{"id":12341,"date":"2014-08-22T08:40:30","date_gmt":"2014-08-22T08:40:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/?p=12341"},"modified":"2014-08-24T15:46:48","modified_gmt":"2014-08-24T15:46:48","slug":"how-the-world-was-a-california-childhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/2014\/08\/22\/how-the-world-was-a-california-childhood\/","title":{"rendered":"How the World Was – A California Childhood"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nBy Emmanuel Guibert<\/strong> translated by Kathryn Pulver (First Second)
\nISBN: 978-1-59643-664-0<\/p>\n

In 1994 French cartoonist, author and storyteller Emmanuel Guibert(The Photographer<\/strong>, Sardine in Outer Space<\/strong>, The Professor’s Daughter<\/strong>) had a chance encounter with elderly American \u00c3\u00a9migr\u00c3\u00a9 Alan Cope.<\/p>\n

The latter was a veteran of World War II and, as they became firm friends, shared his memories of the conflict and his own modest part in it.<\/p>\n

Moved and inspired, the artist transformed those conversational recollections into a beguiling graphic memoir entitled La Guerre d’Alan<\/strong><\/em>. The first of three albums was released in 2000 – a year after Cope passed away – and debuted as English-language graphic novel Alan’s War<\/strong> in 2008.<\/p>\n

Now, that immensely moving volume has been augmented by a wonderful prequel, also culled from laconic, memorable chats between a young man of artistic mien and an ordinary if contemplative old guy with a long life to recall.<\/p>\n

This second dip into the well of the Californian expatriate’s life – originally released in France in 2010 as L’enfance d’Alan<\/em> – focuses on his formative years in the Golden State as it gradually turned from rural paradise into America’s smoggy, grimy industrial and entertainment powerhouse\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Delivered in a understated yet mesmeric, matter-of-fact manner, the frankly miraculous marriage of memory and narrative art opens in full colour at the end of Alan’s life before slipping into the monochrome past\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Alan Cope was born in 1925 when California was still profoundly insular, distant and undeveloped. Here, through his graphic collaborator he shares the intimate daily details and observational minutia of a keen-eyed boy growing up in a loving family, regularly moving from place to place and generally getting by as honest, hardworking folks did in far simpler times\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Through anecdotes, opinions and intimate family secrets from three generations of the maternal Hanson<\/em> and Cope<\/em> lines, a gentle history of joy, tribulation and imperceptible progress unfolds, packed with magical visions of endless days, roller skating, safe and empty streets, pets and pals and pastimes.<\/p>\n

Thus all the fascinating insights and misapprehensions of the young and impressionable boy meld into an elegant and elegiac appraisal of a time, place and way of life we are all the poorer for having lost.<\/p>\n

Through universally mutual childhood experiences – tussles, escapades with bugs, spiders and snakes, girls, doctors, old rented houses, the ever-present wilderness, poverty, family squabbles and troubles, death and religion – Guibert traces his departed friend’s growth in a world where nothing really happened but did so with inexorable force in ways that could only be properly perceived from the distant safety of later decades.<\/p>\n

It was life and you just got on with it\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Utterly magical and captivating in a way mere words cannot express, How the World Was<\/strong> is a loving paean to lost days and a disappearing way of living and thinking, steeped in evocative charm and delivered with easy approachability, gentle humour, enchanting sensitivity and remarkable panache.<\/p>\n

Buy it now and read it regularly for as long as you live\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n