Review: Legend of Hedgehog Boy #2

A year after the first issue, René Capone has published the second book of his Legend of Hedgehog Boy series, and this one clocks at 80 pages¹.

At the end of the previous book, Hedgehog boy’s cat’s skin-wearing boyfriend Kitty had been kidnapped (not, I’m not going to do a “catnapped” joke) by other lost boys (reference definitely intended). Hedgehog and his (maybe imaginary) pet teddy bear Frank had decided to rescue him, and a large part of this issue is devoted to the people they meet: an actor who gives good advice, a girl wearing Frankenstein’s creature-like bolts in the neck (she’s indeed named Flower Frankenstein), a squirrelly messenger-boy, all that thanks to their magical steed, a unicorn who’d previously gifted Hedgehog boy with a bag of knives. Living toys and kids living alongside them is not an original take, but here, the message is not one of having to let go of one’s childhood, but (among other things) rather of trying to surround oneself with friends one can count on. Something adults and kids alike can relate to.
As you can see, the fairytale elements already present in the first issue are now in full bloom, but always with a twist that make them more than a simple postmodern take on, say, Peter Pan, just to name an obvious predecessor.

Hedgehog boy and Chip the mailman become friends

There’s more a sense of fun in this issue than in the first one, where we’d learned what had happened to Hedgehog boy to make him both unhinged and eager for tenderness. But as with the fantasy elements, Capone deftly subverts expectations in often small, subtle ways, by playing with various elements such as a voice-over narration which manages to enchant and unnerve at the same time, or scenes where the kids’ world is shown as being full of both beauty and pain (the knives-carrying unicorn is of course a prime example of that). Capone is obviously able to see the two sides of the coin, and he brings that ability to all aspects of his comic.
This issue ends in the middle of the confrontation between the group of rescuers and the kidnappers, who are a band of similarly bizarre boys (and a girl). One can’t help thinking of superhero comics where, for example, the Justice League battles the Injustice League, mirror-images of the heroes. I don’t subscribe to the notion that superheroes are modern equivalent of mythological characters, but in this case, it adds to the idea of Capone twisting common tropes in fiction.

The supplements of this issue (about 20 pages of sketches, short stories and illustrations) make clear the intended audience: Legend of Hedgehog Boy is for all the kids who have survived traumas and mistreatments, hopefully helping to give them hope and strength. A full-page drawing of Frank the bear holding a sword, with the slogan “When therapy alone just won’t do!”, makes clear the goals of the author. And after all, what could be better than help from a fierce teddy bear in times of trouble?