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)
