Readers only familiar with Chester Brown’s work from Louis Riel, his landmark graphic novel about the Metis leader, may well balk at the cartoonist’s follow-up project. Paying for It arrives billed as “a comic-strip memoir about being a john,” and documents the author’s assignations with more than twenty Toronto sex workers — about as far removed from the nation’s grade eight history classrooms as possible. But this is no underground comix–style tell-all, lewdly depicting one conquest after another. In fact, Paying for It levels the same distanced gaze on love and sex that Louis Riel directed toward rebellion and madness, refusing sensationalism in favour of steady, measured analysis.

The book begins with a record of Brown’s slow disillusionment with the concept of romantic love, then follows his carefully planned and budgeted forays into the world of being a john. In the ensuing encounters, we see the neophyte client pondering niceties of etiquette and jargon — should I use my real name? he wonders; or, what the hell is “digging for gold”? Likewise, we hear his dates weighing in on the benefits of working afternoons (no drunks), or the drawbacks of rub-and-tug drudgery (sore hands).

Despite the documentary impulse that transcribes such knowing details, however, Brown’s real concerns lie beyond mere observation. Throughout, he uses his own experiences to make the case for decriminalizing prostitution. In boldly direct style, his character expounds on his reading material, inquires after his friends’ stance on the morality of sex work, and, in one sequence, simply sits around in his underwear thinking.

It is a testament to Brown’s accomplishment as a cartoonist that such heady stuff remains compelling reading, each thought progressing mathematically to the next. And while he sets out logically to convince us of his argument, this isn’t exactly tract literature either: credit him with making room for doubt, too. A cast of quippy, incredulous confidantes serve as stand-ins for readers unswayed by Brown’s line of reasoning, and debate with him in lengthy Socratic passages.

Here, though, as with the scenes of professional liaisons, the cartoonist portrays the action using frail, tiny figures, preventing our involvement with the bodies depicted on the page. Word balloons obscure the women’s faces, while Brown himself appears behind blank and affectless glasses. In insisting on this remove, Brown’s story becomes not so much about people, but rather about the larger mechanics of their relationships, and the thorny sorting out of individual rights that results when sex and commerce collide. As a result, Paying for It registers less as a memoir than as a thoughtful, if contentious, treatise.