Joan Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert, The Professor’s Daughter (First Second, 2007). $16.95, paperback.

By Beth Hewitt

It’s hard to know for whom Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert wrote The Professor’s Daughter. Although First Second markets the book towards young adult readers, the book’s look – with its sepia palette and Victoriana design – and its gags (like tossing Queen Victoria into the Thames), or its back cover blurb advertisement that it is “best savored with . . . a pot of fine Darjeeling,” makes it seem as if the book is intended for what must be a remarkably small constituency of 60-year old graphic-novel-reading ladies-who-lunch. I’m not convinced, however, that either pubescent or menopausal audiences are going to find any satisfaction in this tale, short of an approving glance at the cover to note, “my, isn’t this lovely.”

Indeed, coupled with the names of Sfar and Guibert, this is certainly why I picked it up. And while I wasn’t expecting a deeply satisfying emotional or intellectual payout from the slender historical melodrama, I was expecting it to fulfill some basic generic rules. Since the story involves the burgeoning love affair between a mummy, Pharaoh Inhomtep IV, and the daughter of the archaeologist who discovers him, I wasn’t expecting realism, but I did assume the pleasures of romance. Instead, we are dropped into their relationship in medea res with no attempt to provide any back-story short of the publisher’s blurb that they are, in fact, in love. The plot, such as it, continues through their episodic misadventures in dull and plodding prose. Guibert’s graphics are likewise dull, although they at least have a kind of polish to them. Despite the fact that Sfar and Guibert are longtime collaborators, there is a remarkable disconnect between words and image: the book reads less like a graphic narrative than a picture book in which all text is located in dialogue bubbles. Nothing is conveyed by image that the stagnant dialogue doesn’t do by itself. Thus, while the visual style perfectly captures the Victorian-lite aesthetic, it certainly doesn’t get the anarchic comedic pacing that it seems Sfar was attempt to evoke.

What follows, then, from this strange recipe is an experience that resembles nothing so much as having your teeth cleaned – one sits patiently, knowing that it will be over in about 20 minutes (which is precisely how long it takes to read the little book), and that within the hour you will remember nothing, save for that somewhat saccharine taste in your mouth. Now I just need a cup of Darjeeling to wash it out.