Reading Through 2021 88: The Playboy, by Chester Brown

 The Playboy, by Chester Brown

1992, revised edition 2013

When I last read this book, I was a boy; now I am kind of a man.

The cover is a repurposed panel

Sometime around the mid-90s, I got turned on to the output of Drawn & Quarterly, and without a doubt, it changed my life. For one thing, it was the leveling up I needed to see from comics to justify keeping up with them. I love genre, but I couldn't subside on genre alone. I needed something with a deeper motive and a greater ambition to keep me from giving up on them all together. D&Q was that thing. It also helped that they were Canadian and helped me to see Canadian art as different than merely government funded would-be American art (there was a lot of not-so-great CanCon movies, music and TV in the 90s).  This book, along with the work of Seth and Joe Matt, gave me something to aspire to, though the work of those three is a pretty narrow spectrum through the lens of 2021.

The current version is smaller in size, with a lot more pages than the 90's version

So I had this, and all the rest of the D&Q books of the time, but I think I gave my copy of it away around the year 2000. It was long gone, anyway. More than once, I looked on my bookshelf for it and couldn't find it, so I finally just ordered a new copy. First thing I noticed was it's a new edition. The old edition was bigger, more panels on the page, black backgrounds, and if I remember correctly, a comment by Hugh Hefner. The new one has one or two panels per page, it's been re-scripted, and other subtle alterations which I missed.

I like the paper the new one is printed on, simple newsprint like a cheap novel has.

You can't buy pornography at the store near your house, for obvious reasons

The book in a nutshell is this: Brown tells autobiographical anecdotes about buying Playboy from teenage years to adulthood. It involves a lot of shame and being extremely conscious about all of it. Where to buy it, how to talk about it, how to dispose of it, how to carry it so that nobody thinks you're doing anything abnormal.

Hiding stuff in your shirt is a terrible idea. You hide it out in the open

Of course, he has his own personal details as to how he did things, but this hit home to me like few things I'd ever read at the time. Even today, it hits home. Pornography is pretty near universal in male experience, but in most circles, it's not something men want to talk about or acknowledge. It's embarrassing, verging into shameful. It depends on the person and their upbringing how much shame there is, but I was raised pretty non-religious, in a fairly open house, and I was mortified that someone might think I wanted to look at naked women. 

The use of pornography at the very least is universal, and if there is a guy who says he's never, then chances are he was simply using Sears catalogs instead. And it's a part of human experience. I studied the history of art, and one of my favorite quotes was by David Hockney (if I remember correctly), which went along the lines of, "It's only pornography for a hundred years, then it goes into a museum." It's been a constant in human culture. 

That's the kind of stuff I had to remind myself to not just feel like a skeeve.

The rituals of calculatedly disposing of his pornography is painful 

Brown lays it all out in detail the efforts he would go to to destroy evidence of having bought a Playboy, being haunted by not having it, and repurchasing it again, and eventually getting rid of the evidence again. It's painful, because he was doing it to himself. He wasn't being preached at by his parents or a reverend. He had just internalized this idea that wanting, having and using pornography was wrong.

So painful

The biggest takeaway is the honesty Brown shows throughout. Even as an adult writing about it, he isn't comfortable with it. In a Maus-like reflection of people reading his work in progress, he feigns not knowing about Playboy history in conversation with a guy who will likely read his comic a month later and see that he was lying. He's tackling the topic, yet he hasn't come to terms with it. It makes the whole project fascinating, and fairly unique. Autobiography was still a minor genre in comics, and rarely does the artist show themselves to be barely able to acknowledge in life what they're acknowledging on the page. Most autobiography is about topics someone has come to terms with.

Porn in forests and parks will never change. I've seen it in Japan lots too

My thoughts on this book, over twenty years after I last read it: it's much smaller than I remembered. At that time, trade paperbacks were still somewhat new. The original book was maybe 160 pages, which felt pretty substantial at the time, but feels quite short within the world of comics today, especially as Brown doesn't use half of the paper on the page. The landscape of comics has evolved a lot in the past 25 years and if it were released today, I think it would still get a lot of praise, but it feels slight compared to most alternative comics I buy.

How foolish of him to try to dispose of a magazine in the family fireplace

The book feels as personal now as it ever did. I've read a number of autobiographical comics this year, and all are revealing, some more than others. Maybe for me, because this resonates so deeply with my own experiences, it just feels that much harder of a book to have made. At this point, I could tell some of my own stories like this, but having read this book would make it easier, and I'd have to have some ironic distance from the "me" I were talking about.  Brown does have his own ironic distance as well, as he narrates the book in the form of a demon.

I imagine an eighteen year old today would still relate to this, though some of the details would be harder for them to imagine. Do young men buy magazines anymore? Maybe a young man today just amasses files on their hard drive, which they purge and rebuild repeatedly. I don't know, I don't talk to any teenagers. Maybe their porn is in the cloud. 

Can't just throw pornography out with your garbage. Someone might see it

This wasn't a book I was dying to get back, it was languishing in my online wishlist for about two years, but I just decided I should have it back on my shelf. Reading it reminded me how important it was for me, because I saw myself in a comic as much as I ever had. My own life had drama and conflict that I had never recognized.