Chester Brown: Oh, yeah, no — the book is pretty cold. In large part that’s because of my approach to art these days. One of my favorite filmmakers is Robert Bresson, who instructed his actors to show no emotion. I realized, drawing certain scenes, “Okay, you’ve gotta draw someone smiling here,” but I was resisting even that.
…
Sean Rogers: Is that something that you see in Harold Gray as well?
Chester Brown: Yes. I mean, some people might disagree because there’s so much melodrama in Gray, but certainly in the way he uses his visuals, as opposed to the superhero comics that I would have grown up on, where there are all these close-ups and where characters have eyes that show emotion. In Gray, the camera is distant from the action, and everyone has these blank eyes, and faces don’t show a lot of emotion. Yes, the stories themselves involve emotion, but the style seems, at least from a modern point of view, very restrained.
— excerpt from The Comics Journal, interview w/ Chester Brown, 9 May 2011
