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.

Dominique Goblet depicts her father as a late medieval Madonna, nurturing his child, right hand in blessing. Drawn on disparate, pasted-together pieces of paper accompanied by shakily calligraphed Gothic handwriting, it is simultaneously a mockery and an illumination.

The image is from Goblet’s Faire semblant c’est mentir (‘To Pretend Is to Lie,’ 2007), a work that the author spent more than a decade creating. In it, she recounts episodes in her life to explicate, or at least represent, truthfully parts of its relational structure and emotional involvement. In this scene, Dominique visits her estranged father for the first time in five years. He is a drunken retired fireman and divorcé, now living with a rickety woman, Cécile—prone to hysteria bordering on the paranoid and drawn like Munch’s Screamer—a precarious stack-up of damaged goods. Dominique brings along her young daughter, Nikita, whom she leaves reluctantly in the hands of Cécile to walk the obliviously chipper dog.

The conversation turns serious, and the father starts blaming the daughter and her mother for the family’s misfortune. The icon mock-up marks a crescendo of his self-righteous diatribe: “And when she left, who took care of you? Wasn’t it me, perhaps? Didn’t you have your little packed lunch every day for school?” It is largely a comic image, but crafted as a question rather than a condemnation, because how can she deny the factual accuracy of that statement?

A collage of clips, rips and palimpsests, rendered in nervous, uneven line, the image emphasizes its limitations and shortcomings. While certainly pathetic, the father crucially is basically sympathetic; his soft facial features and mismatched almond eyes reveal an inner vitality, if also a lack of awareness. The child, in contrast, appears shrewd and present. This is her interpretation, ironic and reverent.

On several occasions in the book Goblet risks hyperbole in this way, employing dramatic juxtapositions and symbolic imagery to accentuate expression and enrich observation. It’s a risky strategy, but one she clearly feels is merited by the material, mundane as it might seem. The book is an attempt to engage a set of issues less by narrative and more by perspective. Goblet finds truth in reiteration, approaching her relationships from different angles and extending the focus beyond herself to the people around her, attempting to make sense of their experience: her father, her mother, and her boyfriend, Guy Marc Hinant, who co-wrote two of the chapters. She interweaves fact and fiction to expose the experiential, emotional truths behind the pretense of autobiography, attempting as well as she can to sidestep solipsism and mythologizing—the ophthalmic migraines and temporary blindness she suffers at a point of severe stress unassumingly accrue metafictional connotations.

Her portrait of her father is essentially a loving one. Despite their estrangement, she cracks convulsively when she learns from a friend of the family—after everyone else—that he was hospitalized days ago and is apparently dead. He isn’t, and he ends up comforting her in the hospital waiting room instead of the other way round. She is suffering from crippling anxiety that her budding relationship with Guy Marc is failing before it has even fully started, and given the juxtaposition, it is hard not to interpret this in the light of her familial disjunction.

As we’ve seen concurrently, Guy Marc has left his previous relationship unsolved. He wavers and relapses, wearing thin Dominique’s need to trust. Goblet draws the specter of his ex haunting them as they go about their daily business, lending a sense of sad menace to her portrayal of the beginnings of a relationship. She captures attentively the ambulatory conversations by which we get to know each other and the sense of promise they hold. In this case—perhaps a little too appropriately—it starts with a ghost story told in exacting, captivating detail, and continues with a no less carefully delineated recipe for pasta with tuna. And situations like Dominique tucking in Nikita in the graffiti-covered room of Guy Marc’s teenaged son (he’s with his mother) have an acute sense of reality to it. The book breathes lived experience.

Though basically expressive, relying on externalizing emotion and broadening character to great effect, Goblet’s painterly pencil-and-chalk drawing at times captures more subtly revelatory moments of insight. This is especially true of the chapters involving her relationship with Guy Marc, in which her endeavor to step outside herself is most fully realized. The distracted, slightly troubled gaze with which he looks at her as she is telling him the ghost story beautifully illustrates the sense of displacement from the present tense that unaddressed problems may visit upon us, yet also suggests his dawning infatuation with the remarkable new person in front of him. And later Goblet depicts herself at her drawing table, against the light of the blinds, as seen from Guy Marc’s point of view, his desire and affection for her almost palpably immanent. An extraordinary instance of empathetic projection through drawing.

Goblet generally excels at displacing emotion, by metaphor as seen in the symbolic portrayal of her father, but also, and perhaps more notably, through transposition. Some of her most intense instances of emotional disclosure about both her father and her boyfriend are expressed not in this book, but in Souvenir d’une journée parfaite (‘Recollection of a Perfect Day,’ 2001), which she wrote and drew while work on Faire semblant was ongoing. Her father eventually did die, and Souvenir is in part a way for Goblet to express her feelings and reflect upon his significance to her shortly after it happened.

Instead of addressing her relationship with him directly, as she does in Faire semblant, however, she uses the conceit of looking for his gravestone at a mausoleum in the cemetery of the Brussels suburb of Uccle. Scanning the many names, she happens upon one of them, Mathias Kahn, and creates a fiction of this anonymous person’s life, which she interweaves with places, instances, and emotions from her own—”fiction as an extension of autobiography,” as she calls it in the brief afterword. The book concentrates primarily on thus charting her relationship with her father, but the “perfect day” she imagines for Kahn also contains a particularly moving, indirect declaration of love that simultaneously becomes redemptive of the old fireman’s flawed life and indicative of hers with Guy Marc.

Souvenir is a compelling work even when read without full cognizance of this metalepsis, but it is still a rather distancing conceit with which to engage personal matters. One understands why Goblet moved on to the more risky, and ultimately more difficult, direct form of representation in Faire semblant. Yet, as the title indicates and as the symbology already discussed should make clear, displacement is also central to this book.

The most emotionally fraught scene describes a traumatic instance of abuse inflicted upon the young Dominique by her mother, against which her father failed to intervene. Characteristically, Goblet seeks not to condemn but understand, describing the exasperating childish antics of her young self mostly from the point of view of the mother, making the latter’s momentary loss of control all the more understandable. Only when their full ramifications become apparent do we switch unequivocally to the child herself in a shocking full-page exclamation.

Concurrently with, and extenuatingly of this, we’ve been watching the father watching Formula 1 on TV, drinking beer. It’s the fateful 1973 Dutch Grand Prix, in which the gifted young English driver Roger Williamson perished in a violent crash. This juxtaposition is a fiction, devised by Goblet symbolically to represent her father’s crucial moment of neglect—a moment of which he had no recollection, as we learn from the conversation between Dominique and himself in the book’s diegetic present.

The heartbreaking spectacle of watching Williamson’s colleague David Purley attempt to extract him from the flames, drawn from video stills, becomes a potent placeholder for the author’s inability to address exhaustively this key episode of her childhood. Unfortunately she almost (but only almost) ruins it by ironically having the inebriated father loudly proclaim how he—the professional fireman—would have been able to save Williamson’s life had he been present, oblivious of the familial conflagration that mother and child are still reeling from. It is a didactic explication of an otherwise perfectly pitched, powerfully moving sequence of empathetic exegesis.

But then, Goblet’s strategy of pretense in the service of truth is a fraught one, and whether the individuals implicated—especially the father and the relatively vaguely defined mother—would recognize fully the events as depicted is of course questionable. But it is a noble, involved, and beautifully realized attempt at illuminating the vagaries and ultimately inexplicable realities of the relationships that shape and define our lives.

Published simultaneously at The Hooded Utilitarian. 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, Chester Brown’s Louis Riel, Gary Panter’s Jimbo in Purgatory. For Danish readers, I wrote briefly about Goblet and her daughter Nikita’s latest book, Chronographie here.