Expanded Horizons: Les Nombrils
Welcome to Expanded Horizons, where I take an occasional look on comics about teenagers from outside of Marvel or DC. Or in this case even outside of the American sphere of comics as whole, being made by a married couple from Canada for the French audience. I randomly remembered I had this series and the Pride Month is ending....but maybe not let us go too far ahead of ourselves, we get to that.
Les Nombrils, also known as The Bellybuttons is a comedy/slice of life/teen drama series that is published in Spirou - the French comics magazine that produced few comics some of you, especially those not living in the States, could have heard of - Smurfs and Lucky Luke being probably their most popular creations. But don’t let these two color your idea about the magazine as a whole, it runs all sorts of genres. There is a place for an adventure series like Yoko Tsuno, a lighthearted fantasy like Melusyne, grim thriller like XIII or gag strip like Kid Paddle. Les Nombrils was something akin to that last one, at least at first. And quite frankly, early volumes of the series (which are also the only ones translated in English) are considerably weaker because of it - very little actually substantial plot and much less defined characters. It took it a while for the series to start evolving but once it did HOLY CRAP it became good.
The series centers around 3 teenage girls who can be best described as “frenemies” - rich and spoiled Vicky, her best friend Jenny, who isn’t very bright and Karine who is basically their punching bag - a lot of humor, especially but not exclusively in the early volumes, comes from how horrible Vicky and Jenny can be to her. If it stayed that way, it would be rather bad and not very funny, but at some point, there was a shift towards introducing more drama. It’s not the first comics from French-Belgian scene to do this but one of the better-received ones (I know that when popular series Lou did the same, it caused far more controversy).
The shift happened somewhere around volume 4. Manipulations of other people caused Karine’s boyfriend to break up with her but she soon found another one- Albin. He pushed her to change her looks and then has been working towards helping her become more confident and independent but also getting her away from Vicky and Jenny. And I think that somewhere along the way creators managed to make something very interesting, a situation with strong ambiguity. Albin is priding himself for his skills to manipulate people and he did make Karine change her look and is trying to push her away from her only friends. Those are clear signs of controlling behavior. But thanks to him Karine can now stand more for herself, something fans wanted to see since first volume AND people he is trying to make her distance herself from are Vicky and Jenny, who were absolutely horrible to her through the entire series. This ambiguity lead to people having arguments over whenever Albin is a decent person or a scumbag for several volumes. It was finally in volume seven where people found the answer. In a way, it actually justified the existence of early volumes - people needed to see how bad friends Vicky and Jenny are to Karine. They needed to be made to wish for her to finally stand up for them. And once that happen they could be left wondering if this is really what they wanted and isn’t Karine really escaping from one toxic relationship straight into another.
Volume 7 (pictured above) is also interesting since it went full head-on exploring hidden depths of Vicky and Jenny as well. There were small moments building on exploring their hidden depths before. Vicky having serious body image issues was shown very early on, for example. But volume seven swung with full force, revealing things like Jenny’s mother being an alcoholic. The theme of this volume is that all 3 of our protagonists managed to get their dream boyfriends...except things are not so good. I the case of Jenny it’s that her super handsome boyfriend sees her as nothing but an arm candy and she’s secretly meeting a much less attractive guy whose company she’s actually enjoying.
And then there is Vicky. Vicky’s arc has been built through volume six and it’s her slowly realizing that she has feelings for her rich boyfriend’s sister, Megane. It’s pretty good arc, with a lot of comedy but also realistic and more serious elements as Vicky has to deal with her own internalized homophobia before dealing with the fact of her orientation and then with the fact her parents would likely disown her if she came out, all while Megane actually slowly becomes part of her life by attending the same school and joining Karine’s band. Hell, one scene from this storyline made it the only comics I’ve seen to ever manage to use fanservice as means to push forward character development. This storyline is still ongoing, although volume seven ended on a series of gut punches on all fronts (nobody dies, but it. In fact, it left creators themselves a bit depressed so volume 8 is a full-on flashback to the time of joke strips. But I’m certain the story will continue and reach a happy ending. I mean, this started as a comedy strip, they won’t be ending things on a depressing note, right?
- Admin
