Heart of darkness

After a 10-year pregnancy, cartoonist Henriette Valium gives birth to the mother of all minicomics

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

"That's it--the big hunk of love," beams Henriette Valium, "another 52 pages of, I don't know how to say it... acid delirium?"

He's clutching a copy of his new publication Mother's Heart, after rummaging it out of the sea of scrap and debris swamping his Villeray basement studio/printshop ("Crisse," he remarks, "c'est un bordel..."). Now, 52 pages isn't unusual for a self-published, hand-printed "minicomic," but at a foot by a foot and a half, the "mini" part seems questionable. Also, minicomics are traditionally sloppy, amateurish affairs (the comix equivalent of indie lo-fi rock), not hyper-dense, technically-exquisite barrages of demented genius. And they're not supposed to take a decade to produce.

"I started it 10 years ago, when I lived on William Street in Old Montreal," says Valium. "I was fed up with doing short strips, comics only a page or two long. So I started "Mother's Heart," the story which ties the various strips in the book together. It took 10 years, though, because I was constantly doing other stuff, and doing a page here and a page there. I started doing those thematic pages, like 'Alcohol,' 'Violence' and 'The Crisis,' and inserted them into the story where it was suitable."

Mother's Heart is being released simultaneously in French as Coeur de Maman, but I use the terms "English" and "French" loosely here, given Valium's penchant for linguistic corruption--a parallel to the bio- and sociological-degradation rampant in his graphics. The book sees new antics from his trademark characters, the twisted German scientist Dr. Lekron and his routinely-brutalized sidekick Pattou, as they stumble through a horrific labyrinth of perverted sex, noxious excretions, hate, loathing and hopelessness, all rendered in excruciatingly precise detail.

"If I worked on it non-stop, like a nine-to-five job, one page start to finish would take me about a week. As it is, it's a month. At a certain point I decided that I didn't want to do any more damn comics. But the thing was already half-done, so I said to myself, 'Fuck, I've got to finish it.' If I don't, it's a waste. I have no choice: I have to finish what I start."

2 legit 2 quit

Valium's frustration with the medium is a common one: all work and no pay makes Jack or Jill one pissed-off ink monkey. While screenprinting concert posters (the same "technology" behind the handmade Mother's Heart) allows Valium to continue making down payments of his Porsche, weighing input versus payout has left him bitter about comics, his medium of choice. At the same time, he's too much the sissypants mama's boy to actually throw in the towel.

"At the beginning of the '90s I was sending out all these packages of copies and books of my stuff, and never getting a goddamn fucking answer. Then I did the first Primitive Cretin book, and said, 'If this doesn't work, then it's last call.' But then Fantagraphics printed an English edition in the States. So I figured, well, alright, I'll keep at it."

Good thing, because at long last attention is picking up. He's long had a small cult following in Europe, and is planning to exhibit work in Amsterdam and Marseilles (as well as in Quebec City and down home here at Foufs), but now Valium has set his sights on the States. At the end of this month he travels to sunny, horrifying L.A. to show works at La Luz de Jesus gallery, the very same lowbrow art barn that reignited Robert Williams' career in the early '80s.

"After that, in September, I'm going down to Maryland for a comics event called Expo 2000, with Simon Bosse, Eric Braun and Jamie Salomon, sort of a Montreal team. I don't know if we're going to win, but we'll attack anyway. The war is just beginning, and we're the first wave of bodies."

Christ is the cancer

Back at the basement bunker, plans to stockpile more ammo for that war continue. "I'm gonna do a second Primitive Cretin, which will be a compilation of stuff I've already done, but I think I'm also going to try some stylistic exploration, maybe even collage or something."

You see, every time Valium has a "fuck comics" fit, he starts to entertain notions of moving on to "real art," creating paintings and prints that will make him the toast of the Manhattan gallery world and keep him in coke and whores 'til the cows come home. The results make his comics seem clear and cuddly by comparison.

"This one will have taken me two years, when I finish it" he says, unrolling a sprawling, corrosive family portrait writhing with superimposed lizards. "It's the family of Josef Goebbels, him, his wife and all his kids. I got the image out of a magazine article on suicides. At the end of the war, they were in a bunker, and she poisoned all the kids except the oldest, who was absent. I call it 'The Survivor.'"

Oh, those Nazis! Hitler's pugnacious posse has lately provided substantial source material for Valium's bastardized "portraits," as seen on the "Monsters" page of Mother's Heart. Needled on this, he retorts, "It's not always Nazis! I really like using Hirohito as well, or maybe Stalin!"

Scrounging some more, he pulls out a filthy plastic bowl brimming with photos he's layered, pierced, folded, spindled and mutilated. "See, look, I found this book of photos of American actors and whatever. I don't know what I'm going to do with this, exactly. Maybe I'll do a book, The Religious Association of the Diseased, all doctors and their patients with text below saying, 'Thank you, God, thank you, Doctor, you've saved me from the car accident,' and show the car all fucked up on the facing page. Sort of an annual report from this fictitious Catholic medical society."

If there's one thing Dr. Valium likes to work his medical mayhem on more than Euro-fascists, it's good ol' homegrown Catholicism. "I'm always telling myself, 'Ah, I have to drop the religion thing.' But it keeps coming back. The religious factor, with all the cross symbols, the Star of David, the Nazi swastika and all. To me, religion is a medical problem--a cancer of ideas." :



Valium launches Mother's Heart at Locallaben (15 Notre-Dame w., #047) on Saturday, April 15, 5pm

... more arts