A Self-Affirming Paradox. . .of Fun!

These Atomic Era sci-fi movies are really scraping the bottom of the barrel. And the pictures uploaded normally. *shrug*

Mister Invincible (written and drawn by Pascal Jousselin, colored by Laurence Croix) is billed as, 'the one and only true comic book superhero.' This owes to the fact his powers are derived from being in a comic book. He can see what's going on in other panels, both on the page he's currently on, and the page facing it, and move between them. So if he needs to get from one place to another, he can call someone where he needs to be. When the next panel shows that person, he simply steps or drops into their panel. 

He isn't limited to the forward flow of time, either, as the him from later on the page often helps the earlier version. This does, as he explains to his recurring foe the Mad Scientist, result in a paradox, but oh well. If he stops for bread on the way to visit his mother, because the him in the panel where he arrived throws a paper airplane back up the page to alert him to the need for bread, well, the important thing is he got the bread, right?

It is rather funny to watch the Mad Scientist keep trying to destroy Mister Invincible, only to fail because he doesn't realize they're competing on different levels. It's a little like Wil E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. The coyote is operating within the rules of their story, which are never going to let him win. But he doesn't know that, because he can't see the rules. Likewise, the Mad Scientist moves through the panels of each page unaware of them, which means he's fighting Mister Invincible blind and dumb. It's just a matter of how Mister Invincible will thwart him (besides with ridiculous ease.)

Jousselin sticks mostly to either 9 or 16-panel grids, and switches between stories that run for one page or several. He introduces a few other characters with other powers related to comics. An old man who can make his voice balloons take physical form when he's ticked (or singing), seen below punching Richard Nixon (who apparently faked his death to become mayor of a small French town). An awkward teen who can mess with perspective within panels, who becomes a sidekick/apprentice of sorts. There's one villain who can shift between panels on opposite sides of the same piece of paper. Not breaking the fourth wall, but whichever one is the back wall of a panel. Second wall?

There's also a rather melancholy story about a woman who seems to go through life backwards, as though she's moving towards the beginning of the book rather than the end. Mister Invincible keeps her from losing her backpack, but she seems condemned to a life spent unable to communicate properly with other people. She's always reacting to things they haven't said or done yet.

Overall, though, the tone is light. Some of the stories are just Mister Invincible using his powers to help him plant a sapling in his yard. Jousselin gets a lot of humor out of the reactions of other people to the things Mister Invincible does. Since they can't see things as he does, he seems to simply vanish and reappear at random. Produce objects from thin air. The Mad Scientist in particular keeps coming up with theories on how the powers work, and plans to thwart them. These plans sometimes act as a way for Jousselin to have more fun with the format, such as having part of a page burned away, so characters see things from the next page instead. 

Still, I think my favorite story was probably the one where Mr. I asks his friend to read a passage on the Arctic. So he can hope into the panels that illustrate it and get some ice for their lemonade. Polar bear-related shenanigans ensue, and it also hints at how he sees the "white space" of panel borders that becomes critical in one of the last stories in the book.