De Tweede Kus (Ringo / Martha / Hanne), by Conz
Conz (full name Constantijn van Cauwenberge) is one of the up and coming Flemish comics writers, so far untranslated into English as far as I can tell (you can get it in French as Quelque Part Les Étoiles, "Somewhere the Stars" rather than "The Second Kiss"). I first encountered him as author of one of the better shorts in Brussel in Beeldekes. Some smart Anglophone publisher should snap him up; this trilogy is a very nice Bildungsroman, set in Belgium and ten years later in Australia; viewpoint character Ringo (real name Maurice, but his two best friends are John and Paul) loves and loses Hanne over the summer that they finish high school in 1993, and in 2003 he finds her again in Sydney. But he has a long journey to get there, both physically and emotionally, and so does Hanne as it turns out; Ringo's mother, the titular Martha of the middle book of the trilogy, leads the pack of internal demons that he must overcome. Conz uses all the graphic novelist's techniques to convey the story, in paricular catching the very different atmospheres of Leuven (which I know well) and Sydney (where I've never been), most memorably conveying a road trip from Darwin across the interior of Australia. Well worth looking out for, if it appears in a language you can read.