I actually think that Brown is one of the single cartoonists about whom I’ve written the most. A lot of it is accessible right here at this site.

— Jim Woodring

The picks of the week from around the web.

Recovering from the long weekend, I have a quick bunch of comics links. Some of them are old news, but so good that I still want to call attention to them:

As should be evident from my 2005 review, I consider this a remarkable book in a remarkable oeuvre. I never thought the interview rendered Brown nor the book justice, consisting mostly of dead ends and leads left unpursued, but I still think the artist makes a number of interesting points and observations and foregrounds the motivations that led him to write Paying for It. I am in any case grateful that Mr. Brown took the time.

The interview was published at Rackham in 2004. This is its first publication in English. I hope you enjoy it, despite its shortcomings.

From Ed the Happy Clown

I want to start by asking you what it’s been like to work with historical material [in Louis Riel], and especially in relation to your earlier work. Because I see underlying themes, which : as far as I see it : are recurrent in all your work that I want to touch upon later. What were the differences between this and your earlier work, and what were the continuities?

There weren’t a lot of problems. Really, the jump from what I was doing before to doing historical comics wasn’t that big a jump. I’ve being doing autobiographical comics, which are about someone’s real-life experiences, so moving to biography, which deals with someone’s life… the only difference is that it’s someone else’s life rather than mine : in both cases you have the same problems of dealing with a large mass of material, all the events in a person’s life, and trying to condense it down into a narrative of however many pages you have : I knew from the beginning I wanted it to be around two hundred pages. The problems were rather ones of finding reference, not the least visual, and trying to reconcile different historical accounts, where for example two historians would disagree with each other, or where two eyewitnesses had different versions of the events, that sort of thing. Whereas with autobiographical material, it’s just one person’s version of what happened : my version.

The reason I’m asking is because I see a lot of your work dealing with notions of reality and normalcy. The problem of what constitutes insanity : you have the whole question of Riel’s sanity…

Right.

From "My Mother Was a Schizophrenic, published in Underwater #4.

… and you address it very directly in your work on your mother : as well as the ideas, I guess, of representing reality in comics, which is something one does pretty directly in many ways : and in some ways not : in both autobiography and history writing. Do you see some kind of continuity there? And, if you do, what kind of problems do you see in relation to representing reality in comics?

Uh… problems?

Well, the problems, which present themselves as to what to show, how to be honest, being true to reality, while telling a story at the same time…

Yeah, being really honest and really true to Riel’s story was impossible in two hundred pages. That’s why I had to have the footnotes at the back of the book; to explain where I’d fudged stuff or changed details for the sake of narrative flow. Most of the changes I made were to keep the book at around two hundred pages. If I really wanted to tell Riel’s story as honestly as I could in comic book form, I would have needed more like a thousand pages or something, not two hundred. That was the big problem : space consideration. Being able to stay true to the material.

The sequence at the bottom of this page from Louis Riel is typical of Brown's method. The three generals never met in person, but by presenting it thus, Brown saves himself and the reader unnecessary complications.

Do you regard what you did as a representation of reality or more as a work of fiction?

Uh, it certainly has fictional elements in it, but I don’t think my concerns were the same as someone who sets out to write fiction. I think writing fiction has more to do with entering into a character’s emotional life, whereas I had absolutely no interest in that. History is more concerned with the events, the outer representation of those events, what happened, the sequence of events and those sorts of things, not getting into a character. So my interest was more of a historical one, but in order to tell that historical story in two hundred pages, I had to resort to fictional methods : making up dialogue, inventing or condensing scenes, that sort of thing.

The reason I’m asking is because so many of the themes found in your previous work seem to pop up in Riel. Did you set out to consciously treat these themes, or did they just present themselves as part of the material as you went along? I can see how some of them would, but…

Yeah, that’s certainly why I was attracted to the story in the first place : Riel’s interest in religion, the whole question of his sanity, his messianic fervor, and those sorts of things. It was there, that’s why I did the story.

Riel is transported to the 4th Heaven.

There are points in the narrative where you sense a definite authorial hand, the most obvious being the representation of Riel’s vision. That kind of moves beyond traditional historical writing, you become aware that there’s an author interpreting the material and adding to it. Did you plan to make that kind of thing obvious, or did it just come naturally? What were your considerations regarding that?

I don’t think I was aware of it, and with that particular scene, it shows what Riel said happened. Of course, in representing it…

Yeah, that’s what I mean.

Yeah, in drawing it, you have to invent : I have Saturn in the back, and Riel never said Saturn was there, or whatever. But of course, that happens in any scene in the book; I draw Riel in a room and have a chair next to him : who knows whether that chair was there?

No, I guess I’m talking about traditions of historical writing. In a traditional account, you normally wouldn’t normally go into a person’s head as you do in that particular scene : not that you do it that much in the book, but in that case, at least. Whether it’s real or not is of course the question, but it’s Riel’s vision represented on paper in your line; it becomes much more palpable than if you’d drawn him coming up telling somebody about the vision.

Yeah, it is an interpretation, and I probably chose that way of doing it, because I do take seriously when people say the have visions. I’m sure sometimes people aren’t truthful about that sort of thing, but other times I think we have to take seriously what people say they experience : if they say they experience talking to the Holy Ghost, then I think they probably really did experience something, and we tend to discount those sorts of experiences and I don’t think we should.

Following the discussion of representation, I would like to ask you what you think are the strengths and the advantages of doing an historical narrative in drawn, comics form.

[Pause] I think it’s more readable. History does seem to be kind of dry, and I say that as someone who enjoys reading historical books. But I know that for a large part of the population, reading history is less exciting than reading other sorts of things, and I think that comics might be a good way of popularizing history in a way that doesn’t do damage to historical truth in the same way that, say, film does when it tackles historical subjects. I think if someone tried to do a… well, actually, there have been film versions of Riel’s story, and I think… I can say for certain that my book was closer to the truth than those films were; it’s probably not as true as a serious prose biography, it kind of sits somewhere in the middle between film adaptations or versions of the story and prose histories. I think cartoonists should be looking at this more seriously at this as a way of getting people to read history.

A while ago I was talking to Joe Sacco about similar problems. The fact that if you recreate something on film, it immediately looks fake [Brown laughs], it connotes fiction…

Yeah.

…whereas, if you draw it, it seems more convincing. It’s obviously an interpretation, but because it’s so obvious, it kind of seems more real than film, which on the face of it looks more real… it’s something he’s given a lot of thought, but couldn’t say anything definite about : have you had similar thoughts? About the interpretative act of drawing? What’s the nature of reality drawn by you, in a style obviously derived from cartoon history?

[Pauses] I didn’t worry about it that much. I think what made this seem not so daunting a task was reading Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe; he just made drawing people in certain historical periods look so easy, the costumes he would put people in just looked so cartoony, so dashed off, but still looked right, somehow. That kind of made it look possible, and made me worry less about getting things absolutely accurate. Obviously, I did try to research as much as I could what things looked like, but…

It didn’t trouble you too much if you couldn’t find a source for something you needed to draw?

No, I did try…

Because I know for Joe it’s very important…

Heh, yeah…

What he does is obviously quite different from what you do, but there are central similarities : the representation of truth in drawn form.

Yeah, maybe I should have made that even clearer in my notes : to refer to my visual sources. I would try to find reference for all the historical figures : photographs or drawings : but sometimes I couldn’t, so I would just make up what they look like, so maybe I should have mentioned in the notes when I did that.

You did that at least once, with that guy whom you drew skinny, but who was actually fat [laughs].

Yeah. There were other instances where I couldn’t find references, and I didn’t note that in the back.

William Mcdougal incorrectly depicted as a skinny man.

I’ve already asked this question, but I think I’m going to ask it again…

OK.

Did you set out to represent historical truth, or did you primarily want to tell a story?

[Long pause] The thing is… you can’t know the truth at this point… Yeah, I was more concerned with the story, and I had a bias. I set out to make the Canadian government look as bad as possible, because my political stance when I began the project was anarchism : it was supposed to be an anti-government work, even though my politics kind of changed while I was working on the book : what I believed at the beginning wasn’t what I believed at the end : and even though I knew Riel himself wasn’t an anarchist, if anything he was politically conservative.

So, did your view of the situation and your politics change because of the work?

Yeah, because of the reading I was doing.

McDonald, "the villain of the piece," presents a plan to thwart Riel.

Yeah, you express in your annotation that, even though [the Canadian Prime Minister] McDonald is sort of the villain of the piece…

Yeah.

… you wouldn’t want to live in a state governed by Riel.

When I began the book, I saw McDonald as a villain, but several years later, when I was actually drawing those scenes, I felt differently, so that’s why I wrote that in the notes. Changing the book’s direction at that point just seemed too difficult; I actually sat down and tried to rewrite the material to reflect my changed in political perspective and it was just too difficult, so I just kept to the script that I had originally written and finished the book that way.

Approaching a work with such profound spiritual content from an anarchist point of view seems kind of problematic. How did you reconcile the two? I mean, you’ve always treated themes of spirituality in your work : could you comment on that? Have you become a religious person along the way?

Oh yeah, I’m a religious person and I have been all along. I don’t see a conflict between being anti-government and believing that there’s a God. Actually, my political views and my spiritual views kind of complement each other, but I’m sure that there are committed anarchists that are also atheist, and that’s fine, whatever… [chuckles]

I just figured that anarchism at its base tended to preclude spirituality, but, of course, looking at your work, that’s obviously not the case. [Long pause] Right, I think I want to return to the drawings. To me, perhaps the strongest aspect of your work is the poetry of the drawings, for example the sheer evocative power of the dream sequences in Underwater, and it’s also very present in Riel, although it has obviously been reined in a little. Did you have any conscious goals you wanted to accomplish with the art themselves, the style, the compositions : the open field, the cartoony characters…

My… one goal was to make the artwork look as much as the artwork in Little Orphan Annie as possible, I was trying to draw like Harold Gray, and…

Was that just self-indulgence or…

I love Gray’s work and that looked like fun to me.

OK.

It looked like fun to draw like Harold Gray. I had other things going on too; there’s a lot of distance between the viewer and the characters, the characters are drawn really small in most of the panels and there’s almost no use of close-up. And that had to do with not wanting to enter into the emotional lives of the characters, trying to stay as distant from them as possible. They were drawn in a very cartoony style, a more cartoony style that Gray used actually, they have big noses, wild hair and that sort of thing, and that was really to keep the characters distinct from each other, so that you would be easily able to recognize which character was which.

Accessibility again.

Yeah.

Yeah, that was also my hunch about it : it was enjoyable to draw like that [Brown laughs]. Your resistance to the use of close-ups : and I might be going out on a total limb here : complements ideas of nineteenth-century visual culture very well. It’s almost like looking into a stereoscope; you present a view that seems God-like, objective, but upon further scrutiny, especially of the framing, you start noticing how subjective it is : it’s all chosen for the viewer by you.

Mm-hm.

You work with that very rigorous grid, and all the panels are the same size : do you think a lot about framing as you work, or does it just come naturally?

Um… Yeah, I guess you could say it comes naturally. I don’t think there’s a lot of thought given to that… the compositions are pretty simple and basic, the characters are either centered or very close to the center of the panels.

Riel's men enter Fort Garry.

There’s a very interesting passage : the one where Riel’s men are entering the fort at the beginning and you keep a figure – not the same figure because they’re all running : but you keep one figure almost at the center of each panel [Brown chuckles]. And at the very corner of the upper images, you can just see a cannon on the other side of the gates.

Mm-hm.

To me, it seems like some thought went into that composition.

Yeah, probably [chuckles].

I don’t know, maybe not, maybe not [laughs]. I’m just thinking of how, in the nineteenth century, images tend to become fragments of a greater whole, and your work very much seems composed of fragments, not the least in how you compose the page; the way you draw each panel individually as you’ve mentioned in several interviews.

Right.

How has your approach to the composition of a page evolved? Have you given up page layout as a prime concern?

Oh yeah, completely. I never think of how each panel is going to work on the page. That happens once the page is put together. Certainly, there was no point in Riel where I put a page together and decided it didn’t work and had to be changed. There was one instance of it in the Ed the Happy Clown book, where I had drawn a head in one panel, a close-up of someone’s head, and when I put the page together, the panel directly below it was a picture of someone else’s body, and it became an odd juxtaposition, it looked like it was supposed to be a total drawing of a head and body, so I had to change the panel with the body : I moved the body over a bit. But nothing like that happened in the Riel book… So yeah, if the pages work, it’s just serendipitous.

OK. Why are you not concerned with that?

[Pause] Because I don’t have to be concerned with it. The pages look fine to me without it. There have been times in the past where I’ve been concerned with it and have tried to be conscious of images work together in sequence, and have tried to do what comic book artists are supposed to do where you lead the eye compositionally through the panels on the page, and… I don’t know, I don’t think that makes a page any more appealing than the random placement of images that were used in, say, the Riel book. People know how to read a comic book page, what balloon to read first and so on; I don’t think there’s a need to guide them.

It again makes for very interesting results in Riel; almost no page is self-contained…

Right.

There’s invariably a change of scene or something on each page that embeds it in the narrative.

Right.

From Riel's trial. Note the assymmetry and the disconnect between the characters across the central gutter.

And you have many instances, especially in the courtroom scene at the end, where the characters are talking to each other with the images showing them as if their backs were turned to each other. Is that also serendipitous?

Yeah. Just as there are sequences were the characters have their backs turned to each other, there are others in that courtroom scene where they actually are facing each other. I just didn’t worry about it.

So there’s no concern with guidelines like the 180 degree-line which is used in film and which some people claim also works better in comics… well, you obviously don’t think so.

Yeah, I never switch : if one person’s supposed to be at the left and another to the right, I don’t switch them around.

But you do between images, and I think it adds to the narrative meaning…

Good [chuckles].

[Laughs] How and when did you develop that approach : drawing each panel on its own?

Uhm… Quite early in my work. I think the first time I did it was with the story “Walrus Blubber Sandwich” in an early issue of Yummy Fur : it’s in the Little Man book, it’s one of the earliest strips in that book. Uhm, why did I do that? [pause] I don’t know, It’s hard to put myself back in…

From "Walrus Blubber Sandwich"

Returning to that approach to the individual panel, did it feel liberating? And have you consistently done it since then?

No, no, no, for the most part I’ve worked that way, but I’m sure that there are a couple of instances where I have done everything on a page. But for the most part I’ve done it. I think I started doing it for the reason I still do it : it’s the easiest way of editing a story and making changes, and things like that. Also I think it was just due to the practical fact that it’s hard to work on a large board : at the top of the page you have to kind of stretch your arm up, whereas if I’m just working on one panel, my arm is closer to my body and it doesn’t have to stretch out as far : it’s easier.

From I Never Liked You.

Right. The reason I’m asking is it really becomes a powerful storytelling tool in I Never Liked You : it becomes very noticeable for the reader in that story. Often a scene that doesn’t necessarily carry a lot of emotional significance gets a single panel on a full page, while in traditional comics grammar you would only do something like that for an emotional climax in a story. Here, something else is going on…

Mm-hm.

Uh, I don’t know what I was going to ask you : I seem to keep wanting to attribute conscious choices to these things if they’re not there… [chuckles] Please deny it, if that’s the case. But did that book feel like a breakthrough narratively in some way? Or even in terms of your autobiographical work?

You mean I Never Liked You? Because I was using that in The Playboy too, and even with “Showing Helder”.

Right, right.

That way of isolating certain panels from the others. So, in those terms, the breakthrough was probably “Showing Helder”, even though later on, midway through Underwater, I went back to using six panels per page. But yeah, that was a great way of working : being able to have as many panels per page as seemed necessary, and being able to isolate certain panels. Yeah, probably more work should be done way, or at least it’s a potential area to be explored by cartoonists.

Brown shows part of his work process, including a phone call to his colleague Seth. From "Showing Helder" in Yummy Fur #20.

So, how much planning goes into individual sequences? How do you put them together? Do you decide in advance roughly how many panels you’re going to use and how you’re going to distribute them on the pages?

Well, with Riel, I did write out a full script beforehand. Each page of script was an 8,5 by 11″ sheet of paper and I would divide the sheet of paper into six panels and write the dialogue for each panel on it. And if it was necessary to remind myself what was going to be drawn in a panel, I would have stick figure indications. I wrote out the whole script, which ended up being 240 pages, and the story ended up being 272 pages I think, which is a bit longer because I extended scenes and added material to what was in the script. I knew that would happen as I was writing the script; the script was really a draft, just because the script indicated a certain number of panels didn’t mean that was the number of panels that were going to end up being on the actual page once the book was finished.

Did you take out a lot?

There were some scenes that were not drawn, but I definitely added more than I took out.

Because I was wondering : the cover of the last issue of Riel has him exiting the window, going to his execution, an image which isn’t found in the actual book.

Right.

The cover to issue 10 or the serialized version of Louis Riel.

Are there many instances of that?

That scene was drawn for the interior of the comic and then I decided it wasn’t necessary for the story, and then I needed an image for the cover and I decided to use it [Matthias chuckles]. And yeah, there were quite a few panels like that which were taken out.

We’re getting very technical here [chuckles]. Just to wrap up, I think I want to ask you whether you see your work as continuously exploring similar themes or moving towards new ones? Some of cartoonists I’ve talked to basically say they’ve explored the same set of themes in all their work and will continue to do so : how do you see your work in relation to that? Is it something you’ve given any thought?

Hm… [long pause]. There are things I’m becoming more interested in dealing with, which I’m not sure were present in the earlier work, particularly political ideas. My earlier work wasn’t that political…

Do you see Riel as being very political?

It’s probably not as political as the work I’ll be doing in the future.

Is this a result of your work on it?

Yeah, working on Riel changed my political perspective and I’m going to want to reflect that in the work I do in the future.

How so? Do you want to express a particular political viewpoint? Or, as I see it, present a situation as you do it in Riel and leave it ambiguous? That’s why I asked whether you thought it was a political book, because I don’t perceive it to be pushing a political agenda.

It’s not an explicit agenda, that’s for sure, and the work I do in the future will probably be more explicit.

I
There is an extraordinary moment near the beginning of Chester Brown’s historical reconstruction, Louis Riel: the newly, ad hoc-elected eponymous popular leader sends his troops into the nearby-situated Fort Garry to secure the provisions and weapons stored there, before they fall into the hands of their pro-Canadian adversaries. A scout is sent ahead and finds the fort deserted, after which he signals his brethren to advance through the open gate.

Before and after.

Pictures like these extend logically from Brown’s earlier work, which has always been characterized by a rare sensitivity to the ineffable, not to say enigmatic qualities of the image. From the surreal excess of Ed the Happy Clown (collected 1989), and the existential desolation of I Never Liked You (collected 1994), to the weirdly beautiful, mysteriously charged dream sequences of the unfinished yet extraordinary Underwater (1994-97), Brown’s unique visual sensibility has always been the driving force.

Emerging as it does directly from his compositional method, by which each panel is drawn separately, only later to be assembled into full comics pages, Louis Riel is his most carefully composed construction so far : his most reflexive use of the fragmentary image as his basic building block.

It has been asserted that comics owe their communicative efficiency to the way they approximate experience itself. Speaking through fragments from which our sense of order elicits coherence, the idea is that comics provide a particularly felicitous condensation of the way we continuously create meaning from fragmentary sensation. Whether this hypothesis stands up to scientific scrutiny is more than doubtful, but that does not make comics as a meaning-making apparatus any less powerful or fascinating. Their emphatic appeal to our participation, our filling the blanks of the ‘gutter’ between panels : what Scott McCloud calls closure : is highly stimulating to the imagination.

It seems natural that a medium that so explicitly works through fragments would be a child of modernity. A fundamentally subjective, fragmented worldview came increasingly to characterize the times around the turn of the 19th century and later engendered the radical notion of God’s death. It not only manifested itself in the broken pictorial field of open-air painting and photography’s luminous grasp of the moment, but also in the birth of a new, mass-produced, caricatured hybrid medium, which in its own way charted and subverted this new, unseated reality.

From the sequence describing the first battle of the rebellion, at Duck Lake

II
More than a century later, Louis Riel is one of the first conscious attempts in the medium to diagnose central aspects of the century that gave it birth. As in Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s superstructure on the London Ripper murders, From Hell, Brown seeks to describe the definitive changes in self and society that came to characterize the new times. Both works are based on historical events, but where From Hell attempts to chart a modern mythology by way of Jack the Ripper, Louis Riel is a more scrupulously executed historical reconstruction of a central phase in Canadian history.

The book describes the conflict between government and people that resulted from Canada’s purchase in 1869 of the central territories of the country, then called Rupert’s Land, from the fur-trading Hudson’s Bay Company. Canada was ruled by the British crown; Rupert’s Land was populated by French-speaking métis of mixed European and native American blood. The Canadian policy of colonizing and reorganizing the land, which the métis regarded as theirs led to a number of clashes over the following decades, culminating in an armed rebellion that was brutally suppressed by the Canadian army. Louis Riel (1844-1885) had been educated as a priest in Montréal and spent part of his life in the United States. He was métis from the contended territories and quickly became a central figure in his people’s negotiations with, and eventual rebellion against, the Canadian government.

The first part of the story as told by Brown describes the conflict between the métis and the local English-speaking population. This ends with the execution of the loyalist Thomas Scott, an event that, as eventually becomes clear, proves fatal for Riel and his cause. This section also deals with the formation of a local government by the métis and their English-speaking neighbors : to which Riel is elected president : and its negotiations with Canada. These lead to the promise of extensive autonomy for the region, now called Manitoba by its government, as well as amnesty for those involved in the insurrection and the execution of Scott. Rather than honoring the deal, however, Canada sends its army to the area and crushes the opposition. This leads to the English-speaking part of the population taking over the region’s governance and Riel being forced to go into hiding.

Riel meets the bed-stricken Bishop Bourget

The second part follows Riel, in spite of being on the run from the authorities, is elected to the Canadian parliament in 1873. As a wanted man, he feels incapable of filling the post, even after he is reelected in 1874. Around this time, he meets the French-Canadian Bishop Bourget, who tells him that he has been chosen to fulfill a special mission. This is a life-changing event for Riel. On a visit to the US in 1875, where he is seeking help from president Ulysses S. Grant and planning an invasion of Manitoba, he experiences a divine vision. He is transported to the Fourth Heaven by a God who gives him the name David, shows him the splendors of all the Earth, and the road he must follow as a prophet of the New World. We then follow his incognito commitment to a mental institution in Canada.

McDonald presents his plan to the director of the CPR

The third part describes Riel’s return in 1884 to a Manitoba under the yoke of the Canadian government, which is in the process of colonizing and reforming the land with no regard for the métis. Riel’s reemergence puts further pressure on Canadian prime minister John A. Macdonald, who is already reeling politically from the troubled efforts by the Canadian Railway Company (CPR) to build a trans-Canadian railway. Macdonald devises a plan that allows him to kill two birds with one stone. By provoking a rebellion in Manitoba and sending the army there to quell it by train, he is able to secure for himself the funding necessary to finish the railway. He succeeds in suppressing the rebellion fairly easily, not the least because of Riel’s unconditional faith in divine providence and insistence on fighting in a ‘civilized’ manner and not resorting to guerilla and other, more advantageous but ‘primitive’ strategies. Riel then gives himself over to the authorities, believing it the best way for him to advance the course of his people.

The railway. A constituent of modernity. The sequence at the bottom is typical of Brown's method. The three generals never met in person, but by presenting it thus, Brown saves himself and the reader unnecessary complications.

The fourth and last part of the book details the trial against Riel, accused of treason. He is defended by a lawyer who : against Riel’s will : seeks acquittal on grounds of insanity, but ends up convicted and sentenced to death by hanging. The punishment is executed on November 16th, 1885. In the epilogue we see how Canada consolidates its power in the region and grants amnesty to most of the métis rebels, as well as how the railway is completed, making the CPR’s director one of the richest men in the world.

Riel is transported to the 4th Heaven.

III
Central to Louis Riel is the question of whether or not he is insane, and : by extension : what insanity in fact is. Long-term readers will be familiar with Brown’s description of his mother’s schizophrenia in I Never Liked You and with his preoccupation with this question. He himself regards Louis Riel as a direct development of the thoughts he advanced in his documentary short comic about the historical reception of schizophrenia, “My Mother Was a Schizophrenic” (1995). He basically considers schizophrenia and many other so-called mental illnesses social constructs defined in accordance with established conventions of normality, rather than actual afflictions.

The basic premise of Louis Riel therefore is the conflict between different conceptions of reality: between a deeply religious, traditional peasant society led by the possibly prophetic Riel, and a modern, rationalist, and pragmatist power structure, personified by Macdonald, the “villain” of the piece. On a more general level, this conflict reflects the great changes to society in the 19th century.

The documentary staging elevates this conflict to a macro level; it becomes an inquiry into our understanding of history. And because it is done in comics form, the work questions fundamentally the conceit of writing history, highlighting the choices any historian must make, and the connections, often narrative in kind, that inevitably arise in order for the material to make sense. In his endnotes Brown explains how he constantly chose to simplify and alter historical facts: three métis negotiators sent to Toronto are reduced to one; Bishop Bourget communicates to Riel in person the words he actually transmitted in a letter; a group of fleeing Mounties leave Fort Carlton in Manitoba in the day rather than : as actually happened : at night, so we can have a conversation between Riel and the military leader of the métis forces Gabriel Dumont, whom Brown places overlooking the flight; and so on.

Riel discusses strategy with Gabriel Dumont

Brown mostly takes such liberties for the sake of clarity, and most of the time he succeeds: many events and relations are simplified simply because presenting them faithfully would unnecessarily muddle and confuse the presentation without adding much of anything. In certain places, however, one senses the difficulty of thus simplifying complex events: in the courtroom scene, for instance, characters appear for the first time that have clearly been involved in the events already narrated, talking about other events that we have not been made privy to. But again, this reflects choices made to advance the narrative. Louis Riel is history as storytelling : if an adjustment to the facts helps the story, Brown makes it, despite its inevitably undermining historical credibility as we normally understand it. At the same time, Brown maintains a certain methodological consistency and privileges the sources. His interpretations never contradict the material and are explained and excused : very scrupulously, it seems : in the notes. Everything is presented in a distanced, matter-of-factly manner, seemingly objectively. Only when we suddenly find ourselves sharing Riel’s vision from the Fourth Heaven is the story’s blurring of the boundaries between different levels of experience made clear.

IV
This questioning of truth is further accentuated by the comic’s very form and structure. The six-panel grid evokes the enlightened, ordered vision on the world that has been determining for the modern experience. The page construction carries within itself the paradox between subjective experience and objective aspiration : while its symmetry assumes objectivity, it conveys a highly subjective point of view. As was the case with the proliferating optical instruments of the 19th century, such as the stereoscope or the peep box, the individual’s experience is privileged, presented with an undisturbed, ‘omniscient’ view of the world. But this view is chosen for us; like all history writing, it is a fragment of a greater, unfathomable reality, contextualized according to a specific ordering principle. By being so demonstratively homogenous, Brown’s page layouts emphasize this. He furthermore subverts very consistently the apparent symmetry of the pages, preferring for instance to cut between individual scenes on the page, rather than between pages; only rarely does he nest a full scene on a single page. And conversations are often staged so that the interlocutors remain isolated, each in their panel, “talking to the margins” rather than face each other across the central gutter of the page.

Brown’s drawing style and narrative approach is a tour de force in the language of comics. His point of departure is Harold Gray’s classic newspaper strip Little Orphan Annie, with its delicate, evocative hatching, it statuesque figures with small heads and empty white eyes. He thus populates a serious historical drama with bona fide cartoons, complete with big feet and long noses. His use of sound effects is also highly confident : shots ring out “BLAM BLAM” when close to the eye of the grid, while they clatter “PK PK” when further away. And his sense of speech balloon semantics is exquisite : all dialogue in French and other non-English languages is marked by triangular brackets as formalized in superhero comics; the thickness of the lettering is varied according to observed speech patterns; and the rank torrent of abuse that leads to the loyalist Scott’s execution is evoked by filling balloon after balloon, page after page, with loud X’s. The sense one gets is both of monotony and intensifying unease, shaping the insults and having them grow in the reader’s imagination.

The obnoxious Scott lets loose a torrent of abuse.

As in the work of the otherwise very different comics journalist Joe Sacco, the strong graphic identity of Brown’s rendering lends to the work a paradoxical sense of authenticity, because the reader is not seduced into mistaking form for reality, but rather reminded of the interpretative nature of the work. Comics as practiced here possess a rare clarity and accessibility, which communicates documentary material very effectively, especially when read along with the annotations. Beyond this, the images, with their airy layouts and varied hatching, carry an archaic feel that evokes nineteenth-century illustration. This is accentuated specifically by the use of the pre-photographic convention depicting horses running with their legs splayed : a non-naturalistic and now archaic, but nevertheless dynamic strategy fully in step with pictorial convention before Eadweard Muybridge’s late 1870s split-second sequential photographic depictions of horses and other bodies in motion.

Most importantly, Brown imbues his images with an ineffable poetry, nourished by the emptiness that seems to define them. It is as if the spirit Riel, whose presence insists upon, has left the world in which he walks. The clarity of this made painfully clear in the trial chapter, which is exclusively staged in long shots depicting figures in profile or ¾ profile against a black background. This minimalism acts as an atmospheric counterpoint to the preceding chapter’s visually expansive description of the rebellion and accentuates the sense of irrevocable loss Riel experiences. His case is not heard, even though the tribunal respectfully lets him talk at length, and he is coolly and rationally sentenced to death after a scrupulously executed trial. It becomes obvious that the times have turned their back on the God in which he so fervently believes. Instead of finding resonance, the New World, for which he would be prophet, shrugs at his accusations of irresponsibility and madness and sends him to the gallows.

From the trial. Note the assymmetry and the disconnect between the characters across the central gutter.

The portrayal of Riel simultaneously as a righteous champion both of earthly and spiritual values and an unstable, detached, and ultimately dangerous fundamentalist is central to Brown’s story. It is built upon paradoxes, both cognizant and doubtful of faith as an alternative to modernity and the world it has brought us : a world in which these divergent interpretations of life remain at odds with no resolution in sight. Upon reflection, Riel’s : and the story’s : last words grow into a desperate and hopeful supplication to Him on whom we have turned our backs.

Originally published in Danish on the Rackham website in 2005. Other installments in this series: David B.’s L’Ascension du haut mal (Epileptic), Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again, Sammy Harkham et. al. Kramers Ergot 4, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Daniel Clowes’ Ice Haven and The Death Ray., Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan — The Smartest Kid on Earth, Dominique Goblet’s Faire semblant c’est mentir, Gary Panter’s Jimbo in Purgatory. For Danish readers, I interviewed Brown about Louis Riel back in 2004.

Jon Gorga and Palle Schmidt dipping underground at Bergen Street

I particularly enjoyed it as an opportunity immediately to get acquainted with the New York comics scene and meet in person a number of people whose work I’ve been appreciating, and some of whom I’ve been corresponding with, over the last half decade or more. I enjoyed attending the Strandicon event and meeting for the first time the whole Comics Journal crew, old and new (videos of panel here); it was great to drop in for a reception at the fine Bergen Street Comics, where I’d never been before, and chat to Tucker Stone. I was great finally to meet comics critics and scholars such as Bill Kartalopoulos, Joe McCulloch, Marc Sobel, Chris Mautner, Alex Dueben, Heidi McDonald and others, and it was cool to sit down and chat with my good internet spirit Derik Badman (read his MoCCA report here). I also got to catch up with a bunch of my Danish friends and colleagues, who were over here in force, as well as some of our Nordic brethren, plus several New York cartoonists I haven’t talked to much since I last lived here.

All good times, but it really overshadowed what seemed to me a somewhat unremarkable festival. The programming was largely unremarkable, lacking in both marquee names or particularly worthwhile themes, so it came down to the offerings in the main hall. I like the democratic aspect of MoCCA, with tables being sufficiently cheap that a lot of DIY and underground stuff is on display, but at the same time I saw very little remarkable work outside the rosters of the show’s few “big” publishers. The impression it left of the American grass roots scene was one of slight stagnation after many years of redoubtable creative growth.

Søren Mosdal, Cav Bøgelund and Rikke Bakman at the Danish table

Yes, a new book by Lisa Hanawalt is not to be scoffed at, Austin English is always interesting, and that Warren Craghead piece in the Sundays antho is gorgeous, but these are still slim pickings. Joseph Lambert’s hyped I Will Bite You is a pretty book, but seems to me slight… I dunno, maybe I’m just grouching or I possibly missed a lot of good work.

Of course, a lot of the high-profile books released or teased at the show seems remarkable — I cannot wait to get my hands on Chester Brown’s Paying for It (D&Q, in a smart marketing move, only brought 25 copies selling out almost instantly); Jim Woodring’s Congress of the Animals predictably looks great, if also perhaps plain predictable (the new Dave McKean porn book is the opposite: unpredictably kitschy, even for him…); it is fantastic to see Lewis Trondheim’s Approximate Continuum Comics finally out in English (after all these years); Shigeru Mizuki’s Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths is a fascinating if flawed work that I’m glad to see released in English; and the collection of Bagge/Hernandez’ Yeah! and the latest Hate! Annual are welcome distractions; Winshluss’ Pinocchio is an impressive if somewhat shallow book, but worth a read; and that fat-ass 301st issue of The Comics Journal (the Éprouvette version) packs a great critical punch.

Perhaps it was just the historical surroundings (noblesse oblige!) or the awareness that across the ocean, in Luzern, another awesome-sounding installment of Fumetto is taking place right now. Anyway, it was great meeting everyone!

The picks of the week from around the web.

A bunch of quick comics links this week.

Photo by Stanley Kubrick.