Cecilia Valagussa

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3033115.html

It's a nicely done short graphic novel about the experience of being a young Italian immigrant in Ghent, just at the time that the financial crisis was hitting the southern European economies and Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain were dubbed PIGS by the Financial Times. Cecilia has a pig's head but does not realise it, as she tries to pass for human in Belgium; and she learns that you really discover how much you belong to your home country by leaving it. The story is therefore a bit cliched, but the art is really good. In particular, she makes great use of the space on the page - no boxes, a lot of two-page spreads, giving a broad canvas, and placing her characters several times over in a frame as they move around, giving a sense of movement and space that we don't often get with comics. It hasn't been translated into English, of course.… (mehr)