Giving it three stars solely because the file was so grainy it was impossible to read. I interviewed the author in 2021 and trust this will be a good read!

The digital copy of this book just isn't great. I think I want to give it another chance if/when I can find a physical copy. I can't rate higher/lower than a 3, because right now it just wouldn't be fair.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for letting me read an advanced copy of this. However the quality of the ebook pages made it very difficult to read the fine detailed footnotes and led me to having to dnf it shortly into starting it and I plan to wait for a copy to be at my local library as I've read from Dave Baker before and wasn't a huge fan of his work as a writer on Forest Hills Bootleg Society with Nicole Goux. I wanted to give his work another shot though and plan on reviewing again when I have a more accessible way of doing so.

This title is definitely for fans of Infinite Jest. If you enjoyed how David Foster Wallace used the interplay of text and footnotes (PS—don’t skip the footnotes) for an additional layer of meaning, then this is for you. If IJ’s format pissed you off, maybe not as much. However, as someone who couldn’t finish IJ despite multiple attempts, I still found this title enjoyable, though not my favorite Dave Baker work.

As always thank you to Net Galley and Publisher for a copy !

I have Mixed opinions about what I could read from the digital copy, as the document was extremely grainy and in some parts illegible or just a headache to read.

The story is told in an interesting way between articles and interviews, as well as by the actual comic itself. It gives house of leaves vibes I was very excited.

I missed bits and pieces because of the document quality however i will be purchasing this book for a clearer read !

This is very meta. We start out reading about how all this got put together and then reading a comic about Mary Tyler Moorehawk and then there are articles about the show and all the behind the scenes drama about it. That is a lot of layers for a graphic novel. It was almost too much, but I also think that maybe I wasn’t in the right mindset to read it. So if you like over the top meta storytelling, then buy a physical copy of this and settle in for a quite a read.

I can only half give a review. The artwork on digital was very difficult to read for parts of it. The parts I could get thru and read where it didn't hurt my eyes was very interesting story but I think I lost half of it by not being able to read everything. If planning on having a ebook version rethink colors. I do wonder if it would've been on my kindle paperwhite maybe it would have been better then full color but I also worry on that the pink would've been too light.
all around seemed like a good story but I only could understand half due to not being able to read the other half.

This was kind of a disappointing way to conclude my reading year.  The story was just okay, and I didn't really love it.  There was a lot going on.

i will say, i appreciate what this book was trying to do. metanarrative is such an important tool, but this just wasn’t executed in a way that made it easy to digest whatsoever. i love a good footnotes side story, and splicing the graphic novel elements with the fake magazine physicalist today was an interesting tactic for sure, but the sheer DENSITY, even in the graphic novel portion, made this a really unpleasant read for me. there was just so much to retain and the graphic novel section had so much text that i found myself wanting to skim the whole thing just to save brain power. this was so ambitious which i commend but definitely missed the mark.

Like so many of my favorite books, Mary Tyler MooreHawk is near-impossible to categorize. Part dystopian literary fiction, part biographical magazine, and part nine-panel comic, Mary Tyler MooreHawk refuses to settle for just one genre. Dave Baker has succeeded in creating a multimedia masterpiece that has a lot to say about art, the pursuit of creativity, and the cult of personalities. Come for the bubblegum pink sci-fi adventure; stay for the avant-garde art and discussions on the ownership of ideas.

There are two Dave Bakers in Mary Tyler MooreHawk - Dave Baker, the journalist, and Dave Baker, the artist. Mary Tyler Moorehawk is a story of these two Dave Bakers and their connection to the titular cult-classic television show. Chapters of the Mary Tyler Moorehawk comic come between articles from a mysterious magazine called "Physicalist Today." These alternating sections combine to create a dystopian world with two Dave Bakers (probably) and one fictional teenage superhero.

The comic portion of Mary Tyler MooreHawk is a phantasmagoria of bubblegum pink, and I mean that in the best way possible. The comics are shades of pink and white - completely pink and white. Imagine black and white newspaper cartoons, but make them pink and white. Should this work? It does when it comes from Dave Baker. Mary Tyler MooreHawk is a teenage superhero, super-sleuth, and all-around incredible character. Landing somewhere between Indiana Jones and the Justice League, these comic chapters were delightfully fun and incredibly heartfelt.

The Physicalist Today magazine sections were my favorite part of the novel. I loved the photos and felt drawn to the world they depicted. The juxtaposition of the corporatized world against its surrealist subculture is striking. The magazine sections have underlying themes of both commercialism and corporatism, which I found particularly poignant. Details of the near-future world are drip-fed throughout the novel, leading to satisfying reveals of what physicalist means, who the audience of Physicalist Today is, and what Dave Baker's world looks like.

Final Thoughts:

Mary Tyler Moorehawk is everything I never knew I needed in a graphic novel. It’s a philosophical, speculative triumph.

Rating: A huge 5/5 Stars.

Thanks to Top Shelf for providing me with an advanced review copy. All the above thoughts are my own.

--- The review will go live on Back Shelf Books at the following link on February 8, 2024. It is visible now for review.

Unfortunately I am unable to provide feedback on this book as the provided review copied on mobile and desktop are so poorly formatted and of such low quality that I can’t make out the detail of the illustration.

If you want people to review books you need to provide them an intelligible copy of them - the NG app version is impossibly grainy and the desktop file download only presented the top half of each page

I have enjoyed some of Dave Baker's previous work and have been really looking forward to Mary Tyler Moorehawk. Unfortunately I did not realize it would be quite so dense as it is. There is a lot of action, adventure, prose, and SO MANY FOOTNOTES. At least for the PDF in the ARC it certainly made the footnotes during the comics difficult to read. I look forward to grabbing a physical copy when it is released but until then, the small footnotes caused some confusion for me upon reading.

I don’t even know what’s going on here. This is so confusing. Too much and not enough happening all at once. A cacophony of confusion.

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher IDW Publishing for gifting me at the holidays with an advanced copy of the most wondrous and mind-blowing graphic novel/prose/experimental prose, even possible future memoir things I have read in quite a long time.

I've been reading comics longer than I have been reading books. I was drawn to the old Sunday Cartoon Pages staring at the art and laughing at what I saw. My grandmother began buying me comics from the newsstand starting with Disney, and Sad Sack with big pictures, moving to superheroes. In my time I have seen comics change from something bought in small stores with many steps leading down, to comic book stores, chains and online. Dark Knights, Ninja Turtles, Radioactive Hamsters, dead heroes, heroes reborn, and dead again. Some of the ones considered classics I think are just ok, some forgotten I mourn like certain relatives. A few have left me with what the heck was that moments. Less have left me with a, I never thought I could read something like this, I am better for it. Mary Tyler Moorehawk is one of those stories. A book that left me going, everything seems so familiar, and yet I have never read a book like this. And I need more. Mary Tyler Moorehawk by writer, artist, designer Dave Baker, is an adventure story, a memoir, an entertainment profile, and futurist view of a world that is grey, where TV is dead, washing machine viewing is in, art is underground, the future is dark, and yet one young woman fights on.

Mary Tyler Moorehawk is a hero with a bodyguard, a cyborg half-brother, a step-mother who is a genius, a love for adventure, a long list of enemies, a wish to find a haunted house to explore, rather than the underground places she usually finds herself. Told in nine panels her adventures pit her against a foe returned from the grave, who died with Moorehawk's mother, with plans to destroy the world, and take Moorehawk has left away. Mary Tyler Moorehawk is also a cult television show, shown in a future that has recycled art, broadcast on the screen for washing machines, before stopping with a last episode unseen. Dave Baker is a young reporter who loved the show as a child, and is doing a profile on the show, hoping to learn more about the making of, the ideas behind, and about its enigmatic creator, also named Dave Baker. Journalist Dave Baker gives a history of a future that could be ours, as he explores a future America tracking clues, and hints and hopefully more about Dave Baker.

This book is basically Philip K. Dick writing a comic book, while writing another book at the same time, while going through both a divorce, his exegesis and his dealer going AWOL. What starts as a fun looking comic book, almost for kids, gos into a prose account about a very sad sounding future full of billionaire ice cream company innovators buying public access television to broadcast shows on washing machines after an entertainment purge. The main character is a writer writing about a show created by a man who has disappeared with the same name as Dave Baker, who also is creating this entire adventure. This could be some sort of Dick novel A Minority Report about Electronic Sheep Darkly. The comic is good, funny, with great characters, lots of names that all should have shows about them. The prose writing is riveting, a Steve Erickson meets Mark Leyner kind of style, about a dark future that rid itself of technology, not for the better but for the dull. Baker is a great stylist. The amount of work this must have taken to create, I can't imagine. The art is fun, middle school adventure book fun. The writing deep, introspective, sad, and yet really really smart. I can't say enough good things about it.

Recommended for all those who always want graphic novel storytelling to finally start striving for those heights that have been promised since the 80's. Oh this book will change things, oh this will change things. I'm still waiting, at least until now. Hopefully this will change some stuff. Fans of comics will like this, fans of Philip K Dick, Steve Erickson, Mark Leyner, Bunny Modern, experimental writing, will love this. Art designers will get a kick out of the photos. Role players will love the idea of the future. I can see this being a hard sell to people. And to read. It is so worth it. Dave Baker is really a talent. I can't wait to read more.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me to read this advanced copy of the graphic novel in exchange for my honest opinion. I LOVED the weird, crazy, AMAZING concept of this book. It made me immediately think of "House of Leaves", which is one of the most daring novels I've ever read. The mostly pink art style immediately drew me in, I'm a huge fan of the way this novel was illustrated. It's so fun while still showing some of the most horrific and heartbreaking material. I think the author interweaving the comic and excerpts from "his life" was masterfully done and so, so interesting. Everything about "Mary Tyler MooreHawk" drew me in and kept me interested, I honestly cannot wait to buy a physical copy of this for myself. I hope to see much more from this author illustrator in the future!

Fun and cute. It wasn’t a kiddie read but it put you in the mindset of a child and that made the read that much more enjoyable seeing things from a child’s perspective.

The contents of a package left on the doorstep of cartoonist Dave Baker; articles by the journalist Dave Baker about the short-lived TV series Mary Tyler MooreHawk, plus comics set in its world, seemingly by the show's reclusive, wronged creator, who was called...yeah, you guessed it. For me, the comics were very much the weak link here. On the face of it, they could be wonderfully odd, something like Goldie Vance taking the lead in a Saturday morning cartoon of God Hates Astronauts, full of dialogue like "Hello, winged dog zombies. My name is Cutie Boy, world's nicest robot. I'll be killing you now. Have a nice day!", and a supporting cast including such memorable folk as Master Silverborn Murdershock: "Part ghost, part samurai, part dragon-person, today leads a martial arts dojo part-time and works as a mystical bounty-hunter the rest of the week." But it's hard to feel the strangeness of Murdershock, or Dreeb Lazenby (psychic head-handed bastard son of nobody's favourite Bond actor), when they've all been crammed into a nine-panel grid where nothing has room to get weird, and coloured only in pink, a choice which turns out to be far less readable than either monochrome or full colour. Yes, there turn out to be in-world reasons for both these problems, but they nevertheless make for a reading experience reminiscent of bubblegum - and I don't mean in the sense the word is normally used of art, I mean it literally looks like the unappetising pink stuff left over after someone has had a good old chew.

Now, you could assume that if the comic in a comic isn't much cop, then that would be a fatal flaw, and normally you'd be correct. But the further into this you go, the more of it is articles about Mary Tyler MooreHawk from Physicalist Today magazine, an illegal publication* from a surprisingly believable future where minimalism and capitalism deepened their accommodation, such that corporate personhood has now reached the point where companies can adopt children, and bankrupting one counts as murder - but at the same time most physical possessions have been banned. As such, television is watched communally, mainly operating at the level of inanity one would currently find on TikTok, only at least here they suffer for it - popular shows include Come Watch Me Stub My Toe!, But My Butt Is On Fire!, and Will I Die If I Jump Off This?. Within which environment, one maverick business finds a loophole, and aims to recreate TV drama, except broadcasting to dishwashers. At their best, these sections have a bleak absurdity suggesting dystopia as sillified by Steve Aylett, while also managing to find a new way to look at fandom, the way so many of the originators of the culture we loved ended up bitter and broke, and even the puzzling truth that we don't necessarily always like the things we love: my favourite bit of the whole thing was probably the consensus among MTMH fans that the show itself never quite lives up to the opening credits.

*Which, OK, has higher production values than I'd normally associate with samizdat, but then, if it is specifically for an audience who are into physical artefacts...

(Netgalley ARC)

Dave Baker’s upcoming opus isn’t easily pigeonholed nor should it be. Although NetGalley categorizes it as a comic/graphic novel, it’s really an admixture of comics and magazine-styled prose that toys around with literary elements on a metatextual level. The comic portions of the book chronicle episodes of the titular fictitious short-lived TV program, an action-adventure space opera following “teen sleuth” Mary Tyler MooreHawk and the ragtag interplanetary crew that adopts her into their team as they embark on various quests and deal with the most eccentric, wildest of foes along the way. Having read Baker’s previous graphic novels, namely Fuck Off Squad and Everyone is Tulip, I can say his work does have robust concepts and this is no exception. Inspired influences from pulpy sci-fi serials to Johnny Quest are proudly on display. Conversely, Baker’s strong premises atrophy from sloppy execution which this comic definitely suffers from. These episodic installments throw you right in the thick of the action inundating the audience with a plethora of characters we never have time to know beyond a surface level. Yes, there are footnotes throughout and character descriptions in every story to contextualize the action and settings, but they should be supplementary and not necessary to understanding the plot, especially if you’re going to use them pervasively with the plodding explanations seen here. Eventually, I was glossing over these parts because of how tedious it was.

Art-wise, I found the pink-purplish color scheme and pulpy aesthetic visually appealing and thematically fitting, particularly the splash pages which are beautiful enough on their own to be curated in an art book.
Unfortunately, these masterful illustrative skills don’t translate as well during most of the action scenes where too many things happen at once in a slapdash fashion.

Where Dave Baker’s writing excels, however, is the prose sections which is when the book gets really meta. Set within a retro-futurist backdrop, we primarily see articles from issues of Physicalist Today, a periodical for (you’ve guessed it) Physicalists, a niche of hobbyists who are into and collect physical items, which have been mostly discarded or banned due to environmental concerns. These pieces dive into the behind-the-scenes of Mary Tyler MooreHawk which only ran for nine episodes before being prematurely canceled and remaining in obscurity outside of a small circle of avid fans, including the writer of these articles, who’s this book’s namesake, searching for the MTMH creator who’s also named Dave Baker. So you could say this is Dave Baker’s Dave Baker’s Dave Baker search (try saying that thrice as fast). As easy as it would be for me to make fun of how self-aggrandizing that sounds, the lost/obscure media fanatic in me dug the whole underground mystery element behind this fictitious production and the whereabouts of the people involved. Since this takes place in a future where television is slowly being revived (via dishwasher sets), the events here in many ways mirror the first Golden Age of Television and parts of the Silver Age during the 1950s and 1960s, so it feels like a love letter to that era and one I’m enthralled in at that

Amazingly, for a book more focused on literary experimentation with form, there is some good character development as well. Article writer Dave Baker goes through an enlightening arc by the end where he finally meets his idol the MTMH creator Dave Baker which results in one of the most beautiful open-ended conclusions I’ve read serving as a bittersweet reminder to cherish one’s creative self-worth.

Overall, Mary Tyler MooreHawk is the most unique book I’ve come across recently due to its homage and recontextualization of pop cultural ephemera that’ll appeal to any obscure media enthusiast and literary fiction reader. If the work’s comic aspect, which takes up a significant chunk of the pages, was actually engaging to read, I probably would have considered this the best upcoming 2024 book. I’d say Dave Baker should write more prose since that’s clearly where his strengths lie.

On that note, here’s a quote from page 246 I would like to end the review on:

“In many ways, writers are like drug addicts. We’re always looking for the next high. We’re always attempting to collect that final piece of the puzzle We’re always trying to connect desperate narrative elements into a cohesive whole.”

Thanks Netgalley and publisher for allowing me to read this graphic novel for free.

Unfortunately I couldn’t understand it because there was too much action going on without context. The text was hard to read like it made me feel I was trying my best not to throw up. It was like reading a merry go round of text. I’m so disappointed as I felt this novel would have potential!