Baby Bjornstrand - Softcover

Renee French has been making comics that revel in the killer side of cute and the horrors that lie within and without since the early 90s. Her past work includes The Ticking (Top Shelf Productions, 2006), Micrographica (Top Shelf Productions, 2007), H Day (PictureBox, 2010), Bjornstrand (PictureBox, 2012), and Hagelbarger and That Nightmare Goat (Yam Books, 2013). French also contributed illustrations to The Adventure Time Encyclopaedia (Abrams, 2013). In 2007 she was the recipient of the prestigious Inkpot Award, which is given out at Comic-Con International to individuals for their contributions to the worlds of comics and other genre-based art and entertainment.

Listed as one of the best graphic novels of all time by Thrillist

“Imagine a black-comedy stage play about the ape-men trying to make sense of the obelisk in 2001 and you've got an inkling of Baby Bjornstrand's humorous, haunting vibe.” ― Sean T. Collins, Thrillist

“’Baby Bjornstrand’ is equal parts Daffy Duck and Samuel Beckett, and all quirky Renee French.” ― Dana Jennings, The New York Times

“One of French’s funnier comics, she has an uncanny sense of how boys talk to each other, the nature of friendships, and the difficulty of finding connection...French has been one of the most consistently excellent cartoonists of the last decade.” ― Rob Clough, The Comics Journal

“Baby Bjornstrand looks like a magic-lantern record of a dream ― alternately mundane and disturbing ― projected onto a screen through a foggy lens and remembered days later with an un-dreamlike clarity and precision. (Or something.)” ― Ken Parille, The Comics Journal

“The boys speak like adolescents, calling each other names, discussing bugs, butts, and farts. They talk like Beavis and Butthead, if Beavis and Butthead ever gazed into the abyss.” ― Jason Viola, Festival Season

“Equal parts clever and cute, Baby Bjornstrand is a coming of age story that doesn’t need to beat you over the head with its message.” ― Tiffany White, The Absolute

“In the end, Baby Bjornstrand might well be a meditation on the nature of personal growth, of claiming what you have learned as your own, wrapping yourself in it and saying that you know it, not that you were taught it. But maybe not. French is careful not to throw answers at you and her narrative unfolds like a poem, expressed through her beautiful artwork that mixes otherworldly illustration with cartoonishness grotesqueness.” ― John Seven, Vermicious

“There’s a sense of menace here, but there’s also a sense of peace and joy, kids having fun, perhaps despite the obstacles that they face. Kids abide, after all, and part of the charm of French’s Bjornstrand is in the way that it feels like a child’s dream come alive in an oblique way.” ― Jason Sacks, Comics Bulletin

“As the uniform proscenium staging of its panels suggests, Bjornstrand remains much closer to Samuel Beckett than Stephen King, despite French’s astonishing proficiency with painstakingly penciled menace. Yet its morose ending has a bite that doesn't require the jaws of a monster.” ― Sean T. Collins, The Comics Journal

“In another set of hands, this graphic novel would have been seen as a horror story. As it stands, however, the book is far more funny than scary...The result is an odd but amusing story for those who don’t always need to take things too seriously.” ― Publishers Weekly

"Like watching David Lynch and Samuel Beckett get mean-drunk: a demented comedy from one of the medium's authentic genuises." ― Warren Ellis, author of Gun Machine, Red, Transmetropolitan

"Baby Bjornstrand is both beautiful and brutal, warm and indifferent. Like all of Renee French's art it hints at the innocent and the profane without missing a beat. A creature after my own heart." ― Guillermo del Toro, Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth, Pacific Rim

“Baby Bjornstrand is a heartbreaking story because it gets at that existential argument of “what’s the point?” What can you make of losing something you love and don’t even understand?” ― Whit Taylor, Panel Patter

"Renee French's graphic novels, including "The Ticking" and "The Soap Lady," tend to split the difference between adorable and horrifically gross." ― Douglas Wolk, New York Times Book Review

"French's work always splits the difference between cuteness and revulsion...She's an inimitable and masterful stylist, a kind of Edward Gorey who draws out the whimsical side of body-horror." ― Publishers Weekly