“Sergel’s visuals fall in the same school as Nick Drnaso and Chris Ware… …this focus on details shows where Sergel’s attention is going, a method of communicating the subjectivity of experience without spelling it out. Form serves function beautifully.” - Paste Magazine, The 25 Best Comics of 2016 (So Far)
"Sergel’s visuals skillfully juxtapose the heated emotions of the story with the posed, deadpan quality of his characters, loading this snappy, pocket-sized parable with equal amounts of drollery and poignancy—and just a touch of menace." – Publishers Weekly
"The uncomfortable truth with which Bald Knobber leaves the reader is the assertion that much of this country’s history is the history of violence smoothed over not by justice but by time." – The Comics Journal
"What’s surprising is that Sergel is able to put an unexpected spin at the end of the tale of dysfunction. One of the aspects missing from Cole’s investigation into and retelling of a historical event is the understanding that history has a perspective and that often reflects the agenda of the person or group doing the retelling. In many cases, this has caused history to be injected with the dichotomy of good versus evil, of parsing out moral aspects to the different sides and therefore creating the political divisions that sustain American anger. But Sergel’s ultimate solution is to turn away from that binary and look beyond the surface on all sides. Which doesn’t mean he lessens the power of Cole’s hurt, but instead widens the possibilities in the emotional give and take that’s portrayed. I’m sure the Bald Knobbers were actually pretty complicated, too." – Comics Beat
"The weaving of the two stories works brilliantly. We feel Cole’s desperation, made so much bigger by the context of a whole country in post-war dissolution. Divorce, Sergel suggests, is a battleground, with kids as the losers. What makes Cole unique in the wide range of books about unhappy divorces is the historical lens he uses to explain his world. Taking a fringe story from the 1880s that isn’t widely known, Sergel gives Cole an expressive depth beyond the usual teen angst." – New York Journal of Books
