My Mommy Is in America and She Met Buffalo Bill

AUTHOR: Regnaud, Jean

ARTIST: Émile Bravo (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Gallimard (French); Fanfare/Ponent Mon (English)

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION:Ma maman est en Amérique, elle a rencontré Buffalo-Bill, 2007 (English translation, 2010)

Publication History

Jean Regnaud and Émile Bravo have been friends since they were adolescents, despite an age difference of four years. They produced their first professional collaboration, Ivoire, in 1990. After Bravo joined l’Atelier Nawak (a collective studio for comics artists), they began work on Aleksis Strogonov, an adventure series that ran throughout much of the 1990’s.

Ma maman est en Amérique, elle a rencontré Buffalo-Bill was originally published in Regnaud and Bravo’s native France in 2007 in the Hors-série BD (“Special-edition Comic Strip”) collection from Gallimard. It was well-received by critics and won the 2008 Essentials Award at the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d’Angoulême and the Tam Tam Literary Award from the Salon du Livres et de la Presse Jeunesse.

Founded in 2003, the union of British publisher Fanfare and Spanish firm Ponent Mon was known as an international publisher of manga but began expanding its scope in 2008. My Mommy Is in America and She Met Buffalo Bill was one of the first works published under this expansion and marked the first English translation of a Regnaud/Bravo’s collaboration.

Plot

On the first day of school, Jean is a bit apprehensive. He attended kindergarten in another neighborhood, so he does not know any of his classmates. Once the teacher gets the the students settled into their seats, she begins asking who they are and what their parents do. Jean becomes nervous instantly, trying to figure out what to say his mother does. When he is finally called on, he blurts out that his father is a boss and his mother a secretary. His tension does not abate immediately, though, and Jean misses what everyone else says.

After school, Jean is picked up by his nanny, Yvette, who has already picked up his brother Paul from kindergarten. At home she makes them iced chocolate milk and, a few hours later, supper. When Jean’s father comes home, they all eat around the table. His father asks some superficial questions about the kids’ day, correcting their grammar in the process. Though always tempted, Jean never summons the courage to ask where his mother actually is.

The couple next door own kennels. Between their yelling and the dogs barking, the area is often uncomfortably loud. None of the parents in the neighborhood wants his or her children to play with one another, but Jean and the sligthly older Michele sit on opposite sides of the hedge and play games beneath it. One day, Michele pulls out from under her sweater a postcard from Jean’s mother. She promises to read it if Jean swears not to tell anyone about it. Michele reads that Jean’s mother is in Spain, eating paella and swimming in the sea.

Jean spends time with his classmates, both in and out of school, and continues to have Michele read him postcards from his mother until the Halloween-All Saint’s Day holiday, when he and Paul visit their maternal grandparents. Neither enjoys himself much because Granny Simone is not a very good cook and there is not much for children to do. When Granny Simone takes them into town, they are stopped constantly by her friends, who all sob and dote on the children. As a teacher, Granny Simone works hard to teach Jean how to read and write, which makes Jean look forward to the end of the vacation.

Back in school, the students are introduced to a psychologist. Rumors fly around the classroom about what the psychologist does and where he sends “wacko” children. Eventually, Jean is called and given some basic tests. When asked about his last vacation, Jean does not mention his grandparents and instead relays the contents of the last postcard from his mother, who was in the United States and saw a rodeo featuring Buffalo Bill. That night, Jean begins to seriously wonder about his mother and what happened to her.

As Michele reads Jean another postcard, her father finds her and begins yelling at her as he drags her away. Jean picks up the dropped postcard and tucks it under his mattress. As winter begins, Jean’s paternal grandmother, Granny Edith, comes to live with them. Jean and Paul think she is much more fun than Granny Simone because she lets them do just about anything they want. Though she does not partake in the activities herself, she gives the children money to enjoy the St. Martin’s festival with Yvette. They come home with cotton candy and toy prizes.

With the holidays approaching, the children get a vacation from school. Yvette goes to spend some time with her family, and Granny Edith is left to babysit them. She helps them write wish lists for Father Christmas and is bemused by their plot to take a picture of him with a Polaroid camera. On Christmas Eve, Jean and Paul try to stay awake and keep an eye on the Christmas tree through the keyhole of their bedroom door. Though Jean falls asleep, Paul wakes him upon hearing a noise. They sneak down to the end of the hall and snap a picture, making a loud racket. Their father steps up to look at the photo, chuckles, and hands it back. Later, Jean examines the photo closely and is excited to see one of Father Christmas’s shoes in the otherwise mundane picture. He hides the picture under his mattress, and decides to pull out the postcard, attempting to read the note now evidently made out to Michele.

The next day, after opening the presents, Jean meets Michele under the hedge. He shows her the picture, to which she responds with laughter, telling him that it was his own father’s shoe and that Father Christmas does not exist. Jean gets upset and pulls her hair. Michele gets angry and reveals that the postcards were all fake and that, in fact, Jean’s mother is dead. Jean races back indoors, sobbing as he tries to tell his father what Michele said about Father Christmas. Jean’s father explains that Father Christmas does exist, but only for children, so he should not say anything to Paul about it. That night, in bed, Jean decides that his mother is like Father Christmas and that he is too old to believe in her any more.

Characters

•Jean is a five-year-old boy just starting school as the story opens. His extreme youth and inexperience with nearly everything provide the unique lens through which the story is told. Jean is often nervous about new experiences, but he generally does what he is told and takes everything people tell him at face value.

•Paul is Jean’s younger brother. He acts as a companion but largely just follows Jean’s lead.

•Yvette is the boys’ nanny. She is caring and nurturing toward them and is visibly touched when they present cards and gifts to her on Mother’s Day. She appears to be in her early twenties.

•Jean’s Daddy is not named in the story, but he is the main source of stability for the family. He spends his days working as the manager at a local bottling factory and frequently has a great deal on his mind, which shows in his graying temples. He is certainly interested in the children’s well-being and education but is uncomfortable dealing with them and instead relies heavily on Yvette’s guidance. He often masks his emotions and sometimes interferes with Jean and Paul’s attempts at having fun.

•Michele Neunier is Jean’s long-haired neighbor. The two often play under the hedges between their houses. Being two years older than Jean, she is privy to his mother’s death and tries to play along with the adults’ wishes to keep Jean ignorant by reading him fictional postcards allegedly sent by his mother.

•Granny Simone and Grandpa Pierrot are Jean’s maternal grandparents. They love both of the grandchildren, but the loss of their daughter has grieved them deeply; there is a sense of perpetual sorrow around them.

•Granny Edith is Jean’s paternal grandmother. Though she smokes incessantly, she is materially generous with the children. Evidently, she convinces her son to get Jean the Native American costume he wants for Christmas.

Artistic Style

Regnaud’s story was the result of years of work, and he seemed to have Bravo in mind to illustrate it from the outset. The script, as Regnaud wrote it, was perfectly suited to Bravo’s sensibilities; he has claimed that absolutely everything he needed was there, including detailed passages describing what turned out to be entirely silent scenes.

Bravo felt that the story in My Mommy Is in America and She Met Buffalo Bill was predicated largely on the pathos of the situation and that his art should in no way detract from that. He consciously and deliberately tried to keep the art as simple as possible in order to force readers to focus on the story. Bravo was actively trying to serve the best needs of the story through simplicity.

The simple style also helped to make the illustrations easier to work on, since Bravo knew many of the people depicted in the story from his long friendship with Regnaud. Bravo was able to work quickly on the project with the relatively simple style and was able to abstract the characters somewhat from their real-life counterparts; both processes allowed him to avoid dwelling on the personal relationships he had with many of the individuals. Regnaud put his complete trust into Bravo and did not see any of the art for the book until Bravo had effectively completed it.

Themes

My Mommy Is in America and She Met Buffalo Bill is written from five-year-old Jean’s perspective. As such, it includes many simple misunderstandings that inevitably arise from not having an adult’s vocabulary or view of life. It also presents many situations with little or no context because the adults around Jean conspire to keep his mother’s death a secret.

The father’s assumption, readers are led to infer, is that Jean is too young to understand death or too immature to deal emotionally with the loss of his mother. This message has been given, directly or implicitly, to the other adults with whom Jean comes into contact, so they all act uncomfortably around Jean, not knowing how to reconcile their grief with his ignorance.

Left to his own devices, though, Jean does in fact come to grips with his mother’s absence well before he learns of her death. While he does not, within the story, come to an understanding of mortality, he does show that he has the emotional fortitude to handle the loss. And while his methods of dealing with grief are different than most adults, they are no less valid and serve equally well and perhaps more effectively. Regnaud is, in effect, showing that children are not nearly as inept as adults often think and understand and process more than they are often given credit for.

Impact

Bravo was a founding member of multiple art studios in France, most notably l’Atelier Nawak in 1992 and l’Atelier des Vosges in 1995. The basic concept of these studios was that several artists would share studio space together while working on their independent projects. The studio cost was split among the artists who could also talk freely with one another to work through problems or to share ideas. The support was financial, technical, and intellectual.

Among the artists in l’Atelier Nawak were Lewis Trondheim, Christophe Blain, and Joann Sfar. Sfar has noted that most had fine-art backgrounds and were learning the art of comics together, sometimes having two artists tackle the same story sequence in order to examine different approaches to solving story problems. Many of the artists also came over to l’Atelier des Vosges, where they were joined by Marjane Satrapi. Satrapi was initially skeptical of the comic book format, but she was soon won over. She has cited Bravo and Blain for providing specific pieces of advice, and much of Persepolis (2000) was created at that studio.

Further Reading

Regnaud, Jean, and Émile Bravo. Ivoire (2006).

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis (2008).

Trondheim, Lewis. Little Nothings (2007).

Bibliography

Brienza, Casey. “My Mommy Is in America and She Met Buffalo Bill.” Review of My Mommy Is in America and She Met Buffalo Bill, by Jean Regnaud. Graphic Novel Reporter. http://www.graphicnovel reporter.com/content/my-mommy-america-and-she-met-buffalo-bill-review.

Hajdu, David. Heroes and Villains:Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2009.

McElhatton, Greg. “My Mommy Is in America and She Met Buffalo Bill.” Review of My Mommy Is in America and She Met Buffalo Bill, by Jean Regnaud. Read About Comics, February 18, 2009. http://www.readaboutcomics.com/2009/02/18/my-mommy-is-in america.