“Obviously one of the great books of all time.”
—Terry Jones, Monthy Python

“Brilliantly rendered and unexpectedly timely … Will reading an erudite, if flat-out hilarious, account of Middle East history help us make sense of our current clash of cultures? Let’s put it this way: ignorance hasn’t worked.”
—Garry Trudeau, creator of Doonesbury

“Gonick’s take on history is whip-smart, skeptical about familiar but questionable stories and absolutely in command of dozens of simultaneous historical threads. He’s also very funny.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A delight. Charming, irreverent, with a true global perspective. A better way to learn human history than… school textbooks.”
—Carl Sagan

“Not simply a comic, but a good story that I can recommend.”
—Richard Leakey

“A wonderfully goofball vision. Serious madness for the whole human family.”
—Richard Gere

“Superb artistry and stand-up wit! The Cartoon History of the Universe is a gift to those of us who love to laugh and who love to learn. Insidiously disguised as cartoon books, Gonick’s well researched and hilariously illustrated graphic texts should be in every library. They are capable of making the densest and most resistant cerebellum absorb and retain REAL INFORMATION! Whoever called comic art “literary junkfood” can eat his words. Gonick’s books are food for thought, rich with humor—and they leave you waiting for the next course.”
—Lynn Johnston, creator of For Better or For Worse

“Larry Gonick should get an Oscar for humor and a Pulitzer for history.”
—Richard Saul Wurman

“An amazing example of the results of over-ambition: a masterpiece!”
—Steve Martin

“Each new volume of Larry Gonick’s epic and irreverent rendition of history is informative, funny and a triumph of the cartoonist’s craft—in other words, cause for celebration.”
—Charles Johnson, author of The Middle Passage (winner of the National Book Award)

“Wells, Toynbee, McNeill, Durant—move over! Make room for a colleague—a witty chronicler-commentator working in a medium more suited than prose to efficiently wedding fact and interpretation. Larry Gonick’s cartoon history… is one of the most amusing, provocative surveys of the planet’s progress ever made… He consistently considers the status of women, lower-class people, and the losers of wars in his account of early civilizations. He also gives appropriate play to the influence of sex upon culture… It’s hard to imagine how Gonick’s achievement could be equaled, let alone bettered.”
—Booklist

“This volume should not be taken as some kind of Mel Brooksish joke. Gonick does his research and interprets his sources with scholarly care. Inspired by the educational comic books of Latin American artist RIUS, Gonick makes world history a blast… his account of the historical rise of Christianity is superb… Gonick maintains the high level of sophistication, skepticism, and just plain fun established by the first volume.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Drawn with painstaking geographical detail but populated by wisecracking cartoon characters, this History guides you through Chinese philosophy, Babylonian hugger-mugger, and the murk of the Dark Ages. There is even a cartoon bibliography at the end of the book. A work of scholarship and looniness, The Cartoon History is a valuable document in its own right.”
—Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly

“This truly funny book [Cartoon History I] covers 13 billion years of history and explains and illustrates the major achievements of modern civilization… The kids will love it, once YOU stop reading it and hand it over. I was totally fascinated, and I’m sure you will be, too.”
—Ann Landers

“Larry Gonick has created a genre all his own. The use of comic art to tell serious history is a brilliant application of the medium. The underlying scholarship in this work reinforces and demonstrates the capability of cartoons as a valid teaching form…. Best of all he is wedding learning with fun. Bravo!”
—Will Eisner

“On wintry evenings when my mood needs cheering, I curl up with Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe. Gonick’s drawings and texts are so irreverent, so unabashedly cynical (yet more informative than many a “serious” history book) that I find myself wiping away tears of laughter, all the while marveling at what kinds of tangled comedies and horrors it took for humankind to evolve into great civilizations—yet with so little “humanist” progress! There’s nothing better for restoring one’s perspective than to be bounced through a few thousand years of war, lechery, and cunning.”
—Rita Dove, former U.S. Poet Laureate, in the Washington Post

“Like a true outsider, [Gonick] mocks academic pretensions and jargon in his books; yet, as a former insider, he has respect for intelligent theories and will present them, even if in shortened form, when he feels it to be appropriate. He follows his sources with precision… and carefully lays out the bibliographies at the end of each book, embellishing them with lots of funny drawings and with a cheerful acknowledgment of the titles he has misplaced and the books he couldn’t finish. The result… is a curious hybrid, at once flippant and scholarly, witty and politically correct, zany and traditional. Mr. Gonick’s approach to the past is personal, free-wheeling, and immensely ambitious.”
—Jonathan Spence, Professor of Chinese History at Yale, in the N.Y. Times

“The most hilarious history books in history.”
—Eric Arnon, 14

“Even the bibliographies are interesting. Really! I’ve read them over and over.”
—Zac Rose, 19

“That part about the sheep [in Volume 2] was really random.”
—Some teenager at a comics convention