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Rifkind, Candida and Warley, Linda, eds,
Canadian Graphic. Picturing Life Narratives
Gabriel Tremblay-Gaudette, PhD
Another Milestone for Canadian Comics
Canadian comics have arrived. Actually, the comics scene is Canada has been alive and kicking for several decades now: after a few timid bursts in the middle of the 20th century —documented in John Bell’s thorough historical essay Invaders From the North. How Canada Conquered The Comic Book Universe (The Dundurn Group, 2006), at the beginning of the 1990s, several artists rose to prominence (Julie Doucet, Seth, Chester Brown, to name a few), Drawn and Quarterly was founded in 1990, the Joe Shuster Awards followed suit in 2004, and the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics was created in 2010. However, from the perspective of comics studies, a new milestone of sorts was achieved in 2016 with the publication of the first university-press-published book about Canadian comics, namely, Canadian Graphic. Picturing Life Narratives, edited by Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley.
The angle of approach selected by the editors is to focus on works depicting life stories, be they biographical, autobiographical or autofictional. This choice is perhaps especially appropriate for a study of Canadian comics, considering that some of the most famous comics artist, including those mentioned in the previous paragraph, are most known for their works on episodes of their lives. It is also unsurprising that this genre of comics would be the focus of a scholarly investigation; for a while at the end of the 20th century, alternative comics were quasi-synonymous with autobiographical stories whose anchoring in the “real world”, leagues away from the fictional cities of Metropolis, Gotham City and their caped crusaders, contributed to the transformation of the reputation of comics from a low-brow entertainment for kids to a serious art form.
There is, however, something a bit paradoxical about the editorial project of Warley and Rifkind. As stated in their introduction, they insist that they will keep at a distance the notion that studying Canadian artist could bring forth something like a “true” Canadian identity:
“While we do not wish to suggest that there is anything recognizably Canadian about graphic life narratives produced in Canada by Canadians—there is no distinctly Canadian style or theme, just as there is no singular Canadian identity—we do believe that it is important to recognize in our analyses elements of the texts that
Canadian Graphic. Picturing Life Narratives.
Rifkind, Candida and Warley, Linda, eds. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2016 ISBN 978-1-77112-179-8
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speak to Canadian differences. (Warley and Rifkind, 2016, 8)
And yet, they later state that the texts pay close scrutiny to aspects of the works studied that pertains specifically to Canadian culture : “Being attentive to these cartoonists as Canadian artists, writers, and cultural producers, even though many of them travel and work outside Canada, allows us to read how and why they engage with national mythologies, narratives, and images.” (Warley and Rifkind, 2016, 9). This seemingly contradiction, however, can be better understood by considering the particular, perhaps peculiar, situation of Canada, both a long-held believer and champion of the concept of multiculturalism and home of the “two solitudes” of French and English Canada, not to mention a renewed if belated recognition of First Nations.
With this context in mind, Canadian Graphic does try to strike a balance between these different groups. While, unsusprisingly, most of the works studied come from the majoritarian English Canada, the introduction of the volume opens on a mention of Québécois artist Sylvie Rancourt, pioneer of the life narrative comic in Canada with her series Melody, and Cheryl Cowdy studies Roch Carrier’s seminal short story The Hockey
Sweater illustrated by Sheldon Cohen as well as Hervé Bouchard and Janice Nadeau’s Harvey: How I Became Invisible. As for First Nations, Doris Wolf analyses works by Swampy Cree author David Alexander
Robertson, convincingly demonstrating how these works highlight the gender dynamics at play in the process of reconciliation between Native and Non-Native contemporary Canadian citizens.
Another aspect of the book that becomes at odds with itself after reading several of the texts is worth mentioning. While the complete title of the book mentions explicitly “life narratives”, almost all the authors name the genre studied in Canadian Graphic differently. Kevin Ziegler calls Julie Doucet’s early works “comics confessions” (28) while J. Andrew Deman prefers “autographics” (75) before Eva C. Karpinski tweaks it slightly to create the neologism “biographics” (237) and James C Hall’s contribution merges two of these terms for his reading of Chester Brown’s I Never Liked You, here called a “confessional autographic”(100). But we’re not done! Kathleen Dunley reads Seth’s Greater Norther Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists as a “life writing” (129) — audaciously but convincingly, I might add — and Linda Warley and Alan Filewod study Scott Chantler’s Two Generals as a “graphic biography” (p. 153). In theory, these terms should each have their own specific usage; however, it turns out that they could have been used interchangeably, since choosing one over the other did not have any significant impact on the texts. The exception to this rule can be found in Candida Rifkind’s analysis of Ho Che Anderson’s King: the author borrows Caitriona Ni Dhuill and Pierre-Héli Monot’s concept of “metabiography” to apply it to comics, arguing that “The panel breakdown of the comics page seems ideally suited to a metabiographical approach that represents the subject as composite reconstruction of an historically real person whose life story remains meaningful to one or more communities” (179). Rikfind applies this concept to her close reading of the comics autobiography of MLK to great effect; and yet, one can’t help but wonder if any life narrative could potentially be understood a metabiography with enough good will, considering how deeply subjective the definition of this concept is.
The editors have to be commended for their work on the book. Each text is independent from the others, a point made even more obvious by the free range of nomenclature for life narrative in comics form, and yet they are grouped in coherent “parts”. Some texts put a stronger emphasis on the Canadian aspects of a work while others spend more time reflecting on the self-representational processes employed by the artists. It is also worth mentioning that each essay is abundantly illustrated by excerpts of the works studied; the presence
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of the comics panels on the pages of the books allow the authors to comment on them rather than having to describe them.
All in all, the book is informative but not essential; insightful but whose conclusions are not necessarily meant to be exported beyond the confine of its covers. Of course, not every contribution on the subject of comics can become a mandatory-reading work to be admired and eventually questioned, as were McCloud’s
Understanding Comics — and as is becoming Hilary Chute’s Graphic Women, judging by the number of
authors referring to her book in Canadian Graphic. And in a sense, the somewhat limited scope of Canadian
Graphic should be taken as an encouraging sign for the state of comics studies, demonstrating that it has
reached a point where publications can afford to simply be what they are instead of also having to justify their existence in the same breath. It can also be taken as a sign of the proliferation of comics publishing; that a collection of essays can narrow its corpus to autobiographic works published within the last 25 years in a “modest” country and still result in a roughly-300-pages book is proof positive of the vivacity of both the 9th art and its scholars.
Gabriel Tremblay-Gaudette is a PhD student in semiotics at Université du Québec à Montréal. His
re-search interests include : text and image semiotics, hypermedia literature, contemporary literature, video games, comic art, graphic novels and webcomics. He is the Media Coordination Assistant at the Laboratoire NT2. He is also a member of the editorial board of Salon Double, an online journal on contemporary litera-ture, and bleuOrange.
