I am currently at work on “Each in His Narrow Cell,” a graphic novel recounting the siege of Quebec and the Battle of The Plains of Abraham in 1759. In revisiting this pivotal moment in Canadian history, my intention is not simply to present a didactic history lesson in visual form, but rather to create an emotionally engaging, character-driven narrative centered on the personal motivations and inner conflicts of the French, English and Indigenous participants. Below are 8 completed pages of the first 60-page sample section I am working on.
One of the parameters I set for myself with the colouring was that all the characters from a particular nation would be depicted in a combination of a neutral grey tone and one characteristic colour -blue for the French, red for the English, purple for the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), and so on. Similarly, the colour of the lettering in the speech bubbles indicates what language is being spoken. Chief Nissowaquet of the Odawa of l’Arbre Croche appears in yellow, a decision based on the background colour of the present-day flag of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa, within whose reservation boundaries the village of l’Arbre Croche was situated.
In this section, the French commander at the siege of Quebec, General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, finally returns to his beloved chateau of Candiac, in Languedoc. To fully understand this scene, it is necessary to know that just before the beginning of the siege, Montcalm received the tragic news that one of his four daughters had died. Although from across the Atlantic Montcalm was not able to find out which one, he assumed it was his youngest, Mirète, who had long been sickly.
I recently participated in an episode of “Les Oreilles d’Anne,” a radio show normally broadcast out of Nantes, France. Its two hosts, Florent Bouchardeau and Lisa Focken, were in Montreal at the tail end of a trip across Eastern Canada, in which they had specifically set out to find out about the country’s Acadian musical traditions and contemporary scene. Beginning at 16:32 you can hear my interview with Florent and Lisa on the subject of my ongoing project to create a graphic novel about the Battle of the Plains of Abraham.
julian peters comics 