Mother, Come Home is Paul Hornschemeier s piercing graphic-novel debut, long out of print and now available for the first time in hardcover. It secured the cartoonist s place as one of his generation s most skillful and ambitious practitioners, and proved a harbinger of the subject matter that the artist would go on to explore most consistently in later work: the nuclear family.

Mother, Come Home quietly studies the inner lives of recently widowed David and his 7-year-old son, Thomas; both are unable to deal with their grief directly. Thomas, protected by a lion s mask that his mother gave him, constructs an identity for himself as the groundskeeper: ritual and routine, already important to children that age, become paramount to him. He struggles desperately to keep up appearances while his father, a professor of symbolic logic, becomes lost in abstractions. Father and son begin to retreat into their fantasies, but only one emerges.

Mother, Come Home is masterfully drawn: Eisner-, Harvey-, and Ignatz-Award-nominated Hornschemeier s controlled brushwork is clean, and his nine-panel page layouts pace David s inexorable descent into utter despair. Hornschemeier is equally precise when it comes to Mother, Come Home s color palette: subdued but warm, which suits the story s melancholy and contemplative mode. Mother, Come Home is a powerful work with universal themes of anguish and loss.