In these endnotes, Brown acknowledges his narrative licentiousness, his deliberate alterations, omissions, and biases. Only when we read Chester Brown’s endnotes, minutely handwritten pages of burnt midnight oil, do we perceive the whole ball of wax, how the scantiness of cartoon narrative forces the author’s oversimplifications. In the sixth issue of Louis Riel, Sir John presents a booze-inspired plot to George Stephen, president of the CP Railway: to orchestrate a Métis rebellion in order to win parliamentary support for the railway’s completion. Drawn and Quarterly is now reprinting the entire ten issue series in one volume. Although Brown is clearly engaged in his subject, it is this supreme narrative challenge, a mammoth task completed over four years, which earns the most respect. Nevertheless, Chester Brown proves a stalwart author, ploughing us through a coherent pictorial narrative with only occasional ellipses.

It is a stony expanse of minor characters overrun by spindly poplars with stubborn pedantic roots. Like the Canadian prairies, history is a fertile but less than ideal terrain, not an obvious place for a cartoonist to stake his claim. Macdonald in Louis Riel, the comic book series on the life of the French Canadian martyr, leader of the Red River and Northwest Rebellions. Drawn & Quarterly $36.95 cloth 260pp 1-89 “He shall hang though every dog in Quebec bark in his favour,” says an eggplant- nosed John A.

Louis riel comic book