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Pascal Girard’s new comic book, Pastimes, serves as something of a diary, documenting a fictionalized version of his days as a social worker, cartoonist and father in Montreal.
Girard says writing comics has been central his entire life — long before he knew he could make a living that way.
“I’ve been doing comics since I was a kid,” he said in an interview with CBC Books.
Eventually Girard started publishing his comics on a blog and got noticed by others doing the same thing, developing a community of cartoonists to collaborate with.
It helped that around 2000, a wave of new comic publishers began popping up in Quebec, putting out work that Girard found inspiring. He said it was only then he realized that creating comics was something he could do at a professional level.
Style of sketches
A page from Pastimes by Pascal Girard. (Pow Pow Press)
The comics in Pastimes are pen sketches, and their bare-bones form is representative of the way they were originally created, Girard says. “All those pages are drawn in a small sketchbook,” he said.
The book’s simple style allowed Girard to put more work out into the world. He said that creating traditional comic books often takes three or four years, but there were times when comics in Pastimes took just an hour per strip.
Girard also says that when he’s working as a social worker, he doesn’t have the time or energy to focus on highly intensive comics. And the small, portable sketchbooks allowed him to squeeze in work on the go.
Caricaturized version of life
Another page from Pastimes. (Pow Pow Press)
Girard says Pastimes is a caricaturized version of his life and family. Though the comic features his family members, he says it should not be read as an accurate record of their life.
While some of the comics represent actual experiences, he said, others are “pretty far from the truth.”
Girard says his part-time job as a social worker also shapes a lot of his creative work.
However, asked how he selects moments to turn into comics, Girard said sometimes things happen in his life that stand out as great subjects for a comic strip, but often he just wants to be in the moment with his family.
“It’s not like I see everything in life like I need to put it in the comic. I’m not like that.”- Pascal Girard
Girard says he has worked on around 10 books, including Nicolas, Bigfoot, Mile End Portraits and Rebecca and Lucie.
Pastimes was translated by Aleshia Jensen, who also translated the 2018 Governor General’s Literary Award for translation finalist Explosions by Mathieu Poulin.
