Ice Box

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Today's blog post considers Alootook Ipellie's first comic strip, Ice Box. In an interview with University of Saskatchewan English professor Michael Kennedy, Ipellie discussed the emergence of his career as a visual artist. He relates how he sold his first pen and ink drawings in the late-1960s after returning to Iqaluit briefly following a year at a vocational high school in Ottawa. The sale of these pieces spurred him to create more, but it was not until he started working for Inuit Monthly magazine (later renamed Inuit Today) that he became more serious about drawing.

In the didactic material for the exhibition Walking Both Sides of an Invisible Border, exhibition curators Sandra Dyck, Heather Igloliorte and Christine Lalonde write:

As a child, even before he could read English, Ipellie was enthralled by comic books from the South and dreamed of growing up to be a cartoonist. He realized this dream when he began working in the early 1970s for Inuit Monthly, a bilingual magazine (Inuktitut and English) published by Inuit Tapirisat of Canada (now Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami). He first published his two-panel Ice Box comics in the January 1974 issue. He described the idea of Ice Box as a “mixture of the two cultures” in which “you’ll see the setting is the Arctic, but the storyline itself is very often from the South.” The strip follows the daily life of the Nook family in the North. Through the Nooks, Ipellie explored the social and political issues facing Northerners at that time, with often biting satire about the state of contemporary culture.

As suggested above, Inuit Today was distributed across the North and its primary audience was other Inuit. The content, the tone, the bilingual nature of the magazine and, by extension, Ipellie’s comics, reflect this. Nearly five decades following their initial publication, we are fortunate to be able to consider the rich and layered perspective his cartoons continue to offer.

Ipellie’s mastery of the comic form is evident in this example from an undated Ice Box comic strip sequence he drew between 1974 and 1981. Here, he reveals an unexpected and humorous plot in just four frames while simultaneously providing readers with clues that firmly situate the scene in modern times. This particular sequence also points to recurring sub-themes in Ipellie’s art.

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In the first panel, parka-clad Papa Nook walks toward a large set of caribou antlers poking out of the snow-covered Arctic tundra. His thought bubble reads, “Holy geepers! I don’t believe it! The good lord has done it again!” Grasping one of the antlers in the second panel he thinks, “It’ll take me a year to carve figurines on this. It’s enormous!” The following frame shows Papa Nook struggling to remove the antlers from the snow which we can see are still attached to the caribou’s head. He wonders “What on earth is going on here? I’ve heard of funny stories about ‘flying antlers’ at Christmas – but this is taking it a bit too far!” In the final panel, Papa Nook sits atop the live caribou who is upright on its back legs. Papa says “Oh well, what the heck! If you can’t beat ‘em – join ‘em! Hi-yo! Silverrr Away!”

Ipellie matter-of-factly indicates the presence of Christianity in the Arctic in the first panel as Papa Nook uses the words “holy geepers” and “good lord.” It is reinforced by the appearance of a cross on his parka in panel two and again with his reference to “flying antlers at Christmas” in panel three. Though this cartoon sequence may not overtly suggest it, Ipellie often incorporated Christian iconography and narratives in his drawing and writing to critique the devastating impacts of the church on Inuit.

Alongside colonial religious references, Ipellie incorporates icons of American popular culture who would have been familiar to his Inuit readers in the 1970s. This time, he invokes the Lone Ranger. This is an especially interesting choice as it gives him the opportunity to cheekily allude to the history of the very medium in which he works: the Lone Ranger was a radio and television program, but it also existed as a comic. He also uses the Lone Ranger reference to upend racial expectations and re-appropriate popular symbols for Inuit: Papa Nook is not portrayed as Tonto but, rather, as an Indigenized version of the Lone Ranger.

Papa Nook’s intended use of the antlers as a decorative carving surface in panel two also refers to the modern era. It implies the existence of an art market which was encouraged by the federal government as an economic initiative to provide alternative income for Inuit who had been forced to settle in communities. Cooperatives supporting the creation of art and craft were formed in several Arctic communities starting in the late 1950s. Until recently, sculptures in stone, bone and ivory as well as prints and wallhangings have been the most widely promoted media. Scenes of pre-contact life and images of Arctic fauna and landscapes were strongly favoured until the end of the 20^th century.

As an artist who was Inuit, Ipellie found himself an outsider of this system. He lived in the South, made line drawings in pen and ink, and addressed unique, even provocative, themes and content in his creative work. In the introduction to his book Arctic Dreams and Nightmares (1993), he suspects that this is why the “stewards of Inuit art” were uninterested in his drawings. Fortunately, their rejections only spurred on his resolve to continue to produce the type of art that he loved. As Amy Prouty notes, Ipellie continued “tirelessly to create works that challenged stereotypes about Inuit and the primacy of Qallunaat ideologies over Inuit knowledge.” 

Post author: Jennifer Gibson

Sources:

Sandra Dyck, Heather Igloliorte and Christine Lalonde, Walking Both Sides of an Invisible Border, exhibition introduction section panel, 2018.

Michael P. J. Kennedy, “Alootook Ipellie: The Voice of an Inuk Artist,” Studies in Canadian Literature (Volume 21, Number 2), 1996. Accessed March 21, 2020.

Amy Prouty, “Drawing Inuit Satiric Resilience: Alootook Ipellie’s Decolonial Comics,” esse, Number 93 (Spring 2018). Accessed March 21, 2020.

Images: Walking Both Sides of an Invisible Border, exhibit installation at Gallery 1C03 showing group of Ice Box comic strip cartoons published in Inuit Today (1974-1981).  Detail of previous image. Photos by Karen Asher.