Luke Doucet & The White Falcon: Steel City Trawling Comic

The last pre-Whitehorse record I made was a dive into corners I’d abandoned from the Veal days. It was designed to be a bit ragged and frantic, in part inspired by our recent move to Hamilton and a reintegration into a blue collar milieu, reminiscent of my Winnipeg childhood. These are working class cities with people living simpler lives than what you’d witness on the glittering high streets of Toronto or Vancouver, where I’d been living since I left Winnipeg as a teenager.

I enlisted Andrew Scott from Sloan to produce, at the behest of his bandmate Chris Murphy. Deep into the early phase of my Sloan infatuation, I wanted as much of their magic as I could glean from whomever would agree to contribute. Murphy and I had recently recorded the theme song to the infamous first generation of CBC’s Q (with Jian Gomeshi) and I was feeling rock and roll music again after a few records of mining the sensitive and introspective parts of my psyche on previous offerings, Blood’s Too Rich, Broken (and Other Rogue States), and Aloha Manitoba.

Melissa would occasionally drag me to graphic novel and comic book Mecca, The Beguiling, in Toronto’s Mirvish Village (before it was carpet bombed into condos, chasing the artist types to Hamilton in droves). Books by Julie Doucet, R Crumb, Joe Matt, Daniel Clowes, Chris Weir, Joe Sacco and others depicted gritty urban decay and the mostly Gen Xers who survived it, using off-coloured humour, self deprecation and a dark lens to convey a perspective on modern living that wasn’t commonly represented in pop culture. They were refreshingly brave and irreverent.

In the early 2000s, David Collier was Hamilton’s offering to the strange world of underground graphic novels and he agreed to create the bulk of the artwork for Steel City Trawler. We met at his house in the North End of Hamilton, a stone’s throw from Bayfront Park where he dropped his kayak into the cool lake every morning before sunrise to row his way around the bay, in the shadow of the sprawling steel plants and their towering infernos belching flames and refinery particulate into the city air.

We discussed the general philosophy of the songs but mostly we talked about life, family, being artists and what cities looked like from where we stood. I gave him very little in the way of direction beyond “Listen to the songs and depict the story as you see it”. I encouraged him to create a comic book of sorts if that approach appealed to him, which it did.

This paradoxical way of reading the landscape is convenient and attractive to young struggling artists but there comes a point when it ceases to be a flex and retreats into simply being pathetic. Collier does hint at that in his work and I was made slightly uncomfortable when he presented it to me but I was very committed to the principle that he should tell whatever story he wanted to, as inspired by the music and the brief meeting we had. If I gave him that impression then I guess that’s on me.