Mother Come Home
Analysis and discussion of Mother, Come Home by Paul Hornschemeier
How does the choice of colors in this novel enhance the mood of the novel?
Mother, Come Home by Paul Hornschemeier is a graphic novel that deals with the serious subject of bereavement and a surviving parent's inability to cope with tragedy. Unlike a traditional comic book that revolves around exterior actions, Hornschemeier is intent upon exploring the inner life of his characters, and the ways that people deal with death. Instead of using a bright palate of primary shades, Hornschemeier depicts his characters in muted, somber pastels. Most of the novel takes place in the mind of the surviving child and his grieving father. The father's mental deterioration, as he grows more and more disenchanted with reality, is reflected in the color choice of the artist. The color tones are darkest when the father is alone. When his son Thomas comes into the frame, the colors brighten to reflect the father's slightly happier mood, although the tones remain fairly bleak.
At other times the author completely enters the mind of the young boy, Thomas. Thomas sometimes imagines himself as a lion, to feel powerful in the wake of the ineffectuality of his father, aunt, and uncle to cope with the tragedy. To show the childlike nature of the boy's mind, all of the characters become animals and the already simple line drawings become even simpler.
Using the colors and the drawing style of the graphic novel enable the author better able to realize his ultimate purpose in creating the text, to show the mental state of family members left behind after someone dies. The fact that one of the characters is a child and the other is mentally unstable makes the fluid use of visually fantastic metaphors particularly effective. Images like when the father floats in the air at night in his dreams to look for the mother or when Thomas becomes a lion are both artistically striking and emotionally evocative. Some of the confusion the reader might feel regarding the narrative shifts from imaginative to concrete reality is alleviated with the subtle differences and shadings of color between the frames depicting reality and the images that are purely fantasy.
Works Cited
Hornschemeier, Paul. Mother, Come Home. Dark Horse Books, 2004.
