Chester Brown

Quite the Kidder

My latest piece is up at http://www.tcj.com/reviews/the-third-remedy/

It begins

The addressees (neatly hand-printed) in the center of the tiny envelope were Adele and I at our home in Berkeley. The addressor (also neatly hand-printed but tinier) was the cartoonist Chester Brown from his apartment in Toronto.
Inside was a black-and-white comic, 37-pages, four-by-five-inches.
The title was THE THIRD REMEDY.
In a box centered on the back cover it said “This story was originally published in 1949 in WALT DISNEY’S COMICS AND STORIES Number 101 (Volume 9, Number 5) February.” On the title page, in a larger box, it said, “Story written by Carl Barks. Artwork drawn by Bob Kane.”
There was no price, no copyright notice, no identification of or information about the publisher.
The principal characters were Batman and Robin.
Huh?

Marketing Report: Week 17

Sold NO books.

Gave three “Cheesesteak”s away. One I swapped to Chris Rodell, a journalist/pal from the defunct writers’ forum Red Room, where he was someone I read eagerly, for his self-published “The Last Baby Boomer.” (Check out his blog at eightdaystoamish.blogspot.com.) The second went to the cartoonist Chester Brown, whose work I’ve admired since I profiled him in “The Comics Journal” in 1993. We’d recently re-connected and he’d sent me his mini- “Daphnis & Chloe,” which is about Romantic Love. The third went to Meredith Tax, whose article on the Kurdish women’s movement and revolution recently went up at firstofthemonth.org, to which I also contribute. (See her forthcoming “A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State.” She and I were in the same college class, though in vastly different crowds. (I recall speaking to her during Orientation Week and again at graduation. She does not remember me at all.) But junior year, when the idea I might be a writer hit me out of nowhere, she and I were the only underclassfolk to have short stories in the university literary magazine, an association that was good for my cred and self-belief.

I don’t think of myself as being part of a literary world, and I don’t know whether the range of these connections supports or contradicts this belief.

Anyway, “Cheesesteak: The West Philadelphia Years.” Send $20 to Spruce Hill Press, POB 9492, Berkeley, CA 94709.