Now I have read four out of five albums of the comic Glorious Summers by Zidrou and Lafebre (featured in a recent post). The series follows the vacations of a Belgian family in 1962, 1968, 1973 and 1979 (though not in that order) plus the occasional bit of flashback or frame narrative. Outwardly, not all that much happens. They drive to France. We get to know all the family members and we see them at different ages. They have their little rituals. They face their challenges, some harmless and fun, some less so. One thing I liked was that the series stays close enough to realism that it always feels like something that could happen to a real family - or at least something that a real family could remember. Each time there are darker issues woven throughout the story and some charcaters are in on it and some aren’t.
I get that the series isn’t for everyone. One reviewer called the first volume a Lifetime Original Movie in comic form. I get where they were coming from, but I don’t think that does it justice, especially if you look at the series as a whole. Every volume adds context and complexity to the others. As a random little example that doesn’t spoil too much, in the first volume we see the oldest daughter unimpressed with a pretty bad dad joke that father makes during the trip. At the time it is only a bit of throwaway characterization establishing her as an embarrassed early teen, something we have seen a million times. In the second volume we see her four years younger and laughing her head off at the joke and suddenly we get an idea of what an emotionally significant moment that stupid joke was for him and how he was trying to connect with her.
What I am trying to say is that it is almost but not quite entirely unlike a Theodor Storm novella.
