First Comics News: My current interviewee for First Comics News is the much-lauded Canadian comics creator Gabriel Morrissette, who has given comics readers such amazing Canadian comic books as the series New Triumph: Featuring Northguard #1 through #5, which he illustrated (a uniquely Canadian superhero), written by his fellow Canadian Mark Shainblum. Mr. Morrissette also illustrated Roulette #1, GoGirl #1, The True North #1, The True North II #1, Chapterhouse Archives: Northguard #1 (a one-shot), Gene Day’s Black Zeppelin #4 and #5, Netherworlds #1, Angloman #1 and #2 (I still haven’t tracked down a copy of Angloman #2, but it’s on my want list), and numerous other independent (Indie) comics titles from various companies. In Quebec, Gabriel did art for the French titles Croc and Safarir, and in Europe, he worked on the title Égide, in collaboration with Fred Weytens at Delcourt.
Gabriel Morrissette: Same here, I did only one issue, and the whole company, Adventurers or some such, went belly up (Netherworlds #1). Those were humour magazines (Croc, Safarir, and Égide), like Mad magazine. The folks who did CROC also did a French version of Mad magazine, to which I contributed one feature, a spoof of a Quebec TV show called SCOOP.
1st: Okay. That is useful information, thanks, because online it lists Netherworlds as having six issues. Obviously, that is incorrect.
Gabriel: Those (Mackenzie Queen series, The Jam Special #1, and The Jam ongoing series) were created by my friend, the late Bernie Mireault. That feature did appear first in New Triumph: Northguard #2. Bernie came to us after #1 came out, and he proposed The Jam. I said yes to it right away, because it was such a contrast to Northguard. Bernie passed away in September 2024, shocking everybody in the Canadian comics community.
1st: I, too, was shocked when I heard that Bernie Mireault had passed away in 2024. That is so very sad. He was an incredible creator. Regrettably, I never got a chance to meet him. As mentioned, Gabriel, you illustrated Canada’s New Triumph: Featuring Northguard #1 through #5 (a uniquely Canadian costumed superhero written by Mark Shainblum, who I think makes his home in Toronto). Then you illustrated Roulette #1, another Canadian comic, I think, though I never saw it.
Gabriel: That was part of what became GAIJIN; there was only one issue of GoGirl #1. I had nothing to do with that. I was and still am a huge fan of Trina Robbins; I might have drawn for that.
1st: I see. You also worked on The True North #1, The True North II #1, and Chapterhouse Archives: Northguard #1 through #4.
Gabriel: As best as I know, there was only one issue of that (Chapterhouse Archives: Northguard #1 through #4, collected). Same here, I did only one issue of Netherworlds #1, and then the whole company, Adventure Publications, went belly up in 1988.
1st: From a Canadian website devoted to fictional Canuck heroes, I found this: “Yours (Gabriel) are the best known in the world of English-Canadian comics. Your (and Mark Shainblum’s) characters Northguard, Fleur de Lys, and Angloman, created in collaboration with Mark Shainblum, have become Canadian national icons, and Library and Archives Canada has dedicated a website to them. Fleur de Lys has even been featured on a Canadian postage stamp.” I myself own an unused set of those. This quote with you, Mr. Gabriel Morrissette, was at the above-mentioned website: “I met Mark Shainblum at a comics convention. Mark had just launched Orion, a comics magazine (of comics and science fiction), and Matrix Graphics, a small comic book publishing company.”
Gabriel: Not quite. I did see Mark Shainblum at the Comicon interviewing Gene Day many years ago, but our first contact came later.
1st: In addition, Gabriel, for our readers, you also illustrated for DC Comics titles such as Checkmate, Deathstroke the Terminator, Doc Savage (volume two), Hawk and Dove, Justice League Task Force, Lobo, a New Teen Titans Annual, Primal Force, Ragman: City of the Dead #1 through #6, and Teen Titans #1 from 1992.
Gabriel: The first and possibly only Doc Savage Annual, too; the only story in that run that happened in the 1930s, Doc Savage’s true milieu.
1st: Yep! The rest of that Doc Savage series was set in the present at the time it was published. Your Ragman: City of the Dead six-issue mini-series for DC was amazing. And at Marvel, Gabriel, you inked Saint Sinner #7 and drew Spider-Man 2099 Special #1. That is nowhere near a complete list of all the comics you have worked on. You are an illustrator, a comic book artist, and an animator. That is quite an impressive resumé, Gabriel. I think I know what keeps you up at night. Smile. Gabriel, what can you tell me about the Quebec animated TV series Arthur that you worked on? Treat the subject as though I know absolutely nothing at all about it, because that is quite literally true. I actually looked at some Quebec French comics interviews you did some time ago, and, since I am regrettably not bilingual, I translated them through Google Translate. I can be a sneaky little dickens when I want to be. Smile.
Gabriel: I am afraid I worked on ARTHUR only for two weeks, and then I moved on to another production. In this case, my timing was good because the owners of the studio CINAR became involved in a scandal. I’ll let Wikipedia tell you the story of that.
1st: This is also a translation from a French interview you did a while ago: “You also worked on the adaptation of Bob Morane, which brought you recognition in Europe.” How would you describe animation compared to comics? What kind of experience did you have with Arthur and Bob Morane?
Gabriel: I worked on Bob Morane on clean-up, taking designs and storyboards and making them usable for the layout stage, mostly backgrounds. These methods of production are now totally outdated. Layouts were drawings done at production size and included various background elements and key poses of characters with camera moves and all that. All that work was sent overseas for animation. There was not much recognition here because, in animation, you are a small cog in a large machine. Unless you are a director or producer, nobody knows you, given the speed at which credits flash by on the screen. It was a job to pay the bills. My move into animation was due to the collapse of the U.S. comic book market in the 1990s.
1st: Especially at that time, what was often referred to as the “Black and White Glut,” black-and-white comics, not coloured, except for the covers.
Gabriel: I did learn the ins and outs of animation production. I did study animation at Concordia University, but that was more geared toward the National Film Board of Canada’s artistic animation rather than commercial animation. But I did get to work on Bob Morane, which I had read in the original book version and in comics in my youth. Back then, my favourite Marabout book was their translation of Doc Savage, with the great Jim Bama covers.
1st: I, too, loved those paperback Doc Savage novels, The Shadow novels, Weird Heroes, and the Lee Falk The Phantom novels. I even liked the reprint of the Lone Ranger novels. Gabriel, based on further internet research I did today, it is my understanding that you worked on other animations as well, including Papyrus and The Boy (Robin, Special Agent). What can you tell our readers about your experiences working on various animated series?
Gabriel: On Papyrus, I did layouts, full layouts. I also worked on THE BOY, doing storyboard clean-up. The studio that produced the show was sold, and I kept working on it after it continued with a new studio. One episode was a terrible mess script-wise, and even worse at the storyboard level. I cleaned it up to the point that I re-did thirty to forty percent of the show, if not more. I think the episode was called “Day of the Dolphin.” One of the great regrets of my career is almost working on the BATMAN: The Animated Series of the 1990s, the Bruce Timm series. But the studio I was working for had no idea what they were doing, so it did not work out. Because of them, I would have had the job. I do not remember their name. I did layouts on Taz-Mania, which was a Warner Bros. animated TV series, and which was, to me, an abomination in the way it was handled behind the scenes. It had Taz as a teen, with a family. The people working on it thought the way the studio handled that job caused the studio to lose Batman: The Animated Series.
1st: Oh, you mean the Warner Bros. animated Tasmanian Devil, “Taz.” Sorry, I was a little slow on the uptake there. Yes, sometimes film studio people at the top meddle with the results of creators’ efforts and, in effect, gum up the works. It is my understanding that you worked on a project called Dieffenbaker, about the late 1950s Canadian Prime Minister, John Diefenbaker, who doomed the Avro Arrow CF-105 jet interceptor project. Diefenbaker not only cancelled the entire Avro Arrow CF-105 project, but he also had the five flying Avro Arrow jet interceptors, the most advanced jets on Earth at that time, cut up with acetylene torches. “Dief” was before my time, before I was born, but for that reason alone, I am not a fan of the man. That said, I would love to hear about the Diefenbaker project you worked on. Was that a comic book one-shot, a comics series, or an animated film or series? I did not know about this project, and I have to track it down. I learned about it after looking at your Wikipedia page.
Gabriel: Those books were done for Jackfruit Press. That was another publisher that was sold and then went belly up in terms of work.
1st: Hmm. Like I said, people at the top who run a lot of companies often gum up the works. That is a shame in both cases.
Gabriel: For Jackfruit Press, I also did Jean Chrétien: The Strangling PM, about another former Prime Minister of Canada. There is even an anecdote in there that I got from my father, who briefly went to the same school as him. John Diefenbaker was always fighting in school when kids made fun of him because of his crooked mouth. I also did Trudeau and the Swinging Sixties, about Pierre Trudeau, another former Prime Minister of Canada, and the father of much later Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Diefenbaker was a lot of fun to draw; he had great facial features to caricature. I did two books with Bernie Mireault in colour. I also did Charles Tupper and John S. D. Thompson. On one of those two, I only did the pencils. I do not remember which one that was.
1st: In Europe, Gabriel, you worked on the title Égide, in collaboration with Fred Weytens at Delcourt. What was Égide? Was that a comic book? What can you tell us about it?
Gabriel: Égide was done for the French publisher Delcourt. It was supposed to be part of a line of books that came out faster than the average French comic book, but the system was not quite perfected. I did the pencils from a storyboard. Denis Rodier, who did the first book, inked only the characters, so I ended up inking the backgrounds, integrating the figures in Photoshop, and doing the lettering. You might think anyone can do lettering; you just type the text in, but that is not the case. You have to learn how to place the lettering and balance it well within the panel and across the page, and you have to do it without fighting the artwork.
1st: I have always thought that the lettering of comic books and graphic novels is a whole skill in and of itself.
Gabriel: It is a whole skill in itself. By the way, Égide is the name of the shield of Athena. It was more of a straightforward action book with lots of hardware, guns, cars, and tanks, not my favourite things to draw. There was no third book; it ended quickly.
1st: Okay. With those questions asked, I would like to start with some biographical questions to allow our readers to get to know you a little bit, if that is all right, before we get into the nitty-gritty. If there are any questions you would rather not answer, just leave them blank, and I will delete them later.
Gabriel: Oh, the boring parts. I was born in Val-d’Or in the Abitibi region of Quebec, basically 500 kilometres northwest of Montreal, a good seven- to eight-hour drive.
1st: Depending on how heavy your foot is on the gas pedal, I guess. I like the “boring stuff.”
Gabriel: And I was raised in Malartic, 20 kilometers from Val-d’Or. Big Trekkies will remember a Valdore Romulan ship in one of the Star Trek movies, but the town came first. It’s a gold-mining region. There used to be two mines when you entered Malartic, and the galleries of the East Malartic Mine ran close to the surface. A stretch of street was closed back in the day. Since then, the primary and secondary schools I attended no longer exist, nor does the house I grew up in, because they were in the zone that became the new mine. Nowadays, a mine is an open-sky hole that keeps growing. A full third of the town was moved for the mine, including my primary and high school. I really can’t go home again. Heck, there was even an episode of the TV show Monster Moves about it.
1st: How old were you when you started drawing, and how old were you when you first discovered the existence of comic books? Were you drawing already when you first discovered comics, or did you become an artist after being inspired by reading them?
Gabriel: All kids draw, and I grew up reading Tintin, and eventually Asterix. I also loved the comic strips in the newspaper my father read, The Montréal-Matin, especially Brick Bradford, by Paul Norris.
1st: Oh, okay. Wait, “Paul Norris.” I’m now wondering if that was the same Paul Norris who created the DC Comics character Aquaman in the 1940s, a character who is still with us today. Or perhaps it’s just a coincidence of the same name. Aquaman was created by Mort Weisinger (writer) and Paul Norris (artist). In my research, I also came across information that Paul Norris worked on Secret Agent X-9. Online, it said that writer William Ritt worked on Brick Bradford from 1933 to 1948, and that artist Clarence Gray worked on the same strip from 1933 to 1956, when he passed away. They created Brick Bradford, and then later, Paul Norris had a long stint on the strip from 195 to 1987. My, that’s a long run for one artist! I remember Brick Bradford.
Gabriel: I’m a big science fiction fan, and I was quite impressed by the newspaper strip Secret Agent X-9. Years later, I got to meet both Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson. Fanboy’s dream comes true. Back then, if you wanted to read French comics, you had books, but mostly you read weekly magazines with a wide array of features and comics, like Spirou, Tintin (both Belgian), or Pilote from France, or Le Journal de Mickey. I read Pilote, which had Astérix, the hot thing at the time. They also had Valérian, and the comic is way better than the movie.
1st: I saw the movie in the theater, but I regret to say I’ve never read the comic strip that preceded it.
Gabriel: I always loved Blueberry, done by a new guy named Giraud. I wonder what happened to him. (Smile.) And lots of other stuff you’ve probably never heard of.
1st: LOL. Yes, Jean Giraud, also known by his nom de plume Moebius, did just fine and had a brilliant career! I discovered Blueberry when Marvel’s Epic imprint began reprinting the French graphic novels in English. For readers unfamiliar with it, Blueberry was a Western series. The character was nicknamed Blueberry, but he was also a “Blue Coat”, a Union cavalryman during the American Civil War. I bought most of them when they were new and have reread them many times.
Gabriel: We also had French versions of Marvel comics from Québec, and Superman and Batman from France. The Marvel stuff was fairly limited at first: Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Hulk, Captain America, Millie the Model (really!), and The Rawhide Kid. They expanded later. They were called Héritage Comics, published by a printer who mostly did cookbooks and needed material to keep the presses rolling. That’s where I discovered John Romita Sr., John Buscema, and especially Jack Kirby!
1st: I have a number of those Heritage Comics black and white Marvel reprints in the French language. They were published on newsprint, even the covers, which were the only part in colour. I couldn’t read them, but the format was so different, I bought them second-hand as I found them. They were published and distributed to Quebec only, so how any of them made it to Nova Scotia, I have no clue! I recall that writer (Samuel) Dashiel Hammett and artist Alex Raymond created the Secret Agent X-9 newspaper strip, which you mentioned. Those names I did (not) have to look up. Dashiel Hammett, as he was better known, spun a lot of wonderful vintage pulp magazine prose fiction stories; he is remembered in The Pulps as one of the top Greats! And, of course, he wrote The Maltese Falcon, later adopted as one of the best Humphrey Bogart movies! Secret Agent X-9 was, of course, right up there with the James Bond 007 type of secret agents and spies. I loved all that stuff!
Gabriel: Years later, I got to meet both Goodwin and Williamson. Fanboy’s dream comes true. Back then, if you wanted to read French comics, you mostly read weekly magazines like Spirou, Tintin, Pilote, or Le Journal de Mickey. I read Pilote, which featured Astérix, and also Valérian. And Blueberry, by that “new guy” Giraud. Gee, I wonder what happened to him. And lots of other stuff you probably never heard of.
1st: Since you are from Montreal, were you the first comics fan to ever read French-language comics titles? What were some of the French-language comic books and/ or graphic novels you recall buying and reading? I’m thinking most of those titles may be totally unfamiliar to most of our readership, and therefore, I think it might be very interesting to explore that.
Gabriel: As mentioned before, I read a wide variety of subjects, since the Franco-Belgian market was more varied. Tintin, Astérix, but also Gotlib, who was influenced by Harvey Kurtzman. René Goscinny, editor-in-chief of Pilote and writer of Astérix, Lucky Luke, Iznogoud, and more, had lived in New York City when he was younger and worked with Kurtzman. When you see a reference to a French person named René in Little Annie Fanny, it’s a Goscinny reference. Gotlib also did film and TV pastiches with the artist Alexis that I still love. Eventually, I discovered The Spirit by Will Eisner, and Comanche and Bernard Prince by Greg and Hermann. When I was about thirteen or fourteen, on a trip to Montréal, I bought The Encyclopedia of Comics by Maurice Horn, so I learned about lots of creators, like Osamu Tezuka, and characters like Modesty Blaise. I was a die-hard comics fan early on, exposed to many styles and subject matters. I also read Spirou by André Franquin and Les Schtroumpfs (The Smurfs) by Peyo.
1st: As an artist, are you mostly or totally self-taught, or did you attend an art school? And if so, which one, and when was it that you attended the same?
Gabriel: Mostly self-taught, there were not a lot of cartoonists in Abitibi to mentor me. So I read lots of books on how to be a cartoonist. I went into animation at Concordia University in Montréal because it was the closest I could get to comics. But back in the early 1980s, the art world was into conceptual art, so there were no classical drawing classes. I started in studio art but switched to animation, which was better suited to my needs.
1st: What were the circumstances under which you first found out about comics, that particular art form? And, when did you begin buying them?
Gabriel: At one of the first proper comic conventions in Montréal that I attended, I met Marv Wolfman. After that, I did a two-page strip of the New Teen Titans being interviewed by Bob and Doug McKenzie. (I was a big SCTV fan.) I showed those two pages to a local comic shop owner, who told me about a guy putting out a fanzine called Orion. That guy was Mark Shainblum, who was beginning to work on Northguard with Geoff Isherwood on art. Geoff left for New York City; he had dual citizenship, so I took over. At the same time, I was doing work in French. I went to Croc (a French humor magazine, pronounced “crow”; the last “c” is silent), which had started a year or two earlier. I began a parallel career working in a more cartoony style, doing humor and satire. Working for Croc, I met Pierre Fournier, creator of Capitaine Québec, and co-writer Michel Risque. Later, I worked on the French comic Red Ketchup. These are big characters in Québec. When I was a kid, the only media-related thing I saw about comics was a show on Radio-Canada called Télé-Chrome. Kids in a Montréal studio would draw a comic strip while other kids called in to suggest what happened in the panels. At the end of the show, there was this tall guy with long hair who would talk about comics, and I clearly remember him telling the audience that the best U.S. comic series at the time was Swamp Thing, by Bernie Wrightson. The next day, I went to the local place that sold magazines and some English comics and found Swamp Thing #10, the last issue done by Wrightson, and I became a lifelong fan. The guy’s name was Jacques Hurtubise. Later, he became the publisher and editor of… Croc. The researcher working with him was Pierre Fournier. Pierre became a friend and mentor. My time at Croc was very important to me. The last time I saw Hurtubise was when I gave the induction speech for him into the Joe Shuster Hall of Fame.
1st: Gabriel, this has been a great interview chat! Thank you very much for participating in this First Comics News interview! I enjoyed it a great deal, and I hope that you did as well!
Ladies and gentlemen, Canada’s own, Mr. Gabriel Morrissette!
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