Maxime Gérin is a Montreal-based illustrator whose works are often artfully portraiture-like, observational character studies buoyed by a strong sense of lived-in authenticity. He has produced several comics – Une Heure au Parc (2017) via the now-defunct La Mauvaise Tête imprint, followed by Ensemble (2018), and contributions to the Dagger Dagger (2020) and Cry Punch Comics (2021) anthologies, amongst a number of commissioned and personal projects.
At his studio – located in the shadow of Rosemont overpass in the city’s famously artist-friendly Plateau neighbourhood – the creatives that Maxime works alongside are in no short order of illustrative excellence and striking creativity – Mathieu Larone, James Collier, and Vincent Giard – all of whom have had their own momentum in ongoing projects within the local sequential arts scene. On the day of our conversation, I arrived at this studio space, and was greeted by Maxime’s head peering out the doorway. He wore a blue scarf especially for this interview.
Maxime: I regret wearing this scarf.
As I entered the room, my eye was immediately drawn to the behemoth visage of French actress Françoise Fabian, her headshot adorning the large scale poster for Éric Rohmer’s Ma nuit chez Maud (1969), tattered and aged, clipped to the studio wall.
Julian: Nice poster you’ve got there!
Maxime: Oh, I paid a lot of money for it. Maybe five hundred dollars.
Julian: I think it’s a good centerpiece for the space.
There are several books and artworks adorning the walls of the studio – including loose page layouts and sketches of a young family in peril, stalked by a mysterious group of stragglers in some vast wilderness. These are from The Hats Off! books, Maxime’s first comics work since 2021.
Julian: Tell me a bit about the origins for Hats Off!
Maxime: I had many ideas floating around, but I wasn’t able to actually go with one. It was kind of hard embarking on a story, but soon I saw Connor Willumsen’s Gray Green (2022). It’s a serialized strip that he made on Instagram. He’s always been a major inspiration, but the format in itself, I don’t think I’d encountered it much at the time…
Julian: That carousel feature, where you swipe panel to panel as you read the comic, yeah. So you, too, were doing a version of Hats Off! [then-titled Têtes à Chapeau] online for a little while, right?
Maxime: Yes, but soon after that, I thought, “Oh, I have enough ideas for this story to make it a long comic”. (…) I’ll rebuild it from scratch, on a stronger basis. But it began with the feeling that I should free myself of any limitation about what the story is about. So, I just started with this kind of cliched old idea of guys pushing a big rock on someone, keeping the setting as bare as possible. It could go anywhere.
Julian: Your characters certainly have a lived-in authenticity about them, they feel very observed… and yet, the big boulder, lifted with the sticks – it’s like a classic Wile E. Coyote Acme routine. Sort of a betrayal of that naturalism you otherwise work within.
Maxime: That’s something that is exciting to me. I’m naturally drawn to realism or naturalism. I can’t do cartoon-cartoons, it’s just too outside of my personality. I’ll have to insert some character moments, realistic dynamics. These two poles are exciting to me. I love just watching people, and it’s a huge part of everything I do; it’s why I draw. A lot of my ideas come from just observing people in real life.
Julian: Prior, you’d had your work published via La Mauvaise Tête and Les Éditions Nouveau Système. It seems like Hats Off! is self-published?
Maxime: Well, uh, yeah, when you say “Nouveau Système”, this is kind of a non-entity, actually. It’s something that Alex [Gofa] and I thought up when we were working on separate comics at the same time… for him, it was Backstab (2018). I was making Ensemble (2018). That’s also self-published!
Julian: Why no Nouveau Système label on this go around?
Maxime: Well, the label was always more of a fantasy, never a project that was working towards something material. We have the logo – that was actually done by Mathieu Labrecque, he does the animations and artwork for the New York Times’ crosswords now – and it would be a great wink to past projects to include it. It was always a tie between Al and I, never something set in stone. But perhaps on Hats Off! #2.
[Mathieu Larone enters the studio]
Mat: Oh, sorry you were talking
Julian: No, don’t worry about it. It’s fine. We’re just busy capturing the truth.
Mat: Uh oh.
Julian: It’s like that movie Civil War (2024).
Mat: Yeah, gotta get the perfect shot.
[Mat hands Maxime a sandwich]
Julian: What did you get there?
Mat: That? What’s that sandwich thing? Serranos.
Julian: Oh, yeah. nice.
Mat: Anyway, don’t mind me.
Maxime: Um, but I think that’s why I was in a bit of a rut. I was kind of pushed by Al’s dabbling in publishing anthologies. He had projects to publish, and I kind of embarked on it. (…) And so I had to come up with all of this work that would be in Dagger Dagger (2020) and then Cry Punch Comics (2021). But then I was kind of left on my own trying to find what I did and what to do next, because the other book’s Kickstarter didn’t work out. You know Gamma Twinkles?
Julian: Gamma Twinkles…
Maxime: Yeah, it was the thing that got uh controversy, when Al tried to do another anthology. It was called Gamma Twinkles. I was making a comic for it. But it had, um, what’s his name?
Mat: Brandon Graham.
Julian: Right.
Maxime: The whole Brandon Graham controversy came up and this book didn’t get financed.
Julian: It was that strong of a reaction from people?
Maxime: Yeah, it stopped completely. It’s a very small community. So when there’s a big controversy around it, it takes just a few people to talk. A lot of people know each other in comics. It was one of those decisive moments where people just chose … ‘I don’t want to back something that has this dude on it’, basically. It was kind of a perfect storm, it just didn’t work out.
Julian: That material for that comic you did, that never went anywhere?
Maxime: No – I think I was struggling with parts of my story. It was more ambitious. As a sci-fi story. I wasn’t enjoying making it that much.
Julian: Yeah, perhaps the genre expectations had a stifling effect on the creative process for you?
Maxime: I was struggling with too many logistical questions surrounding the universe I was building, and it wasn’t stuff that I found very interesting to deal with. (…) I wasn’t coming up with interesting enough questions for myself. I would like to be excited about the story and release it on my own. But there was too much baggage, I guess, attached to it.
Julian: Such is the fickle business of producing comics …
Maxime: So this informs why I started Hats Off! It was so bare and so minimal in its conception, like very few characters, barely a setting. Just that core dynamic (…) these guys living in an idyllic setting, but then on top of them, there’s a conflict brewing that they’re unaware of until a tragedy strikes.
Julian: Do you find that the comics community has a tangible effect on your process?
Maxime: It’s about working alongside people I love. I have tons of ambitious people around me. So I leech off of their energy. I was excited about [James Collier’s] Ballpark (2024), and I thought, maybe I should do it also, maybe I’ll serialize Hats Off!, and I got kind of excited for the first time in a very long time about just making an actual comic. But the social thing is not very attractive to me. I have a social job, I have a social life. It’s not that I refuse to be part of a community, but going to conventions, tabling, it’s not something that will affect my productivity or how I do things.
Julian: But the trouble is having the work seen by people. With a community of any sort in any art practice, folks are there to rep you and put you through different channels, get the projects some exposure.
Maxime: Yeah, I need those people around to push me. If not, on my own, I’m a rock. I can get kind of crushed under the weight of everything, and the only way I was going to come into a story [for Hats Off!] was to not ask myself too many questions, not know where I was going. [When planning a comic], I usually make a small layout, an outline of pages, but rarely do I go over maybe four or five pages. I will write some dialogue ahead, but I almost never write any until after I’ve drawn the page, and I even place speech bubbles sometimes in a panel without knowing what will be in them. I just have to find these mechanisms where I can be at liberty to just make whatever comes naturally, more and more.
Julian: Yeah, and in general, the more you produce, the fewer questions you ask about the process.
Maxime: Yeah, I mean it was kind of a fantasy I had, making comics. I draw, I love stories, I read comics – so I should make a comic. It might be the most accessible way of telling a story I can think of. The means to do it are very accessible, but when you haven’t made any, everything seems kind of magic and weird and difficult.
Julian: Something I catch you doing is these portraits on your socials, of people…designing characters and creating these little moments with them. It feels like they’re almost in their own little world, the way they’re dressed, the way they’re postured. Perhaps outside of comics, that sort of ‘people-watching’ is another means of telling stories for you?
Maxime: That’s what actually drove me to comics, or at least that’s kind of how my brain arranges information – into stories or a little fantasies about the people I see. Perceiving, why somebody’s ‘like that’, what they do, or what they’re gonna do? I’m always kind of narrativizing. Even when I’m not drawing, that’s how I tend to process information. I just like constantly building little stories about the people around me.
Julian: Your characters definitely have that sort of tangible sensibility to them. You have some of these frumpy, disheveled people, and they wear these baggy clothes, just on their lonesome, and it all feels very lived in. There’s definitely a sense of isolation and alienation.
Maxime: Yeah, but I’m thinking I might be mythologizing my own art, because yeah, sometimes it’s just shapes, sometimes I just like baggy clothes. They have something visually – the dirty clothes filled with holes, rough beards. It’s just visually stimulating. It has a nice roughness to it, a texture.
Julian: Visually, do you have any specific influences or inspirations?
Maxime: Oh, yeah, of course. Well, I already mentioned Connor…
Julian: Just as far as how you lay out the page?
Maxime: I would say everything. I think he’s a major influence on all aspects of what I do, as he is, I think, for everyone in this room, too. We talk about him all the time. Alex Toth is also a big influence on me.
Julian: What about outside of comics? I know you’re a Rohmer guy…
[I point to the Ma nuit chez Maud poster looming over Maxime]
Maxime: It’s just the best.
Julian: I haven’t seen that one…
Maxime: I mean, you have the best one-hour-thirty of your life ahead of you.
Julian: The first movie of his I watched was The Green Ray (1986).
Maxime: It’s funny how this one became, I think, one of his most popular. I mean, they’re all of a very high caliber, I think, but this one [Ma nuit chez Maud] is just more special for me. The setting and the character dilemmas, how he shows what the character says versus what he does. It is very striking in this one, and beautiful, the interplay between the characters…it’s insane. It’s so magnificent and perfect.
Julian: Why work in comics? Why not film, something you also have a great affinity for? Even the commission in-progress, for Believer Magazine, centres on a bunch of filmgoers collectively discussing a movie. The idea of cinema, certainly, appears to be a passion of yours.
Maxime: It’s taken me a long time to accept my own rhythms. I mean, that’s why comics, as my chosen medium, is actually related to my personality type. Filmmaking was attractive to me for so many reasons, and I’m a big film buff, but to me it’d feel inflexible! Some people are just made for it, but for me, I have to be in complete control of my own process.
Julian: Yeah, it’s just so much more immediate, as you’d suggested, to make comics. Obviously, film has become so much more accessible, but if you want to do it well, you’re always inevitably adhering to other people’s processes, working with at least a few people. You’re constantly negotiating with others, in a creative sense, to bring a film to life. Unless you’re, like, an animator, a Don Hertzfeld or a Bill Plympton.
Maxime: It’s never good to go too much against how you’re kind of naturally doing things. I mean, I’m not satisfied with anything that I’ve done or written, but yeah, there’s always the feeling with newer books, “it’s not as bad as the ones that came before”. It’s a continual growth.
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