Drawing sarcasm

Illustrator Graham Roumieu speaks about partnering with author Douglas Coupland on new book

By Sofia Hashi — The Fulcrum

OTTAWA (CUP) — It's a book kids should never read and adults will die to get their hands on.

The new novel Highly Inappropriate Tales For Young People by well-known Canadian authors and artists Douglas Coupland and Graham Roumieu is more akin to a series of short stories and emulates a child’s "picture book," but one with highly inappropriate content.

Coupland's sarcastic and witty tone of the book is well complemented by Roumieu’s illustrations. The brevity of the short stories may remind readers of comedy sketches—similar to Saturday Night Live—and readers may find that the quality of work found in the book can be attributed to the relationship between the illustrator and the author.

“I’m not in control of everything, but that’s not to say it’s a bad thing,” said Roumieu. “It’s wonderful, especially when [you’re] working with a calibre writer and a person as fun and interesting as [Coupland].”

Coupland sought out Roumieu as his illustrator after receiving one of Roumieu’s Bigfoot books from a mutual friend, but this practice is becoming an uncommon one. According to Roumieu, there are hardly any more books being published that revere illustrations just as much as they do the text.

“I think it’s a very classic—or at least it seemed like it was—thing for a long time and now it seems like a rarer interaction to have a well-known author and reasonably well-known illustrator,” he explained. “[For example, Alice in Wonderland] is a book that’s been [around] for however many decades—if not a century now—and is still being republished in its original form with the original illustrations, which are seen as integral to the piece of work itself. They are inseparable.”

The BC native still finds pleasure in transforming words into a picture, no matter how difficult this task may be.

“Hundreds of times a year I’m producing illustrations for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Globe and Mail—all these different outlets—and sometimes that can be a struggle to come out with an image that’s suitable,” said Roumieu. “In this case […] I drew quickly and physically couldn’t move my hand and move my hand fast […] It was the ability to absorb the content, the energy, and what was intended by [Coupland] and reconvert it into something else.”

Highly Inappropriate Tales For Young People may be a satire written creatively with flair, but according to Roumieu, getting jokes across through illustration was one of the biggest challenges.

“It has that pseudo-ironic kid’s book stuff going on [and that is what] has to be placed in the mind of people,” said the Toronto-based artist.

“[Some of the other difficulties were] using the illustrations to both carry the story forward and draw what is right there in black and white,” said Roumieu.

“I have secondary narratives that go on in my drawings, often to the point that if you flip through pages surrounding the illustrations, you [won’t] actually be able to find anything that directly points to whatever I have drawn but it is simply another element to the story,” added Roumieu.

“It’s not so much the difficulty, but the challenge is the right balance of that.”

Share