"The scientists at the end of the 19th century had people coming to them with this weird behaviour, and they didn't know what was going on but there seemed to be a similarity. They needed an answer, so they made up one." -- Chester Brown
Chester Brown (born May 16, 1960) is a Canadian alternative cartoonist. His underground work was initially self-published, then released by the independent publishing company Vortex Comics. Most of his output is now published by Drawn and Quarterly.
"Alan Moore does have a sheen of class. He's a smart guy, and I'm sure there was a metaphoric level, I'm not denying that, but let's face it. the main reason he was doing a super-hero comic was because he was working for a super-hero comic book company.""Almost every scene, I re-think as I'm about to start drawing it, and at least half of the time I'm changing dialogue or whatever, or adding scenes or different things.""I consider myself a right-winger and Gray was certainly one.""I Never Liked You. I think that's my best book. I think it works the best as a story, and I like the drawing. It works on both levels, for me at least.""I think people should have the legal right to hurt themselves without fearing that they're going to get locked up for doing so. But on a personal level, if someone I loved was hurting himself or herself in front of me, I would, of course, try to restrain them.""I think politics is important. It's how we run our society. I think it should be natural to have an interest in the subject, and I almost don't understand why some people don't.""I think the thinking is, in the comic books, I should pack as much onto a page as possible, because, you know, it's kind of the cheaper format, and you want to give readers as much as you can for their dollar.""I was looking to do something non-fiction because I had done a strip, 'My Mom Was a Schizophrenic.' I really enjoyed the process of doing that strip, despite its subject matter. To do it I'd had to do a lot of research and reading and I figured I'd like to do that again.""I'd begun reading Crumb shortly before that, and other underground stuff, so that was an influence to some degree. Of course the Marvel and DC comics, they had been my main interests in my teenage years.""I'm planning on finishing the Gospels at some point.""It's not so much that I got that idea at some point, it came up naturally because of the improvisational nature of the story I was telling.""PENTHOUSE didn't seem to concentrate as much on the girls' faces, and I really wanted to see the girls' faces. It seems like through the 1980's, they almost went out of their way to obscure the girls' faces.""People should be allowed the freedom to make their own choices. They should be able to buy or not buy porn and be monogamous or promiscuous as they see fit.""That's the thing. in medicine, you're used to saying there's a problem within the person, and saying there's a problem within the culture, that's not a medical answer. Medicine has to look in one direction, so there's only one type of answer that they can find.""The counter-argument would be, so what if my sexual relationships are superficial, one can still have satisfying and rewarding relationships with friends, or parents, or siblings, or whatever.""The director is planning on titling the film 'Yummy Fur' so we are probably planning on changing the title of the book to 'Yummy Fur' to match the film.""The main problem was a pacing problem. I had wanted the project to be about 20-30 issues, and I should have written it out as a full script beforehand.""The whole schizophrenia angle interested me. When I first started working on it, I thought I would play up that angle more than I ended up doing. The religious aspect of the story was also a draw.""There I was limited to what happened the same way I am with Riel. It doesn't feel like a great burden to have your story, to some degree, set. I am enjoying figuring out what I think is the most dramatic way of telling this set of historical facts.""There's a bit of debate about that; some say it was really Matthew, but the popular consensus is that Mark was the first one, so that's why I did that one first. And I was planning on doing all four.""They thought they were identifying a set of behaviours, but yeah, they just wanted to have an answer.""We couldn't be making as much money, if we had to deal with stranger behaviour. And right now, anybody who slows down our economic productivity, off they go. We have a place for them, the psychiatric institution. That's the main thing, they slow things down.""We're not very accepting of people who act strangely.""When I was a teenager, 'Playboy' was the most interesting magazine in the world, and not just for the playmates. I liked the interviews and the stories, and all that, but nowadays most of the stuff in there doesn't interest me.""With each of those projects I wasn't thinking about how the layout would really affect the story I was working on - it wasn't the content that was affecting the layout, it was, how I wanted to draw at that point in time.""You kind of hope that the events themselves are interesting. I think that's what you have to hope for, that on a broad level it's an interesting story."
Brown made his debut in comics with a self-published mini-comic called Yummy Fur, later published as a full size comic from Vortex Comics, initially reprinting the contents of the earlier mini. Its contents included the surreal black comedy strip Ed the Happy Clown, collected in graphic novel form by Vortex in 1989 and later in an edition by Drawn & Quarterly. The bizarre misfortunes of the title character include being chased by cannibalistic pygmies and having the tip of his penis replaced by the head of a miniature Ronald Reagan from another universe. The book was selected as one of the best comics of 2003 by Time columnist Andrew D. Arnold and was nominated for a 2004 Eisner Award. Brown has begun to reprint the original, unaltered versions of the Ed stories with the publisher Drawn & Quarterly. They plan to eventually publish a revised third and definitive book-length version of the saga.
In later Vortex editions of Yummy Fur, Brown experimented with autobiography, and in 1990 produced highly structured narratives about his childhood in serialized form. These stories were later collected as graphic novels, The Playboy (Drawn and Quarterly, 1992) and I Never Liked You (Drawn and Quarterly, 1994). The former deals with the his obsessive preoccupation with Playboy magazines in his youth, and is promoted as "[a]n autobiographical look at how pornography has affected my life" by the author. I Never Liked You (originally titled Fuck) is an often grim coming-of-age tale, which depicts the author as an introvert who is constantly picked on by his schoolmates and cannot relate to the opposite sex. It also deals with his mother's bout with schizophrenia.
Brown's longest-running work is a series of adaptations of the Christian gospels: he finished the Gospel of Mark as a backup feature in Yummy Fur, and the still unfinished Gospel of Matthew appeared in Yummy Fur and Underwater. These adaptations adhere closely to Biblical events but use colloquial language and often grotesque caricature; Brown's portrayal of Jesus not only is idiosyncratic and often harsh, but varies considerably between the two books, reflecting the differences in emphasis between gospels. The gospel strips have not been reprinted; Brown says he intends to finish them. Recently Chester was asked by Cerebus comic book creator Dave Sim if he'd be interested in letting him publish the unpublished material as part of his proposed possible publication or free print-on-demand from off of the internet of his commentaries of the gospels and The Book of Revelation out of Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort's 1881 interlinear Greek to English translation of The New Testament. At last mention Chester hadn't said yes or no.
Underwater, Brown's first series after Yummy Fur, is an experimental work that attempts to portray life from the point of view of an infant, starting with entirely incomprehensible events and dialogue and gradually developing a coherent narrative as the child matures. The series was not well received by critics and sold poorly, and Brown abandoned it in an unfinished state. His most recent graphic novel is A Comic-Strip Biography, published by Drawn and Quarterly in both its serialized and collected forms.
Regarding his early work, Brown has explained that "the Ed story came automatically, without any thought." Throughout his early years as a cartoonist he mostly experimented with drawing on the darker side of his subconscious, basing his comedy on free-form association, much like the surrealist technique Automatism. An example of such methods in Brown's work can be found in short one-pagers where he randomly selects comic panels from other sources and then mixes them up, often altering the dialogue. This produced an experimental, absurdist effect in his early strips.
Brown first discusses mental illness in his strip "My Mother Was A Schizophrenic". In it, he puts forward the anti-psychiatric idea that what we call "schizophrenia" isn't a real disease at all, but instead a tool our society uses to deal with people who display socially unacceptable beliefs and behaviour. Inspired by the evangelical tracts of Jack T. Chick, Brown left Xeroxes of these strips at bus stops and stations around Montreal so its message would reach a wider audience. This strip was eventually reproduced in a journal of psychiatry; it first appeared as a backup feature in Underwater, and is also reprinted in the collection The Little Man.
Brown's Louis Riel book was inspired by the alleged mental instability of Riel, and Brown's own anarchist politics, and he began his research for the book in 1998. Over the course of researching for the book, he shifted his politics over the course of several years until he was a libertarian. Regarding anarchy, Brown has said "I’m still an anarchist to the degree that I think we should be aiming towards an anarchist society but I don’t think we can actually get there. We probably do need some degree of government."
Brown had a long-term relationship with the musician, actress and media personality Sook-Yin Lee, who is depicted in several of his comics. He also drew the cover for her 1996 solo album Wigs 'n Guns. In September 2008, Brown entered politics as the Libertarian Party of Canada's candidate for the riding of Trinity-Spadina in the 2008 federal election.
A longtime friend of fellow cartoonists Joe Matt and Seth, Brown has been regularly featured in their autobiographical comics over the years, and collaborated with them on various projects. Seth dedicated his graphic novel George Sprott to Brown.
