"Hide with me":

a page by Chester Brown (admired by CH)

One of my favorite comics pages is this one, below, by Chester Brown. It's actually been a few different "pages" over its lifespan, since it's been reformatted more than once since originally appearing in Brown's comic book Yummy Fur #26 (Drawn and Quarterly, Oct. 1991), where, in fact, it originally appeared as a sequence spread out over two pages. I've reproduced two later, revised versions below:

"Black" version (1994):
[click the image to open a larger pop-up version]

This sequence is part of the serialized autobiographical story "Fuck" (Yummy Fur #s 26-30, 10/91 to 4/93), later collected as the book I Never Liked You. The story appeared against a black background in the original (1994) version of that book, then against a white background in a revised, so-called definitive (2002) version. Actually, I prefer the "black" version. I love the way the images stand against the darkness.

Either way, this is a wonderful story: probing, beautifully observed and drawn, and, in the end, moving. It's hard for me to talk about this one page without talking much about the whole story, but I'll try. Briefly, the context:

I Never Liked You is a story of Chester Brown's adolescence, in particular his relationships with several girls and with his mother (a schizophrenic, though this is not quite stated in the book). One of those girls, Carrie, lives across the street and has a terrific crush on the older Chester, who, throughout, remains reticent (much like the book) and emotionally withdrawn. Nonetheless Carrie and Chester often hang out together, talking, playing, or "wrestling." She develops a possessive attitude toward him. In this scene of hide-and-seek, Carrie reaches out to Chester and bids him to hide with her (anticipating a later scene in which Chester will hide with Carrie's sister Connie).

"White" version (2002):
[click the image to open a pop-up]

What I especially like about this page is its quietness and sense of mystery, conjured through Brown's delicate drawings and disconnected panel layout. In context the page, like the entire story, seems to rise up out of a place of silence. The sequence begins with a lone panel on the preceding page and ends with a lone panel on the following page, but, scene-wise, there's little for us to go on: almost no setting up. We're just dropped into a scene, sans transitional devices or context. Like most scenes in the book, it pops out of nowhere as a dreamlike series of pulses. The effect is sometimes eerie, as here, despite the grounding of the story in mundane everyday stuff.

This scene makes for a great example because the hatching imparts a shaded and secluded feel that's just right for an indoor game of hide-and-seek. In addition, that second panel seems downright portentous, symbolic even. The forced perspective (note the slight fisheye distortion of the walls and doorways) makes the hallway daunting somehow, and Chester seems poised between two beckoning possibilities: the open door at hallway's end, from whence light emanates, or the dark though open doorway to his immediate right.

Chester seems intent on making for the end of the hall, but something/someone unexpected snags him from the doorway on the right: Carrie. I like how, in panel four, Chester's surprise is reinforced by a kind of halo: his close-up is surrounded by a white aura that picks him out of the inky darkness (a device often used in the book). The drawings are a superb balancing act between over-playing and under-playing. I also like the droning counting-off of seconds, coming from off-panel.

Layout-wise, this is a less design-centric and less tightly unified page than Craig's (terrific) example by Carol Tyler, last week. Chester Brown's method at the time of this story (maybe even now, I don't know) was, apparently, to draw out each panel on a separate sheet of paper, then tape the panels together on a page, rather like assembling a jigsaw puzzle (this process can be glimpsed in a self-reflexive story from Brown's 1998 collection The Little Man). At times, and I Never Liked You is one of those times, Brown would take apart and rebuild the pages for the collected book editions, creating, in essence, new layouts (moving from black to white versions of the pages is just one example of this kind of creative rethinking on Brown's part). The results of this process, I think, are fascinatingly mixed:

On the one hand, Brown denies himself the kind of density that Tyler goes after; the panels remain separate from each other, and some holistic design possibilities are lost. Panels cannot overlap or bleed into each other. On the other hand, the panels are each beautifully executed; also, Brown is able to get away from the sometimes smothering density of the traditional comic-book grid (this is even truer in those pages that have only one or two panels each, which are many). In this case the layout remains dynamic, with tellingly varied panel sizes and shapes. What I most like about this is how the isolation of each image seems to fit with the reticence and understatement of the whole story. There is, throughout the book, the flickering quality of memory.

Oddly enough, though the scene is precisely timed (seconds tick off in a kind of Eisnerian timing conceit), there is a paradoxical sense of timelessness and symbolic loading here. Again, stillness, quiet, and the power of suggestion.

It occurs to me that this scene is weirdly fraught for such a brief, seemingly trivial incident. Perhaps Carrie's invitation to "hide" could be taken as more than simply literal, given Chester's emotional evasiveness throughout most of the story; perhaps that mysterious corridor connotes choices or unknowns that haunt Chester, then and/or now, and inform the whole project. In any case, this is a hypnotic page in either the black or white version, one that for me conjures up I Never Liked You in its beautiful entirety.

Comments

[Siskoid]

I love Yummy Fur. Obviously the Ed the Happy Clown stuff is a hoot, but I stuck with it when it went autobiographical for its bravery and clarity of observation.

You present the page well. The only thing I would add is how it makes me ask the question: "What is she counting up to?" It helps create the tension in the scene as Chester heads for that unknowable moment, or for his banal destiny.

[CharlesWHatfield]

Ah, Siskoid, nice observation. Yeah, the droning of the count (twenty-five, twenty-six...), which seems tangential to the images, helps bring a certain tension to the scene, the more so because it adds to our sense that the moment, for Chester, is far more significant than its brevity would suggest. For a scene that, ostensibly, lasts only a few second, this has real impact. I thought of Eisner when thinking about the counting as a device; it's the sort of precise, real-world timing that he would sometimes introduce into a scene (a clock's ticking, a faucet dripping, that sort of thing).

Yummy Fur, ach, it's one of the great alt comic book series. Me, I signed on in what turned out to be the middle of "Fuck" (issue #28 I think, Spring 1992, or later when I found it). I don't think I would have coped very well with the earlier, more scatological "Ed" stuff if I'd seen it first, without looking at Brown's more understated autobio stuff beforehand. In short, I worked through Yummy Fur bass-ackward, and it helped me. Now I think the "Ed" stuff is wonderful (YF #4 still remains one of the most shocking and effective comic books I've ever read).

Thanks again for dropping by! I've got you bookmarked. :)