Factory Summers
by Guy Delisle
translated by Helge Dascher and Rob Aspinall
2021
Factory Summers tells the story in three chapters of Delisle's three summers working in a paper factory as a teenager. Delisle learns how the factory works and gets a bit of skill at his job, sees glimpses of the lives of the men who work there full-time, practices his drawing and begins his path to becoming a professional artist, and occasionally interacts with his divorced father, who is an engineer at the factory. It's a short, compact story, only a portion of his coming-of-age, but it's told effectively.
Dilisle's art is deceptively simple. The books is black and white with a couple shades of grey and certain details picked out in yellow, often shirts or the factory's smoke. He draws his teenage self as an almost blank cartoon, the other workers more expressively, and shows the machinery of the factory in a way that is at once realistic but somehow not much more detailed than the people.
After the three main chapters are two short epilogues. One shows teenage Delisle starting a job at an animation studio rather than returning to the factory, and the other shows an event from 2019 or 2020, presumably the event that inspired him to draw this comic, of Delisle and his brother visiting their father's apartment after his funeral, and Delisle discovering that his dad had copies of all the comics he's published.
No comments:
Post a Comment