Camille Jourdy’s marvellous new comic book begins with a train journey: a young woman, Juliette, is leaving Paris, and heading for the small town where she grew up. Exhausted by the city and the seething anxiety from which she has suffered ever since she was a girl, she longs for the awkward embrace of her somewhat complicated family: her divorcee father, now lonely enough to be on the dating apps; her mother, an amateur artist with bohemian leanings who has recently taken yet another younger lover; her older sister, Marylou, who though in possession of both a husband and two small children, is also having a one-day-a-week affair with a man who works in a fancy dress shop (he comes to her for joyful afternoon sex in her greenhouse, disguised as a bear, or a wolf, or a ghost).
From here, Jourdy spins out an exquisite soap opera of a graphic novel, a story she tells in both traditional strips – if you’re a fan of Posy Simmonds, you’ll fall instantly in love with these – and in a series of extraordinarily beautiful, Matisse-inspired watercolours of the town where the action takes place (it’s never named, but Jourdy spent her childhood in Dole, near the Jura mountains: think red roofs, geranium-filled window boxes and old-fashioned, slightly louche bars). What follows is often plangent; by the time Juliette returns to Paris, more than one heart will have been broken. But Jourdy also has a gift for farce, and her book is at moments richly comical. The scene in which Marylou’s lover, wearing one of his ridiculous costumes, is discovered hiding under her son’s desk is masterly.
