Robert Stanley Martin wrote about the harshest piece I think I’ve seen on Chester Brown’s Paying For It in our comments. It seemed wrong to let it languish there, so I have given it it’s own post.
It’s three parts, actually. Here’s the first.
This book really makes me embarrassed for the comics world. If Chester Brown wants to make a creepy, crackpotted spectacle of himself, I suppose that’s his business. But did everybody have to go whole-hog to identify themselves, and by extension, the field with this thing? Judging from the comics-media sites, it’s the book of the year so far. It’s Chester Brown week over at TCJ, for pity’s sake.
Anja Flower then asked Robert what was so embarrassing about prostitution, anyway. Robert responded:
I don’t consider the discussion of prostitution and its prospective decriminalization embarrassing. I don’t think it’s particularly worthwhile, except as an intellectual exercise. The reason is that with, for lack of a better term, morals laws, I don’t believe they get changed unless people feel that one is or could be unfairly deprived of something. Obscenity laws began being undermined by people not feeling it was appropriate to legally deny them the opportunity to read writers like Joyce, Lawrence, and Henry Miller. Laws barring gay marriage in the U.S. are now taking a beating that I expect will end in their repeal. Homosexuality is increasingly acceptable in our society, people are more likely to have social relationships with people who are openly gay, and people are seeing that gay partnerships are in practice identical to heterosexual marriage. They increasingly don’t think its appropriate for gay couples not to have the legal prerogatives of straight ones.
I don’t think that’s going to happen with prostitution because I don’t see the stigma of being on either end of the transaction going away. I think lax enforcement of the laws is probably the most that can be hoped for.
What I find embarrassing relates to North American comics and their community of artists and readers.
North American comics are invariably unconscious allegories of male potency anxiety that stink up the field like a miasma. (The comic-book efforts that have broken through to success in bookstores–where the customers for memoir and fiction material are overwhelmingly female–either eschew this altogether or interrogate it with such sophistication that people are able to get past the ick factor.) What Chester Brown has produced is an intellectually pretentious acting-out of his fantasies of himself as a porno stud.
Brown has demonstrated exhibitionist tendencies in his work almost from the beginning. A minor example was an autobiographical piece that featured an extended sequence of him picking his nose and eating the half-dried mucus. The major one is The Playboy, a memoir of his experience with pornography that featured several bluntly explicit scenes of him masturbating. Brown obviously has a compulsion to publicly show himself engaging in activities that most people would just as soon stay private. Paying for It is his latest venture with this tendency.
What the comics community has never been able to get through its head is how repellent mpa material largely is to people in the outside world, who at best just consider it adolescent. Show Paying for It to a halfway reasonable person outside the comics world, and they’re going to see a rather pathetic crank flaunting his emotional shortcomings and grody personal behavior, which he then tries to portray as virtues. Any other field would marginalize this, such as the literary community did with Mailer’s misogyny. But not the comics field. The message of “Hey, everybody! Isn’t being a socially stunted dweeb who’s into hookers and wants everyone to share the joy fun and cool!” blares like a civil-defense alarm from tcj.com and other comics-press mainstays. The field has had more (much, much more) than its share of embarrassing spectacles, but the reception accorded this book just takes the cake.
And finally this.
Let me add that in general I hold Chester Brown in very high regard as an artist.
Ed the Happy Clown, which I read during its initial serialization, was my entry into alternative comics. It set a standard for cartoon surrealism that all subsequent works in that mode must be measured against, and none have yet to meet. I Never Liked You is an outstanding memoir of adolescence. I’m putting together a list of my top-ten all-time favorite/best/most worthwhile comics for another project, and one or both will likely make the final ten.
As for his other major efforts, what I’ve seen of Underwater shows it to be an interesting and admirable misfire. I have yet to read Louis Riel, but by all accounts it’s a strong piece of historical fiction, and I look forward to reading it. And his Gospel adaptations show just how tepid Crumb’s Genesis effort is by comparison.
I want to add that I think he’s a nice person. I encountered him once at a Barnes & Noble signing with Seth and Adrian Tomine in New York a few years back. He’s a friendly–if very reserved–fellow face-to-face.
However, we all have our unfortunate sides, and Paying for It is the worst aspects of Chester Brown’s work writ large.
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Other posts in what’s turning into a slowly evolving roundtable on Paying for It here.
Mike Hunter responded to my second comment in the other thread. Here’s what he wrote:
Robert Stanley Martin says:
…The message of “Hey, everybody! Isn’t being a socially stunted dweeb who’s into hookers and wants everyone to share the joy fun and cool!” blares like a civil-defense alarm from tcj.com and other comics-press mainstays. The field has had more (much, much more) than its share of embarrassing spectacles, but the reception accorded this book just takes the cake…
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Though Brown goes to great lengths to defend the whole prostitution thing, it’s pretty obvious from the many examples shown that his depiction is, if not utterly grim and dreary, hardly “joy fun and cool.”
And the overall critical reception given the book is, though overall positive — Brown is an important art-comics creator, the book has its share of aesthetic merits — hardly unmixed. And certainly not in the nature of “hooray for Chester Brown for showing how kewl it is to be a socially stunted dweeb who’s into hookers!”
My reply:
Mike–
I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear. The “Hey everybody!” line was a caricature of the celebratory atmosphere surrounding the book in the comics community.
Granted, the book has Brown’s characteristically laconic tone and unromantic perspective. However, I don’t think he’s the least bit ambivalent about what he sees as the fundamentally beneficient nature of the sex-for-money transaction.
This book shouldn’t have been treated any more seriously than Neal Adams’ theories of geology. In other fields, I don’t think it would have been.
I do think Mike’s right that the reaction hasn’t really been all that positive overall, though? Naomi Fry was pretty unimpressed, and Matt Seneca was quite, quite negative — about as negative as I think I’ve ever seen him be, I think. R. Fiore wasn’t super into it either. Even Tom Spurgeon’s wasn’t exactly enthusiastic. In fact, I haven’t seen a flat out enthusiastic appreciation of it. Maybe I’m reading the wrong reviews?
Oh, I’m having trouble waking up this morning. Let me amend that a bit. I’m certainly aware that there have been negative views published of the book. Naomi Fry’s essay at tcj.com is a good example. My “Hey, everybody!” line was more of a comment on Tim Hodler and Dan Nadel’s presentation, which is very heavily echoed in the reporting on TCAF. It’s also echoed in various other comics-press sites.
For all I’ve written elsewhere, I do think Tim and Dan have done a very impressive job with their revamp of tcj.com. They obviously have very strong editorial instincts and skills. However, I think their handling of this was a big misstep.
Adding further: The publication of this book is certainly being treated as an event. That overwhelms the negative tone of any individual review.
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Robert Stanley Martin says:
Granted, the book has Brown’s characteristically laconic tone and unromantic perspective. However, I don’t think he’s the least bit ambivalent about what he sees as the fundamentally beneficient nature of the sex-for-money transaction.
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Oh yeah; he’s pretty messianic in going on about the abolition of that awful, pain-inducing thing, romance (why not extend it to condemning life? As Gore Vidal had the title character do in his “Messiah”) and the greatness of sex as a loveless commercial transaction.
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This book shouldn’t have been treated any more seriously than Neal Adams’ theories of geology. In other fields, I don’t think it would have been.
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Certainly Chester Brown’s arguments deserve to get bricks thrown at them. (Which there should have been more of.)
But, didn’t most critics have no trouble separating between Brown’s absurd (to put it kindly) “manifesto” and his story, artistic approach? As, for instance, shown in the bits from Tom Spurgeon’s critique I’d quoted on that first HU thread on the book:
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When the cartoonist moves away from his own experiences and into broader proclamations about the nature of romantic love and assertions that more frequent monetary remuneration in sexual relationships will somehow ease relationships between men and women, it’s hard to engage with what he’s saying beyond being certain he means it. To put it more directly, even for someone not invested in the general subject matter, many of the broader arguments fail to convince. That they represent issues that can be argued, even passionately so, doesn’t seem all that remarkable an endorsement in the Age Of The Internet.
… Give me scenes like the one where Brown argues with Seth over the issues, seething and impatient with Seth’s answers and his own, desperate and human in wanting to make and win such discussions, over any number of facile dissections of each argument’s actual merits. Within the context of a personal narrative, seeing Brown dismiss the possibility of abuses as things he doesn’t himself see has a revealing, human quality; pushing past such arguments in a more standard mini-essay on the issue itself seems way more problematic.
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https://hoodedutilitarian.com/2011/04/dyspeptic-oroborous-reacting-to-it/
(And at least Neal Adams’ theories are merely ridiculous, not psychologically grotesque.)
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Robert Stanley Martin says:
…My “Hey, everybody!” line was more of a comment on Tim Hodler and Dan Nadel’s presentation…
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Fair enough; there was a lot of pretty enthusiastic hoopla on display.
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…which is very heavily echoed in the reporting on TCAF…
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What is this “TCAF,” please? (Also, what is “mpa,” as in “repellent mpa material”?)
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Adding further: The publication of this book is certainly being treated as an event. That overwhelms the negative tone of any individual review.
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True; commercially, anyway. I don’t see critical caveats as overcoming the “buzz” and marketable sensationalism of the subject. (Even if Brown’s approach somewhat downplays the last factor.)
The only uniformly positive reviews I remember reading so far are Jeet Heer’s (which is really more about his relationship with Brown and the ideas he puts forward in the book) and the AV Club’s. While I certainly liked parts of the book I wouldn’t call my review a positive one. Nor with Sean Collins or any other of the reviews I’ve come across.
Like it or not, the publication of the book is an event. Brown hasn’t published anything in years and, as you note, he’s one of the most interesting and influential cartoonists going these days. It makes perfect sense to me for TCJ to have a week devoted to the book, just as they had three reviews for Lost Girls and have devoted large spreads to “big” books in the past.
…And making Brown’s book more of an “event” is that…
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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 is the long awaited Paying For It…
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_Brown
“Longest gap” since new Brown comics had come out; no serialization, so the book had more of a surprise factor; “long anticipated”… all of these factors indicating/building up interest in anything that Brown would put out next.
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Robert Stanley Martin says:
What the comics community has never been able to get through its head is how repellent mpa material largely is to people in the outside world, who at best just consider it adolescent. Show Paying for It to a halfway reasonable person outside the comics world, and they’re going to see a rather pathetic crank flaunting his emotional shortcomings and grody personal behavior, which he then tries to portray as virtues…
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No explanation to what mpa stands for yet (alas, Google only turned up the likes of the Midwestern Psychological Association, The Maine Principals’ Association, Motion Picture Association of America, Minnesota Percussion Association…), but it’s striking how — as I’d mentioned in that first HU PFI thread — in the comics world…
“…unless I blinked and missed it — none of the male reviewers/critics thought to condemn Chester Brown for his part in the whole degrading mess [of using prostitutes]….”
I’m betting that mainstream press reviews of the book will not be as nonjudgmental. Whether by factors such as featuring proportionately more women critics, giving a nod to conservative attitudes, or not being as overwhelmingly liberal as the comics world, I don’t think Brown can expect to get a bunch of “get out of moral condemnation free” cards…
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Any other field would marginalize this, such as the literary community did with Mailer’s misogyny.
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Well, Mailer stabbed his wife and continued being a Major Literary Figure; Roman Polanski’s statutory-rape case hardly derailed his film career; Mike Tyson was found guilty of raping an 18-year-old beauty pageant contestant, continues to get mostly-positive press attention, and is now the star of his own reality show; R. Kelly was found in possession of child porn, with videos of him having sex with underage girls sent to a newspaper and found among his stuff…his success affected not a jot.
(Kind of undercuts my “mainstream critics will be more morally judgmental of Brown” argument, but I’m thinking the far greater fame of those listed above has gotten them easier treatment, plus time passing means their past crimes are “yesterday’s news.” Not to mention they weren’t kid-show hosts, like poor Paul Reubens…)
All the above far worse actions that Dave Sim’s rantings about women, which in the comics world has cast a continued cloud over the creator.
Mike–
Perhaps if serialization was still the norm, the atmosphere of the reception would have been more measured. You bring up Dave Sim’s Reads, which offers a great counterpoint. That was serialized. Suppose it hadn’t been. Would it have been accorded the event reception Paying for It received if Sim had been out of circulation with new work for a few years? Sim was (is?) considered a major talent, but the field collectively went out of its way to distance itself from that thing as quickly as it could. There’s no way to answer the question, but it’s worth thinking about.
Sorry about the confusion over “mpa.” It’s an abbreviation of “male potency anxiety,” which appeared earlier in the comment.
I’m not talking about Mailer’s actions (although the disconnect between the revulsion at his, Polanski’s, et al.’s private behavior and the continued acclaim their work received might prove a fruitful discussion). What I’m talking about is the intellectually pretentious macho nonsense that littered his writing and other public statements. An example that immediately comes to mind is his speculation in his Marilyn Monroe book that men pass their intelligence onto women with their semen. The reaction, much like the comics field’s response to Sim’s gender baloney, was along the lines of, “Man, this is really eccentric and boorish. You’re putting us in the position of wondering whether we want to be associated with you, and would you kindly put a cork in it?” Are the negative reviews of Paying for It saying anything comparable to that?
Matt Seneca’s review condemns Brown for visiting prostitutes and anyone who purchases the book for participating in the economy of prostitution. Naomi Fry was pretty unambiguous about saying the book was creepy.
Thanks for that Seneca link, Noah! An outstanding critique…
American Alternative comics don’t so much celebrate dweebs as much as creeps and scum and lowlifes. The entire canon of 60s comix (even Lord Crumb) is to me wholly unreadable. I’m not as repulsed by but still detached from the comics literary elite (Clowes, Tomine, Brown, Burns, Ware, Bagge, Brunetti,etc.) who are to various degrees in the creep tentacle’s snare. I don’t know where along the line that sexual malaise and perversion and anti-social violence became the pinnacle of literary thought that comics were deemed uniquely positioned to explore, but it is irritating.
I have more sympathy for the autism-spectrum dweebery of anime fans, furries, even superhero geeks. Just sayin’.
Preach it.
“Sexual malaise and perversion”? Guilty as charged! “Anti-social,” sure! But, “violence”? Aside from Spain and Tim Eichhorn in their younger, rowdy days, we’re talking wuss-o-rama here, with passive-aggressiveness about the worst tactic.
(Justin Green did hit his wife, Carol Tyler, once, for messin’ with his lion’s head — the symbolism! — door-knocker, but his shameful side seems limited to cheating on her. Joe Matt, as it turns out, says he suffered plenty of punching from Trish, before the hitting incident he didn’t depict in one comic…)
I just read Matt’s review–just great. Three cheers in particular to his fifth paragraph. I wish I’d said it half as well.
funnyanimalbooks:
“American Alternative comics don’t so much celebrate dweebs as much as creeps and scum and lowlifes. The entire canon of 60s comix (even Lord Crumb) is to me wholly unreadable. I’m not as repulsed by but still detached from the comics literary elite (Clowes, Tomine, Brown, Burns, Ware, Bagge, Brunetti,etc.) who are to various degrees in the creep tentacle’s snare. I don’t know where along the line that sexual malaise and perversion and anti-social violence became the pinnacle of literary thought that comics were deemed uniquely positioned to explore, but it is irritating.
I have more sympathy for the autism-spectrum dweebery of anime fans, furries, even superhero geeks. Just sayin’.”
Just sayin’ my ass.
Hey, f, did you know that Caravaggio was a murderer? That Leonardo da Vinci, T.E.White and Oscar Wilde were pedophiles? That William Shakespeare was a grain speculator who got rich in famine years, and also stole the people’s land by enclosing it?
That horse of yours is a bit too high.
But they aren’t celebrated for those things, Alex. Nobody says Leonardo da Vinci is great because of his lapses. But people come close to saying that Crumb, for example, is great because of his willingness to put his unpleasant attitudes towards women out there.
He’s not saying that comics creators are worse than anyone else. He’s saying that alt comics seem determined to glorify a particular kind of behavior which is unpleasant. Pointing to caravaggio’s mug sheet is really elaborately beside the point.
The willingness to explore the darker side of human nature is one of the hallmarks of modern art, not just alternative comics. The objections to Crumb, etc. seem as philistine to me as the genteel objections to Joyce and Picasso which were once common.
There is much to disagree with in Paying For It. I’ve made my own objections to the book clear in my Comics Journal column, and I think Fry and other reviewers have made good points as well. But part of the value of a book like this is that it opens up discussion on a pervasive phenomenon (sex work) that is rarely talked about, at least not with Chester Brown’s level of candor. So the book is opening up an important debate. The attempt by some writers to foreclose this debate (by suggesting the book shouldn’t be bought or that it shouldn’t be written about) is regrettable. Brown has given us lots to talk about — why not hash these issues out rather than pretend that there is a consensus on them, when such a consensus is a fiction?
“Did you know Caravaggio was a murderer?”
Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot.
I don’t find anything illuminating or enjoyable about anyone’s elaborate ugly violent rape fantasies. I have my own taste, and some creators who happen to be important don’t appeal to it. If that makes me a Philistine, I don’t feel all that wounded by that implication.
High horse. Oh brother.
Noah gets is.
“The willingness to explore the darker side of human nature is one of the hallmarks of modern art, not just alternative comics. ”
Yep. That is correct. I don’t dismiss transgressive comics or the underground or this book in particular. I just don’t enjoy reading them. They make me feel bad, and I don’t learn anything or grow from that bad feeling. I don’t have any sexual malaise issues I need to work through with women that these comics can help me with. So…
Who’s trying to shut down discussion about Brown’s arguments? Because I never suggested that.
Jeet’s referring to Matt Seneca’s review; Matt strongly urges people not to buy the book.
I think the issues Brown raises are important, and I have problems with Matt’s review as well — as I said in my own piece, I don’t think an appeal to romantic love is really the alternative to Brown’s worldview that Matt thinks it is. I also don’t think that it makes any ethical sense to say that immoral works stop being immoral after the people they’d effect are dead. And…I really don’t think, as Matt implies, that Brown’s book is great art.
But back to Jeet’s point…. Like I said, I think a discussion of legalization is good to have, and I’m happy to have that issue be higher profile. On the other hand, Brown’s book is (a) not really all that good, and (b) coming from a perspective that I think is fairly morally repugnant. As such, I wonder how much it’s actually going to create a productive discussion or raise awareness.
And even if it does raise awareness, I don’t think that would make it a good book. I wouldn’t tell people that they had a moral responsibility not to buy it, as Matt did, but I don’t think I could honestly recommend that anyone should shell out money for it.
Noah: you’re position (that Paying For It is a bad book and people shouldn’t buy it) makes sense. Matt Seneca’s position (that it’s possibly a great work of art but people shouldn’t buy it because Chester Brown exploits women in the making of it) is harder to justify considering the moral strictures that could be made against almost any great work of art.
As to whether Paying For It is going to create a productive debate or not, that’s something that’s open to empircal testing. The book is getting a lot of press, as are the issues it raises. A column I wrote for The Globe and Mail (one of Canada’s leading newspapers) used Brown’s book to advocate for the decriminalization and normalization of prostitution. I’ve received a lot of interesting emails and comments on that piece, including a comment from a former escort and sex workers rights advocate who said she was pleased that an article making this argument got such prominent play in the mainstream media. So whatever reservations you may have about Paying For It, it’s hard to deny that the book is moving the conversation forward.
Well, I can’t be unhappy about that.
jesus christ, i made jeet heer and noah berlatsky agree. time to tip on out to afghanistan and see what i can do over there
We don’t entirely agree! I think I liked you essay significantly more than he did (which is to say, overall I liked it!)
But yes; you are the next George Mitchell!
Actually I tend to agree with Noah about 10% to 15% of the time. Higher than you would expect.
Thought you all might be interested in a Paying For It review by a sex worker. Some interesting insights.. http://titsandsass.com/?p=2297
Thanks Sean; that’s an interesting review. (Basically she appreciates him as a public ally, but finds him personally creepy.) She keys into some of the iconographic things comics folks have noticed as well (no faces; joyless images of sex, etc.)