Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus

by Chester Brown

Overview

The idiosyncratic master Chester Brown continues his thoughts on sex work

“The Bible is Chester Brown’s holy harlot. He plumbs the mysteries of her depths while she schools him in the ways of love. Like all of Chester’s work, Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus is confounding, yet addictive, instantly re-readable, and expands with revelations in his hundred pages of notes. A work of passion, research, and elegant clarity. My new favourite.”—Craig Thompson, author of Blankets and Habibi

“Chester Brown is both God’s and the devil’s gift to the world.”—David Henry Sterry, author of Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys

“Chester’s work never fails to surprise and delight me. Since I always enjoy mythic and legendary tales of harlots, I knew I would like Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus, but I was pleased and impressed by the way he used all these stories to illustrate a larger theme about humanity’s relationship to Divinity and the role my profession plays in that relationship. Chester shows that spirituality and sexuality, which are so often depicted in our culture as opposed to one another, are actually deeply intertwined.”—Maggie McNeill, author of The Honest Courtesan

The iconoclastic and bestselling cartoonist of Paying for It: A comic-strip memoir about being a john and Louis Riel returns and with a polemical interpretation of the Bible that will be one of the most controversial and talked-about graphic novels of 2016. Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus is the retelling in comics form of nine biblical stories that present Chester Brown's fascinating and startling thesis about biblical representations of prostitution. Brown weaves a connecting line between Bathsheba, Ruth, Rahab, Tamar, Mary of Bethany, and the Virgin Mother. He reassesses the Christian moral code by examining the cultural implications of the Bible's representations of sex work.

Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus is a fitting follow-up to Brown's sui generis graphic memoir Paying for It, which was reviewed twice in The New York Times and hailed by sex workers for Brown's advocacy for the decriminalization and normalization of prostitution. Brown approaches the Bible as he did the life of Louis Riel, making these stories compellingly readable and utterly pertinent to a modern audience. In classic Chester Brown fashion, he provides extensive handwritten endnotes that delve into the biblical lore that informs Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781770462342
Publisher:	Drawn & Quarterly
Publication date:	04/12/2016
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	4.40(w) x 7.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Chester Brown was born in Montreal in 1960 and is best known for his two recent nonfiction graphic novels: the meticulously researched and Harvey Award-winning Louis Riel and the controversial, critically acclaimedPaying for It. Brown began self-publishing his comic book series Yummy Fur at twenty-three, and has been publishing with D+Q since 1991. He is the author of The Playboy, I Never Liked You, The Little Man, and Ed The Happy Clown. Brown lives in Toronto, where he ran for Parliament twice as a member of the Libertarian Party of Canada.

Editorial Reviews

With a bit of effort, it's possible to make Scripture imply almost anything you want it to, and the gifted, intensely odd Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown has performed an impressive feat of creative reinterpretation with Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus…As biblical scholarship goes, [it] seems fairly iffy…As art, on the other hand, it's pretty wonderful…The bulk of the book is Brown's adaptations of Bible stories, some very familiar and others less so, all given some degree of explicitly interpretive spin. His evenhanded pace of four small panels on each page keeps the tone understated, and he gets a lot of comedic mileage out of rendering biblical dialogue into modern vernacular…But Brown zeros in on the human drama in each story…and his visual craftsmanship is as sharp as it's ever been.

The New York Times Book Review - Douglas Wolk

★ 02/15/2016
Reviewed by A. David Lewis On one level, Brown’s new graphic novel is a stunning piece of exegesis. His 2011 graphic memoir, Paying for It, nakedly recounted his years of hiring sex workers and his changing attitude toward prostitution—evolving from a nervous john to a thoughtful connoisseur and advocate of the often-reviled oldest profession. Following his previous examination of the financial, social, familial, and medical objections to sanctioned prostitution, the new book delivers more than a well-researched argument, imaginatively reconstructed from Scripture, against a Judeo-Christian condemnation of sex work: rather, it’s a full-fisted counterpunch right to the biblical “souler” plexus. Brown’s thesis is that the Bible endorses prostitution, but does so in a coded manner. By reverting to what he believes is the uncensored version of Jesus’s parables—the Aramaic version of Matthew’s Gospel—and the “sexual initiative” shown by the women in the Old Testament treatments of Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth, he aims to overturn a sacred attitude. Not only was the “virginal” Mary, Jesus’s mother, herself a prostitute, Brown contends, but Jesus himself had no objection to her work, unlike James or later Paul. Therefore, neither should modern-day Christians. Much as with Paying for It and Louis Riel, Brown keeps the art minimal, using the pace of his panels rather than facial expressions or body language to communicate tone, suspense, or emotion. A casual reader might flip through the pages and consider them cartoony were it not for women’s exposed breasts, unobscured copulating, and an image of God as not much more than a nude giant. This overall dichotomy between deadpan cartooning and wildly violent, sexual episodes is a hallmark of Brown’s work: staying graphically essential in order to have the reader confront matter as viscerally as possible. The art is kept clear and simple, the vignettes short and direct, in order to maintain Brown’s message: prostitution is not wrong, and if the Bible were read/depicted correctly (i.e. as Brown—and apparently Matthew the disciple—intend), it would confirm that. Extensive notes, citations, and explanations for the Spartan scenes fill the book’s last 100 pages, which promises to keep scholars and religionists engaged and in debate for a long time. Given the amount of effort expended, it’s an impressive, worthwhile, and even brave text. On another level, however, the issue isn’t so much the message but the product. Brown’s approach, though logical, academic and detached, still smacks of a strange naïveté. If one reads the afterword and then delves into his notes, the rationale for his seemingly shocking interpretations are explained. But only the most devoted—or repulsed—are likely to read that additional material. The majority will wield this book as a loud, blunt instrument either for the gleeful exploitation of prostitutes or for the hellfire condemnation of whoring, as Brown feels was done with Matthew’s work, the oldest of the Gospels. Mary Wept is a politely inflammatory treatise, but it will likely be targeted more often than it’s read. (April) A. David Lewis has a doctorate in religious studies and is the author of the Eisner-nominated American Comic Books, Literary Theory, and Religion: The Superhero Afterlife.

Publishers Weekly

"[Mary Wept] includes stories about Ruth, Bathsheba, Tamar, Job, and, of course, Mary of Bethany. Brown doesn’t tell these stories to demean the women involved: he advocates for the legalization of sex work and respect for its practitioners."—Salon

"His evenhanded pace of four small panels on each page keeps the tone understated, and he gets a lot of comedic mileage out of rendering biblical dialogue into modern vernacular...But Brown zeros in on the human drama in each story...and his visual craftsmanship is as sharp as it's ever been."— The New York Times

"Chester Brown’s Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus may be the most provocative comic book published this year... Though he tells familiar stories, Brown often pushes them in surprising—and sometimes even shocking—directions... Brown defends [his] conclusion[s] in a series of lengthy exegetical endnotes that capture both the scope of his inquiries and the shape of his own fascinations.”—Slate Book Review

"…this graphic interpretation of tales of sex and personal politics from the Bible is revelatory and brilliant. That Brown is an excellent artist is a given, but the research and documentation here is scholarly and insightful."—Miami Herald

"Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus is a spiritual successor, of sorts, to the acclaimed 2011 memoir/manifesto Paying For It... In a way, the 55-year-old Brown has been building toward this book, which combines a deep interest in Christian theology and sex-work advocacy, his entire career."—Globe & Mail

"...a stunning piece of exegesis... a full-fisted counterpunch right to the biblical “souler” plexus."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"Brown here is, as always, an original thinker, and his take on the Good Book is oddly uplifting."—Macleans

From the Publisher