LIFELINES: THREE SHADOWS. The sudden loss of a child is as inexplicable as it is horrifying. But equally devastating is a death foretold–the bad diagnosis, the crossfire of hope and terror, the attempts to somehow accept the catastrophe before it’s even happened.

Three Shadows (a comic by Cyril Pedrosa, originally in French but now available in English) is a fable in which a father tries to cheat fate. Louis, Joachim’s father, is living in a rural idyll which is disrupted when the silent, menacing shadows come on horseback. They stay far away at first, faceless and inky like Picasso’s Quixote. But then the family dog disappears, and it becomes clear that the shadows mean business.

Louis defies his wife’s advice and tries to take Joachim out of the country, hoping that the shadows won’t be able to follow. As a result of his actions, he’s imprisoned, shipwrecked, cheated… and nothing he does can keep the shadows away. Even turning himself into a kind of golem, with his son hidden in his tightly-closed fist as if in a second womb, can’t give the child protection.

The book is peopled with fortune tellers and slave traders, shipboard murders and storms at sea, but through all the adventures the inevitability of the boy’s death only becomes clearer.

The shadows at last reveal themselves to be the three Fates of classical mythology. When Joachim tries to thank them for sparing his father’s life, they reply, “Do not thank us. We decide nothing.” The blankness of fate leaves no one to blame for life’s horrors–and no one to thank for life’s beauties and mercies. Nor can the Fates offer any information about the afterlife: “…I cannot tell you what awaits you on the other side. Of that I know nothing. …It is only life that ends here and now.”

The boy accepts this, accepts his own death, despite his father’s fear and denial. His words to his father underscore the hardest truth about parenthood: “There’s no room for me to grow inside your fist. It’s boring here. Please let me out. I’m not afraid of the shadows anymore.” At last Joachim crawls out of his father’s giant hand, and in a snow-swept, desolate landscape he faces the Fates–now turned from faceless shadows into beautiful cloaked women—with calm and a quiet sadness.

Pedrosa got his start in animation, and worked on Disney’s Hercules and The Hunchback of Notre Dame; echoes of that style can be seen in his huge, bearish father, willowy mother, and stumpy little boy. But Three Shadows has a scrawly, sketchy, rough line, which can be playful or frightening as the story demands. Pedrosa has a terrific sense of pacing and page layout–when to zoom in, when to switch perspectives, when to pull back to give a sense of impending disaster. He occasionally uses white-on-black to give the most mythic scenes an even more otherworldly, afterlife feel.

Pedrosa also manages the difficult balance needed for any mythic narrative, making his characters iconic without draining them of particularity and personality. Louis is an archetypal protective father, anguished by his confrontation with his own helplessness. He’s also a man with weaknesses, fears, family stories and sayings, layers of complexity which make him feel real. Scattered, untranslated phrases in Portuguese give the story a sense of place.

Three Shadows is reminiscent of some of Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar stories. Like Hernandez, Pedrosa can do humor and horror–sometimes both at once, as in the bizarre, funny interlude in which the Fates get drunk trying to win a man’s life in a card game. Pedrosa can tell big stories about small lives. In Three Shadows, he has created a sad, strange, and lovely story, a haunting comic which offers solace in the face of unanswerable pain.