‘Missing You’ GN (review)

Written by Phellip Willian
Illustrated by Melissa Garabeli
Translated by Fabio Ramos
Published by Oni Press

Missing You is a children’s graphic story about love, loss, and change, and it comes with warm, beautiful illustrations by Melissa Garabeli.

Unfortunately, the story itself lost me,

Written by Phellip William (and translated by Fabio Ramos), it’s about a young deer found by some children whose mother has apparently just died. The grieving father allows them to keep the deer as a pet and they name him Lion.

From there we follow the story as Lion gives the boy and girl something to cling to, something that needs them.

Then their grandmother comes to visit and she doesn’t want the deer in the house, rightly pointing out that a deer is a wild animal, not a domesticated one.

We see the deer start to grow up, albeit seemingly far more quickly than it should. The kids have issues with their grandmother trying to keep them apart from their pet.

But then…There’s a whole chapter that starts with hunters following what appears to be another small deer. My first thought was maybe it was Lion and this is how he came to be injured when they found him. Only in this case an old woman—and seemingly not the Grandma—finds him and takes him in. Then one day she goes out and doesn’t come back. We see some guy come through the woods looking for her house and they see the deer, who runs away.

After that, it’s back to Lion and his human family. He continues to grow and eventually the kids—who still seem the same age—have to learn to let him go. He goes back to the forest and ends up sleeping on the porch where the OTHER deer slept and the old woman had lived.

The end.

Lovely art or not, I read through it a couple of times trying to keep up and it never did make any sense to me.

Who was the old woman? Why was someone looking for her? Was that supposed to be the same deer? What am I missing?

Don’t know but if I can’t figure it out, I have to think the message of Missing You would be lost on kids.