Paying For It

"Chester Brown is no shy guy. Even though the slight and soft-spoken cartoonist admits to having difficulty talking up girls, his catalogue of raunchy and political comics reveals a loud, confessional and political artist pushing the pen.
Brown, the author of the highly acclaimed biography Louis Riel, is returning from an almost decade-long hiatus to premiere his widely anticipated graphic novel about sex work, Paying For It. The book, to be released in May by Montreal’s Drawn & Quarterly press, is an autobiographical account of Chester’s experience employing prostitutes after his breakup with actor and director Sook-Yin Lee in 1996.

“I had just gotten disillusioned with the whole romantic-life game. For a while I wasn’t sure what I was going to do as far as sex was concerned. I knew I didn’t want a girlfriend, and I really didn’t have the social skills to just pick up women. I was celibate for a couple years, and then I was like, ‘Why not pay for it?’” says Chester, whose book details, at something of a distance, a variety of encounters with sex workers over the course of the last decade. The book also includes a couple dozen pages of Chester’s notes arguing for the decriminalization of sex work".

http://www.xtra.ca/public/Toronto/Chester_Brown_brings_us_a_johns_story-10048.aspx