Our cartoonist Pascal Élie died last Friday of the consequences of a terrible degenerative disease, which he fought with all his might for more than a decade. To his beloved spouse and his two sons, of whom he was so proud, we offer our most sincere condolences today, in the form of a tribute.
Born somewhere between the end of the baby boom and the beginning of Generation X, Pascal Élie was an eternal freelancer. He made his mark at The Outremont Express, a weekly in which he was already displaying his lively culture, his incisive and biting trait at the expense of the people of Outremont. He held the lighthouse Bar Journal, using his law studies to deride the scholarly Latin expressions that the legal profession holds in such high esteem. He collaborated with the newspaper Deals and to The Press. He held the lighthouse Thirty, the magazine of the Professional Federation of Journalists of Quebec. He happily transgressed linguistic borders on a daily basis The Gazette before joining the To have to.
Every time, his pencil line testified to an ability to merge his news culture, his vast general knowledge, his (a little) dark and twisted humor and the cultural referents of his target readership. He was a funny hybrid animal, capable of soaking up his immediate environment and rising above the group to take a critical and questioning look at the individual and the collective.
Pascal did not only have qualities, despite his undeniable charm. He was the epitome of creative doubt, able to complicate a simple, brilliant idea into a mess that required soul-searching into his tortured soul to figure out what he really meant. If Greg’s Laszlo Zlotz had been a cartoonist, in the comic Achille Talon, he would have looked like the Pascal of the days of questioning.
Marie-Andrée Chouinard, editor-in-chief, and I knowingly hired Pascal to succeed Michel “Garnotte” Garneau in 2019. A collaborator since 2016, the eternal freelancer in him had difficulty claiming for himself- even what was due to him by the strength of his talent and his perseverance: a permanent position in a medium he admired.
The dark part of me wondered what we were going to accomplish, and for how long, with such an inspired, yet fragile cartoonist. I’m ashamed to have doubted for a moment my friend’s stubborn determination to overcome the limitations of an illness that was gradually making him a prisoner of his body. There were days when Pascal couldn’t get up before the late hour of the very fat mornings that one usually only experiences in adolescence. Days when inspiration came to him so close to the deadline for the next day’s edition that he broke into a cold sweat at the desk.
He never complained about his “condition.” He spoke little about it, except with his family and very close friends. He never asked for special treatment. We have seen over the years his face tense up, his speech slow down. We have seen all these little nasties that a degenerative disease imposes on the victim without warning.
Even under the grins and contortions, we always found our Pascal, a mixture of humor, self-mockery, kindness and empathy. Illness has never succeeded in overcoming this humanity and this dignity anchored in the depths of his soul. In this, he will have been a model of courage and stoic resignation in the face of adversity.
As a joke, I sometimes said that Pascal Élie was officially employed at the To have to, but that he reported unofficially to Serge Chapleau! The two companions and friends exchanged daily on their respective ideas from the early hours of the day, when the light of inspiration is not yet veiled by the dark anguish of the daily deadline. Real balls of doubt, inspiration and questioning, Serge and Pascal tested an idea here, they perfected the punch of a gag there.
In a media universe too often marked by fierce competition between the media and professional rivalries, their complicity was admirable. It reminds us that collaboration is more fruitful than the appetite for individual gain in creative professions, such as journalism, a profession in which caricature is one of the most original and precious genres… And fragile, because the brotherhood already limited to Quebec has just lost one of its most illustrious gentleman.
Exceptionally, Serge Chapleau returns today to our pages and platforms, 26 years after his departure for The Press, to pay tribute to his colleague and friend. It is in the order of things that he wears the HB lead pencil in the wound, with this sublime drawing which brings us back to the contorted humanity of Pascal. We warmly thank Serge Chapleau and the management of The Press for responding gracefully to this special request. Pascal deserves his mentor to accompany him one last time, gently, with respect, sadness and admiration.