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This Saturday, November 19, we’ll be hosting another live book club meeting at the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. This time we’ll be discussing the recently translated French comic Lucille, by Ludovic Debeurme.

As we did last time, we’re planning to start by showing some slides to introduce a topic of cartooning that is related to Debeurme’s book. For our first meeting, discussing Fun Home, we talked a bit about the use of text in comics and how it interacts with images. For our Ice Haven meeting, we talked about how cartoonists can use drawing and storytelling styles associated with different genres and formats as part of their storytelling toolkit. One striking aspect of Lucille when you open it is that it uses no panel borders.

Here are a few general questions/topics that will likely come up in Saturday’s conversation:

• simple drawing style
• open layouts
• improv writing method
• mixture of dream imagery and carefully observed realism
• use of diaries common to all three books so far
• no narration—how is exposition handled?
• role of nature, both visually and symbolically

And here are references to a few specific pages, sequences, and panels that struck us for one reason or another:

• the little figure jumping off the cliff (referred to by Arthur/Vladimir later in the book)
• the accident in the boat
• the vineyard owner and his assistant, their backstories