Time & Perspective Quote by Chester Brown

The glamour myth of comics is the lone cartoonist executing a pristine vision, panel by panel, like a human printer. Chester Brown punctures that fantasy with a working artist's confession: the real creative act happens at the edge of the page, right before the pen commits. "Almost every scene" is a quiet flex of craft discipline, but it reads more like an admission of perpetual second-guessing. He is describing revision not as a phase but as the medium's pulse.

The phrasing matters. "As I'm about to start drawing it" locates the decision point in the moment when the idea collides with the irreversibility of ink and time. In prose, you can swap a word; in comics, a change in dialogue can demand a new facial expression, a different gesture, a re-blocked sequence. Brown's "or whatever" is doing cultural work: it deflates auteur mystique, insisting that high-stakes narrative decisions often arrive disguised as mundane tinkering.

There's also an ethic embedded here. Changing "at least half of the time" suggests he doesn't trust the first draft, or the first impulse, to be honest enough. For a cartoonist known for controlled minimalism and unflinching subject matter, the subtext is that simplicity is built, not found. Revision becomes a moral practice: you redraw until the scene says what it needs to say, not what you originally wanted it to say.