Rules for Dating My Daughter: Cartoon Dispatches from the Front-Lines of Modern Fatherhood

Though it’s billed as “the modern father’s guide to good parenting,” anyone demanding clear answers on parenting will only find more questions in Dawson’s (Troop 142) short comic pieces presenting contemporary issues around raising a child. Some directly relate to the topic, such as the title story. Others take a more philosophical journey covering the larger political and social concerns affecting personal lives. Dawson’s sharp piece refuting the idea that Americans love an underdog was a mild viral hit when it was released on Medium, and rightly so, but that’s just the tip of a sometimes bleak iceberg. Also effective are chapters, all drawn in a loose cartoony style, imagining his own family surviving the climate-change-induced breakdown of civilization and thoughts on guns and Christmas. If he sometimes seems helpless against the universe, Dawson still channels the parental zeitgeist, as shown in his suggestion that the one good choice is to raise thoughtful children who understand reality. (May)