Would you trust this man with your prostitute?
Preview – tonight in Vancouver, Chester Brown
- by Shawn Conner
Chester Brown is on a book tour for his new graphic novel Paying For It. Tonight, May 18, he’s at the Vancouver Public Library’s central (Georgia & Homer) branch.
Even in an artform known for its, uhm, unique individuals, the 50-year-old Brown stands out.
Yummy Fur, his first serialized comic, was as strange as anything that came before and probably since; few who have read it will forget Ronald Reagan as a talking penis (never mind that the transposed head doesn’t even look like Reagan’s).
Since Yummy Fur‘s weirdquake on the alt-comic consciousness, Brown has followed his own path, with subject matter that has ranged from the autobiographical (I Never Liked You Anyway, The Playboy) to the Canadian-historical (Louis Riel) to the WTF? (the not-in-any-known-language series Underwater, which Brown has, at least temporarily, abandoned).
Chester Brown's cover for Penguin Classics' 2006 reissue of Lady Chatterley's Lover
Typically for such an atypical artist, his methodology – at least, from what I recall reading of his early work – is, or was, also unorthodox. Where most artists lay out all the panels on a page, Brown would draw each panel on a separate piece of paper, then arrange them into a page. He also hand letters every word – not completely unusual in the world of alternative comics until you consider he also hand letters, in Paying For It, appendices and jacket copy as well.
Chester Brown's poster art for Sook-Yin Lee's Year of the Carnivore
Unusually, Paying For It, Brown’s latest, didn’t start as a comic first, so no teaser preceded the graphic novel, which suddenly appeared fully-formed earlier this year.
Part essay in book form, part story, Paying For It charts Brown’s “progress” from a guy who has just broken up with his girlfriend (well, she breaks up with him) to a john. This progress beings prosaically, with Brown checking out the “escort” ads in the back of a Toronto weekly paper, a detail – like the appearance in the book of Brown’s ex, Sook-Yin Lee, filmmaker and former MuchMusic on-air personality – that adds to the Canadian-ness of it all.
Paying For It shares several of the artist’s encounters with prostitutes, all the while keeping the women’s features obscured. The book is about Brown, not the women, and about his awakening (if you want to call it that) and his beliefs – some of which will be all too familiar to some men, as when Brown bemoans his lack of social skills when it comes to meeting women. It is also about making the case for the decriminalization of prostitution.
Indeed, Paying For It could have been completely didactic, and at times it devolves into a bunch of talking heads discussing the law. But Brown is such a natural storyteller, and his sense of humour so subtle and dry – with himself almost always the butt of the joke – that the book is hard to put down.
Panel from Paying For It by Chester Brown (Drawn & Quarterly, 2011).
The best line in Paying For It actually doesn’t even appear in the story itself, however. In one of the book’s appendices, Seth – a fellow Toronto cartoonist friend of Brown’s who is in several sequences in the book – responds to the author’s invitation to comment on the panels in which he, Seth, appears. But Seth also remarks on a couple of pages where Brown and their mutual cartoonist friend Joe Matt discuss romantic love.
“Joe Matt and Chester Brown discussing romantic love,” writes Seth, “Is like two blind men discussing a sunset.” One can imagine Brown’s characteristic high-pitched giggle when he first read, then hand-lettered, those words.
Chester Brown at The Strand bookstore.
