Feature: Hicotea Reviews 

“Hicotea: A Nightlights Story”

By | April 8th, 2019
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Lorena Alvarez’s “Hicotea: A Nightlights Story” is a celebration of curiosity, imagination, and empathy. Where “Nightlights” was a nicely contained story, “Hicotea” opens up Sandy’s world so much, I already find myself longing for a third album.

Written and Illustrated by Lorena Alvarez

In this mesmerising follow-up to Nightlights, Lorena Alvarez explores our relationship with nature and animals.

On a school field trip to the river, Sandy wanders away from her classmates and discovers an empty turtle shell. Peeking through the dark hole, she suddenly finds herself within a magical new dimension. Filled with sculptures, paintings and books, the turtle’s shell is a museum of the natural world. But one painting is incomplete, and the turtle needs Sandy’s help to finish it…

Lorena Alvarez’s “Nightlights” was a welcome surprise in 2017. It hadn’t been on my radar at all and it won me over all at once. What wasn’t a surprise was when it was nominated for Best Publication for Kids (ages 9–12) for the 2018 Eisner Awards—the honor was well deserved. I’d been particularly impressed with the way Alvarez played with the comics literacy of her readers, introducing simple concepts and expanding on them throughout the book.

In this way “Hicotea: A Nightlights Story” is very much a sequel. It assumes a baseline of literacy the reader would’ve learned in the previous book and then takes it much further. Where “Nightlights” dipped its toe and waded in a little to ambiguous waters, “Hicotea” dives right in. Several portions are left wide open to the reader’s interpretation, and I imagine different readers will experience these sections very differently.

Right from the beginning, the reader is expected to interpret Sandy’s reactions and imagine her interior thoughts—she’s not going to tell us how she feels or what she’s thinking. The first five pages, while very dialogue heavy have only two lines from Sandy herself. Everyone else in her school is rather blasé about the classroom full of dead animals kept in jars and a dissected frog, but Sandy is feeling something very different, told entirely through her body language and the panel composition. Right away, Alvarez is telling her reader not to power on from speech bubble to speech bubble; slow down and pay attention!

By the time Sandy meets the titular Hicotea, Alvarez is really playing with the reader. Very early on there’s a double-page that starts reading not from the top left, but from the bottom left, and then worms its way up and down and around, flowing across the page like a river, and yet always in a way that seems logical. She uses paths in the environment (like a winding stairway) or the characters’ eyelines to lead us from one moment to the next, and because it comes from the environment and the characters, it doesn’t feel like she’s leading her reader, but rather the reader is forging their own path across the pages.

And then Sandy leaps into a painting and the book takes a plunge into some delightfully ambiguous imagery. Location is not a fixed thing in “Hicotea”—even time itself becomes malleable. When she meets Den the frog and she tells Sandy her story, it surrounds and envelops her, transporting her to another place.

One detail I particularly loved was the way that Sandy drifts between her class excursion and the world with Den the frog. She falls asleep in Den’s world, and the excursion manifests like a dream, and when she returns to Den’s world, she wakes up. It’s the reverse of how most storytellers would approach this material. Alvarez doesn’t tell us Den’s world is a mere fantasy or fake, but rather teases that the opposite could be true. Alvarez ignores the hierarchy of reality over fantasy we often see in stories that dance between both.

The best stuff in “Hicotea” comes along when Livion the black bird appears in the story. She is simultaneously both one bird and many; a character in the scene and yet also at the edges of it; a negative space gnawing at the frames of panels. The character, almost like the Nothing from Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story, is something that has an effect on the world, but seems to be more of a feeling that an actual physical creature. What Livion is exactly, well, that’s up to the reader.

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“Hicotea” is a story about curiosity and not being afraid of not knowing something, of encountering something beyond your understanding with courage, so Alvarez’s use or ambiguity through the story is thematically relevant every step of the way. This isn’t a book that gives its reader answers, but instead challenges them to find answers on their own. The closest Alvarez gets to being explicit about her themes is when Hicotea realizes that any answers Sandy could have found on her journey were never going to be of any use to her—Hicotea needs to find her own answers, not stay in the safety of her shell while the world falls apart around her.

Like its predecessor, “Hicotea” is a gorgeous book, but much less tamed. In “Nightlights,” the fantasy elements were mostly welcoming, except where Morfie, the antagonist, was involved. In “Hicotea” the fantasy is beautiful, but even before Livion shows up, there’s an unsettled quality to everything. Most importantly, this is not just more of the same imaginings we saw in “Nightlights.” In “Hicotea,” Sandy’s imagination goes far beyond what we saw in the first book, taking us so much further and deeper and into wilder realms. And most importantly, it leaves us feeling like there’s still a wealth we haven’t seen.

That said, at times “Hicotea” feels almost overly full. “Nightlights” had an easy pace and could take its time with the smallest of moments, but in “Hicotea” sometimes moments overlap and aren’t given quite enough breathing space to fully resonate. These moments are few, but at times it feels like the story wanted to grow beyond the bounds of the format. Given the wealth of imagination on display, I can easily see how future “Nightlights” stories could naturally grow in length with each new volume.

At the same time, this is the sort of quibble that has more weight on a first-time read through, but on future readings won’t mean nearly as much. And, I can assure you, “Hicotea” definitely rewards multiple readings. It challenges its readers not just with its visual complexity, but with its thematic complexity. It’s the kind of sequel that grows the world rather than retreading familiar territory, and invites the reader to wonder what lies beyond.

Final verdict: 9. A worthy sequel to the magnificent “Nightlights.”


Mark Tweedale

Mark writes Haunted Trails, The Harrow County Observer, The Damned Speakeasy, and a bunch of stuff for Mignolaversity. An animator and an eternal Tintin fan, he spends his free time reading comics, listening to film scores, watching far too many video essays, and consuming the finest dark chocolates. You can find him on BlueSky.

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