REVIEW: Olive: Lost in Inner Space
Olive: Lost in Inner Space
By Vero Cazot and Lucy Mazel
256 pages/Abrams ComicArts/$38
Autism is a challenge to depict in comic form; so much depends on the artist’s strength, since it’s all about nuance. Take Olive, for example. In Paris, she arrives at school as a 17-year-old, forced to adapt to a world alien to her. The school has worked to accommodate her needs in exchange for maintaining respectable grades. We meet her when the opposite has happened, and she is now being forced to share her dorm room with Charlie, a fairly normal teenager. The counseling sessions helps provide insights into Olive’s past.
Olive lives in her head, a wonderfully creative space she shares with a large rubber duck, Noel, and the transparent whale Rose. When reality overwhelms her, this is her safe space until the day an astronaut crashes into her realm.
The 2024 French album arrives in glorious color, courtesy of Vero Cazot and Lucy Mazel. Broken into four parts, we trace Olive’s attempts to figure out how the astronaut got into her world, which leads her to mount a rescue mission to locate him. Fantasy bleeds into reality when it becomes clear that astronaut Lenny Popincourt has crash-landed on Earth and is missing.
Over the course of the story, Olive searches in both realms, aided in our reality by Charlie, who accepts Olive’s condition and supports her efforts with good cheer. In exchange, Olive begins to open up and, in a rare act, invites her home for Christmas.
The story in both realities slowly unfolds as Olive can’t understand how this other person has invaded her private realm, even though clues about their connection are presented early on.
It’s a charming coming-of-age story as well as a fine fantasy tale; that is, until the final section, where Olive manages to cross into Siberia on her own (when did she get a passport, considering her aversion to the world?) in search of Lenny. But it’s a minor quibble over a lovely tale of magical realism.
Mazel’s art and color help make both realities distinctive and ground the teens well. This is a fanciful tale that is a fine page-turner.
