Chester the Libertarian

Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography met with the kind of widespread accolades that would get Chester Brown asked for his opinion on a forthcoming Canadian federal election. Thing is, over the course of researching the graphic novel, Brown determined that the political party he was most interested in joining was Libertarian. And, after turning out for a few of their monthly meetings, Brown was asked late last year if he was interested in getting his name on a few ballots in downtown Toronto. Just one week before the deadline, he began the task of finding 100 eligible voters willing to scribble their vouch for his ability to run.

Assistance has been solicited from customers of The Beguiling (601 Markham St.) who helpfully note: “You can nominate Chester and then decide to vote for someone who might actually get elected.”

Brown is nonetheless planning a genuine run for Member of Parliament in the Trinity-Spadina riding, a job currently held by NDP celeb Olivia Chow, where he would be the closest thing the Libertarians have ever boasted to a star candidate — taking time out for campaign events between working on his follow-up to 2003’s Louis Riel, a 200-page chronicle of his experiences paying for sexual services, which is about one-quarter complete, produced with the assistance of a $16,000 grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.

How is a candidate telling voters that the government should keep as much distance as rationally possible going to explain that one?

“I don’t understand why those grants are there,” says Brown. “If you can’t make money off your art then you should get a real job to support yourself.
 
“I also don’t think that people collecting welfare are doing anything wrong. What I’m taking a stand against are the people who do the distributing.

“And, if I didn’t take it, the money would probably go to someone less deserving than me.”

What changed 48-year-old Brown’s beliefs from passive anarchist to active Libertarian was how the issue of property rights factored into the tale of Riel’s legendary resistances. While starting work on the script in 1998, he picked up The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages by John Bethell, and was further influenced by the argument that the institution of private property was the biggest factor in the improvement of Western civilization.

“I realized there was a need for an agency that would protect those rights,” says Brown. “And that agency would be the federal government.”

Otherwise, the Libertarian philosophy would rather keep politicians as far out of people’s lives — only defining crime as a situation where somebody else was affected. For an artist like Brown, working full-time for the past 22 years in an illustrative medium that is all about being an outsider, the party turned out to be the one that suited his outlook.

“Politically, maybe I’d have considered myself among the NDP types in my 20s, although I wasn’t really all that interested,” he says. “Yes, it was a nice thing that there’s money distributed to poor people. Their stance on social issues or drug laws is something that generally fit my own.

“Becoming a Libertarian wasn’t the easiest thing for me. At first, I thought, aren’t those just a bunch of right-wing assholes? But when I met other party members I discovered there was a lot for me to agree with.”

The reaction to this political conversion, even amongst fellow artists fond of Brown’s eccentric outlook, was generally confused: “It was like, ’Oh, there goes Chester with another one of his kooky enthusiasms.’

“Seth told me that, after he heard I was into this, that something died within him.”

Brown and his two cartoonist pals, Seth and Joe Matt, acquired a collective demi-celebrity as a kind of gutter rat pack trying to make it through their drawing boards in 1990s Toronto, each responding in their own unique way to the hostilities surrounding them. The biography of Louis Riel was an establishment breakthrough for Brown — he also received a $6,000 Canada Council grant at a time when he needed it most. (The publisher, Montreal-based Drawn & Quarterly, is also the beneficiary of three federal programs.)

When he moved to Toronto at age 19 from Chateaugay, Quebec — motivated by the fact that he never learned to speak French — Brown got a job at a Bathurst Street photo lab while working on his own series of self-published mini-comics, Yummy Fur. Seven years later, in late 1986, a deal with publisher Vortex Comics allowed him to quit the job. He’s been getting up each day at the crack of dawn to draw ever since.

“If you’re an artist it’s because you want to be an artist,” says Brown. “I can’t say the government helped me get started because I motivated myself.

“Like most young people, I was vaguely angry about stuff — as a teenager, into your 20s, the outside world can seem kind of difficult. But having some level of success gave me a bit of self-confidence. When you’re forced to deal with people who then tell you they love your work it’s hard not to feel just a little bit better about yourself.”

Childhood scars never go away, though, and Brown connected with even more fans with graphic novels about his obsession with Playboy magazine and grappling with puberty around the same time his mother grappled with schizophrenia. The Christian gospels have also provided Brown with a fair share of comic fodder.

But he emphasizes that feelings about protecting property don’t extend to that other thorny election topic in the anti-Conservative arts sector — copyright: “I don’t believe in property rights for ideas,” he says. “Then again, having those laws around has probably helped me out.”

Similarly, the fact that Brown’s chosen medium went from being the stuff of plain-brown-wrapper comix to anti-hero movies about Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar, has given him and his cohorts legitimacy unthinkable in the age when Yummy Fur was a photocopied zine.

Can he do the same in helping to bring the Libertarian Party a notch away from the fringe? Come back to Scrolling Eye over the next four weeks to see what happens.

Just don’t look for Chester Brown on your Twitter feed, since he does not own a computer, and figures he can continue living without one.

A couple of days into the process, however, he’s already wondering what he’s gotten himself into. “Running in one election doesn’t make me a politician,” he says. “Getting these 100 signatures makes it feel like I’m begging. I’m committed to doing this, though, since I have enough confidence in my ability to express what the Libertarian Party of Canada believes.

“But I’m pretty sure my political career will be coming to an end on October 15.”
 

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