Chester Brown is a Canadian cartoonist.
Brown was born in Montreal in 1960 and grew up in the nearby suburb of Chateauguay.
At 19, Brown moved to Toronto, where he found a day job while practicing cartooning in his free time. In 1983, he began to self-publish his work in photocopied mini-comics under the title Yummy Fur. These pamphlets attracted some attention in the industry, and in 1986 the Toronto-based comic book publisher Vortex Comics approached Brown. The first Vortex issue of Yummy Fur sold well, so Brown quit his day job to become a full-time cartoonist.
In the pages of Yummy Fur, Brown serialized the story Ed the Happy Clown, which was published as a graphic novel in 1989 and went on to win several awards.
Brown's following book The Playboy (1992) was the first graphic novel released by the Canadian comic publisher Drawn & Quarterly. It was followed by I Never Liked You (1994) and the collection of shorts tories The Little Man: Short Strips, 1980-1995 (1998). From 1998 to 2003 Brown worked on Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography. His latest books are Paying for It (2011) and Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus (2016), both tackling at some level the theme of decriminalisation of prostitution.