Synopses & Reviews
Mother, Come Home is Paul Hornschemeier's piercing graphic-novel debut, long out of print and now available for the first time in hardcover. It secured the cartoonist's place as one of his generation's 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 lion's 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 Hornschemeier's controlled brushwork is clean, and his nine-panel page layouts pace David's inexorable descent into utter despair. Hornschemeier is equally precise when it comes to Mother, Come Home's color palette: subdued but warm, which suits the story's melancholy and contemplative mode. Mother, Come Home is a powerful work with universal themes of anguish and loss.
Review
opens with a man drifting a la Superman in flight, sadly searching for someone, and pursued on the ground by whale-headed figures that try to drag him into an ocean. He is seven-year-old mother, has died of cancer, and he is adrift on a sea of grief and guilt. He eventually must go into residential therapy, leaving Thomas with an aunt and uncle. As for Thomas--who, as an adult, narrates the book while, as a child, he is its visual center--under a cape and lion mask that his mother gave him, he has become "the groundskeeper," picking up around the house, abandoned garden and her grave. Eventually, Thomas loses his father, too, in a shocking yet inevitable, strangely gentle climax. To portray this intimate emotional drama, Hornschemeier sticks to clean-lined, flat figuration against single-color backdrops; to a palette excluding hair are the brightest hues; and to a straightforward angle of vision, as if the reader were sitting in a theater watching the action on a level stage.
Review
series has been something of an underground hit in art-comics circles. His first book collection is a grimly melancholic domestic tragedy, written from the point of view of a young boy named mother by retreating deep into a fantasy world while his father gradually collapses into insanity. Hornschemeier has been compared to Chris Ware, and while the two cartoonists have a few obvious points of similarity--a fondness for flat, muted colors, relentless depressiveness and understated drawing that captures the solidity of objects with a few lines--Hornschemeier has a unique sense of formal invention and a gift for subtleties of facial expressions. The metaphor that drives this work is symbolic logic, both the philosophical kind that obsesses the father and ultimately destroys him, and the logic that Thomas imposes on the baffling world by turning everything into simple symbols, like the lion mask he wears to play at being powerful. reinterpretations of his real life in a different style from the rest of the book: childlike single-line drawings, representing everyone as animals. And the metafictional into focus until the final page. The plot is a real three-hanky weeper, but Hornschemeier leverages some of its heaviness into bittersweet
Review
Mother, Come Homeis a subtle, dark story about death and madness and fantasy… It's not bleak, though; …perhaps Hornschmeier's lesson is that we all can, if we try — if we step outside our rituals and fantasies and reach out to each other, we can make it through. -- Andrew Wheeler
Review
"Hornschemeier retains an audacious sense of what is possible in the graphic arts." Steve Duin
Review
"Hornschemeier doesn't simply push the panel edges of the comics medium; he designs entirely off the page, encouraging other creators to join him over the horizon." The Oregonian
Review
Hornschemeier uses simple line art and varied color palettes for conveying emotional and narrative detail, capturing graphically with a sort of exquisite beauty the symbolic fantasies of Thomas and the grief-induced psychosis of his father.Nothing is visually beautiful, and while all of this would seem to work against the impact of the story, it ultimately conveys a feeling of overwhelming nervousness, or waking up way too early in the morning and blearily staring into an unfamiliar world, and this is what infects you until it all makes sense.... should be a welcome addition to any collection. -- Collin David
Review
Paul avoids the hammering sentimentality and labored connect-all-the-dots obviousness of too much contemporary work, in any media. -- Jonathan Lethem, author of
Synopsis
Back in print: the debut graphic novel from the author of The Three Paradoxes. Mother, Come Homeis Paul Hornschemeier's piercing graphic-novel debut: it secured the cartoonist's place as one of his generation's most skillful and ambitious practitioners. Mother, Come Homequietly studies the inner lives of recently widowed David and his 7-year-old son, Thomas. Thomas 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 Homeis masterfully drawn: Eisner-, Harvey-and Ignatz-Award-nominated Hornschemeier's controlled brushwork is clean, and his nine-panel page layouts pace David's inexorable descent into utter despair. Hornschemeier is equally precise when it comes to Mother, Come Home's color palette: subdued but warm, which suits the story's melancholy and contemplative mode. Mother, Come Homeis a powerful work, and, because of its universal themes of anguish and loss, has resonance beyond its core audience of alternative-comics readers.
Synopsis
Back in print: the debut graphic novel from the author of The Three Paradoxes. Mother, Come Home is Paul Hornschemeier's piercing graphic-novel debut: it secured the cartoonist's place as one of his generation's most skillful and ambitious practitioners. Mother, Come Home quietly studies the inner lives of recently widowed David and his 7-year-old son, Thomas. Thomas 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 Hornschemeier's controlled brushwork is clean, and his nine-panel page layouts pace David's inexorable descent into utter despair. Hornschemeier is equally precise when it comes to Mother, Come Home's color palette: subdued but warm, which suits the story's melancholy and contemplative mode. Mother, Come Home is a powerful work, and, because of its universal themes of anguish and loss, has resonance beyond its core audience of alternative-comics readers.
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
Paul Hornschemeier lives in Chicago, IL, with his fiancée, Emily. He is the author of several graphic novels, including Mother, Come Home, Let Us Be Perfectly Clear, The Three Paradoxes, All and Sundry and Forlorn Funnies.