Gray Horses

Hope Larson's second book-length work, Gray Horses, follows her debut, Salamander Dream, by only a few months. It is a similarly slim volume, at slightly over 100 pages, and like Salamander Dream, it is printed in a two-tone color scheme.

Gray Horses is about Noemie, a French girl moving to Chicago to study art. There are several plot threads entwined in her story, making the book one part coming-of-age story, one part fish-out-of-water tale, and one part supernatural mystery. While the multiple stories may not affect each other directly, the way Seinfeld episodes end up piling plot threads together into a perfectly resolved heap, but they all contribute to Noemie's growth as a character, giving her the confidence to move through her strange surroundings and adpot them as her own.

Photographs play an important role in the story, showing up in several contexts. Noemie keeps a photograph of a boy next to her bed in the apartment she rents in Chicago, and it's significance becomes clear as the story progresses, revealing Noemie's level of attachment to a past that has already disappeared. There are the photographs of Noemie, taken by a shy and flight-prone boy, in a series of scenes reminiscent of Brian Wood's Local #2, without the creepy aspect. And most importantly, there is the photgraph that turns up at the end of a trail of horse-shaped images that appear to Noemie in various contexts: in the lemon juice "invisible ink" drawing her friend Anna makes for her, in the shadows in one of her secret admirer's photographs, and in the peeling wallpaper of her apartment. It's this last photograph, and the dream sequences that lead to it, that tie together her experiences. This experience, of mementos of the past bringing some meaning or resolution to a third party in the present, reminded me of the early scenes of Amelie. In fact, much of the story carries the same tone of romantic whimsy.

Hope's art style is simple but expressive. There's a precise, economical quality to her linework, reminiscent of Seth at times, most notably in her architectural elements. She has an elegant lettering style as well, using cursive lettering to inegrate sounds and smells in the artwork, and giving her dialogue a home in curlicued word ballons whose tails twist around each other without impairing readability. There's a wonderful variation in the density of her art as well, with heavy blacks piling up in the intense dream sequences, and the warm peach color holding more importance in the daylight scenes, and often defining the shape of the freeform, borderless panels.

Hope is shaping up to be a formidable talent in her generation of young comics artists. Her work is formally experimental, without losing focus on the highly accessible and affecting stories she tells. And she's well-rounded, handling every aspect of her books (script, art, colors, lettering) with an obvious attention to detail. Check out her current ongoing autobio webcomic, She's From Away, to get a taste of her work.