Scroll down for French translation (Thanks to Marc Tessier)

Help support our Crowdfundr campaign to get the work of the late underground comics legend Henriette Valium (real name Patrick Henley) into print (in English).

Valium’s frenetically rendered comics appeared in almost every punk and underground publication in Montreal and France throughout the 80s and 90s. He self-published his own “albums” in giant silkscreened formats. Often called the “Pope” of the Quebec comics community he continued to produce artwork, music, posters, installations, comix and more until his untimely death on Sept 1, 2021.

In 2016 Conundrum was proud to publish his epic over-sized hardcover The Palace of Champions, which took almost a decade to create, and went on to win a Doug Wright Award. In the months before he died Valium sent us all his pages in English and we hoped to work on a historical document, collecting his work and finally bringing to light this underground legend. After his death we discovered his dream was to have all his oversized silkscreened albums published as hardcover volumes in a box set. Conundrum is hoping to get this important work archived for posterity the way the artist intended, and maybe sear some eyeballs along the way.

With your support, and the blessing of the estate, we are planning a box set containing the following volumes:

* 1000 Rectums (1982-1986)
* Primitive Cretin (1987-1990)
* Mother's Heart (1994-1997)
* Princess Brune (2000-2006 + never-before-seen material)
* The Palace of Champions (reprint) (2006-2015)

 Or… You can support by purchasing any of these titles individually (or Maladies, Henriette Valium's Conundrum25 pocketbook).

The Box Set Specs

+ Contains 5 Volumes, each a 9x14 inch hardcover 
+ Quality slipcase 
+ Covers the entirety of his career: 1982-2021 
+ Includes 25 pages of new material from his unfinished book Defeko
+ Interviews and essays and more!

We are asking for $25,000 in US dollars because the printer in Malaysia is paid in US dollars, and this will not even cover the total printing cost for 1000 sets. Conundrum will cover most shipping and all other costs. We are making the campaign "All or Nothing" because if you pay for a box set or an individual book, that is what we want you to receive. If we do not meet this goal we will consider a new campaign with a lower goal to have all the volumes published in one giant book which would be awesome, but not exactly to Valium’s vision. We plan to send this box set to print in September 2023 if all goes well. This will result in an approximate delivery date of May, 2024 and a launch at TCAF / MCAF.

Take heed:

The heavy black lines and frenetic detailing of Valium's comics demand attention, weeding out any casual readers. His style is like the bastard love child of S. Clay Wilson and Derf Backderf as raised by French avant-garde collective Le Dernier Cri. He has also been compared to other acclaimed artists such as Julie Doucet, Charles Burns, Kim Deitch, and Pascal Doury, but his style is all his own. Henriette Valium made a significant contribution to comics history, and these books are intended to provide a definitive archival record of his work, which has long been controversial in nature.

Therefore, his books are not for everyone. Valium's work comes with an extreme warning of mature content. Picture a long and varied list of content warnings here and consider your comfort level before purchasing. People are either repulsed or in awe of Valium, so scroll down to view his images and consider before purchasing: which one are you? 

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What others have said about Valium:

"Do [these images] make your heart race with joy? Do you marvel at the sheer insanity of the composition? The way that it is packed with so much visual information that it threatens to overwhelm every functioning neuron in your brain? Do you love the way it looks? If so, then you will love everything about this book. Or does it make your heart sink with anxiety? Are you stressed out and overwhelmed by the images? Does it make you feel vaguely nauseous? Is your heart palpitating at the thought of hundreds of additional pages like this one? Then you might want to lie down now, this book is not for the faint of heart. If you're a Valium fan, this book will nicely replace all your previous versions of his work—this is the definitive object. If you're not a Valium fan, there is probably nothing that I can say about him to make you interested. His work, though smart and funny, is highly visceral. Your reaction to him will be felt in your gut—lust or revulsion. There is little middle ground with an artist working in this style. You take Valium on his own terms, or not at all." — Bart Beaty (reviewing the French edition of collected work from L’Association)

“Valium was to any emerging local cartoonist in Montreal both a threat and a favourite uncle, a threat not only because of his obvious artistic mastery but also his seething fury of a public persona. The work itself scared and exhilarated us. It's funny and wicked. Lesser talents can play with taboo but Valium owned it, challenging his readers with their own dark fantasies. At once a lit fuse and a gentleman.” — Billy Mavreas

"One of the true wild men of comics, uncompromising and unhinged." — Sean Rogers

"Despite the notoriety his work enjoys on the underground comics scene across Europe and North America, his hallucinogenic style of deep furtive industry has kept him apart from the mainstream comic book industry. Furthermore, his true importance as an artist of exotic genius has never been adequately assessed or acknowledged ... Valium is the proverbial Outsider’s outsider. Here is an iconoclast by both nature and inclination, and one never far from a precipice." — James Campbell

“The Hieronymous Bosch of Montreal” — Rupert Bottenberg

"In his extremely peculiar way, Valium explores the rotting decay of an urban environment that he obsessively renders and depicts in horrific, sometimes nonsensical way. He is fascinated with every possible corruption of the human body and mind: sickness, addictions, abnormal sexuality and social decay, exposing our culture’s fears and hypocrisies with an acute, caustic, sharp and absurd sense of humor. Many say that his books are more about creating an experience than reading a comic book. I say there’s nothing wrong about being both." — Robert Poulin

“Valium’s illustrations are loaded with information — hell, worlds of it — and seem to operate outside the realms of time, space, and logic, to the point where they may even render such concepts outmoded at best, if not downright meaningless. Assaulting your eyeballs and sense of reason with equal gusto, Valium takes elements of old-school underground comix “ugly art,” occult and Kabbalistic diagrams, and the other-dimensional architectural schematics of the visionary Paul Laffoley, adds in several drops of richly garish color, tosses it all in a blender, sets it on “high,” and then pours what comes out five minutes later onto the page. Your first thought when looking at Valium’s art may in fact very well be that something like this probably shouldn’t even exist.” — Ryan C, Four Color Apocalypse