Abelard
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. --Jesse Karp