2 out of 5

A cute mash-up of some 80s movie tropes, transposed into the animal world, Pau’s Baboon! ultimately suffers from some limitations the artist (purposefully or otherwise) put on themselves, which furthermore results the story feeling much more repetitive and aimless than it might otherwise have.

To start: a leopard mother is hunting baboons for a meal for her child. She nabs one in particular and runs off with it, but circumstances leave her childless, and discovering that the baboon she has killed has left a baby without a parent. Some panels of indecision later, and leopard mom is raising baboon child has her own, stalking prey and the like as a leopard would.

Later, a crisis of identity when our now-grown baboon discovers others like him, and faces difficulty trying to insert himself into their clan. From here, the book switches from Tarzan / Jungle Book framing into Karate Kid, and while that’s quite a brilliantly unexpected changeup, Pau never quite marries one side of the story to another, and a late attempt to link them falls flat. The last half or so of the story is all training, and saving the baboon girl from the tuffs in the clan.

…Which is quite a reinforcement of save-the-princess stuff, and that feels quite lazy for something published in 2020.

This is an odd undercurrent to the story: this is 100+ pages, with quite a cast, and, though stylized, featuring lots of detailed, animated scenes and scenery. The plot is repetitive, but it’s also not a one line draft. There’s work here, but it also comes off as off-the-cuff to a degree. A patchwork of stuff the artist wanted to draw, and then stitched together by story, which may be part of te cause of that repetition: there’s a cycle of our lead baboon getting into scuffles and retreating that seems to happen again and again, and though changes are incremental during each cycle, it’s not necessarily engaging; it all feels like it could’ve been compressed into 30 pages.

But the other part of that is probably the limitations of how Pau tells this story: it’s wordless, and the artist also avoided going too cartoony with the animals (except, funnily, using randomly appearing bandages to show when they’ve been injured), which means that these story beats have to be told strictly through “acting,” and unfortunately… the book isn’t quite up to that task, especially with the relative “realism” of the creatures, as Pau was prevented (or avoided) giving each of them too distinguishing of marks, which makes even telling two of the same animals in one panel apart difficult. When you get to the back half of the story with all of the baboons, I sincerely couldn’t figure out who we were supposed to be focusing on much of the time. This obviously undermines the storytelling.

In an afterword, Pau mentions this book was started before Atlas and Axis, and finished after, and maybe there’s something to that: a dormant project resurrected, and interrupted by work on an arguably greater project. Baboon is a fun set of scattered ideas, very unevenly executed – perhaps without that interruption, the final project would’ve had a more stable, realized identity.