Unbeatable, it’s a “meta” series that never stops renewing itself album after album. The whole principle of these stories lies in the diversion of the medium. The hero is aware of being one, he appropriates the comic book support to achieve his ends. The stakes of the work are finally quite common: Unbeatable must stop thugs, Unbeatable must save his nephew from an argument at the stadium, Unbeatable must make pancakes … All these gags organized in the form of small sketches in one or more boards are a pretext to give free rein to the graphic and narrative ingenuity of the designer.
Always more ambitious, we thought that Pascal Jousselin had made the tour of its innovations, it is not so. The designer plays with the boards, boxes and bubbles at will. He goes so far as to offer us an empirical change since he allows his hero to make a foray into reality thanks to an ingenious mixture of photos and collage. Unbeatable became tangible for a moment. The design, impeccable, is adapted to all these ingenious processes. The story is interesting and the gags finely drawn, the author sometimes makes more serious and subtle allusions to it when he discusses subjects such as racism, sexism or mourning.
It is precisely on the subject of mourning that the author surprised us the most. In this third album, we learn that Jean-Pierre, the hero’s acolyte policeman lost his wife a few years ago. To instigate the presence of the latter, like a specter, the author has resorted to a subtle printing process comprising a varnish spotted shiny. This makes it possible to understand the character well and to understand that a benevolent soul accompanies him on a daily basis. A touching performance breaking with the tone of the rest of the album but which is not inconsistent for all that.
Jousselin is not limited to boxes: he does shake up the page. The ultimate fatality for the hero being to leave the frame. He explodes, transforms, and reappropriates the codes of comics in order to offer something else, an ambitious, creative and clever project that will appeal to young readers as well as to the elderly. It pays homage to the canons of comics to better modify them. One could almost qualify Unbeatable as an unidentified graphic object, so new and innovative is this series.
A hero certainly unbeatable but also now essential for readers of the Spirou diary.
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