FACTORY SUMMERS

A rites-of-passage portrait of the graphic artist as a young man.

For more than 20 years, French Canadian cartoonist Delisle has chronicled his experiences as a vagabond traveler, with graphic narratives taking readers to Burma, Jerusalem, North Korea, and elsewhere. Here, he provides a kind of origin story of his formative years in Quebec City, when he was drawing for fun and unsure how to translate his talent into a career. Beginning at the age of 16, he spent his first of three summers working at the local paper mill, which produced newsprint for the likes of the New York Times. His father had spent his professional life as an engineer at the factory, but the author rarely saw him. Most of what’s important in the narrative goes unsaid, or barely said, with Delisle and his father failing to connect. In the drawings, which any Delisle fan will appreciate, the mill and its machinery exert a greater physical presence than any of the characters. The author remembers himself as a “loner,” more interested in going to the library than interacting with his fellow workers, some of whom are overly friendly, others brutish and ill-tempered. Those with whom he formed any sort of bond could be gone the next summer, and he chronicles how he visited his father, who no longer lived with the family, only once each summer. During the rest of the year, Delisle pursued an education as an animator, and though he was prepared to return for a fourth summer at the mill, an employment offer provided the pathway to his career in cartooning. He and his father never discussed his art, at least as portrayed in these pages, but when he died, the author discovered his father kept much of his work.

Bittersweet and elliptical, a narrative in which not much happens but everything changes.