240 pgs. color | $29.99 hardcover | W & A: Chloé Wary
Barb is a star player and the captain of her U-19 football club, the Rosigny Roses, and she’s doing great on the pitch. Off it, she’s dealing with the usual teenage stuff—she’s had it with the rundown suburb (in France, that means high-rise buildings far from the city center, akin to housing projects and mostly populated by immigrants and the poor) where she lives, her hardworking single mom thinks she should stop being a tomboy and take more responsibility for keeping the household running and take her schoolwork more seriously since it’s her senior year, and her boyfriend Bilal can be a real jerk sometimes.
All that pales, however, in the face of an administrative decision from her football club that, due to a shortage of funds, they can only fund one team to compete in post-season play—and that one team will be the men’s team. It’s a common situation faced by women in sports traditionally identified as male—no matter what they accomplish, it doesn’t really matter, because they’re only an afterthought while the men’s team is the real deal.
News travels fast, and some players on the men’s team can’t keep themselves from gloating, to say nothing of making inappropriate sexual gestures. So the women challenge them to a match, and win. But it’s not much of a win because it doesn’t count for anything—the men demand a rematch under more official conditions, and even then there’s no guarantee that the winning team will be sponsored to play in the post-season. In the meantime, the Roses get serious about finding their own sponsors, since their club clearly doesn’t take them seriously, and also think a lot about the other choices they’ve been making in their lives and what really matters in a world where “unfair” is the rule of the day.
Season of the Roses is a sports graphic novel that’s not really about the sport in question—or rather it’s about much more than the sport, in particular about what the sport illuminates about the characters and their society. The characters in this graphic novel don’t live in the glamorous Paris of the movies, and they’re not the kind of young people who have their lives planned out for the next 40 years either. Instead, for them the only time is now, and the only world that matters is the one they’re living in at this very minute.
The art for Season of the Roses is drawn with colored markers, adding a distinctively handmade look to art that is also reminiscent of the simple clear-line style used in many French-language comics. This is a particularly appropriate choice for a graphic novel about teenagers—the scrappiness of the art makes the characters’ fierceness pop right out of the page and the inherent messiness of Wary’s choice of media creates a feeling of spontaneity that says “teenage girls mad as hell and afraid of absolutely nothing” in a way a more polished style would not. The frame dimensions change with the character’s moods—sometimes they’re orderly rectangles, sometimes disruptive trapezoids, and sometimes you get a full-page or double-page spread, often with an extremely expressive sky dominating the frame.
Season of the Roses won the Audience Award at the 2020 Angoulême International Comics Festival and the 2020 Artemisia Prize. You can see a sample of the artwork on the Fantagraphics web site. | Sarah Boslaugh
