Comic book captures ‘quintessential Quebec’
MONTREAL— Over the last week in Quebec a comic has moved to the front pages of the province’s newspapers, spread through its televisions, started storming movie theatres and even wormed its way into a museum.
The feat worthy of Superman is rightly attributed to 53-year-old Montreal illustrator Michel Rabagliati, whose 2009 graphic novel, Paul à Québec, has been turned into a film of the same name. The opening of the movie this week has itself turned into a celebration of what the French refer to as the ninth art: the comic book.
Paul is Rabagliati’s semi-autobiographical protagonist, a character created 15 year ago that has worked its way into the Québécois imagination in the same sort of way that Tintin’s adventures around the world fascinated French-speaking Europeans for generations.
But instead of Tintin’s travels to Soviet Russia, Tibet, the moon or the Sahara desert, readers have followed Paul through the stages of his life, including his first job, first apartment, and a summer as a scout set against the turbulent backdrop of the War Measures Act, the imposition of martial law in 1970 in response to the kidnappings by the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ).
“He captures with his comics the quintessential Quebec,” says Peggy Burns of Montreal graphic novel publishing house Drawn & Quarterly. “Everyone has read his comics, from the person who reads all comics to the person who doesn’t read that many comics.”
The best known book in the series is Paul à Québec (published by Conundrum Press in English as The Song of Roland) and it is about to become even more widely known thanks to the highly anticipated film that celebrates the family of Rabagliati’s ex-wife and, in particular, his cancer-stricken father-in-law.
From the story’s opening on June 24, 1999, Quebec’s “national” holiday, Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, to its end in the church cemetery in the village of Saint-Nicolas, dramatically overlooking the St. Lawrence River, Rabagliati’s work also celebrates the province, its slang, its architecture and its streetscapes.
That, the cartoonist says, is one of the keys to his success not only in Quebec and the French-speaking world, but the book’s Spanish, Dutch, German, Italian and even Croatian translations.
“You can’t pretend to be international. You have to be local. It’s (Quebec playwright) Michel Tremblay who said that: The best way to have international success is to stay local,” he says in an interview.
“I’m from Montreal and I’m not someone who travels a lot, so my stories are rooted in Quebec and the language I use is also very Québécois. The narration is proper international French, but the dialogue is more Québécois and Montrealaise.”
That celebration of the quotidian may have something to do with the success of an illustrator who didn’t start until his late 30s when he gave up his job as a graphic designer after being struck by the works of Seth, the Guelph, Ont., graphic novelist behind Palookaville, and Toronto cartoonist Chester Brown ( The Playboy, The Little Man, Louis Riel).
Now it is Rabagliati’s success on display. The movie release is being accompanied by a companion book by illustrator Cyril Doisneau that gives a behind-the-scenes comic peek at the production of the film.
And in a highbrow honour for a genre once passed over as the domain of children and ne’er do wells, Quebec City’s Musée national des beaux-art is launching an exhibition of Rabagliati’s work next week to go along with the film’s opening at the local film festival.
All of the attention can only help to legitimize the medium and spread the message about the possibilities, Rabagliati says. “It’s not pow-pow violence. It’s totally adult, totally contemporary. It’s normal relations. There are no superheroes or superpowers or capes. It’s a normal guy: Mr. Everybody. The film could have been made without the comic book, but the fact that it was makes it more special,” Rabagliati says.
It’s also likely to ensure that everyone involved in the production of comics and graphic novels, particularly in Quebec, gets a commercial boost from the burst of publicity for Paul à Québec, said Burns.
She said there was a “pretty unusual” run on American cartoonist Phoebe Gloeckner’s 2002 Diary of a Teenage Girl when it was released as a film this summer. The same occurred when the Scott Pilgrim series by London, Ont., cartoonist Bryan Lee O’Malley was adapted for the big screen in 2010.
Burns had just emerged from a sales strategy meeting at which the attention being showered on Rabagliati was discussed. “We’re anticipating a lot of sales for Paul à Québec,” she says.
Rabagliati will also profit from the attention by releasing the series’ next instalment, Paul dans le nord (Paul in the North), in October.
“For the editor, it’s marvellous because the book will be shown. But at the same time graphic novels at large will be on display. Readers will probably buy this book for the first time before or after having seen the film to learn about it. But that’s surely going to lead them to the graphic novels of the likes of (Quebec City cartoonist) Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang and Jerusalem, or Chester Brown or Seth,” he says. “The bookstores have all those books, but people may just not know that they exist.” En scène is a monthly column on Quebec culture. Email: awoods@thestar.ca.
Quebec City’s Musée national des beaux-art is launching an exhibition of Rabagliati’s work