Webcomic Weekly: ‘Boumerie’ by Boum Is Perfectly Funny Little Slices Of Life

Webcomic Weekly – a comic to read online, every week – simple really!

Today, it was going to be a two-in-one deal, with the work of Boum and her two webcomics, Boumeries and A Small Revolution, except I found myself getting so involved in Boumeries that I ended up reading it all, start to finish and had no time for A Small Revolution – that one will have to come later!

Boum (Samantha Leriche-Gionet) is a freelance comic artist and illustrator who lives and works in Montreal, Canada. According to her about page, she enjoys “the company of rabbits, wine, snowy days, cheese, retro video games, and sporting weird hairdos.” Who doesn’t enjoy the company of rabbits, eh?

Boumeries is Boum’s diary comic, giving us more and more of the daily life about “sharing a flat with her programming partner Pierre-Luc and their daughters Margot and Annette, working at home, juggling with everyday chores and drawing, and having absurd dreams in the meantime.“

Yes, dreams do play a big role, right from the beginning – it all began like this, with a great hourly comics day post back in 2011…

And just improves from there, getting more and more confident, more and more polished, all with the same sense of the absurdity in the everyday. You get gaming, work, travel, Boum and Pierre-Luc’s romantic life, and a lot of toilets, and so much else besides, mostly all done in 4-panels, usually with a twist of the silly, the absurd, the ridiculous, even the absurd.

But the whole way through what you get is that delightful combination of the sweet, the absurd, and a cartoonist who knows how the whole pacing of a gag works, the beats are invariably just perfect in Boumeries:

There’s even a wonderful sense of repetition at times – after all, don’t we all have the same things annoying the crap out of us again and again… just like this with the umbrella… with the strips several weeks apart with the call-back moment making the second gag all the sweeter:

Of course, around the 2013 mark, we get a lot more family-based strips, as Baum and Pierre-Luc welcome Margot and their lives go from happy-go-lucky to absolutely revolving around the new baby, just the same as every parent’s experienced:

Of course, having a baby should never change your romantic relationship, right?

Nah, this is perfect:

I said at the beginning that I was planning on doing both Boumeries and A Small Revolution in one, but frankly, I reckon the greatest compliment I can give to Boumeries is that there was so much in the nine years of the comic, from 2011-2020, that I just got rather lost in it all.

So I read on and read on and read on, laughing all the way through, watching the parents get tired, Margot grow up, past the second pregnancy…

past second baby, hi Annette:

(Oh, and I just realised I never told you about the toilets; there are a lot of toilets involved)

And before I knew where I was, it was 2020 and the end to a wonderful ride with this lovely contemplative piece:

And that was it, nine years and two days of webcomics is some achievement! four-panel anecdotes done wonderfully well.

Well, not quite – she came back for a welcome curtain call with the 2021 Hourly Comic Day:

Next up for Boum after that was the Boumeries omnibus editions (in French only, for now) published by Glénat Québec (hopefully there will be an English version coming). And after that came A Small Revolution, which I promise I’ll get to at a later date.

And she’s also about a third through storyboarding a 200+ page graphic novel about “young adulthood, independence and acceptance, and love.”

Now, to end this edition of Webcomic Weekly, there’s one strip back in 2014 that poses the question, “What is Boumeries?”

And as funny as that is, I reckon it’s wrong. It’s not that ‘kinda hard to explain’.

Here in Boumeries you get nine years of wonderful little comics that tell you everything you wanted to know (and some things you really didn’t) about the life of the artist, complete with work, play, gaming, Pierre-Luc, pregnancies, babies, children, and the wonders of it all. Plus a load of dreams, a load of toilets, and plenty of dreams about toilets.

Or even simpler – nine years of life’s everyday moments, with added partner, pregnancies, children, with added dreams and toilets. And plenty of laughs on the way.

That’s about right.

Go and read Boumeries right here.

Go say hi to the artist on Twitter.

Then go and buy the books here and support Boumeries on PayPal, Ko-Fi, Patreon here.

And ENJOY!