G07: Companion Book Project: Picture Books

The wind phone (風の電話, kaze no denwa) is an unconnected telephone booth in Ōtsuchi, Iwate Prefecture, Japan, where visitors can hold one-way conversations with deceased loved ones.

At once a highly symbolic, almost semiotic visual travelogue and a work of remarkable philosophical sensitivity, the book invites us to see our tiresomely familiar world through the eyes of a young man who has a creative intelligence few adults are endowed with and a childlike capacity for wonder and metaphorical imagery. The busy King’s Cross station of the London Tube becomes a serpentine King of the Underworld, Big Ben a giant omniscient rooster, and London’s female workforce — women who seem to Shyam to do most of the work “and happily” — multi-handed goddesses.

In this short, wordless graphic picture book, a young boy feels alone with his anxiety. He isn’t fitting in well at school. His grades are slipping. He’s even lashing out at those who love him.

Mel Tregonning was a graphic design graduate (2004) and talented artist who, before she died by suicide in 2014, published her debut graphic novel Small Things. It received widespread critical acclaim, including praise from award-winning illustrator Shaun Tan, who helped to complete the final pages of the book after Mel’s passing.

Nine years ago Mel Tregonning started working on a comic strip about a little boy overwhelmed by his worry monsters. But before she could finish it, she took her own life.
It wasn't until after Mel's death, in 2014, that her family discovered the story reflected her own personal struggle with anxiety and depression.

On April 18, 2020, Jamalo Makdan, a 12-year-old, died while walking from the chilli fields of Telangana to her home in Chhattisgarh after a nationwide lockdown was announced due to COVID-19 outbreak. She was among a group of migrant workers who, like many others across the country, decided to return home on foot. Her story touched filmmaker Samina Mishra so deeply that she made it into a book, the recently released Jamlo Walks (Puffin books).