The third in a series of “wildlife graphic novels” hits stores this June, click the jump for the book trailer and a review of the often perplexing, but still pretty gorgeous, Love: The Lion.
Each of the books in this series follow a different animal: the first a tiger, the second a fox, and now a lion. They aren’t fantasy books: none of the animals talk and we don’t have word bubbles to know what they’re thinking, so it’s less “Disney” and more a Planet Earth kind of story. (Did you watch the BBC Planet Earth series? You really should. But I digress…)
The story still personifies the animals enough that we know roughly what we’re thinking. We can see resentment and sadness, contentment, irritation, desperation and, in the end, some love too, but probably not in the way you’re expecting.
The story follows one lion who ended up solitary (it happens, not every male is accepted into the pride.) He travels on his own, scrounging on scraps left from the one pride he orbits around. He has some good moments, but it’s a pretty hard life all in all: I’ve heard the word “heartbreaking” thrown around a lot in regards to this book, and that’s pretty accurate.
It’s not meant to be a straightforward plot, mostly because hey, they’re lions. Sometimes they’re hunting, sometimes they’re lounging around, there isn’t really going to be a plan here.
I did get confused from time to time: I’d thought the outcast lion was following the pride, but after a battle he clearly won he takes off, and the pride seems to follow him, but he’s still on his own, still very much an outcast. I couldn’t always parse out the timeline, and the visual differences between each lion seemed very subtle sometimes.
Was the lion who got his whiskers pulled the same one our lion scratched up in the flight in the rain? Were the skinny, vicious lions leftover from the same fractured group? Did our lion lead the pride into the grasslands only to end up behind them again after the lioness was kicked in the mouth?
In the end, it’s a story to sort of absorb as a whole. If you can take in the images without worrying about cause and effect, it’ll be a lot more satisfying. Because even with the questions I had, the ending was still triumphant, even though the story as a whole wasn’t a happy one.
Part of what makes it easy to love even when it’s confusing is the artwork: almost every single panel could work on its own as a piece of art you’d want to frame. It’s all a detailed watercolor style, nothing cartoonish or stylized about it, but it’s still extremely dynamic and fluid. I can’t imagine how much research had to go in to making every animal in the book (not just lions, but hyenas, cheetahs, monkeys, birds, hippos, gazelles and more) look as good as they did.
The colors stay in a very specific palette; lots of sepia and dark greens and hot-day sky blue, and staying inside those colors makes the firestorm yellows and carcass reds really stand out when they appear.
It’s a book that’s definitely worth a read, trigger warnings aside; it’s a pride of lions fighting for survival, so there’s lots of death and not all of it is the prey. If you’re not comfortable with that….well, don’t go watch Planet Earth either. But if you’d like to look at some staggeringly good art and read a story that talks about life, love, family, and courage (all without one single written word) you should give it a look.
Love: The Lion is written by Frederic Brremaud and illustrated by Federico Bertolucci. It is available in limited quantities now and in stores June 4th.