Broken Frontier

Already an established talent in Europe with work for the renowned publishing house Dupuis, Cyril Pedrosa finally reaches the American audience with his 208 page graphic novel Three Shadows. First Second handles the publishing and they could not have picked a better work of Pedrosa, the French edition of Three Shadows was named 'Best Breakout Book' in 2007 at the Angoulême Comics Festival, the European Cannes of Comics.

Country life is simple and sweet for young Joachim and his parents, Louis and Lise—filled with cozy winter nights, lazy summer days, and, always, the chores associated with running the orchards. One day three Shadows appear on the horizon, and everything changes. Louis and Lise know that these shadowy fates have come for Joachim. Determined to save the boy, Louis flees with Joachim, desperate to stay one step ahead of the deathly Shadows.

The story itself is inspired by the death of a close friend's young child and Pedrosa turns this event into a phantasmagorical dream chase throughout the Old Land. His style of storytelling firmly sets itself in the metaphorical, magical-realism style. On a first read, it is a nicely done, haunting tale of grief and acceptance building on universal truths. On a second read though you realise how nicely Pedrosa avoids the stereotypical pitfalls of such a tale, making it neither too wrought with grief or too light on the emotional front. He strikes a perfect balance without losing any of the gravity that lies beneath the surface, keeping even a lighthearted touch in the book. The father gets the most screen time and although the mother also features in it, ultimately it is a tale about the father and his struggle with the order of things and how to come to terms with grief and suffering. By extension, it is also the father who comes to the front as a fully rounded character. Both the mother and Joachim stay somewhat stuck in their generalization of stereotypes although the mother shows a lot of potential, unfortunately she doesn't get enough screen time to be properly developed. And Joachim all the while stays a bit stuck in his role as the loving child.

The black and white line work of Pedrosa betrays his animation background a bit (he has worked on The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Hercules) in the sometimes overacted scenes and facial work. To be honest, this is nitpicking a bit because the art is so fluid and beautiful, you tend to look at it closer and in more detail, going over the tiniest minutiae. Pedrosa does not always stick to the same material and switches from ink to pen to charcoal to dry brush depending on the demands of a scene. Like an expert triathlete, he senses his surroundings and adjusts his speed, his mode of storytelling and his sparseness of text to arrive at the best possible performance of a scene.

His figure work is very dynamic due to his fluid line and experience with animation. It allows Pedrosa to construct pages that seem so effortless that you fly through the panels while reading. Transitions between panels flow and bulge and buckle, further enhanced by sometimes leaving out borders around panels, sometimes using sketched out borders with thin lines and sometimes by using fluid shapes that are more rounded and less delineated than normal square black borders. Overall, the drawings exhume a very poetic quality perfectly suited for this magical realism tale.

Three Shadows is a grand and poetic tale that guides you through the pitfalls of love and loss. Cyril Pedrosa's fluid pencil line is your compass that lets you experience the emotions of the characters and the trials and tribulations a father experiences when he is about to lose his son.

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Three Shadows by Cyril Pedrosa is published by First Second and was released into bookshops and comicshops in April 2008. Look for the interview with Cyril Perdrosa coming soon at Broken Frontier.