By Beth Hewitt

Be still my heart. Two months back I relished George O’Connor’s graphic narrative of the Dutch West India Company, and now I receive another boon in the form of Scott Chantler’s Northwest Passage, the story of the Hudson Bay Company. Set in 1755, in fictional Fort Newcastle (clearly modeled on the real York Factory), the novel describes the conflict between the major competitors for the land and resources of what is now interior Canada and which was, at that time, referred to as Rupert’s Land: the British Hudson’s Bay Company, the Native American tribes, and independent French traders. Chantler’s book is pure historical romance, with all the trappings of a James Fenimore Cooper novel.

Our protagonist is an aged heroic explorer, Charles Lord, who having become a bureaucratic functionary for Hudson’s Bay Company, eagerly anticipates his retirement when he will set out once again to discover a northwest passage. Our antagonist is Lord’s gratuitously cruel enemy, the Frenchman Guirin Montglave. The two men fight not just over beaver pelts and forts, but also Lord’s moody and asocial son, the product of Lord’s marriage to an Indian Princess. We even have a “noble savage” in the form of Cree shamen, who risks his own life to warn Lord of the impending threat to the Fort. In this novel, the Hudson’s Bay Company is good, the French are bad, and the Native are neutral. Clearly, then, the pleasure of the novel is not found in psychological shading, evocative prose (this is Chantler’s first foray into writing), or moral complexity. And yet, reading pleasure still abounds. And it comes, I think, from Chantler’s evident recognition that the ideal way to tell an historical romance is by way of the action picture. It is as if he determines that the best way to update Cooper is to mash him up with Tony Scott. The novel, for example, opens with a chase scene in which a mob of French mercenaries chase the shamen, Eagle Eye. These opening pages are beautiful: each page neatly divided into horizontal thirds, Chantler depicts the terror of the chase at the same time that the comic form allows his readers to do what an action film audience cannot: to pause and consider the relationship of the individual in space and time. In a strange way, then, what I enjoyed in this novel is precisely what I like in reading Cooper: even as we are swept into an historical adventure, we are slowed down by visual detail and framed vistas. Chantler’s true artistry lies in his talent for design and composition: he sees with a director’s eye, and what is most striking and beautiful about the novel is its filmic composition.

In the afterward to the second volume (there are three in the series), Chantler thanks Omni Press for publishing this book, “which feature neither guys with blades sticking out of their bodies nor the excruciating day-today lives of mope-y losers who can’t get a date.” If his implicit dismissal of some of the most important comic artists of the last 20 years (Pekar, Clowes, Ware, Lapham, Miller, Azzarello and Risso) seems unnecessary, then it nevertheless does point to fact that Chantler is breaking new graphic novel generic ground here, albeit by digging in an old novelistic form. Chantler is clearly indebted to other comic artists who have turned to historical settings—Ben Katchor or Chester Brown (whose tremendous Louis Riel likewise details territorial conflict in Rupert’s Land territory, albeit a century later). And like them, he has done his research. Yet one doesn’t finish Northwest Territory feeling as if you know much more about 18th century Canadian history. That said, I did learn that the graphic narrative is an ideal medium for the historical romance, and I’m happy to know it.