Following the lockdowns, you wanted to change your life but it's far from easy. What if it was enough to follow the Happytech method? This first volume gives you the recipe to find happiness and on its flip side…
Happiness is harmful to health
In Happytech, Sunday, during a family meal, Xavier Guignard is bored, so he drinks, protecting his cubi of rosé like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. He can enjoy a swimming pool in the summer and be surrounded by his extended family, but nothing helps. This proximity makes him hate his loved ones even more. He feels totally different from them and former friends show him that even his pleasant holiday memories were a lie: they hated and humiliated him. However, this day is only the first step in a very long Way of the Cross. Sunday begins with a couple crisis. On Monday, a polite refusal to a beggar ends with an interrogation at the police station and then distressing colleagues harass Xavier. The day ends when his wife leaves him in the evening. Here is a perfectly adapted context for Xavier to take stock of his life… settled in three boxes. The forty-year-old feels like he has achieved nothing and is hated. He seems to be depressed and wants to escape his routine. It must be said that he also appears to readers as an unpleasant character. In his life as a couple, he is obnoxious with his girlfriend and, in his professional life, he takes pleasure in pushing customers to buy totally useless insurance. The drawing illustrates this pathetic character. He ruminates on a radical change of life… but in shorts and with socks. The screenwriter Corbeyran turns everyday life into a ridiculous adventure. The characters' names are so commonplace that they become ridiculous. However, the series of disasters he suffers makes him almost endearing. A cousin who attended a happiness workshop gives him an idea and Xavier decides to take charge of himself. He will call on the company Happytech and follow their method to become happy. The screenwriter Corbeyran and the cartoonist Alessia Fattore then ask this question: can we buy happiness?
The perfect recipe?
In the first volume, Xavier who climbs into the Happytech organization but also his dark side by a woman who has strangely disappeared. Very quickly, details intrigue Xavier: the actress representing Happytech looks like a beggar seen the day before in the subway. Happytech seduces many people including Xavier but the reader sees the drifts and asks himself this question: what should we sacrifice to obtain happiness? This first volume is indeed a critique of personal development, of these guides proposing the recipe for happiness in kit. Happytech's meaningless verbiage is effective in stunning depressed candidates. It would be enough to follow the instructions for use… and to pay large sums because the offices and outfits of Happytech employees illustrate the transformation of religion in business. This company also evokes Scientology. By the tests at the entrance of the training, a sect is put into algorithms. We rank and score according to a degree of happiness. The colorist Giulia Priori illustrates this fake happiness by very pop and therefore unreal colors when Xavier seems to find happiness, but before and then, the tones are darker to show Xavier's dreary life. Published by Delcourt, Happytech denounces with humor a simplistic vision of happiness. A company gives the keys but the anti-hero, Xavier, struggles to seize them. The cliffhanger of this first volume shows a man in doubt and the reader asks more and more questions about this company. On the site, you can find other chronicles of life in comics with PMA and Ommm.
