Name: Ménage à 3 Volume 1
ISBN: 9781772940596

David Lumsdon

Gisele Lagace

Ménage à 3 Volume 1

Jeff James

Full disclosure: I received a free review copy of this book from NetGalley.

Ménage a 3 is a French-Canadian webcomic about the sexy hijinks of three roommates - Gary, the 29-year-old virgin, Zii, the bisexual punk rock chick, and Didi, the busty, Amazonian French-Canadian. It's essentially Three's Company but smutty.

This collection includes the first two years of the webcomic, reformatted in a vertical layout. Although the art by Gisèle Lagacé is far more polished and consistent than other nascent webcomics I've read, this volume can't escape its origins on the web. It's essentially plotless, with romantic entanglements and sexual confusion the only real driving force throughout.

The thing about webcomics, though, is that they can be strangely addictive. When I first discovered Questionable Content, I read at least a decade of strips over the course of a few days and I regret nothing.

The tendency in webcomics toward episodic storytelling coupled with ongoing but loosely defined story arcs means that it's all about the characters. Any individual strip is usually about pushing those characters closer together or further apart and changing the status quo so slowly (if ever) that you experience the narrative equivalent of boiling a frog.

I liked this volume enough that I'll probably keep reading even though not much happened besides a lot of nudity, innuendo and silliness. It helps that the art is pretty great and reading it isn't a terrible way to pass the time. Speaking of which, Lagacé has done the occasional work for Archie comics, which makes total sense because her style is perfect for those books.