Daily Inspiration Quote by Chester Brown

Brown is sketching an origin story that refuses the myth of the pure, self-invented alternative artist. The line is casual, almost tossed off, but it’s doing careful cultural bookkeeping: underground comix weren’t a lightning bolt that erased the past, they were an addition to an already-formed visual language built on Marvel and DC’s mass-produced melodrama.

The key phrase is “to some degree.” It’s a hedge that signals both humility and strategy. Brown acknowledges Crumb’s gravitational pull without letting it swallow his agency, and without performing the predictable conversion narrative: I saw the underground and instantly rejected the mainstream. Instead, he frames influence as overlap and timing. “Shortly before that” places the discovery of Crumb as a pivot point, not a starting point, implying a gradual recalibration of taste and technique rather than a clean break.

There’s also a quiet map of cultural legitimacy here. For cartoonists of Brown’s generation, Marvel/DC were the childhood commons; Crumb and “other underground stuff” were the forbidden library. By pairing them, Brown normalizes the idea that an artist can carry both: the discipline of serialized storytelling, iconography, and pacing from superheroes, and the underground’s permission to be blunt, personal, abrasive, or formally weird.

Subtext: the boundary between “high” authenticity and “low” commerce is porous. Brown is telling you his work comes from that seepage, where the mainstream supplies the grammar and the underground supplies the nerve.