Chester Brown

chap – The Little Man is short stories from before, during and for a good while after the Ed The Happy Clown period, transitioning from The Man Who Couldn’t Stop-style silliness (this was originally an unconnected short, not intended as part of Ed) to a 32-page polemic talking-head essay about mistreatment and diagnosis of schizophrenia across the years.

The Playboy and I Never Liked You are autobiographical books done immediately after Ed* - one about his conflicted relationship with Playboy magazine and masturbation from teens into early adulthood, and one a more time-focussed book about his early sexy interactions with girls, his mother’s mental illness, and behavioural taboos. (I Never Liked You was originally serialised as “FUCK”, and I think is in print in German under that title.) Any of these would be a good next step.

*although there were another six issues of Yummy Fur with the Ed strip in them beyond what’s collected in any of the three versions of the Ed paperback.

i still sometimes wish he'd go back to the big-eyed mayhem of "ed" but after 20 years i know better.

(a new story in that vein, i mean. he's tinkered-to-fuck-all with "ed" itself long enough.)

RANKING THE BROWN DISCOGRAPHY

gospels
ed
i never liked you/fuck
louis riel
underwater*
shorts
the playboy

*i think i was the only human who liked this comic sometimes.

my favorite thing about the gospel strips is how jesus, instead of saying 'get thee behind me satan,' will lunge at the person he's addressing and scream 'get AWAY from me, SATAN!'

i still sometimes wish he'd go back to the big-eyed mayhem of "ed" but after 20 years i know better.

similarly, i sometimes wish dan clowes still drew things like 'li'l octagon' once in a while instead of the same sad comic about the guy sitting in the coffee shop over and over.

brown's jesus was such a bad-ass. it was like robert mitchum grew a jesus beard.

dan clowes is heartbreak city.

(which will probably be the title of his next comic.)

tinkered-to-fuck-all

= drew a six-page epilogue in 1992

I liked Underwater, but when it disappeared was more annoyed at all the effort I'd invested into ~comprehending~ it wasn't going to be rewarded by eventually getting to readable-on-opening issues, than on missing out on more of what was going on so far.

you know, I'm still not entirely convinced by this new Chester Brown book. Why would any right thinking person want to read some creepy guy's catalogue of his encounter with prostitutes?

do you like the comics medium?

yes... but I like films too, and I don't go and see films about unpleasant subjects just because they are really well made.

Do you think anyone who does has something wrong with their head?

you have me now.

tinkered-to-fuck-all

= drew a six-page epilogue in 1992

― all cats are gay (sic), Tuesday, June 14, 2011 9:55 PM

ha i meant mostly the comics-format reprint he was doing a couple years a go that he didnt't finish (did he?).

In the Ed the Happy Clown Reprint comics from a few years ago (the same as the book versions which left off the end of the original story) he published a few panels from a new redrawn version of Ed. I can't remember the details but he'd drawn a sizeable amount of pages retelling the ED story, before deciding his time was better spent doing something new.

ah, from wikipedia:

Drawn and Quarterly (Brown's publisher since 1991) reissued the original Ed stories in a nine issue series from 2004 until 2006 titled Ed the Happy Clown with new covers, previously unpublished art and extensive commentary by Brown. Brown had originally intended to redraw the story, and had penciled about 100 pages of it, but stopped because he believed the new version wasn't any better than the original.[6]

which is kind of insane

George Lucas syndrome

I have a $20/mo allowance for comics/records... am thinking of making Paying For It next month's purchase

otoh it seems kinda loathsome in a lot of ways

it's not loathsome. it's dense and throught-provoking enough that you'll probably get your budget's worth out of it.

maybe I'm pre-judging it unfairly, but it seems self-serving and polemical in a way that, say, Joe Matt's work is not. Like, I'm not really sympathetic to this purported libertarian pro-prostitution angle

if you think that'll annoy you, maybe don't buy it (or skip a few pages of the notes). if you think you'll enjoy disagreeing with Chester's odd personality arguing his case, rush out and get it!

He is the world's gentlest libertarian. It's not as bad as it sounds.

Like Omaha the Cat Dancer is 1,000x the preachiness of Paying For It. IDK what that comparison's worth to you. Paying For It is the self-servingness of a nearly egoless person.

Maybe not "nearly egoless," I think I might be projecting myself a little on Ches, which I tend to do; part of me feels like I should find this book loathsome. You should really read it if not nec. buy it. My local library has it!

(this means your local library may also have it...or at least inter-library loan it...I am always willing to play the cheapo long game on ILLs)

Like Omaha the Cat Dancer is 1,000x the preachiness of Paying For It. IDK what that comparison's worth to you

lol Abbott you da best. as someone who reads old back issues of the Comics Journal from the 80s, it means a lot!

I would reread hella 80's Comics Journals if I had em on hand. That shit was bedrock. There weren't a lot of great comics to write about but the level of the writing-about has never been equalled.

PAYING FOR IT is totally worth buying/reading. It has an odd flatness of affect that results in one of the least salacious treatments this subject will likely ever have.

Also, there are a couple of Omaha collections in my house. I blame my wife.

I don't have a ton but I have a few and I gotta say yeah the level+quantity of criticism is just insane. Pages and pages of 10 point text enumerating why some (by now beyond obscure) direct-market minor-imprint terrible comic is racist/mysogynist/reactionary. Tons of industry in-fighting. Pages and pages of Harvey Pekar arguing with other letter writers about Tolstoy or whatever. They're a beautiful window to a unique (and now very gone) era.

lol @ the 1988ness of opening up a chester brown thread and seeing a mention of omaha the cat dancer. i really do expect to see r. fiore and carter scholz and bob levin posting here.

Those names ;_;

I even have fond memories of Amazing Heroes...

r. fiore! oh man

Carter Scholz is another good one, because I totally did not recognize his name years/decades later when he did a split/novel with Jonathan Lethem

fiore's writing again for tcj.com, which is infinitely improved since the comics comics guys took over.

scholz wrote some great bitchy science fiction crit back in the day, too.

seriously though, shakey's right about how out on a limb those guys were in terms of the intensity of their writing vs. what they were forced to write about back then.

oh shit, you guys are making me want to have a good cry -- I had every TCJ from about #60 to #200 at one point, and eventually dumped them all because they were so freaking heavy and we were in our "let's move every two years because we're young and dumb" phase. My LCS in Memphis wouldn't take them off my hands at any price.

the only two issues i managed to hang onto were the giant chris ware/charles schulz issue from around '97 and the "100 greatest comics" issue from i can't remember when.

i had the giant spiegelman two-parter (with bonus crumb interview) but it basically disintegrated on me.

the spurgeon years were when i came on board, really, and they were pretty damn formative. (it's not as if the bulk of the comics they had to cover in the early to mid '90s were any better really.) i've said it elsewhere on ilx but the big jim woodring interview from around '94 basically changed my life.

also my apologizes for derailing this discussion of chester brown's i-like-hookers polemic.

I have the big Kirby interview issue, late 80s.

a couple others lying around iirc, I should check with my brother

hey jess

http://www.tcj.com/the-jim-woodring-interview/

oh shit.

i encourage everyone to read that. the animation stuff is priceless.

I remember that Woodring interview. It in itself is one of Jim's masterpieces in a way.

The most life-changing TCJ article for me was the 2-part Newwave Comics Survey by Dale Luciano that ran in... 85 or 86? They made a book of it now. When it ran originally i was 15 or 16 and it was like having a whole continent revealed to me.

Heidi Macdonald was writing for them back then-- "Why Fight Scenes Suck" was a classic...

chester brown i had a crush on sookyin lee since i was 14 watching her interview the smashing pumpkins and the wedge what was that like bro???? she's so pretty right

ended up buying Paying For It this weekend. by the end I was laughing out loud at various things (esp Seth's notes in the back. "robots don't have mid-life crises" lol). Good book, very odd. especially in contrast to Joe Matt's work, which is riddled with self-loathing and insecurity

that being said I find the majority of the ideas Brown espouses ludicrous and it's funny to see various things go unchallenged in this book, he seems both painfully self-aware but also stupefyingly oblivious

like most of us tbh

also thought it was funny how he ends up more or less as he was at the beginning of the book - in a monogomous relationship with someone who doesn't return his affection. if only he could have paid sook-yi to have sex with him lol

i'm more or less with him on the fact that people should be able to see prostitutes without a social or legal stigma attached; where he lost me was in one of the appendices in which he lays out his utopian ideal, in which people casually pay each other sex in simple social transactions. as in, it's not far enough for prostitution to be legal and accepted; for brown to be satisfied, everyone has to be both a prostitute and a john.

i did really enjoy the book, though. i wasn't bothered by his decision to obscure their faces, although i think he could have accomplished the same thing by just drawing them different from how they actually looked. otherwise, graphically at least, it's difficult not to come away with the impression that he mentally dehumanizes the women quite a bit.

yeah that is not really a world I want to live in. where every last goddamn inch of our lives has been monetized.

Sex workers weigh in on problems of representation in the new book: http://titsandsass.com/mary-wept-at-the-feet-of-jesus-2016/

notice only dudes are into cb

― kurt schwitterz, Wednesday, April 20, 2016 12:44 PM (1 week ago)
it ~~
not a sausage partier and CB is my main man of cartooning tho yeah he is and always has been a total weirdo

i rewatched SHORTBUS recently and wikipedia'ed it ~~ sook-yon lee is the main character (repressed sex therapist) and that was a mind blower!!
she gets depicted like an everyday friend/ex in 'the little man' and this demure nothing in 'paying for it'
ches talks about her unhappiness with her portrayal in TLM in its footnotes (how did this guy start drowning in his own footnotes??)
well she seems like her own person
and it made me feel weird to realize that!!
tho clearly this guy is in his own world and always has been
always digging deep in the gospels and a big rep of the conspiracy that shakespeare was someone else

like what I <3 about ches is 1. above all his acumen at cartooning and its form; he is such an excellent draw-er
and
2. that he is totally the guy who gets THEORIES from public library RABBIT HOLES but is frank about the how and why of it

I’d prefer it if that work wasn’t reprinted.

Creating those Yummy-Fur/Underwater adaptations was part of my process of learning about the gospels and coming to understand them on a deeper level. (Suat would probably disagree that my understanding is deeper.) While I had some knowledge of the gospels when I began adapting them, that knowledge was pretty shallow. I feel that I’d do a much better job now. Also, the artwork in most of my version of Mark is poor. I did a better job in drawing Matthew.

from

when the retrospective thoughts of artists, especially in light of their evolving work, deprive us of their older work :(

let's cut a deal, Chester, I'll buy your new shit if you reprint some of the old ones

i rewatched SHORTBUS recently and wikipedia'ed it ~~ sook-yon lee is the main character (repressed sex therapist) and that was a mind blower!!

I only found out about this myself recently (altho I recall being aware of Shortbus when it came out), was totally surprised. is that film actually worth seeing?

yeah. it's not very good, though.

this new one is good and a fast read (probs wouldve been better as a mini comic tbh) and the notes get sleep-inducing. also no matter how deep into the theory he tries to go, there is no way to not see this as a dude trying to justify his love of hookers by way of his love of god.

is he no longer in love with just the one hooker

haha oh shit... also the drawing in the new one is beautiful (of course)

if chester brown's work didn't exist, we would need a morally conflicted sex robot to invent it