Pascal Élie – RIP

D. D. Degg October 25, 2022 1 minute 0 comments

Editorial cartoonist Pascal Élie has passed away.

Pascal Élie
1959 – October 21, 2022

From Terry Mosher and The Montreal Gazette:

My friend Pascal Élie, editorial cartoonist for Le Devoir, died at 63 last week after struggling with a debilitating disease diagnosed when he was only 49. Always the professional, Pascal supplied cartoons for the newspaper until just days before his death.

When Pascal started out as a cartoonist around 2001, he didn’t know any practising caricaturists other than Serge Chapleau at La Presse and myself at the Montreal Gazette. So Serge and I took him to a convention of cartoonists in Toronto. Pascal was so pleased to meet the Globe and Mail’s Brian Gable and other scribblers he admired from across the country. Jokers by nature, we had a surprise in store for “the new guy.” During a meeting, Pascal stepped out briefly. While he was gone, we elected him the new president of our association.

Pascal impressed us all the following year by doing a great job organizing our convention in Quebec City — no one realized that Pascal was actually a lawyer and highly organized. He had studied both law and visual arts at L’Université de Montréal. However, he chose to follow his first passion: cartooning.

A brief paragraph about Pascal’s career from Le Devoir (untranslated):

A graduate in visual arts and law (huh?), Pascal Élie quit his job with a legal publisher in January 1998 to become a full-time cartoonist, thus triggering the worst ice storm in Quebec history. Since then, he has drawn for The Gazette, La Presse, Les Affaires, Le Journal du Barreau, Profession Santé and several other publications. In short, everything destined him to end up, in June 2016, in the “best” of newspapers, Le Devoir, where he drew three editorial cartoons a week.

 
Pascal's last cartoon for Le Devoir, October 15, 2022

From Actual News Magazine:

The cartoonist of [Le Devoir] to Pascal Élie, known as Pascal, died on Friday of the consequences of a degenerative disease he had been fighting for a decade. Recognized for his “very personal graphic approach”, he has earned a place of renown among his Quebec “accomplices” by focusing on the “humorous” dimension of press cartoons.

“Today I am losing a friend, but I am also losing a colleague,” confided the cartoonist of The Press Serge Chapleau.

“Pascal was already a well-known caricaturist who worked for [The Gazette] as a regular contributor. It’s rare for a cartoonist to be able to work on both sides of the linguistic border. Pascal was able to understand the codes, the subtleties of the public of the Gazette, then he swam like a fish in water in the subtleties of French-speaking Quebec,” said Brian Myles. “Knowing how to draw is one thing. Making a gag is another. But making a gag with the cultural referent for the audience was a high attribute. “