“Forget Me Not” by Alix Garin [Review]

“Forget Me Not” is a stand alone album by Belgian cartoonist Alix Garin that tells the story of a young woman who is so dismayed at the way her Alzheimer’s-stricken grandmother is being treated that she effectively kidnaps her.

There’s love, discovery, frustration, and a bit of comic relief along the way.

It’s a wonderful book that creates some beautiful characters who go through a serious sequence of challenges and changes in an effective manner.

There are also a couple of storytelling choices that I can’t wait to talk about.

But, first, some credits:

Kidnapping the Credits

Not Exactly a High Speed Chase Book

Clémence is a college student and actress struggling to get by in the world. She’s the center of the book, and she has some issues. There are some questions about how comfortable she is in her own skin as a lesbian. There’s a feeling of abandonment from her mother, who was always so busy with her medical career that she was rarely there for her daughter. It fell to Clémence’s grandmother, Grammy, to do a lot of the job of raising her.

These days, Grammy is in a home where her Alzheimer’s is getting progressively worse. She needs to be medicated to protect her safety. This is the final straw for Clémence, who scoops her up to take her on a road trip back to her childhood home in the hopes of jogging her memory and bringing her some joy.

That “scoop” amounts to kidnapping, and so Clémence and Grammy are on the run, but Grammy doesn’t even realize what’s going on. She doesn’t realize that her own parents are long gone, nor that she even has a daughter or granddaughter. Her brief moments of clarity only spur Clémence on.

Can the two of them keep it together long enough to get to their final location without getting caught or driving each other crazy?

Clémence clearly has doubts. She makes some questionable decisions, one in particular that costs her dearly. She’s an imperfect person whose heart is in the right place, but who might just be in over her head. Through the course of the book, Garin provides plenty of context to help explain why Clémence thinks the way she does. It makes sense in satisfying ways.

Playing with Story Structure

The story occurs as a series of flashbacks, as Clémence bites her nails while telling two police officers everything that happened.

Garin artfully tells the story in such a way that you don’t know what the ending is, even though she’s basically started her story at the end of it. It’s a nice literary technique, and one that adds a little extra bit of tension for the reader. Yes, you see that some things happened, but you’re not told how it went until the next flashback. You can try to piece it together in your mind, but the truth is often far stranger.

It’s not quite as extensive as Jordi Lafebre’s backward romance, “Always Never“, but it does use that element of time to its advantage.

The book is a real page-turner, which is not something you’d expect from a family drama like this, maybe. It’s not to see how the car chase or the fight choreography is going to turn out. (Though there are a few punches thrown in the book.)

Garin uses the page turns well. Most of the pages end with a moment that drags you into the next page, either because there’s a question to be answered or because the momentum of the current scene is pulling you along.

Clémence is a likable character that you grow to care about, even when you know she’s clearly doing bad/dumb/wrong things. Those things aren’t done for the sake of moving the plot along, either. Garin is careful to justify all of them, whether it’s from the pressure of the current situation or a flashback that explains how she got this way in the first place.

Rooting for her, even in her most self-destructive moments, also helps keep the pages turning quickly. Your curiosity needs to be satisfied, and Garin doesn’t let up on the plot. Things are always in motion here.

Not Up My Usual Alley, But Well Done

Garin’s storytelling is wide open. Her art style consists of very simple, uniformly thin lines. It often feels like you’re reading an autobiographical webcomic, to be honest. Characters are super simple, backgrounds are often nonexistent. Props and backgrounds are kept simple, often established and repeated as nothing more than blocks of color.

The watercolors for the book — digital, I think? — give the book a lighter feeling. There aren’t too many saturated colors in the scheme she’s using here. Even the dark nighttime scenes use a blue that feels lighter than you’d realistically expect.

Honestly, this book is not in my usual wheelhouse. I love the more densely packed Franco-Belgian style. I like the crazy inks of Franquin or the controlled variation in line weights of Peyo’s studio.

This — this is one of those autobiography comics Fantagraphics would have published in the 90s that I would have made fun of.

Maybe I’m just a more mature human being, but I really enjoyed it. First, even though it’s super simple, it’s easy to follow. There’s never a question about which character is which, or where they’re standing in relation to each other. Sequences of events are clear. There’s a soft mood that permeates the entire book that’s a product of Garin’s art and storytelling style.

The thing that most impressed me, though, was the facial expressions in the book. Even when hands might look like squiggles and bodies might have the barest details you could imagine, Garin’s faces tell the whole story. They’re wonderfully cartooned. Whether in Grammy’s sunken cheeks, large nose, and lipless mouth or Clémence’s very animated style with the upturned nose and the eyes and mouth that can grow as big as they need to tell the story, Garin’s art is filled with life.

Here’s the moment when Clémence realizes what she’s doing and gets a sudden amount of nervous glee over the whole thing:

Look at the body language and sadness in her face, even when viewed from over the shoulders, as she leaves Grammy’s house, knowing Grammy will never return there:

No matter what comic art style you prefer, the point is to convey emotion and action, and that’s what Garin does so well throughout the book.

Not Showing Peak Action

The one thing that I noticed most in the book, though, was the choice Garin made in a couple of different places to have the peak moment in a scene happen sort of off-panel. I won’t get into spoilers, but there’s one moment specifically where something happens as Clémence is driving at night. It’s not a life-changing moment, but it is a strong emotional beat for the character.

The moment that the event happens is not shown. It’s hidden on a page turn. You don’t realize it happened until it was in the past. I flipped back to see if I missed a page, but then I realized how interesting the choice was that Garin made here. You didn’t need to see it. It’s enough that it happened. Show the consequences and the emotions, not the trigger.

Even the big climax at the end of the book is not explicitly seen. It would be a huge moment for an artist to draw, but Garin specifically shows the moment before and after. She shows the humanity of the event and the person impacted by it, not the issues happening around her.

You’d think that peak moment of “action” would be the one to emphasize, but Garin skips it entirely. That makes sense when you think about it – the importance of the action is Clemence’s reaction, which is shown in the following panels, mostly through the visuals, not even the dialogue. That’s only something you can pull off with a cartoonist strong enough to visually sell the story. Garin can do that.

Talk, Talk, Talk, But Not Really

The book runs 224 pages, but don’t let that scare you or fool you. This is a very quick read for its size. Garin’s pages are super breezy.

The pages are sparse, with lots of large panels. Almost every scene is a talking heads scene, yet it never feels like the book slows down because of that.

No, the constant turning of the pages and the deliberate choice to give every line of dialogue its moment makes everything feel important, even when you’re rushing past it to get to the next line.

And a lot of the dialogue skirts around the issues directly. This is how most people talk, whether they realize it or not. They say things in ways that don’t tell their own truths. They don’t explain things to people who already know. And they often try to please the other person, or talk around the uncomfortable parts. Sometimes, we see it visually in the panels, while other times we can infer it from how much we know about the character and their situation.

The dialogue is also conversational and not labored. I don’t know how the original French dialogue reads, but Montana Kane does a good job with her translation here in keeping this book so grounded. It’s a very dialogue-driven book, even with all the supporting art, but it never gets mannered or stylized for no good reason.

About the Lettering

I like the font used in the lettering. It works well against this art style. It’s all caps, and it feels very hand-drawn. The letters aren’t so uniform as to look too technical. (The “U” is not symmetrical. The “M” doesn’t descend all the way down in the middle.) There are lots of imperfections to help it feel more organic against this less mannered art style.

Unfortunately, the crossbar-I problems are more abundant here than in any comic I’ve read in years. You’ll see it twice in the one balloon seen in the sample below. (Amazingly, the two balloons in the panel above don’t have a single “I” in them outside of the proper pronoun version. That’s harder than it sounds.)

Garin’s original word balloons have some interesting choices. They often have line breaks or whole sections of them missing. I like how organic they look, though sometimes on colored backgrounds there is an awkwardness deciding where the balloon ends and the background begins.

I’m also not a big fan of the tails off the balloons which are irregularly shaped and often don’t quite point to the speaker.

This panel has an odd choice for balloon placement, for example. I understand wanting to put the balloon in the negative space, but that means that the tail has to point over the head of Clémence to get to Grammy, who is actually speaking.

There’s room behind Grammy’s head to make it an easier left-to-read read, or higher in the panel to the right so that tail can more directly point to Grammy. It just feels weird to have the balloon have to point across the panel like that. It balances out the elements in the panel more nicely, but it harms the readability of the moment. It causes a slight stumble for the reader as they’re flowing through the panels.

Recommended?

Not for everyone. This isn’t my usual upbeat, funny big nose cartoon style book. But it is entertaining, if somber. It’s a story I never would have guessed would work, but I’ve read it now a couple of times and can promise you that it does, indeed, work.

It works very well, indeed.

In fact, the greatest trick this book pulls off is in the way it hides its thematic core. This isn’t about a road trip with Grammy. This is about Clémence, as a character, coming of age and coming to terms with her mother, her grandmother, and herself. The epic drive through the back roads of the French countryside is just the cover story. It’s the character work that is so strong here.

The story is well composed and has a strong theme, the storytelling is easy to follow, and the art works beautifully for it. Alix Garin is only 24 years old and is this good already. She’s a storyteller to keep an eye out for, for sure.

EuropeComics has a short interview with Alix Garlin (in English) up on YouTube. It’s a good promo for the book.

Buy It Now

It’s available digitally in all the usual places:

• Izneo
• Comixology
• Amazon