Louis Riel (comics) - Reception and Legacy

Reception and Legacy

The book sold well, and became the first graphic novel to reach Canada's non-fiction bestseller list. A critical and commercial success, it was especially popular with libraries and schools. Comics academic Jeet Heer claims that it has perhaps sold more copies in Canada than any other graphic novel. Publishers Weekly called it "a strong contender for the best graphic novel ever", Time magazine included it in its annual Best Comix list in 2003, and, in 2009, the Toronto Star placed it on its list of the ten best books of "The Century So Far". It is regularly cited as being at the forefront of a trend in historical graphic novels, along with Art Spiegelman's Maus and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis.

Especially in Canada, Louis Riel brought Brown out of the fringes into the mainstream, and also attracted more serious attention to graphic novels. It was the first work of comics to receive a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts (although his libertarian politics have led him to condemn the government for handing out grants), and helped pave the way for the Council's special category for graphic novels. It was optioned for a movie by Bruce McDonald and another film director, though the project never started filming.

Researching Riel had a significant impact on Brown's thinking. When he started the book, he considered himself an anarchist. His intention was to write an anti-government book, and had a bias in Riel's favour—despite what Brown considered Riel's own political conservatism—as Riel opposed the government. Over the course of drawing the book, he came to sympathize more with Macdonald. His reading led him in 1998 to The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages by Tom Bethell, which led him change his own politics to favour libertarianism. He later ran for parliament as representative of the Libertarian Party of Canada, to the dismay of his friends. At one point, after Brown had started drawing the book, he tried to rewrite the script to reflect his changed perspective, but found it too difficult and stayed with the original script, revealing his new beliefs only in the appendix.

Critic Rich Kreiner found that Brown's disengaged approach to Louis Riel invited a reader-response approach to reading it. For example, it was the impetus for an in-depth, three-part interview conducted by Dave Sim in the pages of his comic book Cerebus. Sim uses the interview as an opportunity to apply his indiosyncratic views to an interpretation of events in Brown's book.