REVIEWS & ENDORSEMENTS
AUDREY NIFFENEGGER
Burger Force is marvellous. Strange, funny and so, so stylish. Burger Force is the dream you have while sleeping it off after the best party ever. Jackie Ryan is an exciting artist and this collection brings her lovely Burger Force together into one quirky volume [#1].
MATTHEW CONDON
This lively, often hilarious, at times chilling political and social history [We'll Show the World: Expo 88] may be the first work to successfully define what it means to be that strange beast - a Queenslander. While the details of the exposition itself are skilfully told, it's the other contextual forces [...] that give this book its thrilling and lively edge. This is the quintessential Queensland story.
BARBARA FELDON
Burger Force is a splendid comic book; it's spectacularly creative and entertaining. Jackie got the 1960s look just right.
EDDIE CAMPBELL
I like Burger Force. It's smart and visually striking. But I feel Jackie Ryan knows an unreasonable number of good-looking people.
KOREN HELBIG
Think Mills & Boon but worse ... and yet simultaneously so much better. And thus, you've been initiated into the weird and wonderful world of the Fanciful Fiction Auxiliary.
BELLA LI
Razor sharp and supremely funny, Burger Force is an inventive mélange of comics, cinema and classic spy thrillers. This is Get Smart (and more) for the twenty-first century.
HUGH LUNN
Jackie Ryan shows there was so much more to Expo 88 than the tap dancers on the pink submarine floating down the Brisbane River. The rorts, the forced resumption of land, the political drama, the arguments, the wild ride to success. Jackie takes us back to that time, that place, and those people so that the memories jump off every page.
RICHARD GLOVER
This is our world - but with a really excellent makeover. Stylish, sexy and satiric - I want to wallpaper my life with Burger Force.
STEVEN CARROLL
This is a witty and astute study of an unlikely subject - the 1988 World Expo in Brisbane [...] that a city often looked down upon as parochial and under the thumb of a paternalistic government should host an international event - is central to its fascination.
FrANCES WHITING
...When Ryan's book We'll Show the World came out in 2018, she remembered her childhood visits to Expo 88 as "like walking inside a kaleiodoscope". The same could be said of the festival [Brisbane Writers Festival] she and her team have created – colourful, surprising and something magical at every turn.'
Myles McGuire
I wonder, is she a polymath? A Renaissance woman? Or are these merely cover stories, false identities worn and discarded? The defining feature of Ryan’s oeuvre is her affinity for masks and artifice, simultaneously camp and chic.
[...] Are the performers, the characters, her masks, façades she dons, a riff on Cindy Shermanesque self-portraiture? Or does the real Jackie Ryan exist in the space around the subjects, in the totalising vision at once enlarging and compressive?
TRENT JAMIESON
Funny, sublime, stylish and sly, Burger Force is a guaranteed delight. One of my favourite comics and soon to be one of yours.
CASS MORIARTY
[...] if you have a taste for the wacky, weird and witty, you will appreciate the special kind of intellectual ferocity combined with a sense of fun that has gone into making this project [Burger Force].
MATTHEW WENGERT
Six [Fanciful Fiction Auxiliary] writers took the stage an had the audience laughing hard at their seriously ridiculous - or ridiculously serious - take on the ever-popular romance genre [...] all dug deeply into their profound insight into the delicate flower that is human love, and together produced a colourful bouquet of hilarity, that they threw to their adoring fans.
Phil Brown
It takes a steady hand and a lot of skill and knowledge to successfully run a writer’s festival. BWF [Brisbane Writers Festival] has had its ups and downs with directors, but it feels like things have stabilised. And Ryan’s last album, er, festival was good. So, let’s play the second. Put it on the turntable and away we go.