From Above: An (Info)Graphic Novel

Panchaud’s idiosyncratic debut, an Angoulême award winner, tracks a London adolescent’s life after it’s upended by an unlikely windfall, mapping the consequences through pictographs and navigation iconography. A fortune teller’s prediction persuades Simon Hope, a 14-year-old bullied for his weight, to steal from his father and bet the money on a long-shot horse at Royal Ascot. He wins a staggering £16 million—but at a terrible cost. He returns home, ticket tucked in his shoe, to a crime scene, his mother in a coma after being assaulted. A topsy-turvy quest to untangle this mess takes him to Liverpool and back, through run-ins with detectives, biker gangs, and even a beached whale. Apart from some dry humor mined from working-class eccentrics, the value proposition is the visual language, which draws on the syntax of training manuals. Characters appear as colored dots tracked across bird’s-eye schematics; fistfights play out in diagrams. This clinical presentation complements the story’s deadpan script and adds winking emphasis to its more unlikely plot turns, but the book fumbles the emotional stakes of Simon’s ordeal, and lapses into neatly diagrammed but often superfluous digressions. The experiment is audacious but the effect is a bit like reading assembly instructions for a suspense story. (July)