Overview

Best known for his alternative comics, Chester Brown (b. 1960) is one of the most acclaimed and influential cartoonists of the last half century. This first biography provides a critical account of Brown's life and career, highlighting his role in the evolving comics landscape and tracing his journey from self-publishing minicomics on the streets of Toronto to creating award-winning graphic novels. Characterized by often minimalist art and unconventional themes, comics such as Yummy Fur, Ed the Happy Clown, I Never Liked You, Louis Riel, and Paying for It have consistently pushed boundaries and confronted taboos. Chester Brown offers unique insight into Brown's creative process as well the scope of his work and its larger cultural contexts. Organized chronologically, the book provides a full account of the artist's career, beginning with his failed attempts to break into superhero comics and ending with discussions of his most recent work, in which he blends autobiography with political views on sex work and religion. The book also examines Brown's extensive authorial revisions and considers how he has deployed both these and an increasingly voluminous amount of paratextual material in the service of creating a highly distinctive authorial persona that in turn cannot help but influence how we encounter and read his work. Chester Brown pulls back the curtain on this pioneering artist and emphasizes the inseparability of Brown's art and life, including the myriad ways they have informed each other across the last four decades of comics history.

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9781496858344

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Reviews

A comprehensive companion to the work of a major cartoonist, whose decades-long career stretches from surreal self-published minicomics to bold autobiography and beyond. Køhlert expertly combines attention to idiosyncratic detail with a broader historical perspective, showing how Chester Brown's unique trajectory mirrors shifting trends in alternative comics.--Daniel Marrone, author Forging the Past: Seth and the Art of Memory Frederik Byrn Køhlert fills a significant gap in comics scholarship with his Chester Brown, the first monograph to offer a career-spanning study of Brown's work. Combining a biographical look at Brown with close readings of his work, Køhlert persuasively traces Brown's changes of thought over time, as reflected not only in each subsequent work but also in Brown's ongoing project of revision of earlier works. Køhlert's chapter on Brown's self-revision is especially insightful as a guide to the changes Brown has made to his work and what impact they have on its meaning. Køhlert also gives welcome attention to less-frequently analyzed aspects of Brown's career, such as his incomplete and unfinished works, notably his Gospel adaptations. Køhlert expertly tracks Brown's growth and changes as an artist, providing Brown scholars with an invaluable resource while also producing a work so admirably clearly written that the casual fan or undergraduate student will find the book easily digestible.--Dominick Grace, coeditor of The Canadian Alternative: Cartoonists, Comics, and Graphic Novels and Chester Brown: Conversations

Author Information

Frederik Byrn Køhlert is lecturer in English and film at Edinburgh Napier University. In addition to several articles and book chapters about comics, he is author of Serial Selves: Identity and Representation in Autobiographical Comics and editor of two companion book series for Routledge on Gender, Sexuality, and Comics. Alongside his work on comics and related visual media, he has authored and edited two books on the literary and cultural history of Chicago.

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