Five-year-old
Jean has a busy father, a pugnacious younger brother, a grouchy
schoolteacher, a kindhearted nanny…and a mother who
has long been missing. Where has she gone? His next-door neighbor
Michele seems to know and delivers regular postcards from around the
world addressed to Jean from his mommy. At school, at home,
and with family and friends, Jean slowly but surely comes to terms
with the realities of the world out there and the strength within
himself.
My Mommy Is in America and She Met Buffalo Bill
is a semiautobiographical French comic album written by
Jean Regnaud and illustrated by Émile Bravo. Critically acclaimed, it
has won both the 2008 Essentials Award at the 35th Festival of
Angoulême, France, and the 2008 Tam Tam Literary Award from the
Salon du Livres et de la Presse Jeunesse. Bravo’s short story “Young
Americans” was nominated for an Eisner Award in 2008. This is the first
of the creators’ long works to be published in an
English translation.
On the surface, there does not seem to be much in the way of a
narrative arc to the storyline. Jean’s days are a disjointed mixture of
reading lessons, pillow fights, and annoying older relatives.
Nothing world-shattering happens here, not even, for example, when a
terrified Jean is instructed to visit a school psychoanalyst. But then,
“world-shattering” would not be the point. In actuality,
this graphic novel is an exquisitely subtle coming-of-age tale: It
begins with a young boy anxious about what other people think of his
motherless family and ends with that same boy, only half a
year later, located happily in a world where only he—and not who,
what, or where his mother is—matters. It is, in short, about the
realization of a child’s selfhood.
Artistically, this comic is a fascinating amalgamation of visual
techniques. Some pages are little more than pinup illustrations with or
without accompanying text, identical to what you might find
in a children’s picture book. Other pages are sequences of sequential
art without panels, while still others have conventional
comic-book-style panels and layouts. There are also numerous
single-sheet vignettes that resemble the sort of situational humor
that is the bread and butter of newspaper funnies. The last works
especially well, given that both the artwork’s style and the
story’s thematic mood bear a certain amount of resemblance to Charles
Schultz’s Peanuts.
My Mommy Is in America and She Met Buffalo Bill has been
published in English by Fanfare as an oversized hardcover book that
builds an elegant, transitional bridge between children’s
picture books and graphic novels. By teaching young people the set of
visual literacies necessary to read sequential art, this modest yet
meticulously crafted work may help to make some of them
lifelong comic book readers. Furthermore, the volume is high-quality
and durable enough to sustain the countless rereadings of a young fan—or
fans.
Source: GraphicNovelReporter
Auteur : Casey Brienza
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire