Reluctantly Bell concludes that the dream of a Canadian national superhero might have to be abandoned and that the future of comics lies in the more mature graphic novels created by contemporary graphic novelists like Chester Brown and Seth (the pen name of cartoonist Gregory Gallant). Brown’s graphic novel about Louis Riel sold more than 20,000 copies in hardcover and is now used in many university courses. Perhaps the best chapter of Bell ’s book is the one arguing for the centrality of Brown’s work in contemporary comics. Seth’s wistful nostalgia-laden mediations (published in such magazines as Toro, The New Yorker, and the New York Times Magazine) also have an enthusiastic (and international) audience. Certainly both artists have produced a body of work that is more successful, aesthetically and commercially, than Captain Canada or Nelvana.

....

The long-delayed adulthood of Canadian comics came in the early 1990s, when a cohort of artists used the form for personal expression. Aside from Seth and Chester Brown, the important figures were Julie Doucet (an artist with a remarkable ability to plop her subconscious right on the printed page with dreams strips about cities drowning in menstrual blood and lewd beer bottles hitting on young women), Ho Che Anderson (whose comic strip biography of Martin Luther King was notable for its unvarnished honesty in dealing with race and sex), and David Collier (an artist who has recreated in comic book form the old Canadian persona of the backwoods yarn spinner).

Labels: comics history, reviews