Curate of Curiosities

Pretty much immediately after I started reading Tamara, I was quickly introduced to other comics through Google Play. One of them, in fact the very first one that the app's algorithm showed me, was The Bellybuttons (original title: Les Nombrils), a comic that I had known about for some time already.

It had probably been years since the first time I've heard of this comic, but the fact that the main characters look like Bratz dolls that have been left out in the sun for too long didn't exactly endear me to it. The blonde one, in particular, looked like she had been stretched out on a medieval torture rack on top of that. However, there were a couple things that led me to believe that this was worth reading after all:

One was the fact that it actually has an English translation. That would definitely save me the trouble of checking a dictionary every two seconds.

The second thing is that, as the title of this page indicates, it's one of the most popular comics aimed at its demographic, as well as one of the most popular comics published in Spirou Magazine.

The comic is and remains one of the top searches on Dupuis' website. And yes, combining the above two points, this is a comic with an English-speaking cult following, which I believe was how I discovered it to begin with.

The best thing about this is that it was very easy for me to gauge its reception and visibility both among its contemporaries and within French-language comics as a whole.

You have its Wikipedia page, in which we find out, unsurprisingly, that it has won a number of awards, among them the prestigious Joe Shuster Award, and translated into nearly a dozen languages, English being among them, of course.

From there, it's just a stone's throw to the official website. "The girls' comic that's not just for girls" It has all sorts of things: promotional clips, wallpapers, fanart, and especially reviews.

Here is just a sample of the rave reviews that this comic has recieved from the press over the years:

"An unprecedented phenomenon in the history of comics" -Le Journal de Montreal
"The Bellybuttons shows itself to be one of the most intelligent coming-of-age series in youth comics" -Les p'tits mots-dits
"As funny as they are politically incorrect, teens Vicky, Jenny, and Karine bring with them a fresh wind from Quebec into Franco-Belgian comics" -Pure FM
"Beneath the satire and jokes, the duo Delaf and Dubuc do not shy away from confronting heavier themes such as suicide, depression, drugs, alcoholism and homosexuality" -La Presse

The reader reviews are similarly glowing. The very first one can be summarized as "our 8-year-old loves this comic!" Yep, this looks like it's going to be another of those kids' comics that has an uncomfortable amount of suspect content.

Oh right, I forgot to tell you the actual history of the comic. In 2004, illustrator Marc "Delaf" Delafontaine and writer Maryse Dubuc made this comic for Quebec-based magazine Safarir. This comic got the attention of Dupuis--which, may I remind you, is headquartered in Belgium, thousands of miles from Quebec--and it began to be published in Spirou Magazine starting in 2005.

As of 2020, this comic has eight volumes, plus two spinoff albums. What's more, the first four volumes were translated into English by UK-based publisher Cinebook. None of them ever seemed to be available on Google Play, though, so it looks like once again I'm stuck with one tab on the ebook and another tab on WordReference.

With that, it looks like we're off to see just what it is about this comic that's so special. It didn't have a Best Of digital collection or anything like that, so we're going in blind this time around.

Sections:

1. Like A Lioness in Heat (Vol. 1) (UNDER CONSTRUCTION)
   You might think that this is a bit too cruel for younger audiences. But who cares, really?