Chester Brown was among the early guys who followed Harvey Pekar in doing autobiography in comics form about day-to-day life. In Pekar's case, he was a regular working guy with a civil service job, so his take on the world was (and remains) a lot more easy to identify with than some of the group who followed. In Brown's case, as with so many of the other artists who took that route, their stories were curled about the fact that they are comic book artists. For most of us, that's not the kind of bedrock our own identities are built upon. Still, fellows like Joe Matt and Chester Brown created some intense and interesting narratives.
For years I thought of Brown as "the guy who eats his own boogers", since he singularly revealed this hideous fact in one of his comics. Graphically, of course. It's comics, after all.
If he came across as rather a strange bird, it's because he is a strange bird. He always seemed relatively honest--more so than most of us would be when faced with the task of documenting our own lives. I think that's what made his comics refreshing, give or take a really gross booger-eating sequence or two.
One thing about Brown's work is that he never seems to show himself expressing any emotion. The world is a slide and the rest of us are microbes that he's eye-balling as we glide across it beneath his all-seeing gaze. Whenever he shows himself, it's with a blank, clinical expression as he seems to be calmly considering his fellow bugs.
And so it is with this new book, PAYING FOR IT. It's his autobiography of his life as a John, the customer who pays prostitutes for sex. Like Chester himself, it's rather wretched, but very interesting. As usual, he portrays himself as a very unemotional, almost robotic individual. His face never has much of an expression--his eyes mere slits, his mouth a deft slash, his features cadaverous and almost death-like. I can believe this fellow eats boogers and has to pay whores for sex.
My hardback copy of PAYING FOR IT by Chester Brown (with a neat introduction by Robert Crumb).And that's what he calls them in the book: "whores". It's not flattering. Of course he never calls them that to their faces, nor does he ever illustrate a single face of any of the whores he pays for sex. We see only their bodies and read his impressions of what they look like--"young" or "cute" or "gorgeous", etc. But always Brown hides their faces. He claims it's to mask their identities, as if his cartoons might be used in a police prosecution or something. In the end, it indicates a kind of disturbing dishonesty and condescension toward the whores he pays.
Still and all, PAYING FOR IT is an entertaining book. I read it with great interest and it's quite good. He seems to have leaned toward the style of one of his friends, comic book artist Joe Matt. As with Matt's style used in some issues of his book PEEPSHOW, Brown has opted for very small panels and tightly drawn figures and using a minimalist's edge to his pen. Since my eyesight is going, this kind of stuff is frustrating for me--one reason I find it more and more difficult to enjoy the work of artists like Matt and Brown who seem to be following the lead of Chris Ware. Amazing work, fellows, but I'm going blind.
Since I have done one other small essay on Chester Brown, that one focusing on his twisted political views, I will mention that these views also crop up in PAYING FOR IT. The one time he truly shows his cartoon self displaying any passionate emotion at all is when his friend, artist Seth, voices an opinion that flies in the face of Brown's Libertarian sensibilities. His mind is shown as a violent lightning storm and overlain with his reasonable thoughts that he needs to calm down because his friend is just being foolish. All this over whether or not prostitution should be regulated if it's made completely legal. (Brown thinks not, Seth thinks so.)
Another thing about the book is that it's largely humorless. The figure of Chester Brown is a most feeble individual. He shows himself to be a spineless sort in most matters, especially in his relationship with his last girlfriend, Sook-Yin (apparently some sort of counter-culture figure in Canada). He admits to being a total doormat of a man when Sook-Yin tells him that she thinks she loves someone else more than she loves Brown and would he mind if she had sex with that other guy, pretty please? Brown agrees to all of this impassively, even when the new boyfriend moves in and Brown finds himself alone while Sook-Yin bangs the new guy one thin wall away. A mensch, he's not.
The only time the book made me laugh was after Brown's first experience with a prostitute as he tells his pals Seth and Joe about it. Joe Matt's reaction was nothing short of hilarious and the exchange as it is illustrated was quite funny. For a moment I thought that Larry David was writing the book.
In the end, I found PAYING FOR IT illustrating Chester Brown as something of a social loser. He claims to be a Libertarian, champion of keep-the-government-out-of-my-life type. But it's good to know that he accepted Canada's generous government grants to artists--funds which kept him afloat while he created his books; funds which, in part, helped him to be able to buy his own condo so that he could bring his whores home when he could afford the expensive bouts of sex. And it was sad to read and watch as he tells his two best pals that he has fallen in love with his long-time whore. That's rich. I once had a friend who fell in love with one of his whores and continued to send her money even after he left Manila and shipped back home. I'm sure she continued to love him back.
Until the money ran out, I reckon.
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