Drawing Conclusions

When I was a child, like many boys my age, I was fascinated with trains of all kinds. I remember a grey October day in 1977 when my family and I stood at Wakefield station in the Gatineau Hills, not far from where we lived, to await the arrival of Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh. I must admit I was more captivated by the steam locomotive puffing away than by the royal couple. But this was no simple machine: it had a certain aesthetic, forged in metal — a beauty paired with brute force. It looked like a big colourful toy drawn from my imagination and made manifest.

Years later, in 2018, when the writer and activist Anne-Marie Saint-Cerny approached me with an idea for a collaborative project about the Lac‑Mégantic rail disaster, I had just completed the illustrations for Vous avez détruit la beauté du monde: Le suicide scénarisé au Québec depuis 1763. For that...