Anna and Froga: Out and About

"One of the things I love about Anouk Ricard, the French artist who does Anna and Froga, is that she’s also an exhibiting painter. She’s worked in a bunch of different media, and the style that she has in her paintings is pretty much like the style she has in this book, which is for children but is a completely compelling, charming, serious story for adults too. Or, to put it another way, in terms of contemporary children’s books, it is the one that I most enjoy reading to actual children. I actively enjoy it. She has a pared down style and a certain kind of sophistication and lightness that mixes together in the story, about a group of friends who are not quite children and not quite adults. One of them is a human, then there’s a frog, a worm, a dog, and a cat. They are in the so-called ‘funny animal’ genre of comics, which means that they act like humans even if they have animal faces. There’s an openness and a porousness to her drawings and also to her dialogue that is just incredibly appealing for kids, and it is incredibly appealing for me, as an adult. There’s not a lot of play with panels the way there is in other sophisticated comics works. She has used these clean frames, six or so frames a page, but each episode is punctuated by really gorgeous splash pages in which she paints a scene that loosely connects to the story, but is not exactly part of the story. The book has a visual layering that’s very appealing. I love how she inverts the idea of the splash panel—the conventional language of a typical comic—in which the opening panel encapsulates the story in this visually virtuoso way, to draw the reader in. Instead, she leaves that to the end as a kind of epilogue. So she is playing with comics conventions in an artistic way. One of my favourite characters is the worm named Christopher. Some of these stories have jokes about the fact that Christopher has no arms because he is a worm. In the first story, which is about them making Christmas presents, one of the characters says, ‘I’m making an ashtray for Christopher,’ and Anna, the main character, says, ‘For Christopher? He doesn’t smoke.’ The idea of a smoking worm is hilarious, and they make him a scarf instead. This is what I mean, dialogue that’s not quite kid stuff, and not quite adult. They do adult things, but in an innocent universe of picnics and vacations and neighbours and that type of thing. This is the fifth Anna and Froga book from Drawn & Quarterly, which is arguably the best publisher of independent comics today. They did something really brilliant by translating this book. I hope that there will be more because it really caught on in audiences of all ages."