Ordinary Victories, Vol.4: Swing That Hammer by Manu Larcenet

Digital books have a lot of advantages - they can be cheaper, they're definitely lighter, you can fit many more of them in the same space, they can be accessed almost immediately from almost anywhere, and so forth. But they can also mysteriously disappear in a way that never happens with physical books.

The publishing consortium Europe Comics - which, as I understand it, is somewhere between a rights clearing-house and a pan-company cooperative project - went through some upheavals three years ago. (He said, understating the case.) See their website for the confusing announcement that they would continue to release a few books a month but would stop all "consumer-facing activities." [1] At the same time, everything from Europe disappeared overnight from the app my library uses, including several dozen things I'd flagged that I wanted to read.

That was sad, but I resigned myself to it, and have been reading other things.

And then I stumbled across a book that used to be on my list, and discovered that, at some point in the past two years, the corpus of Europe Comics had miraculously reappeared on the Hoopla app. I spent some happy time re-flagging things that I probably had flagged before - who can remember, exactly? - and tried to think if I was in the middle of anything at the time.

There was one series that I'd almost finished in 2023: Ordinary Victories by Manu Larcenet, a transmuted memoir about a photographer named Marco, the shipyard where his father used to work, his newish partner and the birth and first years of their first child. It was a four-book series - originally published in French in the Aughts, translated into English once soon afterward, and then again around 2016 for this four-volume edition, in a naturalistic tone I've really liked by Mercedes Claire Gilliom.

The first three were Ordinary Victories, Trivial Quantities, and Precious Things. The fourth, final book is Swing That Hammer.

Swing has the same low-key, everyday feeling as the earlier books. It's well-observed, personal, specific - but small, in the way that any one life is small. This book sees a lot of major changes: Marco and Emily's daughter is getting big enough to talk and wander about and ask questions, the shipyard is finally closing down for good to be redeveloped, and an elderly neighbor Marco had befriended is suddenly gone. There's more than that, but those are the major points: like any life, it keeps going, and things keep changing. Swing has less to do with Marco's career than the earlier books; it's more focused on his personal life.

Larcenet's art is still wonderful here, with an ease and grace to his line and characters that are full of life. The whole series is warm and true and real - not quite autobiography, but close to it, an alternate-world version of the real Larcenet's life, told cleanly and with clear vision and a quiet sense of time and space. I recommend the whole series - especially now that they're back - to anyone who likes comics about real people living real lives.

[1] I think I've said this in the past, but, just to be clear: releasing a book is part of publishing. But it's not the most important part. Getting that book in front of an audience - all of those "consumer-facing activities" - are at least as important to the publishing process as shoving content onto pages (dead-tree or electronic). Of course, Europe Comics is not primarily an enterprise aimed at consumers to begin with - it's largely a proof-of-concept for the books it does, and its goal is for bigger companies to buy the rights, so Europe can take down their editions and someone else actually publish the book with a bigger splash. So their change wasn't strange in retrospect, but it is definitely odd if you think of them as a publisher.