Little Things: A Memoir in Slices

For those that don’t know (and I’m assuming it’s a lot of you) I’m now a staff-reviewer at CBR. I recently posted my review of Jeff Brown’s latest release, Little Things: A Memoir in Slices in the CBR reviews section. Still, a couple of weeks have passed, so I’m now reposting it here - excuse the fact that it might be slightly condescending at times - after all, the original was for a wider audience, not just the Jeff Brown fans!

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Jeffrey Brown epitomizes all that is good and bad about a certain kind of indie comic. If you ever hear people criticizing the black-and-white navel-gazing autobiographical emo-indie comic about boys who can’t get girlfriends, then they’re talking about Jeffrey Brown. If you hear people praising the insightful, witty, emotionally-open alternative to spandex and testosterone-filled mainstream comics, then they’re also talking about Jeffrey Brown. You may even already known which side of the fence you fall on, so let me warn you — if it’s the former, move along now. You’re not going to find anything you like here.

If, on the other hand, you’re a Jeffrey Brown fan, well good news! You’re going to be pleased! “Little Things” is simply more of the same, though I mean that in a wholly positive way. While packaged in a format much closer to Brown’s autobiographical Girlfriend Trilogy books, “Little Things” also shares much in common with his minicomic collections, like 2005’s “Minisulk” — the contents are occasionally lifted from existing self-published works, though given the limited print run they will have received, it might as well be all-new.

The book sees Brown dispensing with the comedy/parody interludes that permeated his more recent publications — presumably, these things are being saved for the release of his new quarterly anthology, “Sulk”, later this year — and concentrating again on autobiographical short stories. Given that this is the first time Brown has taken his autobiography to a mass-market publisher, it makes sense to present a more straight-up work. After all, a mass-market publisher will hopefully translate to mass-market readers, who will have different expectations to his regular comics audience.

As such, the story ploughs through various events in Brown’s life as experienced over the course of the last few years. They are presented in Brown’s now-traditional non-chronological order in a way that invites the reader to draw parallels between the stories themselves. Recurrent motifs include car crashes and medical problems, and very specific references to the music accompanying certain events or frames of mind. That said, one of the longer chapters, “Missing the Mountains” is atypical of Brown’s work, if only because it occasionally pauses to capture the visual moments in the relative vista of a single-panel splash page — it represents a welcome departure from the norm, to see Brown’s artistic side being unveiled.

As ever, Brown’s main talent is in insightfully capturing the emotional essence of a moment, be it funny or sad, or angry, or calm, and then using his superficially crude drawings to evoke it on the page. The expressive art style Brown uses makes his world both relatable and accessible to all readers. That’s always been the case, of course, but it never hurts to explain his charm.

It’s not for everyone, admittedly. Some people simply won’t get the appeal, which is a fair enough matter of taste. Fans will, not unexpectedly, get exactly what they wanted. If you’ve never read Brown’s work and are anxious to go for something a little less graphic and emotionally brutal than his Girlfriend Trilogy, then you’re in luck — this is as good a place to start as any.

Buy Little Things from Amazon (US)
Buy Little Things from Amazon (UK)

 

Feeble Attempts

Feeble Attempts is a 48-page collection of Jeffrey Brown’s short comics - something of a “pilot” for his forthcoming series, which is expected to be launched under the title of “Sulk” some time this year.

When it originally came out in May ‘07, I was incredibly pleased that it was bringing together a lot of material from many disparate sources. I’d read a couple of the strips online, and one or two I’d found in other comics, but as I’ve said before, being a die-hard, completist Jeffrey Brown fan can be incredibly hard work, trying to track down all the curios, so comprehensive collections like this are exactly what I’m into. They showcase all of his styles, bringing together comedy, autiobiography, and even superheroics all under one title. The topic of religion even gets a look in which is something he rarely tackles so openly.

Even now, it remains one of my favourite releases of his, simply because there’s so much in there. 48 pages from Brown means a LOT of work, since most of the pages contain a number of panels that’s well into double figures, crammed with dialogue, if not necessarily action. It’s really packed in there too - the inside covers have glorious, full-colour comics printed on them. There’s nary an inch of free space in the entire volume, and for $5 it’s incredibly well-priced. You could pay 5 times that for an anthology of similar quality.

The longest story is a reprint of the Bighead piece which can be found in Project: Superior, though not the Bighead anthology, and that alone is worth what you’ll pay for it just to see more of Brown’s take on Superheroics, with his art being taken to a rarely-seen level.

It’s hard to know what sort of beast Feeble Attempts is. Certainly, I’d give it to someone who wanted to get into Brown’s work because it’s got it all in there, it’s like a Jeffrey Brown sampler - but I’m finding it hard to think of a situation where someone would want to get into his work without already knowing what they like about it, so I dunno. All I can say is that there’s no excuse for a Jeffrey Brown fan not to own a copy.

Buy Feeble Attempts from Top Shelf (Intl.)
Feeble Attempts Preview pages from Top Shelf

 

Every Girl is the End of the World for Me

With a title like that, you can probably see where this is going.

This short volume, released in 2005, serves as an epilogue to Brown’s “Girlfriend Trilogy” which comprises his three autobiographical books, Clumsy, Unlikely and Any Easy Intimacy. It describes events which occurred over Christmas and New Year 2003-2004.

Perhaps the focus of this book is Jeff’s slowly re-kindling relationship with Allisyn, the girl from Unlikely. Jeff has moved on in life, but a series of the usual coincidences brings the two of them back into contact, both wondering if they’ve changed enough to make another go of it. Now, I won’t spoil the ending for you, but let me put it like this - it wouldn’t make for a particularly dramatic story if they did and everything was fine, would it? Interspersed throughout the book are encounters with other women of various eligibility that Jeff, by his own admission, lives and dies over. It’s essentially a story about being too wrapped up in your relationships. Still, calling it a “story” is perhaps overly charitable. While the thread of his relationship with Allisyn neatly wraps the book up, large parts of it are vignettes/chapters devoted to other women entirely.

What I enjoy most about EGITEOTWFM (besides the ridiculously large acronym) is the size of the artwork. We’re still on 4 panels to each fairly small page, but these are huge, very clearly printed panels we’re talking about. It somehow manages to realise Brown’s work even better than before. Due to the dates, the book takes place in Winter and this really showcases Brown’s talents for conveying the nuances that bring things to life. The level of detail is both remarkable and satisfying - you can practically feel the frost on the page sometimes.

Given that Jeff is now married and has a child, it’s probably fair to say that this is the final word on all things female from him. Assuming he doesn’t want to tell the story of his current relationship, that is, but in fairness the man deserves his secrets (and christ knows there appear to be previous few of those left) so as entertaining as it’s been, I think that for now, that chapter is complete.

Buy Every Girl… from Amazon (UK)
Buy Every Girl… from Amazon (US)
View Preview Pages for Every Girl… at Top Shelf

 

You Ain’t No Dancer, Vol. 2

You Ain’t No Dancer, volume 2, came out a year ago this month, October 2006, only shortly after I purchased the previous volume. Like the previous volume, it’s packed with indie talent, in a fairly unconventional package that forces the use of a widescreen format. While that’s fairly standard for a certain kind of strip (Webcomic creator Mitch Clem is undoubtedly right at home) it’s not something you see in the mainstream, or even indie mainstream very often, and it gives these books a distinctive look. The strips themselves are also fairly short - 23 stories in 95 pages, and only one or two get past the 6 page mark. To New Reliable’s credit, they’re really crammed a lot into this.

Jeffrey Brown’s story in YAND Vol. 2 is entitled “Chimney Preference” and revisits the familiar setting of the “Young Jeff” autobiographical comics that I’ve previously discussed in the review of Minisulk. It’s a 2-page comedy piece that makes the most of Brown’s style, though I have to admit if you’re buying this collection just for the Jeffrey Brown in it, you might not be fully satisfied by 2 pages and one joke. It’s less of a snack, more a morsel. That said, I have to admit, in these kind of strips half the humour, for me, comes from the expression on Young Jeff’s face, which is inherently hilarious for reasons I can’t begin to articulate.

If 2 pages isn’t enough brown for you, well, then, good news, because he’s also painted the cover! A wraparound cover, no less, depicting Young Jeff and his brother in the playground at autumn, a rare example of coloured work from Brown.

Now, 2 pages is a bit small for a full review, so let’s quickly look elsewhere in the anthology. My favourites of the remainder were The Eve Of, by Blaise Laramee, and Phil McAndrew’s Sharp Young Minds, both stories united by a theme of childhood exploration and cameraderie, the former going with a confessional psychological tone, and the latter with a more humourous turn.

Overall, volume 2 feels more disjointed than the original, and contains fewer “name” creators to put you on familiar ground for the fairly steep price point. With generally less conventional material, even fans of the first volume might find this challenging, but as ever it remains a brilliant way to expose yourself to new creators and stories. As with the previous volume, the quality of both is consistently high, but the quantity of work means that it’s impossible for everything to click - given the range of work available, don’t expect to come into this and love everything, just consider that what you do enjoy is going to be worth the price, and the rest of it is bonus material.

Buy You Ain’t No Dancer from New Reliable (US & Int.)
You Ain’t No Dancer v2 Preview Page (Jeff Brown)
You Ain’t No Dancer v2 Preview Page (Blaise Larmee)
You Ain’t No Dancer v2 Preview Page (Phil McAndrew)

 

Conversation #2

Conversation #2 is a fairly odd comic, even by the standards of the indie scene. In a format devised by Kochalka, two creators illustrate a conversation that they’re having, alternately drawing half a panel at a time and allowing the other one to complete it. The topic of said conversation? In this case: Art. Why they make it, and where it comes from. A pretty hefty topic for 48 pages, that’s for sure, especially when this is probably the tiniest comic I’ve ever actually bought - it could fit inside a CD case with plenty of space. It seems like it could be a real challenge to fit topics so huge into so little space.

Somehow, the format does manage to keep up. Rather than being the static, boring talking-heads piece that the idea of an illustrated conversation suggests, it’s remarkably action-packed. Kochalka brings his surrealist and vulgar tone to the artwork, meaning that you get a 48-page philosophical head-to-head across some giant metaphorical landscape that starts on a rock beneath a tree and eventually visits prehistoric caves and outer space, while along the way a giant version of Brown destroys a city. Strangely compelling. Brown and Kochalka’s styles, while fairly different, meld together fairly well. It’s clear who’s drawn what, but in the cases where one inhabit’s the other’s landscapes, the way they stick out almost seems to service the conflict of ideologies that’s being presented.

The two artists do genuinely approach their comics differently. Kochalka seems to espouses a more immediate, visceral, “draw first and ask questions later” approach, in which his comics aren’t about his life - they are his life - and he draws solely because he can. Brown takes a different tack, with a reflective and introverted approach where everything has a reason. I’m unsure of Kochalka’s background, but it certainly feels like Brown’s fine arts education is influencing him.

While I can see the appeal in both methods, it’s probably no surprise that I agree with Brown more than Kochalka. At one point, Brown feels like Kochalka’s reasoning has become circular, and it does seem that way to me as a reader at times. Kochalka evades direct questioning about his reasons for writing and drawing comics about himself by making assertions about living through art and art through living. Eventually they come to an agreement about why actually go so far as to publish the comics they make, rather than just write them, which to me feels like Kochalka has finally been tempered into addressing his motivations and reasoning, despite his earlier willingness to avoid them. In the interests of balance, (and in the nature of dialogue presented by the very format of this comic) Kochalkaholic does a review where he’s firmly in the Kochalka camp.

Despite Conversation being written by two largely autobiorgaphical creators, it feel like the most honest work they’ve done. It cuts directly to the core of why either is even making comics in the first place, and more importantly it presents them as about as human as it gets, exchanging ideas - occasionally inarticulately, or inaccurately - seemingly without revision or filtering. Even the imperfect version of Brown he usually writes is still, to some degree, only a version of the true one. The Brown in Conversation feels like Brown, the creator, rather than Brown, the character.

It’s fair to say there’s very niche appeal to Conversation. The experimental format and the very subject matter mean that likely the only people this is going to attract are people who are already fans of Kochalka and Brown. I hesitate to use the term “vanity project” but it’s certainly fair to say that Top Shelf probably took a reasonable risk that this would sell based on the names of the creators alone. It’s a small subset of people that are going to find this a rewarding reading experience, but to those that would, it’s an incredibly unique piece of work, essential for understanding the creators involved.

Buy Conversation #2 from Top Shelf

 

Miniature Sulk

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)

 

Aeiou: Any Easy Intimacy

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)

 

Unlikely

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.

 

Be A Man

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)

 

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.