Mikaël’s New York Trilogy

Stéphanie St. Clair, aka Queenie, is at the heart of Harlem, a diptych that should close the New York trilogy by cartoonist Mikaël. Around this criminal who stood up to Jewish and Italian gangsters, he masterfully evokes life in the working class district of northern Manhattan in the 1930s.

Alexandre Vigneault
The Press

New York is the city of Spider-Man and Captain America, but it is also the inspiration for Gotham and Metropolis, which Batman and Superman defend. His fascination with the American megalopolis, Mikaël, a Quebec cartoonist of French origin, does not, however, hold it comic book American. Rather television, then the fantasy of America.

This idea of ​​another possible life is precisely the thread that connects the different series that make up his New York trilogy. These characters are immigrants, people “forgotten by great history”, he says, who helped build the city and tried to make their way there.

In Giant (two volumes), he imagined an Irish colossus who worked on the construction of skyscrapers. In bootblack (also two volumes), he was more of a shoeshiner of German origin. Harlemwhich will be officially launched on Saturday at the Morency bookstore in Quebec City, revolves around a historical figure, Stéphanie St. Clair, a gangster woman of West Indian origin, who dominated this district located north of Central Park.

Social fresco

Mikaël, unlike the authors of Queenie, another comic book built around Stéphanie St. Clair published last fall, does not claim to be a biographer. It evokes the main lines of the life of the one who was the godmother of Harlem, but dwells above all on everything that swarms around her: poverty, shenanigans, conflicts with the police and other gangs, jazz …

It paints the portrait of a hard and lonely woman, but not insensitive to the fate of her fellows. “Her fight is above all individual: she first seeks her personal enrichment, analyzes Mikaël. But the fact that it offers loans at reduced rates or sometimes without interest, that it helps charities and churches or that it denounces the abuses of the police against the black population makes it participate in the advance of the cause of African Americans in Harlem. »

Mikaël does not praise it naively, however: the one who called herself Queenie was a criminal who had “blood on her hands”. His business – an illegal lottery – also relied on the vulnerability of his fellow citizens, eager to win money. “She stole from the poor to give back to the poor,” sums up the cartoonist. It’s not exactly Robin Hood…”

Eloquent Impressionism

His story, partly told by a white journalist who finds himself in the entourage of Stéphanie St. Clair, is served by an absolutely magnificent visual composition. Inspired by the painters of the Aschan School, who reproduced everyday scenes in a vaporous style, but far from any form of idealization. Mikaël emphasizes the material, evokes the dirt and the noises of the street.

He reproduces with precision the architecture and the urban framework of Harlem, but the universe which he creates is rather made of impressions. His drawing focuses above all on creating the atmospheres in which his characters evolve, to which he is always very close, from the dark alleys to the lively evenings of the Cotton Club.

“Above all, it’s a human story,” explains the cartoonist. He also takes this aspect very seriously: Mikaël takes the time to invent a biography for each of his characters, even if they only play a secondary or even tertiary role. “That’s what contributes, I hope, he says, to the richness of the story. »

Stéphanie St. Clair is the binder of her Harlem, the element that gives it spice. What makes it strong is the sensitivity with which Mikaël captures the story of this woman and that of this neighborhood in the 1930s to tell the story of poverty, violence, the challenges of integration, racism and many other things happening here and now.

Harlem

Michael

Dargaud

64 pages