In Review: The Bellybuttons - It's Ugly Out There

There are times when a book can take you completely by surprise and turn out to be completely different to what you were expecting. The Bellybuttons book It's Ugly Out There with its teen girl talk, high school setting, caricatured artwork and humour wasn't exactly high on my list of "that looks good" and yet...

The Bellybuttons tells of the lives and loves of three high school girls - the glamorous but conniving Vicky and Jenny and the plain and very put upon Karine. Indeed the cover of It's Ugly Out There, of Karine carrying a umbrella for the other two while she herself gets wet, rather sums up the relationship between the three. While both Vicky and Jenny try to be the most glamorous and desirable girl at school and vie for the attention of the older motorbike riding, and perpetually helmeted, John John, Karine acts as their skivvy until she finds love with the rather more sensible Dan. However as the other two realise that they are losing Karine to a boyfriend that they encouraged her to talk to in the first place, they plot to end Karine and Dan's relationship.

The Bellybuttons strip is actually Les Nombrils, a normally single page humour strip in Spirou magazine which began in the French-Canadian humour magazine Safirir since its creators, writer Maryse Dubuc and her husband, artist Marc Delafontaine (Delaf), are from the town of Sherbrooke in Canada's Quebec province. Since Sherbrooke has two universities, it is tempting to suggest that being surrounded by students can only help to inspire the strip's creators - and inspired the strip can be.

This is an ongoing story told in mainly one page segments with a punchline panel at the end of each which shows Karine and Dan's relationship blossom while rounding out the three main characters so much more than I would have expected. Karine's kindness to the zit-covered Murphy threatens to undermine her budding romance with Dan while, despite their queen bitch personas in school, it is difficult not to have sympathy for Vicky and Jenny when we see their often grim home lives.
Unusually there are several times in the book when the speech balloons are left with their original French language, although translated into English in text boxes at the bottom. It is as if Cinebook decided that the joke was so French, or Quebecois, that it needed to be left in the original wording. This is not something that I have come across in other titles in their range and does seem somewhat strange in a book that, while it does not have a geographic locale, could easily be set in a generic American high school, albeit with one of the girls called Karine rather than Karen.

Cinebook classify The Bellybuttons as a 15+ title and with references to flavoured condoms and the gruesome death of Jenny's lap dog it certainly isn't for younger children but for those who enjoy Titan's reprints of Lise Myhre's goth girl Nemi, The Bellybuttons may well also hit the mark.

With its well constructed story and unusual depth to its humorous characters, The Bellybuttons - It's Ugly Out There took me by surprise. Give it a chance and you may be surprised as well.

• There are more details of The Bellybuttons on the Cinebook website.

• There are more details of Les Nombrils on the Dupuis website (in English).

• Buy Bellybutton Volume 2: It's Ugly Out There from amazon.co.uk

• Also available: Bellybuttons, The Volume 1: Who Do You Think You Are?

In Review: Spirou And Fantasio - Adventure Down Under

The weekly comic magazine that is now known as Spirou began as Le Journal Du Spirou in April 1938 in the French speaking Belgian region of Wallonia and the character of Spirou has been in it since that first issue. As such he has a publishing history similar to Desperate Dan in The Dandy which began just four months earlier in December 1937. Yet despite being in his eighth decade of stories in the comic and with some 50 albums released in French, for most comics readers in the UK the character of Spirou is unknown. While Euro Books in India have recently released a selection of Spirou titles in English, in the West only a single album, Z Is For Zorglub, was translated into English by America's Fantasy Flight in 1995 based on the 1961 album Z Comme Zorglub, but sales did not warrant any further books. No doubt Cinebook are hoping for better things with their Spirou And Fantasio - Adventure Down Under.

Young Spirou and his older friend Fantasio are journalists who work for Spirou magazine (this may sound strange but let's remember that Beano characters read the Beano). Having just arrived back from Bangkok, their fellow journalist Cellophine catches them in the airport with a telegram from Spirou's scientist friend, the Count of Champignac, which says that they must come to Australia. There they make their way to a mining settlement in the Outback where miners are desperately digging for opals near an Aboriginal holy ground only to discover from the miners that the Count died in a mining accident. Spirou refuses to accept the story and they dig up the Count's coffin which leads them to discover that not all the miners can be trusted and, due to what is going on near their sacred land, that the Aborigines trust no one.

While it is the first Cinebook publication of Spirou and Fantasio, Aventure en Australie was the 34th Spirou album, originally published in 1985, and was written by Philippe Vandevelde (Tome) and illustrated by Jean-Richard Geurts (Janry) - their pseudonyms chosen as a play on Hanna Barbera's Tom and Jerry cartoon characters. Despite the above description of the story, which has all the trappings of a Tintin book, the story and art style are more like Asterix. Janry's art is both fun and at times remarkably detailed with the sequence in the airport at the beginning particularly warranting closer inspection with much going on in the background. Tome's story is humourous with fantastical elements in it mainly to do with the Aboriginal wise man Kaloo-Long who can levitate whilst asleep, hence the unusual cover illustration of him hovering whilst attached to a rock.

Yet there is certainly more going on with the book than just the story. The girl reporter who accompanies our two heroes to Australia is called Cellophine in the Cinebook version while her original French name is Seccotine. Seccotine is a French brand of glue that has become a byword for a person who is too clingy, so her translated name of Cellophine is a play on cellophane wrap which is also known as cling film. This and a selection of the Aboriginal names for people and places introduces word play similar to that used in the character names in the English language Asterix books. In addition to this the flight that the three main characters take to Australia is 714. That is the flight number of the plane that Tintin misses in the book that we know as Flight 714 but the full translated title of which should be 'Flight 714 to Sydney'. These little touches enhance the Spirou book.

It all adds up to something that can be a quick fun read for children or something a little more amusing for adults. It is just a pity that we will have to wait a year for the next one.


• There are more details of the book on the Cinebook website and the next Spirou and Fantasio book from Cinebook will be Spirou and Fantasio in New York which is scheduled for October 2010.

• There are more details of the original book on the official Spirou website (in French).