Sholm Pearly

Elle(s), written by Kid Toussain and illustrated by Aveline Stokart is a beautiful YA comic book with a big mystery at its center. Is Elle, that fun new student, really a psychology case, or is she something more supernatural? 

We follow the journey of Elle as she arrives to a new school and makes friends, starts a new life, picks up a mounting amount of everyday anxiety until something snaps. Suddenly she is someone else, and someone else again, and it becomes hard for everyone, including her to live in her shadow. 

The illustrations of that graphic novel are particularly beautiful. The colours are bright and glow out of the page with amazing lighting. The expressiveness of the characters are hilarious at times and so very clear. Even the personality switching is very easy to follow as Elle’s hair colour changes for us and lets us see the very transformations she has to go through. There is a lot of details here and the artiste really gave a lot of love and attention to this work. I truly enjoyed the style and will plainly admit it is one of my favourite things about this comic and it is what made me pick it up in the first place. 

What I liked less what the fact it really stops after just the introduction to the story. Nothing really happened or is explained, we are just introduced to an idea. And while the idea could be interesting I have no clue as to what direction it’s going to take or what purpose it will serve. It’s interesting, but I feel like I got more in a lot less pages with the Pixar anime Inside Out. This feels like it wants to be impactful and yet I’m not sure there is much substance behind any of it. The visual is amazing and I am sure will gather many fans, but the actual story needs to be more developed for any reader to have more of an opinion. Maybe the next volume will make it worth it? I don’t know, I will probably not read it as it didn’t particularly talk to me.

There is something of another Elle character in the heroine of this book, and I guess that fans of the TV series Stranger Things will like that. People who also enjoyed the comic Spill Zone should be happy with this one.