An awful man has kids and then abandons them for five years. He then returns and sneaks off with two of them to a jungle plantation his family owned when he was a boy. This is only the first half of the story and the shady things going on are vague at this point. The main character has no redeeming qualities and the story isn't very interesting. The art isn't very good either.

Europe Comics rarely disappoint me both in subject and scope of material.
In Malaterre (Part 1) we learn of Gabriel's final rash financial decision before checking out.
Then we hear his story from his birth. We are asked as readers to be less judgement of his failings and decisions he makes.
It is clear he is a chancer, a loner, a bit of a playboy, a party animal, and a bon viveur (it was originally written in French, just getting into the spirit). He is a lousy husband, and an absent father seeking pleasure rather than building stability and a future along conventional means.
This is a story of past colonial times for the French; Gabriel is taken more by previous splendour and less about present realities. For a dream but not for a song, he purchases his ancestorial estate in the jungle of a former French territory to restore family honour and link his children into his future prosperity in a shared heritage. The estate forms part of a logging business but he has little business acumen, timber management skills or common sense where money is concerned.
He is a double or quits type of fundraiser, a gambler who says after two failures best of five. He cares little for other people's feelings but thinks some rich person will always bail him out because of his slick moves and quick velvet tongue.
Like the estate he has brought back into the family name he lacks the presentational skills to appear something else; the jungle and time have taken a toll on Malaterre, cigarettes and alcoholism has done for Gabriel.
Having re-entered his children's lives he wins the right for custody based on promises made and dreams capturing his older two offspring's imagination. With money to throw at them; their single mum raising the three in his absence, could never have matched financially, with little and inconsistent maintenance, he turns the children's heads and somehow wins in court.
When trouble arises back in the estate he takes his two children with him without a thought to their Mum or of legal consequences.
The story ends with Gabriel trying to hold a reception for new investors and although being drunk meeting a shrewd businessman who is contemplating a partnership or takeover.
The colour palette for the drawings and the detailed illustrations adds to the tone and texture of the story that although concerns Gabriel and Malaterre is often viewed through the children. This attention to wider implications of this man's behaviour and stubbornness gives much more clarity to life choices and the impact it has on others. It makes for a more complete and interesting story and should make everyone wish to seek out part II.

First off, I hate the art style, but it's sort of fits the chaotic nature of the storytelling itself.
It's basically the story of an absolutely horrible man, starting with his heath and then jumping back in time to his childhood and then adulthood.
Gabriel is an angry chain-smoking alcoholic who wants to regain his ancestor's jungle mansion and turn it into a successful logging operation. For some reason he decides he needs to take his two oldest children with him, even though he basically abandons them in a tiny apartment and really only wanted custody of them to stick it to his ex wife (especially since he left one of his kids behind with the ex).
Gabriel is a horrible businessman, and an even more horrible father, and the book unfortunately ends awkwardly and abruptly just when things start to get interesting, so you don't get to experience his entire downfall, which you want to experience, because he sucks so much.

I appreciate having had an opportunity to read this book in ARC form. The appeal of this particular book was not evident to me, and if I cannot file a generally positive review I prefer to simply advise the publisher to that effect and file no review at all.

'Malaterre: Part 1' with script and art by Pierre-Henry Gomont is about the decadent dreams of a father who is in way over his head.

Gabriel is the kind of irresponsible main character that leads you to believe things you are reading will not end well. From his alcoholism to his philandering and bad business decisions. This is the story about his attempt to buy back a family estate called Malaterre deep in an unknown jungle. He has no business trying to manage it, and it shows. Things are made worse when he takes two of his children to a foreign country and proves he isn't much of a father, along with his other failings.

There is not a lot of happiness to be found in this story. What I felt was a sense of impending dread. I'll have to read part 2 to see how it all ends. The art is pretty good, and it's not a bad story about a person out of control.

I received a review copy of this graphic novel from Europe Comics and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.

Malaterre Part One by Pierre-Henry Gomont
Europe Comics

Focusing on surly, unlikable drunk Gabriel, Malaterre starts with his death and works backward, his lawyer calmly recounting the ugly story of his life and his desperate attempt to reclaim his family’s glory in Africa.

Since from the beginning you know that Gabriel is going to end up lifeless on a dirt road in Africa, the challenge for Gomont is to make the journey to that spot interesting, and he does this perfectly. Following Gabriel through his reprobate younger years and into his sinister marriage to Claudia, Gomont paints the picture of a horrible person whose decisions are destined to self-destruct.

His dream is to restore a mansion in Africa that had once belonged to his family to its former glory and make up for the blemish of his grandfather’s losing the property. In reality, it’s a desire for a return to colonialism, of a time when a white French man had a misguided pride from his social position over black Africans. In Gabriel’s warped mind, this is going to redeem him from his life as a loser.

Gomont makes this all bearable by populating the story with people you do like, Gabriel’s family, the people he is most screwing over, and as his venture becomes shiftier and more doomed, the actions of his children to get through the nightmare become more and more central to the story.

Gomont’s story is nuanced enough, but his art only adds to the depth, rendering the landscapes of France and Africa with scratchy, moody beauty, utilizing layouts in clever ways that create alternate jumbles and flows, and really excelling at the body language of his figures. I’m excited to see where this goes.

Malaterre tells the tale of Gabriel Lasaffre, a man whom I’d label as a functioning alcoholic, who at the very beginning of the book dies of a heart attack. For the rest of the tale his story is told by a friend and business partner. We’re told how Gabriel dreams of buying back the jungle estate his ancestors once owned and the interactions he has with those around him before and during this time.

Part One focuses, predominantly, on the “before” part, covering his youth, the start of his own family and his destructive rather than nurturing behaviours when handling any and all relationships. Gabriel only really looks out for Gabriel and will, seemingly, undermine his relationships with his own children to get what he wants.

The story itself is told fairly simply but its the art work that really makes everything work. At times the character work really reminds me of Quentin Blake (he who illustrated Roald Dahls works), although said characters are far more detailed than Blake’s work. There’s a real hand drawn sketching element to the artwork that adds life and a European feel to what we’re reading. Even if Gomont hadn’t explicitly told us that (at times) we were in France it would have been easy to place the characters there from the way Malaterre has been drawn. Some of the location drawings, especially of the cities and the beach are beautiful to look at and are almost characters within themselves.

What adds to this feel is the muted blocky palette that Gomont has applied to his work really helps the reader feel the tone and mood of particular sections of the story whilst the inventive use of speech bubbles, wherein we occasionally have images such as a pan of water boiling over or a fire, really help the reader understand the emotional state of the characters rather than just reading the text or having the characters spelt their feelings out to us at all times which really works to show how controlling and manipulative Gabriel can be in his interactions with others and how that makes them feel.

So far, so good then, Malaterre has been split into two parts by the publisher for its English translation (it appears to be one book for its original French release) but at just shy of 100 pages, theres a good chunk of work here to read through. I for one am looking forward to seeing how things unravel for Gabriel, his children and his ex-wife, not to mention the estate of Malaterre itself.

*Disclaimer: I received this book for free on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I went into this graphic novel completely blind, knowing nothing about it other than I love the artwork on the front.

Unfortunately I didn't enjoy this at all.  It was a struggle to get through which is surprising considering it's a graphic novel. The characters were horrible, the plot almost non-existent and the illustration style couldn't save it for me unfortunately. I won't be carrying on with this series and to be honest I can't recommend it.

An admirable attempt but unfortunately this book was unable to sustain my attention. Perhaps more attention needs to be paid to the narrative arc.

Read in English, which is important as it would appear the French audience got the whole thing, while our English-language publishers were happy to split this needlessly into two halves. So this drama, where an alcoholic terror of a man tries to reestablish his ancestral family's colonial interest in a timber jungle – and steals his two older children from their mother to try and keep the whole place slightly sane – is most abruptly stopped. Strong colouring design and a sense of anything-could-happen will bring the reader back, but it's unfortunate (if I'm right) that they have to make the repeat journey.

I liked this overall. I got a little bored in the middle of part one, which seemed to drag a bit. More in the review of part 2.

The artwork is good, but it was the story of the father that kept me reading. Why was he so callous? Why didn't his children feel they could reach out to their mother? The father reminds me of my own. A hustler, an alcoholic, a conman. This first volume ends on a cliffhanger so I am interested to see where volume 2 takes us.

This is an engrossing story about a man who leaves France in order to buy property in Africa and start a rather speculative business operation. He basically steps into uncertainty and he takes his children with him without the permission of their mother.

Gabriel Lesaffre buys the property which formerly belonged to his colonizing ancestors. The man has been a very turbulent person since childhood and this turbulence very much describes how he lives as a grown man, only now his family are drawn into this. Very much a law unto himself and rebellious against all kinds of authority, the story tells how he eventually falls in love, gets married, has three children and then gets divorced and disappears.

But sometime later he reappears and begins to develop a relationship with his three children who are entranced by him, but what he has in mind is very sinister because he manages to get custody of two of his three children and then disappears with them to Africa.

We are not told which African country he disappears to but he goes there too resurrect the colonial grandeur of his family home and thus the reader is sucked into the story, wanting to know whether or not he will succeed and what happens to the children.

The artwork is good, but for me it was the actual story that held my attention because the man was just so flippant, callous and self-serving, and such a liar but for what? I couldn't understand why anybody would take their children and live in such a precarious way just for the sake of it, when he could've left the children with their mother and then rebuilt the property and developed his business.

But this is a man who doesn't follow convention or do what is best for others and that is part of the story. This isn't a man who is rational or hard-working, basically the man is a hustler and an alcoholic one to boot.

It is a very compelling graphic novel. The storytelling is so good that I could feel the agony of his ex-wife separated from her children and the way the children were manipulated. The novel manages to convey this through the artwork in a really powerful way. I could feel the frustration of having married a man who is just so manipulative, selfish and blind, and yet who has the ability to push through his plans and ambitions. This is a man who probably could have succeeded at anything he put his mind to but who makes destructive choices.

I do think it would have been good if the reader could know where the children were actually living and I was also surprised by the isolation of their mother and her inability to retrieve her children. This is very much a fascinating story and I honestly wish I could read book two. I don't know why the author has decided to tell the story in two books. I was on tenterhooks as I read this, only to find out that I have to wait for the second volume to be released and I am now desperate to find out what happens.

Copy provided by Europe comics via Netgalley in exchange for an unbiased review.

This one was not quite for me, but I know some patrons that will enjoy this graphic novel. The color work is very good though.

Pierre-Henry Gomont gives us unique art and a compelling narrative. Malaterre is a book that faces its reader head on. Enjoyable and a fine example of the graphic novel medium.

Malaterre is the story of a man for whom nothing is ever enough, a man who holds onto a family past that never again comes to fruition. Above all, it’s the story of a family torn apart by a man’s false ambitions and his race for a success he is incapable of sustaining. The graphic novel begins at the end before showing us the origins and subsequent meanderings of this troubled man. We see him fly around the world, trying to weasel his way into the good graces of the wealthy patrons of multiple countries. His family is left in the lurch, forced to deal with his constant absences and his shady behavior that eventually tears his family apart. Malaterre is part one of a family saga that is sure to have a dramatic finish.

The art style is fascinating, to say the least. The lines are aggressive and exaggerated, matching perfectly with the personality of the protagonist. He’s unpredictable and jagged around the edges, and the artist has done a great job capturing that in the art. There’s a mastery of nature in the style as well, showing the wildness of the jungle through twisted details that are both intricate and obscured. The man’s emotions are illustrated well through explosive sound bubbles and color changes.

Overall, Malaterre is an intimate portrait of a man who is a complete mess as a businessman, father, and friend. We see his whims thrown across the masterfully drawn panels, echoing a life filled with insecurities. I look forward to seeing how the story continues, knowing the typical end for a not-so-typical man.

Review will be published on 2/18/19: https://reviewsandrobots.com/2019/02/18/malaterre-book-review