Bigby Bear, Vol. 1 by Philipe Coudray

"All-ages" can mean a lot of things. Sometimes it means "designed for the youngest, dullest children and shoved out into the world with a vain hope anyone more experienced will find the tiniest bit of joy in it."

And sometimes it means something like "aimed vaguely at children by ruthlessly removing everything even slightly complicated or nuanced."

But it can also mean "pitched in a tone and using language that bright elementary-schoolers can understand, but serious about itself and unafraid to tackle the kind of Big Ideas that new, smart people are drawn to."

As far as I can tell, the "Bigby Bear" stories of French cartoonist Philipe Coudray are of the third type. This first collection - Bigby Bear, Vol. 1 - contains a hundred single-page stories, which I assume first appeared one by one in French somewhere, but the book doesn't explain where or how. That original publication is copyright 2012-2018, though I suspect that was the two or three smaller collections that were combined for this English-language edition. This version was translated by Miceal Ogriefa and published by Humanoids' all-ages BiG imprint in 2019.

Coudray uses a cartoony, simple, energetic style to tell these short vignettes about a thoughtful, quirky bear and his friend Rabbit, along with some other occasional forest animals as supporting cast. The stories about about exploration, wordplay, some humorous reversals, and a whole lot of cartoon thinking - digging a deep hole to see the sunset first, exploring how shadows work as the day goes on, and other things like that.

Again, mostly ideas that an eight-year-old might have had, in exactly that way or a less sophisticated version - the odd, "how does this really work" ideas that are partially joke, partially an attempt to understand how the world really does work, and partially tying to sketch out how the world should work.

This is amusing and fun, not quite getting into meta-comics but occasionally coming close - Bigby is an explorer and a thinker, a creator of art and an active outdoorsman (well, he's a bear, so I suppose everything he does is outdoors, and he's not a man, but you know what I mean). He's an engaging character in a wide world full of color and life and ideas, and his stories are the kind of all-ages work that works just as well for adults as for children.