Gabrielle Drolet’s Rats are the Barbenheimer of My Summer
By Dan Brown Montreal cartoonist Gabrielle Drolet is on holiday. And I’m loving every minute of her European vacation. If you’re a fan of online cartoonists, you may already know Drolet’s work. I found her on Twitter (the platform now known as X) and she posts on Instagram, too. Drolet’s comics have also appeared in mainstream outlets like the Globe and Mail and the New Yorker. She has a simple, expressive style — her work is funny, engaging and thoughtful.Oh yeah, she also likes to draw rats. A lot. At the end of June, Drolet posted that she was heading to the Continent to visit such destinations as Croatia, Hungary, Italy, and Slovenia.. “Leaving Canada for the first time in six years to lie on beaches around Europe,” she tweeted, adding she would be posting periodic cartoon updates. Her short narratives, typically no longer than one page, have been a highlight of my summer. She does them on the fly, often posting a comic that documents that day’s sightseeing. (Full disclosure: Drolet worked several years ago at the Western Gazette, where I mentor young journalists as my day job, although I’ve never met her in real life. And I hope very much to acquire some of her original work.) The young cartoonist is travelling in Europe with a group of friends. In a recent cartoon from Hungary, one of her companions asked the others to take a look at a tick bite on his back that had grown itchy. He turns his back so they can see the wound. They stand there gaping. “I’m calling our health insurance,” says one member of the group. “I”m texting a photo to my doctor girlfriend,” says another. “I’m making a cartoon,” Drolet’s rat self chirps cheerily as she documents the episode. That’s right – her preferred way of depicting herself in the autobiographical comics is as a rat wearing glasses. She draws her friends as turtles, cats, dogs, geese, you name it. Part of the joke is having animals say things humans are hesitant to express. In a Budapest nightclub, for instance, Drolet’s rat boogies with a friendly bunny. Finally, she broaches a delicate topic. “Hey . . . are you gay?” the rat asks. “I don’t know. Maybe!” responds her dancing partner. “I don’t know what to make of that!” “Me neither!” They then go their separate ways. Maybe the truth is I can’t fully explain why the anthropomorphizing is so droll. All I may be able to do is describe my reaction. These cartoons make me laugh and think, which is the highest compliment I can pay any artist. In a comic context, the question about substituting animals for people is always: What is gained? Why bother switching out people for animals that might be their pets? In the 2019 graphic novel Off Season, for instance, veteran graphic novelist James Sturm told the story of one couple’s disintegration amid the rise of Donald Trump on the political scene. In my view, there was absolutely no reason to make the human cast of that book into canines who stand upright and wear clothes. It added nothing. With Drolet, the change makes her characters more innocent. Their emotions, by some strange cartoon alchemy, become more relatable. The over-arching theme of her art – making her way in the world as a young adult – comes through so clearly. One recent cartoon shows how Drolet dresses for travel: linen dress, baseball hat, fanny pack, SPF 50 everywhere. “God, I look like such a tourist,” she says to herself. “Then again, I AM a tourist.”Somehow, those lines are funnier when coming from a human-sized rodent. A few weeks ago, I wrote a column in this space wondering what the Barbenheimer of summer 2024 will be – the cultural event that everyone is talking about and remembers years from now. Maybe when Deadpool & Wolverine lands in theatres at the end of this week that question will be answered for most people. But not me. The Barbenheimer of my summer – the one thing that is getting me more excited than anything else – is the story of one rat’s adventures in Europe. Would it be too much to ask for a comics publisher to collect all of these images and publish them in a graphic-novel format? Drawn & Quarterly, I’m looking at you. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 31 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
