My Mommy [Hardcover]

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.

-- Casey Brienza

I wandered into a book store today not really looking for anything and picked this up. The cover art is adorable and the voice of the little boy in the first few pages grabbed me. I love the innocence and purity of the boy's feelings. I have 2 kids (one of which is 4) and this really captured for me the way I catch them experiencing the world. I loved it and hope people will appreciate it for the subtle way it expresses such deep and profound emotion.

I won't go into any more of the details of the book; the previous reviewer has done an excellent job of that. I will give my impressions of the book instead. And, I would like to add that this book and artist Emile Bravo were nominated for 3 2010 Eisner awards (the comics equivalent to the Oscars). I just read the book after purchasing it at the San Diego Comic-Con, not knowing anything about it except that it was given great reviews, and that the artwork was lovely. I loved the subtle realism of everyday life as felt by the 5 year old Jean. I say felt, as opposed to seen, because the book does such an excellent job of letting you feel what Jean experiences, through the lovely illustrations and simple narration. When trauma happens to Jean, you feel his trepidation, his fears, his anxieties. The little single-page interludes give added peeks into Jean's life without overstepping the overall story arc. They provide snippets to help you understand why people do what they do, and how that affects Jean. Early on in the book, you sort of know how it ends. But, the journey is so expressively told that you feel Jean's sadness even more deeply. It is a book for older or mature children (9-10 yrs +?) and adults. It took awhile for the subtleties of the emotions to seep in, but once they grabbed me, I felt them as if I were Jean myself. It is a heartfelt autobiographical story of growing up, of learning how one fits into life, and how one should carry on. I highly recommend it.