Louis riel comic strip biography reviews
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Review by Jack Kibble-White
Chester Brown creates nonchalantly brilliant comics books. His first ongoing series, Yummy Fur, featured a free-flowing ongoing remsa called ‘Ed the Happy Clown’, before the title evolved into an autobiographical account of the cartoonist’s formative years. At a time when alternative comic books were chock full of true life stories of this type, Brown’s work stood out for its lyricism and ability to find profundity within its confessional subject matter.
Seemingly growing tired of autobiography, Brown diverted into something stranger with his, eventually abandoned, series Underwater, before turning his clear-headed, dispassionate style to something different – a biography of Canadian politician Louis Riel. Originally serialised in comic form over four years, the collection of these ten issues into a single volume is by far the best way to experience the initially perfunctory feeling Louis Riel.
The characters speak in pure exposition,
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What I Am Reading: "Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography" by Chester Brown
I know, I know: a comic book? Despite what I tell people, I don't actually hate graphic novels; with my favorite being Alan Moore's From Hell (superheroes are a different story). The stars aligned perfectly for me to read Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography now: I stumbled across a reference the topic while Wiki-browsing about Victorian conflicts (Gordon in Khartoum, specifically); my memory of the reference in the excellent and Canadian Hark! A Vagrant was triggered; and I needed something light to read after the arduous journey through Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. As a bonus: the author had once been written up in Ferretbrain. So, one trip to The Strand later, here we are.
This comic heavily economizes it's storytelling. There is not a single panel that is not dedicated to advancing the story forward, and almost all of the dialogue is a straightforward explanation of what a character is doing
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fawndolyn's review against another edition
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4.0
Book 2 / Kindle 0 - Kindle died just before the epilogue. And I had to skip the notes, because it is impossible to flip to so many referred pages on a kindle.
But this book is worth owning in the flesh.
The art was simple and acceptional, however left little room for character expressions. The story was astounding, a little dull toward the beginning, but blew my mind nonetheless. I hadn't heard this much of Riel's tale, and I realized that oftentimes, he wasn't as heroic as I thought, but sometimes he was more clever than I remembered.
Dumont was my favourite. I saw a lot of me in him, especially in his "savage" ideas for an ambush.
I still don't understand why Père André blew the Métis's cover, then cried so sadly at the hanging.
jlye's review against another edition
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darkinformativesadtensefast-paced
3.25
As a format for learning about the formidable Louis Riel, there