Mother Come Home [Hardcover]

Paul Hornschemeier (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 15, 2009

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Hornschemeier's Forlorn Funnies comics 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 Thomas who's dealing with the death of his 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 similarityâ€"a fondness for flat, muted colors, relentless depressiveness and understated drawing that captures the solidity of objects with a few linesâ€"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. Hornschemeier renders Thomas's imaginary 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 conceit that frames the book doesn't fully come into focus until the final page. The plot is a real three-hanky weeper, but Hornschemeier leverages some of its heaviness into bittersweet absurdity. He's a talent to watch.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School–Collecting two issues of Hornschemeier's "Forlorn Funnies" series, Mother, Come Home is a stand-alone retrospective tale of family tragedy told by Thomas Tennant, who lost his mother to cancer when he was seven. The story opens after her death, with his professor father struggling to maintain some sense of comfort and equilibrium for himself and his son. Thomas, occasionally donning a superhero cape and lion mask, fights to keep things together by cleaning up after his father, lying to the college when his dad misses yet another class, and tending his mother's garden. Needing more help than his son can provide, the father checks himself into residential care. Forced to move in with an uncle and aunt, Thomas copes by entering a bright, cartoonish fantasy world where everything is how he wants it. His fantasies drive the heart-wrenching climax when he "rescues" his father from the care center. The simplified forms and muted earth tones of the artwork alongside dark and serious themes create links to Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Pantheon, 2000), but Hornschemeier wields that rare gift of layered subtlety. Be it an almost imperceptible change in facial expressions or the slow death of a flower, he says significant, moving things in a few panels that would take pages to convey in a novel. But the book's greatest strength is the story itself and the lessons it offers for life, loss, and, most importantly, how to move on.–Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 128 pages
• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books (February 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560979739
• ISBN-13: 978-1560979739
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,192,300 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars subtle, effective, gorgeous, September 5, 2006

By 

J. N. Brandel "appreciator" (chicago) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mother, Come Home (Paperback)

Hornschemeier is not the type of guy or author to go for the easy, in-your-face type of story-telling. He's in it for the more interesting subtleties that emerge from the space in between. He is masterful with the moments of intense, complicated, nameless emotions that arise from the interaction with sparse dialogue and stark illustration. He allows the reader to figure out what the reader feels, he does not condescend. I loved it.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Listen to me., February 7, 2006

By 

C. R. Agnew (Mechanicsburg, PA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mother, Come Home (Paperback)

I'm not sure what a lot of this complaining is about. Paul Hornschemeier doesn't draw like chris ware or tell stories like Chris Ware. For that I'm glad, because his is a more direct storytelling style than Chris', who has a more design first manner to his work. Hornshemeier is far more fluid and almost ambient. That said, it was not a surprise to me that part of the soundtrack to this book's creation was Sigur Ros. He is able to keep up a mood of melancholy and foreboding throughout this book that isn't something that you can enjoy in the same way as the maniacally glib Bendis, but is good and worth reading.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The wood between the worlds..., March 29, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Mother, Come Home (Paperback)

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.