Factory Summers

The legendary cartoonist aims his pen and paper towards 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. As the paper industry slowly begins to move overseas, Guy works the floor doing physically strenuous tasks. He is one of the few young people on site, and furthermore gets the job because of his father s connections, a fact which rightfully earns him disdain from the lifers. Guy s father spends his whole working life in the white-collar