Crudely Drawn Naked People

Despite several weeks of near-clockwork regularity and constant updates, there was bound to come a time when it wouldn’t be possible for me to do an update, and this week is the first of those times. I am, as you read this, most probably in a field in Berkshire either camping in a waterlogged tent, or listening to a bunch of bands playing. In any case, I’m in no condition to be writing about anything, Jeffrey Brown or otherwise.

Still, that’s not to say I’m leaving you out in the cold. I don’t have a review, but here’s some Jeff Brown content I prepared earlier. Visit my Flickr page and see images tagged “Jeffrey Brown” for a look at what kind of mini-sketches Jeff puts into his books when you sign them. These particular books were my own personal copies, signed by him downstairs at Gosh! Comics in London. We had a conversation about his Wolverine parody book and the forthcoming Transformers movie, and he was very polite despite how obviously I struggle with interpersonal skills. I would recommend the experience to a friend.

And, because it greatly amuses me, here’s an embedded copy of the postcard advertising the signing:

See you next week!

One of the more frustrating things about following indie comics creators, especially for people like me - that is, someone who is both:

1. A completist
2. Living somewhere that’s not America

is that people who write and draw their own comics have a tendancy to self-publish them too. This means there’s often a substantial body of work that you can’t get, because they don’t ship overseas or, even worse, only take them to conventions where there’s no chance in hell I’ll ever get my filthy mitts on them.

Luckily, if you wait long enough, there comes a third way: collected editions. If you pray hard enough to the right god, indie comic creators will eventually cram their last few out-of-print minicomics into a larger anthology and put it on general release. Miniature Sulk appears to be one of those such releases.

After the fairly heavy going work that is Brown’s autobiographical works, miniature sulk largely dispenses with the emotion and concentrates on the comedy. That’s not to say that the stories in Miniature Sulk aren’t autobiographical, of course, because that does largely seem to be the case. Emphasis on seem, though, because with Brown’s comedy work it’s much harder to say how far lines have been blurred between fiction and reality to service the humour.

The first section appears to be the contents of a minicomic entitles “My Brother Knows Kung Fu” which is a series of authobiographical comics in the Unlikely format about Jeff as (mostly) a young boy and his siblings. The caricature that is young Jeff embodies all of the same things that the older version does - confusion, vulnerability, awkwardness - only sort of… more so. The drawings, to me, have an inately hilarious look to them, and as ever it lies in the power of the expressions Brown can depict, full of subtlety. A second section, “Cute Girls Are Cute”, follows a similar vein showing Jeff’s dealings with women during childhood and adolescence, pre-Unlikely.

The last major piece in the book is an 15-page original work entitled “To Wenatchee” which shifts gears and takes a more serious tack. It’s a little at odds with the comedic tone of the rest of the book, but that’s not to say that it’s bad, because it’s a great short story and a fantastic use of the ccmics medium.

Interspersed between the larger bodies of work are loads of smaller pieces, ranging from 1-page parody advertisements, single-panel comics and 3 or 4-page shorts. My personal favourite would be “Bitch Get Off the Phone” in which Brown vents his anger at people who concentrate more on their mobile phone conversation than their driving, in a manner that any pedestrian can probably relate to.

All in all, Miniature Sulk is a fantastic way to spend $8 (that’s about 4 quid in real money). It’s much smaller than any of Brown’s other work, but it’s a great taster for anyone who thinks they’ll prefer Brown’s observational comedy over his usual observational tragedy.

Buy Miniature Sulk from Amazon (UK)
Buy Miniature Sulk from Amazon (US)

Published by New Reliable Press, You Ain’t No Dancer, Volume 1 is one of those rare finds where I pick a book off the shelf just to see what it’s about and discover that it’s packed full of high-quality work. At the time, I had recently allowed Scott Pilgrim into my life and was on something of a Byan Lee O’Malley kick, and was waiting for my delivery of his first full-length work, Lost at Sea, so I was ecstatic to discover this contained some of his work. However, even before that, I had read the two names that guaranteed my purchase of the book: Jeffrey Brown.

Despite one of the most wilfully grotesque covers I’ve seen in recent years, You Ain’t No Dancer is one of the highest quality indie anthologies I’ve read. Volume 1 contains more “big name” indie creators than you can shake a stick at, including some of my favourites: Jim Mahfood, Hope Larson, Dean Trippe - as well as a selection of artists with less exposure. Many of these creators would also show up in the ridiculously high-quality “Project” trilogy from Adhouse, including Brown himself (so I believe I’ll get to those on the blog eventually) and that alone should be an indication of how good it is. Anthologies such as these usually have a specific theme, but I can’t find one in these, so let’s assume for now that the theme is “excellent and original short comics” and I think we’ll all be happy with that.

Brown’s story, “William, I Need You” occupies the theological end of Brown’s spectrum, albeit comedically, which is one aspect of his work that unfortunately (for an elightened atheist like me) doesn’t show up very often. The piece itself is drawn in Brown’s more realistic style (ie, proper shading, varied line thickness, all those “real” artist’s tricks) and has 4 panels per (landscape) page (though the Man himself, God, does grab himself an entire page’s worth of splash panel). It’s not the heaviest piece of social commentary, nor the most original - general broad comedy around the idea that following God’s instructions instead of thinking for yourself will end up getting you killed - but it IS a timeless message, and I guarantee that there’s no other place you’ll get such amusement out of a man trying to decide how he can make fun of a pack of Lions.

I won’t go through all the others, because there are a huge amount, and I’m not going to single out the best, because they’re all of equally high quality, but I will tell you my two favourites and we can agree that no-one’s being snubbed.

Nicholas Gurewitch did one of my favorite strips, entitled “Giant Jim, your wife is cheating on you with the baker.” Which mixes fairy tale and infidelity into one bittersweet tale only 4 panels long and containing some brilliantly distilled storytelling. While researching this, I realised that he’s the same guy who does Perry Bible Fellowship, which is one of my favourite webcomics, and, even better, a version of this exact strip is available on that very site, so don’t say I never do anything for you.

Mahfood’s art style is always welcome, and his strip, “The Worst of Times” featuring his long-time anthology stalwart, One Page Filler Man, is as good as his work gets, with the frantic pace and humour one expects from anything he does. OPFM’s full-length OGN wasn’t the best work he’s done, but this short is top-quality.

Any more gushing would come across a bit TOO sycophantic (and after going out on Sunday this weekend, I’ve got limited time on Monday night to bash this entry out, so I could probably do to keep it succint now that Brown’s work is covered) but suffice to say, even without Brown’s inclusion I’d be giving this anthology the Crudely Drawn Naked People stamp of quality. I’m only now realising that Crudely Drawn Naked People actually applies to several of the shorts in this book, and the indie scene in general. Clearly I am a Genius.

Buy You Ain’t No Dancer from New Reliable (US & Int.)
You Ain’t No Dancer Preview Pages (including Jeff Brown artwork!)

Aeiou, or Any Easy Intimacy marks the ‘end’ of Jeffrey Brown’s autobiographical Girlfriend Trilogy, following Clumsy and Unlikely. There will be a short epilogue which I’ll certainly be getting to in due course. This last book contains the story of Brown’s relationship with a girl named Sophia, in a way that Brown himself claims in post-script “leaves so much left unsaid that it may as well be fiction.”

Ever the auteur, Brown presents Aeiou in an even simpler fashion than his previous books. With two large panels per page, and 2 pages per ‘chapter’ it breaks the format of his other autobiographical work in several ways. Most importantly, the moments are more carefully defined and rendered, as with the pencil work. As a result, much of the story happens through implication only - rather than being a warts-and-all document of a relationship, it leaves the reader to infer much of the character interplay based on a suggestion, with the starts and ends of conversations occasionally missing, and the fallout and buildup of any emotional moment left to our imaginations. These techniques give a hyper-real feeling to the characters and events, giving a stark picture of things that would seem far more mundane as part of a larger tapestry.

It seems that, out of all of Brown’s documented relationships, Aeiou appears to tell the story of the one that hit him the hardest. Occasionally criticised for being weaker in structure than the others, the fact that it misses out so much, allowing huge narrative jumps, suggests that he felt less willing to go into a lot of specifics - clearly, the acknowledgement at the end indicates a fair amount of missing material, as does the fact that the narrative has a happy ending that the relationship clearly didn’t. It’s not as if it was the freshest in his mind - Clumsy, at least, was started before the relationship ended. The shift from his earlier autobiographies leads many people to claim that this isn’t the best book to start with, but I disagree - it’s more challenging, certainly, and perhaps a non-comics reader might have trouble reading a comic that gets so disjointed, but the more I consider it, the more I think it’s probably the best of the three books. It takes the techniques and idiosyncracies of them and trims away the fat, leaving an arguably purer experience, and one that certainly requires more of the reader, and in return, gives more back.

One thing I’ve never mentioned about Brown’s artwork, but that seems most appropriate for this story, is how disarming his depictions can be. The simplicity of the drawing lets you connect with characters on a far more direct level than deeply accurate renderings would allow. Part of the appeal of cartooning (against more ‘mainstream’ comic work) is that it allows for the application of a more general mental model, and Brown’s work in Aeiou takes advantage of that to about the fullest extent possible, finally inverting things with the last panel - a detailed illustration of Sophia standing in a darkened room. That moment alone hits you all the harded because of the sudden realism that previously was absent.

Understandably, Aeiou isn’t going to be everyone’s favourite. It does largely depend on how you take ambiguity in a story. For those that have read Clumsy and Unlikely and are looking for more of the same, this is the closest you can get from Brown, but it’s not quite identical to what has come before. It’s not really the last word, but it’s the end of the full-length works on the subject. Just don’t go into it looking for closure.

Buy Aeiou: Any Easy Intimacy from Amazon (UK)
Buy Aeiou: Any Easy Intimacy from Amazon (US)