Graphic novelist brings Alberta’s grim history to life in debut, Frank
Ben Rankel compares his debut graphic novel, Frank, to an episode of Law & Order.
It’s a bit of an underwhelming comparison.
Granted, not unlike NBC’s longrunning formulaic police procedural, there is a murder to unravel. More than one, actually. But it’s only one element of Frank (Renegade Arts Entertainment, $25), a twisty historical drama that uses one of Alberta’s most tragic natural disasters as a backdrop. That would be the 1903 Frank slide, which killed dozens of miners and townsfolk in what is now part of the Crowsnest Pass. Frank boasts an equally intriguing protagonist in Eve Lee, an obsessive and selfdestructive woman slowly drinking herself to death after having her heart broken. There are hints of racial and labour unrest and bigger themes of unrequited love, loss and regret bubbling beneath the story as well.
But despite all these layers, Rankel insists the novel mostly took its shape based largely on his desire to create something manageable on his first attempt.
“This will sound terrible, but I wanted to do something that I felt I could handle,” says the Calgary cartoonist. “I felt I was most familiar with, through the media I consume, dealing with the formula of a murder-mystery. In my mind, I could see the building blocks that were involved in doing an episode of Law & Order. I thought that was something I could get around my head enough to take a stab at since it was my first book.”
It takes only a few pages for the first murder to take place, when a black miner is brutally stabbed on his way home from a bar. We eventually meet Eve, a young woman prone to drinking herself into a stupor and waking up beside a puke bucket in the jail cell of black RCMP officer Gilbert Ware. Eve was supposed to start a new life in Frank, only to have her partner Oscar leave her and her plans collapse. When her former lover goes missing, she begins to suspect a conspiracy is afoot involving murder and coverups within the town’s coal-mining operation.
The landslide, one of Canada’s worst natural disasters, saw 110 million metric tonnes of limestone fall from the top of Turtle Mountain on Frank, decimating much of the town and killing an undermined number of miners and townspeople (more than 90 were killed, although an exact number has never been established since the bodies of most victims were not recovered.)
Rankel had been fascinated by the incident. Growing up in Calgary, family trips to visit his grandparents in British Columbia passed through Crowsnest Pass. Occasionally, his father would pull over and tell Rankel and his five siblings the story of the Frank Slide.
“He’d tell us there was a big landslide and kind of giving us that basic overview,” Rankel says. “Something really big had happened here and a lot of people had died. But that was it, so I spent a lot of time wondering what the actual details of the event were and having this larger-than-life thing happened in your own backyard. It was always there in the back of my mind about something interesting that had happened there.”
Rankel said he didn’t want to write about real people who lived there and experienced the tragedy, fearing that might be viewed as insensitive. So he used it as a backdrop for a fictional tale with fictional characters. He chose Ben Rankel will hold a book launch on Thursday, July 5 at Shelf Life Books at 7 p.m.
a woman protagonist, thinking that the story about being unable to give up the life she had planned was universal enough to give it to “somebody who doesn’t get the same representation.”
The same went for the non-white characters in the book, which include an Indigenous worker who has lost his language and family after being taken to a residential school.
“There’s a whole lot of AfricanAmerican settlers who came up from the U.S. — Kansas and Oklahoma — and settled in Alberta around the 1900s and earlier,” Rankel says. “There was a representation I didn’t see in some of the photos but then I would get hints of in other photos. There were a lot of other people there that weren’t shown in most of these European settler-centric images that were easier to find.”
Born in Edmonton, Rankel moved to Calgary with his family at the age of seven. He attended the Alberta College of Art and Design and has done work for Image Comics and Comixology. He wrote and drew the 10-page comic-book accompaniment to Calgary ’s electropop duo Sidney York’s album, <3s.
But for his first book, Rankel was determined to write an Alberta story.
“I have an interest in telling stories that are set here in Alberta,” he says. “Even more than just doing Canadiana, I’m interested in telling stories that are set here, in Calgary and Alberta, and strengthening the awareness of our own history in our province and by doing that, hopefully, helping figure out what our culture is here and how we define ourselves. I think the best way to do that is by telling our own stories.”