Daily Inspiration Quote by Chester Brown

Chester Brown is doing something sly here: he’s framing a deeply loaded artistic choice as if it were just a scheduling decision. By invoking the scholarly squabble over Gospel priority (Mark first? Matthew first?), he quietly signals that his project isn’t devotional illustration so much as an adaptation with footnotes in its bloodstream. The line reads like shop talk, but it’s also a credibility move: Brown plants himself adjacent to academic discourse without adopting its stiff posture, translating textual criticism into the plain language of a working cartoonist.

The subtext is about authority. In religion, authority is inherited; in comics, it’s built panel by panel. Brown borrows the prestige of “popular consensus” while keeping one eyebrow raised at it, acknowledging that even supposedly settled origins are, in practice, negotiated stories. That matters because the Gospels themselves are negotiated stories: overlapping accounts shaped by community memory, editorial choices, and theological agenda. By choosing Mark “first,” Brown isn’t just going chronological; he’s choosing the leanest, most abrupt narrative as his entry point, the version with less ornament and more velocity. That’s a cartoonist’s instinct.

Then there’s the final clause: “planning on doing all four.” It’s both ambitious and deliberately noncommittal, a reminder that adaptation is a long game and that completeness is a promise artists make to themselves before reality intervenes. Brown’s understated tone performs a larger argument: sacred texts can be approached as craft problems - sequence, source, structure - without stripping them of their cultural charge. That’s the tightrope his work often walks, and this quote shows him testing the balance.