trial when all tonal variation is dropped, and the white figures are placed against a heavy black background, which emphasizes the claustrophobic atmosphere. Brown makes the language barriers that separate the characters visual by having Riel drop the letter "h" in his dialogue (e.g. "over t'e last several days") and by putting French-language dialogue in ⟨chevron brackets⟩ and Cree language dialogue in ⟨⟨double-chevrons⟩⟩. He shows Riel, who was an educated and sophisticated speaker of French, struggling with English. These touches emphasize that English was not yet a dominant language in the regions in which the story unfolds. Brown uses consistent semantics in his speech balloons; the size and weight of the dialogue varies according to speech patterns, and sound effects vary according to how close they are to the reader. Brown's drawing style had always changed from project to project. He frequently cited Harold Gray of Little Orphan Annie as the primary influence on the drawing style of Louis Riel—restrained artwork which avoids extreme closeups, and blank-eyed characters with large bodies, small heads, and oversized noses. Gray's drawing and compositional style was well suited to the subject of Louis Riel. Gray often used his strip as a public platform for politics, and Louis Riel was also very public and outward-looking. This approach is in great contrast to the inward-looking comics Brown had previously been known for—notably his autobiographical work. His cross-hatching style was reminiscent of the editorial cartoonists of Riel's time. Gray's outdoor scenes were inspired by the Illinois plains of Gray's youth, terrain similar to that of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Brown also acknowledges significant debts to Jack Jackson's historical comics, Hergé's The Adventures of Tintin, and the extremely exaggerated style of Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe. He says he referred to Jack Hamm's How to Draw Animals when drawing the horses that appear frequently throughout the book, which were rendered running with their legs splayed, as an artist may have depicted them in the days before the influence of Eadweard Muybridge's photographs of bodies in motion. Brown drew each of the 1325 panels separately on watercolour paper on a block of wood he placed on his lap in lieu of a drawing table, which allowed him seamlessly to rearrange, insert, and delete panels as he saw fit. The drawings were finished using both a thin ink brush (no larger than size 0) and dip pen with a