Glorious Summers, Vol. 3: Little Miss Esterel by Zidrou & Jordi Lafebre

This is not my nostalgia. But, reading this book, I was reminded that the whole series is about the nostalgia of people around my age and their parents, remembering the era when the parents were young and energetic and the children were young and free.

Glorious Summers is a six-book series, written by Belgian Zidrou and drawn by Spaniard Jordi Lafebre. They were published in French quickly in the teens, and the first five translated into English - this third volume by Laura Vergnaud - for publication in 2018 by Europe Comics. They're digital-only; Europe is not quite a full-line publisher, and acts mostly as a proof-of-concept and an engine for licensing material to American/British publishers who would then bring out their own editions. Each one is set in a particular year, and tells the story of one summer vacation of the Faldérault family.

So Southbound! began with a frame story in what seemed to be roughly the present day, with an aged Pierre Faldérault and his wife Maddie, before flashing back to 1973, when they had four young and rambunctious children. The Calanque dove right into 1969, without a frame story, when the Faldérault family had slightly younger children and only three of them.

This third book is Little Miss Esterel - that's the model of car they drove in those first two books, and this is her story, in a way. The frame story isn't dated, but it's probably the mid-Nineties: the youngest child "Peaches" (Paulette) is still at home, in her early twenties (wearing a Nirvana T-shirt), and the other three are out, with their own lives. But the bulk of this book, like the others, is about one summer - in this case 1962, the year the Faldérault family got that Esterel and went on a two-week long vacation (minus four days; as always Pierre overruns the beginning of the holidays finishing up his comics-making work).

The family is obviously even smaller in 1962 than it was in 1969: Peaches and her older brother Louis aren't even born yet. Julie is a toddler and Nicole is a baby, still breast-feeding. But the traveling crew - in that brand-new Esterel - will include Maddie's parents as well.

She's an only child - we learn some details of why late in the book - and her parents seem old in 1962, while the Faldéraults are in their energetic mid-twenties. Maddie's father Henry - lovingly called "Fat Pop-Pop" by Julie - had a heart attack the year before, and around the same time sold his hat store and retired. He's a genial, happy man. His wife Yvette is tighter-wound and massively more controlled - we think she's been managing her husband's health (and maybe his store, and her family, and whatever else) for a long time, back to the War which still looms in their history.

Pierre thinks it will be fun to have Henry and Yvette along; that they'll drive down to the coast and camp out and Julie will love having "Fat Pop-Pop" to play with. The last of those things is true, at least.

Yvette is an inveterate organizer, with a Michelin guide in her hands, and she takes over entirely - they only make it as far as Saint-Etienne (which is reasonably far South, but not "The South" and certainly not on the Mediterranean), and settle into a hotel there. Yvette leads them around to see all the cathedrals and churches, in strict Michelin-star order.

Worse, the hotel has a Belgian-style restaurant, so they end up eating as if they were at home instead of French cuisine - but not even that, since Yvette browbeats the staff into taking frites off the menu for their entire visit, to protect Henry's heart. (And what is more Belgian than frites?)

Julie has a fine time, of course - she's a toddler. And Nicole is a baby. Yvette is having the vacation she wants, mostly - as much as she can be happy about anything. Henry is thrilled to still be alive and spending time with his family. Pierre and Maddie push back in some ways - they commandeer a wheelbarrow to act as a stroller for the girls - but the tension between Maddie and her mother simmers, until it breaks out into a full-fledged argument in the (slow, stuck-in-traffic) drive back home.

But Maddie learns things about her mother she didn't know, and Yvette learns to unbend a bit. We see the whole Faldérault family making a stop at a frites stand just over the border, the beginning of a tradition that was called out in the previous books. And the core family does have a quick camp-out, in their own backyard, back at home - we are convinced they will find ways to be happy and to do the things that strengthen their family, no matter what.

That's the nostalgia, or the story-telling aspect of it - the haze of memory that turns it all to something good in retrospect. Even a vacation you didn't love at the time becomes a good story years later.

As always with this series, the story is true and realistic, with interesting characters we care about - even Yvette, in the end. And Lafebre's art is magnificent in a clean, crisp story-telling style, with great faces in particular. Glorious Summers is a marvelous example of what comics can be: this series tells stories almost entirely outside any of the mainstreams of North American (or British, or even Japanese) comics - domestic, evocative of specific moments in the past, family-centered, lovely, small, perfectly formed.