Review - Little Vampire by Joann Sfar
French cartoonist Joann Sfar unleashes his macabre kids comic “Little Vampire,” with three stories that mix dark comedy with sincere sweetness for a collection that will no doubt speak to children as it values not only their intelligence, but empathy and perspective.
Little Vampire himself lives in a haunted mansion with other ghouls — all grown ups. In one way, he finds himself cloistered among his own kind, since everyone else in the mansion is a ghost or a monster or some kind of zombie creature, and each treats Little Vampire with the sort of gentle demeanor one would hope caretakers of a child would employ. But Little Vampire of is of two kinds — ghoul and child — and though he is fulfilled as the former, he is desperate to make some connection as the latter.
Little Vampire demands that he be allowed to go to school — and all the horrors of the mansion work to make sure that he does and that it’s a great experience.
Certain issues involved in the particulars of being a monster disrupt Little Vampire’s attempts to go to school — monsters don’t keep hours agreeable to school boards. In making the best of the situation, though, Little Vampire manages to make a connection with a boy named Michael and it’s this friendship that fuels the book.
In the other stories in the book, Little Vampire uses supernatural solutions to help Michael contend with a bully and the entire ghoul gang takes up the cause of some dogs escaping an animal testing laboratory.
In each story, Sfar’s artwork — so beautiful in “The Rabbi’s Cat” books — works toward comedy, unfolding some very funny, very rollicking little adventures. It’s all undeniably European, however — I can’t imagine an American creator would use some of the dark and mature subject matter that he does so casually, but in Sfar’s hands, I barely batted an eye at any of it. Sfar is such a master at his craft — without a doubt, one of the best cartoonists in the world today — and any kid’s library will be elevated by the inclusion of “Little Vampire.”
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