Situated at the boundaries between Bildungsroman and fairy tale, The Gull Yettin portrays the story of an orphaned child whose parents died in a house fire. Chased by a shapeshifting and anthropomorphised bird (the “Gull Yettin” of the title) acting both as a threat and as a guide, the protagonist ventures forth in a familiar yet disquieting landscape. 

Joe Kessler is among the most experimental comics artists of our age. Co-founder of the Breakdown Press Publishing House and winner of the 2020 Fauve Révélation at the Angoulême Festival with Windowpane, he’s part of the thematic journey that explores the relationship between body and landscape, in an exhibit dedicated to his long and wordless graphic novel, released in 2022 for L’Association and in the following year for NYRC

The Gull Yettin starts off from an archetypical trope, the trauma deriving from the death of loved ones, which causes a need for traversing space, in a journey in search for the protagonist’s place in the world. Like Max, the protagonist of Maurice Sendak’s famous book Where the Wild Things Are, the main character in The Gull Yettin ventures forth inside the “wild” dimension that is childhood.
Like in Kessler’s debut book Windowpane, the mark changes from panel to panel, adapting to the character’s emotional state. Bodies and environments chase themselves and mix in a weave of shapes that blends the broken lines of buildings and the fauve colors of the forest, letting the reader plunge in the ambiguous and all-encompassing reality of childhood.