Chester Brown

Blimey, I've only read Ed the Happy Clown- seems a bit different.

he seems to be slowly turning into some sort of "dave sim with a modicum of self-awareness" figure. not that he's a misogynist (though the libertarianism is just as baffling to me) but that his comics are becoming agitprop for a series of increasingly specific and potentially alienating beliefs. that said i'm on record above as considering the yummy fur gospel strips among his best work, so i'm much more intrigued by this than by "paying for it." (which was a slog.)

Sim is an apt comparison judging from the wikipedia research I've just done.

Very fond of EtHC anyhow, should probably catch up with some of his other work some day.

I did get around to reading "Paying for It" although just the comic part. I'm going to take a deep breath and jump into the appendices sometime soon.

The impression I've gotten is that the brief asides and conversation bits between Brown and his friends that lead into introspection (which are great!) are interpreted completely differently than my own take

everything up through "louis riel" is worth reading. (though "the playboy" is more of a flawed dry-run for "i never liked you" and the book of short stories should only be picked up cheap.) i kind of miss the looseness of his pre-"riel" art, but the samples from the new book look like a nice midway point between the grotesqueries of "ed" and the harold gray homages of his later stuff.

Sim comparison seems hard to avoid, with the exception that a) I don't think Chester's ever been as good as Sim was at his peak, and b) he doesn't seem to have gone quite as far around the bend as Sim (there's still time tho lol)

notice only dudes are into cb

oh yeah cb is in no way as good a cartoonist (or as purely ambitious) as sim. he also seems to still have at least one foot in consensus reality. sim spending his (creative) life in relative isolation and feeling increasingly embattled after the whole post-issue-186 blow-up seems to have exacerbated his crack-up considerably.

did you miss Abbott posting in this thread xp

nah my wife likes Chester Brown (not as much as Julia Wertz tho)

his comics are becoming agitprop for a series of increasingly specific and potentially alienating beliefs.

I'm infinitely more sympathetic to the idea of decriminalised prostitution that basically anything Sim has been espousing for the past two decades.

i'd take brown's views on religion over sim's, that's for sure

yeah i'm not necessarily against brown's views on prostitution (though i think he has the typical libertarian's simplicity regarding the actual nuts-and-bolts reality thereof), but whatever you can say about sim's views (trust me: i'd disavow everything he stands for after 1993 or so), i can't deny his batshit commitment to craft in putting them on the page, where "paying for it" had all the visual appeal of a particularly skillful chick tract.

particularly skillful chick tract

lol I liked it but can't really argue with this characterization

Can we somehow compel Chet legally to do a collection of the fucking yummy fur bible stories? It'd be like his best book.

^^^ when i heard about the new book i was hoping it was this.

I assume that will never happen. are there rights issues?

it seems bizarre that's the only work of his (with the exception of "underwater") that's still uncollected. i mean he even included his (extreme) juvenalia in "the little man."

lol Underwater. that seemed like such a bad idea

He only got partway through the second gospel, so there is no book to collect. (Since part of the point in doing them was to contrast the different portrayals of Jesus in each, he wouldn't want to give the wrong impression by only reprinting the bits that got done, and it was over two decades ago, so he's proooobably moved on by now)

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