For the last 10 minutes, my son Noah has been walking around the house holding up a hand mirror, staring at himself, tripping over the cat, bumping into furniture. He can see only what he’s looking at, which is himself and what’s behind him. “What are you doing?” I ask. “I’m trying to feel what it would be like if I existed only in third person,” he replies. “I see,” I say. “Stay away from the stairs.”
Myth does what Noah is doing. It holds a mirror up to the first person to extract the third. Folk tales leave the first person crumpled on the ground, like an old bathrobe, and refigure its outline into allegory.
On the cover of NIGHT STORIES: Folktales From Latin America (Toon, 48 pp., $17.99, ages 7 to 9), by the Argentine cartoonist Ricardo Liniers Siri, known as Liniers, the “O” in the title is cleverly replaced by a moon with a furrowed brow. Once an open vowel, once a hole in the word “stories,” the worried moon shines on a brother and sister as they tell each other Latin American folk tales from a bunk bed set against a starry sky.
The sky shown behind them in subsequent comics sequences — whorls and loops of black ink on gray watercolor — resembles a fingerprint. But whose? Maybe it’s a folk tale fingerprint that belongs to all of us at once; a fingerprint shared by persons first and third, the storytellers and the characters inside the tales.
Depending on how scared the other sibling is, the brother and sister change the endings and twist the middles of their stories. Around these ad-libbers, Liniers draws soft, circular borders reminiscent of dream bubbles, as if the folk tales themselves are dreaming up the children retelling them. I’ve always believed we tell stories to survive, but maybe I’ve had it backward. Maybe folk tales dream us up so that they never die.
Without ever climbing out of bed, this boy and girl travel across South America, frightening each other with stories of Brazil’s Iara (a mermaid who lures young men to leave everything and live with her underwater forever); Mexico’s La Lechuza (an owl with the face of an old woman who “lost a child to cruelty” and now seeks revenge); and Argentina and Uruguay’s La Luz Mala (an evil light named Mandinga, “a demon that arose from the souls of those who were not buried properly” and spooks weary travelers on the pampas during the driest months).
Below the brim of his black bowler hat, in a panel that takes up three-quarters of a page, Mandinga’s hair shoots out in straight black lines from both sides of his head. His eyes are yellow with red pupils, his mouth and nose hidden by the high collar of a red overcoat. Underneath this panel are terror and its echo: a traumatized gaucho on the left and the brother listening to the folk tale on the right.
Now firmly lodged in the story, the brother is scared enough to ask if, “just for tonight,” the lights could be left on. Not a bad idea given that on the last page — seemingly unaware of one another and contemporized — the mermaid, the owl and Mandinga all appear on a street that could easily be right outside the window.
The book’s introduction, by David Bowles, touches on the Aztecs’ and other Nahua people’s creation myths, reminding us that sometimes it takes five tries to get a world right. And a treasure trove of back matter in turn explains the origins of Liniers’s three “night stories.”
Vera Brosgol’s underwater folk tale, PLAIN JANE AND THE MERMAID (First Second, 368 pp., $14.99, ages 10 to 14), is a cabaret of tropes and figures from many tales we know and love, spun anew. Flecks from “Alice in Wonderland,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Cinderella,” “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Beauty and the Beast” sparkle across the pages of this graphic novel like antique glitter.
Plain Jane feels like a figure not only rescued from the imagination of Hans Christian Andersen, but ultimately relieved of the agony his protagonists often suffer. Brosgol gives Jane the chance of a “happily,” rather than only the darkening fate of an “ever after.”
One might think a world populated with a crone, selkies, zombies, evil mermaids, a water demon, an anglerfish, a lost brother, dead parents, eviction and lovesickness would leave no room for a discernible plot, but Brosgol must have drunk the same potion Jane drinks, giving her the power to breathe underwater, cohere the story and know exactly when to come up for air.
At the heart of her tale are a mermaid who keeps her youth and beauty by eating beautiful men; a mermaid-gone-crone who sacrifices her beauty because she can’t bear to eat the man she loves; and Plain Jane, whose heroic adventures in the depths of the sea enable her to finally see through herself.
Sometimes to get to our truest reflection, we must swim past the many myths that warp our mirrors to where the water is clearest.
