Crudely Drawn Naked People

So, this is the first time since I started this blog that I’ve bought a new Jeffrey Brown release the same week. So, because it’s unprecedented, I’ll just state how I intend to deal with it so it’s down in black and white. If new Jeffrey Brown material surfaces in one form or another (e.g, it is released that week, or I first buy a copy of it that week) my plan is to break from the reviewing of old material and do the new thing. This week is a double first, because it’s also the first time I’m reviewing his work in an anthology title, so I’ll have to figure out a format for that as well. Still, shouldn’t prove too difficult (getting the will to write this up instead of continuing with my pokemon game, though - that’s difficult.)

This week, I’m looking at an anthology title that I’ve never encountered before called “Deevee.” The website, Deevee Press, doesn’t contain much information, so feel free to correct me if you’re a massive Deevee fan and some of what I say sounds like rubbish, but here’s what I’ve managed to scrape together so far: Deevee appears to be released fairly sporadically. There are references in the back to previous issues, now collected, of Deevee 2001, Deevee: Molotov, and Deevee: Flange, suggesting this is only the 4th release in 6 years. The indicia calls this issue Deevee 2007, which seems fairly accurate. It appears to be published by an Australian company, though the presence of Jeffrey Brown suggests no specific limitation to just Australian creators, but it’s a fair bet that some of them are - which is cool, because you see a lot of American and British indie anthologies, but I don’t recall any specifically Australian ones before. A cursory search shows this marketing hype turn up in a few places, so here it is again:

The new issue of the long running Australian anthology DeeVee is listed in the current Diamond Previews catalogue. This stand-alone special features ‘tales of spiteful romance’ including a brand new Playwright story illustrated by Eddie Campbell plus The Fat Sheila Hit Me, the crime story he illustrated to crime author Peter Doyle’s script. Also features work by Jeffrey Brown, Mandy Ord, Jason Paulos, mr j and the pick of current Aussie cartoonists. We’re listed under the Top Shelf section and the order code is Diamond APR074012.

So far, so good. It’s priced reasonably high and, to be honest, the paper quality is pretty low, but when you’re dealing with indie companies and indie creators, both publisher and readers have to cut corners on the financial sides to make the relationship work. Make no mistake - this is a great title.

Jeffrey Brown’s work, which readers of this blog will no doubt be interested in, falls under the umbrella of semi-fictionalised autobiography. His 3-page strip appears to star himself and an un-named girlfriend, and is titled “The Depth of my Anger is Indication of my Love.” - the spiel above mentions “spiteful romance” - well, Brown’s strip contains a fair amount of spite, and only brief allusions to romance (though it is a comedy.)

Don’t go thinking that 3 pages is an insubstantial body of work. These 3 pagers contain no less than 120 panels. Okay, they’re small and there’s a fair amount of talking heads, but there’s also a fair amount of what I’m going to start terming CDNPs in an effort to ensure I don’t start getting porno-traffic. This comic may contain more depictions of sexual activity in 3 pages than most comic readers see in a year (har har, I am funny!)

What we really get here is a relationship distilled into the essence of its sexual liasons. 120 panels broken into around 6 or 7 panel mini-chapters describing the sexual dynamics of a given moment. They work as a serial or taken alone, and while the focus on sex leaves you with some gaps to fill in, it’s got a rapid fire punchlines that something like American Pie would kill for (with very few small penis jokes!)

Now, while it’s worth the price of admission for Jeff Brown alone, I’ll just quickly give my opinions of the rest:

Eddie Campbell’s 2 strips, The Playwright with Daren White, and The Fat Sheila Hit Me with Peter Doyle are both excellent - The Playwright serves as a chapter/trailer for a larger release coming in 2008, and deals with a sexually frustrated playwright’s observations look after his older, mentally ill brother, that looks like it could be very worth buying.

Mandy Ord’s style I recognised from her work with Adhouse, and her strip, Arsehole, was one of my favourite pieces in the book though the following story, Don’t Call me Baby, by David Tang and Matt Huynh might just edgee it out slightly. Ord’s piece deals with body image and the expectation surrounding physical attraction. Tang/Hynh’s piece is about how repression (emotional and sexual) can damage a relationship. Both pieces distill their themes brilliantly while leaving a relatable human core.

Blind Love, by Daren White and Jason Paulos a hilarious story of Super-Heroine, Sweet Spot, in love with Super-Villain, Spore, defending their relationship to the members of her Super-Hero pantheon, The Institute of Integrity. To its massive credit, could’ve come straight out of Adhouse’s brilliant Project: Superior or Project: Romance. The funniest thing in the book, though, was probably the two strips on the back cover - Doctor Karen Summers, M.D. - A pastiche of soap-opera newspaper strips, by Dan Best, Andy Finlayson and Lee Slattery, with a vaguely 60s sensibility. It’s the kind of thing I’ve got a real soft spot for.

The only thing that didn’t really work for me was Mister J’s “Hayley Cambell Funnies.” The humour was broad and the art traditionally cartoonish, it’ll be right up your alley if you’re a fan of, say, Andy Capp, or Hagar the Horrible (imagine those with swearing and a few cultural references, and you’re pretty much there.) Actually, here’s a nice test. Do you find this funny:

Mister J: “Well Hayley, we’ve had a lovely evening, how about a goodnight kiss?”
Hayley: “Why spoil a perfectly good evening?”

I don’t want to get snobbish, but seriously, it’s not really on the same level as the rest of the work, and appears to be lacking a severely necessary amount of self-awareness. It just reads like a slightly dodgy webcomic. I don’t often use the phrase “not as good as Penny Arcade” but in this case…

Still, that’s the only duff note in this metaphorical symphony of greatness. It came out a couple of weeks ago, though I only spotted it this week when I was attracted, like a foolish insect, to the bright colours adorning the cover, then trapped like a rat as soon as I saw the name Jeffrey Brown on it. It’s so good I’m making animal metaphors all over the place. Buy it below, and hey, why not visit the Deevee site and get the trade of the previous issues of Deevee like I’m planning on doing?

Buy Deevee 2007 from Top Shelf
Buy Deevee Collected (does not include Deevee 2007) from Deevee Press

Unlikely is Jeffrey Brown’s second major published work. Sub-titled “How I Lost My Virginity,” it takes place before the events of Clumsy and depicts the events of his first serious relationship, including, as promised, how he loses his virginity. It’s a story almost everyone’s going to have at some point in their life, but in most cases it’s not something people are anxious to share, let alone write, draw and have published for the entire world to see. Jeffrey Brown decided to do just that, however - as you can imagine, it’s a story that must have required some level of catharsis.

So, let’s get it straight - this isn’t bragging. If you think he wanted to draw a comic about losing his virginity because it involved twelve cheerleaders and vat of baby oil, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. Unlikely is, if anything, the most fundamentally traumatic of the so-called “Girlfriend Trilogy,” simply because he goes into the relationship innocently and seems unprepared for what’s going to happen to him, both physically and emotionally.

When reading Unlikely, it’s very easy to fall into relationship-counsellor mode and start predicting doom. Frankly, when Allysin starts describing her past full of drugs, abuse and eating disorders immediately after they first kiss, it becomes obvious that she’s a walking pile of drama and it’s unlikely to be the somewhat naive-seeming virgin, our hero Jeffrey Brown, that calms her down. However, for the purposes of the story, we have to remember two things - first, that the events depicted are selective and obviously the truth, if not distorted, has certainly been snipped away to present a particular picture, and secondly, that what matters is that at the time they thought it could work.

Detractors of Clumsy will be glad to see a Jeffrey Brown in Unlikely who is less of a doormat. Unfortunately, it’s easy to see how his relationship with Allysin informs his later relationship with Theresa. If the message of Unlikely is anything, it’s that people can’t be forced to be what they’re not. In Jeff’s eyes, the relationship broke down because Allysin frequently got drunk, smoked and used drugs against his wishes. It’s likely that she feels differently - while we don’t have a comic about it, there’s enough there to infer that she feels the relationship ended because Jeff was unable to accept those aspects of her and attempted to force her to change. By the events of Clumsy, Jeff is needier, and given the emotional wringer he’s gone through in his first relationship, it’s not hard to see why.

Unlikely presents a similar art style to it’s predecessor, however it’s far more refined. The images are better-composed, the designs more consistent, and you get such advanced techniques as shading turning up during particularly important moments. The immediacy and emotion are still there in the work - it’s certainly not over-rendered - but by balancing the crude with the conventional the book looks and reads far better than his debut. The format is similar to Clumsy - it’s a slightly larger book, though it retains the 6-panel per page structure, and titled-vignette format, though they are arranged into 8 chapters each of which contain a significant event or discretely-defined period in the relationship.

Unlikely was the first Jeff Brown book I ever read. There are a lot of moments, good and bad, that I could identify with on some level, and even if my girlfriend isn’t a drug-obsessed loon it struck me as being the first depiction of modern romance that mirrored, in any way, my own experiences. That’s what compelled me to go and find more. The events of Unlikely, more than Clumsy or AEIOU are driven more by the girl he’s with rather than his own actions, and it feels like a more traditional story as a result. The overwhelming sense is a little more one-sided than the other books - you’re reading less about two people, and more about how Jeff Brown was increasingly unable to deal with this cartoon-character of a girl. The further through the book you get, the more the sweetness between them turns to conflict, and it’s not hard to feel bad for Brown’s attempts to deal with it, and inability to end his first relationship long after it’s finished in her mind.

In retrospect, it’s probably the worst starting point of the three books despite being the one that’s chronologically first, because it needs the context of Clumsy to show that it’s not being unreasonably hard on Allysin simply because they broke up. However, once you’ve read Clumsy and want to know the full story of one of book’s opening vignettes, entitled “My last night with Krystin,” Unlikely is where you’ll need to go.

A page from Unlikely.
Buy Unlikely from Amazon UK.
Buy Unlikely from Amazon US.

Following the release of Clumsy, there was much praise, and not unsurprisingly, a certain amount of backlash for this new cartoonist who was showing everyone up with his scratchy penmanship and penchant for navel-gazing. Much of the criticism focussed less on the easy target of the art, and more on the even easier target of Brown himself. He was accused of being emotionally under-developed, of being whiny, and of lacking masculinity. The implication was that Brown’s relationship troubles with Theresa could have simply been solved if only he had stood up for himself, and been a man.

Never one to back down from a fight (though, presumably as long as it doesn’t involve any actual punching) Brown addressed these criticisms head on by releasing the minicomic, Be a Man.

Be a Man isn’t the sequel to Clumsy, like AEIOU. Nor is it a prequel, like Unlikely. Be a Man is an alternate take on how the events of Clumsy could’ve gone, if only he’d taken the advice of those self-appointed relationship counsellors and stopped letting some woman push him around. It takes certain pages from Clumsy and re-draws the ending. In Brown’s own words:

A few months ago I realized I was much too sensitive and pathetic in ‘Clumsy‘, so I wrote ‘Be a Man’ and fixed myself, creating the ‘Clumsy‘ you all wanted to see.

What results is Brown’s first foray into humour from a major publisher. There’s no aspect of his character that he doesn’t assassinate over the course of 32 pages, presenting a Jeffrey Brown who chases other women, ignores the feelings of others, and cares about no-one but himself. Instead of being confused by his girlfriend’s lesbian crush, he suggests a threesome. When Theresa breaks up with him, his reaction is a cheer instead of a sob. In short, this is a Jeffrey Brown who’s not afraid to be a man.

Each chapter is presented in a similar manner to the events of Clumsy, if slightly abbreviated for space, before veering off in a new direction as dictated by the ‘new’ Brown’s behaviour. The chapters have the same title (so you can go back and compare the original and ‘corrected’ versions) and the 6-panel format that exemplifies Brown’s autobiographical work returns. The comic is even the same pocket-size as the novel, with the same colours on the cover. Clearly, it’s designed to complement the original. 

The first time I read Be a Man was well after I read the rest of the ‘girlfriend trilogy’ - at the time it was very hard to come by outside the US, but his popularity and subsequent reprints have made it a bit less difficult to find (though it’s still not available through Amazon…) Perhaps my favourite thing about Be a Man is how openly it attacks the perception of what is and isn’t masculine behaviour - the Jeffrey Brown portrayed within Be a Man is deeply cruel, unlikeable and emotionally retarded, and yet all of his behaviour stems directly from the kind of male archetype that is considered not only acceptable, but desirable. Essentially a writer of modern romance, Brown is well-poised to take those assumptions on, and after doing so indirectly with his self-portrayal in Clumsy he uses Be a Man to go right for the jugular and show that it’s not a bad thing for men to be a little complicated.

Be a Man is brilliantly self-aware, and proves to anyone that Brown is well-poised both to address his critics and to recognise how some people are going to react to his work. He’s not perfect - none of us are - but his response is this, a collection of 32 pages of hilarious ‘fuck you’ comics aimed right at anyone who thinks they could have done better in his situation. It’s a brilliant palette-cleanser following the emotional weight of Clumsy, and a great introduction to the style of humour that’ll later become prominent in Brown’s non-autobiographical works. Find links to purchase it below.

Buy from Top Shelf (US)
Buy from Gosh! Comics, London (UK)

The first thing I ever noticed about Clumsy was that it doesn’t look like a comic. Square-bound, no picture on the cover, muted brown and grey tones - it looks like any other title you might find on a bookshelf. The cover even states - “Clumsy: A Novel” - not “A Graphic Novel” as you might expect. These things immediately set Jeffrey Brown’s work apart not only from more traditional comics fare, but from even the self-published and independent stuff you can find in comic shops. Clumsy presents itself as a novel, and demands to be taken seriously as one. It’s designed to sit unassumingly in bookstores and blend in with its surroundings, so that anyone, not just the small subset of the public willing to call themselves comics readers, might pick it up and start reading.

Even when you start reading Clumsy, the conceit that it’s not a comic never fully goes away. The pages are uniformly laid out with 6 panels each, eschewing traditional comicbook devices that before now would’ve seemed almost indispensable. The pace created by such uniformity is certainly reminiscent of a novel or movie far more than any comic. Merely with the visual language he’s employing, Brown has taken up back to basics in a comprehensive way.

Now that we’ve mentioned “basics,” of course, Brown’s art style cannot go unacknowledged for any longer. Clumsy is drawn, like much of his work, in a deliberately child-like manner, with irregular lines and malformed physiology, as if scrawled without thought in some notepad or sketchbook by an infant. What, at first glance, appears to be a complete inability to draw far belies Brown’s ability - he’s got fine art qualifications and raw talent far beyond what he’ll let allow you to realise. Brown masks his proficiency beneath layers of expression and immediacy, with each panel showing the emotive weight of every pen stroke. On closer inspection, you can see detail utterly pouring out of the pages, from the way he’s drawn certain locations to the range and nuance of emotions visible in each face.

The awkward and (oh, all right, I’ll say it) clumsy nature of Brown’s penmanship fits the subject matter perfectly. Clumsy is, most of all, a story about a long-distance relationship that for whatever reason, didn’t stand the strain. Told (mostly) chronologically, it details the first time Jeff and Theresa meet right up to their last tearful phone call as boyfriend and girlfriend. It covers the ups, downs, ins and outs of a relationship without any of the gloss you’ll find in the wider media, where romance and personal interactions are idealised to the point of unreality. Clumsy is about as real as it gets, not shying away from the kind of mundane topics any relationship encounters, from not wanting to get out of bed together, to feeling rejected because your significant other wanted to watch TV instead of speaking on the phone. The big and small moments are all afforded equal weight within the wider tapestry of the relationship. There’s no feel-good ending, nor any moment where it all comes together for a giant catharsis, nor even any real sense of finality. The penultimate image in the book is a phone, evoking the way Jeff and Theresa spent their time communicating, and the unanswered question of whether it’ll ever ring again.

Clumsy was not the first Jeffrey Brown book I ever read - that honour actually falls to the sequel, Unlikely. What strikes me now about Clumsy is how different the artwork is to his later work. Clumsy was evidently drawn over quite a long time period, as you can see the style evolving throughout the book, which makes it appear a little uneven in places - definitely a debut, but then it performs as such easing you into the world as seen by Jeffrey Brown and giving you the sort of information, both textual and visual, that’ll be taken as read in future books. It’s is at times funny, at times brutally honest, at times it’s surreal, and other times it’s almost impossibly mundane. It should certainly be the starting point for anyone discovering Jeff Brown, because it gives everything he’s ever written an unprecedented level of context. It sets the tone for Brown’s entire body of work - It’s smart and stupid, mature and puerile, it’s brilliantly observant, and, most of all, it’s full of crudely drawn naked people.

Buy Clumsy from Amazon UK.
Buy Clumsy from Amazon US.

So, if you’ve ended up at this page, you’re probably looking for some information about the work of Jeffrey Brown, award-winning cartoonist and comic creator. If this is so, then you’ve come to the right place. Of course, it could be that you’re genuinely looking for some crudely drawn naked people, in which case…you’ve still come to the right place, I suppose.

Crudely Drawn Naked People is my attempt to introduce Jeffrey Brown to anyone and everyone who’ll listen. This kind of project is a first for me, so you may see some confusion and inconsistencies along the way, but it’s all part of the learning process and hopefully nobody’s going to make an ass out of themselves.

My plan is to go through Jeff’s body of work, reasonably chronologically, and write a little bit about it all. Sometimes you’re going to be getting his own books, sometimes you’ll be getting anthologies he’s in, and more often than not you’re not going to be getting one of the billions of contributions that I haven’t managed to track down, because quite frankly the man is hideously prolific and there are only so many hours in the day. I’ve not decided on a schedule yet, but I’ll be keeping it reasonably regular so unless you’re reading this in the future and I haven’t done so, you can be sure I’ll probably have semi-frequent updates to bring you.

The first update, starting tomorrow, will be Clumsy.