Freddy Lombard, Vol. 2: The Elephant Graveyard

I'm still not quite sure what the deal is with Freddy Lombard - the man himself or the series of bandes desinées he's the hero of - even as I'm starting to wonder if there is a deal to begin with. This is a five-book series, all album-format, that came out in the Franco-Belgian comics world in the '80s, all written and drawn by Yves Chaland. They were translated into English substantially later - this edition by Sasha Watson for publication in the US in 2015.

Freddy lives with his friends Dina and Sweep: all of them seem to be in their mid-twenties and have the kind of plot-convenient poverty where they complain about money a lot, live in lousy flats where they dodge the landlord because they don't have the rent money yet, and are willing to dive into just about any kind of adventure if there's a promise of a payday at the end. Maybe that is the deal: young, on the make, living on remittances from a vague relative in Australia, and otherwise mostly blank to be part of any possible story.

And my sense is that Freddy is the title character, rather than Dina or Sweep, because...well, he looks like the hero: blonde Belgian guy with a quiff, Tintin face, tan trenchcoat. Maybe because he's the most hot-headed and active, or maybe he has that personality because he is the hero - either way works.

The Elephant Graveyard is the second book of Freddy's adventures; it has two stories and came out in 1984. (It follows The Will of Godrey of Bouillon, from 1981.)  The two stories are untitled, but the first one is about a trip to Africa to retrieve a valuable photographic plate and the second - the one that gives the volume its title - is about a series of murders linked to Africa and to elephants.

(I say "Africa" rather than anything more specific because that's how the book puts it. The natives in the first story might also look visually a bit racist to some people - they don't talk or act like stereotypes, mostly, but they are designed in a very outdated, um, high-contrast style.)

Both have adventure-story plots, handled confidently and cleanly by Chaland, though there might be an undertone that he doesn't quite believe in it all - it's just a bit too frenetic, too quickly-paced. (Though that may be an artifact of cramming two stories with their own complications into one album. I may also be influenced by having read Chaland's more deliberately norm-breaking Young Albert.)

In any case, Freddy (with Sweep and Dina) get pulled into these two adventure stories - hearing screams from a house as they pass and from the flat upstairs from where they live - and dive into them. In the first case, a rich collector is willing to pay them to go to Africa, so they do without any fuss, and run an expedition out to find a remote tribe and get the photographic plate before the agent of a rival (British, of course) collector gets there first. In the second case, they find a dead body and get caught up in the investigation - while Freddy also speculates that there's a vast treasure (the fabled elephant graveyard, full of ivory) behind it all.

He's wrong about that - about their getting a fortune, at least - but he's always wrong about that, since the premise of the series is that they're poor. He's right, or at least confidently sure, most of the time.

This volume has somewhat more conventional plots than Godfrey did - the stories go more or less as expected and end well, with a lot of action and tense dialogue along the way. Chaland's art is expressive as usual, very good at story-telling. I might even go so far as to recommend new readers start here; it introduces Freddy and his world better than Godfrey.