After this, Aimée decided to focus on graphic novels and animation. Her first graphic novel The Return of the Honey Buzzard won the Prix Saint-Michel and was adapted to film. She debuted with Snippers, a humorous daily comic series for the Dutch newspaper Metro. Aimée received her degree in Animation at the Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam, KASK Ghent and at the Gobelins Summer School Paris. Subsequent books, Blossoms in Autumn and Taxi!, were translated worldwide and won awards in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Japan.ĭays of Sand was originally published in France as Jours de Sable (Dargaud, 2021) selling over 40,000 copies.Aimée de Jongh (1988) is a comic author, animator and illustrator from the Netherlands, with a large variety of drawing styles.

The Return of the Honey Buzzard, her first graphic novel, won the Prix Saint-Michel for best Dutch graphic novel and was made into a film in 2017. A detailed travelogue of this trip is available in English on her blog.Īimée de Jongh is an award-winning comics author and animator from the Netherlands. During the trip, she stopped at museums and archives, to interview experts of the Dust Bowl and FSA history. In researching Days of Sand, Aimée spent 10 days driving from Oklahoma, through the old Dust Bowl area, to California. It looks both fascinating and evocative, another important looking, award-winning graphic novel coming from Europe to shine a light on a period of history often overlooked. They became climate refugees – 90 years ago. A total of 2.5 million inhabitants decided to leave the area, mostly toward California, in search of a better life. These storms carried so much sand and dust, that they could block all sunlight, turning days into nights. The Dust Bowl was an oval-shaped region in the Mid-South, that was struck by severe droughts and heavily blowing dust storms. In 1937, the federal FSA agency hired photographers to document the lives of farmers across the United States. Over the course of Clark’s time there he begins to understand the awful conditions these people have to suffer and comes to question his own role and responsibilities in this tragedy sweeping through the center of the country.ĭescribed as “a moving and unforgettable tale, inspired by real-life stories of courage and perseverance against all odds,” Days of Sand is based on true events. Set in the United States, 1937, smack in the middle of the Great Depression, Days of Sand tells the tale of 22-year-old photographer John Clark, given the job of documenting the terrible conditions of the dust bowl of the Central and Southern States by the Farm Security Administration.īut when he starts working, the attempts to bring the matter to the public are met with apathy and distrust, with the people affected asking what good are a couple of photos against relentless and deadly dust storms?

Aimee de jongh days of sand