Who wants to live forever? That question from Queen’s eponymous song is the heart of Yannick Pelegrin’s tale of a man who’s lived for three centuries, but perhaps not Lived.
Cover by Yannick PelegrinWritten and Illustrated by Yannick Pelegrin
Aldo has been twenty-eight for three hundred years. Despite his long life, he still hasn’t developed very good social skills. His whole family has been dead now for a long while, and nobody believes he is immortal. As a result, he leads a lonely existence. He is afraid to love anything or anyone, except for his beautiful Alfa Romeo and his little pug Gustav. When he tries to seek professional help, there too the truth seems too absurd for words. But then he spots someone on television and recognizes him from an encounter two hundred years ago. And he decides to visit the man to get some answers.
On the surface, the concept of immortality seems great. To be young forever, never watch your body fall to illness while watching the world amazingly evolve around you. But Aldo is here to remind you that immortality comes with a price. Three hundred years of being 28 certainly hasn’t taught him much about life or the world, and while he lives, his social circle dies. It’s a lonely life for him with only the simplest of pleasures to bring a whit of comfort but not resolution to his current state of affairs.
No journey through emotion and discovery of self is linear, and the reader feels that same sense of grasping at straws that Aldo himself does in his pursuit of a mystery man he recognizes from a very long time ago. There are no answers, and if you’re looking to this work to provide you those answers as you reach the final page, you will be most disappointed. Pelegrin tricks you in the most quiet and elegant of ways, for when you reach this work’s climax, when you are on the precipice of seeing Aldo perhaps connect with someone who can give him answers to his past . . . you are back at the beginning, which itself provides you with that answer as to just who this man is and what inhabits his mind.
One of the aspects of “Aldo” that struck me in initial consideration was its length: 81 pages. That’s not a great deal of time for world-building for a graphic novel. Indeed, there are levels of context missing, such as: how did Aldo become immortal? Who is the mysterious Oscar that he visits? How did little Gustav come into Aldo’s life? All these small omissions that readers would demand of their storytelling are not there, bringing the sense of confusion that Aldo feels right to the reader. We are exploring this world side-by-side with him. Rare is it the writer that can bring the reader right into the story with their protagonist in such a minimalist way. Accept that you’re not on a linear journey with Aldo. Embrace his perplexity to find some commonality with our own existential questions. Once you do these two things, you will find depth and meaning in this work, truths that may lead you on that further path of perception and awareness.
There’s a contemplative, almost dreamy aspect to this artwork that befits this quiet but tense journey. Never has the search for the meaning of life and self ever looked so good. Color is delicate, an elegant peaches-and-cream style that befits the story’s pensive tone. There’s nothing here that’s harsh to the eye. Pelegrin gives his characters a certain flat look with only the basics of facial features that they themselves open up the questions that script prompts. While Aldo comments early on about his large nose, you can’t help but notice that the elderly Oscar has a similar shape to his nose. Are they brothers? Father and son? Or even the same person in different timelines? What he spares in detail in the human form, he makes up for in richly intricate and precise landscapes. I know this to be a hallmark of Franco-Belgian cartooning and often sing its praises. Here it’s more distraction that thing of beauty, taking our attention away from the narrative where we need our attention to be the most.
What I will remember this work most for is its paneling and layouts. With the exception of full page spreads, very few (if any) pages look alike. Pelegrin composes his panels with people at the heart of them, adding a level of intimacy and artistic maturity that the story’s themes and tone undoubtedly require. And each panel has fine balance in character and scene. Nothing is too large or too small for the space in which it is contained. Such is the benefit of artist who is writer (and writer who is artist), that one person sharing and shaping their vision from concept to page. There are times where Pelegrin breaks borders in fun ways to heighten Aldo’s tension and move the narrative: word balloons that fluidly connect to manifest Aldo’s realization at the mysterious man from TV, a fire escape that travels from panel to panel in a 12 panel grid as Aldo travels down it to the street. He directs your eye and keeps himself as creator and narrator in control in the same ways his omissions in storytelling do the same. This is the odyssey he wants the reader to take, and he guides you through it, even if it is with only a partial map to the terrain.
The atmosphere of “Aldo” is one that stays with you when you reach the final page, and one that makes you pick it up immediately to start again, to walk with Aldo again and see if perhaps you can find the closure that he so desperately seeks.
