![]() ![]() Brown won the Harvey Awards for best writing and best graphic novel for his compelling, meticulous, and dispassionate retelling of the charismatic, and perhaps insane, nineteenth-century Metis leaders life. Not overly intellectualized yet dense with detail, the book is a wonderful combination of factual resources and powerful art and storytelling. Chester Brown reinvents the comic book medium to create the critically acclaimed historical biography Louis Riel. Brown has created a consistent narrative for this 240-page comic-strip‚ along with 27 pages of endnotes that detail his artistic liberties with the facts, the myriad reference sources he employed, and, as he writes in the foreword, “other stuff that I think may be of interest.” Using Harold Gray’s beautiful design work from Little Orphan Annie as his inspiration, Brown’s black and white art is vibrant and striking – you feel the artist’s hand on the page. Riel is an honourable but flawed leader whose intentions to protect his community from a corrupt, alien government are distorted by his megalomania and religious fanaticism. His work has not only upped the high-water mark for fellow comics artists, but has served as a portal for the medium into mainstream culture.īrown’s sympathetic biography of Métis leader Louis Riel is no different. Louis Riel By Chester Brown Drawn & Quarterly, 2003. This is not hyperbole: each of his major works – Ed the Happy Clown, I Never Liked You, and The Playboy – have broken new artistic ground in their different ways. Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography is yet another landmark work by Chester Brown, an artist considered to be one of the greatest cartoonists living today. ![]()
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