This might indeed be a 5 star book, but it is, in the tradition of McCarthy's The Road, Lemire's Sweet Tooth an absolutely brutal dystopian graphic novel that features an ailing father and two surviving sons. The father keeps a journal, but the boys can't read. Survival is almost secondary for one boy to learning what is in this journal that reflects on their early life, their mother, and their father's true feelings for them (since he forbids words like love and caring, because they can only lead to pain).
The time is The End, after "The Poisoning," and now it is all about survival of the fittest and meanest. Or is it, as in The Road? The boys find a slave girl that two "deformed" (let's call them physically disabled) twins are using to bargain with a brutal group with some quasi-religious pretensions. They also find a middle aged woman who they see as "good people" to face the future with. So you have been warned, this is brutal and even nightmarish and about family and love and caring, maybe just the slightest threads of those impulses, but they keep hoping, striving, on their road. That the boy eventually finds someone to tell him even a little of what is in the journal is central to any hope in the story.
Hard to read, but more hopeful than the dystopian series Crossed, by Garth Ennis, which I couldn't continue reading. This is the third graphic novel I have been able to get in English from Gipi. One, Garage Band, is really a short story in comparison to this, and lighter, feels like memoir. A second one, a little more developed, Notes for a War Story, which is similarly episodic and coming-of-age to Land of the Sons, is about two brothers also just trying to survive in an endless war.
These books are really preparation for his magnum opus, this book, which I would read with The Road, or with something like Alone by Chabouté, which is to say that Sons is an allegory for facing The End of anything, of devastation, of personal tragedy or global disaster. Powerful. This is Gipi's best realized artistic accomplishment, in delicate (black and white) pencil drawings.