"One of the medium's brilliant mavericks." --Time.com
The Little Man: Short Strips, 1980-1995is a collection of short-story works by the celebrated and bestsellingLouis Riel cartoonist Chester Brown. From his early experimental comedic surrealism to his later autobiographical and essay strips, we see not a major talent in development but a fully realized storytelling virtuoso. Included are his early autobiographical stories "Helder" (a story about a young man's tentativeness when pursuing a woman), "Showing Helder" (a blow-by-blow account of the construction of the previous story), and "Danny" (a strangely compelling moment-by-moment account of Brown waking upand trying to avoid contact with a fellow rooming-house tenant). Other standouts are Brown's controversial essay on schizophrenia (specifically his own mother's) and various medical views on this baffling disease, and the title story, "The Little Man," a Freudian classroom romp fantasy by a adolescent Brown that ties into the schizophrenia essay in a surprising way. The acclaimed compendium, culled mostly from his groundbreaking comic book series Yummy Fur, provides a fascinating insight into Brown's psyche; he rounds out the collection with exacting notes on each story.

Chester Brown's profile page

Chester Brown(I Never Liked YouandLouis Riel) was born in 1960 in Montreal and lives in Toronto; he is an illustrator forThe New York Times MagazineandThe New Yorker.

Outrageous, surreal, hushed, mystical, and, often, funny as hell.

They universally exhibit Brown's inimitable mix of intimate and surreal.

It might seem jarring for a book to begin with 'The Toilet Paper Revolt' . . . and end with 'My Mom Was a Schizophrenic' . . . , but Brown pulls it off by mixing equal parts surrealism, violence, and contemplation. As a whole, this book tells another story: the maturing of an artist.

A note of pure genius.