Dear Chester Brown,
Writing letters is an interesting thing - especially when they are addressed to people you don’t know, or do not “really” know -
- i wonder what a comic book of letters would be like - i would like to do this or see this done or both - alas, i cannot draw - i wish i could - i love your drawings - you tell a good story - i mean, i like your stories very much because they have a certain feel to them - there is of course the story of anybody’s feeling in each one, but that is different from what i am referring to - you might say gestalt, if it wasn’t too annoying or too glib to say a thing like that -
- i think your work is full of tragedy - you might not agree - but i think there is melancholy all the time in your work - it could be because of how you draw yourself that i get that from your work - where “draw yourself” means more than just the drawing - although the drawing is a major part of it - i mean drawing like depicting, representing, unfolding also, and like drawing yourself out like you might try to draw anybody out when they are shy and you do not wish them to be shy -
- when you draw yourself you are always there in a way that i never feel you are whenever i have met you and have spoken with you and listened to you speaking to anybody else - this i think is you the way you are to you and that is always interesting - and you are very quiet and composed and rather still often in your drawing, although not always - not when you are a child sometimes - but anyway it doesn’t matter if you are there or another character is there, tragedy is there -
- even with Louis Riel it was very sad at the heart of it - of course that story is a tragedy but i think that Ed the Clown also is a tragedy - there are funny times and other sorts of times in your pieces - there even is opinion and ideology and perhaps philosophy - there are different human feelings in them - but they are at heart always being tragedies -
- i do think that tragedies are quite difficult to understand sometimes in some ways, but they are attractive often in a way that can be difficult to say - they can be moving, and i do like to be moved - melancholy can be sweet and devastating also - it returns anybody in a way to empathy and sympathy and an understanding that is shared of communal human living knowing there is loss and that loss is sad and necessary too, or unavoidable, it seems -
- in this way, reading you is like listening to music - and it reaches me somehow inexplicably and stirs me up and gets me going like all great things i know, i read, i watch, i listen to, i come in contact with - it’s inexplicable and that’s the reason it is great -
- i don’t care to review great things - even if i call it doing that, reviewing, i am not doing that - i am responding, rather - inspiration is the best that i can ever have as a result of anything i read, i see, i hear, i watch, i encounter or whatever - sometimes my own thinking does that for me -
- writing anything to anyone specifically when you do not know them, when they aren’t your friend or relative or colleague or comrade or fellow-something-or-other that put’s you in contact with each other in some sort of way that’s relational and mutual more or less, is rather strange and odd and all the more so seeing as it’s rather commonplace as well - i don’t know why i am compelled to do so -
- i am a writer and i know how different i am from what i write and i know that what i write is me thinking and making stories up and creating something that i think about as art and literature and poetry and i have a lot to say about doing all of that and there is a process that i think about and don’t think about deliberately sometimes too and all of that - so i know my novel isn’t me but i know that it is mine - but i don’t tell stories about me, and you do - so this intrigues me very much - to have a sense of you from your art and a sense of you from meeting you and seeing you in different contexts - and to think about the art of being you in a public context over all -
- i met you first new year’s eve at reg hart’s place 1985 becoming 1986 i think - he was ever trying to make an animated version of the epic of gilgamesh - i first met him at the cineforum down past king street in toronto - i’m not sure when that was - i think it was around 1980 - anyway he has a stupendously beautiful and fantastic film collection of cartoons and silent films and he always introduced them and they were a part of him, the whole thing was a part of him, and he was always making sure to tell the audience about it all and i at the time that i was married my wife and i were fascinated with this guy and his trip and i was totally bugged out by the stuff in his collection and i was not put off by him as a lot of people often were put off by him and wanted him to show the stuff and not make it be about him anyway anyhow, but we didn’t mind -
- so by the time i went to his new year’s eve party i had known him for awhile - i had got divorced and changed my life - and he was always trying to make this movie and doing things that i thought were interesting too and bringing in amazing people from the history of cartoons and movie making - so when i went with my girlfriend to his new year’s eve party at his house he was still trying to make this movie and he introduced me to you as one of his new artists trying to draw or make this thing - and you showed me some woodcut style drawings you had done, which i thought were very good and interesting and not like anything i’ve seen by you since then -
- my girlfriend sang for everyone and everybody was enthralled by her singing and because she was the only woman in the place and all the guys were bugging out because of her, because of how she sang and how she looked and how she was - and reg was digging her as well and wanted her to sing while he screened metropolis that old fantastic silent movie, to sing ave maria while that played at some point when he screened it at that club on bloor street that i used to always go to when i used to live in the anex back in the early eighties and worked at the by the way cafe - lee’s palace, was the name of the place - so we all went there and he screened the movie and my girlfriend sang and even the regulars at the bar who never did shut up were quiet when she sang -
- you told me that you did a thing called yummy fur - a photo-copy thing and i looked for it and found it and bought a few of them and they were different from your woodcuts and i liked them, i thought they were original and i liked that you were doing this, making your own comic book and selling it like that - it reminded me of stuart ross and mark laba and lilian necakov and krad kolodny and myself, me not so much, standing on street corners with our books and a sign around our necks with a pithy marker saying things like weirdo writer buy my book 2 dollars - i used to try and sell my book hit by a rock that way - stuart published it -
- then i moved to montreal later that year and it wasn’t long before you became rather famous in a certain kind of way and being that i was and am really into comics and was paying attention to such things and to who was being talked about as doing something interesting and it was often you, i noticed this was happening - but i was going back to visit in toronto a fair bit because my family is there and friends were there and when i’d go there sometimes i would run into you on bloor street, but you looked very different from when i’d met you at reg hart’s - your hair was very interesting - you had an unusual haircut that i liked - we spoke a little bit and you were nice and a little bit remote in a way that was polite and maybe you remembered me but probably you didn’t although i spoke of when we’d met -
- but i was very much struck by how different you were not just in the way you looked but in the way you carried yourself - you were very different in the way that you were being you - and reading your new stuff in the new commercially published version of yummy fur i was paying attention to your stuff as you started telling stories about you that there was a sense of you that wasn’t like the sense of you i first met nor that i’d run into on bloor street either -
- then i didn’t see you at all for years, but i did keep reading your stuff and enjoying it and wondering about it - and i didn’t see you again until you came to banff where i was living and hanging out with my spouse - my novel hadn’t come out yet - you were launching your louis riel book - you came with ho che anderson and i bought your book and his books and i think i was the only one who bought your book in banff - we had a beer together afterwards and you said it was your worst signing ever - i think you did a little better that year in calgary, though -
- we spoke a little bit about reg hart and some other things, and you seemed a bit bummed out and you didn’t hang out long - but again you were quite different from how you ever were -
- then i saw you recently in calgary for the launch of the paper version of the riel book - this time you were consistent with the way you’d been the last time i’d seen you - you didn’t seem to recognize me - and again i gave you the background - it’s sort of funny in a way - anyhow, i bought a different book because i have the riel book already - and you asked me what i thought about the riel book and i said something approving but i have never really been that satisfied with what i had said but what can be expected in a situation such as that -
- so every now and then i try to think about it more - and this is what has happened trying to think about it now - i’ve ended up thinking about your work in general because i read recently, only recently, the other book i bought, which is a collection of short pieces, some of which i had read already in their original comic book form - but some of which i hadn’t read at all -
- i am fascinated in a way by the footnotes and other sorts of notes you make - these things really captivate me - i love your drawings and your stories but i love your annotations too - this is also true of the riel book - there is a quality in them that is unusual, being very personal, that i really do enjoy - there is a feeling in a way of some sort of definite disclosure -
- your work as a telling of your story is of course always going to be a matter of disclosure, and it will never be one that is ever satisfying because it is always at the same time wanting to be art and being that and being very good at being that and being what it is beyond whatever you might like to tell or be - which is what anything that’s interesting is always doing really - so in the measure that it is unsatisfying in one way, it is thereby always satisfying in another way - which is rather interesting to me ...
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