Think of The Naked Boy, by Daniel Duford, as a Marvel Comic written by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Woody Guthrie, penciled by Jose Orozco, inked by Steve Ditko, lettered by Walt Whitman, and published by the members of the Ashcan School. It is a phantasmagoria of myth and history that contains legions, speaking in the grand, rowdy, mournful voice of America herself.
Jon Raymond author of The Half Life and Sustainability
Daniel Duford’s The Naked Boy succeeds where Horatio Greenough’s statue of George Washington failed by creating a true representation of the mythological spirit of the United States. Although each are cartoon exaggerations in their own right, Duford’s work displays the dark undercurrent of U.S. history that is such a necessary element for telling the whole story. The Naked Boy lives in a murky world of fear and competition, one that is vivid and lived in. It’s a world that you may not want to live in yourself, but the truth is that you already do.
Ryan Alexander-Tanner, To Teach: the Journey, in Comics
The Naked Boy is a great American epic in the raw, revolutionary spirit of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Daniel Duford’s graphic road trip presents compellingly strange characters as well as familiar faces: Woody Guthrie, Angela Davis, Frederick Douglass, Walt himself. “As you see,” declares Sitting Bull to the Naked Boy in Part 3, “we are very much alive.” I felt invigorated, too, by the energy, intensity, and meaningfulness of this journey—at once so dark, and so enlightening.
Karen Karbiener, NYU Professor and Walt Whitman scholar
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