Pictures with a story to tell

The grand old man of the form, Will Eisner, calls words and pictures strung together on the page "sequential art." As a genre, sequential art -- comic books and graphic novels -- increasingly occupies a prominent place in the popular culture. The cartoonist has to master dual disciplines -- art and storytelling -- and in the best books, the two elements are seamless.

And so it is with "Mother, Come Home" (Dark Horse Books: 128 pp., $14.95) by 27-year-old Paul Hornschemeier, a story almost Scandinavian in its bleakness. Thomas, a 7-year-old, loses his mother, who, just before she dies, gives him a plastic lion's mask. "My mother loved to give presents," narrates the adult Thomas in the next panel, which shows the boy standing in the snow at her grave, his father next to him. The two are not holding hands.

In response to the loss, the father slowly withdraws from the world. One long, dreamy sequence depicts him suspended in the dark purple morass of his mind, searching for his lost wife. Soon, the young Thomas (nicknamed "Aquinas") imagines himself "the groundskeeper," watching over his father's retreat while trying to control the weeds that threaten their garden, wearing -- inevitably -- the cheap lion's mask.

The story is miserable but never maudlin, in part because of the tightly reined visuals. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but tragedy beats with the cruel heart of pithiness. Clean-swept and slow, "Mother, Come Home" is so sparse that certain panels are pure abstraction. One shows simply a wall phone, recognizable only in the context of panels before and after. The world is seen through the eyes of someone just tall enough to reach that phone but who nonetheless imagines himself the protector of a sadly shrinking household. When the world comes apart (again), it's a small world getting even smaller.

Art Spiegelman's "In the Shadow of No Towers" (Pantheon: 42 pp., $19.95) hints at economy in its page count. Each page, however, is cardboard thick and broadsheet wide, like the book itself: sprawling, oversized and dense. It fits the large subject: Spiegelman's experience of the events of Sept. 11 and their aftermath. His black-on-black New Yorker cover, with the ghostly outline of the World Trade Center towers, was the magazine's first after the attacks.