ABSTRACT
Mother, Come Home is the first graphic novel of the North American artist Paul Hornschemeier. As a mark of identity, his stories tend to depict the intimate worlds of characters with a deep mental life, usually suffering from existential maladies. His fictional world portrays a complex bitter-sweet reflection on existence in a contemporary Western world where both forlorn and funny elements seem to be inextricably mixed. In fact, after his early experimental black-and-white works (republished in The Collected Sequential), in 2001 he created a series entitled Forlorn Funnies (collected in Let Us Be Perfectly Clear). Mother, Come Home was first published in instalments, in issues 2 to 4 of this series, between 2002 and 2003. Afterwards, Hornschemeier authored the graphic novels The Three Paradoxes (2007) and Life with Mr Dangerous (2011, originally released in instalments in the comics anthology Mome between 2005 and 2009). His art can be placed in the context of other U.S. works like Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan (2000), Daniel Clowes’ David Boring (2000), Charles Burns’ Black Hole (1995-2004), or David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp (2009), which, as explained in the Introduction to this book, belong in what can be termed as a trend of stream-of-consciousness graphic novels.
