The two piles are locked in a continual battle of who can largest over a longer period of time. In one corner of the room are the single issues—the floppies that accumulate every month with each shipment from my local shop. On the other side is the graphic novel shelf—volumes that I keep thinking I’ll get around to at some unspoken time. And this week we come to one volume that has been sitting there nearly since its release with its fine layer of dust and slightly warped cover: Bandette Vol. 1: Presto! by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover.

Bandette is the story of the world’s greatest thief, a woman only known as Bandette. Mostly, that is all you need to know about her. She steals artifacts from people who are especially wicked and collects the reward money to spend on rate books that she hasn’t already pilfered from other collections.

But that’s simply the background that we can glean as her main story in this volume involves the shadowy organization, Finis, and their just as mysterious leader, Absinthe. Bandette has built up a reputation for foiling their schemes and thieving from them as though they were her own little free library. It is why Absinthe, at a gathering of Finis overheard by another thief, Monsieur, we discover that they plan on killing Bandette using any means necessary. Finis, however, forget that Bandette is less a thief and more a cartoon character in their crime drama. 

This is what makes Bandette such a perfect comic character. She’s a combination of every gentleman thief and teenage sleuth with the luck and acrobatic prowess of every Robin—outside of Jason Todd. She’s untouchable, but it’s less from the plot demanding that she come out of a sniper ambush without a scratch and more from the joy we get from seeing her traipsing around, yelling “presto!” and having her gang of sidekicks dress up like her to confuse said snipers. Bandette moves through the world like Bugs Bunny, with any imminent peril being a distraction from her true purpose: to entertain. Who is Bandette before the mask or when it comes off? Who cares! We don’t have time for that when there’s adventuring and thieving to do. She’s archetypal, but so imminently likeable in this context, she feels like we’ve been reading her stories in bandes dedessinées for decades.

I’ve come to Bandette a decade too late in more than one way. While this comic has been sitting on my shelf since 2015, this story would have shifted my brain in fundamental ways when I was fifteen—much in the same way Lupin III did around that time—and set my young comic reading down a different path. The earnestness that comes off every page, the handstands on gravestones, and Coover’s art bringing to mind classics of European comics while being singularly its own thing makes Bandette sit on my shelf for years because it felt like it always belonged there. 

Get excited. Get liberating.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, 651, & 674) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.