Night Stories: Folktales from Latin America by Liniers

This may seem vaguely familiar: it's a large-format book, in comics, for a mostly young-readers audience, adapting three folktales from "Latin America" for an American audience, by a noted cartoonist. Jaime Hernandez did very much the same thing, for the same publisher, back in 2018 with The Dragon Slayer.

But "Latin America" - I keep putting it in quotes because a continent and a half, with nearly 700 million people and dozens of cultures, is not one thing - has plenty of folktales to choose from. So TOON Books, a few years later, asked Liniers (best-known for the daily strip Macanudo, and an Argentine now resident in the USA) to do his version.

That's 2024's Night Stories, which adapts three traditional tales - Liniers or his editors include a map, showing that one is from the Texas-Mexico border, one from the Amazon basin of Brazil, and one from the Argentine pampas - along with some related, and vaguely educational, text material. Novelist and translator David Bowles provides an introduction, and there's text explanations of the three tales (by Liniers, maybe) and a bibliography in the back.

Liniers has always been fond of story-telling in his comics, and he has a suitable frame story here - two young siblings, a boy and a girl, are in bunk beds, not ready to go to sleep, and telling each other these stories to (lightly) scare each other.

The boy leads off with the Brazilian story, "The Mermaid and the Pink Dolphin," about a solo river-boat captain who is captivated by a mermaid he sees at night (but who turns into a pink river dolphin by day) and finds a way to join her.

That's not very scary, his sister says, so he continues with "The Owl of Doom," the Mexican border story. The Owl of the title is a powerful bruja or witch, who frightens a local town with her calls - which are said to variously kill or torment all those who hear them. One young person in town has a novel solution to the problem.

And then the sister tells the last story, from Argentina: "The Evil Light." Two gauchos, out on the pampas, talk about the title manifestation, said to be the light from a crack into Hell. It of course brings death and mayhem in its wake, and they flee when they see a mysterious light...which is not what they expect.

Liniers makes his people somewhat cartoony, in a very story-book way, here - it's appropriate for the material and the audience, and very similar to the way he works in his daily strips. He mostly keeps the tone light, despite the kids' talk about scary stories. And he tells three different, interesting bits of folklore in a modern, knowing tone.

I imagine this is already in a lot of libraries, school and classroom and public, which is where most readers will find it. (It's where I did, too.) The package may be a little too obviously "educational" for some readers well past their educational years; that's too bad for them.