Seth vs Chester Brown

also my canadian friends were like "holy shit someone drew a comic book about louis riel"

in it's a good life.. i wasn't sure if seth wanted to put himself across as a bore or not. a bunch of his uh central concerns seem to be in robinson's 'starman' which i've been reading and is surprisingly good, actually - i dunno. 'clyde fans' seems to engage with the past in a much, much more interesting fashion, although not one i have any particular insights w/r/t.

mostly i started this thread bcz the way they draw each other is cute.

i've read brown's thing about playboy and the shorts collection, what else should i look into?

Underwater was brilliant, but v. uncommercial and got abandoned about ten issues in. Intending to tell a life story from birth to [death?] Brown gave up when he'd been doing it for two or three years and the babies were still not processing human speech or their visual perceptions. He came up with ingenious representations of these though! But most of the audience bailed, thinking it was utter gibberish. Don't bother now unless you like unfinished, possibly frustrating works.

Ed The Happy Clown has been different in serial, first collection and second collection. He's starting a new serialised reprint, with heavier revisions than before, ahead of another collected edition - this is probably going to be a lot of fun to read piece by piece if you're looking for a next step.

One of my favorite comics ever and one of my favorite artists. The story 'Showing Helder' (I think that's what it was called) reprinted in 'The Little Man' has the most beautiful art--frameless panels on white pages.

huh! this can still lead to a totally different third collection though, given how much of it was never reprinted before. no back-up features though, I take it?

No back-up features indeed, though there's a few pages of Brown's notes about the comic--how he drew it, where the ideas came from etc.

These nine comic-books will reprint the work exactly as it appeared in the 1992 book edition...

So there. How that differs from what was printed in Yummy Fur I don't know.

(the first book omitted them because they didn't exist yet, the second omitted them because Brown decided the later stuff wasn't as good as the rest and had gotten used to the unresolved ending in the first one.)

Plus there may have been the odd art revision here and there, nothing major.

Do I want the Louis Riel book? I think I do.

Your friend,

I'm sure I will get the book. I thought last time this came up, Huk asked me hadn't he shown me a few issues of it. Also, I'm downloading the latest Corner Gas right now.

Once I didn't buy a book of terrible poetry for a dollar even though the author was from rural Sask. I still mostly don't regret that.

Agreed. But John K's busy producing another band's new record right now, so I don't know that a new Weakerthans album will be along that soon.

Huk, that book sounds good -- what's the title, if you don't mind.

Includes CBC Comics Fest

"Canadian comics are anything but dull" - author has obv never read Louis Riel

didn't have much time for Seth's over-ornate, self-regarding foppery until a friend gave me Wimbledon Green, which is a really funny, really beautiful piece of auto-critique abt comics (and collecting in general) - he shld be more 'spontaneous' more often, fuck a grand schema/structure

his next work after Wimbledon Green was very much in that mode, but suffered from being too self-conscious about trying to capture the new elements that made WG a success in the end. or maybe it was just that he kept hitting the same plot notes every three weeks for intended poignancy.