Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography

AUTHOR: Brown, Chester

ARTIST: Chester Brown (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Drawn and Quarterly

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1999-2003

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2003

Publication History

Chester Brown’s Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography was originally published in ten issues by the Canadian press Drawn and Quarterly between 1999 and 2003; it was collected into a single volume in 2003. Born and raised in Montreal, Canada, Brown was already an established figure in the world of alternative comics at the time, known for autobiographical works such as The Playboy (1992) and grimly comedic fiction such as Ed the Happy Clown (1989).

Louis Riel, a tightly illustrated and thoroughly researched work of nonfiction, represented a major departure for the author in terms of both content and artistic approach. Brown controlled every aspect of Louis Riel, researching, writing, illustrating, and even hand lettering the entire work. Despite the warnings of his publishers, Brown printed the original issues of Louis Riel on newsprint with matte, sepia-toned card stock covers in order to lower the price and give a “warmer” tone to the work. The format of the original issues was also slightly smaller than the average comic book, giving them a uniquely austere appearance.

Plot

Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography is about the life of the Canadian folk hero Louis Riel, who led rebellions against the Canadian government in 1869 and 1885. Instead of creating an exhaustive biography, Brown focuses only on the events surrounding the two uprisings and Riel’s subsequent capture and trial.

The story begins in 1869, as the Canadian prime minister John Macdonald takes control of the Red River settlement and begins to enforce new laws on the area’s population of Metis, the mixed-race descendants of French and aboriginal (mostly Cree or Ojibwe) parents. Unhappy that his people are no longer allowed to govern themselves as they had for centuries, the young Metis Riel organizes his people and forms a provisional government to resist Canadian annexation. Tensions mount between the French-speaking Metis and local English-speaking Canadians led by Doc Schultz, leading to a series of violent clashes that leave several dead. The political crisis is brought to a head when Riel sentences a fanatical pro-Canadian named Thomas Scott to death for the brutal murder of a Metis. Scott’s execution gives Prime Minister Macdonald the excuse he needs to send in the Canadian military, putting a bloody end to the uprising.

Knowing he will be lynched if captured by the Canadians, Riel goes into exile in the United States. Spending most of the next decade on the run, he is relentlessly pursued by Doc Schultz, who has offered a reward of five thousand dollars for Riel’s capture—dead or alive. The constant flight takes a mental toll on Riel, who begins to suffer delusions and eventually has a total breakdown, during which he receives a vision from God and is anointed as the prophet of the New World. Due to this breakdown, Riel is committed to an asylum.

The story resumes in 1881, as the Canadian government is again encroaching on the land of the Metis refugees of the Red River uprising, this time the western territory of Saskatchewan. Married and living in Montana, Riel is recruited by the Metis military leader Gabriel Dumont to lead the political resistance against the Canadian government. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Macdonald concocts a scheme to drum up political support for his unpopular trans-Canadian railroad by enflaming the conflict between the Canadians and the Metis, allowing him to send in troops using the newly built railway.

The plan works, and a full-scale war breaks out between Canada and the Metis. Although outnumbered and using primitive weapons, the Metis are able to repel the Canadian soldiers thanks to the effective guerrilla tactics of Dumont. Riel continues to show signs of mental instability during the conflict. Believing that he and the Metis are ordained by God, Riel prevents Dumont from engaging in the “Indian tactics” of ambush and sabotage, allowing the Canadians to wear down the Metis’s defenses. Left with only a few hundred men, Riel, Dumont, and the Metis make their last stand in the village of Batoche. Out of ammunition, betrayed by the village priest, and facing the advancing army, Dumont and the remaining Metis flee as Riel allows himself to be captured.

The last section of the book details Riel’s trial for treason, during which the court assesses his sanity. A series of experts and characters from previous episodes of the novel testify as to Riel’s state of mind, with some claiming he is insane and others claiming he is not. The trial ends with an impassioned speech by Riel, who declares that his cause is just regardless of his mental state. The jury returns a guilty verdict, and Riel is hanged.

Characters

•Louis Riel, the protagonist, is a French-speaking Metis who has recently returned to the Red River settlement after attending seminary school in Montreal for several years. He is intelligent, educated, and charismatic, making him a natural leader for his people, but he suffers from occasional bouts of madness and at times believes he is a divinely inspired prophet.

•John A. Macdonald is the prime minister of Canada during both of Riel’s uprisings and is the Metis’s greatest political antagonist. He does everything in his power to prevent the nonwhite, French-speaking Metis from gaining the right to govern themselves.

•Doc Schultz is an Anglo-Canadian settler who supports Macdonald’s annexation of the Red River settlement and leads an armed resistance against the Metis. He becomes Riel’s antagonist after being imprisoned during the uprising of 1869, and he spends the next decade pursuing Riel across the United States and Canada.

•Thomas Scott is a gaunt, intense Anglo-Canadian and a fanatical supporter of Doc Schultz. He is prone to intense rage, leading him to brutally murder a Metis man with an ax. After being captured by Riel’s forces, Scott continuously screams racist and profane threats against his Metis guards. His execution causes the intervention of the Canadian military in the uprising.

•Gabriel Dumont is a large, bearded Metis marksman and trapper from the western plains of Saskatchewan. A brilliant tactician and capable warrior, he acts as Riel’s general during the rebellion of 1885. He eventually loses confidence in Riel, who claims that God ordered him not to allow Dumont to use guerrilla tactics against the superior forces of the Canadian army.

Artistic Style

The overall aesthetic of Louis Riel is one of emptiness, silence, and distance. Brown’s black-and-white illustrations are clean and minimal, reducing everything on the page to its simplest visual form. Interior backgrounds are often reduced to solid expanses of black or white, while exteriors capture the cold spareness of the Canadian plains by rendering them as empty horizon lines sparsely punctuated by leafless trees.

Brown makes no attempt to capture his historical subjects realistically. Instead, his characters are rendered in simple line drawings and display cartoonish features such as outsized hands and large noses. Brown almost never depicts his characters in motion, choosing to present them instead in stiff, almost unnatural poses reminiscent of mannequins. The entire effect establishes an emotional distance between the reader and the characters, reminding the readers that they are reading an account of historical events pieced together from various historical sources and not a definitive representation of what actually happened.

Brown has noted that he based the visual aesthetic of Louis Riel on Harold Gray’s popular Little Orphan Annie comic strip (first published in 1924), citing the dramatic restraint of Gray’s compositional style and the emotional distance created by his representation of his characters, who have empty eyes that lack pupils or additional details. Although Annie did not appear until nearly forty years after Riel’s death, Brown’s use of Gray’s style gives Louis Riel the look of a period piece from the early days of comic-strip art.

The sense of authorial distance is reinforced by the composition of the panels. Brown presents his characters as very small relative to the size of the panels, as if readers are observing the action from a distance. This perspective is especially evident in Brown’s depictions of battles, during which the point of view shifts to high above the action, reducing the characters to the appearance of toy soldiers or symbols on a tactician’s map.

Brown uses the same grid layout, consisting of two columns and three rows of equally sized square panels, for each page of the novel. By forcing the story to conform to an unchanging layout on the page, Brown creates a sense of impartiality, making the reader view the events of the story from a fixed position. Only on the last page of the book, at the moment of Riel’s death, does Brown deviate from the regularity of the grid, leaving blank the lower right corner of the page.

Themes

Mental illness and parameters of reality are the overriding themes of Louis Riel. Brown explains in a footnote to the novel that he was interested in exploring the question of Riel’s sanity. Therefore, Brown chooses to present Riel not as the larger-than-life hero he has become, but as a man of great intellect and charisma plagued by questionable mental stability. Brown believes that Riel’s madness was not caused by mental illness and considers that interpretation to be culturally biased; rather, he argues that Riel’s mental state was shaped by a strict religious upbringing and the added pressures of political persecution. He suggests that Riel’s religious visions of liberation provided the religiously conservative and socially persecuted Metis with the morale needed to fight against Canadian oppression. The book’s exploration of madness as a social, rather than biological, outcome is a continuation of Brown’s previous autobiographical work “My Mom Was a Schizophrenic,” published in The Little Man (1998).

Because the other major theme of Louis Riel is the historical mistreatment of Canada’s indigenous peoples by the Canadian government, Brown suggests that the question of Riel’s mental stability should have no bearing on how one views the justice of his cause. Brown presents Macdonald and other Canadian politicians as greedy, dishonest, and utterly corrupted by corporate interests, drawing them with deformed features such as grotesquely large noses and sunken, skull-like faces. On the other hand, the Metis, to whom Brown gives strong, proportional features, are represented as simple men who want only to protect their lands and way of life. Even though he sympathizes with the Metis, Brown avoids presenting the group as “noble savages.” Instead, he shows them bickering, dealing with internal corruption and dissent, and even betraying one another. The representation of the Metis as regular people facing enormous obstacles is intended to make their struggle more comprehensible to nonindigenous readers.

Impact

Louis Riel is part of a larger wave of interest in the expansion of the graphic novel medium that followed the critical and commercial success of Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986). While previous nonfiction comics were largely artless affairs produced for schoolchildren, throughout the 1990’s and 2000’s, comics such as Joe Sacco’s Palestine (2001) and Safe Area Goražde (2000), Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (1993), and Brown’s adaptations of the Christian Gospels experimented with the medium as a method of delivering academic-level treatments of complex subject matter.

Brown claimed that he wanted Louis Riel to avoid what he saw as the aesthetic failure of many historical comics. Most of these comics, Brown observed, relied on text-heavy narration to present the story. Louis Riel features almost no narration, relying on sparse dialogue and the visual elements of the page to convey the story. For those readers interested in the details of the Riel story, Brown includes a twenty-seven-page appendix with relevant quotes from the historical texts on which Brown based his work, as well as an index. In his introduction to Louis Riel, Brown notes the anomaly of such academic features appearing in a graphic novel.

Further Reading

Aaron, Jason, and R. M. Guéra. Scalped (2007- )

Bogaert, Harmen Meyndertsz van den, and George O’Connor. Journey into Mohawk Country (2006).

Jacobson, Sid, and Ernie Colón. Che: A Graphic Biography (2009).

Bibliography

Brown, Chester. “Chester Brown.” Interview by Nicolas Verstappen. Du9, August, 2008. http://www.du9.org/Chester-Brown,1030.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Getting Riel with Chester Brown.” Interview by Guy Leshinski. The Cultural Gutter, January 5, 2006. http://www.theculturalgutter.com/comics/getting‗riel‗with‗chester‗brown.html.

Lesk, Andrew. “Redrawing Nationalism: Chester Brown’s Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 1, no. 1 (June, 2010): 63-81.

Siggins, Maggie. Louis Riel: A Life of Revolution. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1994.