Louis Riel (comics) - Use of Appendices

Use of Appendices

When he began Louis Riel, Brown had increasingly been making use of notes and appendices in his work, beginning with his researching and annotating the 1994 comics essay, "My Mom was a Schizophrenic". He added appendices to the 1998 collection of short strips, The Little Man, and the 2002 reprinting of I Never Liked You. In Louis Riel, the appendix totalled 23 pages, along with a bibliography and an index. Alan Moore's use of extensive end notes in his and Eddie Campbell's From Hell, another fictional reconstruction of a historical event, influenced Brown's appendices. In the comics essay "Dance of the Gull Catchers" which closes the From Hell appendices, Moore metaphorical reveals to the reader the myriad choices he could have made from the available historical evidence when putting together his version of the Jack the Ripper story.

Allowing him to "tell the best story and tell the truth", Brown's notes were self-reflexive, drawing attention to the artistic choices he made when putting together the book. Brown makes explicit the inaccuracies in the book, as when he realized his drawings of William McDougall did not match up with descriptions of him by biographers as a "portly" and "heavily built man". Brown chose not to redraw McDougall's scenes, deciding he "could live with that level of inaccuracy". He also admits that he deliberately changed some of the historical details, as when he has Prime Minister Macdonald in talks with the Hudson's Bay Company in London—Macdonald was not in London at that time and did not directly participate in the negotiations. In other instances, Brown noted where he paid special care to historical details: the dialogue of Riel's trial comes directly from court transcripts. Brown makes clear in his notes the amount of research undertaken for the book, emphasizing both its authenticity and his desire to show the different aspects of Riel's ambiguous story. Many of his changes were made for space considerations, as he intended the book to be limited to about two hundred pages.

The notes range from nearly insignificant details to major discrepancies and deliberate distortions. They have a self-deprecatory tone that is common in North American comics, tracing its roots to the awkwardly self-aware underground comix of the 1960s and 1970s. They also reveal Brown's process in shaping the story from conflicting sources. He acknowledges some of the more capricious details. He explains he was not committed to the conspiracy theory he presented, but included it in order to present Macdonald in a certain light: "illains are fun in a story", he said, and he was "trying to tell this tale in an engaging manner". He also included a "Major-General Thomas Bland Strange" in an 1885 meeting at which the general was not actually present. Brown explains that he included Strange because he was amused by the Major-General's name.