Chester Brown

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

Brown has gone through several stylistic and thematic periods.

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 does not 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.

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.

He gained notice in alternative comics circles in the 1980s for the surreal, scatological Ed the Happy Clown serial.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Joe Matt and Seth, and the autobiographical comics trend.

Since the late 1990s Brown has had a penchant for providing detailed annotations for his work and extensively altering and reformatting older works.

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.

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.