The legendary cartoonist aims his pen and paper toward his high school
summer job
For three summers beginning when he was 16, cartoonist Guy Delisle
worked at a pulp and paper factory in Quebec City. Factory Summers
chronicles the daily rhythms of life in the mill, and the twelve hour
shifts he spent in a hot, noisy building filled with arcane machinery.
Delisle takes his noted outsider perspective and applies it
domestically, this time as a boy amongst men through the universal rite
of passage of the summer job. Even as a teenager, Delisle's keen eye for
hypocrisy highlights the tensions of class and the rampant sexism an
all-male workplace permits.
Guy works the floor doing physically strenuous tasks. He is one of the
few young people on site, and furthermore gets the job through his
father's connections, a fact which rightfully earns him disdain from the
lifers. Guy's dad spends his whole career in the white collar offices,
working 9 to 5 instead of the rigorous 12-hour shifts of the unionized
labor. Guy and his dad aren't close, and Factory Summers leaves
Delisle reconciling whether the job led to his dad's aloofness and
unhappiness.
On his days off, Guy finds refuge in art, a world far beyond the factory
floor. Delisle shows himself rediscovering comics at the public library,
and preparing for animation school-only to be told on the first day,
"There are no jobs in animation." Eager to pursue a job he enjoys, Guy
throws caution to the wind.
