I'm using the same tool to browse through the books of
Chester Brown right now...
Funny thing there is: Ive come across his books in stores every now and then, would always get engrossed in reading bits and pieces of one, and yet always eventually left without buying it, taking something else instead (like Seth).
Why? Because, with all its teen angst and stuff, it seemed like too much of a cartoonlike cartoon to spend the money on (cause cartoons are bloody expensive for the time it takes to finish 'em)? I mean, because it just all seemed too
high-school?
Or because some of the dread in 'em was too close to home, and I had to shake it off instead of, you know, taking it home?
Yet now, browsing through 'em online, I realise how much of it I've read all in all, dragging my feet in some bookstore or other some time in the last ten years. And that I still remember much of it, too.
Must be pretty good then, after all.
Theres one story in particular, I read it in that brilliant cartoon/animated-novel shop in Kreuzberg, Berlin, in 1995 - and the more I look at this Chester Brown stuff, the more I'm convinced that that one must have been his too. But I've never seen it back, cant find it back.
Perhaps its somewhere in the back of
I never liked you, anyway?
Its about this super-angsted insecure guy, who's hopelessly apathetic and has a dysfunctional relationship with this girl who treats him ever more shoddily. Cheats on him, and again: in the end even right outside, on the hood of the car. And he knows, but does nothing, and she despises him ever more (for it?); and when finally, one evening, he hits her, she immediately heats up to him and they have intense sex, before one leaves the other (dont remember which way round), after all.
Pretty morbidly depressive story, really. Which is probably why I didnt buy it. Also because the guy reminded me of a person I'm afraid of being in nightmares: kinda like the glaring, stark B/W vision of yourself you can have on LSD, as if you suddenly see how bad everything could very well end up in some situation some time, through some briefly opening vision window. It closes and you breathe relief that you're not actually anything like that, IRL - but it was a
version of you, still, a real enough nightmare version of you.
Anyway, so I didnt buy it. Which I kinda regret now.
