For instance, she took the Mensa test in order to tell the world what it was like, and she once crawled inside the orgone box belonging to the cartoonist William Steig while interviewing him for his obituary.
Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, Boxer focused on the photography of that day and was one of the many New York Times reporters who composed short profiles of the victims, the Portraits of Grief.
[9] Boxer's career as a critic began on the editorial board of The Harvard Crimson, where she reviewed the movie The Europeans and "The Exhibit of Perfect" by the conceptual artist James Lee Byars.
Her pieces included an examination of the visual remains of September 11, a book review of Deirdre Bair's Saul Steinberg biography, and a consideration of "The Masters of American Comics" exhibition from a feminist perspective.
In a critic's notebook headlined "Art of the Internet: A Protest Song, Reloaded," about the musical mashups following Hurricane Katrina, Boxer explored how the meaning of Green Day's "Wake Me Up When September Ends," was forever altered.
She wrote, for example, about the circus around Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirror rooms and the public's craze for participatory art,[15] and she documented the experience of reading all of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Timeon her cellphone.
[25] Her essay "The Exemplary Narcissism of Snoopy,"[26] which was called "stunningly good" and held up as prose to emulate on Bryan Garner's LawProse blog in a post titled "Learning to write by sedulous aping,"[27] was subsequently anthologized in The Peanuts Papers.
Boxer's first graphic novel, In The Floyd Archives: A Psycho-Bestiary (Pantheon, 2001), a comic with footnotes, which The New York Times Book Review described as "a smart, droll, original series of interconnected cartoons"[31] based on Sigmund Freud's case histories (the Rat Man, the Wolf Man, Little Hans, and Dora), stars a cast of neurotic animals in therapy with a bird analyst named Floyd.
"[32] In a piece titled "Floydian Funnies," The Comics Journal noted that "Boxer belongs to the line of erudite, intellectual cartooning exemplified by Jules Feiffer, David Levine and Edward Gorey.
"[38] Tablet magazine noted that her "psychoanalytic comix are ingeniously playful reminders of how much we carry around, no matter how far we think we’ve moved on from the Freudian fantasyland.
In an interview for Print magazine's blog, Steve Heller described Boxer's Tragic-Comics as "exposing the great William Shakespeare to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.