The Green Hand and Other Stories

September 4, 2017
French artist Claveloux published most of her work for adults in the 1970s in Heavy Metal and other magazines. This is the first time her short stories have been collected in English, and they show an impish sense of humor and fanciful, rounded art style in the vein of Heinz Edelmann and Terry Gilliam. Most of the stories are goofy, hallucinatoy skits, some written by her frequent collaborator Edith Zha, fitfully amusing and disturbing by turns. But while most don’t quite merit the acclaim bestowed on them by Daniel Clowes’s flag-waving introduction (“it arouses feelings that can’t be quantified or explained”), her ardor for Lovecraftian weirdness gets a solid workout in the title piece and the linked stories that follow. Starting as a lightly surreal mood piece about a woman, a plant, and a depressed bird, it starts vaulting through dimensions with alacrity and ends on an unexpectedly romantic note. Cherubic but lethal babies are a recurring theme in other tales, including one that follows a surreal chain of family murders and another about a young princess who suffers when her father remarries. These pages dream furiously.

January 1, 2018
Like a time capsule, these 1970s stories by French cartoonist Clavelouxlargely untranslated and unseen in the States until this collectionare a reminder of just how outrageous and imaginative comics could be back in that freewheeling decade. In the title story, her pet bird's jealousy over a newly acquired talking houseplant leads a woman on an interdimensional quest that ends in unexpected romance. Other narratives involve a baby's nonchalant recital of his family's string of intergenerational murders, an aspirational tuber who dreams of becoming a panther, a loquacious infant auditioning new parents on the subway, and a young woman anticipating her first period, who fantasizes about drowning the world in blood. Claveloux's exquisitely detailed illustrations reflect such contemporary forces as underground comix artists from Robert Crumb to Victor Moscoso, designer Heinz Edelman (Yellow Submarine), and the Day-Glo colors of psychedelic posters. But the biggest influence seems to be Lewis Carroll (she illustrated a French translation of Alice in Wonderland around this time). Her amalgam, though, is a singularly remarkable trip.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)