Most people associate the now defunct Front de libération du Québec with the 1970 October Crisis, which reached its dark apogee when the separatist terrorist group kidnapped and killed labour minister Pierre Laporte, prompting Trudeau père to invoke the War Measures Act.
But the path of history is crooked, and readily forgotten. As Chris Oliveros, co-founder of the book’s Montreal-based publisher, Drawn & Quarterly, shows in his eye-opening and quirkily appealing graphic history of the FLQ, the latter had several less well-known, less successful iterations – at times, comically so – following its 1963 founding.
Are You Willing to Die for the Cause? focuses on the group’s first three leaders: Georges Schoeters, François Schirm and Pierre Vallières. (The latter, who later renounced the FLQ, along with terrorism as a political tool, remains a familiar name owing to his manifesto, N— Blancs d’Amerique.) All would serve prison time.
Though a Belgian immigrant, Schoeters apparently shared native Quebeckers’ outrage when the anglophone president of CN Rail, Donald Gordon, famously blamed the lack of French-Canadian executives at his company on their lack of qualifications.
Inspired by Fidel Castro, whom he claimed to have met, Schoeters put together a small, shambolic group that targeted Montreal’s armouries with Molotov cocktails before graduating to mailbox bombings. (“Are you willing to die for the cause?” was a question from an early recruitment pamphlet – notable in that it did not specify what the cause was. Another, more practical query was, “Do you have access to a secret hideout?”)
Schirm, who headed up the FLQ’s second wave, took an ostensibly more organized, militaristic approach. He lured a dozen recruits to a training camp outside Montreal with promises that Che Guevara would show up (he didn’t) and that their numbers would soon swell to thousands (they added two).
When winter temperatures and food supplies plunged, so did the group’s morale. Worse, Schirm’s hopes of gaining public sympathy went up in smoke when his plan to rob a downtown Montreal gun store went awry, ending in the shootout death of its manager.
The book’s caricatures are delightfully spot-on (long-time Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau particularly so). It also includes copious, useful background notes. A second volume, still in the works – and I hope Oliveros hurries up – will cover the October Crisis itself.
Roaming, Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s newest graphic novel, is a warmly propulsive tale of three female college students meeting up for a quick New York getaway. Zoe and Dani are old school chums. Fiona, a friend of Dani’s from art school (she yarn-bombs, and is contemplating a pivot to video), also tags along, thus ensuring that the dynamic won’t be as expected.
The title is a double-entendre. In addition to travelling, roaming also refers to the cellphone charges the cash-strapped group are trying to avoid, but that become unavoidable after Zoe and Fiona drunkenly hook-up in the women’s shared hostel room, prompting a humiliated Dani to take off solo.
Endlessly opinionated, and too cool for school, Fiona is an immediately recognizable character. She keeps chiding the other two for acting like tourists, even though that’s exactly what they are.
The Tamakis (cousins whose previous work includes the Caldecott-winning One Summer) have always been expert at exploiting the graphic form’s innate strengths. Here, the shifting chemistry between our threesome is alternately conveyed through text, words, glances and body language in a manner that would be clunky in either a film or short story.
Because they focus on young people, the Tamakis often get slotted into the YA category, but the emotional truths their books invoke seem, to me at least, ageless and perennial.
Erdogan is the first of a planned two-volume biography of Turkey’s divisive leader by Can Dundar, a prominent Turkish journalist and documentary filmmaker. Let’s just say he’s not a fan. Both he and the book’s Egyptian-Sudanese illustrator, Anwar, met in Berlin, where they’ve both been living in exile after getting on the wrong side of their respective governments.
It’s thus to his credit that Dundar has attempted – via extensive research that relied equally on pro- and con-Erdogan sources, as well as Erdogan’s own accounts – an impartial chronicling of Erdogan’s hardscrabble rise from poverty and obscurity to mayor of Istanbul to the co-founding of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) under which he still rules. (Many of Anwar’s drawings, likewise, are based on photographs of real events.)
“Erdogan is not fond of humour in general, and caricature in particular” and has an “intolerance for criticism,” Dundar notes in his afterword. (In a blurb, novelist Orhan Pamuk calls Dundar “very courageous.”)
The book, drawn in bold black-and-white, in classic comic-book style, takes a chronological approach, starting with the abuse Erdogan’s suffered at the hands of teachers as well as his hot-tempered, authoritarian father, then chronicling his early passion for soccer, and his education in Islamic schools known as Imam Hatip.
Politics and opportunism have always made comfortable bedfellows, but Erdogan took this to an extreme. When the winds of Turkish politics blew secular, he hid his dedication to political Islam, telling sex workers, Jewish groups and members of the military exactly what they wanted to hear to gain their support. He softened his initially intransigent belief that women should wear head coverings, for instance, when he realized that the opposite view would get him elected, then pivoted again later.
Dundar uses the visual Sisyphean metaphor of scaling a mountain to depict Erdogan’s uneven political ascendancy, whose many setbacks included his 1998 imprisonment for incitement of hatred through the recitation of a poem. Erdogan ends where the next volume will presumably begin, in 2000, with Erdogan sitting on a mountaintop throne in priest’s garb.
The Mysteries is less a graphic novel than an adult picture book.
The wild success of Bill Watterson’s long-running newspaper cartoon, Calvin and Hobbes, about the relationship between a precocious boy and his stuffed tiger, Hobbes (animated only to him), made him beloved, even revered. When the strip went dark in 1995, Watterson did too; so when it was announced that, after 28 years, he was coming out with some new work, anticipation ran high.
Each of The Mysteries’ 70 or so pages has just seven or eight words on it. (Though not aimed at children, it could certainly be read to them.) Written by Watterson, its open-ended environmentally tinged parable begins with the inhabitants of a medieval village building powerful walls to ward off an unseen collective presence known as “the mysteries.”
Everything changes on the day they capture one. Realizing this “mystery” poses no threat after all, the villagers cut down the forest from whence it came. Now openly disrespecting, even mocking, the thing they once feared, they spread themselves over the earth with the accoutrements (planes, cars) of modernity. There are signs this might not have been a good idea.
The Mysteries’ standout feature is its moody, chiaroscuro-based images, which Watterson created, using models and photography, with John Kascht, an American caricaturist whose work is held in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery’s permanent collection.
A YouTube video uploaded by Watterson and Kascht’s publisher, and narrated by both creators, nicely explains the book’s origins and the nature of their collaboration. Politicians could take a cue from their process. Says Watterson at one point: “I wanted a sparring partner, someone’s whose ideas and skills would challenge my own. So John and I set off with one rule, which was that neither of us would get the final say on any decision. Either one of us could veto anything for any reason, or even pull the plug on the whole project. We proceeded only if we both agreed. That decision doomed us to endless debates, but it’s what made the project so interesting to me.”