Webcomic Weekly – ‘A Small Revolution’ by Boum – Brutal, Heartbreaking Work

Webcomic Weekly – one comic for you to read online every week, simple, eh?

This week, we’re back with the artist Boum and her newer webcomic A Small Revolution and it couldn’t be further from her Boumeries webcomic. Gone is the lightness, gone is the comedy, instead we have a short, brutal, and so very sad tale of childhood and revolution.

Boum (Samantha Leriche-Gionet) is a freelance comic artist and illustrator who lives and works in Montreal, Canada. For nine years (2011-2020), she worked on the absolutely lovely Boumeries (which we covered already in Webcomic Weekly) and is currently deep in prep for her graphic novel about “young adulthood, independence and acceptance, and love.”

But here, we’re looking at A Small Revolution, first published in French in 2012 under the title La petite révolution by Front Froid editions, in Montreal, Canada, with the webcomic serialization running from March 2015 to January 2016.

It’s a short tale, just 83 pages long, but it surely packs an emotional punch.

Here’s the first couple of pages, just to give you a feel of the artwork and how great Boum’s style is for this one…

It’s a very different look from Boumaries, her journal comic. Gone is the lightness, the rounded figure work and, in its place, we get a starkness and thinner line marking it all out as somewhere you really wouldn’t want to be.

A Small Revolution is the story of a little orphaned girl named Florence, one of far too many orphans living on the streets in this awful place, this country ruled by the President.

Her closest friend Auguste is a sickly child, his lungs diseased, and depends on Florence and his older brother, Dominique, to look after him and keep him safe.

It’s a dangerous, nasty, cruel world where there’s revolution in the air, with Dominique right in the middle of it all.

But Florence’s ideas of what the revolution will bring are idealised, childish, something that she’s sadly going to be forced, brutally, horribly, finally, to realise through A Small Revolution.

It’s not just Boum’s artwork that’s transformed here, the whole comic is a dark, traumatic thing, dealing with loss, the horrors of war, and its effects on the children here.

It’s not pleasant reading, it’s simply not meant to be, but it is damn good reading, another great comic from Boum, a definite talent.

Go and read A Small Revolution right here.

You can get A Small Revolution in book form from Soaring Penguin Press.

Go say hi to the artist on Twitter.

Then go and buy the books here and support Boumeries on PayPal, Ko-Fi, Patreon here.