Les Blondes is a French comic written and drawn by Gaby and Dzack. As the name implies it is about Dumb Blondes.
The humour involves a lot of slapstick and wordplay based on translating blonde jokes to a visual medium. Given most of the cast are drawn as gorgeous, surprisingly few of the jokes are based around sex, even when it comes to innuendo. While there are lots of one-shot blondes characters who appear only for a single page gag, the lead (and series mascot) is Vanessa, recognizable by her distinctive hairstyle. She's very sweet-natured and likable and very pretty but incredibly foolish and permanently at odds with reality. Other important characters include Vanessa's niece (exactly the same as her aunt but a pre-teen), fellow Dumb Blonde Cindy and her good (and thankfully much smarter) non-blonde friends Kim, Chloe, Michelle and Anne.
The series currently has 27 volumes and has been adapted into an animated TV series.
Tropes:
- Amusing Injuries: At least half the humour comes from Vanessa (or another blonde in the one shot strips) suffering these. Less frequently innocent bystanders are caught up in this.
- Asian and Nerdy: Kim. While all of Vanessa's friends are brighter than her, Kim is the one who seems to have nerdy hobbies - she cosplays as a Jedi (see also Genre Savvy below.)
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: While she goes through a lot of injuries, Vanessa is never left with any lasting bruises or scars.
- Black Comedy: The series uses fairly lighthearted art and most of the gags usually result in embarrassment or Amusing Injuries but some strips get quite dark with implied (or even explicit) death.
- Brainless Beauty: Vanessa herself and most of the other blondes (though there are rare exceptions to the 'beauty' part with overweight or elderly blondes). Actually it seems to be literally true of Vanessa — in one album a baffled doctor shows her an X-ray of her empty cranium and explains he found nothing at all in her head. Vanessa is visibly delighted at the all clear.
- Cloudcuckoolander: All the blondes.
- Cute Clumsy Girl: One of Vanessa's defining traits. Thankfully for her she lives in a Beauty Is Never Tarnished universe.
- Dumb Blonde: As if the comic title wasn't a clue!
- Dumb Is Good: Airhead though she is Vanessa doesn't have a mean bone in her body. Several strips are based around her trying to help someone... with inevitable results.
- Epic Fail: When Vanessa tries to impress her friends with hypnosis, she accidentally hypnotizes herself.
- Genre Savvy: Kim actually figures out a way to make Vanessa's airheadedness work for them in the Star Wars convention strip listed below.
- Hair Antennae: Vanessa's distinctive look. It took a few volumes to evolve; in the earliest strips unless named on panel the only way to tell her apart from the generic one-shot blondes is via her supporting cast.
- Hypno Fool: After learning hypnosis Vanessa tried to impress her friends. She accidentally hypnotized herself.
- Idiot Heroine
- Improbably Female Cast: While there are certainly plenty of male extras and incidental characters like doctors or bosses almost all the core cast are female and several strips have only Vanessa and her niece or friends or two blondes together.
- Innocent Blue Eyes: Vanessa. While the art style means most of the female characters have big eyes Vanessa and her (identical but younger) niece have particularly prominent baby blues to empashise their naiveté.
- In One Ear, Out The Other: A blonde is listening to some gossip on her cell phone and laughing out loud. Her equally blonde friend asks her what the gossip is and the first blonde tells her to stick her ear next to the first blonde's other ear, allowing her to listen in on the phonecall. It works.
- The 24th volume has a longer joke where Kim brings a nervous Vanessa along to a Star Wars convention. Kim is dressed in full Jedi robes and carries a toy lightsaber but poor Vanessa lacks any sort of costume and is nearly thrown out. Kim tells the other fans that the "the Force is strong in her [Vanessa's] family" and 'proves' it by turning off the lights and having Vanessa shine a blue flashlight in her left ear... the beam of which naturally shines out Vanessa's right ear, looking like a lightsaber passing harmlessly through her (ala Obi-Wan in Episode IV). The other fans love it and literally fall down in worship of Vanessa, much to her surprise and delight.
- In the 27th volume we get a dialogue free page of Vanessa using a cotton swab to clean her ear after a shower. To her surprise and confusion the swab goes in so deep it disappears entirely into her left ear canal. She tries a second swab with the same result. Then she realizes she can feel something in her right ear...
- Only Sane Man: Vanessa's friends collectively and individually. Vanessa thinks she is one of these.
- Negative Continuity: While there are callbacks and running gags the Vanessa strips run on these (the 'generic' blondes in the other strips are by definition mostly one offs). Vanessa has actually died or has been heavily implied to die in several of them and been none the worse for wear a page later.
- Slapstick: And how! One of the most frequent recurring jokes involve Vanessa's friends visiting her in the hospital to learn how she got her latest set of bandages.
