Freddy Lombard, Vol. 3: The Comet of Carthage by Yves Chaland

The Freddy Lombard books are Belgian creator Yves Chaland's major work, according to everything I've seen. He died very young - in 1990, at barely more than thirty - but he'd done this five-book series over the previous decade, along with some other random works. I started with Chaland, maybe because I always go at things from an odd angle, with his quirkier, spikier collection of shorts Young Albert, and have read the first two Freddy books over the past year: The Will of Godrey of Bouillon and The Elephant Graveyard.

Those first two Freddy books started fairly conventionally (both stories in Elephant and the one in Will): Freddy and his friends Dina and Sweep are young and poor, and wander into a situation where there's the potential for adventure and remuneration, and so jump at it. Adventure then ensues.

The Comet of Carthage isn't playing that game; it isn't going to set up its plot or explain anything up front. It is about as in medias res as any book can be; we don't even see Freddie and his friends until the eighth story page (of 46).

What Comet does not tell you up front includes:

• We are in the French Mediterranean port of Cassis.
• A massive comet is approaching (this particular city?!), which will cause a tidal wave that may wipe out everything.
• This comet last appeared two thousand years ago, right at the time of the fall of Carthage, and This Is Important.
• Freddie and friends are near Cassis, camping on the beach, gathering crabs to sell their claws to...someone.
• They also may be searching for random old artifacts, or maybe they just find one or two without really looking for them on purpose.

The book opens with the storm rising, a dead body found on the beach, and a woman fleeing this city whose name we don't know. (Her name, either, I mean. She's Alaia and the dead woman is Ava - both of them are Tunisian, we eventually learn, and in France without papers.) Alaia tries to flee town on the local bus, to get to Marseille and, we think, get further away from there.

But the single road connecting Cassis with the outside world has washed away, so the bus is stopped. Alaia tries to pick her way around the broken section, on crumbly limestone cliffs, but she falls, injured and knocked out. Freddy finds and saves her, bringing her back, unconscious, to the camp he's sharing with Dina and Sweep.

By this point, the reader will have picked up some of the above backstory, but will also notice that the characters are talking around the situation, over-dramatically, and a few of them, especially Freddy, seem to be obsessed with the fall of Carthage and with the ancient Phoenician civilization for no obvious reason.

Alaia has been working as an artist's model in Cassis for Phidas, who I think is also Tunisian or Phoenician or something like that. He is tempestuous and demanding and mercurial, as a secondary-character artist in a fictional work often is, and Alaia is sure that he murdered Ava when she was done posing, that he's done it many times before, and that she is next. This is, obviously, why she fled.

But there's no way out of Cassis. Freddy says he'll help her, but his help, as we've seen in the previous books, is freely offered and energetically delivered but only occasionally useful.

Phidas both grabs and browbeats Alaia when she leaves, so she does go back to him - multiple times over the course of the book - and we do see him act violently in other ways. It's entirely plausible that he's a Bluebeard-esque murderer, we think. Whether he and Alaia and maybe Freddy are acting out roles from the fall of Carthage is much murkier and more confusing, made doubly so by the fact that no one actually makes that possibility clear at any point and the dialogue dances on the edge of being deliberately obscure.

Meanwhile, the usual mad scientist in a Franco-Belgian BD - here called Professor Picard - arrives in his bright red submersible, having run out of fuel. He has no French money, and the locals are suspicious of him. Well, they're suspicious of everyone about everything, being whipped into a frenzy by the approaching comet, and shouting wild-eyed things that may be more of the Carthage-come-again stuff or just random racist Frenchness. (Against the dark-skinned Tunisians as well as against the Belgians like Picard and our heroes.)

The comet does hit in the end, the flood waters rising and battering Cassis. Before that, the local rabble march with torches and Frankenstein rakes, yelling various things and attempting to stone Freddy and Alaia to death at one point. Everyone believes there is a single culprit for all of the bad things happening in Cassis: thefts of fuel, electricity cut off, Ava's murder, the comet itself, and perhaps even the perfidy of the ancient Carthaginians. They are wrong: multiple people have done multiple things, and the comet, I think, is just a natural phenomenon. (At least I hope it is; there's one portentous flashback, so it may actually be some sort of supernatural wrecking ball after all.)

Comet is a weird story, told somewhat sideways, and definitely the most interesting and exciting of the three Freddy books I've seen so far. Chaland's art is supple and precise, particularly good at big drama and ominous atmosphere. I don't know that I would call it entirely successful at what it sets out to do - and the dialogue is more than too much a lot of the time, in ways that make me wonder if it's quoting something I'm unfamiliar with - but it is big and bold and confident and I wish more books would take big risks like this one does.