Mother Come Home

Rating:
Summary: Stunning
Review: "Mother, Come Home" breaks away any preconceived notion of what comic books are and takes you on an intense, emotion-filled journey. The art is subtly beautiful, the story is very powerful and you find yourself not only feeling for these characters but also wondering what your life could be if encountered with the same situation. Highly Recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Good writing, but something's amiss...
Review: 'Mother Come Home' certainly deserves praise for its writing. The tragic events viewed through the eyes of a child cleverly unfold through a simple color scheme and a world that mirrors our own but stripped of detail. The lack of detail works both for and against the book. This is not the superior craftsmanship level of Chris Ware and it can't help but feel like an imitator. Toward the last part of the book, even the final tragedy feels forced. Chris Ware was able to inject empathy throughout his masterwork 'Jimmy Corrigan' and its something Hornschemeier never quite accomplishes. Its as though he felt compelled to drive the plot points to their most extreme existantial end which leaves the reader feeling, well...nothing.

Rating:
Summary: A perfect meld of pathos and insight.
Review: If you are interested in discovering why the comic book medium is getting the same respect that more traditional media such as the novel and the short story enjoy, this is a good place to start.

Rating:
Summary: Seriously over-rated
Review: Paul Hornschemeier can draw pretty well. His design sense and use of color is relatively evolved...but is clearly derivative of Chris Ware's. In fact, Hornschemeier is embarrassingly under the sway of Mr. Ware's work. He manages to capture certain superficialities, but none of the depth. Also, Thomas's ever-present mask in the story seems to be a trope stolen from Daniel Clowes's "Immortal, Invisible." These are great influences to have, but it's also an enormous Bloomian agon to overcome and Hornschemeier is nowhere near the task. This book bears the distinct mark of a gifted and intelligent young man who has not yet learned how to assimilate his influences into a style of his own...The major problem with this book though is its undernourished writing. Characters lack believable dimension. They fail to act or talk with the weight of any kind of logical motivation behind them (The teacher is overly grotesque in conception; NO ONE is that clueless. The nurse talks to Thomas in a way no one would ever to a young boy. The father/son motivations at the end are troubled.) You can see the gears shifting on forced plot devices (the phone conversations with the "Teaching Assistant"; The ending again.) The scenes in the mental hospital betray a serious lack of research (the sessions with the doctors are unbelievable.). Certain conversations between father and son are well done, but not consistently enough. The conversations at the end particularly don't work. I won't spoil it for those who wish to read it, but suffice it to say that it fails to ring true on almost every level...I seem to be the lone dissenting voice on this book so far, but I feel that hard-core fans of serious literary comic books need to be warned. This is obviously not on a par with the work of Ware or Clowes, but it also needs to be said that Hornschemeier is lagging behind his peers in age as well: Anders Nilson, Wayne Huizenga, Ariel Schragg, and Adrian Tomine (to name a few) are all still well ahead of him. I still have a certain amount of hope for Mr. Hornschemeier and think he may well end up being one to watch...but he's not there yet.

Rating:
Summary: The wood between the worlds...
Review: Phenomenonal book! The drawings are clean and crisp, but there is something about the way that the prose manages to be at once straight-forward and surreal that reminds me of Edward Gorey. Great, sad, compelling.

Rating:
Summary: Best Graphic Novel EVER
Review: This is the most beautiful I have ever read, and I really mean that. This is the sad story of a young, seven-year-old boy whose mother has just died and whose father is slipping deeper and deeper into an incredible depression and how the both of them, father and son, escape wherever they can to find solace.

Buy this book twice because the first copy will be ruined with your tears.