55 Facts About Chester Brown

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

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

Chester Brown has received grants from the Canada Council to complete Louis Riel and Paying for It.

Chester William David Brown was born on 16 May 1960 at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Chester Brown grew up in Chateauguay, a Montreal suburb with a large English-speaking minority.

Chester Brown's grandfather was history professor Chester New, after whom Chester New Hall is named at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

Chester Brown has a brother, Gordon, who is two years his junior.

Chester Brown's mother had schizophrenia, and died in 1976 after falling down the stairs while in the Montreal General Hospital.

Chester Brown 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.

Chester Brown described himself as a "nerdy teeneager" attracted to comic books from a young age, especially ones about superheroes and monsters.

Chester Brown 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.

Chester Brown moved to Montreal where he attended Dawson College.

Chester Brown tried to find work in New York, but was rejected again.

Chester Brown discovered the alternative comics scene that was developing in the early 1980s, and grasped its feeling freedom to produce what he wanted.

At around twenty, Chester 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.

Chester Brown 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 Francoise Mouly's Raw magazine.

Chester Brown 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.

Chester Brown soon found himself at the centre of Toronto's small-press scene.

Chester Brown had become a part of Toronto's avant-garde community, along with other artists, musicians and writers, centred around Queen Street West.

Chester Brown quit his day job to work full-time on Yummy Fur.

Chester Brown began to weave together some of the earlier unrelated strips into an ongoing surreal black comedy called Ed the Happy Clown.

The adaptations later continued with the Gospel of Matthew and the apocryphal "The Twin" from the Gnostic text Pistis Sophia, and Chester Brown went through periods of agnosticism and Gnosticism.

At this point, Chester Brown had grown to lose interest in the Ed story as he gravitated toward the autobiographical approach of Pekar, Joe Matt, and Julie Doucet, and the simpler artwork of Seth.

Chester Brown found his friends were uncomfortable with his writing about their lives, and soon turned to his adolescence for source material.

Around this time, Chester Brown had become friends with the cartoonists Seth and Joe Matt.

In 1992, Chester Brown began a relationship with musician Sook-Yin Lee, and in 1993 moved to Vancouver to be with her.

Chester Brown stayed there with her until 1995, when Lee began as VJ at MuchMusic in Toronto, and the two moved back there together.

Chester Brown's father died in 1998 as he was putting together his collection of short strips, The Little Man.

Chester Brown lost interest in Underwater, and had been reading about Metis resistance leader Louis Riel, and decided he wanted to do a biography on him.

Chester Brown wanted to do it as an original graphic novel, but Chris Oliveros convinced him to serialize it first.

In 1999, after three years of celibacy, Chester Brown decided he would start frequenting prostitutes.

Chester Brown's reading eventually took him to believe that countries with strong property rights prospered, while those without them did not.

In 2007 Chester Brown provided six weeks worth of strips to Toronto's NOW magazine as part of the "Live With Culture" ad campaign.

At about this time, Chester Brown finally stated he didn't intend to finish his Gospel of Matthew, which had been on hiatus since 1997.

In 2016 Chester Brown followed up Paying for It with Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus, made up of adaptations of stories from the Bible that Chester Brown believes promote pro-prostitution attitudes among early Christians, and argues for the decriminalization of prostitution.

Chester Brown declared his research determined that Mary, mother of Jesus, was a prostitute, that early Christians practised prostitution, and that Jesus' Parable of the Talents should be read in a pro-prostitution light.

Chester Brown describes himself as a Christian who is "not at all concerned with imposing 'moral' values or religious laws on others" and believes that Biblical figures such as Abel and Job "find favour with God because they oppose his will or challenge him in some way".

Chester Brown was brought up in a Baptist household, and in his early twenties he began adapting the Gospels.

Since then, Chester Brown has consistently described himself as religious, but has alternated between periods of identifying as a Christian and simply believing in God.

Chester Brown considered himself an anarchist until, while researching Louis Riel, he became interested in issues of property rights, especially influenced by his reading of Tom Bethell's The Noblest Triumph, a book which argues that the West owes its prosperity to having established strong property rights.

Chester Brown stood in the same riding for the same party in the 2011 Canadian federal election, coming in fifth out of six candidates.

Chester Brown was worried his promotion of that topic in the media would make the Libertarian Party uncomfortable with having him run, 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.

Chester Brown dedicated The Playboy to Seth, and Paying for It to Matt.

Chester Brown had a long-term relationship with the musician, actress and media personality Sook-Yin Lee from 1992 until 1996.

Chester Brown moved to Vancouver for two years to be with her, and moved back to Toronto with her when she became a VJ for MuchMusic.

Chester Brown drew the cover for her 1996 solo album Wigs 'n Guns.

Chester Brown first discusses mental illness in his strip "My Mother Was A Schizophrenic".

Chester Brown's drawing style has evolved and changed a lot throughout his career.

Chester Brown 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".

From about the age of 20, Chester 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 Chester Brown's Louis Riel.

Chester Brown had been reading the Little Lulu Library around this time, and credit's the cartooning of Little Lulu 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 Chester Brown had been reading around the time, was the primary influence on the style Chester Brown used in Paying for It.

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

Chester Brown has done the cover for Sook-Yin Lee's 1996 solo album Wigs 'n' Guns, and the poster for her film, Year of the Carnivore.

Chester Brown was inducted into the Canadian Comic Book Creator Hall of Fame, on 18 June 2011, at the Joe Shuster Awards in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.