What If We Were... only has a three-period ellipsis in its title. This is wrong. When an ellipsis ends a sentence, it needs to have four periods. I am incredibly disappointed at this major, unforgivable mistake.
This book collects what I think were forty or fifty individual strips - the main story seems to be in two-page entries, but there's also interstitial material that might have been attached to the stories, added for this book, or maybe the alternate version in every other issue - that appeared in Quebec's teen-focused magazine Curium in French. From the copyright page, I think a version of this collection then appeared in book form in Quebecois French, from Front Froid, and then this edition came out in 2020, from Top Shelf, translated by Pablo Strauss and Aleshia Jensen. It is the first of two books collecting this strip; I have no idea if that's the whole run or not.
Marie and Natalie are teens, best friends who have played the title game since they were little kids. One of them has a premise - what if the two of them were Vikings, or superheroines, or world-famous scientists, or whatever - and they both riff on the idea. The strip is about their friendship, using the game as a regular (but not required) element to show how they relate to each other and what they care about. Oh, and Natalie has a crush on another girl they go to school with - first unnamed, then called "Jane Doe"...which somehow turns into her actual name over the course of the strip.
Jane does become the third major character during these strips, first having that very teenager-y circumlocutious conversation with Marie to ask if Natalie 1) likes girls and 2) likes her. Since Natalie does and definitely does, Jane starts circling the outer orbit of the strip about a third of the way into this book, gradually getting more and more central until the two of them actually have a date.
This is very much a story about teenagers, originally for teenagers. It has that nervous, insecure-in-its-own-skin energy of the teen, the sense that all of the world is new and overwhelming and awesome but also deeply scary. Marie and Natalie are interesting, quirky, real people with foibles and distinct personalities - Jane is a bit more of a plot token, especially early on, but she does get somewhat more depth once she's in the strip more.
What If We Were... is fun and zippy - it's clearly a collection of a loose serial, and equally clearly a work for teens (especially French-speaking teen girls in Canada, which may be a bit too far away from some readers' experience), and definitely not as ambitious and impressive as Lenoir's big graphic novel Secret Passages. But Lenoir has an infectious energy in her drawing and her dialogue is always specific and grounded - this is a story about these people and what they care and think about.
No comments:
Post a Comment