Obituary by BK Munn
Pierre Fournier, the iconoclastic Quebec cartoonist, died November 11 of complications arising from Lewy body dementia.
Fournier was at the vanguard of Québécois artists who began making funny, political French-language comics in the 1960s and 1970s. He self-published the groundbreaking superhero satire Les Aventures du Capitaine Kébec and went on to transform the character into a sort of mascot for the francophone comics community, with a a comics-themed tv show, "Les Amis du Capitaine Kébec", as well as more comics and strips. Fournier was among the first contributors to the humour magazine Croc, and introduced another long-running character, Michel Risque, in its pages in 1979. Co-created with artist Réal Godbout, the violent adventure comics parody and its spin-off, Red Ketchup, were intermittently-published in a variety of formats over the following decades (recently reissued in a series of graphic novels by La Pasteque). A Red Ketchup animated cartoon series is set to debut in 2023.
Outside of Croc, Fournier also contributed to the magazine Titanic and the Quebec edition of Mad. He edited his own short-lived humour magazine Anormal in 1991, and was an editor and art director for Matrix Comics. His contributions to comics were recognized with the inaugural Albert Chartier Award and the induction into the Joe Shuster Awards hall of fame in 2008.
As well as writing for film and television, Fournier organized exhibits about the history of Quebec bande dessinée beginning in the 1970s and was something of a comics, science fiction and horror pop culture historian, running a well-regarded blog, Frankensteinia, about aspects of the Frankenstein mythos for many years.
Fournier suffered from a lengthy illness and had been in long-term care since February. His death was confirmed by friends and family through Fournier's page on Facebook.
