Review by New York Times Review
FIRST PUBLISHED IN FRANCE 1? the late 1970s and now collected for the first time in English, Nicole Claveloux's comics are both psychedelic and deeply sober. She was a frequent contributor to Metal Hurlant (Heavy Metal), a French science-fiction magazine, though her work doesn't land firmly in any particular genre. Darkly humorous, existential, erotic, trance inducing - these comics wield a rare and innovative power. In "The Little Vegetable Who Dreamed He Was a Panther," a root vegetable who identifies as a highly feminine panther plots ways of becoming one. In "The Ninny and Her Prince Charming," a woman waits her whole life for love, only to drop dead on her 94th birthday after her prince finally arrives. In "A Little Girl Always in a Dream," a young girl's horrible family orders her to eat tapioca pudding and she watches them morph into menacing, interspecies forms. Then her toy dog comes to life, eating the meat off their bones. Later, the girl imagines the onset of her period and sees herself dancing naked in a tidal wave of blood, wild with happiness. "Enough of these disgusting stories!" a family member scolds, perhaps addressing both the little girl and the author herself. Claveloux's comics encapsulate the desire to change or reinvent oneself - but also to undermine society and the absurd sense of order it imposes. Her characters are often staring out a window or into the distance off the page, beaming out of the panels that contain them. Their facial features change dramatically from one drawing to the next but never disorientingly so - through Claveloux's inconsistencies, each story is imbued with the fluidity of perception. It's not like the fantasies of Disney, where the brand is always front and center. Claveloux takes pleasure in violating the familiar and many of these stories sneer at the stunted, insulting rituals of capitalism. With a wry sort of joy, Claveloux conveys the spectrum contained in polarities: real and unreal, male and female, animal and human, young and old. The most transporting piece in the collection is the title story, "The Green Hand," in which Claveloux's rich, gradient-hued illustrations look like beautiful tattoos - the kind of images one could commit to for life. Rendered with what seems to be black ink, colored markers and an airbrush, the images reflect the theme of transient states - a way of being between selves. The text is written in hypnotic and often hilarious prose by Edith Zha and follows a woman and her housemate: a snarky, lonesome bird of indeterminate gender. The nature of their relationship is also pleasantly elusive - are they lovers? Friends? Is the bird her pet? Her parent? These questions dissolve as we are seduced into the world they share - a kind of portal through which to experience philosophy. The bird becomes hostile when the woman brings home a sweetnatured talking plant. "Green hand" is the equivalent of "green thumb" in France and taking the phrase literally, the woman dyes her hand green. "Why's your hand all green?" the bird asks. "To communicate better with her," the woman says. "Pathetic!" snaps the bird, who ultimately kills the plant. Upon discovering this, the woman floats through the wall in a rage, her dress disintegrating in midair. The story is as much about searching as it is about wandering - how the odyssey of one's life can feel aimless and how some measure of sorrow is often an appropriate response to the culture. Yet "The Green Hand" is oddly punctuated with joy - mostly the joy of making alternative sense, but also a joy in expanding the world of the outsider, with whom Claveloux herself identifies: "I most of all wanted to draw fantastic-dreamy-freaky stories that were also personal, and I was only slightly drawn toward women's lives in general. I don't really like the militant spirit, which, in my view, roasts the neurons and stops one from thinking freely, and I've never been part of a group." Claveloux embraces the compulsion to fantasize. The brilliance of her comics lies in what they require of the viewer, to be intimate with what is not known, both within the work and themselves. LEOPOLDINE CORE is the author of the story collection "When Watched." Claveloux's comics are darkly humorous, existential and erotic.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 3, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
Like a time capsule, these 1970s stories by French cartoonist Claveloux largely untranslated and unseen in the States until this collection are 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.--Flagg, Gordon Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
A woman tries her newly greened hand at growing a plant, but her depressive blue-feathered friend's jealously poisons the leafy new life. During the ensuing argument with the bird, the lady is propelled sans clothing through the walls of her residence to other strange apartments. Waking from the bizarre trip, she leaves the building for a major resort, where the lockstep affluent vacationers remain self-obsessed, ignoring the majesty around them. Meanwhile, the melancholy avian attempts to recapture some lost personal vagary, which takes him on a journey of his own through the modern cityscape and a meeting with a sinister surveyor. Will the globe-trotting gentlewoman and the blue bird reunite? Other stories involve a most murderous family, a little root that dreams of becoming a glamorous panther, a woman waiting patiently for Prince Charming, a youth whose wild fantasies concerning her burgeoning sexuality annoy her family, and other hypnagogic phantasms. Verdict Claveloux (Grabote) and Zha's (coauthor, La Maison sur la digue) explicitly adult pop-art fantasia delivers emotional insight and imaginative visuals that take the driver's seat away from the strong logic of the narrative and enjoyably amble readers toward the byways of the subconscious with hauntingly powerful designs and sagacious observation. [Previewed in "Comics Cross Over," LJ 6/15/17.]-Douglas Rednour, Georgia State Univ. Lib., Atlanta © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
