Camp Spirit by Axelle Lenoir

Elodie is a seventeen-year-old Quebecois on her way to college, the kind of dark, brooding teen we've seen a lot of in media (and may have been, ourselves, if we're the kind of people who consume a lot of media). She likes dark, loud music: this is 1994, so it seems to be largely the louder side of grunge, but there's plenty of metal in the mix, too.

She has plans for this last summer before college, none of which involve being a camp counselor somewhere out in the woods - Elodie is a solidly urban teen, preferring sidewalks and buildings to trees and lakes and canoes. But her mother has other plans, and one of the core experiences of being a teen is doing things you really don't want to do because your parents make you.

So Camp Spirit opens with Elodie first telling her best friend at school about the camp, and then being driven there by her mother: we know there was rebellion, but creator Axelle Lenoir leapfrogs over all of that to get right to the story. It's divided into eight chapters, each the same length - I don't think this was serialized in the English language, but the original French version (Lenoir is herself from Quebec, like her heroine) might have been.

This is a slightly earlier work than Secret Passages, which I saw a few months ago. It's more clearly a work in a genre - stories for teens or tweens, a little romance and more than a little fantasy & thriller, relatable and grounded. (I have to imagine the pitch had the word "Lumberjanes" in it at least once.) It's not quite transmuted autobiography the way Secret Passages was, but Lenoir was a teen in 1994, and she may well have been a camp counsellor.

The fantasy stuff has got to be fictionalized, though. I'm sure of that.

Elodie, of course, has an epically bad mood, and starts off with a massively unhelpful attitude. (I've already mentioned she was a teenager: it's a characteristic of teens that they get in their own way too much of the time.) She gets the bunch of kids - six assorted redheaded hellions in mid to late elementary school - that is the most unruly and challenging. She doesn't want to hang out with the other counselors at the campfire in the evening; she doesn't want to do anything to make this easier, just to seethe and grump and write nasty things in her diary.

That's where she starts: obviously things happen from there. And we get it: this is nothing like what she wanted. But she does sort-of make a friend of another counselor, Catherine, who goes out of her way to help and support Elodie. And she turns out to be a good counselor for the hellions: they love and respect her in the way only a pack of semi-feral girls can care for a sharp-tongued goth teen.

Oh, but also: this camp is weird. The "Chief" is hugely enthusiastic about everything - that's not the weird bit; that's expected - but seems to have secrets, is way too invested in a violent First Nations camp-specific myth he dramatizes to the assembled camp at the beginning of each season, and leads the singalongs with dark, Satanic lyrics. (One might think Elodie would approve that the Chief has similar musical tastes, but he's just so energetically odd that he creeps her out from the jump, and every time she sees him after that.)

I've mentioned there's a supernatural element: the Chief is part of that. Elodie has suspicions and fears as she goes on - she becomes a good camp counselor, worried about her charges, without noticing it - which I won't detail. And I won't explain the supernatural, or how it all comes out.

Because it does all come out: that's the genre we're in. It's the story of a summer, and how it transformed Elodie (and, maybe, almost as much, other people I will not specify). She is a good counselor, at least for this particular group of feral redheads. She learns secrets of the camp. She learns secrets of other people. She learns to be close to other people, one in particular. And she goes off to college at the end, not quite the same person as before but better and more interesting and more grown up.

This is not as pyrotechnic or ambitious as Secret Passages is: it's a bit more than a genre exercise, but it fits comfortably into a genre and does fun things with the outlines and tropes of that genre. I'm still deeply impressed at the colloquial English-language writing - it all sounds crisp and specific, with distinctive voices for the characters, and that can't be easy to accomplish in a second language. Her art is supple, good at story-telling and ready to be weird for the intrusions of the fantastic. Lenoir is a real talent, and I hope to see a lot more of her comics over the coming years.