Years of professional training in our graphic novel review – The Tower

Still remember your first job – your first job as a teenager to earn a little extra money? You had no idea about the world of work and could not always help effectively. However, this is an important step towards growth, even if you haven’t always been seen as a fully qualified worker out there. Despite all the negative examples of exploiting apprentices, there are also good experiences. Canadian author and illustrator Guy DeLilly talks about such a positive experience in his work “Lehrjahre”, published by Reprodukt in Germany.

Shenzhen, Pyongyang, Burma, Jerusalem, and now Quebec… Author and illustrator Jay Delisle takes us on a journey back into his youth. In his Canadian homeland, he worked as a student in a paper mill for three summers in the 1980s, initially on the night shift, but also during the day in between. That means 12-hour shifts in a hot, noisy building filled with huge, mysterious machines. A finger or even an entire hand can quickly disappear between giant reels of paper, and if you’re not careful, an entire New York Times edition paper will be destroyed.

At the time, Guy DeLilly was already living with his mother, and she and his father had already separated. The strange thing: his father is also a technical painter in this factory, but communication there in the factory as well as in private life is difficult. Jay and his father don’t have much to say to each other. He rarely visits him at home, but even then, usually only his father speaks. Father is less interested in what Jay does. And so they don’t bump into each other at the plant until the third summer.

But Jay works on his drawing skills in his spare time and gradually reads more and more graphic novels and comics to broaden his horizons. In the second summer of this story, he was accepted into an animation school in Toronto, and a dream came true for him. However, we are still seeing his third summer at the Paper Mill.

In his past work, Jay DeLilly has emerged as an observer of other cultures, so his travel illustrated reports have received great acclaim and awards in the past. This time his journey takes him back to his youth, as he shares his experiences at the Factory with humor and narrative form. Sometimes as a reader, you can almost feel the heat and sweat of the ’80s inside the factory, a tough job full of noise and stench. But DeLilly does not look back with suspicion, he tells episodes of people in the factory, of all kinds, so to speak. And so it’s also sexist and masculine when men are only among themselves.

The apprenticeship years fade quickly and are always fun. Visually, the main character stands out with his yellow and orange top, as well as smoke billowing from the chimneys of the factory. Otherwise, the rest of the book will be in black and white. According to Delisle, this should also represent the heat within the walls of the plant. Throughout the book, we readers also get a good outline of specific production processes and details about machines and work equipment: just what it means to make paper.

If you want to have your own picture of artwork for years of apprenticeship, you will find it here Few impressions on the publisher’s website.

Years of Apprenticeship Published by Reprodukt, ISBN: 978-3-95640-262-3, 144 pages, 2-tone, 16.5 x 24.5 cm, hardcover with flaps, €20

Order your apprenticeship years now at Bücher.de

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Order your years of apprenticeship now from Amazon.de

Our online magazine ntower is a member of the affiliate networks Amazon PartnerNet, Awin, Webgains, Media Markt E-Business GmbH and Saturn online GmbH. When ordering via one of our affiliate links, we receive a variable commission from the operator of the respective store. There are no additional costs for end customers.