Chester Brown

Chester William David Brown (born 16 May 1960) is a Canadian cartoonist.

Brown has gone through several stylistic and thematic periods. He gained notice in alternative comics circles in the 1980s for the surreal, scatological ''Ed the Happy Clown'' serial. After bringing ''Ed'' to an abrupt end, he delved into confessional autobiographical comics in the early 1990s and was strongly associated with fellow Toronto-based cartoonists Seth and Joe Matt, and the contemporary autobiographical comics trend. Two graphic novels came from this period: '' The Playboy'' (1992) and '' I Never Liked You'' (1994). Surprise mainstream success in the 2000s came with ''Louis Riel'' (2003), a historical-biographical graphic novel about rebel Métis leader Louis Riel. '' Paying for It'' (2011) drew controversy as a polemic in support of decriminalizing prostitution, a theme he explored further with '' Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus'' (2016), a book of adaptations of stories from the Bible that Brown believes promote pro-prostitution attitudes among early Christians.

Brown draws from a range of influences, including monster and superhero comic books, underground comix, and comic strips such as Harold Gray's ''Little Orphan Annie''. His later works employ a sparse drawing style and flat dialogue. Rather than the traditional method of drawing complete pages, Brown draws individual panels without regard for page composition and assembles them into pages after completion. Since the late 1990s Brown has had a penchant for providing detailed annotations for his work and extensively altering and reformatting older works.

Brown at first self-published his work as a minicomic called '' Yummy Fur'' beginning in 1983; Toronto publisher Vortex Comics began publishing the series as a comic book in 1986. The content tended towards controversial themes: a distributor and a printer dropped it in the late 1980s, and it has been held up at the Canada–United States border. Since 1991, Brown has associated himself with Montreal publisher Drawn & Quarterly. Following ''Louis Riel'' Brown ceased serializing his work to publish graphic novels directly. He has received grants from the Canada Council to complete ''Louis Riel'' and ''Paying for It''.

Life and career

Early life

Chester William David Brown was born on 16 May 1960 at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He grew up in Châteauguay, a Montreal suburb with a large English-speaking minority. His grandfather was history professor Chester New, after whom Chester New Hall is named at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He has a brother, Gordon, who is two years his junior. His mother had schizophrenia, and died in 1976 after falling down the stairs while in the Montreal General Hospital.

Though he grew up in a predominantly French-speaking province and had his first mainstream success with his biography of French-speaking Métis rebel leader Louis Riel, Brown says he doesn't speak French. He said he had little contact with francophone culture when he was growing up, and the French speakers he had contact with spoke with him in English.

Brown described himself as a "nerdy teeneager" attracted to comic books from a young age, especially ones about superheroes and monsters. He aimed at a career in superhero comics, and after graduating from high school in 1977 headed to New York City, where he had unsuccessful but encouraging interviews with Marvel and DC Comics. He moved to Montreal where he attended Dawson College. The program did not aim at a comics career, and he dropped out after a little more than a year. He tried to find work in New York, but was rejected again. He discovered the alternative comics scene that was developing in the early 1980s, and grasped its feeling freedom to produce what he wanted. At 19 he moved to Toronto, where he got a job in a photography lab and lived frugally in rooming houses.

Toronto (1979–1986)

At around twenty, Brown's interests moved away from superhero and monster comic books towards the work of Robert Crumb and other underground cartoonists, '' Heavy Metal'' magazine, and Will Eisner's graphic novel ''A Contract with God'' (1978). He started drawing in an underground-inspired style, and submitted his work to publishers Fantagraphics Books and Last Gasp; he got an encouraging rejection when he submitted to Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly's ''Raw'' magazine. He became friends with film archivist Reg Hartt, and the two unsuccessfully planned to put out a comics anthology called ''Beans and Wieners'' as a showcase for local Toronto talent.

In 1983 Brown's girlfriend Kris Nakamura introduced him to the small-press publisher John W. Curry (or "jwcurry"), whose example inspired the local small-press community. Nakamura convinced Brown that summer to print his unpublished work as minicomics, which he did under his Tortured Canoe imprint. The sporadically self-published '' Yummy Fur'' lasted seven issues as a minicomic. Brown soon found himself at the centre of Toronto's small-press scene. While he found it difficult at first, Brown managed to get the title into independent bookstores, the emerging comic shops, and other countercultural retailers, and also sold it through the growing North American zine network. ''Yummy Fur'' had respectable sales through several reprintings and repackaging.

Brown and a number of other cartoonists featured in a show called Kromalaffing at the Grunwald Art Gallery in early 1984. He had become a part of Toronto's avant-garde community, along with other artists, musicians and writers, centred around Queen Street West. In 1986, at the urging of Brown's future friend Seth, Vortex Comics publisher Bill Marks picked up ''Yummy Fur'' as a regular, initially bimonthly comic book. Brown quit his day job to work full-time on ''Yummy Fur''.

Vortex and ''Ed the Happy Clown'' (1986–1989)

Starting publication in December 1986, the first three issues of ''Yummy Fur'' reprinted the contents of the seven issues of the earlier minicomic, and Brown quit his job at the copy shop. Brown began to weave together some of the earlier unrelated strips into an ongoing surreal black comedy called ''Ed the Happy Clown''. The bizarre misfortunes of the title character include being inundated in the faeces of a man unable to stop defaecating, being chased by cannibalistic pygmies, befriending a vengeful vampire, and having the head of his penis replaced by the head of a miniature Ronald Reagan from another dimension.

A counterpoint to the at-times blasphemous ''Ed'' serial, Brown also began to run straight adaptation of the Gospels, beginning with the Gospel of Mark in a subdued style. What appeared a natural target of satire for the author of ''Ed'' was instead a continuing attempt of Brown's to find what he really believed, having been raised a Christian Baptist. The adaptations later continued with the Gospel of Matthew and the apocryphal "The Twin" from the Gnostic text ''Pistis Sophia'', and Brown went through periods of agnosticism and Gnosticism.

The offensive content of ''Ed'' caused it to be dropped by one printer, and is suspected to be behind Diamond Comic Distributors' decision to stop distributing ''Yummy Fur'' starting with issue #9. After ''The Comics Journal'' announced they would be investigating the issue, Diamond started distributing it again.

In 1989 the first ''Ed'' collection appeared, collecting the ''Ed'' stories from the first twelve issues of ''Yummy Fur'' with an introduction by ''American Splendor'' writer Harvey Pekar and drawn by Brown. At this point, Brown had grown to lose interest in the ''Ed'' story as he gravitated toward the autobiographical approach of Pekar, Joe Matt, and Julie Doucet