Mother Come Home - Tapa dura

Hornschemeier's exceptionally powerful work opens with a man drifting a la Superman in flight, sadly searching for someone, and pursued on the ground by whale-headed figures that try to drag him into an ocean. He is seven-year-old Thomas Tennant's father. His wife, Thomas' mother, has died of cancer, and he is adrift on a sea of grief and guilt. He eventually must go into residential therapy, leaving Thomas with an aunt and uncle. As for Thomas--who, as an adult, narrates the book while, as a child, he is its visual center--under a cape and lion mask that his mother gave him, he has become "the groundskeeper," picking up around the house, taking phone messages, and tending his mother's abandoned garden and her grave. Eventually, Thomas loses his father, too, in a shocking yet inevitable, strangely gentle climax. To portray this intimate emotional drama, Hornschemeier sticks to clean-lined, flat figuration against single-color backdrops; to a palette excluding blue, in which flesh tones and Thomas' blond hair are the brightest hues; and to a straightforward angle of vision, as if the reader were sitting in a theater watching the action on a level stage. -- Ray Olson

Hornschemeier's "Forlorn Funnies" comics series has been something of an underground hit in art-comics circles. His first book collection is a grimly melancholic domestic tragedy, written from the point of view of a young boy named Thomas who's dealing with the death of his mother by retreating deep into a fantasy world while his father gradually collapses into insanity. Hornschemeier has been compared to Chris Ware, and while the two cartoonists have a few obvious points of similarity--a fondness for flat, muted colors, relentless depressiveness and understated drawing that captures the solidity of objects with a few lines--Hornschemeier has a unique sense of formal invention and a gift for subtleties of facial expressions. The metaphor that drives this work is symbolic logic, both the philosophical kind that obsesses the father and ultimately destroys him, and the logic that Thomas imposes on the baffling world by turning everything into simple symbols, like the lion mask he wears to play at being powerful. Hornschemeier renders Thomas's imaginary reinterpretations of his real life in a different style from the rest of the book: childlike single-line drawings, representing everyone as animals. And the metafictional conceit that frames the book doesn't fully come into focus until the final page. The plot is a real three-hanky weeper, but Hornschemeier leverages some of its heaviness into bittersweet absurdity. He's a talent to watch.

Adult/High School-Collecting two issues of Hornschemeier's "Forlorn Funnies" series, Mother, Come Home is a stand-alone retrospective tale of family tragedy told by Thomas Tennant, who lost his mother to cancer when he was seven. The story opens after her death, with his professor father struggling to maintain some sense of comfort and equilibrium for himself and his son. Thomas, occasionally donning a superhero cape and lion mask, fights to keep things together by cleaning up after his father, lying to the college when his dad misses yet another class, and tending his mother's garden. Needing more help than his son can provide, the father checks himself into residential care. Forced to move in with an uncle and aunt, Thomas copes by entering a bright, cartoonish fantasy world where everything is how he wants it. His fantasies drive the heart-wrenching climax when he "rescues" his father from the care center. The simplified forms and muted earth tones of the artwork alongside dark and serious themes create links to Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Pantheon, 2000), but Hornschemeier wields that rare gift of layered subtlety. Be it an almost imperceptible change in facial expressions or the slow death of a flower, he says significant, moving things in a few panels that would take pages to convey in a novel. But the book's greatest strength is the story itself and the lessons it offers for life, loss, and, most importantly, how to move on. -- Matthew L. Moffett

opens with a man drifting a la Superman in flight, sadly searching for someone, and pursued on the ground by whale-headed figures that try to drag him into an ocean. He is seven-year-old mother, has died of cancer, and he is adrift on a sea of grief and guilt. He eventually must go into residential therapy, leaving Thomas with an aunt and uncle. As for Thomas--who, as an adult, narrates the book while, as a child, he is its visual center--under a cape and lion mask that his mother gave him, he has become "the groundskeeper," picking up around the house, abandoned garden and her grave. Eventually, Thomas loses his father, too, in a shocking yet inevitable, strangely gentle climax. To portray this intimate emotional drama, Hornschemeier sticks to clean-lined, flat figuration against single-color backdrops; to a palette excluding hair are the brightest hues; and to a straightforward angle of vision, as if the reader were sitting in a theater watching the action on a level stage.

series has been something of an underground hit in art-comics circles. His first book collection is a grimly melancholic domestic tragedy, written from the point of view of a young boy named mother by retreating deep into a fantasy world while his father gradually collapses into insanity. Hornschemeier has been compared to Chris Ware, and while the two cartoonists have a few obvious points of similarity--a fondness for flat, muted colors, relentless depressiveness and understated drawing that captures the solidity of objects with a few lines--Hornschemeier has a unique sense of formal invention and a gift for subtleties of facial expressions. The metaphor that drives this work is symbolic logic, both the philosophical kind that obsesses the father and ultimately destroys him, and the logic that Thomas imposes on the baffling world by turning everything into simple symbols, like the lion mask he wears to play at being powerful. reinterpretations of his real life in a different style from the rest of the book: childlike single-line drawings, representing everyone as animals. And the metafictional into focus until the final page. The plot is a real three-hanky weeper, but Hornschemeier leverages some of its heaviness into bittersweet

Adult/High School-Collecting two issues of series, Mother, Come Home is a stand-alone retrospective tale of family tragedy told by Thomas Tennant, who lost his mother to cancer when he was seven. The story opens after her death, with his professor father struggling to maintain some sense of comfort and equilibrium for himself and his son. Thomas, occasionally donning a superhero cape and lion mask, fights to keep things together by cleaning up after his father, lying to the college when his dad misses yet another class, and tending Needing more help than his son can provide, the father checks himself into residential care. Forced to move in with an uncle and aunt, Thomas copes by entering a bright, cartoonish fantasy world where everything is how he wants it. His fantasies drive the heart-wrenching climax when he "rescues" his father from the care center. The simplified forms and muted earth tones of the artwork alongside dark and serious themes Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Pantheon, 2000), but Hornschemeier wields that rare gift of layered subtlety. Be it an almost imperceptible change in facial expressions or the slow death of a flower, he says significant, moving things in a few panels that would take pages to convey in a the story itself and the lessons it offers for life, loss, and, most importantly, how to move on.

An exquisitely written and beautifully drawn exploration of grief. -- Martha Cornog

Mother, Come Home is a subtle, dark story about death and madness and fantasy It's not bleak, though; perhaps Hornschmeier's lesson is that we all can, if we try if we step outside our rituals and fantasies and reach out to each other, we can make it through. --Andrew Wheeler"

Hornschemeier retains an audacious sense of what is possible in the graphic arts.--Steve Duin

Hornschemeier doesn t simply push the panel edges of the comics medium; he designs entirely off the page, encouraging other creators to join him over the horizon."

Back in print: the debut graphic novel from the author of The Three Paradoxes. Mother, Come Home is Paul Hornschemeier's piercing graphic-novel debut: it secured the cartoonist's place as one of his generation's most skillful and ambitious practitioners. Mother, Come Home quietly studies the inner lives of recently widowed David and his 7-year-old son, Thomas. Thomas struggles desperately to keep up appearances while his father, a professor of symbolic logic, becomes lost in abstractions. Father and son begin to retreat into their fantasies, but only one emerges. Mother, Come Home is masterfully drawn: Eisner-, Harvey-and Ignatz-Award-nominated Hornschemeier's controlled brushwork is clean, and his nine-panel page layouts pace David's inexorable descent into utter despair. Hornschemeier is equally precise when it comes to Mother, Come Home's color palette: subdued but warm, which suits the story's melancholy and contemplative mode. Mother, Come Home is a powerful work, and, because of its universal themes of anguish and loss, has resonance beyond its core audience of alternative-comics readers.