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Thursday 10 August 2017

Me, Crad Kilodney and Chester Brown

I habitually forget that one of my first commissions (other than painting a copy of a Picasso for a Taiwanese account executive's condo living room) was drawing the cover of Junior Brain Tumors in Action for Toronto self-publishing legend, Crad Kilodney who used to sell his self-published books on the street in the 1980's and early 1990's... since then he has, unfortunately, passed away.

Anyway, I was reminded by a mention in Chester Brown's excellent page on Patreon -- I suggest everyone support Chester, one of the greatest living cartoonists!  -- anyway, it mentions that back in high school I drew the cover for this book, which I no longer have a copy of.  It was meant as a parody of some school primer that kids used to have in the 1950's.


"Junior Brain Tumors in Action"
by Crad Kilodney, 1990 (cover by Matthew Brown)


Crad Kilodney in action

Click on link to go directly to Chester's Patreon site - https://www.patreon.com/posts/6601903

(Quotation follows: )

"Matthew — I’d forgotten that you did a cover for one of Crad Kilodney’s books, but now I remember that when I saw that cover I was a bit jealous, thinking something like, 'Why hasn’t Crad asked ME to do a cover for him? Doesn’t he like my work?' Thinking about it, I don’t recall him ever complimenting me on anything, although I must have told him how much I enjoyed his stuff, particularly those last two books, Excrement and Putrid Scum. I’m hoping this documentary will trigger a posthumous interest in his work and that some publisher will put those two books back into print.
Hi Chester! That would be fantastic. I'm not sure why Crad asked me... maybe he figured he could pay me a cheap rate because I was still in high school. Plus, I had two cute female friends (fellow high school students) who came with me to visit his place, so maybe that tipped the scales...? I do recall as they were analyzing his movie poster of a giant ant eating a well-endowed heroine, he had a gleeful glint in his eye. Or I was just malleable or something. There's no way my drawing matched anything you could do!"

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