Pistouvi caught my attention when going through comics at the library a few weeks ago, and last week I decided to give it a shot after seeing the other books I was interested in were all checked out. The art style on the cover was appealing, and when I flipped through the pages before taking it with me, I liked the fine lines that made up everything. Unfortunately, the art (for the most part) is the only decent thing about this one. Pistouvi feels like someone's half-hearted attempt at making a coming of age story, influenced by the worst pseudo-philosophical parts of anime and manga. The comic has a very Japanese style to it, right down to the word bubbles and text looking like they were originally made to fit hiragana/katakana/kanji, with so much empty space in them around the English text.
The lead character, Pistouvi, is a little fox that runs around shooting birds with his slingshot. He's labeled as "mischievous" on the back of the book, but he barely does anything that out of the ordinary. Aside from nailing a bird in the first few pages with a shot to the head, he eats a bug that he's never seen before, and slacks off from helping his human friend, a girl named Jeanne, collect fire wood. Jeanne herself doesn't do a whole lot aside from playing her ocarina and cleaning their treehouse. The birds in the area will turn you into one of them if they talk to you, and there's a giant tractor with the torso of a human male with a huge beard attached to it that sleeps in a huge barn. There's also a wind spirit that...goes around winding. There are only a few chapters in this book and while they're mostly standalone chapters, there's a tiny bit connecting them to each other, like Jeanne stealing a few magic seeds from Wind and grows a huge black tree in their home, which doesn't do anything except grow some black fruit, then the tree starts to rot and we never learn anything else about it, like if it's a dangerous tree or not.
So much nothing happens in this book that it's a shame because the art is pretty good. After a while, I got tired of the fine lines, but it still has a look that I'll remember for a while. The one thing I didn't like about the art was Jeanne's mouth. Even when she's giving a standard response to something, and not screaming or in a dire situation, they drew her mouth huge and showing both the top and bottom rows of her teeth. It's really unsettling at times. I guess the message here, according to the back of the book, is that this is Jeanne's story, about growing up and moving on from childish things, but it's hard to really see that anywhere in the book until the final 3-4 pages, which I'll spoil in this next section here. You can skip it if you want, but trust me, you're not missing anything.
Pistouvi is asleep when a big bird starts to talk to him. Because he was only semi-awake, he doesn't fully turn into a bird, and instead only gets feathers in his tail. Wind does some wind magic and makes the feathers go away. But later on, another bird talks and Pistouvi turns into a bird that looks like an owl, and Jeanne can't believe it. Before she can go to get help, he flies away with the others. She eventually finds Wind, begs her to help, and Wind says she will take care of it and tells Jeanne to go home. But Wind doesn't do that; she just follows Jeanne, who's crying about losing her friend, and the giant tractor man tells her that she doesn't need to mess around with animals. Then it ends. No epilogue on what she does without Pistouvi, no finding out if Pistouvi turns back to a fox, no appearance of Jeanne's parents, it just ends.
Heavy with symbolism that feels more forced than anything, and never bothering to tell a good story, I can't recommend this to anyone unless you just want something with good art. You can read through it in under an hour, and after that, hopefully move on to something better. This is probably best for people who try hard to not read more mainstream things and have some lesser-known book to tell people about.
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