Chester Brown

endlessly re-editing his best* stuff?

*well, second to the gospels.

a) that's not faking emotion in any way!

b) the only editing he did was in 1992, involving a few pages only, and greatly for the better (redrawing some and then abandoning it once, ten years later, doesn't rly count since it was something he did in his bedroom, not in public, and he still published new work regardless)

c) u mad, Paying For It is amazing (cf me upthread), and lots of his other work is at least close to as rich and intriguing as Ed, it just ä) happens to be from a more mature artist with different concerns* and ß) you yourself are not 17 anymore sorry dude ;_;

*although some of the shorts are from young Chet

d) my point rly was that human emoting has not been a feature of his work in recent years so

nah come on. i think louis riel was brilliant and i am one of like five humans who enjoyed underwater. but you're right, i'm not sure i'm interested in dude's book-length hooker meditation even if i'll always enjoy his art as art. emotionally, though, you're right that fuck/i never liked you seemed to be some kinda breaking point.

"this book about how human emotions confused and upset me when I was a teenager has shown me I am better off disregarding them"

I'd rather he'd finished Underwater than the gospels tbh, I was mad invested in that

now I want to re-read Riel and see how many scenes of blank Gray faces followed by plot-driving actions textually represent the unknowableness of human emotional motivation

yeah underwater is one of the great unfinished works of comics imo. kinda feel like her lost his nerve there, unforgivably. though i wasn't him, trying to stay solvent why working on an inscrutable comic about babies learning to process human speech, so i can't say "fuck however many people were reading it, you shoulda kept going."

an inscrutable comic about babies learning to process human speech

ah so this IS what that was about... I remember thumbing through a few issues when it was on the stands and scratching my head.

Lot more interested in new Chester Brown than I am in new Daniel Clowes.

this has made me want to go back and read the Playboy stories. iirc he was portraying himself as pretty robotic even back then.

"yeah underwater is one of the great unfinished works of comics imo"

What are the other ones? Big Numbers? 1963?

1963 was unfinished? didn't seem like the kind of thing that needed a definite ending to me.

I thought there was supposed to be some super crazy future tie up thing that never happened?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1963_%28comics%29#Incomplete_status

oh lol I thought that came out and I had just ignored it

I think the roboticness is a deliberate stylistic choice. He seems like a normally emotive guy in Joe Matt's stuff with him. He also mentioned in every interview around the time Paying For It came out that he was drawing on Bresson's direction to show no emotion. eg this TCJ interview

ROGERS: I’m not saying that Joe would say this, but would you object to the book itself being called “cold and clinical”?

BROWN: Oh, yeah, no—the book is pretty cold. [both laugh] In large part that’s because of my approach to art these days. One of my favorite filmmakers is Robert Bresson, who instructed his actors to show no emotion. I realized, drawing certain scenes, “Okay, you’ve gotta draw someone smiling here,” [Rogers laughs] but I was resisting even that.

ROGERS: Yeah, the most emotion that you have in the book is that your brow is creased at one point. One little line.

BROWN: [laughs] I guess that was the struggle for me with my stylistic tendency, which is to drain emotion from my drawing style. And what often does really happen, certainly with my current “girlfriend,” [is that] it is very emotional. I feel a lot of emotion, and she seems to feel similar sorts of emotion for me. So that was a fight: how comfortable am I showing emotion, depicting emotion?

That said I have no idea what this guy is like in person.

sure. I take it as a given that we're discussing persona/character as depicted in the book and not CHESTER BROWN THE REAL PERSON (this goes double or maybe even triple for Joe Matt's work).

that being said I think my favorite page in this whole thing is the one where Chester is just sitting expressionless in a chair for several panels and then, with no change in his depiction, feels a "twinge of happiness".

lol had no idea he actually ran for office as a libertarian ayiyiyi

and she seems to feel similar sorts of emotion

maybe she is also a robot

thx for linking that interview btw Abbott - hadn't read before, all the stuff about him and Dave Sim is news to me

Yeah quiet robot Ches on a Canadian lib ticket is just too much for me. What a world we live in! TBH this weird robot prostitute guy is the one thing humanizing libertarians for me.

Peter Bagge seems like a pretty decent guy despite his libertarian leanings (he even does cartoons for Reason haha.)

Ha, his earlier book Louis Riel just got into the final ten for next year's Canada Reads competition - it'll be whittled to five before the final showdown but it's in some very good company right now.

He keeps running as a Libertarian in the Trinity-Spadina riding in downtown Toronto, and apparently he was concerned that the party wouldn't be happy that he had just released a book where he admits to paying for sex, and they were all like "Nah, that's cool, it's probably a GOOD thing" once they thought about the Libertarian platform.

Chester Brown is really one of those people I identify with even though I am almost nothing like him. I just wish I lived his life. I loved that this book was assisted by funding for the Canadaian Council for the Arts. I remember his couple of strips in The Little Man about "censorship," the pornography one with the trolls with the comically long dongs. At the time I thought "man at least we got the first amendment." But what the fuck group in the U.S. would be the patron of some extended flat affect thesis on why paying for sex is really the only way to have sex? I am so glad this book exists regardless of what I think about his central thesis.
xps

Fact (as of 2007): CB didn't own a computer or cell phone.

xxxxxxxxxp, having met joe matt a few times, i can say that he comes across almost EXACTLY like he does in his comics.

jeez how many libertarian cartoonists are there actually?

Chester's been politically active for maybe four years, I learnt the existence of Libertarianism from Pete Bagge's 1993 TCJ interview*, can't think of any others who make a deal out of it


* the one where Bagge wrote in later to politely say he was very confused by some of what S0b0cinski** had transcribed him as saying, but he guess he must have misspoken, except that he would like it on record that he had definitely said "I wouldn't call myself a right-winger," not her representation of the infelicitous phrasing "I would call myself a right-winger"

** TCJ editor who left one issue later, after various acts of more serious internal sabotage were discovered, stole the TCJ rolodex on the way out, and spent months sending various fake letters from pros abusing Groth for having a small penis, and fake letters of abuse from Groth to pros, etc etc. Den!s Kitch3n was genuinely surprised to find her an unsatisfactory and swiftly-terminated employee when he subsequently hired her as E-I-C (or something) at KSP.

holy cats, how have i not heard that story! Where would I read more, besides wikipedia?

erm, a few TCJ editorials and lettercolumns of the time, some back and forth in CBG (around an outrageously OTT TCJ response to a fake letter), a huge article in Gauntlet c. 1995 about Gr0th and Ellis0n, in which IIRC the writer and P. David leaned towards suggesting Groth had faked things himself? because S0b0cinski had been nice in person once? ... around 1998, the one guy in the office that she'd browbeat into conspiring with her posted a detailed confessional account of the times on the Journal message board, that was really great.

I recall that Gr0th eventually interviewed Kitch3n sometime (this century?) and asked why he'd not called Gr0th for a reference so that he could be warned off (or not paid any attention to what she'd already done), to which Kitch3n was all "well her resume seemed impressive, I dunno man, who wants to seem like they don't trust a woman?" but I can't remember when.


[sorry for annoying-to-read J0r-E11ing, just don't want this half-arsed gossiping to be a google source for anyone ever trying to remember properly]

I love that you have google guarded Groth even though the ungoogle guarded word is upthread.

There is also a stray Groth in the post.

I didn't mean how many cartoonists are literal members of the Libertarian Party btw. Ditko, for example, talks a very libertarian-esque line, but he's not a partisan.

just noting that there seems to be an odd streak of this type of thinking within the comics industry, that's all

interesting (and old) blog post from Sim re: Chet and prostitution

just noting that there seems to be an odd streak of this type of thinking within the comics industry, that's all

who else? I don't think Bagge's a member of the party

Paul Pope? Ditko (sorta?)

Sim's probably too hardcore conservative to be considered libertarian (by his own admission)

Oh boy, that Sim post...I'm through the looking glass.

lol I know rite

"...and women's obsessive interest in androgyny in all its forms, the borderland where distinctions between men and women get fuzzy around the edges. Women really get off on that. Why? Beats me. "

MAKES YA THINK

yeah, Pope I guess. out of thousands of active creators it's still v far from a streak tho!

There is also a stray Groth in the post.

I'm sure this is legal as long as he's fully franked

Fact (as of 2007): CB didn't own a computer or cell phone.

the Sim post reminded me that someone should check this against the book - is he going to the library for all those john review sites?

someone should try and draw a map of Mike Baron's politics

is he going to the library for all those john review sites?

I think there's a scene in the book where he does exactly this actually...?

Bob Burden's another one with a weird reactionary libertarian streak iirc

@sic, he told me this himself in 2007. I offered him a retired Mac, but he declined.

I mean yeah I'm not talking like a huge majority of the comics industry (which is a LOT of people) just that it pops up enough to be noticeable. Maybe it's all the business experiences of all these creator-owned types...

Mike Baron's an interesting one... there is some kind of implication in Nexus that Ylum is intended as a libertarian paradise.

I think there's a scene in the book where he does exactly this actually...?

yeah, I think he does the first time, but I can't remember if he later gets a computer so he can do it at home

btw I clicked through the blogpost to the Cerebus Yahoo group, thinking "I wonder if it's still active? I remember Sim himself gave up on trying to follow it (circa 2005) because they talked about Star Wars too much" -- and 17 of the last 30 posts are about what order to watch Star Wars in.