Jommeke is a Belgian comic series for very young children. The eponymic hero and main character is a young boy, devoid of characteristics barring perfection — the ideal tabula rasa that any five year old can identify with.1 He is surrounded by a broad cast of peers, adults, and a surprisingly large number of animals, anthropomorphised to various degrees. One of his main enemies is Anatool, a sort of nefarious but mostly harmless counterpart to Nestor from the Tintin series. In this particular volume, Anatool has absconded with Don Juan’s wig.
This makes him somehow irresistible to women, and so he manages to get quite intimate with a rising pop star. In the picture above, you can see him on the left lounging at her pool and sporting the stolen wig. If you can tear your eyes away from the chess game on the right, that is.
Jommeke is heading the black army against his good friend Filiberke. He excitedly exclaims that it’s checkmate, so I excitedly got to work on the reconstruction. It was a hard task. Because the chess board is drawn so small, the pictures and position are very hard to make out. Assuming the mushroom-shaped pieces are rooks,2 the tall ones are kings, and the diminutive ones are pawns, we arrive at the following position:3
Dear Lord! Can we borrow the wig and put it on this position? Because this is a wretched spectacle — and that’s after I have made it more presentable by making half of the squares black. It seems that, perhaps, Anatool is not the worst criminal around. As for Jommeke, I am deeply disappointed in him.
I am also deeply disappointed that, in a world where a good hairdo can make one irresistible, his barber decided to just plop a bowl on his head and cut along the rim. No wonder he turned to crime.
Realism: 0/5 The plots in the Jommeke series are usually rather implausible, but even by their standards this is ridiculous.
Probable winner: Jommeke’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, white is completely winning. He could try the final trick with Kxe7, hoping for c8Q Nd3+, but cxb8Q is easily winning. However, black seems to be holding a piece. He definitely can’t deliver checkmate with it. In fact, whatever piece it is, it has to take on c3. The rook + knight versus rook endgame that arises after Rxc3 Kxc3 would be drawn on a normal chessboard; I guess it should be the same here.
1. [That makes him some weak substitute for Tintin. He evens tends to wear blue, like Tintin!] ↩
2. [Possibly, they’re just the cause of the following hallucinations.] ↩
3. [Diagram made with this editor and reluctance.] ↩