Last time I talked about one of the Suske and Wiske comics, I complained about the low, low quality of post-Vandersteen Suske and Wiske stories. Little did I know it would get much, much worse still. Now, thanks to a chess friend, I know. Strap in, fellow men, for it’s going to be a long, long ride.
It starts at the very first panel on the very first page.1 Suske and Wiske are playing a game of chess — on a 6×5 board! Yes, the whole story revolves around chess, chess is even in the title, but the artist2 couldn’t even get the size of the board right.3
‘Checkmate’; yells Wiske all excited. She’s wrong obviously. Put perhaps the artist just messed up and the writer really did mean for it to show an actual checkmate. For the writer’s first stumble, you have to wait all the way until the next panel; where he feels the need to explain what capturing a piece means, even though the much more specific term checkmate passed without comment.
But that’s just a weird decision. The first real mistake in the writing is on page four. Wiske wants to play in a local tournament, but there’s a rating floor of 1500. In order to get that, Wiske needs to win against a certain Dirk.4 She dutifully does so — admittedly on a board with an i file — and with that, somehow, raises her Elorating to 2000.
And then she meets her big rival: Bettie Blunder. They decide an a, well, not exactly a friendly game but at least an unofficial one. It takes up several panels and the position differs widely between them. It starts in the following position
although I’m really only sure about the position above the b7-g2 diagonal. Bettie has white and starts by taking the d7 rook with her bishop. Black immediately takes it with her knight, but in an entirely different position on a board with just five ranks and with not a king in sight. Then Bettie gives a check on b8 with her queen, but black takes this piece, too…
…on d2, on a six-by-five board. Naturally, this leads to checkmate in one, but in which position I couldn’t possibly tell.
Then we get to the chess-playing spook from the title. It convinces Wiske that it can help her in turn for offerings of objects that hold a sentimental value. To show its efficacy, it helps Wiske against a mister Varanovski, a “former champion who was never beaten”. You’d think he’d still be champion, but apparently not. Maybe he retired, like Fischer. In any case, he gets soundly beaten. The details are sadly kept from us, but it’s clear that Wiske deliver checkmate to her opponent’s king on h1 by moving her rook to g2. Somehow.
Wiske wins her quarter final, but again we don’t really get to see how. We’re more lucky for the semifinal, though. Well, lucky…
The board is set up wrongly again, but that’s the least of our problems. For one, Wiske doesn’t have a king. In fact, her queen has just been taken, leaving her with no pieces at all. And yet, she checkmates her opponent next move. I’m becoming more and more convinced that the authors have never even met someone who has at some point been in the vicinity of someone who has heard of someone playing chess.
There’s a flashback, which is mainly there to show that things weren’t necessarily better in the past:
Admittedly, we don’t get to see the a-file, but that’s the most normal one in the diagram. Also, there’s a textbox obscuring the top of the pieces on b8 and c8, so I’m not entirely sure about their identities.
There is just one more thing to discuss: the final game of the tournament. And, miraculously, we see a legal position on a board on which h1 is a white square.
Black does seem to have castled wrongly and misplaced a piece, but the rest seems vaguely plausible. White plays a3 here, which convinces black to retreat her bishop in a completely different position. But white immediately moves her knight to c3, where it already was, to attack a queen on d5, which was never there. After brief shots of positions on a 7×7 and a 5×6 board, we finally get the last chess position of the comic:
Yeah. I think I’ll stop here.
Realism: 0/5 Frankly, a zero is overly generous.
Probable winner: I don’t know. De Kiekeboes, perhaps.
1. [Okay, the cover is also terrible, with the board that’s set up wrongly and all pieces fighting together, but I’m willing to chalk that up to a misguided attempt at dynamism to lure people in.] ↩
2. [Perhaps I should say ‘the drawer‘.] ↩
3. [This diagram editor can even the the size wrong!] ↩
4. [He’s not the sharpest tool in the box.] ↩