The mastery in Michel Rabagliati’s storytelling sneaks up on you. I remember my first encounter with his work, in one of those big Drawn and Quarterly anthologies circa 2000, thinking that I had found a cartoonist with a knack for well-observed comedy.
<img class="wp-image-395 alignright size-medium" style="width: 150px;" src="http://columbusscribbler.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/paulmovesout.jpeg" alt="Paul Moves Out cover">And then I read Paul Moves Out, first published in English in 2005 by Drawn and Quarterly. Yes, it was funny. Yes, the Montreal setting was vivid and fun. But it became clear that the cartoony figures and jaunty tone was just a surface layer. Rabagliati was telling stories about nostalgia and loss.
Paul Moves Out is a story about Paul, Rabagliati’s autobiographical stand-in, attending a small art school where he meets and falls in love with his future spouse. The story unfolds through flashbacks as Paul and Lucie are setting up their first apartment together.
I recommend Paul Moves Out as a good first taste of Rabagliati’s work. It occupies a middle ground between the books that focus on Paul’s youth and those that focus on his adulthood, and tonally it touches on some serious subjects but is not as deep and dark as some of the books that come after.
One of the pleasures of a Paul book is the digressions. For most of his career, Rabagliati was a commercial artist who did comics on this side. I imagine him at his drawing table on the evenings and weekends, having fun with these pages. In the middle of a story, he may digress into a riff on public transit or the virtues of analog, before coming back to the main thread. Reading his work is like hanging out with an especially clever friend.
Outside of Quebec, where Rabagliati has a large audience, the Paul books have yet to gain wide recognition beyond a succession of glowing reviews from critics. The books’ initial English-language publisher was Drawn and Quarterly, then switched to Conundrum Press, another great Canadian company, for some of the best volumes in the series, like The Song of Roland. Now, Paul is back at Drawn and Quarterly, for the most recent book, Paul at Home, released in 2019.
Any of the Paul books can work as a jumping-on point, but Paul Moves Out is the one I hand to people with a pushy exuberance: “Read this. You’ll be glad you did.”