page_title: Chester Brown's autobiographical comics
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Chester Brown's autobiographical comics / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Map of southern Québec Province within Canada, for use in location map templates.Français&#160;: Carte du sud du Québec.
context_page_description: Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown attracted the attention of critics and peers in the early 1990s alternative comics world when he began publishing autobiographical comics in his comic book Yummy Fur. During this period Brown produced a number of short strips and two graphic novels: The Playboy and I Never Liked You. The personal and revealing deal with Brown's social awkwardness and introversion, and the artwork and page layouts are minimal and organic. In 2011 Brown returned to autobiography with Paying for It, an account of his experience with prostitutes.
  The Yummy Fur autobiographical stories have been collected–the short stories in The Little Man, and the graphic novels The Playboy and Fuck as I Never Liked You. Paying for It has appeared only in book form.
context_section_description: Chester Brown grew up in Châteauguay, a Montreal suburb with a large English-speaking minority; he does not speak French.  He described himself as a "nerdy teenager" attracted to comic books from a young age, and sought a career in superhero comics, but was unsuccessful in finding work with Marvel or DC after graduating from high school.  He moved to Toronto and discovered underground comix and the small-press community.  From 1983 he self-published a minicomic titled Yummy Fur.
  From 1986 Toronto-based Vortex Comics began publishing Yummy Fur as a full comic book.  After making a name for himself in alternative comics with the surreal serial Ed the Happy Clown, Brown turned to autobiography under the influence of the work of Julie Doucet and Joe Matt.  He gradually simplified his style, inspired by the example of his friend and fellow Toronto cartoonist Seth.
  After bringing Ed to an end, Brown moved on to a series of personally revealing autobiographical stories, starting with "Helder" in Yummy Fur #19.  The drawing style, done with a brush, became more and more sparse in an attempt to move away from the style of Ed the Happy Clown, which Brown had grown uncomfortable with.  Most of the shorter stories, like "Helder", "Showing Helder" and "Danny's Story", took place not long before they were written, but the longer graphic novels took place mostly in Brown's adolescence in the 1970s.
  Brown drew inspiration from Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar's autobiographical stories, but he says the biggest push he had at the time was from Seth, his friend and fellow Vortex Comics cartoonist; Joe Matt, whose one-page autobiographical cartoons Brown and Seth discovered in 1989, and who eventually moved to Toronto and became friends with the two; and Julie Doucet, whose comics were not explicitly autobiographical, but starred the cartoonist herself and contained autobiographical elements.  All four cartoonists would shortly join Drawn and Quarterly and become associated with one another to the public.
  Some of Brown's autobiographical early stories dealt with himself as an adult, but he quickly ran into problems with friends who disagreed with his depiction of them.  He then turned to his teenage years and produced some of his most highly acclaimed work.  He says he found "the intense emotions of the period [of adolescence], as you’re figuring out sex and love and everything" to be "bound to produce rich material for stories."
  Brown's autobiographical work developed from a scene that had been developing since the 1970s and which had reached a peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
caption: Several of the stories take place in Châteauguay, Quebec.
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