Caviar and cosmology

Travels across the world and far beyond it in
Ruts and Gullies and Catland Empire

FELINE FREAKOUT: Catland Empire

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

From a pair of illustrators with connections to Montreal, two journeys captured in graphic novel form have recently been released—one a travelogue, the other a trip.

Quebec City native Philippe Girard reminisces about a short jaunt to Russia in Ruts and Gullies: Nine Days in Saint Petersburg. In, 2007, with Montreal comic artist Jimmy Beaulieu at his side (it would be interesting to see Beaulieu’s spin on the same visit), Girard attended a comics festival in St. Petersburg, Russia’s Baltic outlet for culture and art.

The recollections lack the penetrating, objective sociopolitical insights that litter the comparable Asian travelogues of Guy Deslisle (Pyongyang etc.), but with a mere week to work from, Girard’s superficial observations—Russians are friendly and drink a fair bit, they’re not like James Bond villains, they have some neat quirks—are about all that could be asked for.

The backbone of the book, Girard’s real journey, is in fact his coming to terms with the death of his close friend Guillaume a year prior. Guillaume’s memory haunts Girard, almost literally, and his visits mark both the debut of each of the day-by-day chapters and the steps in Girard’s grieving process.

The clear and simple structure and intentions of Ruts and Gullies are mirrored by his similarly uncluttered artwork, a charming and very distilled style that wastes little ink and nails its targets—a page of pocket-sized portraits of the festival’s various comic artist guests is a particular delight.

From the former “evil empire,” we move over to Catland Empire, the new graphic novel from onetime Montrealer Keith Jones. With his previous Drawn & Quarterly art book, the miniature but mega-packed Bacter-Area, Jones showcased his penchant for tightly controlled chaos, noisy tableaus full of lasers, cowboys, ice cream cones and, fuck, I dunno, broccoli? Stuff, anyway.

Relating a proper narrative—even one that revolves around cats, dogs, Time, Space, beer, snacks, planet-wide genocide and the clockworks of the cosmos—required a reduction in the density of Jones’ artwork, something he compensates for both with loopy wordplay (“three-headed manitou cyclops rodents” over here, “radial intercom deathcamps” over there) and a colour scheme suggesting the controlled detonation of a Crayola factory.

The mix that Jones achieves here, blending the vast and fearsome ontological imaginings of, say, Philip K. Dick with refined riffing on school-binder doodles and cereal-box bonhommes, is an intriguing, potentially irritating and/or enthralling one—the gears and mechanisms of the universe through eternity as explained by a nine-year-old riding a gummy-bear sugar high.

RUSSIAN ROADTRIP: St. Petersburg

RUTS AND GULLIES: NINE DAYS IN
SAINT PETERSBURG BY PHILIPPE
GIRARD, BDANG (CONUNDRUM
PRESS), PB, 160 PP., $17
CATLAND EMPIRE BY KEITH JONES,
DRAWN & QUARTERLY, PB,
184 PP., $32.95