La vie comme elle vient (Lapinot)

La vie comme elle vient (unofficial English translation: Life as it comes) is a comic strip in the series The spiffy adventures of McConey (Les formidables aventures de Lapinot in the original French language), by the popular French cartoonist Lewis Trondheim. It was first released in 2004 as volume 8 in the series.

Although this book is number 8 in the series, it was released after number 9, L'accélérateur atomique, which was released in 2003, and is thus the final entry in the series.

Trondheim was going through a personal crisis when he wrote this book, reconsidering his relationship with the world of comic books. The tone is practically void of humour and is even depressing, creating a major contrast with the other, generally much lighter-spirited volumes. The themes of La vie comme elle vient are death, loss, and how people deal with them. At around the same time the book was published, Trondheim announced his decision to more or less retire and only publish new comic strips on an occasional basis.

Plot

This adventure takes place in modern France and uses the normal continuing storyline of the series. Lapinot meets with all his friends for an evening in the apartment he shares with his girlfriend Nadia. There, a tarot card reader predicts someone in the room will die before the next day. Lapinot and Nadia break up and pretty much all the other characters suffer various misfortunes: for example, Richard is beaten up and falls into a coma, and Titi is diagnosed with cancer.

It turns out to be Lapinot, the main character of the series, who dies as the story finishes. After the book's publication, as Trondheim hinted that he one day might come out of his semi-retirement, he explained in his book Désoeuvré that the death of his character didn't exclude the possibility of seeing him again in stock historical settings or in modern day flashbacks before his death. This however hasn't happened as of 2009.