Boris the Potato Child

In her latest graphic novel, French artist and illustrator Anne Simon returns to her visually and allegorically rich fantasyland.

Boris, the round-headed child, reigns like a despot in the little house he lives in with his mother. His mother, Bulle, formerly known as Aglaia, was once the all-powerful queen of the country Marylene. Since Marylene’s fall, residents have lived in peace thanks to a self-governing system they have adopted. But when Boris meets Sabine, a warrior French fry thirsty for revenge, nothing will ever be the same …The third book in Anne Simon’s “Tales of Marylene ” graphic novel series (after The Song of Aglaia and Empress Cixtisis), Boris the Potato Child delivers a bitter critique of our consumerist impulses and abuses. Mixing literature and pop culture (such as mashing Simone de Beauvoir with the Beatles), Simon has created in Marylene a world as abundant in visual imagination as Oz or Narnia, but crafted with a Swiftian pen that’s mightier than any man’s sword.