I read this round our friends' place in Brussels. Honestly, I think enough has been written about it already, so I'll try to keep this brief.

Overall, I don't think that overall this comic works - it doesn't seem to know what it wants to be: confessional, polemic, manifesto, or even just story. In the end it settles for my least favourite sort of comics autobio - lacking in introspection, structure, awareness. Even humour. It's main virtue is that it is, I suppose, honest. Unfortunately, that leads to the obsessive documenting of (all?) the prostitutes he has met, which is obsessive, as well as a little unsettling. The space devoted to them is all the more infuriating as he fails to engage with the more interesting questions about his life choices (particularly toward the end of book).

To be honest, there are many grounds on which to challenge this book, but in the end, any comic that has, as this does, tens of pages of (prose) appendices, probably doesn't manage to achieve what it set out to. And that is strongly indicative of why I don't think this is a good comic.
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Definitely an uncommon topic. The rendition is real and it seems the author's coldness is real, too. Doesn't say anything positive about human relationships. PS: there are too many appendices. ( )

This is an unusual book-a memoir of being a buyer of services from sex workers. We follow Chester from he enters the world of explicit selling and buying of sex and in his interactions with (anonymized) sex workers. Throughout, Chester is arguing with his friends about the value of romantic love and the rightness of the way he has chosen and his distancing himself from romantic love. Crucially, he also give the sex workers a voice. Their voice is of course filtered through the author, but it is frequently a voice that is not heard at all. After all his complaining and misgivings about monogamous love, Chester paradoxically ends up in a steady, monogamous relationship with one sex worker. ( )

Hearing Chester Brown read a good chunk of his newest graphic novel at a book launch, helped keep his distinct voice and cadence in my head while I read it. There's no denying the importance of this book politically in regards to sex workers and I think it does a really good job of normalizing 'the john' - especially through the internal monologues of Brown's exploration of different relationship paradigms and his paranoia in visiting sex workers. The book is charming and poignant but falls into the trap of a lot of memoirs - it doesn't necessarily follow a story structure - because real life doesn't do that - so in parts it starts to feel a bit repetitive or 'samey'. Other than that, Paying For It is still a fascinating read and an ambitious project on Brown's part. ( )

Paying for It is both a memoir and an extended conversation, argument, about the role of prostitution in society. Brown makes a convincing argument and renders his experience in a way that isn't particularly flattering to him, but honest and clear, which are attributes that need to be brought into conversations about sex work.