Clumsy

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.