Website Pop Mythology has published a five-star review of Dark Horse’s new edition of Ann Nocenti and John Bolton graphic novel Someplace Strange. Praising Bolton’s realistic but dream-like art, writer John Kirk wrote, “John Bolton is purely gifted when it comes to illustrating the surreal.” Going on to examine the main theme of children’s nightmares, Kirk related his own daughter’s struggle with nightmares to that of the Someplace Strange’s protagonists, Edward and James, and felt that Ann Nocenti’s writing showed great insight into the experience:
Ann Nocenti grasps this concept. Her bogeymen are more than just the embodiment of evil; they are the embodiment of evil as a child would understand it: sudden violence coupled with explosive melodrama and, most importantly, vanquishable. Evil is scary – to a child – but also defeatable in the most obvious and direct way a kid can imagine. In order to defeat the bogeyman, they become typical square-jawed, muscle-bound, four-coloured heroes who, given confidence by their own vision of themselves, take the fight directly to it. Evil is obvious and there is no question of evil being defeated – Edward and James just need to imagine how.
Grand Design Communications represented Nocenti and Bolton in licensing the rights for Someplace Strange to Dark Horse.