Jeffrey Brown's Kids Are Still Weird

It's funny to see where cartoonists wind up in their careers. Jeffrey Brown burst onto the alt-comics scene over 20 years ago with his self-published memoir, Clumsy, which was about losing his virginity. He was one of the central figures of what Tom Spurgeon called "Sad Boy Comics." This term has been subject to parody in later years, but at the time, this was more of an extension of the thoughtful, vulnerable, and even poetic comics of cartoonists like John Porcellino and Dave Kiersh. Brown's comics, especially in his first three books (which he dubbed "The Girlfriend Trilogy"), built on that template and added a structural, narrative solidity that set his work apart. His visual style was a mix of the ratty line typical of the Fort Thunder era that was also informed by Gary Panter and a highly palatable, cartoony simplicity. Jeffrey Brown's figures were and are cute, which at once made them more approachable for a reader but also acted as a distancing device for the more jagged emotional moments of his books. 

However, at heart, Brown was always a humorist. In his many years publishing with Top Shelf, Brown drew a bunch of superhero parodies, Transformers parodies, and other total nonsense. Part of the fun was seeing him draw genre comics in his resolutely anti-commercial style. However, what really made them interesting was Brown's keen instincts as a parodist who genuinely admired these kinds of stories. His first more mainstream humor book was Cat Getting Out Of A Bag And Other Observations, but what really made his career was Darth Vader And Son, an improbably warm and funny use of the arch-villain and young Luke Skywalker. This led to an entirely new career doing these kinds of Star Wars-related comics (Jedi Academy became another one) at around the same time he became a father. He stopped doing memoir comics altogether, perhaps because he was too busy with other work or perhaps because the narratives he had been doing no longer made sense. 

He did, however, do a book called Kids Are Weird, a "kids say the darnedest things"-style collection of observations about his first son, Oscar. Now publishing with NBM, he dipped his toes back into smaller press publishing with Kids Are Still Weird, which is about his younger son, Simon. Brown's ability to create verisimilitude in his dialogue without it feeling clunky or forced has always been one of his best assets, and that particular ear for dialogue is the lynchpin of this book's success. That ear led him to use a variety of compositional structures to highlight the particular gag or feeling expressed by Simon. Sometimes Brown uses his old, trusty four-panel grid. However, he also sometimes uses, on a given page, a gag that's two or three panels (like a comic strip) with a single image below it that is its own separate gag. 

Brown gently depicts Simon's frequently defiant, aggressive, and oppositional energy as a toddler. As a three-year-old, Simon is just starting to push boundaries and assert his agency on the world. Whether it's yelling at the GPS on a phone to stop talking, yelling at his mom during playtime that he's "talking to Daddy," or telling his older brother he doesn't love him, his pugnaciousness is also an expression of his overall curiosity. At the same time, Brown observes him doing ninja moves, debating whether or not he's a "big boy," and declaring that his preferred superpower is to shoot lasers out of his eyes. He also expresses moods and emotions, like saying his brain doesn't feel good, or that he can only come up with horrible stories. Brown creates a pleasant rhythm from comic to comic that doesn't overstay its welcome. Wisely, he doesn't attempt to create a more coherent narrative; instead, he favors little moments in time. Small struggles, tiny triumphs, moments of wisdom, and plenty of just-plain weirdness (as promised!) fill this collection. It's all done in Brown's familiar style, and in color; Brown's overall expressive line is the key to filling these amusing anecdotes with their own sense of life. 

Whit Taylor's Dead Air #1-2

Over on Patreon, Whit Taylor has been serializing her new long-form project, entitled Dead Air. It's the sort of slice-of-life comic that was common in the 90s but has largely fallen out of fashion. It's set at a college in 2002 and follows a frosh named Noe (loosely based on Taylor) who decides to become a DJ at the college radio station. If you're at all familiar with that particular social ecosystem on a college campus, it's a scene that's at once broad-reaching and brimming with potential but also incredibly insular. Taylor mines the particularities of this scene with an incredibly fine sense of detail that creates a rich, albeit wacky, world-building setting. 

One problem with slice-of-life fiction is that it can be meandering and episodic. While the plot is certainly episodic, Taylor smartly establishes key aspects of Noe's character and introduces the key secondary character (a fellow frosh named Nate) within the first three pages of the story. Noe dreams of being a connector, of having something to say and finding a way to say it. Dead Air is a sort of spiritual successor to Taylor's older quasi-autobiographical series Madtown High, another story with a large ensemble cast that celebrates a certain cultural era from the point of view of a protagonist who is an outsider in many ways. 

What Taylor does best here is conjure up a huge cast of outsized personalities with an established pecking order, and slowly reveal details on the nature of their interactions through the eyes of Noe. The first issue goes into a deep dive as to why alternative music is so important to her. It allowed her to express her angst and manage her loneliness and alienation. Taylor once edited an anthology called Sub-Cultures, and she locks into this particular sub-culture in the way that it creates a certain camaraderie even when some of her fellow DJs are insufferable and awful. There is a magic and power to music that Taylor also taps into, as the band she gets free tickets to see creates an experience where Noe says "And just like that, I was transfixed." She wants to be a DJ and become part of the subculture, but she never forgets what music does for her. 

The second issue delves into the specifics of what a DJ does and how they do it, and because the radio station has certain commercial obligations, it is considerably less fun than Noe had hoped. Taylor also established a plot element (each prospective DJ has to make their own ad feature in order to pass their probationary period) and deepened the relationship/friendship between Noe and Nate. The fact that Nate has a girlfriend throws a bit of a roadblock, even if their relationship had been platonic up until that point. That's where the second issue ends, as the narrative starts to build and other key characters are introduced. There is a looseness to the proceedings that's a great deal of fun, as the best slice-of-life stories tend to lend themselves an informal hang-out feel. Taylor focuses on character dynamics and bodies relating in space, which only serves to reinforce this balance of pleasant relationships and witty interactions with the overarching theme of wanting to find a place to belong. 

Tia Roxae's Face Fatigue

Tia Roxae's Face Fatigue is a short (10 pages) but highly effective bit of body horror and social critique & satire. A woman who just turned 21 is obsessed with her youth as her only asset, but is all-too-aware of how men objectify and threaten her when she doesn't make herself available for them as a sexual object. When she develops some mysterious kind of acne. It gets bad enough that she starts wearing a scarf to obscure her face, and there's an over-the-top bit of ridiculousness when her mom shows her a fish her father caught and the young woman screams "I LOOK LIKE IT!" The comic then devolves into revenge, more body horror, and an injury-to-the-eye sequence that would make Dr. Wertham flinch. 

There's a lot to like here. Roxae's mix of pastel pinks and blues is highly effective, especially when pink turns to red with blood. Roxae's use of body distortion veers from simple pimples to monstrous physical changes, even as the affliction is purely on the surface. The murder scene is a total descent into madness and fantasy revenge rolled up into one, and her final facial reveal is a mix of desperation, horror, and social-influencer smile. The face fatigue has a double meaning here--being tired of relying on beauty, then being tired of having it taken away. In both cases, the protagonist was on edge and ready to snap.