Louis

AUTHOR: Chalmers, John

ARTIST: Sandra Marrs (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Metaphrog

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2000-2010

Publication History

Beginning in the mid-1990’s, Sandra Marrs and John Chalmers, working under the pseudonym “Metaphrog,” self-published the serial Strange Weather Lately. It took an enormous amount of effort for the two to self-publish and promote the bimonthly series, so when Strange Weather was completed, the duo decided against serializing their next work and focused instead on producing a book-length comic. Marrs had an early concept of creating a story about a character trapped inside a cell. This idea eventually morphed into Louis and his strange, closely monitored world.

Metaphrog soon leveraged their early experience in the comics industry and published Louis: Red Letter Day in 2000. Glasgow-based printer Clydeside Press handled the early volumes of the series, and the book was distributed with the support of local businesses and Diamond Comic Distributors. The first volume was highly acclaimed and received Eisner Award nominations for Best Graphic Album—New and Best Title for a Younger Audience. Their early success encouraged them to continue the series and, in 2001 and 2002, they released Lying to Clive and The Clown’s Last Words. The third volume of Louis became the first graphic novel to ever receive funding from the Scottish Arts Council.

In 2004, as Metaphrog prepared to release the fourth volume of the series, Dreams Never Die, the husband-and-wife team collaborated with musicians Hey and múm to create a soundtrack to accompany and complement their work. Marrs also created a short animated preview of the book, hand drawing the frames individually with a tablet computer in a process that took months to create just two minutes of animation. While Metaphrog continue to self-publish all their work, Dreams Never Die was published in association with the label Fat Cat Records. By this time, Louis’s popularity had outgrown Clydeside Press, and Metaphrog began using other printers; nevertheless, a small portion of Louis books continues to be printed in Glasgow. In 2010, Metaphrog released the series’ fifth installment, Night Salad, which was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Coloring. In 2011, the duo released a completely redrawn version of Red Letter Day, which had been out of print for some time.

Plot

Following the end of Strange Weather Lately, Marrs and Chalmers decided to produce a story that was lighter and more accessible than the photorealistic, black-and-white serial. Their intention was to create a story with the apparent simplicity of a children’s book but without a clear, simple structure or a resolute, happy ending. The series opens in Louis’s strange neighborhood of identical houses, separated by tall fences. Louis is completely isolated within his home, with his mechanical bird Formulaic Companion, or FC, as his only real contact. Louis spends his days manufacturing fruit for a living. His neighbors, the Quidnuncs, have been screening Louis’s mail, intercepting Louis’s letters to his aunt, and posing as Louis’s aunt in that correspondence. It is never clear who is in charge of Louis’s town, Hamlet, but its citizens are all closely monitored; one day, Louis is inexplicably removed from his home and sent to a penal colony. At the prison, known as the Bee Farm, he befriends a bee named Clive. Everyone is subjected to the strange hierarchy at the farm, and the “bees with disease” suffer the most, separated at some distance from everyone else. Eventually, Louis is released and allowed to return home.

After Louis returns from the farm, everyone in Hamlet receives an invitation to a mandatory Fun Day Out, which requires everyone to enter a competition to design a game. Louis is forced to attend weekly sessions at the Cheeseman Information Agency, where he is tortured with various cheeses and questioned about his relationship with the mysterious “underground.” Back at Louis’s home, the Quidnuncs continue to intercept Louis’s letters to his aunt and appear to steal several of his design ideas. The Quidnuncs then prevent Louis from attending the Fun Day Out festivities by instead directing him toward a dangerous mine, where Louis falls into a deep hole. At the bottom of the hole, Louis finds the bodies of several dead clowns. He discovers a note from one of the clowns describing her feelings of being disconnected with her audience since the advent of the “image boxes.” Louis is then rescued by a girl with colored hair, and she tells him that someone is planning to blow up the rollercoaster at the fair with the first-prize winners on it. At the “unfair,” the Quidnuncs are accepting first prize after submitting Louis’s game when Louis and the girl ride in on a giant rubber spider to disperse the crowd before the bomb explodes.

Louis continues to worry about his Aunt Alison. The Quidnuncs have been sending Louis letters posing as his aunt, pretending she is ill. Louis has not received a letter in a long time and is beginning to worry. When the mechanical surveillance system, “The Monitor,” breaks down in front of Louis’s home, he takes the opportunity to run out into the streets in a desperate attempt to find his aunt. Guards with pointed white hoods respond quickly to the scene, and they begin looking for Louis with robotic dogs and flies. Just when Louis begins to feel desperately lost and confused, the girl appears and leads him through an underground system of tunnels to his aunt’s neighborhood. When Louis finds Aunt Alison’s house, it appears to have been abandoned for some time. The camouflaged, hooded guards sneak up on Louis and spray him with chemicals to disorient him. Before Louis is captured by a band of guards led by an Adolf Hitler look-alike, he is rescued by the people of the underground.

Louis returns home to his work, but trips while handling toxic chemicals, accidentally poisoning FC. The bird becomes mute and dangerously ill, and Louis is consumed by guilt and anxiety. Louis tries to find relief in books or in his imagination, but he becomes increasingly sick. He reaches out to Aunt Alison, and the Quidnuncs respond that the only cure is from the mythological fruit of the raining tree. The letter warns Louis that he has only a few days to save his friend, sending Louis into a frenzy. He runs from the house, desperate to do something to help FC, but he has become so ill that he collapses in the front yard.

Louis drifts into a dream in which he teams with a guide to find the raining tree. Even in the dream, the Quidnuncs are never far behind, constantly tracking Louis. Louis and his guide become great friends, but, then, a pair of pink clouds begins circling them. The clouds surround Louis’s friend and dissolve him, rendering him a pile of dust. As Louis grieves, he notices a new star forming, and the star leads him to the raining tree.

The dream begins to dissolve as Louis hears FC singing; Louis slowly comes to consciousness. The girl with purple hair and a woman find Louis facedown in his front yard, and they restore him and FC to health. As Louis is recovering, the girl teaches him about seed germination; he is skeptical, however, and when he gets well, he returns to the “normal” way of manufacturing fruit. However, he does have the chemical vats removed from his yard, and begins to prefer fruit grown from seeds to the heavily advertised and ubiquitous Mort™ cereal. Through quiet rebellions like these and in his imagination, Louis is able to temporarily escape the oppressive environment of Hamlet.

Volumes

•Louis:Red Letter Day (2000). Features Louis’s early adventures in Hamlet and the schemes of the Quidnuncs against him. Explains some of the strange elements of Louis’s world.

•Louis:Lying to Clive (2001). Tells the story of Louis’s imprisonment in Bee Hall and the oppressive conformity there. Introduces the character Clive and Louis’s developing friendship with him.

•Louis:The Clown’s Last Words (2002). Features the story of the Fun Day Out scheme and Louis’s creative process in designing his game. The Quidnuncs attempt to ruin Louis’s fun day but do not succeed.

•Louis:Dreams Never Die (2004). Tells the story of Louis’s attempt to sneak past the Monitor in order to find Aunt Alison. Includes a CD with an accompanying soundtrack created by musicians múm and Hey.

•Louis:Night Salad (2010). Features the story of a terrible accident, FC’s deadly sickness, and Louis’s terrifying vision quest to save his friend.

Characters

•Louis, the protagonist is a small rounded character with babyish features and a red jumpsuit printed with the number 3120. He is extremely imaginative and longs for a deeper connection with the few people in his life. Through his dreams, imagination, and friendship with FC, he is able to create some happiness in his isolated world.

•Formulaic Companion is Louis’s mechanical pet bird, who lives in a ringed yellow cage. FC appears to be made of blue metal, with wings and long legs. FC loves Louis and singing but has difficulty understanding Louis.

•Jerk Quidnunc, the antagonist, is Louis’s neighbor and has orange hair and a moustache. He wears glasses and a white shirt with a blue bow tie. He has a sick and strange sense of humor and enjoys spying on Louis and causing him pain.

•Clean Quidnunc, the antagonist, is Louis’s neighbor and a relative of Jerk. Clean is bald and wears a white shirt. He seems to be obsessed with money and status, and shares Jerk’s lowbrow, slapstick sense of humor.

•Aunt Alison is ostensibly Louis’s aunt, though it is unclear whether she is an actual person or if she has been invented entirely by the Quidnuncs to tease Louis. Louis receives regular letters from her, which have actually been written by the Quidnuncs.

•The Postman, the antagonist, has a brown moustache and wears a blue postal uniform. It is unclear what the motives of the postman are and how closely involved he is with the power structure of Louis’s world. He collaborates with the Quidnuncs in screening Louis’s mail.

•Clive, the protagonist, is dressed in a hooded bee costume. He is Louis’s best friend at the bee farm, and he hopes to learn how to fly, practicing often.

•The Girl, the protagonist, is a young girl with long hair that is shaded a different color in each volume. This girl functions as the deus ex machina in the story, often saving Louis and FC at the last moment.

Artistic Style

All five volumes of the Louis series have been illustrated by Marrs. While the panels depicting Louis’s everyday life are often clear and straightforward, they are interspersed with and overtaken by Louis’s rich daydreams. Even with the series’ apparent artistic simplicity, Marrs complicates the story by slowly revealing new elements piece-by-piece, showing unfamiliar objects at strange angles, making it difficult for the reader to immediately grasp what is happening. In Louis’s dreams, simple objects in his world take on a rich symbolism as they move and morph in his imagination. The first three volumes feature hand-painted illustrations done in gouache. For the last two volumes, Marrs creates bolder, more vivid illustrations by switching to acrylic inks. The rich colors of the acrylics are better able to render the lush world of Louis’s imagination. In fact, the re-released edition of Red Letter Day has been completely redrawn in this style.

The series largely follows a nine-panel grid pattern, which matches the regulated and routine lifestyle of the people of Hamlet. Louis’s freewheeling imagination, however, is able to break from this structure and tumbles freely across the page, surrounding and incorporating his bleak reality into beautiful and unrestricted images. As the series progresses, Marrs and Chalmers increasingly deviate from the grid pattern, creating a more complex rhythm to the storytelling and accentuating the emotional impact of the story. When Louis begins feeling ill, the panels sway back and forth to underscore his nausea. After Louis’s friend and guide is vaporized by the clouds, Louis stands alone in a center panel surrounded by negative space, visually underscoring his loss, isolation, and lack of direction. Despite the clarity and simplicity of this style, the subtle changes to the color scheme, page layouts, and content of the images impart a larger meaning to the series and deepen its emotional impact.

Themes

One of the major themes of the Louis series is the difficulty of self-expression and communication in the modern world. As much as Louis loves FC, the two have a fundamental inability to communicate with each other, which often causes Louis to feel lonely. Even Louis’s intentions with his friend sometimes get lost in translation. Louis is often caught trying to find the right word or some way to truly express himself.

The Quidnuncs’s constant tampering with Louis’s mail also touches upon this theme of a modern disconnection in communication. Louis naïvely accepts their bogus correspondence as real, because he has had no real relationship with his aunt against which to gauge it. Conversely, the series also emphasizes the power and importance of words. Louis relies on his small collection of books to inspire him and distract him from his mundane routine. The characters in Louis’s dreams often speak in riddles, rhyme, or alliteration, and his guide in Night Salad asks him directly, “Do you like words?” before adding in understatement, “Very handy for putting things across.” Even Jerk Quidnunc cares deeply about words, poring over Louis’s letters to Aunt Alison and commenting, “A careful rereading. . . it’s amazing what words will reveal.”

The Quidnuncs’s long-running interest in spying on Louis speaks to the theme of voyeurism in the series. The basis of the Quidnuncs’s sense of humor is schadenfreude, and the two go to great lengths to witness the pain and suffering they cause Louis. More broadly, the residents of Hamlet are constantly monitored and each home is equipped with a Nineteen Eighty-Four-esque “entertainment center” (EC). The EC continuously plays “news” and advertisements and all of the town’s residents, excepting Louis, seem to watch it constantly.

The series also focuses on the impact of technology on modern life. The Clown’s Last Words, in particular, touches upon the gap created between performers and their audience by television. The images of the residents of Hamlet dozing in front of their blaring ECs comment on the passivity of many modern viewers. In this vein, the series also examines brand and advertising culture, and the pervasiveness of distracting and hollow ads. The main advertisements in Louis’s world seem to be for junk food, with names like “Mort™,” “Snak,” and “Shok.” Even Louis’s fruit manufacturing job, in which he adds chemicals to fruits to “discourage prolonged sniffing,” speaks to the modern phenomenon of highly processed foods. The volume Night Salad, in particular, cautions against the dangerous presence of so many chemical toxins in people’s food and homes.

Most important, the Louis series is about the power of the imagination to transcend daily life. The Clown’s Last Words features the profound influence of Louis’s dream world on his game design. In Night Salad, Louis’s visionary imagination allows him to process and cope with his grief. Louis is constantly enriching his daily routines with his daydreams, which is his most important defense mechanism against the strange and shallow world of Hamlet.

Impact

The Louis series represents the rare “all ages” genre by conveying a simple narrative but simultaneously imparting a deeper message. As the first graphic novel to be sponsored by the Scottish Arts Council, Louis represents the modern trend of wider acceptance of comics among a general audience. The initial success of the Louis series led Metaphrog to redraw and re-release the first Louis volume, Red Letter Day, in 2011. Louis, reminiscent of Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin but dealing with Kafkian themes, is a successful example of self-publication, a staple of the Modern Age of comics.

Further Reading

Hergé. The Adventures of Tintin (1929–1976).

Chalmers, John, and Sandra Marrs. Strange Weather Lately (1999).

Bibliography

Chalmers, John, and Sandra Marrs. “Lies, Letters, and the Strange Weather.” Interviewby Jennifer M. Contino. Sequential Tart. http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/nov01/metaphrog.shtml.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “The Metaphrog Interview.” Interview by Gavin Lees. The Comics Journal, September 28, 2011. http://www.tcj.com/the-metaphrog-interview.

Lees, Gavin. “Graphic Youth: Louis: Night Salad by Metaphrog.” Review of Louis: Night Salad, by John Chalmers and Sandra Marrs. The Comics Journal, February 21, 2011. http://classic.tcj.com/alternative/louis-night-salad-by-Metaphrog.

Wild, Abigail. “Punks of Publishing.” The Herald Scotland, September 18, 2004.