Chester Brown

Chester Brown
Chester Brown, at the 2009 Toronto Word on the Street festival
Born	May 16, 1960 (1960-05-16) Montreal, Canada
Nationality	Canadian
Area(s)	Cartoonist
Pseudonym(s)	CWDB
Notable works	Ed the Happy Clown, The Playboy, I Never Liked You, Louis Riel (comic)
Awards	Harvey
Influences Robert Crumb, Harold Gray, Joe Matt, Seth, Julie Doucet
Influenced Seth, Anders Nilsen, Dave Cooper, Jhonen Vasquez[citation needed]

Chester William David Brown (born May 16, 1960 in Montreal), is an award-winning, best-selling Canadian alternative cartoonist and, since 2008, the Libertarian Party of Canada's candidate for the riding of Trinity-Spadina in Toronto, Canada.

Brown has gone through several periods in his work, most famously the improvised, surreal, scatalogical Ed the Happy Clown in the 1980s, his controversial confessional autobiographical comics of the early 1990s, his biographical graphic novel of rebellious Métis leader Louis Riel, and his pro-prostitution polemic, Paying for It. His work has tended towards controversial themes and content, which has caused it to be dropped from a distributor and a printer, and has been held up at the Canadian border.

His underground work was initially self-published as a minicomic called Yummy Fur. Yummy Fur was picked up by the Toronto-based independent comics publisher Vortex Comics in 1986, and became a regular black-and-white comic book. Since 1991, most of his output has been published by the Montreal-based Drawn and Quarterly. As of the publiction of Paying for It, he has given up on serializing his work and has started to publish his work directly as graphic novels. He has received grants from the Canadian government to complete his work on Louis Riel and Paying for It.

Especially in the 1990s, Brown was strongly associated with fellow Toronto cartoonists Seth and Joe Matt, and the autobiographical comics trend during that period. The three would often depict one another in their own comics, do comics and minicomics together, and appear in interviews together.

Brown often signs his work CWDB.

Personal history

Early life

Brown was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, on May 16, 1960, at the Royal Victoria Hospital, but grew up in Châteauguay, a suburb of Montreal which has 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 suffered from schizophrenia, and died after falling down the stairs while in the Montreal General Hospital when he was 17 years old.

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

Brown was a "nerdy teeneager" who was attracted to comic books from a young age, especially about superheroes and monsters. He decided he wanted to make drawing superhero comics his career, and after graduating from high school in 1977, he 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, but since the program wasn't one that aimed at a career in comics, he dropped out after a little more than a year, and tried once again to find work in New York. He was again politely rejected, but had discovered the new alternative comics in the interim, and later decided that it was a good thing to have been rejected, as doing things on his own gave him freedom to do the work he wanted to do. He moved to Toronto when he was 19, where he has spent most of his adult life, and got a job in a photography lab, living frugally in rooming houses.

Toronto

Around the age of twenty, Brown's interest started to move away from superhero and monster comics and more towards undergrounds like Robert Crumb. He also came across Heavy Metal and Will Eisner's A Contract with God around this time. He started drawing in a more underground style, and submitted his work to Fantagraphics Books, Last Gasp, and Art Spiegelman's Raw, from whom he got an encouraging rejection.

In 1983, his girlfriend, Kris Nakamura, convinced him to print his unpublished work as minicomics. The sporadically self-published Yummy Fur minicomic lasted seven issues, which he made in his spare time while working for a copy shop. It sold respectably well and got a positive review in The Comics Journal, a publication Brown looked up to. 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 and set to work full-time on Yummy Fur.

Vortex and Ed the Happy Clown

Starting in December 1986, the first three issues of Yummy Fur reprinted the contents of the seven issues of the earlier mini, 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, such as the "Adventures in Science" strips and "The Man Who Couldn't Stop", about who couldn't stop defecating, which ended up becoming central to the plot. The bizarre misfortunes of the title character include being chased by cannibalistic pygmies 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 a straight adaptation of the Gospel of Mark in a subdued style. What seemed like what would have been a natural target of satire for the author of Ed was actually Brown's searching for what he really believed, having been raised a Christian Baptist and not having yet given it up. Over the course of his Gospel adaptations, would later include the Gospel of Matthew, Brown went through a period of agnosticism, and another period of Gnosticism. During his Gnostic period, he adapted some short Gnostic stories as well, and included some apocrypha in his Gospels.

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.

Although delayed by a bindary refusing to bind it due to its content, in 1989 the first Ed collection made its appearance, collecting the Ed stories from the first twelve issues of Yummy Fur with an introduction in comics form written by American Splendor writer Harvey Pekar and drawn by Brown. At this point, Brown had grown to lose interest in the way the Ed story was going, especially in the episodes that post-dated the collection. He had also grown interested in a number of other cartoonists, and had a desire to change his style. After reading through a package of Julie Doucet's minicomics, Brown decided he wanted to do similarly personal work. The same night, he worked out an ending to Ed, which was published as Yummy Fur #18, and began to do autobiographical comics.

Autobio and Drawn and Quarterly

Brown started his "autobio" period with some short comics, "Helder" and "Showing Helder". In the latter, he deconstructed how he came to make the former, and the choices and changes he made during the stories creation, showing it to his friends Kris, Seth and Mark Askwith. In this story, he decided not to ink in the borders he had pencilled, and abandoned the grid, arranging his panels freely on the page. Brown had always drawn his panels individually, and arranged them on the page together later. Until "Showing Helder", this had always been in a grid, but from that story, and for the next few years, he would abandon the grid entirely.

Issue #21 of Yummy Fur saw the first instalment of what would become the graphic novel, The Playboy. This would be a revealing story of Brown's adolescent obsession with masturbating over the Playmates of Playboy magazine, his guilt about it, and the difficulties he had relating to women even into adulthood. It received both praise from critics for its honesty, while attracting flack for seeming to rationalize pornography, with one fan tearing up issue #21 and mailing it back Brown.

Around this time, Brown had become friends with the cartoonists Seth and Joe Matt. The three became noted for doing confessional autobio comics in the early 1990s, and for depicting each other in their works. In 1993, they did an interview together in The Comics Journal's autobiographical comics issue. Seth had joined the new Montreal-based comics publisher Drawn and Quarterly, which had also started publishing Julie Doucet. D&Q's Chris Oliveros had been courting Brown to join as well, but Brown had felt loyal to Bill Marks for giving him his first break. When his contract came up in 1991, however, Oliveros offered Brown nearly double the royalty he was getting from Vortex. Brown moved to D&Q starting with Yummy Fur #25.

Vancouver and Underwater

The dialogue in Underwater gradually becomes comprehensible as Kupifam acquires language

In 1992, Brown started having a relationship with Sook-Yin Lee, and in 1993 moved to Vancouver to be with her. He stayed there with her until 1995, when Lee landed a job as VJ at MuchMusic in Toronto, and the two moved back there together.

Brown moved away from autobio after the conclusion of Fuck, and for his next major project, Chris Oliveros convinced him to change the title, believing the title Yummy Fur was no longer a fitting one for the direction that Brown's work had taken, and that the title made the book harder to sell. His next work, Underwater, would appear under its own title, while continuing the Gospel of Matthew adaptation as a backup feature.

Underwater was an ambitious work. Its lead character, Kupifam, was an infant who was surrounded by an encoded "gibberish" language, which she comes to understand in bits and pieces. Fans and critics gave the series, with its glacial pacing, a lukewarm reception. Eventually, Brown came to feel he had gotten in over his head with the scope of the project, and cancelled it after eleven issues, leaving it in an unfinished state in 1998.

Partway through the series, in 1996, Brown and Lee broke up, but continued to live with each other, and have continued to be close friends. Brown came to decide that he no longer wanted to have exclusive relations with women, but also realized he lacked the social skills to pick up girls for casual sex. He spent the next few years celibate.

Louis Riel and prostitution

While researching Louis Riel, Brown gradually turned to libertarianism

Brown's father died in 1998 as he was putting together his collection of short strips, The Little Man. He lost interest in Underwater, and had been reading about Métis rebel leader Louis Riel, and decided he wanted to do a biography on him. He wanted to do it as an original graphic novel, but Chris Oliveros convinced him to serialize it first. Ten issues of Louis Riel were put out starting in 1999, and with help from a grant from the Canadian Council for the Arts, the finished collection, complete with annotations, appeared in 2004, to much acclaim and healthy sales, especially in Canada.

In 1999, after three years of celibacy, Brown decided he would start frequenting prostitutes. His open nature prevented him from hiding this fact from his friends, and the fact soon became widely known. After completing Louis Riel, he embarked upon another autobiographical graphic novel that would detail his experiences as a john. This time, the work would not be serialized, and would wait until 2011 to be published as Paying for It.

In the early 2000s, Brown moved out from the place he shared with Lee and got himself a condominium, where he lived by himself, and was free to bring prostitutes home. Around this time, Joe Matt moved back to the United States, and Seth moved to Guelph, Ontario, breaking up the "Toronto Three".

During the long wait between Louis Riel and Paying for It, Brown agreed to allow Drawn and Quarterly to reprint Ed the Happy Clown as a serial comic, with explanatory notes that were becoming both more common and more detailed in Brown's work.

Libertarianism and Paying for It

While reading up on issues surrounding Louis Riel, Brown became increasingly interested in property rights. His reading eventually took him to believe that countries with strong property rights prospered, while those without strong property rights did not. This path gradually led him to espouse the ideology of libertarianism. Eventually, he joined the Libertarian Party of Canada, and first ran as the Libertarian candidate for the riding of Trinity-Spadina in Toronto in the 2008 federal election in Canada. He came in fifth in that election, as well as in the 2011 election.

Right at the time of the 2011 election, Brown's long awaited Paying for It was released, again with the help of a Canada Council grant. It was a polemic promoting the decriminalization of prostitution, and attracted much praise for its artistry and bare-all honesty, while attracting heavy criticism for its subject matter and Brown's perceived naïveté when he brushed aside objections related to human trafficking and his dismissal of drug addiction as a myth.

Personal beliefs

Religion

Brown was brought up in a strictly Christian Baptist household. He considered himself a Christian until his early 20s, when he started to do a lot of reading on Christianity.

Brown took on his retelling of the Gospels "trying to figure out what I believed about this stuff. It was a matter of trying to figure out whether I even believed the Christian claims — whether or not Jesus was divine."

While doing the Gospels, Brown came to abandon Christianity, and spent time as an agnostic, before turning to Gnosticism. At the time he said, "I just realized that Christianity was something that didn't make sense to me". He returned to it later, but as of 2011, he once again no longer considers himself a Christian despite maintaining that he believes in God and considers himself religious.

Politics

In the 1980s, Brown expressed sympathy for left-wing politics, although he admits his understanding of politics was not deep.

During the course of researching Louis Riel, Brown became interested in the issue of property rights, especially influenced by his reading of John Bethell's The Noblest Triumph, a book which argued that strong property rights were what led to the West's prosperity. This eventually led him to an interest in libertarianism–a belief that government should protect property rights (although, he says, not copyrights), and otherwise should mostly keep out of people's lives. After attending a few meetings of the Libertarian Party of Canada, he was asked if he would be interested in running for Parliament, and began collecting the 100 signatures necessary to appear on the ballot.

In September 2008, Brown entered politics as the Libertarian Party's candidate for the riding of Trinity-Spadina in the 2008 federal election. He came in fifth out of seven candidates. He stood in the same riding for the same party in the Canadian federal election, 2011, coming in fifth out of six candidates. The 2011 election coincided with the release of Paying for It, in which Brown talks about his frequenting prostitutes. He was worried if the Libertarian Party would be comfortable having him run with his promotion of that topic in the media, but his official Party agent and the Ontario representative assured him that, as libertarians, they believed in individual freedom, and would continue to support his candidacy.

Cartooning career

Starting in December 1986, the first three issues of Yummy Fur reprinted the contents of the seven issues of the earlier mini, and Brown quit his job at the copy shop. Its contents included the surreal black comedy strip Ed the Happy Clown, collected in graphic novel form first in 1989 and later in a "Definitive" edition 1992, both from Vortex. 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, which will be re-collected with notes and appendices in mid-2012.

In later Vortex issues of Yummy Fur, Brown experimented with autobiography, and in the early 1990s had structured narratives about his childhood serialized in his comic. Yummy Fur switched publishers to Drawn and Quarterly in 1991. The two longer autobiographical stories were later collected as the graphic novels The Playboy in 1992 and I Never Liked You in 1994. The former deals with 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 when serialized in Yummy Fur) 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 briefly touches on his mother's schizophrenia.

Brown's longest-running work was 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 had long said he intended to finish them, but in a 2011 interview with The Comics Journal, he said it is no longer likely, as his "heart just isn’t in it." Recently Chester was asked by Cerebus comic book creator Dave Sim for permission to print previously unpublished material related to this work. At last mention Chester hadn't said yes or no.^{[citation needed]}

Underwater, Brown's first series after Yummy Fur, was an experimental work that attempted to portray life from the point of view of an infant, starting with seemingly incomprehensible events and dialogue which gradually become more coherent as the child matures. The series was not well received by critics and sold poorly; Brown abandoned it in an unfinished state. He followed it up with the series Louis Riel, which was supported in part by a CAD $16,000 grant from the Canadian Council for the Arts. The collected version appeared in hardcover in 2004, and in softcover in 2006.

Following Louis Riel was the longest gap between published works for Brown. For the first time, Brown produced a full-length graphic novel without the benefit of serializing it first. The result was the long awaited Paying For It, about Brown's "two competing desires--the desire to have sex, versus the desire to NOT have a girlfriend." Brown's solution to the problem is to forgo traditional boyfriend/girlfriend relationships and marriage and to take up the life of a "john" by frequenting prostitutes.

In 2007, Brown provided six weeks worth of strips to Toronto's NOW magazine as part of the "Live With Culture" ad campaign, featuring a male zombie and a living human girl participating in various cultural activities, culminating in the two going to the movies to watch Bruce McDonald's as-yet-unmade Yummy Fur adaptation.

Personal relations

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. The three were often mentioned together, and have been called "the Three Musketeers of alternative comics" and the "Toronto Three",^{[citation needed]} forming "a kind of gutter rat pack trying to make it through their drawing boards in 1990s Toronto." Brown dedicated The Playboy to Seth, "for his example as an artist", and Seth dedicated his graphic novel George Sprott to Brown ("Best Cartoonist, Best Friend").

Brown had a long-term relationship with the musician, actress and media personality Sook-Yin Lee from 1992 until 1996. She is depicted in several of his comics. He moved to Vancouver for two years to be with her, and moved back to Toronto with her when she became a VJ for MuchMusic. He also drew the cover for her 1996 solo album Wigs 'n Guns. Brown's relationship with Lee is the last boyfriend/girlfriend relationship he had, as he explains in Paying For It. They remain good friends, and Brown has contributed artwork to her productions as recently as 2009's Year of the Carnivore.

Title changes

Many of his books have undergone title changes, sometimes at the behest of his publisher, sometimes without his permission. Ed the Happy Clown: the Definitive Ed Book was given the Definitive title, despite the fact that he "didn't want to put that as the subtitle of the second edition. Vortex did it for marketing reasons." The Playboy was originally titled Disgust and then The Playboy Stories, and I Never Liked You was called Fuck (the German translation retains that title). Underwater was originally intended to appear in Yummy Fur, but Brown's new publisher felt they could attract more readers with a different title. Paying For It carries the sense of a double entendre that Brown dislikes — he would have preferred to call the book I Pay For Sex.

Thematic subjects

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 phone booths around Toronto so its message would reach a wider audience. It first appeared in Underwater #4, 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."

Style

Brown's style has evolved and changed a lot throughout his career. He's been known to switch between using Rapidograph pens, dip pens, brushes, pencils and markers for his black-and-white cartooning, and has used paints for some colour covers (notably in Underwater).

Working method

Joe Matt expresses surprise at Brown's low-rent method of creating his comics (from Matt's Peepshow)

Brown does not follow the tradition of drawing his comics by the page—he draws them one panel at a time, and then arranges them on the page. In the case of his acclaimed graphic novels The Playboy and I Never Liked You, this allowed him to rearrange the panels on the page as he saw fit. In the case of I Never Liked You, this resulted in a different page count in the book was collectio than in the Yummy Fur serialization. The panels were slightly rearranged again when the "New Definitive Edition" of I Never Liked You was released in 2002. Brown depicted himself making comics in this way in the story Showing Helder in Yummy Fur #20 (also collected in The Little Man). Despite drawing is panels individually, he says his "brain doesn’t tend to think in terms of one image at a time", so that he has difficulty coming up with one-image covers.

He has used a number of different drawing tools, including Rapidograph technical pens, markers, crowquill pens and ink brushes, the latter of which he has called his favourite tool, for its "fluid grace". For much of Ed the Happy Clown, he had artwork printed from photocopies of his pencils, which was faster for him than inking the work, and produced a more spontaneous feel, but in the end he turned away from this method, feeling it was "too raw".

Drawing influences

In an interview with Seth, Brown says his earliest childhood cartoon was an imitation of Doug Wright's Little Nipper. He frequently mentions Steve Gerber as amongst his foremost influences of his teenage years. From about the age of 20, Brown discovered the work of Robert Crumb and other underground artists, as well as class comic strip artists such as Harold Gray, whose influence is most evident in Brown's Louis Riel.

Brown often talks of contemporaries Seth, Joe Matt and Julie Doucet's influence on his work, especially during his autobiographical period. He also had been reading the Little Lulu Library around this time, and credit's the cartooning of Little Lulu's John Stanley and Seth with his desire to simplify his style during this period.

The stiff, stylized look of Fletcher Hanks' comics, reprints from Fantagraphics of which Brown had been reading around the time, was the primary influence on the style Brown used in Paying For It.

Recognition

Over the years, Brown has received four Harvey Awards and numerous Harvey and Ignatz award nominations. "The autobiographical comics from Yummy Fur" placed #38 on the Comics Journal's list of the 100 best comics of the century. He was inducted into the Canadian Comic Book Creator Hall of Fame, on June 18, 2011 at the Joe Shuster Awards in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Brown was one of the cartoonists to appear in the first volume of Fantagraphics' two-volume The Best Comics of the Decade (1990. ISBN 9781560970361).

Awards

Awards
Year	Organization	Award for	Award
1990	Harvey Awards	Chester Brown	Best Cartoonist
		Ed the Happy Clown	Best Graphic Album for the first edition
	U.K. Comic Art Award	Ed the Happy Clown	Best Graphic Novel/Collection for the first edition
1999	Urhunden Prizes	Ed the Happy Clown	Foreign Album
2004	Harvey Awards	Louis Riel	Best Writer
			Best Graphic Album of Previously Published Work

Nominations

Award Nominations
Year	Organization	Award for	Award
1989	Harvey Awards	Yummy Fur	Best Writer
			Best Cartoonist
			Best Continuing or Limited Series
			Special Achievement in Humor
1990		Chester Brown	Special Award for Humor
1991		Yummy Fur	Best Continuing or Limited Series
		"The Playboy Stories" in Yummy Fur #21-23	Best Single Issue or Story
		Yummy Fur	Best Cartoonist (Writer/Artist)
1992			Best Cartoonist
1993		The Playboy	Best Graphic Album of Previously Released Material
1998	Ignatz Awards	The Little Man	Outstanding Graphic Novel or Collection
1999	Harvey Awards		Special Award for Excellence in Presentation
1999			Best Graphic Album of Previously Published Work
2000		Louis Riel	Best New Series
2002	Ignatz Awards		Outstanding Artist
2003	Harvey Awards	Chester Brown	Best Cartoonist
		Louis Riel	Best Continuing or Limited Series
2004	Ignatz Awards		Outstanding Graphic Novel or Collection
			Outstanding Artist

Comic book series

Date	Title	Publisher	Issues	Notes
1983-1986	Yummy Fur (mini-comic)	self-published	7
1986-1995	Yummy Fur	# 1 - 24 Vortex Comics # 25 - 32 Drawn and Quarterly	32
1995-1998	Underwater	Drawn and Quarterly	11	Left unfinished
1999-2004	Louis Riel		10
2004-2006	Ed the Happy Clown		9	Reprinted material from Yummy Fur with extra background information

Graphic novels and collections

Year	Title	Publisher	ISBN	Notes
1989	Ed the Happy Clown: a Yummy Fur Book	Vortex Comics	978-0-921-45104-4	forward by Harvey Pekar not complete
1992	Ed the Happy Clown: the Definitive Ed Book		978-0-921-45108-2	abridged changed ending
	The Playboy: A Comic Book	Drawn and Quarterly	978-0-969-67011-7
1994	I Never Liked You		978-0-969-67016-2
1998	The Little Man: Short Strips 1980-1995		978-1-896-59713-3
2002	I Never Liked You (Second Edition)		978-1-896-59714-0	black page backgrounds changed to white added two-page appendix
2004	Louis Riel		978-1-894-93789-4
2011	Paying For It		978-1-770-46048-5	introduction by Robert Crumb
2012	Ed the Happy Clown: a Graphic Novel		978-1-77046-075-1	with annotations

Illustration

Brown has also done a certain amount of illustration work. In 1998, he did the cover to Sphinx Productions' Comic Book Confidential #1; in 2005 he did the cover to True Porn 2 from Alternative Comics; and he illustrated the cover for Penguin Books' Deluxe Classics edition of Lady Chatterly's Lover by D. H. Lawrence.

He has done the cover for Sook-Yin Lee's 1996 solo album Wigs 'n Guns (to which he also contributed lyrics for one song), and the poster for her film, Year of the Carnivore.

Brown illustrated the cover to the July 11, 2004 issue of The New York Times Magazine, an issue whose theme was graphic novels.

Collaborations

Brown provided the illustrations for the story "A Tribute To Bill Marks" in Harvey Pekar's American Splendor #15 in 1990, and "How This Forward Got Written" in The New American Splendor Anthology in 1991.

He inked Seth's pencils for the story "Them Changes" in Dennis Eichhorn's Real Stuff #6 in 1992, and shared artwork duties with Sook-Yin Lee on the story "The Not So Great Escape" in Real Stuff #16 in 1993.

He also inked Steve Bissette's pencils for the story "It Came From...Higher Space!" in Alan Moore's 1963 #3 in 1993.

A jam piece with Dave Sim was included in the Cerebus World Tour Book in 1995.

See also

• Alternative comics
• Chester Brown's Gospel adaptations
• Chester Brown's autobiographical comics
• Libertarian Party of Canada
• The Beguiling

References

Works cited

• Bell, John. Invaders from the North: How Canada Conquered the Comic Book Universe. Dundurn Press Ltd., 2006. ISBN 978-1-550-02659-7

• Brown, Chester. I Never Liked You (Second Edition). Drawn and Quarterly, 2002. ISBN 978-1-896-59714-0.

• Brown, Chester. Ed the Happy Clown. Drawn and Quarterly. Nine issues (February 2005–September 2006)
  (notes pages unnumbered, counted from first page of notes)

• Brown, Chester. Paying For It. Drawn and Quarterly, May 2011. ISBN 978-1-77046-048-5

• Grammel, Scott (April 1990). "Chester Brown (interview)". The Comics Journal (Fantagraphics Books) (135): 66–90. 

• Juno, Andrea. Dangerous Drawings. Interview with Chester Brown. Juno Books, LLC, (1997). pp 130–147. ISBN 0-9651042-8-1.

• Levin, Bob (October 1993). "Chester Brown". The Comics Journal (162): 45–49. 

• Rogers, Sean. A John’s Gospel: The Chester Brown Interview part 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8. The Comics Journal. 2011-05-09. Retrieved 2011-05-10.

• Sim, Dave. "Getting Riel" interview Part 1 2 3. Cerebus (295–297). Aardvark-Vanaheim. Retrieved 2011-04-07.

• Wolk, Douglas. "Chester Brown: The Outsider". Reading comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, pages 147–155. Da Capo Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-306-81509-6

External links

• Chester Brown at the Grand Comics Database
• Chester Brown at the Comic Book DB
• News Briefs featuring Chester Brown at Drawn and Quarterly's website
• Time.com interview with Chester Brown
• CBC Arts Online article about Chester Brown's Ed The Happy Clown series
• Chester Brown induction into CBC Arts Online's Alternative Canadian Walk of Fame
• Interview with Chester Brown on twohandedman.com
• Audio interview of Brown by Seth
• Brown's candidacy in Eye Weekly in 2008
• Zombies Take Toronto