Background
"I read and thought, 'That's a good dramatic story—it'd make a good strip.'"
Chester Brown, interview with Dave Sim (2003)In 1995, Brown published the anti-psychiatry comics essay "My Mom was a Schizophrenic", in which he examines society's role in mental illness, and questions the medical profession's accepted beliefs about it. The six-page strip came with two pages of end notes gathered from his research. Brown enjoyed this project and thought he would like to take on another project in which he could "cram a lot of research into a comic strip". When he came across Siggins' biography of Riel, he had been working on the experimental Underwater series, a project on which felt he had lost his way. His father died in late 1997, and he decided he did not "want to waste time with projects that weren't working out". In 1998, he turned his attention to Riel, putting the unpopular Underwater series on hold.
While researching, Brown came across two books by Tom Flanagan: Louis "David" Riel: "Prophet of the New World" (1996) and Louis Riel and the Rebellion: 1885 Reconsidered (2000). Brown found "Prophet of the New World" particularly intriguing as it dealt with Riel's religious ideas while reevaluating his alleged diagnosis of mental illness, two topics Brown had especial interest in, having previously made "eccentric" adaptations of the Gospel, and comics dealing with his mother's schizophrenia. He also came across books by researcher Don McLean and historian Douglas N. Sprague that advanced the conspiracy theory that the 1885 North-West Rebellion was deliberately provoked by Prime Minister John A. Macdonald to gain support for the building of the transcontinental railway.
Brown had already gained a reputation for improvised storytelling by the time he began work on Louis Riel. With Underwater, he had intended to write a script, but in the end decided to improvise. The results were unsatisfactory, and Brown decided to write a full script beforehand for his next project. The script for Louis Riel came to over 200 pages.
Brown's was not the first depiction of the Métis leader in comics. James Simpkins, a Canadian cartoonist best known for Jasper the Bear, made a mildly anti-Riel two-page strip in 1967, and Pierre Dupuis produced a French-language two-page summary in 1979. A 23-page pro-Riel strip appeared in Canadian History Comic Book No. 2: Rebellion in 1972. In 1980, Italian artist Hugo Pratt created a character called Jesuit Joe who was supposed to have descended from Riel. Publishing house Les Éditions des Plaines published two books on Riel: Robert Freynet's 58-page Louis Riel en bande dessinée in 1990, and Zoran and Toufik's Louis Riel, le père du Manitoba in 1996, both in French. Riel also played a secondary role in the 1995 album Le crépuscule des Bois-Brûlés.
Read more about this topic: Louis Riel (comics)
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