Mother, Come Home

Features of Mother, Come Home

With clean, distinctive art and poignant storytelling, this is a quietly stunning tale of a father and son struggling, by varying degrees of escapism and fantasy, to come to terms with the death of the boy's mother.Mother, Come Home is Paul Hornschemeiers piercing graphic-novel debut, long out of print and now available for the first time in hardcover. It secured the cartoonists place as one of his generations most skillful and ambitious practitioners, and proved a harbinger of the subject matter that the artist would go on to explore most consistently in later work: the nuclear family.Mother, Come Home quietly studies the inner lives of recently widowed David and his 7-year-old son, Thomas; both are unable to deal with their grief directly. Thomas, protected by a lions mask that his mother gave him, constructs an identity for himself as the groundskeeper: ritual and routine, already important to children that age, become paramount to him. He 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 Hornschemeiers controlled brushwork is clean, and his nine-panel page layouts pace Davids inexorable descent into utter despair. Hornschemeier is equally precise when it comes to Mother, Come Homes color palette: subdued but warm, which suits the storys melancholy and contemplative mode. Mother, Come Home is a powerful work with universal themes of anguish and loss.