Daily Inspiration Quote by Chester Brown

Brown’s observation lands like a deadpan confession, but it’s really a cartoonist’s manifesto about looking. He isn’t talking about “taste” so much as composition: where the camera places attention, what it withholds, what kind of viewer it manufactures. The complaint that Penthouse “didn’t seem to concentrate as much on the girls’ faces” frames pornography as a problem of framing, not libido. Faces mean personhood, consent, interiority; they also mean narrative. For an artist whose medium lives and dies on expression, a body without a readable face is a panel without dialogue.

The subtext is thornier. Wanting to “see the girls’ faces” can read as a bid for recognition of the subject’s humanity, but it also signals a desire for intimacy that porn often simulates while carefully preventing it. Brown notices that the 1980s “went out of their way to obscure” faces, implying an industry choice rather than an accident: anonymity as a product feature. That choice protected models from stigma and employers from lawsuits, but it also made the images more interchangeable, more purely consumable. A hidden face turns a person into a category.

Context matters: Brown comes out of a late-20th-century comics culture obsessed with the politics of representation, and he’s speaking from inside a male gaze that’s trying to become self-aware without fully escaping itself. The line’s power is its clinical specificity. Instead of moralizing about porn, he points to a tiny visual decision that reveals the whole apparatus: desire managed by omission.