Louis Riel

Legendary cartoonist Chester Brown's Louis Riel has been nominated for the 2003 Eisner Awards for Best Continuing Series. In this comic biography, Brown reveals that at least one dusty closet of Canadian history holds some skeletons that won't stop rattling. Canadians everywhere can tell the story of Louis Riel and the Red River Rebellion of 1869. To some Louis Riel was one of the founding fathers of a new nation. To others he was a murderer who nearly tore a country apart.Riel was a man so charismatic he was elected to government twice while in exile with a bounty on his head but so impassioned that his dramatic behaviour cast serious doubts on his sanity. The absolute rebel, Riel took on the army, the government, the Queen of England and even the Church in the name of his passionate vision of freedom for the people of the prairies. One of the hippest comics going, Louis Riel promises to be a controverial must-have in 2003. "How does a history of a real 19th-century Quebecois rebel mystic become fun to read? When he is drawn with the clownish proportions of a tiny head and a giant's body. Chester Brown makes history his own by rewriting it just slightly, while annotating every altered detail, and presenting it all in his spare, almost goofy drawing style." -Time