Louis Riel (comics) - Style

Style

Louis Riel is noted for its emotional restraint, and intentionally flat and expository dialogue. Critic Rich Kreiner notes that the book "has been rigorously scrubbed of staged drama and crowd-pleasing effects". It avoids manipulation of the reader by invoking sympathy or sentiment. Brown takes a distanced approach, and relies faithfully on his source material — he focuses on the concrete and corporeal, and eschews techniques of speculation such as thought balloons. This includes his presentation of Riel's mystical experiences, which is presented plainly and without interpretation of its reality or lack thereof by Brown.

The book makes frequent deliberate use of silent panels, focused on imagery with the narrative moved forward by the characters' actions. Riel's "despairs over the decisions he makes" are expressed through pictures, as Brown had come to believe that historical comics had been too "narration-heavy". He wanted Louis Riel "to show what the medium is capable of", and made use of greater panel-to-panel continuity. While the grid of panels gives a feeling of page symmetry, the pages are not composed as a unit—scenes change anywhere on the page with little regard to page layout.

Printed on yellowish paper, each page conforms strictly to a rhythmic six-panel grid, in contrast to the free placement of panels that characterized Brown's autobiographical period. Tone and mood are set by the composition of the panels, as during Riel's trial when all tonal variation is dropped, and the white figures are placed against a heavy black background, emphasizing the claustrophobic atmosphere.

The language barriers that separate the characters are made visual by Brown's having Riel drop the letter "h" in his dialogue (e.g. "over t'e last several days ..."), and by putting "translated" French-language dialogue in ⟨chevron brackets⟩, and Cree language dialogue in ⟨⟨double-chevrons⟩⟩. Riel, who was an educated and sophisticated speaker of French, is shown to struggle with English. These touches emphasize that English was not yet a dominant language in the regions in which the story unfolds. Brown's semantics in his speech balloons are consistent and deftly handled. The size and weight of the dialogue in the speech balloons is varied according to speech patterns, and sound effects are varied according to how close they are to the reader.

"My ... one goal was to make the artwork look as much as the artwork in Little Orphan Annie as possible, I was trying to draw like Harold Gray"

Chester Brown, interview with Matthias Wivel (2004)

Brown's drawing style had always changed from project to project. He frequently cited Harold Gray of Little Orphan Annie as the primary influence on the drawing style of Louis Riel — restrained artwork which avoids extreme closeups, and blank-eyed characters with large bodies, small heads, and oversized noses. Gray's drawing and compositional style was well suited to the subject of Louis Riel. Gray often used his strip as a public platform for politics, and Louis Riel was also very public and outward-looking. This approach is in great contrast to the inward-looking comics Brown had previously been known for—notably his autobiographical work. His cross-hatching style was reminiscent of the editorial cartoonists of Riel's time. Gray's outdoor scenes were inspired by the Illinois plains of Gray's youth, terrain similar to that of Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

Brown also acknowledges significant debts to Jack Jackson's historical comics, Hergé's Tintin, and the extremely exaggerated style of Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe. He says he referred to Jack Hamm's How to Draw Animals when drawing the horses that appear frequently throughout the book, which were rendered running with their legs splayed, as an artist may have depicted them in the days before the influence of Eadweard Muybridge's photographs of bodies in motion. Brown drew each of the 1325 panels separately on watercolour paper on a block of wood he placed on his lap in lieu of a drawing table, which allowed him seamlessly to rearrange, insert, and delete panels as he saw fit. The drawings were finished using both a thin ink brush (no larger than size 0) and dip pen with a Hunt 102 nib and black ink.