What If We Were...2 by Axelle Lenoir

When I covered the first What If We Were... book a few months ago, I didn't mention that it had been nominated for an Eisner award. (Because I didn't know; I gather the edition still in print predates the nomination, which is pretty typical.)

Creator Axelle Lenoir has an afterword in this second volume - titled, unsurprisingly, What If We Were...2 - explaining something of the background and history of the series. And I think that nomination boosted her profile, at least down here in the States; she's from French-speaking Canada and was better-known there to begin with. So I may have the first What If We Were... to thank for the fact that I saw her magnificent semi-autobiographical book Secret Passages first, and discovered Lenoir at all. The world is complex and full of wheels within wheels.

Anyway: this series originally appeared in French, in the magazine Curium, under the title Si On Ētait, starting in 2016. The first collection, collecting the first fifty strips with thirty pages of new interstitial material, was published in French in 2019 and, translated into English, by Top Shelf about a year later. This second book is dated 2023, and was translated by Pablo Strauss. It also has about eighty pages, so my assumption - and we all know what happens when you assume, right? - is that this one is also about fifty strips from Curium and thirty pages of new material.

The concept is simple: Natalie and Marie are high-school students and best friends; they've known each other for what counts for teenagers as forever. They play a story-telling game together, in which one of them has a concept (Vikings, pirates, scientists) and the two each talk about how they would be that thing. There's a vague sense that one of them "wins" with the better story, but it's really a way to bullshit and waste time together, like all the best homegrown games. Lenoir tells these stories in an energetic style, with a lot of color in her pages and a lot of amusing, appropriate facial expressions from her whole cast - this time out, it's even more colorful, as the story heads beyond the high-school world for extended periods.

This book sees the concept expanding a bit; it's mostly more slice-of-life, showing how Natalie and Marie met, plus some other moments in their shared past, and a bit of a spotlight on Natalie's still-new girlfriend, Jane Doe. There's also a long sequence where they are accidentally transformed, during the game, into characters in a fairy tale, and need to work through that story and get back to the real world in the end. It gets frenzied, in that episodic-story way, so energy can ramp up very quickly in a short sequence of pages - but it all flows together into this larger collection.

This started off as a "you can be who and whatever you want to be" story for French-speaking teen girls, and that's still the core of it - but it works just fine, and is wonderfully entertaining, even to those who never were French-speaking, girls, or Canadian and who have been what they are for several decades now. Lenoir's characters are big and fun and specific, and the hijinks they get up to make great stories.