friend of fellow cartoonists Joe Matt and Seth, Brown has been regularly featured in their autobiographical comics over the years, and collaborated with them on various projects. The three were often mentioned together, and have been called "the Three Musketeers of alternative comics" and the "Toronto Three", forming "a kind of gutter rat pack trying to make it through their drawing boards in 1990s Toronto". Brown dedicated The Playboy to Seth, and Paying for It to Matt. Seth dedicated his graphic novel George Sprott to Brown ("Best Cartoonist, Best Friend"). Brown had a long-term relationship with the musician, actress and media personality Sook-Yin Lee from 1992 until 1996. She is depicted in several of his comics. He moved to Vancouver for two years to be with her, and moved back to Toronto with her when she became a VJ for MuchMusic. He also drew the cover for her 1996 solo album Wigs 'n Guns. Brown's relationship with Lee is the last boyfriend/girlfriend relationship he had, as he explains in Paying for It. They remain good friends, and Brown has contributed artwork to her productions as recently as 2009's Year of the Carnivore. Work Thematic subjects Throughout his early years as a cartoonist he mostly experimented with drawing on the darker side of his subconscious, basing his comedy on free-form association, much like the surrealist technique Automatism. An example of such methods in Brown's work can be found in short one-pagers where he randomly selects comic panels from other sources and then mixes them up, often altering the dialogue. This produced an experimental, absurdist effect in his early strips. Brown first discusses mental illness in his strip "My Mother Was A Schizophrenic". In it, he puts forward the anti-psychiatric idea that what we call "schizophrenia" isn't a real disease at all, but instead a tool our society uses to deal with people who display socially unacceptable beliefs and behaviour. Inspired by the evangelical tracts of Jack T. Chick, Brown left Xeroxes of these strips at bus stops and phone booths around Toronto so its message would reach a wider audience. It first appeared in Underwater #4, and is also reprinted in the collection The Little Man. Brown's Louis Riel book was inspired by the alleged mental instability of Riel, and Brown's own anarchist politics, and he began his research for the book in 1998. Over the course of researching for the