Like a quiet force, author, illustrator and cartoonist Christian Quesnel is slowly but surely making his way through the world of French-language comics. The name of the one who published in 1995 The twilight of the Bois-Brûlés, a first album telling the story of a young Métis at the time of Louis Riel, has been increasingly heard over the past fifteen years. With reason.
Moreover, it was a year of consecration for the doctoral student enrolled in the Multidisciplinary School of the Image – the famous program devoted to comics offered at the University of Quebec in Outaouais -, he who received the Eco -Fauve Raja 2022 at the Angoulême Comics Festival for the album Mégantic, a train in the nightwhich he co-signed with Anne-Marie Saint-Cerny.
The artist launches these days The oblique citya particularly interesting album, which retraces the history of Quebec and its capital as if it were told to us by the American author HP Lovecraft (with texts by Ariane Gélinas).
“I’ve been doing comics for 30 years. I drove the same nail for years and years. And it didn’t always work out, but I learned from my mistakes. If, today, I am reaping the fruits of all this work, I know that it does not come from nowhere, I have worked hard. I wouldn’t say that I don’t touch the ground, because I’m the type to dream on dry land, but I’m happy and I’m also happy for Quebec comics in general, which find their place everywhere in the world ! »
Christian Quesnel arouses curiosity when he says he has learned from his mistakes. Is he talking about anything in particular? “Choosing my subjects or, perhaps, explaining them better. For example, my comic You destroyed the beauty of the world, which is about suicide, was well received, but the subject was really not obvious and, above all, I think I could have explained it better. In the creation phases, there is also promotion, selling your idea to the public. It’s something I’ve learned to do over time. I also have to be careful how I choose my collaborations. Does the publisher have a budget? Because it’s still my livelihood. And, finally, artistic freedom. It happened to me to let people interfere a little too much in my work. »
It is true that Quesnel does not take it easy. He has dealt with suicide, the tragedy of Lac-Mégantic, and he is currently preparing a work on Dédé Fortin.
A few years ago, he decided to cancel the release of an album born from the desire to transpose a film script written by Claude Jutra. The comic was to appear when the name of the filmmaker, who died in 1986, was at the heart of a sexual controversy in 2016.
” It is called A good year for olives and what’s special is that it’s done in a style that’s almost the opposite of what I do. It’s very colourful, very optimistic, since it takes place at the end of the 1960s. I still don’t know if I’m going to release it. Maybe one day… “
A particular style
Speaking of style, Quesnel’s is much closer to painting than to traditional comics, with its drippings and transparencies and, above all, this obsession with blue. But where does this fixation for this color come from? Is he so obsessed with twilights?
“It’s almost unconscious, for me. Yes, I made the decision to use this palette, and it’s true that I really like turquoise, for example. Not to paint my walls this color, at home, but in my work, I think it evokes our nature, the many lakes of the Outaouais? Perhaps, too, because I am fascinated by maritime Quebec, when you see the mountains of Charlevoix merge with the river and the sky, there are incredible shades of blue. This is what I try to reproduce, even if I am unable to. »
River which, precisely, is found in the heart of The oblique cityinspired by Lovecraft’s actual travels in Quebec City in the early 1930s, which resulted in texts published in a collection edited posthumously, long after the death of the creator of the Cthulhu mythos in 1937.
“It’s a pretty special story! It was Thomas-Louis Côté, the director of Québec BD, who asked me, while we were participating in a festival in France in 2017, if I had thought of adapting Lovecraft given that our styles were similar. And he added that Lovecraft even wrote about Quebec City, which I didn’t know, and that piqued my curiosity. I went to read them, these texts, which aren’t very thrilling, let’s face it, but it made me want to work on them. So, I decided to tell, rather, the history of Quebec as if it had been imagined by Lovecraft. But since the texts were relatively weak, we decided to rewrite them at the very end of the process, and that’s where the author Ariane Gélinas arrived, who was introduced to me by a mutual friend. In short, this project was carried out a little backwards! »
Which gives, in the end, a completely uchronic version of the history of the province, a kind of history of Quebec and New France, a world version upside down Stranger Things, which constantly sends a shiver down our spine and leads us to believe that our geography and our ancestral mythologies could serve as fertile ground for these strange stories that would benefit from being told. In beautiful shades of blue, in the style of Christian Quesnel, for example.