Timothy Hodler
The Bun Field begins with a typical comic-strip scenario: An adolescent girl lies in bed, dreaming of talking ducks and dinosaurs. This Slumberland scene displays little Winsor McCay–like polish, though; the Disneyesque ducks are rendered with childlike simplicity, and the dinosaur is as crudely penciled as a drawing taped to a kindergarten wall. The child smiles and winces in her sleep and then, at the sound of nuts being cracked, awakens to a daylight world scarcely less surreal than the one she just left behind. In her debut graphic novella, Finnish cartoonist Amanda Vähämäki proves to be a master at Tintinology is a neglected field of study in the United States, but something approaching a cottage industry in the rest of the world. More than seventy books have been written about the great Belgian Georges Remi, who died in 1983 and was better known by his pseudonym, Hergé. Yet despite this torrent of analysis about the creator of the strangely coiffed boy reporter Tintin; his little dog, Snowy; and Captain Haddock, the drunken sailor with a Tourette’s-like compulsion to shout insults, we still know surprisingly little about the cartoonist, who was famously reticent, granting only a handful of major interviews