If you're not from a specific region in Europe, you've certainly never heard of this. There's a good reason for that.
Here's something that's not only different from everything else I've done so far, but something I've been thinking about doing for some time now.
Up to this point, I have done writeups on quite a variety of works. The one thing that they all have in common is that they are all in English. While some of them were translated from other languages (Moe Era was originally in Russian, and Charon's games were in Japanese), they were translated either in-house or by a third party. So what happens when you try to tackle something that not only was never translated to English, but also has almost everything relating to it on the far side of a language barrier?
Such is the case with Tamara, a comic written by Zidrou (real name Benoît Drousie) and drawn by Christian Darasse, both of whom are from Belgium. It was first published in Spirou Magazine on November 7, 2001, and its first album came out in 2003. As of this writing, it has 16 albums, the most recent having been published in 2018.
I don't remember exactly how I first found out about this comic, but I do know that when I saw it, the very first thing I thought was "Isn't this just Cathy: The Teen Years?" Despite that, I wanted to read it for myself.
Of course, the first major obstacle to doing so is that the comic is in French, with no English translation that I know of. However, I did take some French classes in high school, and even though I'm a bit out of practice, I'm certain that I can at least get the basic gist of the text.
The comic not only has an official Dutch translation (it being a Belgian comic), but was also published in the Dutch girls' magazine Tina between 2011-2012.
The issue where it debuted had a sort of bait and switch:
To succeed in comics, it's best to have measurements like these... (Measurements: 36-26-38)
The moment you open the issue, however, you are greeted with this:
Unless your name is Tamara Boula (Measurements: 32-43-39)
It's like, "Expecting some blonde bombshell? Too bad! You're getting this fat lump with goofy hair, and you're gonna like it!" That said, it's clear that Dupuis had some confidence in it, which wasn't undeserved given that it ended up running for nearly two decades.
The second major obstacle was finding a way to read this comic. I've read Franco-Belgian comics online before, so I expected to have a pretty easy time getting a digital copy. This turned out to be a bit trickier than I expected, due to the aforementioned language barrier, not to mention that the comic seems to be practically unheard of in English-speaking circles.
It's description (which also applies to the rest of the comic in general) is as follows:
Discover the tenderly sour adventures of a self-conscious teenager and her smart-mouthed stepsister, a gag series that strives to add a little something extra: emotion.
So I started reading it, and...
- You're the type of person to stare at your neighbor's chest instead of watching the movie! - Who? Me?- But...but...the end of the world?! - I'm gonna show you the ends of the world!
I was swiftly reminded that this was indeed a European comic.
If you know anything about how content guidelines are different over there, it won't be much of a surprise for you to know that this comic is in fact aimed at children, according to the publisher's official website:
As you can clearly see, this comic is not only listed as being for ages 9 and up, but also placed under the "Pour toute la famille" (For the whole family) category.
Nevertheless, I was already kind of sold on the comic, and wanted to read more of it.
Fortunately, the rest of the series would be readily available on Google Play. Or at least, that's what I expected.
Unfortunately, Google seems to have skipped volumes 4 through 10. That's a total of 7 volumes--nearly half of the series. What makes this especially weird is the fact that the Best Of volume contains material from the comic's first six volumes.
Of course, that only makes the situation all the more interesting. Just what did Google have to gain from hiding nearly half of this series from the American people? And since I started writing this, it's only gotten worse!
Not only did the series category apparently get nuked, but when you look up Zidrou's name on Google Play, this is all you get!
Fortunately, I did manage to purchase the first few volumes before they were taken down. This is what I get for trusting Google...
