Getting Riel with Chester Brown

When I visited him in 2003, he was living in a posh, modern mid-rise, its lobby ablaze in polished surfaces that gleamed like gold teeth. A waxed baby grand languished near the concierge’s desk. His apartment on the 10th floor seemed an affront to the cool gloss below: homey, dishevelled, hot as an incubator. And books, everywhere, sprouting like mushrooms in a greenhouse, pullulating on shelves, in shoots that teetered at navel height like cubist stalagmites.

Elfin and inward, Chester Brown at home could almost have been mistaken for part of the ephemera, though a reader of the Toronto cartoonist’s work would have spotted him instantly from the precise self-portraits in his comics: the aquiline bone structure; the large head that, like a satellite, seemed to orbit its willowy body; the long hands, one of which laced mine in its slender fingers and faintly mimiced a handshake, giving my wrist a gentle nudge as though it were setting a bowl of hot soup on a table. I foraged for a seat amid the chattel, and navigated a landing on the ottoman of a lemony 19th-century fauteuil, a family heirloom. “The person who owned that chair was living out West at the time of the Riel rebellion,” Brown was saying. “It would have been in the same air as Louis Riel.”

It’s Riel I had come to discuss, the Métis hero/pariah of my gradeschool Canadian Studies course and the subject of Brown’s then-recently compiled comic-book biography, Louis Riel. Except Brown, folded in a straight-backed chair, seemed in no mood to gab. He was spent. Or wary. He kneaded at his sock and stared at me blankly. He’d just returned from the western limb of his Riel promo tour, and in two days was leaving for Montreal, stopping back in Toronto that November. He was hoping the new shipment of books (published by Drawn & Quarterly, $36.95) would arrive from Hong Kong in time — they’d been in vexingly short supply, flying off vending tables like goats in a tornado. And now he was facing a journalist, another in a nosy procession that had been coursing to his door, firing intimate questions and vivisecting the new book, his first since the richly poetic I Never Liked You — a graphic novel on his troubled youth in Châteauguay, Quebec.

His last project, the experimental series Underwater, he had drowned abruptly when the improvised main story outgrew its tank. In response, he had planned Riel with minute precision: the book demanded five years’ labour for its 272 pages; dozens of books to scour, facts to annotate, panels to draw. “There were a couple of times when I felt I might be in over my head,” Brown reluctantly admitted. His voice was a reedy hush, like a jet of water issuing from a punctured pipe. “Not wanting to fail again at something.”

His protagonist was one of the most divisive figures in Canadian history, the mercurial leader of an armed rebellion against English government forces in Manitoba, hanged for treason in 1885, who still looms over the political landscape. “What happened to Riel severely weakened the Conservative party and lead to the dominance of the Liberal party today,” Brown argued. He was taking his time, weighing his words and squeezing them out in measured drops. “It’s not as personal as some of my autobiographical work, or even Ed the Happy Clown,” he said, alluding to a tale he serialized in his early-’90s comic Yummy Fur about a hapless clown who, in a Kafkaesque twist, wakes one morning to find Ronald Reagan’s head grafted to the tip of his penis. “I admired [Riel’s] heroic qualities, his desire to live what he thought was a good and honourable life and do the best he could for his people.”

Riel was originally published in 10 issues, from June ‘99 to February ‘03. The book was split into four chapters, each page evenly divided in a six-panel grid. Characters, like a mango-nosed John A. Macdonald, often moved silently through panels, with only glancing narration — and a lengthy appendix of footnotes — guiding the action. “With Riel, I wanted to show what the medium is capable of. It seems that most people who use [comics] to tell a historical story are very narration-heavy. They use narration blocks in every panel. And there’s not a lot of panel-to-panel continuity. That’s not the best way to use the medium.”

As every other journalist had scooped out of him, Brown admitted to the powerful influence of Harold Gray (Little Orphan Annie) on his work, Riel in particular: his spartan line, uniform panels, spacious composition. “It’s his dramatic restraint,” Brown explained. “Those blank eyes.” Pause. “I like the lack of emotional expression there. I’m a big believer in emotional restraint.”

Tags: Canada , Chester Brown , Harold Gray , history , interviews , Louis Riel , Manitoba , Metis , Native Americans , Nineteenth Century