Young Mozart by Augel cover
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Young Mozart v1

“Young Mozart” is creative, inventive, cute, and funny.

I like this one.

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Who Knew Harpsichords Could Be Funny?

Young Mozart by Augel cover
Writers: William Augel
Artist: William Augel
Translator: Blase A. Provitola
Published by: Humanoids/BiG
Number of Pages: 78
Original Publication: 2017

Humor

I’m a sucker for these kinds of books. I like humor comics. And I love the format so many Franco-Belgian albums present them in. They’re collections of one page gags centered on a specific niche. That covers everything from cycling to horseback riding, rugby to motorcyclists.

Or, in this book’s case, the comic misadventures of a young classical composer.

Young Mozart rocks the violin

This book is all about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as a child. He’s presented in this book by cartoonist William Augel as a music-obsessive kid, maybe a tween at the oldest. Everything he says and does centers on music.

He’s also slightly precocious, capable of being that cute kid whose simple and honest observation reveals the hypocrisy of human behavior. On the other hand, he’s also the one who likes to disobey his parents to go do his own thing.

It’s a world viewed through a musician’s eyes. You’d be amazed at the number of every day things you can filter through that musical lens to make new punchlines. Augel uses that to mix things up and keep the humor ever-changing. He can skip around from gags about Mozart being fresh to his siblings to Mozart terrorizing his family with an extreme form of musical practice.

And, yes, once in a while things get a little crude in that way kids find poop and fart jokes funny. That’s only for a page or two, though. Thankfully.

But then Augel also has pages of strips where Mozart has simple conversations with adults, or even with his dog.

“Out of the mouths of babes” and all…

Format

Mozart plays a loaf of bride instead of slicing it

This is not illustrated radio. You need to look at this book, and thankfully Augel’s art style is interesting enough to carry the book. It seems so basic, but you’d amazed at just how many comics don’t take their visuals seriously as a part of their core. Comics are a visual medium; if the reader can ignore what’s pictured and just skip across the balloons, then the book is at least half a failure.

That’s one of the reasons I love sight gags most of all. They require someone to write the situation, but then for the artist to deliver the story. It’s up to the artist to guide the reader’s eye and frame the story and keep the body language and facial expressions consistent and believable. They may also give the artist a chance to experiment with the nature of the medium, itself.

Sight gags are the purest expression of comics.

Some gags take up the whole page, while others more closely resemble standard three panel horizontal strip comics, collected three or four at a time on the page. It’s a great variety that keeps the book from getting repetitive.

William Augel provides an homage to Calvin and Hobbes in "Young Mozart" with this snowman army gag page.

There are little odes to classic comic strips in the book, as well. The title page features an image of Mozart with his dog, in homage of “Peanuts.” And the “Calvin and Hobbes” comparisons are inevitable on the strip where he builds a snowman army.

Most of all, this is a book about a kid obsessed with music and how it plays into his every day life. When his mother asks him to slice a loaf of break, Augel draws multiple panels down the page to show how Mozart imitates the arm motions of a voilinist to get the job done. He tries to conduct a choir of local wild animals. He uses chalk not to draw hop scotch, but to line our some sheet music. A vacation to Italy brings out his favorite musical terms.

This goes on for 79 pages, but you don’t need to read them all in one sitting. I paced myself, reading a quarter of the book at a time. That kept me from trying to speed read through the book and let me appreciate the art and the humor. There’s a lot going on with this book, so it was worth it.

An Obsessive Artist

Check out this sequence:

None of that is copied-and-pasted. Augel redrew every panel.

It’s not just the ink lines. It’s not just the little marks inside the piano. Watch the way the sheet music on the stand changes ever so slightly from panel to panel. He’s redrawing it in every panel!

I’m wondering if this isn’t some sort of obsessive/compulsive French artist purist thing going on here. It’s remarkable enough that he’s likely drawing this on paper with pens and pencils, but there are still ways to literally cut and paste a repeated background across those panels.

Good for him for going through the extra effort. I hope he still met all his deadlines…

Recommended?

Young Mozart by Augel cover

Yes. This isn’t a book that sticks to one type of joke or even one format for its jokes.

While it has its share of clear homages, it also employs a wide variety of gag styles and character traits. Young Mozart is a music obsessive, but he does other things, as well. The humor comes from how those two things meet.

But, sometimes, he’s also just a kid who’s surprisingly deep, but who also loves his dog, as much as he frustrates him sometimes.

This is a book that will work for all ages (it’s part of Humanoids’ “BiG” imprint, which also gave us “Bigby Bear“), but I think has particular relevance for the younger readers and for music fans. That’s what comics needs more of — comics that are for other people beyond just comic fans.

— 2019.028 —

The Podcast Version of This Review

If you’re an audio fan, episode #41 of the Pipeline Comics podcast covered this book, as well, using this review as its script.

Buy It Now

This book is available in print, as well as digital. Follow the Amazon link for the hardcover edition:

Buy this book on Amazon
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Bonus Image: Mozart and a Beagle

William Augel's "Young Mozart" homages "Peanuts"

Yes, this is the Snoopy homage I referenced earlier…


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