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Not Knowing

Michel Hellman begins, as many artists do, with an absence of certainty.

Ask him how one becomes a comic book artist and he will tell you, plainly: he doesn’t know. The question interests him precisely because it resists a clean answer. It sends him back into his own practice, into the accumulated habits of drawing and thinking that, over time, became a life.

Everyone draws as a child, he says. The mystery is not in beginning, but in continuing.

What interrupts that continuity, more often than not, is the idea of an audience.

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The Audience

Hellman returns to this problem repeatedly—not as a complaint, but as a kind of structural condition. The moment one imagines the public too clearly, the work stiffens. Effort becomes visible. Intention hardens. Drawings made to please tend to collapse under their own weight, while the quick sketch—something provisional, almost careless—can travel much further, sometimes unexpectedly, sometimes widely. The lesson is not especially comforting: the artist cannot predict reception, nor control interpretation. The work leaves, and in leaving, becomes something else.

And yet comics, perhaps more than other forms, depend on that departure. They are built on the assumption of a reader.

Hellman sometimes wonders what would remain if that reader disappeared. Alone on a desert island, he is certain he would continue to make art. Expression seems less a choice than a necessity. But comics—narrative, sequential, addressed—might fall away. They require an other. They are, at their core, an act of sharing.

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The Reader

This does not mean the audience can be fixed or known. On the contrary, it is unstable, imagined, shifting. It exists somewhere between the artist’s intention and the reader’s experience, and the space between those two points—the gap, the misalignment—is not a failure of the form but its condition. In comics, that gap is literalized in the space between panels, where the reader supplies what is missing. Meaning is always, to some degree, collaborative.

To work in comics, then, is to accept a certain loss of authority.

Hellman speaks of this without anxiety. Once a work is finished, he says, it no longer belongs to him. Readers will find meanings he did not intend; they will overlook others he considered essential. This redistribution of ownership is not something to be corrected. It is part of the exchange.

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Doubt

If there is a tension in his work, it lies less between artist and audience than within the artist himself—between the desire for authenticity and the impossibility of securing it.

One cannot try to be authentic. The effort itself distorts the result. Authenticity, if it appears at all, does so indirectly, as a byproduct of attention, of sustained practice, of a certain fidelity to one’s own way of seeing. And even then, it remains difficult to recognize. Hellman describes moments when a drawing seems to work, only to look at it later with doubt. The criteria are unstable. What feels right in the moment may not hold. What seemed minor may endure.

Doubt, in this sense, is not an obstacle to the work but part of its movement.

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The Sketchbook

There is, however, one space where that doubt loosens its grip: the sketchbook. Hellman treats it as a zone of complete freedom, untouched by the expectations that accompany publication. Here, drawings do not need to justify themselves. They can remain unfinished, inconsistent, excessive. The sketchbook is not a rehearsal for the “real” work but a parallel practice, one that preserves the conditions under which the work can remain alive.

Outside of it, constraints return. Deadlines, formats, the knowledge of an eventual audience—all of these shape the work in visible and invisible ways. But constraint is not purely limiting. It can also be generative. It forces decisions, sharpens attention, introduces a kind of resistance against which the work can take form. The difficulty is not to eliminate constraint, but to work through it without losing one’s voice.

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Simplicity

This balance is visible in Hellman’s drawings, which are often described as simple. The simplicity is deliberate, though not reductive. It is a way of keeping the work open—of allowing readers to enter without obstruction. Detail, in excess, can close a drawing off; it can fix the image too tightly to a particular interpretation. Simplicity, by contrast, leaves room. It invites recognition.

It is also, perhaps, a form of trust: that depth does not require density.

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Process

Comics, as a medium, complicate this further by operating between writing and drawing. Neither element is fully subordinate to the other. At times, the text carries the movement; at others, the image does. More often, they negotiate—each adjusting to the other in what Hellman describes as a kind of dance. The process is iterative, subtractive. He begins with more than he needs—sketches, fragments, impressions—and gradually pares them down, searching for what is essential.

This method resists linearity. A drawing may generate a line of text; a sentence may demand a different image. The work develops through this back-and-forth, not according to a fixed sequence but through accumulation and revision.

The City

If there is a stable point in Hellman’s practice, it is not a method but a place.

Montreal is not simply a setting in his work; it is a condition of it. Born and raised there, he approaches the city not as a subject to be documented but as a field of experience—something lived, observed, and gradually translated. In Mile End, the neighborhood gives the book its structure, but what emerges is less a portrait of a single place than a sense of the city as a whole: its textures, its rhythms, its small, persistent details.

And yet Hellman resists the idea that his work is bound exclusively to Montreal. The approach, he suggests—curiosity, openness to others—could travel. In another city, the work would change, but not entirely. It might take on the perspective of an outsider, an expatriate, attentive to difference rather than familiarity. The method would remain, even as the material shifted.

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Return

This attention to lived experience extends beyond his personal work. In his collaborations with researchers, he gathers stories from residents, students, workers—fragments of daily life that are then reworked into comics. The role is both interpretive and translational: to receive experience and return it in another form. Here again, the question of audience reappears, but differently. The people who inspire the work are also, in some sense, its recipients.

They will see themselves, or fail to, in what he has made.

The uncertainty of that encounter cannot be resolved in advance.

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Practice

It is tempting, in moments like this, to look for firmer ground—for a method that guarantees coherence, or a standard by which the work can be judged. Hellman offers none. Even after years of practice, he describes his process as uncertain, even opaque to himself. There is no reliable way to determine, in advance, what will resonate and what will not.

Social media, with its metrics and immediate feedback, gives the illusion of clarity. A drawing receives attention; another does not. But these signals are unstable, easily misread. They can guide, but they can also mislead. To rely on them too heavily is to risk confusing visibility with value.

What remains, in the end, is practice.

Not as discipline alone, but as a way of continuing despite the absence of certainty. Confidence, if it develops, does so gradually—not from the elimination of doubt, but from learning to work alongside it. Over time, one accumulates not answers, but a tolerance for the questions.

Hellman does not resolve the problem of the audience, or of authenticity, or of interpretation. He returns to them, again and again, allowing them to shape the work without closing it.

Between one panel and the next, something is always left unsaid.

The reader steps in.

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About "I'm Not Sure"

Everyone's always talking about what we're sure of: certainties, predictions, facts.

Here at “I’m Not Sure”, we take a turn and ask: What are some things we aren’t so sure of? What do scientists, artists, practitioners, experts, and leaders wonder about? What are the questions and curiosities that guide us to explore the smallest particles, the farthest spaces, the deepest mysteries, and our closest relationships?

‍Co-hosted by: Ollivier Dyens & Isabella Chiaravallotti
Produced by: Alex Nicholas Chen
Music by: Christian Denis
Graphics by: Sophie Wu
Emerged in Montréal, Canada 2026