There are humerous comic collections of men being the primary caretaker, or the co-caretaker in their child's lives. The ones from the States and from Canada have a lot of humor in them, mixed with sadness, at times. Asaf's stories, from Israel, have an overlaying sadness from just being in a place that is constantly being attacked in minor and major ways, and yet life has to still go on.

This is an interesting look into one person's life. Not all of it is happy. There are happy bits, but there is a lot of tension in the marriage, and a lot of sadness, as I have said.

For those who want to see a slice of someone else's life.

Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review.

A fun edgy take on the graphic novel. Cool art style.