Abelard

November 5, 2012
At first glance, Dillies (Bubbles & Gondola) and Hautière's story of a naïve chick's impromptu voyage to America may seem like a lighthearted jaunt, but as the titular young bird finds out, things are not always as rosy as they seem. After a chance meeting with a pretty girl, a smitten Abelard departs his bucolic home and heads for America in order to board a rumored flying machine so he can "give her the moon" and prove his love. But a dire fate awaits poor Abelard, whose ignorance of the world's evils leads him into a series of troubling confrontations, followed by a rescue by Gaston, a gruff bear who begrudgingly allows Abelard to tag along on his trip across the Atlantic. Along the way Abelard never loses his sense of optimism, and the world remains an awe-inspiring and whimsical placeâawash in Dillies's lush colors and nuanced sensitivity to moodâdespite the misfortunes that befall him. What eventually reveals itself amid the cute animals and dry humor is a poignant tale echoing the plight of early European immigrants, who abandoned everything they knew in search of a better life and nurtured hope even in the worst of situations.

January 1, 2013
NBM continues to import French comics culture, sometimes kicking and screaming, into the midst of our own. It's not that these compelling but unfamiliar tales aren't a natural fit so much as that they require some searching to find whom exactly they are a natural fit for. This graphic novel is, if anything, so very much more French than Dillies' Bubbles & Gondola (2011). In it, a guileless but optimistic young bird leaves his comfortable marsh, journeying to America in hopes of finding the recently invented flying machine so that he may pick a bunch of stars for his untouchable love, Eppily. Filled with characters damaged by love, spouters of casual racism, and a bear who refuses to see hope until it may be too late, this is not so much for children, though its somber, textured, heavily crosshatched art trades in the anthropomorphization of classic cartooning. Its bittersweet tale of how one life can deeply touch another is meant for burgeoning existentialists and those who wish to see what comics are capable of through the prism of an idiosyncraticphilosophy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)