Albert Chartier By Jeet Heer National Post (November 20, 2003). Unless you grew up in a farm in Quebec, you've probably never heard of Albert Chartier, one of the most delightful illustrators Canada has ever produced. For almost sixty years, from 1943 until 2002, Chartier drew a monthly comic strip Onesime for Le Bulletin des Agriculteurs, a magazine that, like the farmers' almanacs of yore, remains a fixture of rural Quebecois life. Neither Chartier nor the magazine attracted many readers in big cities like Montreal or Paris, let alone the English-speaking world. Paradoxically for an artist who worked mainly for a rustic audience, Chartier's drawings are marked by metropolitan elegance and sophisticated wit. Consider the cartoon that accompanies this column: a bejeweled dowager, her balloon-shaped bosom barely contained in a strapless dress, sits in a spacious theatre booth with her tuxedoed partner, presumably her husband. With lofty confidence, this wealthy grand dame looks down upon the stage through tiny theatre glasses, held in a dainty white-gloved hand. Meanwhile her mate, one ear cocked near a radio, tries to catch word about a hockey game. Clearly this couple is divided, as high cultural aspirations battle a passion for sporting news. While the joke is understated, the compositional grace of the drawing holds our attention long after we stop smiling at the gag. The whiteness of the dowager, not just her dress but also her hair and gloves, is set against the ruddy earth-tone background. Aside from the plump lady up front, there is another woman in the extreme left who is slimmer but exudes an equally snobbish attitude. While both women seem to have their eyes almost closed in haughty contemplative composure, the hockey fan is pop-eyed with delight. With its debonair style and sly humour, Chartier's drawing calls to mind the classic cartoons that appeared in the early New Yorker, under the famed editorship of Harold Ross. Like New Yorker stalwart Peter Arno, Chartier clearly enjoys poking fun at the amply-fed upper class. In fact, although its style is characteristic of Chartier's work, this drawing appeared in a slightly more upscale publication than his usual fare, since it served as the cover for Le Samedi, weekly magazine supplement of La Presse. Still, while slightly more accessible than Le Bulletin des Agriculteurs, this drawing wouldn't have circulated outside of Quebec. As an artist who did fine work while living tucked away from the main centres of culture and fame, Albert Chartier is typical of many talented Canadian cartoonists from the past century. As a rule, even fairly successful Canadian cartoonists tended to have, at best, a strong regional audience but little national or international recognition. Aside from its own intrinsic merit, Chartier's career is worth examining for what it reveals about the history of cartooning in Canada. Albert Chartier was born in 1912 in Plateau Mont-Royal, which was then a solidly working class neighborhood of Montreal, although it has since gentrified. Chartier learned both English and French thanks to his father, a traveling salesman whose sales territory included the United States. Since traveling salesmen ply their ware while cracking jokes, Chartier had an ideal paternity for a cartoonist. Aside from his father, Chartier had many other links with the wider world simply through the fact that he grew up in Montreal in the early decades of the century. At the time it was far more cosmopolitan than anywhere else in Canada, and in fact most of North America. Especially in the 1920s, when most of the continent suffered under prohibition, Montreal's sane tolerance of alcohol drew fun-seekers from the neighboring Anglo states and provinces. Coming of age in a city of jazz clubs and cabarets, Chartier picked up on the risqué humor that still flourished in these nightspots. Pretty women, double entendres, and winking hints of sexuality would remain recurring elements in Chartier's work. After a brief stint in art school in the early 1930s, Chartier started his career as freelance artist, working briefly for a comic book company in New York before returning to Canada. In the early 1940s, Chartier hooked up with Le Bulletin des Agriculteurs, for whom he created his comic strip Onesime. Set in the Quebec countryside, this strip followed the humorous travails of Onesime, a soft middle-aged Walter Mitty figure. A chinless pipe-smoker who always wears a pince-nez with the long chain dangling from his face, Onesime is a typically harried comic strip husband. His wife Zenoide, who is as round as the opera-going dowager, constantly harries Onesime, and occasionally threatens him with a rolling pin. Our hapless hero is also beset by his other family members, including his crusty father and a sleek niece (who is always attracting wolfish male attention). Even nature conspires against poor Onesime: like anyone living in rural Canada, he frequently finds himself or his car snowed in. Aside from the marvelous comic creation of Onesime, who soldiers through his endless problems with only mild grumbles, Chartier's strip has many other virtues. The cartoonist is s keen observer of rural folkways, so the strip captures a large swath of Quebec social history as the province moved from being a citadel of Catholic conservatism towards its current acceptance of secular modernity. Yet, as we've seen, parts of Quebec have long been modern, especially the city that Chartier grew up in. His Montreal background explains the interesting and fruitful tension in Chartier's work: although his subject matter in Onesime is rural, his style has always been crisply modernistic. From their earliest days, Onesime and his characters were drawn with a slinky, sensuous line, which is always eye-pleasingly clear. Chartier did more than just record Quebec's transition to modernity, he did so in an appropriately modernist style. Now 91 years old and only recently retired, Chartier lives in Saint Jean De Matha, Quebec. In rural Quebec, he remains a cherished local hero: there is bridge named after him in his town. Unfortunately, those who didn't grow up reading Onesime have been slower to appreciate Chartier's work. For Guelph-based cartoonist Seth, the lack of fame of Chartier and other Canadian cartoonists of his era can be traced to the venues they published in. "I don't think cartoons things were thought of as not much different from the section on how to feed your chickens," Seth quips. "They were just part of the family journal." Chris Oliveros, publisher of the Montreal firm Drawn and Quarterly, concurs with the idea that Chartier has been unjustly ignored. "With the exception of two poorly produced books published in Quebec in the 1970s, [Chartier's] life's work has never been collected in book form, no museum has ever held a retrospective dedicated to his art, and he remains unrecognized on any official level by both the Canadian and Quebec governments," complains Oliveros. Oliveros is working hard to redress this cultural injustice of Chartier's obscurity. In the new issue of his flagship journal Drawn and Quarterly, Oliveros is publishing seventy plus pages of Chartier's art, including a healthy sampling of Onesime and many lively magazine illustrations. (Set to be released in a few weeks, Drawn and Quarterly volume 5 is a perfect Christmas gift for lovers of Canadian art). Interesting, Oliveros's effort to recover Chartier's work for a wider audience is being matched by the efforts of a few other enthusiasts to unearth Canada's cartooning past. Perhaps Chartier's closest English-speaking counterpart was Jimmie Frise (1891-1948), whose delightful weekly comic strip Birdseye Center was a frisky and amusingly off-kilter record of small town Ontario. It appeared for many decades in the Toronto Star. Tragically Frise, whose work was admired by Ernest Hemingway, not long after he started working on a syndicated strip that was attracting a larger audience. Kenneth S. Barker, a retired Presbyterian minister living in Owen Sound, Ontario is working on a biography of Frise, believing the artist has a spot in Canadian cultural history. Brad Mackay, a Toronto freelance writer who is collaborating with Seth on a history of Canadian cartoonists, agrees on the importance of Frise's work. "Aside from his obvious artistic skills, Birdseye Center serves as this subtle riff on how urbanites imagine life in the country," Mackay notes. "His imaginary town of Birdseye Center was obviously based on his hometown Lake Scugog, which is about 90 minutes outside of Toronto. The characters are all kind of slightly exaggerated small-town folk who have one over on big city types (i.e. Torontonians) who drop in to hunt or fish." During their careers, artists like Frise and Chartier attracted readers in small town and rural Canada, who loved these artists for showing everyday life through antic eyes. Thanks to the work of Chris Oliveros and other researchers, we can see that these artists now deserve a second audience, one that can appreciate them for their elegant art and their faithful recording of our past. With luck, the republication of Chartier's work will spark a larger interest in Canada's cartooning history.