If the cartoonist Chester Brown had lived a few hundred years ago, they’d have called him, among other things, a heresiarch.
Why the man – who’s provided this lucky world with such treasures as I Never Liked You and The Playboy and Louis Riel and even the sick & surreal masterpiece Ed the Happy Clown – would be called a heresiarch is because he’s worked up a reinterpretation, a series of detailed reinterpretations, of what’s commonly accepted as the underlying message of portions of the Christian Bible.
“Reinterpretation.”
Such an innocuous word, n’est-ce pas?
It’s not everybody who’s a proponent of more sane laws for, and more reasoned societal consideration of, sex workers who will do that. It’s not everybody who will undertake such a project of interpretation, a highly researched thesis that explicates, for instance, how the Nazarene Jesus’ mother was a prostitute, and how that’s basically a good (or at the very least neutral) thing.
It’s not everybody who will go to the trouble of drafting compelling sequences of narrative panels to show how things might’ve gone down in biblical times vis-a-vis the tenets of Christianity and how those tenets relate to the occupation of whores. But then, it’s not every artist who’s so relentlessly in pursuit of the rational. And it’s not every man whose girlfriend is a prostitute.
And so here we have Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus, Brown’s follow-up to his autobiographical Paying for It, featuring several straight-up tales from the Bible, and a few of Jesus’ parables as well, illustrated in Brown’s simple and effective and always well-directed cartooning style. And here we also have page after handwritten page of the artist’s suppositions and assertions and alternative takes on what this or that biblical scholar has written about what the Good Book suggests about prostitution and religious obedience and what the Christian God really wants and so on.
Heresy, if you give enough of a damn to use such a label.
A deep and deeply personal exploration into arcane religious matters, in any case – all in service of showing that, look, if someone wants you to pay to fuck them, and you’re willing to pay to fuck them, then, hey, there’s nothing wrong with that.
At around $25, this sharp new hardcover from Drawn & Quarterly is about, what, the cost of a blow job? It’s definitely worth that.
This article appears in April 15 • 2016.