Sorcerers and supreme chiefs: René Lévesque and Pierre Elliott Trudeau in the Bojoual Le Huron Kébékois series
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The 1970s in Quebec is often referred to as the Springtime of Québécois Bande Dessinée. Following the so-called Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, a period of intense social change and modernization, the decade saw Québécois creators and publishers seek to create a distinctly Québécois incarnation of the Bande Dessinée form. Groups of creators sprang up throughout the province and publishers sought Québécois creators to help them capture for themselves contemporary interest in imported titles. Bojoual le Huron Kébékois (1973) by J. Guilemay is a Québécois version of Astérix that attempts to use the form, style and content of Goscinny and Uderzo’s albums to make something that is at once familiar to a reader of comics but also distinctly Québécois in tone. Populated by characters inspired by contemporary political figures such as Jean Drapeau, hapless Mayor of Montreal, these albums give insights not only in the development of the BD form in Quebec but also the contemporary political situation. This article will address Guilemay’s depictions of René Lévesque, leader of the pro-independence Parti Québécois and Pierre Elliott Trudeau. It will also address why their appearance in this BD aimed at a young audience is so significant for the contemporary political situation. Following their victory in the 1976 provincial elections the Parti Québécois became a crucial voice of opposition within the province. A referendum on Quebec sovereignty became inevitable and so Trudeau and Lévesque were positioned in opposition to one another as assumed leaders of the Yes and No campaigns. This relationship was echoed in the comics produced before and during the referendum campaign and this paper will explore the significance of these comics and the depictions of Trudeau and Lévesque via a close reading of the three Bojoual albums and the political background to their production.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".