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If the word “comics” only brings to mind images of obnoxious cats and posturing superheroes; if your only conception of a comic book artist involves a propeller beanie and an ill-fitting Spider-Man T-shirt, then prepare yourself for a big surprise.
Two surprises, actually. Not only are comic books finally being acknowledged as a legitimate means of artistic expression, but our city is home to a remarkable number of the people who create them. Dozens of cartoonists, writers, and publishers live in Montreal and environs. Some of them draw gritty superhero adventures for US giants like DC and Marvel Comics. Some create serious stories for little reward; stories about life and love, sex and death, death and taxes, --you know, that literary stuff-- for alternative publishers like Montreal’s own Drawn & Quarterly Publications. Some even self-publish intensely personal, iconoclastic work on photocopy machines in print-runs of less than a hundred.
This community is an illustration painted on a broad canvas, in a huge variety of styles. English and French, commercial and alternative, photo-realistic and cartoony, escapist fun and serious literature, all overlap in a joyous, four-color melange with no discernible pattern. The only thing many of these people share is their medium, the common language of sequential stories told in panels, of dialogue balloons and caption boxes. The pure joy of comics, in Montreal, in the Spring of 1995.
US born Geof Isherwood, is a comic book veteran of the classic superhero school. A devoted fan of Marvel Comics, in 1982 Isherwood first fulfilled a lifelong ambition when he illustrated a twelve page horror story for one of the publisher’s minor anthology comics. Since then, after facing down a few obstacles along the way, Isherwood has gone on to greater heights within the hero comics pantheon. He has illustrated the adventures of such classic characters as Conan, Doctor Strange, and the Sub-Mariner for Marvel, as well as the now-defunct Suicide Squad series for rival DC Comics. He is currently working with British-born comic book great Barry Windsor-Smith on a new, creator-owned line of comics which will likely hit comicshop shelves some time next year.
Isherwood’s art isn’t restricted only to comics, however. His wife is Sonja Skarstedt, a well-known Montreal poet, and publisher of poetry imprint Empyreal Press. Though less involved with Skarstedt’s press than he was in its early days, Isherwood has nevertheless illustrated several of Empyreal’s books of poetry and literary criticism, most notably Ken Norris’ A New World. Norris, also a lifelong comics fan, asked Isherwood to create a pseudo-superheroic cover in the Marvel style for his collection of essays on poetry and poetics. With tongue firmly planted in cheek, Isherwood called the resulting illustration “Doctor Metaphor’s Dream.”
Isherwood enjoys his dual life in the comics and local literary scenes. “There’s a different type of creative thought involved,” he says. “Though I take both very seriously, understanding the literary history of Montreal has a more personalized meaning than Batman #46, or something like that.”
Isherwood is convinced that popular culture figures like the Marvel superheroes he draws have a far greater impact on children than so-called “real” literature ever could. And he counters those who decry superhero comics as a bad influence on children by citing his own example as a child growing up in North Virginia. “When I would read about Captain America and his infallible sense of justice --and the fact that he would never under any circumstance do the wrong thing-- I took that to heart. That influenced me. “There are some very positive aspects about these heroic characters.”
At the extreme opposite end of the spectrum is alternative cartoonist and publisher Gavin Innes. Dressed in a bright blue rave wig which made him resemble nothing so much as a Dr. Seuss character, McInnes was a blur of activity at the recent successful alternative comics launch held recently at bar la Péaule, on rue St-Denis. Outspoken and hilariously funny in person as well as on paper, McInnes publishes the alternative mini-comic anthology Pervert and also serves as assistant editor of the irregular arts tabloid The Voice.
“The beauty of comics,” says McInnes, shouting over the noise of Tuesday afternoon traffic on rue St-Denis, “is that you can draw funny pictures, you can be funny and tell stories, you can be a megalomaniac, and you can still have a little social commentary there.
“Comics are a lot like mescaline, where you get the best of coke, the best of speed, the best of pot.” he continues, tongue firmly planted in cheek. “It’s the same with comics. You’ve got the best of being in a band, the best of doing art. It’s six drawing a page as opposed to pissing around with two or three paintings a year.”
“It’s for workaholics, really.”
Somewhere between Geof Isherwood and Scott McInnes --or, more appropriately, in a unique space all his own-- lies Bernie Mireault, a ten year veteran of the independent comics scene. Mireault is the creator of several alternative comics features, including his first, Mackenzie Queen, a funky, Canadian, post-modern riff on the Doctor Strange sorceror-in-the-modern-world tune. His second creation, first published in 1985 and still going strong ten years and five publishers, is The Jam. Subtitled “Urban Adventure,” The Jam originated as Mireault’s personal take on the gritty old vigilante superhero theme. From the start, however, Mireault’s take on the genre had a subtle and goofy, yet still hard-boiled edge which undercut some of the traditional superhero silliness. Eventually, Mireault’s own boundless creativity completely overtook the source material and pushed The Jam in other directions.
When asked to explain the Jam’s relative independent press longevity, Mireault answers in his usual no-nonsense style “My willingness to do this for no money,” he says, flatly.
That willingness springs from deep roots, however. “When I first started reading comics I was eighteen. Most people are much younger,” he explains. “I started picking up comics to read to pass the time while commuting every day. And I noticed how bad they were. Uniformly awful. “I liked the form, but I thought there was a huge quality void.”
Though huge success eludes still Mireault --or perhaps he eludes it-- The Jam remains a favorite among other comic book professionals and has garnered a small but fiercely loyal cult following. The series always manages to survive cancellation at one publisher to be reborn anew at another. Currently being published by Detroit’s Caliber Press --after stints with Matrix Comics, Comico, Slave Labor Graphics, Tundra Press, and Dark Horse Comics-- Mireault’s work continues to evolve into something honest, fresh and quite different from both the tired commercial mainstream and the often self-indulgent alternative press. “Aside from being a father, comics are the only thing that have resonated with me,” Mireault says. “The only thing that has given my life meaning.”
Eric Theriault is the only cartoonist in Montreal who can claim to have worked three sides of the language divide: French, English, and Serbian, of all things. Self-publisher of the alternative mini-comic Veena since 1991, Theriault has also been published in Patagonesia, a Yugoslav comic magazine unavailable in Canada due to the United Nations blockade of Slobodan Milosevic’s ultra-nationalist government.
Theriault’s Serbian connection began with the publication of one of his short stories in a Toronto underground comic called The Comics Compendium 1991. Sasha Rakevic, a Belgrade cartoonist published in the same book -- and who shared a similar interest in dreams-- contacted Theriault by mail and offered to reprint his work in Yugoslavia. Rakevic is now working on a new comics anthology about dreams --to be published somewhere outside of the truncated Yugoslavia made up of Serbia and Montenegro-- and has invited Theriault to participate.
Theriault’s work has also appeared in Eric’s work has also been published in indepent comics in Dennis Eichorn’s Real Stuff published by Fantagraphics Books, and Buzzart from Cat-Head Comics, and ironically, he worked briefly as an inker on the short-lived 1992 revival of Canadian superhero Captain Canuck Most of his work, however, has appeared in his own self-published mini-comics. “I self-publisher because there are no publishers (in Quebec). There was a time where comic artists worked together in magazines they published as a group. But a kind of fatigue set in. I think people lost their taste for the administrative side of things or for struggling with their friends to get the magazine together.” But he keeps at it, he says, for very simple reason.
“It’s a drug.”
Jacques Boivin illustrates the highly regarded --and lightly inhibited-- Melody, the comic book autobiography of former nude dancer Sylvie Rancourt. Recently collected in book form as The Orgies of Abittibi by US publisher Kitchen Sink Press, Melody has long been garnering accolades for its realistic, raunchy, and sensitive portrayal of author Rancourt’s life.
These days, however, Boivin is often more interested in discussing the issue of censorship than the latest issue of his own comic book. A co-founder of the Sans Censure anti-censorship group, Boivin has been active in combatting Canada Customs’ random and often arbitrary habit of seizing books and magazines at the border. Comic books tend to be disproportinately represented in items seized, Boivin points out.
Boivin’s struggle with censor does not end at the border, however, and he doesn’t lay all the blame for censorship entirely at the government’s door. Today’s comics, for example, are the historical product of the corporate and social censorship the medium endured during the 1950’s. Blamed in those pre-TV days for everything from juvenile delinquincy to illiteracy to eye-strain, the Canadian government slapped stringent legal control on what could be portrayed in comic books, though the law in question was never actually invoked. To avoid similar regulation at home, the US industry established a self-censorship office called the Comics Code Authority, and entire categories of comic books simply disappeared from the spinner rack. This censorship dealt the comics medium a blow from which it has never fully recovered, Boivin claims. “By 1954 superheroes had become a minor genre in a huge field dominated by everything from horror to romance,” he explains. “But once comics were ‘cleaned up’ and rendered innocuous, the superhero became again the only genre that could be explored.
“You could no longer show gore, for example, but nothing stopped you from using sound effects. This gives a whole new meaning to Zap! Pow! and Biff!”
Chris Oliveros is less concerned with censorship than he is with indifference. Co-publisher of Montreal’s Drawn & Quarterly Publications, currently Montreal’s only full-fledged English-language press, Oliveros worries that the general public’s preconceptions about comics hinder the art form’s growth.
“If you tell most people that comics exist outside the usual superhero and newspaper strip genres, they usually don’t believe you,” Oliveros claims. “Or if they believe you, they don’t believe they can be very good. I mean, how can they be good? They’re comics!”
“Most of the comics the general public comes into contact with are pretty lamentable,” Oliveros allows. “But this shouldn’t be held against the medium itself. Comics, after all, are a marriage of art and words. They should have no limitations! Why should they be relegated to a goofy pasttime?”
Oliveros should know the answer. From day one he and Drawn & Quarterly co-publisher Marina Lesenko have been forced to contend with the irrational biases and preconceptions that burdern the comics artform. Even within the comics milieu, Drawn & Quarterly’s publications face an uphill battle. Most comic book specialty stores, including the 70-plus outlets in the Montreal area, tend to focus on the safe, known quantity of commercial comics from mainstream publishers.
Drawn & Quarterly isn’t safe and it isn’t mainstream. Oliveros and Lesenko publish comics on the literary cutting edge of the medium. Emphasizing an autobiographical style, Drawn & Quarterly’s line includes intensely personal comic books like Julie Doucet’s Dirty Plotte (see below), Seth’s Palookaville, and Chester Brown’s Underwater. These comics are not about grand mythological themes, they’re about survival and love and art; menstruation and masturbation and all the other picayune details of everyday life. Still run from Oliveros and Lesenko’s apartment over a kosher butcher shop in the Mile-End district, Drawn & Quarterly is easily Montreal’s most successful English-language publisher of comics. Still in business after five years, still profitable enough to allow its principals and its creators to survive, it has joined the ranks of such publishers as Seattle’s Fantagraphics Books as one of the primary publisher of alternative comics in North America.
An early self-publisher, Montreal cartoonist Julie Doucet realized that if she wanted to get her work circulated outside the fanzine and mini-comics world she would have to pursue the English-language market. A series of English mini-comics followed, which brought her to the attention of legendary underground artist Robert Crumb.
It was publication in Crumb’s Weirdo magazine which gave soft-spoken Doucet the beginnings of a mass-following, if you can call anything in the alternative press “mass.” Dirty Plotte, her regular English-language comic from Drawn & Quarterly, has since made her into something of a cult figure.
"Working with Chris Oliveros is nice. He never tells me not to do things. He never censors me. I'm free. I'm really free."
Surprisingly reticent in person, Doucet's comic art is usually controversial and quite fearless. She confronts difficult issues like sex, violence, menstruation and male/female issues head on in a dramatic way that is completely belied by her real persona.
"I really don't do it on purpose," she explains, almost apologetically. "I just do what comes naturally."
Gabriel Morrissette couldn’t even read English when he got hooked on superhero comics as a teenager in his Abittibbi hometown of Malartic, population 3,000. Beginning with the iconoclastically translated French editions of Fantastic Four then published by Longueiul’s Editions Héritage, Morrissette eventually went on to learn sufficient English to read the Marvel Comics originals, and then went on to work for Marvel Comics itself.
An amazingly prolific artist who began his career about ten years ago in the black and white independent press, in recent years Morrissette has worked on such classic characters as Doc Savage and Spider-Man (albeit in the futuristic Spider-Man 2099 version), as well as on alternative projects like Rancourt and Boivin’s Melody. Morrissette, who has also worked for such Québecois humour magazines as Croc and Safarir --for whom he illustrates the biting superhero satire Séveudireman-- now expresses a certain degree of cynicism about how important comics actually are in the global scheme of things.
“Comics have a social impact to some degree, but it’s less than some people like to think,” he says. “Superman and Batman have become cultural archetypes, but I don’t think people give a damn about Swamp Thing. I don't think comics are a mass-medium powerful enough to have a cultural impact like television and movies.”
Morrissette is also less than sanguine about the current state of the American comics market, which has recent gone through a difficult period of rationalization and adjustment.
“Comics have always been very cyclical, and right now we’re in a very safe, very commercial part of the cycle,” he says. “Nobody is experimenting. Everybody is scared, none of the publishers know what ‘works’ anymore.”
“It’s very possible that the illustrated storytelling medium will have to change from being based on paper to an electronic, computer-based medium.”
Pierre Fournier laughs when asked how he became the emminence grise of Quebec’s francophone comics scene.
“I’m just a stubborn old bastard,” he says. “I’ve been doing this for almost 25 years now. It’s my medum.” Fournier entered Montreal’s burgeoning bandes dessinees scene in 1973, with the publication of his nationalist superhero parody Capitaine Kébek. Le Capitaine --not to be confused with Montreal comicshop chain Capitaine Québec-- vaulted his creator into public prominence and a degree of success few Québecois comic artists can ever hope to attain.
Many years later, with fellow comics-great Réal Godbout, Fournier co-created Michel Risque and Red Ketchup, two of the most enduring comics characters to ever emerge from Quebec. Michel Risque began in Croc magazine as a parody of French pulp-hero Bob Moran.
Psychotic FBI agent Red Ketchup is indestructible in more than just a literary sense. First appeared as a supporting character in the Michel Risque strip, Ketchup was supposed to die at the end of the serial, but he was so overwhelmingly popular with readers that he eventually supplanted the title character and took over his strip.
“In the history of comics and popular culture things like that happen,” Fournier explains. “Popeye was originally a minor character introduced into the Thimble Theatre comic strip. It’s nice when people react to your work that way.”
There are currently three hardcover Red Ketchup albums in print in Quebec and Europe, with four more complete and ready to print. In the most recent serial to appear in Croc magazine, “Red Ketchup en enfer,” the drug-crazed, super-patriotic agent is tossed out of hell because he’s too tough and mean.
Ironically, Fournier’s current work is at the opposite end of the spectrum, and a startling reminder of how different the cultural taboos remain in French and English culture. He is illustrating a comics album featuring characters from the hit children’s TV show Bibi et Genevieve which airs on le Canal Famille and TQS. Bibi veut tout savoir sur le SIDA is an attempt by the show’s creator, Paul Cadieux to warn children early about the realities, and the dangers, of AIDS.
“I like this commission because I enjoy doing books for young kids,” says Fournier. “The extra kick is that it’s dealing with such a serious issue. This is for real. I like that a lot.”
“This book wouldn’t fly in the States at all,” he cautions. “At one point Bibi points out that you can’t make babies with a condom on, and Genevieve explains that people don’t always make love to make babies. Sometimes it’s for fun!”
Denis Rodier has had more than his fair share of comic books rolling off the presses in recent years. A comic book illustrator who works largely as an inker --an artist who applies black ink lines to another artist’s pencil illustrations-- Rodier has been working on DC Comics’ flagship Action Comics title for over five years. Action is the pivotal comic in the superhero genre, because it was in Action #1, published in 1938, that Jerry Siegel and Toronto-born Joe Shuster debuted their new character Superman. Comics, and pop culture in general, would never be the same.
Action has been published continuously since 1938, making it the longest-running comic book still in existence. In 1992 Action's sales, and those of the other four books in DC’s Superman line, were pumped up to enormous levels by the hyped “Death of Superman” phenomenon. Rodier's royalties multiplied geometrically virtually overnight, to the point where he was able to purchase his own home in the Laurentians.
Contrary to popular belief, Rodier claims that the whole Death of Superman hoopla was more of an accident than a cynical, planned marketing ploy. DC's original plan for the Man of Steel in 1992 involved wedding bells, not a funeral dirge. ABC Television, however, asked DC to hold off on the storyline to avoid a conflict with the launch of the Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. Suddenly, just in time for their annual strategy-planning "Super Summit," Rodier and his super colleagues found themselves derailed from a major plotline they had been building towards for almost two years.
"We were kind of ticked off," Rodier admits, "because many of us had been hanging in for the big wedding scene. Gags started flying back and forth and suddenly someone said 'Hey! Why don't we kill him?
"The rest is history."
Messina estimates that Quebecor Printing’s Montreal division, formerly BCE-controlled Ronald’s Printing, accounts for well over 80% of all comic books printed in North America. Messina may be one of a handful of people in North America who knows precisely how big that market is. Quebecor has undertaken studies of the market and probably understands it far better than many of the publishers in the business. Again, for competitive reasons, he is reluctant to make those studies public.
“Comics are a significant part, a very significant part, of everything we do at our RDP facility,” he says, refering to the company’s massive east end printing plant.
Messina, known jokingly to some of his colleagues as “the Godfather of Comics,” has aggressively pursued the busines of comics giants like DC, Marvel, Image, and Dark Horse, particularly as Quebecor’s main industry rival, Illinois-based Spartan Printing, has slipped further and further behind in the high-technology sweepstakes. Quebecor pioneered the use of quality papers and high-speed rotary offset presses in an industry which, until quite recently, produced most of its output on obsolete letterpresses dating back to the Second World War.
“We brought comics into the 20th century,” claims Messina.“It’s a product that fits high-technology printing well, as we try to translate what the artist does and reproduce it with ink smeared on paper.”
Now that Quebecor has virtually sown up the business of most of the major publishing houses -- only industry leader Marvel Comics prefers to spread some of its printing work to other plants-- Messina is eyeing the lucrative European hardcover comics trade and, surprisingly, is aggressively going after the business of smaller alternative publishers who normally print their work in black and white. The firm now prints comics in runs as small as five thousand copies for over fifty independent and self-publishers in Canada and the US, including Montreal’s iconoclastic Drawn & Quarterly Press.
“If you service an industry, you service it entirely,” says Messina. “Everybody starts at some point, and most people in comics start in black and white because it’s a cheaper form of publishing.
“Some of these black and white artists are incredibly talented, and if they go on to color, we hope they go on with us.”