Four-Colour Words greets the new year by looking into a pair of new Canadian comics!

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Une piquante petite brunette, by Albert Chartier

You could say this about any number of comics released during the last decade mirabilis, but it bears underlining here: how wild is it that this book ever even saw publication? It consists of dozens upon dozens of rejected and unpublished try-out strips by a cartoonist best known, when he’s known at all, for limning the misadventures of a milquetoast in a strip that ran in a monthly bulletin serving rural Québec.

Which isn’t to imply that this book’s existence is undeserving—far from it, since this is accomplished, attractive work. It’s just that when comics so seemingly destined for obscurity nevertheless wend their way toward publication, forty years after their completion, it should behoove us to remark upon what we’re gaining now, in comics’ current golden age, that we’d been missing out on all these years, in the absence of such archival projects. And in the case of Une piquante petite brunette, what we’re gaining isn’t so much an undiscovered classic as it is an instructive glimpse into the processes of a working cartoonist.

In the 1960s, Albert Chartier devoted most of his schedule to illustration work for La Presse and the Montreal Star, and to his long-running strips Séraphin and Onésime. (In an age even more gilded than our own, Une piquante petite brunette would serve only as an appendix or footnote to a heftier sampling of Onésime than we currently have—but alas….)

Even so, he also spent the decade toiling away at a series of ever-saucier pantomime strips designed to break him in to the English-language and foreign syndication markets. Collected here under the various titles of Suzy, Suzette, Kiki, and Elsinore, each strip starred a female protagonist of near-identical type—basically, a flighty urban naif, with a pair of gams and a bosom so startling that the word ‘hourglass’ couldn’t begin to describe her figure. Chartier carries off each episode with vivacity, executing his drawings in crisp lines and generous curves, all strapping men and sturdy motorcars, slinky clothes and demure gals. Despite the occasional bout of wobbly-limbed frenzy, every strip drives toward its final-panel gag with a sense of purpose. These are a craftsman’s strips.

As such, unfortunately, the gags are often groaners. It’s easy to see how syndicates passed these efforts over, despite their evident technical finesse. (Plus, when a good-sized portion of the punchlines revolves around just how very ample Kiki’s boobs are—like, thick-lipped natives worship them, they prevent elevator doors from closing, etc.—well then, something tells me the strips were far too risqué for a general audience in 1960s North America anyway.)

If Chartier had had more time to settle into the strip—or if Kiki et al. ever actually developed into characters, rather than just busty blanks whose sole defining traits were their man-craziness and the frequency with which they lost their tops or fell plop into laps—then the feature could well have evolved into any number of things. Perhaps we’d have an urban Onésime, or a look at the lives of Montrealers during a time of intense change for that city, or at least a refreshingly high-gloss gag-a-day strip on a comics page ever lowering its standards. What we’re left with, however, is a curio.

Still, while the strip may be a curio, the book holds a different appeal. Chartier’s constant retooling and reformatting of the same material over and over again, and his evident frustration with the submissions process, gives us a valuable look at how a professional mid-century cartoonist approached his work. Because so little of this work was ever published, Chartier was unafraid of revisiting the same gag three or four times, reframing this panel for a different emphasis, adding or subtracting dialogue here, extending the strip to six panels or reducing it to one.

It’s too rare that we get to witness these experiments, peering in on a cartoonist perfecting the science of the gag. It’s also interesting to see Chartier use different effects to gear his strips toward different markets: Suzette, for example, he created as a strip meant to teach anglos some rudimentary French. Its dialogue may be pedantic, but it gets the joke across; whereas the later pantomime Kiki strips often merely remove Suzette’s dialogue, sometimes rendering the gag obscure, if not inscrutable.

Chartier’s styles and characters change with the times, too: the earliest Suzy strips feature a heroine who is less of a sexpot, more respectably hard-done-by, and drawn with crisper, classier lines. As the variations on the strip wear into the ’60s, though, Chartier’s penmanship gains some vavavoom and his girls get more suggestively shapely, less brainy, and far, far more mod. That progression, though, doesn’t stop Elsinore, Chartier’s last few attempts at a strip featuring his piquante petite brunette, from being the squarest strip of the bunch. It’s a groovy misunderstanding of youth culture, fresh out of Tim Hensley’s daydreams: after a decade of polishing and rethinking every aspect of his approach, Chartier’s drawing and pacing have become flawless and almost computer-precise. The yuks, too, are as corny and obvious as anything out of Nancy, and each strip strives for pure cartooning in the same way that Ernie Bushmiller seemed to do. It’s a little amazing to be privy to this kind of refinement of technique.

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Drop-In, by Dave Lapp

If the unseen work of underappreciated career cartoonists occupies one extreme of our current publishing spree, we shouldn’t be surprised to find book-length debuts from little-heard-of talents taking up another. Dave Lapp’s Drop-In is one such title: promising work from a developing cartoonist, of the kind we would have only seen piecemeal in fanzines or minicomics in years prior.

The book format can flatter new cartoonists, allowing them free range for their ambitions rather than cramped space in low-circulation anthologies, but it can also hamper them, by providing them with too many directions in which to veer off. Lapp manages not to veer too much, and to make use of the space afforded him in interesting and counter-intuitive ways, even if they’re not always successful ones.

Rather than presenting us with one overarching story, Lapp constructs Drop-In as a sequence of related vignettes drawn from his experiences working at Toronto drop-in centres for underprivileged and at-risk youth. Each strip—ranging in length from one to fifteen pages—tells a story that Lapp’s been involved with firsthand, or witnessed, or overheard, and each one adds to the sense of just how strange life can get, especially at certain limits of poverty or mental health.

Lapp examines this strangeness with a light tone that’s ready to acknowledge the bizarre humour involved in students threatening to hit him, or competing desperately for attention or simply punching each other because there’s nothing better to do. But his kids-say-the-darnedest-things approach to these experiences—“Hey! If you’re going to the kitchen, get me a knife so I can kill myself!”—allows him never to flinch from the darker implications of these actions. As a result, this isn’t a book of dramatic moments or conflicts so much as it is one of undercurrents, an exhibition of behaviours and symptoms whose causes are rarely rooted out.

Though Lapp is adept at depicting personal confrontations and mounting tensions—as in the book’s longest chapter, in which girls fight over a tamagotchi—still the strongest and most precarious moments in his work arrive when these undercurrents briefly surface. It’s one thing to work with troubled kids, trying to find ways through and around their problems; it’s another to see the trouble itself, in the hidden form of dying parents, or vermin-infested food, or abusive neighbours. It’s to Lapp’s credit that at these moments he exposes himself as helpless, something of a bumbling interloper, however well-intentioned. Confronted with his role as perpetual outsider, the stories he tells often cease to be about his observations, and with a startling suddenness become reclaimed by those he’s observing.

Lapp’s work owes a debt to Joe Sacco in this respect. Each cartoonist places himself in situations he knows very little about, which forces both him and us to puzzle through the connotations we all seem to be ignorant of, but which those involved know all too well. Lapp’s draughtsmanship, too, recalls Sacco’s, though his hatching is less practiced, and his characters lack solidity and certainty. In fact, with thicker, cruder brushtrokes, as in the “Flytrap” strip, Lapp seems more at ease, and the resulting story hits its beats more naturally than in the Sacco-like strips, such as “Thanks.” That one, a first-person account of childhood during the Vietnam War, is one of several strips that just don’t work. Its illustrations of carnage and jungle don’t seem lived-in; they feel disconnected from the voice that’s describing them.

Other strips arrive overladen with meaning or metaphor, as when Lapp compares a family’s apartment to an aquarium; or they awkwardly shoulder story information, as when a coworker tells Lapp of a shooting; or they otherwise simply fall flat, as do most of the strips about street people, which feel easy and almost crass, if funny. Still, the benefit of the book format, for the developing cartoonist, is that these missteps can get lost in the cumulative effect that all these pages provide. Drop-In builds not to any climactic moment or grand statement, but instead to a sense of benumbed optimism.

Tags: Canadiana

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Posted on Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 at 11:35 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.