Glorious Summers v2: “The Calanque”

We go back four years to 1969 and a smaller Falderault family with familiar vacation plans.

Previously, on PipelineComics.com…

I reviewed the first volume of this series.

Back In Time

Zidrou jumps back in time by four years to tell an interesting story that also helps to set up the first story.  As a writing exercise, it’s fascinating. It combines parts of the trip you remember from the first book with additional layers on top to keep things new and different. 

As a reader, I also enjoyed it.  Zidrou provides enough of those connecting moments for dedicated readers to pick up on while not just repeating himself for more than fifty pages. 

I’m sure some people will complain that it rehashes too much territory and there’s no “drama” in it, but I would disagree almost immediately with that.  If you’ve read the first book, you’ll get plenty of moments of drama and irony and foreshadowing that’ll hold your interest, above and beyond the small adventures the family takes part in.

In many ways, this is more a story about people, and not the events that happen to them.  It’s capturing a time and a place that doesn’t exist anymore, and that’s interesting, as well. 

This style of story — where you’re following a similar pattern to the previous one, while connecting it as much as possible, with characters who aren’t explosive — is not an easy trick to pull off. As a writer, you’re stripping yourself of every proven storytelling trick in the book, it seems. Nice characters are boring and characters who get along are yawn-worthy, right? Maybe it’s the sword hanging above their marriage in the first volume that makes these happier days seem all the more poignant, though? Maybe that’s the big conflict of the series: knowing that things almost don’t end well, and now we’re going back to show you why that would have been such a sad waste.

There’s another example more direct in this book of something awful that’s about to happen, but Zidrou, I believe, is leaving that as an exercise for the devoted reader. I’ll talk more about that in a bit….

The book wanders through 50+ pages, with the family doing things on vacation and having a good time, meeting new people, and exploring new things.  They get help from kind strangers and continue to tease each other in the way only a family can without coming to blows.   It’s a very pleasant read, with the promise of new moments at the turn of any page, and without worrying that a shark is suddenly going to pop out of the water a the next page turn to eat a family member.

As much as I love a good thriller movie, I’m starting to enjoy the happier and more pleasant things in life more than the moments calculating to make me hold my breath and white knuckle read my book.

Family Vacations

I had these vacations growing up. They might not have been formalized to the same degree as the vacations this family takes, to the point where Dad’s stories are known word for word, and his Dad jokes aren’t just known, but expected and appreciated as part of the ceremony of the vacation.

Furthermore, the realities of modern living changed vacations like these not too long after this.  The idea of just getting lost on a road trip and sleeping on the side of the roads in random clearings feels positively antediluvian.  There’s even a reference in the book to how new the concept of drivers licenses are.  I looked it up on Wikipedia.  Check this out:

Other countries in Europe also introduced driving tests during the twentieth century, the last of them being Belgium where, until 1977, it was possible to purchase and hold a license without having to undergo a driving test

Imagine that! Back to the vacation now:

But, still, if you go to the same place every year as a child for a vacation, you hit certain rhythms and expectations, whether it’s a particular rest stop you stop at along the way, or an album you listen to in the car (in my era, cassette tapes), or games you played looking out the window, or rousing songs you sing to help pass the time.

Zidrou shows all of that in this book. So many of the small events we saw along the way of the vacation in volume 1 have become ritual to the reader by volume 2.  The order is just reversed for the characters, since the chronology of the books is backwards.

Fun With Comics

Freddie’s new series excited Maddie, enough so that they looked for his new book while away on vacation.  Bonus: An Asterix reference!  I can’t skip over one of those…

The book opens up with two pages from Pierre’s “sure-fire hit series” “Four.” In the first book, you saw a poster of it hanging in Pierre’s studio.  When the delivery boy points to it, Pierre doesn’t flinch.  He continues to work on his current pages while saying “Four” didn’t work out. I thought he didn’t want to talk about it.  You know that going into this book, yet you’re still excited to see him get his big change. You know it ends badly, you just don’t know when or how. 

It’s the strength of a good writer than he or she can write an entertaining story even when you know the final outcome of things. Filling in those gaps makes that happen.

In this second volume, we see what “Four” was.  It’s like a bad parody of a bad western comic.  It tries to be Goscinny in its script and Bonhomme/Morris in its art with some “Lucky Luke” in its flat coloring, but never gets there. To be clear; Zidrou and Lefebre do a great job in creating this artifact; it’s PIerre’s work that’s stereotypically bad. 

Given Pierre’s son’s love of “Lucky Luke,” I almost wonder if there’s a connection to Pierre doing this style of comic as his big creator owned project (that we know is doomed to fail.)

I don’t want to ruin the gags on these two pages.  They’re so bad that I want you to see them and laugh at them yourself.  In particular, the twin bad guys have ridiculous names with hilarious origins.

We see a bit more of Pierre’s career struggles in this book, as he moves away from his more comfortable job as an assistant on a successful title to create his own series and try to break out into his own thing.  We knew from the first volume that the time his career takes up causes issues with his wife, and this book gives you more examples of it.  Yes, they’re late to start their vacation again, but his career, in general, isn’t necessarily on the uptick, which has Maddie nervous.

Lafebre Continues to Astound

This is still a very pretty book. With help on colors from Mado Pena, Jordi Lafebre’s art is on point.  The color schemes certainly help glue chunks of the book together nicely.  When you zoom out and look at the pages all lined up, you can see where scenes and sections of the book start and end by how the colors shift.  A lot of this book takes place on a beach or on the water, so there’s a large chunk of it that’s warm and slightly washed out.  The overwhelming sun light keeps everything bright.  Nighttime scenes are again a blue-purple color cast over everything on the page.

I’d make the case that the second book is even better looking than the first, though a big chunk of that is thanks to some nice locales in the script for Lafebre to draw.  Between the adventures in and around the lake to the shopping expedition in a small downtown area, Lafebre gets key locations that help to show off his art.

And the characters are always doing something, even in what you might think would be a simple talking heads scene. Lafebre animates his characters in every panel, whether it’s just in their eyes, or their posture or the way they’re standing. It’s never a generic pose to get through the panel, and that’s part of what I find so special about his work in this book, in particular.  He’s always thinking about what they’re thinking and how he can show that in the panel. It’s as simple a character leaning in while listening to something they find interesting, or tilting their head and looking up when they’re reflecting. And, if they’re a kid, give them life and have them doing something else, like petting a cat.  Everyone has something to do.

The line work is great. The coloring is special. But, at the end of the day, when I think about the reason I love Lafebre’s art and so many others’ — particularly artists who’ve come from animation — it’s for that life they put into every panel.  Everything is so well thought out and expressed. There’s something interesting to look at in every panel, especially in the context of the story.

Going Back to Volume 1

— or —

Questions I Have

It’s clear that Zidrou has this story mapped out. It’s more than just attempting to repeat the same moments in every book in a different way, or in telling their “secret origins” as he thinks of them. He’s setting things up from the first page of the first book that continues to be referenced in future books. Little background details from Pierre’s studio become plot points later in the book and again in the second.

Reading the first book after the second makes the impending break-up of the marriage feel all the more tragic. It makes many of the choices in the second book feel even more warm and fuzzy.

The biggest question I have right now is centered on Maddie’s pregnancy.  Is this Paulette/Peaches?  Or is this the ill-fated pregnancy mentioned in volume 1?

This book is set in 1969, so it sounds like this is the baby she loses at some point after this vacation.  There’s a reason she’s not announcing this pregnancy yet during this vacation. It’s just too early to do so. And there’s why. 

There’s a mention elsewhere of a vacation where they came back a larger family, so that would have to mean that she bounces back relatively quickly and has Peaches in the 1970 vacation.

That certainly leaves something hanging over this entire vacation — it’s something that slaps you across the face every time the pregnancy is mentioned. Whether it’s dealt with directly in the pages of this series or not, it’s ok to feel your stomach tie itself in a knot over the whole thing. That conflict of a character against her own body, really, is hanging there, waiting for its time to strike.

And then I wonder where Pierre’s Dad went between the second and first books.  As far as I remember, he’s only mentioned in passing with the Franco warnings in the first book, but never directly or in the past tense.  He’s not at the funeral in book one, either.  Did he die between the second book and the first?  And where’s his dog, then?

I miss him already.  He’s got a great sense of humor, and I love the way he mixes Spanish and English together.  My rudimentary Spanish can follow his dialogue easily.

Did the old French couple whose garden the family crashed into in this book move back to the South of France?  Or did they die in the last two years?  Does Pierre want to move into their house?  That’s not their garden they’re returning to in the first book, is it?

I know one of the upcoming books is set in the 80s.  It’ll be interesting to see if they’re in the same house by then, or have moved to France.

I think as the books go on and Zidrou continues to add little details and layers on top of what we already know, we’ll get a fuller picture that won’t turn the world upside down, but will make these characters all the more endearing.  I like that.  I keep going back and forth between the two books, looking for details of where things meet up.

The more I think about this book, the more dramatic turns I imagine it taking.  I don’t think Zidrou is going for that kind of over-the-top cheesy soap opera stuff, though.  This is much more real, and I’m definitely in for the ride.

Oh, one last question: Is this car that the family passes by on their way home the same Dutch family as winds up in their picnic spot in the first book?  It looks a lot like them, but the kids would be a lot older by the first volume if they were, wouldn’t they?  The car is different, too, but it’s been four years.  People buy new cars in that kind of time frame.  Maybe I’m reaching….

Recommended?

Yes, even more so than the first.  Seeing the way the books fit together, while learning more about the characters, makes everything more interesting and fleshed out.  Lafebre’s art is a joy on every page, and he pull off the remarkable ability to draw the same characters at different points in time that still look like themselves, while looking older or younger, as the case may be.

“Glorious Summers” may be low drama, but it’s high quality.  I’m enjoying every page of it and hope to see the rest of it in English as quickly as possible.

— 2018.074 —

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For Those Of You Who Read Volume 1 Already…

Well, that won’t end well…