Chester Brown

Taking sides: The last few issues of Yummy Fur (inc I never liked you, Playboy stuff) v the earlier vampire and wheeled-cow, adventures in science, wanking squid, never-ending shitting man, Ed, aliens stuff

This guy has to be the world's most likeable libertarian.

interesting review of his new book: http://comiczine-fa.com/reviews/paying-for-it/

One of the blurbs on the dust jacket compares it to My Secret Life, which is intensely inaccurate. It is funny though because the blurbs are about even thirds: professors of sociology or sexuality, popular blogging callgirls (I guess?), or generous blurb-giving comics guys (Crumb, Gaiman, Moore).

I really liked his new book.

A fictional panel discussion about the book that I thought was really interesting.

sounds like a good read. I haven't paid attention since the Playboy stories ended oh so many moons ago tbh. altho I did like his adaptation of the book of mark.

was really bummed to see he's not planning to finish the gospel stories, which probably means they won't ever be collected. i think they're the weirdest and most interesting work i've seen from him, though i've liked everything of his that i've read. i read somewhere that he lists robert bresson's films as an influence, which makes sense to me.

also I'm starting to wonder what Seth's deep dark secret is, he seems way too well adjusted to be hanging out with Chester and Joe all the time

I thought this was a good review of Paying for It (haven't read the book):
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/chester-brown-paying-for-it/Content?oid=3724333

off-hand it seems a) creepy to me that he draws all the prostitutes without faces (I mean point made, but it's an ugly point) and b) lol he draws himself to look like the Red Skull now

also kinda hilarious that this is running in tandem with the thread featuring the anarcho-mysogynist lol

while flipping through the new one i realized that it retells (presumably) a scene joe matt also draws in 'spent.' it's where a waitress asks the three of them what they do for a living. in the joe matt version they all go 'we're cartoonists!' and the waitress gives them an uncomprehending look (and joe freaks out because he assumes the waitress now looks down on him), and in the chester version chester gives a very thorough explanation of what a cartoonist does and either seth or joe gets annoyed at him for 'going into too much detail.'

it must be weird to talk to your friend on the phone and then find it in the next issue of their comic book.

2 years later

that's a decent review, but if i'd noticed the byline 'noah berlatsky' i would've run for the hills.

one of the more hilarious things about Joe Matt and Chester Brown's worldviews is that they both have this pursuit-of-personal-pleasure-at-all-costs thing going, and yet neither of them seems to be remotely happy. at least, their fictional selves do not seem to achieve any lasting happiness.

but if i'd noticed the byline 'noah berlatsky' i would've run for the hills.

Ha yeah.

i'm not even a comic book person, particularly, but every time i pass by fat jack's comic crypt, i'm like, oh yeah, joe matt used to work there. and then i feel weirdly happy. it's right near the shambhala center and helium comedy club.

seth's deep dark secret is that he cosplays 1947 irl and has a pretend cardboard city in his basement, none of that is sexually bizarre or overtly sinister but i think it fits the profile of a guy who might have weirdass friends

compared to consorting with prostitutes and peeing in a jar/living in a homemade porn library I dunno that seems pretty tame. like, there's a pretty big world of difference between a grown man and his action figure collecting hobby and a grown man and his sexual-obsession-that-has-consumed-his-entire-life-and-made-him-dysfunctional

also I'm starting to wonder what Seth's deep dark secret is, he seems way too well adjusted to be hanging out with Chester and Joe all the time

He lives 95km from Chester and 4,000 km from Joe, he's probably doing OK

2 years later

12 years later! That Joe scene was in the preview in.... Details magazine? And even then was a year or two before the issue came out, and probably a year or two after it happened.

one of the more hilarious things about Joe Matt and Chester Brown's worldviews is that they both have this pursuit-of-personal-pleasure-at-all-costs thing going, and yet neither of them seems to be remotely happy. at least, their fictional selves do not seem to achieve any lasting happiness.

?? Both Chester and Seth's accounts in the book portray Chet as one of the chillest, most content dudes in the world.

Paying For It is the best squarebound comics I've read all year, and probably the book that's stayed swirling in my head most since Bottomless Bellybutton.

one of the more hilarious things about Joe Matt and Chester Brown's worldviews is that they both have this pursuit-of-personal-pleasure-at-all-costs thing going, and yet neither of them seems to be remotely happy. at least, their fictional selves do not seem to achieve any lasting happiness.

One of the 23 (!!!) appendices is Seth's thoughts on some scenes he's in. The most lolsome was: "I'm not in this scene, but I can't resist noting the idea of Chester Brown and Joe Matt discussing the nature of romantic love is not unlike two blind men painting a sunset." Also affirms Chester is by all appearances content, but affectionately calls him an emotionless robot at the same time.

I'm ashamed to say I've only read Ed the Happy Clown, which was right up my street. Where next?

it must be weird to talk to your friend on the phone and then find it in the next issue of their comic book.

or on ILX!

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?

haha actually i'm guessing those are legit quotes. i remember frank's almost homoerotic descriptions of his own physical prowess as a strapping young man.

right the first time, that was joeks but based on vivid memories of how he talked up his body, his ability to beat up entire gangs of hoodlums as a youth, and how when hired to paint for Bakshi's Fire And Ice he took control and acted out all the rotoscoped fight action too, because they were sissyboy filmmakers who had no idea about real movement

haaa

YES!:

Even when we got all that done, then we had to shoot the movie, and of course I was right there on the set. He’s giving them direction. I’m giving them direction. If I didn’t like the way they moved or if the action was kind of silly – and I gotta tell ya, some of those stunt men are hot dogs. I mean, I was trying to get a real nasty moving-type action, and they were trying to make these karate moves, which was ludicrous. Karate! What the hell is that?! We’re talking about primitive Neanderthals, and here they were doing karate! Give me a break. [Groth laughs.] They’d say, “Oh, it’ll be great, it’ll be great.” I said, “It won’t be great.” I wanted it simple and deadly.

So I’d always do the action. They’d always confront me: “Show us what you mean, Frank,” ha-ha, chuckle-chuckle. So the adrenaline gets going, and I found myself doing action that I haven’t done since I was 18. It was incredible. I had them amazed – and I had myself amazed! I don’t know where it came from. It’s interesting, you know? I’ve heard Stallone say that. He says when he makes his movies, the adrenaline gets pumping, and he found himself doing one-hand pushups and he’d never done it before. Adrenaline can make you do things that you can’t imagine you could do.

You were in your early 50s at that time?

Yeah. I jumped from high places, and they’d scream as if I was killing myself, and I landed like a cat, just like I used to. It was really quite remarkable. I felt really good about myself — naturally, considering my age! [Laughs.]

This thread is blowing my mind!!

i know--the things I'm learning (that are, frankly, much more entertaining than brown's prostitute shenanigans)

I never knew Frazetta thought he was one of the guys in his art.

yeah that stuff about acting out Fire and Ice is in the Bakshi book too

thing is, frazetta did look like one of his drawings!

http://thevelvetrocket.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/frank_frazetta-01.jpg

strongo is otm abt the political disconnect between groth and some of his interview subjects - it comes over esp strongly in his schulz interview iirc.

man no wonder "landed like a cat" stuck in my mind for 16 years:

But what’s interesting is that you went on to became an artist, that the violence didn’t really brutalize you.

No, I was always the good guy, you know! [Laughs.] The funny part is, even though it sounds like I must have been some pain in the ass, the fact of the matter is I used to walk the street and I used to eyeball all the tough-looking guys — you know, bullies, shitheads, you know the type, the guys who needed gangs behind them. I used to be a loner. I used to walk through the neighborhoods and defy them. I was crazy. I had such confidence in myself; all I had to do was take on the leader, and suddenly, I had a reputation all over Brooklyn. But I thought that was real cool!

[Laughs.] The difference between us is that I’d always get the shit kicked out of me.

Well, you’ve got to be able to back it up or you’d better split. But I used to think “cat” when I got involved. I had a thing for cats, leopards in particular, and I used to watch them. God, they could move so quickly the eye could not follow them. I could mentally understand it, and make myself do it, up to a point. If you could do that, if you could be like a cat, then nobody could beat you. I don’t care how big they were. If they were much bigger and stronger, I could spin and swirl, and get out of anything, just because I was thinking “cat.” You know what I’m saying?

I think I do.

lol @ all this. young frank f was a good lookin dude though.

the schulz one was another interview that stuck in my mind for that reason, yeah. like come on, gary, you cant be surprised that kindly, near-death sparky schulz has no great feelings about robert crumb and doesnt view merchandising as wholly evil.

the part of that interview that always amazed me came when groth asked schulz if he ever felt frustrated by not being able to explore sexuality in his own work the way crumb did. (i find the thought of anyone asking charles schulz this question kind of unspeakably horrifying.) schulz evidently paused for a long time, then finally answered something like: 'well, you know, these are just little kids i'm drawing here.'

another favorite: the art spiegelman interview where groth keeps badgering him to express an opinion on jack kirby. spiegelman obviously has zero interest but somehow lets himself get drawn into an endless, circular argument about it. (i.e., groth: 'the way kirby would draw the thing hurling a boulder across the river, that didn't grab you?' spiegelman: 'no.')

well: http://boingboing.net/2016/04/20/mary-wept-over-the-feet-of-jes.html

loved it. still reading the (copious) notes but the 170-ish illustrated pages are some of his best work. simple and expressive lines echoed in the dialogue and narration (which is all intertitles) that adds up to a weird powerful argument about something i don't really care about. thus i can admire the mania (good and bad) on display.

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

Sook-Yin Lee with Chester Brown on the story behind the film version of Paying For It

This quote is really wild!

For Chester’s cartoonist pals in his graphic novel, I fictionalised the names and depictions, because his peers who inspired the characters did not want their real names used.

I can't think of any comic gang more notoriously joined at the hip than them -- would not be surprised if a scene of them arguing about being in the movie ultimately making it into one of their comics.

too late for the one most likely to (and the whole gang haven’t lived in the same city / country for over two decades)