placing his faith in God that the Métis will defeat the Canadians. Brown depicts him as having a messianic complex and possibly having schizophrenia. He is unsure of himself, averse to bloodshed, and easily convinced to flee to the U.S. to avoid capture. John A. Macdonald Macdonald (1815–91) was the first Prime Minister of Canada, in office 1867–73, and again 1878–91. Brown depicts the Prime Minister in the role of scheming villain and caricatures his features in an absurd manner, giving him an extremely oversized nose and showing him as a drunk. He is a man of ambitions and will not let anyone stand in the way of his legacy. In the appendix, however, Brown discloses that he does not see Macdonald as the villain he has portrayed in the book. Brown's distrust of big government leads him to push the conspiracy theory side of the story to Macdonald's detriment, but, in the end, he states that he "would rather have lived in a state run by John A. Macdonald than one run by Louis Riel". Style Louis Riel is noted for its emotional restraint, and intentionally flat and expository dialogue. To critic Rich Kreiner the book "has been rigorously scrubbed of staged drama and crowd-pleasing effects". It avoids manipulation of the reader by invoking sympathy or sentiment. Brown takes a distanced approach and relies faithfully on his source material—he focuses on the concrete and corporeal and eschews techniques of speculation such as thought balloons. This includes his presentation of Riel's mystical experiences, which Brown presents plainly and without interpretation of its reality or lack thereof. The book makes frequent deliberate use of silent panels, focused on imagery with the narrative moved forward by the characters' actions. Riel's "despairs over the decisions he makes" are expressed through pictures, as Brown had come to believe that historical comics had been too "narration-heavy". He wanted Louis Riel "to show what the medium is capable of", and made use of greater panel-to-panel continuity. While the grid of panels gives a feeling of page symmetry, the pages are not composed as a unit—scenes change anywhere on the page with little regard to page layout. Printed on yellowish paper, each page conforms strictly to a rhythmic six-panel grid, in contrast to the free placement of panels that characterized Brown's autobiographical period. Tone and mood are set by the composition of the panels, as during Riel's