Incredible! by Zabus & Hippolyte

Before I dive into the details of this book, I just want to take a moment to note how far above its weight Belgium punches in the comics world. It's comparable in size and population to the state I live in (New Jersey), similarly sandwiched between bigger, noisier powers (France and Germany for Belgium, New York and Philadelphia for New Jersey) and divided culturally in a similar way. Although, I should note that the gulf between Flemings and Walloons is substantially more fraught than the debate about whether to call one's breakfast meat "pork roll" or "Taylor ham."

And yet, it's not the French comics ecosystem that dominates Europe - it's the Franco-Belgian comics world. With Belgium second in the name, sure, but close to equal with a country that has twenty times its physical size and five times its population. I don't know why - maybe Belgium has Chinese-style academies for fomenting their children's comics-making power, to funnel them into the 9th art? But it's a whole thing, has been for two or three generations now, and this book is deeply Belgian in an unapologetic way that might be notable from some other small country. But, with Belgium and comics, it's just to be expected - Belgium is the land of comics.

Incredible! is a 2020 bande dessinée, originally published by Dargaud in Europe, with this Europe Comics English-language edition coming out the same year in this Joseph Laredo translation. It's written by Zabus and drawn by Hippolyte, two more of those single-named creators so common in Europe (and somewhat baffling to me) - both of whom, as far as I can tell, are new to me. But, again, it's a big Franco-Belgian world of comics, most of which never gets translated into English to begin with, and I've never tried to be comprehensive anyway.

I don't think this is for children, exactly, though it's the kind of book that's fine for most ages. But it is about a child: Jean-Loup, an eleven-year-old Belgian boy. Even if the book didn't tell us explicitly that he was Belgian, the fact that his confidant and basically only friend is a figurine of the then-Belgian king (the story is set in 1983, for possibly semi-autobiographical reasons) would be a major clue.

Jean-Loup is a stutterer, quiet and withdrawn at school, not wanting to call attention to himself. He has a lot of rituals and rules for himself, which we see on his way home from school - we think he may have OCD, or something similar. He lives with his father, who is distant and busy - we don't see the father on the page. Jean-Loup spends his time researching things intensively, writing down facts on little cards, and organizing those cards - so he has a large collection of knowledge, or semi-random things, that he built himself and knows pretty deeply.

His mother is dead. He talks to a funerary urn of her ashes. And he's got some externalized guilt and fear related to his family - we don't know exactly why, but he's an imaginative kid who sees (at least in this book, in comics form to make it visual) visions of his relatives and that Belgian king, nagging and demanding and exhorting and criticizing him all of the time.

So Jean-Loup is a smart, interesting kid with a lot of stuff to deal with, much of it deeply personal - things he doesn't tell anyone else.

And his class at school is having a series of oral presentations. Jean-Loup has prepared his, on a topic carefully constructed to be very boring (so he doesn't draw attention) and very thorough (so he gets a good grade). But things go wrong on the morning of his presentation, and he leaves his notes behind - so he ends up talking off the cuff about his latest research project, the thing he's currently passionate about: the burial customs of people around the world. He's riveting, energetic, engaging his audience and full of facts that he has right at the tip of his fingers.

His teacher gives him a high grade - and also asks him to be their school's representative in a regional presentation contest. He'd have to do a new presentation: slightly more formal, somewhat longer, on a new topic. Jean-Loup immediately agrees - and never regrets or goes back on that decision.

But it's not easy. His father can't take him to the regional competition - in another city a few weeks later - so his deeply unreliable uncle Johnny Gala has to do it. And, even before that, Jean-Loup wants to ask the advice of the Belgian king on his topic - I think this is one part "Belgium is a small enough country that this isn't a completely insane idea" and one part "Jean-Loup is really caught up in his fantasies and thinks this is a completely reasonable idea," so Johnny Gala has to drive him there.

Johnny's car is unreliable, and breaks down on both trips - but Jean-Loup does meet with the king, briefly, and he he does make it to the competition on time, in the end.

Other things happen, too - there's some family history that we learn along the way, and some changes for Jean-Loup - but that's all part of the journey.

There is a happy ending, slightly bigger than I expected, with Jean-Loup triumphant and happy and (we think) somewhat better positioned in life and somewhat less mentally unsteady.

Zabus tells this story in a slightly more ornate, detailed style than the reader might expect - giving more detail, going down more side-alleys, adding more grace-notes - which works, given Jean-Loup's mania for research and his cabinets crammed full of little cards of facts. Hippolyte draws it in a cartoony style, his figures often lightly outlined and his colors giving at least a pop of sunniness - often from Jean-Loup's blonde hair - on every page. His panels are regular and square, but with loose, rough edges, and his watercolors keep that softness, like a haze of memory taking us back to 1983.

Incredible! is a sweet, positive book suitable for eleven-year-olds like Jean-Loup and anyone who has been eleven, in 1983 or since then. I do suspect some aspects of it are semi-autobiographical, but I have no idea how many or how much.