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. 

Notes on the Cycle: A Matter of Life

As memoirist Jeffrey Brown has grown older, the focus of his autobio comics has shifted a bit. His earliest books were about relationships, jumping back and forth in time to depict small but important moments. Brown's storytelling technique is nonetheless a narrative with a beginning, middle and end, but by going against strict chronology, one gets the sense that it allows him to fully understand and digest certain events better. Indeed, since all memories are of the past, one could argue that this is a more true-to-life way of depicting a personal narrative, as our memories tend to jumble and blur. Brown shifted from writing about his relationships with partners to his relationship with art and his own health in other books, crafting books of greater subtlety and depth than his earlier works. With A Matter of Life, Brown for the first time widens his focus to include stories about his father and first-born son Oscar. While both have popped up from time to time in his stories, this is the first time Brown has tried to create a narrative surrounding the three of them. The result is heartfelt but not as coherent as his recent My Funny, Misshapen Body or Little Things.

The most interesting element of the book is that Brown's father is a minister, making this book about his own faith and the process by which he became an atheist. What is ironic is that what initially started him down that path was his insider's understanding of how church worked, with the politics and pettiness inherent in any organization prevalent in his father's world as well. Those politics extended to young Jeffrey as well, who was expected to dress up, be polite and otherwise be an exemplar of good behavior and piety while his dad was working. Of course, preacher's kids frequently turn out to be quietly rebellious (and sometimes not-so-quietly), especially if they can detect any level of bullshit emanating from their parents. Brown mostly keeps the book pretty light, relating tales of being bored in church and acting out, provoking his parents into threatening to take away his Tolkein books and birthday presents. Brown's become a skilled comic storyteller, and the way he escalates his bad behavior in that story is made funnier by way of how it contrasts with the gentler strips in the book.

Brown builds up slowly to the reveal where he tells his parents that he's no longer a Christian, which ends in an anti-climax as he couldn't remember further details from the conversation. Yet the slightly shell-shocked expressions on everyone's faces said more than any further anecdote could communicate, a look that revealed sadness and sheer bewilderment. Brown quickly follows that heavy scene up with a goof on "Jesus in your heart", with a miniature Jesus literally pounding on Brown's aorta. Brown dips into the past and future as he addresses ideas like anger and homosexuality, admitting that he was homophobic in high school. It's yet another example of Brown willing to make himself look bad in service of the story, but it also fits into the book's overall theme of how beliefs are shaped but can change over time. He links some of that to growing up highly sexually repressed; it's not unusual for ignorance to be linked to prejudice and Brown certainly comes clean on that front.

The back half of the book addresses Brown's own challenges as a father and healthcare scares. He relates one incident where his son has a horrible allergic reaction to an antibiotic and has to go on a battery of medications to combat the still-present infection. Brown gets across that sense of helplessness a parent can feel while they think they are doing the right thing, and then ties it into the helplessness he feels when his father starts to get sick. Again, he finds ways to lighten the mood, ending the story about his son with frustration over the three year old's insistence on watching the same episodes of The Smurfs over and over.

The stories that Brown tells are frequently lovely and touching. They're certainly told beautifully, as Brown has now fully integrated color into his autobio work in a manner that makes a difference, like in a crucial scene depicting the beauty of a sunset that doesn't make him think of it as God's handiwork. The way he draws his son is adorably simple, with two dot eyes and a simple line for a smile; at the same time, Brown is able to draw a lot of nuance out of that simple character design. The first half of the book, which really examines Brown's relationship with his father and faith in great deal while referencing his own son, is as strong as his work has ever been. However, the back half, which focuses more on Oscar, feels underdeveloped. There's a lengthy anecdote about going to a museum in Europe whose connections to the rest of the book seems tenuous. This is a short book to begin with (just 96 pages) and as a reader, I got the sense that Brown didn't have enough material to justify a full-length book. Part of that may be that he simply doesn't have the distance from being a father now to fully grapple with that material the way he does other past events. He does manage to end the book gracefully by engaging the subject of death head-on, but it's almost as though the other anecdotes that would have made sense to include just haven't happened yet, like how his own son will ultimately choose to proceed regarding faith. Still, this book sees Brown moving in some interesting new directions, and I'd love to see him follow up on a number of ideas he explored.

Another Look Inside the CCS Student/Mentor Process

In honor of the graduating class of 2013 at the Center for Cartoon Studies, here's some heretofore unreleased interview material that I did for my article on CCS for The Comics Journal #301. I asked each student the same questions. Here are some selected answers regarding my topic: the student/thesis mentor relationship.

Steve Seck

Steve Seck is in the middle

RC: Why did you choose Alex Robinson as your advisor?

SS: As someone who is attempting a serialized comic, I was interested in hearing his thoughts on how he went about serializing Box Office Poison (which works remarkably well as a book). I am a great admirer of his storytelling ability, sense of humor & drawing style & saw a lot of things he was doing well in his work that I needed to improve on in mine. He also seemed like someone who would be approachable & relatively easy to work with.

RC: What was the process of working with Robinson like? How hands-on was he?

SS: I had a great experience working with Alex. My girlfriend & I had moved back to New Jersey from Vermont in the fall of 2008 - I was one of the first low-residency students in the CCS program - so I was able to meet up with Alex in Manhattan a few times to review work, have a couple drinks & discuss comics with him. I would bring copies of my inked pages with me for him to sketch revision ideas on & show him my (very rough) thumbnails for upcoming pages. I always emailed him my scripts before I got started on a new comic to get input from him about what to add, remove, revise, etc. before I started drawing. His comments were thoughtful & he never tried to dramatically change what I was trying to achieve with a scene or line of dialogue. He was always very respectful of my work - he was encouraging & his suggestions were mostly in line with what I was going for.

RC:  How much of an influence do you feel he had on you as an artist, and in what ways?

SS: It's hard to say exactly how much of an influence Alex had on me as an artist - he was really much more into guiding me through my own way of working than telling me explicitly how to do things. If he felt something wasn't quite right with how I had done a panel,line of dialogue or gag, he'd often give me a few suggestions as to how he'd do it & leave it up to me to figure out my angle on it. He was always responsive if I came to him with a problem I couldn't solve, but mostly let me do my own work & guided or encouraged me whenever I'd give him a new batch of pages. He never imposed the ALEX ROBINSON WAY OF DOING THINGS on me, but rather helped me to further realize my own vision for my work.

RC:. How much of that influence was pre-existing, and how much came as a result of how he worked on you on your thesis?

SS: Box Office Poison - being one of the first books that got me into indie comics - had a pretty big impact on me; I'd say most of the Alex Robinson influence on my work was pre-existing. As stated previously, as an adviser Alex seemed interested in helping me continue to develop my own style & voice.

RC: What was the most valuable thing you learned from your advisor?

SS: First and foremost, giving my work to one of my favorite cartoonists was a big deal for me - I had never done anything of the sort until I gave Alex my CCS first year final project at MoCCA 2008. (I'm relatively "green" when it comes to cartooning - I didn't really start seriously pursuing it until right before I had been accepted to CCS.) Having him actually agree to be my adviser after reading it was also a huge deal - hey, he
thinks my stuff is worthwhile enough to spend a year helping me get better at it! Working with him gave me the confidence I needed to not only trust my instincts but also to keep at it & push myself to improve.

Alex Robinson

RC: What was the most frustrating aspect of working with your advisor?

SS: I really didn't have a frustrating experience with Alex at all - he was responsive & encouraging.

RC: What advice would you give to future CCS cartoonists on how to navigate the experience?

SS: My advice to future CCS cartoonists when choosing an adviser? Look at what some of the cartoonists you like are doing well that you'd like to see yourself do better. Don't be afraid to choose someone whose style isn't exactly like yours - look for someone who excels at the stuff you want to improve at.


Casey Bohn

RC: Why did you choose Paul Karasik as your advisor?

CB: I had previous positive experience working with Paul on a class project in my first year. Beyond that, I felt that an editor, especially one of Paul's standing within the industry, would be the best choice for an advisor. Someone who is expressly a cartoonist isn't necessarily able to explain in words how something is or isn't working. Paul has a lot of experience doing exactly that.

RC: What was/is the process of working with Karasik like? How hands-on was he?

CB: Paul was most involved in revising sketch versions of my comics. I would email him sketches, he would give me notes, I would revise it again, and he would give me more notes, until he was completely satisfied. The magic words were, "This is looking good. Now start pencilling." From my second book on I pencilled from blowups of my thumbnails, and while I showed Paul my pencils every time, once I started doing that there was very little that needed to be said.

RC: How much of an influence do you feel he had on you as an artist, and in what ways?

CB: Paul's focus was graphic storytelling. Does it make sense, does it read smoothly, is it getting the intended message across, is it compelling? These were the unspoken maxims that every critique was predicated upon, and I intend on taking a lot of that to heart from here on.

RC: What was the most valuable thing you learned from him?

CB: Getting to hear him laugh. We spoke on the phone twice and in person once, and hearing him laugh at the funny bits I had written was really satisfying. It was also much easier to…

RC: What was the most frustrating aspect of working with your advisor?

CB: Disagreeing with Paul. I didn't want to ever have to do it. Just before inter break he sent me suggestions for new endings of my second book, and I ddn't like any of them, but I didn't want to tell him that. So I just said I would table my thesis until after winter break. He came to the school in January for Visiting Artist Seminar and he read over the last email he had sent me about my thesis, and he couldn't believe his suggestions, either. "Was I high?" he asked with disbelief. I preferred to wait until Paul could
disagree with himself than to speak against him.

RC: What advice would you give to future CCS cartoonists on how to navigate the experience?

CB: Choosing someone for their editorial experience really helped me. Settle on a project in the first week, stick to it, and get cracking. Do multiple smaller projects, with the goal being to complete everything you start this year. Don't try to do a graphic novel. The momentous work that gets made by Seniors begins life as a bit of fun that snowballs.


Alex Kim

RC: Why did you choose Chip Kidd as your advisor?

AK: I chose Chip because I greatly admire his work. His book covers are some of my favorite pieces of art out there. Also because he loves comics and understands how they work but isn't a cartoonist himself so I thought his feedback wouldn't get caught up so much in the mechanics of my process, which I knew I would get a lot of in school, and more on the final product.
RC: What was the process of working with this person like? How hands-on were they?

AK: Well, the process we set up was that I'd work on my thesis and present when I thought I had enough work to show. It was more presenting finished portions of my comic rather than presenting an outline or thumbnails, etc.... I was able to get a lot of feedback from my teachers and classmates during the process and wanted the use the time w/ my advisor to go over more finished work. I thought this would be more helpful since it would allow me to keep working and working and then get feedback on a chunk of work. This was also driven by how I wanted to work - I wanted to try and get as much drawing done as I could and then take a step back and look at what was produced. I thought it would be an interesting way to work and that there would be a lot I could learn.

RC: How much of an influence do you feel they have had on you as an artist, and in what ways?

AK: A lot and on composition and using words and images together effectively.

RC: What was the most valuable thing you learned from your advisor?

AK: To draw everyday.

RC: What was the most frustrating aspect of working with your advisor?

AK: I ended up wanting more interaction with Chip. In the end, I think it was my fault. I think he would have been open to more interaction but I had to ask for it.

RC: What advice would you give to future CCS cartoonists on how to navigate the experience?

AK: Don't hesitate in asking for more face time with your advisor. Sounds like that goes without saying, but I know I should have asked for more.


Josh Rosen

RC: Why did you choose Aaron Renier as your advisor?

JR: It was James's  (Sturm, head of CCS--RC) idea, actually. It'd been the end of the first year, and I was at sort of a loss for who I wanted for a thesis advisor, so I met with James and asked his advice. And James just started rattling off names, and with almost all of them I was instantly, like, "that's a great idea! Why didn't I think of them!" And Aaron was one of them. On top of which, I remembered Alec Longstreth (who's good friends with Aaron) mentioning that Aaron was really good at "world building," which is something I was really interested in at the time. And I'd heard that Aaron was a really nice, positive person, which seemed like a good thing to have in a thesis advisor to me.

RC: Before you started working with your advisor, what was your understanding of what the thesis process would be like?

JR: I wasn't entirely sure what to expect, partially because I'd heard that the thesis advisor relationship often tended to vary from person to person (which makes sense). I knew I'd be sending them my work in progress over the course of the year, and getting their feedback on that, though I wasn't sure how involved the process would be. And I guess I assumed they would be a good potential resource for professional advice as well? I don't know, I suppose my expectations going in were ultimately sort of vague.

RC: What was the process of working with Renier like? How hands-on was he?

JR: Well Aaron lives in Chicago, which is far enough that we never had a chance to meet in person. However, we managed fairly early on to set up a schedule of meeting on Skype once a week, and having an hour or so long video chat about whatever it was that I was working on at the time. So we ended up working together a fair amount

RC: How much of an influence do you feel he had on you as an artist, and in what ways?

JR: One of the earliest things was that Aaron's influence got me starting to use brush a bit more, something I hadn't had a lot of experience with before (I'd mostly just stuck to nib or technical pens previously). My main project for this past year ended up being doing a large thumbnail draft for a graphic novel that I plan to begin serializing after I graduate, and he ended up having a huge influence on that process as well. Honestly, that whole draft probably wouldn't even have existed without him. He encouraged me to just lay down a straight six panel grid, not to worry about layout or how the drawings look or anything like that, and just fill up the panels. Just write out the story. And the whole process proved extremely liberating, and made the whole writing process easier than it had ever been. It's a way of going about things that probably wouldn't ever have occurred to me on my own, and now I absolutely love it. So that probably turned out to be the biggest influence ultimately, just in terms of process.

RC: How much of that influence was pre-existing, and how much came as a result of how they worked on you on your thesis?

JR: I think the influence Aaron has had on my work came out more through working with him than anything pre-existing before. I of course really admired his work before, and I would look at a drawing by him and be like "woah, I wish I could do that." But I don't think I really tried to consciously emulate his work until I started working with him during my thesis year. And I think part of that is because his work is so obviously brush-y, and I really only started working with brush over the course of the past year. And part of that as well is just that when you're working with someone really talented like Aaron, you sort of can't help but be like "Aaron does this really well. Maybe I should try doing something a bit like that too, while he's still around, and see what tips he might have on that." And the influence that comes about just through going through that process.

RC: What was the most valuable thing you learned from your advisor?

JR: Oh, lord. I'm not sure, I find it hard to gage what's "most valuable" at this point. Again, starting to use the brush and the altered thumbnailing process I took from him both spring to mind as pretty big things. Um, I think setting personal deadlines was a pretty important thing Aaron helped me to learn a bit too. As soon as we decided to start setting deadlines for the project I was working on, my productivity went way up. And I don't know, there's little stuff too, like when he encouraged me to try to just draw the shading on a rock or something now and then. I suspect that stuff'll stick with me too.

RC: What was the most frustrating aspect of working with your advisor?

JR: Um, well I think we both tend to occasionally be somewhat absent-minded (and overly busy) people, so even though we did manage to more or less maintain a weekly meeting schedule we did both have a bad habit of occasionally accidentally missing, or needing to last-minute reschedule meetings, or even just changing the day we were supposed to be regularly meeting on several times over the course of the year. Which could occasionally become a little frustrating. Haha, but whatever, I think we were both just as guilty in regards to that, so what can you do.

Aaron Renier (on the left)

RC: Was the experience all that you had hoped it would be?

JR: Well originally I was imagining it to be absolutely magical and full of rainbows, and we would become instant best friends and dance off into the sunset. Haha, which, you know, wasn't entirely accurate. Although on occasion I felt like it would come close! Heh. But yeah. It was still fun. And I still consider everything I learnt from it to be pretty much invaluable.

RC: What advice would you give to future CCS cartoonists on how to navigate the experience?

JR: I'd say if you can figure out a regular schedule for talking/meeting with your advisor, and if you can establish a good rapport, then you're already a huge chunk of the way there. And, you know, remember that your thesis advisor is a person too, and they also have their own work and their own life. So remember to allow them time for all that.


Finally, here's the view from one of the advisors, Jeffrey Brown:

RC: What was it about this role that appealed to you enough to take it on, given your busy schedule?

JB: There were a few reasons. One, I feel like I've been extremely fortunate to have an older generation of cartoonists who have mentored me in various ways to various extents, and I think it's good to pass that on. I also think that there's a lot one can learn from trying to help someone else understand their work, things which can then help one see their own work in new ways. I've also thought about the possibility of teaching, and this seemed like a good baby step toward seeing if that's something I'd really like to do.

RC: What did you see as your role with regard to the student, or did you leave that up to each individual?

JB: For the most part, I tried to let the student guide things. I saw my role as having two basic components. One, that I would respond to any questions or needs the student expressed, be a foil to them in examining their own work, and give any insight I could that they may not be able to get elsewhere. Two, I felt that I could be a system of support as a fellow cartoonist, and as someone who'd been through what they're going through.

RC: What was your understanding of what the mentor role would entail when you agreed to participate, and how did that change over time?

JB: I don't think my understanding changed at all, except that maybe I felt less pressure as time went on, and I became more comfortable with the student-mentor relationship, as well as getting to know each other better. I saw my role as somewhat reactive rather than proactive; that is, to respond to the student's needs and desires, without being any kind of taskmaster or trying to push the student in a particular direction. After my experience, I felt like this was the right way to go about it, and that I was more helpful in that way - just being available and offering feedback, rather than telling the student what they need to do.

RC: What has been the most satisfying part of being a mentor?

JB: Seeing a student's work improve, as well as seeing their working methods improve, and feeling that I played a role in helping that happen. It's nice to know that I could have a positive impact like that.

RC: What has been the most frustrating part of being a mentor?

JB: Schedule-wise it's tough, and that was a constant frustration - both sides forgetting their was a phone call schedule, one or the other of us not responding too quickly. That said, those were relatively minor frustrations and tended to not distract from the experience at all, I think.

Sequart Reprints: 10 Great Minis From MoCCA 2005

This article was originally published in 2005 at sequart.com. It was my first-ever column on minicomics.
*******
Readers only vaguely familiar with the concept of mini-comics will be relieved to know that it's nearly impossible to pin down what is and isn't a mini-comic. Generally, they are small (but not always), usually relatively brief (anywhere between 8 and 80 pages), hand-made, frequently self-published, and often with personal touches like silk-screened covers, hand-stitched bindings, etc. Often, they serve as a sort of proving ground for young and/or inexperienced artists, though there are several accomplished artists who publish nothing but minicomics. The line between minicomics and zines is often blurred, but they often share similar content, a similar aesthetic, and the same sort of autobiographical self-expression.

The ten mini-comics I picked for this list were chosen based on how substantial they were (I skipped over some worthy 8-12 page minis simply because there wasn't enough "there" there), notable aesthetic or narrative qualities (preferably both), and formal elements unique to the world of minicomics. The artists range from absolute newcomers to those who have books from major publishers.

1. VAGABONDS #1.5: OF TWO MINDS, by Josh Neufeld (http://www.JoshComix.com). $2, 16 pages. Neufeld recently won a Xeric grant for A FEW PERFECT HOURS, distributed by Alternative. It's a collection of travel comics he had done over the years in his two-man anthology, KEYHOLE, and various other places. But Neufeld is also well known for doing a number of collaborative works (AMERICAN SPLENDOR the highest profile), and this mini is an exceptional collection of such stories. Neufeld adapts the poetry of several authors to comics, the most notable being "Time of Arrival". This is a single page with a 4x6 panel grid arrangement. The entire grid taken as a whole is an airplane, and Neufeld chops up the words of the poem into individual panels that comprise the plane. It's a clever formal trick and an effective means of getting across the poem's intent. Neufeld also did a story drawn with his non-dominant hand, imagining that such a person existed in his mirror and setting the story from the point of view of that character, and also draws a page using dialogue from an issue of Superman and completely recontextualizes its meaning with his new art. The mini is attractively packaged and extensively notated.

2. SATISFACTORY COMICS #6, by Isaac Cates & Mike Wenthe (isaac.cates@aya.yale.edu). $3, 28 pages plus extras. Full disclosure: Mike Wenthe is a long-time friend of mine. However, the work that he and his partner have produced speaks for itself. The duo has long thrived on experimentation with the form for their attractive minis, with other participants drawing panels for inclusion, providing built-in story constraints or throwing in random elements for the Cates-Wenthe team to work into their stories. As one might expect, jam comics are frequently better in theory than in practice, and some of their stories suffer from a lack of narrative cohesion. However, their output in the last year or so has shown considerable and sustained growth. Their latest effort is so jam-packed with different kinds of stories, ideas and clever geegaws that the result is a sort of miniature version of the comics issue of McSweeney's that Chris Ware edited. This issue features two comics based on a map created by a group of creators; an autobiographical story about online game addiction; a detective story wherein each page must mirror the form of a stanza of a sestina; an adaptation of Job 41, and a minicomic tucked into the front cover and a random shuffle comic paperclipped into the back.

3. NO PUNCHBACKS, by Kelly Denato & Christine Nimocks (http://www.nopunchbacks.com). $5, 28 pages. Amazingly, this is the debut comic for this duo, although initially No Punchbacks Press contained more contributors. Denato is an animator by trade, and it shows in her story, "Nanni-Nanni Boo-Boo". It's a wordless tale about a man who buys a bird and a fish from a pet shop whom are already friends, and how the fish is taken away. Her style resembles CHUNKY RICE-era Craig Thompson and Sara Varon, with a clean, assured line creating a cartoony world. Nimocks is a fine artist whose style and content is radically different than Denato's. She employs a scribbly line and deals with more autobiographical subjects, including internet dating. This is a remarkably accomplished first comic, with attractive packaging and smart storytelling. Interestingly, the duo was inspired by past visits to MoCCA to create their own comic.

4. SEE SAW, by Sara Edward-Corbett (http://www.greenfog.com, http://www.partykausa.com). $8, 35 pages plus extras. The artist is the most impressive member of the Partyka collective, and her strips here are reprinted from the New York Press. She uses a thin, precise line but balances this with heavy blacks and cross-hatching, giving these tales of schoolchildren an extra weight. The strips are about brother & sister Georgie & Olga, psychopathic Chucky and lovesick Meals. Georgie is an ultra-intelligent little nebbish, while his sister is constantly paranoid. Her dreams of being killed by a gangster octopus (complete with mask) are vivid, and while we feel her fear, the whole set-up is still hilarious. The comic is hand-stitched, with a "cootie-catcher" enclosed in the back.

5. APOLLO ASTRO #9: JOURNEY OF GEORGE, by Jack Turnbull. (http://www.jackturnbull.com). $5, 30 pages. Turnbull abandons his anthology-style for his mini and devotes an issue to his Walking George Potato character. The simplicity of the George and Veggie characters are balanced by Turnbull's lavish backgrounds and the Dreaded Bellpepper Storm Toucan, not to mention a gorgeous silkscreened cover It's a simple story, well-told, that owes as much to Dr Seuss as it does to Chris Ware. Turnbull's biggest strength is his ability to draw out every ounce of expression from his characters using just a few lines. He took a chance using characters that had mostly inhabited one-off strips and plugged them into a larger narrative, and it worked well. This issue is part one of a larger story.

6. COUCH TAG #2, by Jesse Reklaw. (http://www.hobocomics.com). $2, 20 pages. Reklaw is the artist of the syndicated dream strip, SLOW WAVE. This mini has a simple premise: it's about the thirteen different cats Reklaw had during his childhood. What makes this such a great read is that this is really an autobiographical account of his family, but telling it through the device of when certain pets were around and making that the focus of the narrative makes the side details all the more intriguing. Little touches like designing different logos for each cat's introduction and skipping long periods of time between pets make this a great read.

7. THESE THINGS THESE THINGS, by Jeffrey Brown. (http://www.theholyconsumption.com). $4, 36 pages. Brown's scratchy art style and his focus on his love life in his major works for Top Shelf have made him a love him or leave him sort of artist. Personally, I can't get enough of his comics and their lack of adornment when dealing with major drama. Beyond his graphic novels, his minis are often just as compelling for very different reasons. Brown lets his sense of humor show more in his minis, and tells different kinds of stories. This mini deals with some of the events in ANY EASY INTIMACY, providing a sort of closure as Brown deals with yet another broken relationship, the quest to find the artist who performed a particular song, and a book tour with some fellow artists.

8. SUMMA CUM LAUDE, by Eve Englezos & Josh Moutray. (http://www.icecreamlandia.com). 10 pages. The comics that this duo creates are unlike anything else out there today. This latest work, a little bridge between issues of the sublimely strange Icecreamlandia, is designed to look like a minature diploma case. As you open it up, the pages fold out accordian-style, revealing a bizarre science fair. For some reason, the adults are all in 18th century aristocratic dress (complete with powdered wigs and corsets). The dialogue follows from this absurd set-up ("Why, yes, it seems pretty obvious to me now that the dinosaurs were in 3-D.") As always, the realistic, clear-line art belies the insanity of the set-up.

9. A CASE IN TOKYO, by Damien Jay. $10, 22 pages. This comic wins the "most beautiful mini" award, hands-down. Printed on a heavy cardstock and hand-assembled, the coloring process used to illustrate this creepy little story makes the whole thing feel like a children's book gone horribly wrong. The story describes a mental patient who in fact may be possessed, and the momentary clarity she displayed in this state. Her clarity was so incisive that everyone couldn't stand to be around her, until the spell faded and "she became a stupid person once again." While a very quick read, the visuals alone make this a worthwhile purchase. Jay gets the most out of the minicomic format, using every hand-crafted trick in the book.

10. ISOLATION CHAMBER #2, by Ed Piskor (wimpyrutherford@hotmail.com). $1.50, 16 pages. Of the comics on this list, this is the only diary strip. Diary strips (much like personal zines or blogs) can get boring quickly if the author simply devotes it to standard quotidian concerns. It's important to establish some sort of angle early on to differentiate it from other kinds of autobiography. Piskor does this through establishing his voice loud and clear in the early going: he's a curmudgeon who knows a lot of strange people, and isn't afraid to dish. He manages to inject sincerity into his description of his relationship with his baby sister without seeming overly sentimental. He struggles with what to put in his journal and what to censor, some interesting interactions with his parents, and a local group of comics creators. There are weird stories about his interactions with junkies, talks with Harvey Pekar and his feelings about becoming semi-famous. At the end, Piskor announces that the cartoon journal took up all of his time and discontinued it--an interesting statement in itself. Piskor is a real talent and has an interesting voice; it'll be interesting to see what he does after he finishes up his work with Harvey Pekar.

Sequart Reprints: Little Things

 This article was originally published at sequart.com in 2007.
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I've reviewed a number of works by Jeffrey Brown for sequart.com, but Little Things is the sort of collection of anecdotes, reflections and observations that Brown does best. I enjoy his off-kilter takes on genre comics like Bighead and Incredible Change-Bots, but his real skill lies in arranging seemingly unconnected and random quotidian moments into something that coheres into an engaging emotional narrative. In Little Things, Brown's eleven different stories not only pile up emotional resonance on their own, there's also an accumulated emotional power the collection gains as we reach the final story, about Brown and his infant son.

The subtitle of this book is "A Memoir in Slices", and it aptly describes the strategy that Brown uses. In each story, Brown deliberately subverts the reader's expectations in terms of narrative, background and exposition. At the same time, each story is not a haphazard moment from Brown's diary, but rather seems carefully selected, constructed and manipulated. In stories like "These Things These Things" (originally published as a mini), Brown shifts the emotional focus of the story, keeping the reader off-balance, until we realize that the story is really about the connection between music and memory. In the course of relating some seemingly unconnected set of anecdotes about an old girlfriend, touring with other artists and his time at work, Brown is actually elaborately detailing his musical connection with a particular artist. It's a strong choice to lead off the collection, because it's the clearest example of the use of this technique.

"Missing the Mountains", for example, is about Brown's feelings about nature and confinement, and not really about the people he spends time with. In the story, Brown is constantly running ahead of his friends to spend time alone, but he really gets across his message with his visuals. Brown employs a rough, sketchy style designed to quickly get across information and as such rarely pays much attention to detail in his backgrounds. The relatively lush depictions of nature and the way Brown gazes out an airplane window at the mountains below is the key to understanding what's going on here.

The specific expectation that Brown upends is that each story will be about specific friendships or romantic relationships. For example, in "The Calm Before The Storm", Brown starts off with a story that seems like it's going to be about him dealing with his girlfriend's jealous ex threatening him, but that's just a feint for a humorous and embarrassing anecdote. "Everything Gets Fucked Up But Occasionally Gets Repaired" starts as a pleasantly ambling story about being uncomfortable around people foisted on him and then reacting to his windshield getting shattered that suddenly turns into a medical drama. As the title suggests, a number of things do get repaired--with the exception of a particular relationship. "Everyday Job" starts as a typical day in the life but shifts suddenly into Brown dealing with a car accident that happens right before his eyes.

Brown has a dry, sometimes distant but consistently self-deprecating sense of humor. The title piece is simultaneously the most straightforward story in the book in terms of narrative and also the most detached, as Brown narrates his life's story as an instruction manual whose goal is "How To Meet A Girl". With steps like "Meet Chris Ware (no substitutions, please) at a book signing and show him some work to receive encouragement" leading up to him meeting a girl who read one of his comics and contacted him as a result.

Above all else, Brown is a master of tone. His comics have spawned a wave of imitators, but none of them match his mastery at taking what seems to be an ordinary experience and infusing it with wit, drama or absurdity. I think some artists mistake what Brown does for a James Kochalka-type diary comic, conflating the immediacy of scribbling down their experiences with the spontaneity that Brown is able to evoke on the page. Little Things is especially interesting because it feels like a specifically-designed complement to the many books he's done about his relationships (like Clumsy, Unlikely, Any Easy Intimacy,  Every Girl Is The End Of The World To Me), telling stories about all of the spaces between his relationships. Brown understands that by fracturing the chronology of his autobiographical story, it helps him remove the potential tedium in telling stories about himself and allows him to shape his anecdotes for whatever theme he's developing.

Piling On: Incredible Change-Bots Two

Jeffrey Brown's first Incredible Change-Bots book was a smart-ass but affectionate nod to The Transformers cartoon of the 80s, highlighting the absurd elements of genre fiction in general and playing up its more melodramatic and cliched elements to the hilt. It was amusing but entirely predictable, even when he delved into the sort of minutia more common to this autobio comics. The sequel, also from Top Shelf, takes that initial plot and goes to some strange places with it.All successful genre sequels, as they say, consist of making exactly the same movie over again. In terms of the conflict and plot, that's exactly what Brown does here, and he makes no pretense of hiding that fact. Instead, he throws in the Superman myth as evil Fantasticon Shootertron loses his memory and gets taken in by a kindly couple on a farm. Having his main villain vacillate between cheerful warmth and over-the-top ruthlessness is one of the funnier ideas Brown pursued in this book.


Brown also makes a point of noting that chief Awesomebot Big Rig (the Optimus Prime analog) is kind of an ineffectual blowhard. Indeed, he makes the further assertion that in most genre fiction, both sides employ extreme violence, even as one is labeled good and the other evil. Mot of the robots on both sides are pretty awful in their own right. Even an innocuous character like the golf cart robot Balls (yes, Brown isn't afraid to go for a cheap joke) is annoying in his own way. Everything about this second volume is sharper. The awkward lulls are more pointed and funny, the plot is even more arbitrary and fluid, and the colors are more vivid. The pointless love story in the first book is revived and it becomes even more pointless and funny. In Kyle Baker's book You Are Here, he said that he wanted to put a pretty girl, a fight or a chase scene on every page. For Brown, there's either a comedic bit, a fight or an explosion on every page. Sometimes, there's all three. One gets the sense that Brown's enthusiasm for this book was almost gleeful, given that he had the opportunity to do something farcical and silly, as opposed to his more poetic, weighty autobio work. It seems clear that these sorts of books make his other comics better, because they've only become more ambitious. A book like Incredible Change-Bots Two clearly allows Brown to forestall burnout while treating his audience to an amusing lark that still bears the mark of hard work.

Minicomics Round-Up: Spina, Robinson, Solomon, Kirby, Ullman/Brown

This batch of minicomics is a true grab-bag and is hard to pin down to any one particular genre:



Fight, by Sam Spina. This comic won a Xeric grant for Spina and is not unlike a slightly gentler version of Johnny Ryan's Prison Pit. While Spina's diary strip may be prosaic at times, his fiction has always been extra-crazy in response. He comes up with wacky premises, carries them through to their logical extremes, and then bombards the reader with uncomfortable gags along the way. Fight features a world where certain creatures have been bioengineered for specific tasks. This comic focuses on humanoid creatures bred only to fight for entertainment. The plot follows a creature called Fight, his downfall and eventual triumph over the female Super Fight that defeats him via trickery, her psychopathic offspring that forms as a result of their brief coupling, and lots of battles along the way. Spina loves gross-out gags, like when Super Fight gives birth to a bounding creature or the truly revolting Boobstadon, a sort of walking set of teats with a brain that is forcibly milked. The scene where an overeager farmer fondles it lasciviously is hilariously uncomfortable, but Spina tops it with Super Fight's child unexpectedly ripping it (and everything else in its path) to shreds. Spina's line is simple and energetic, and the mini-sized format helps add a density and urgency to each page. It's definitely an interesting step for an artist still developing his voice as a humorist.


Box Office Poison #78, by Alex Robinson. This minicomic represents Robinson's failed attempt to revive his first comics series, as he was looking for a new direction after some false starts. He has said that he thought it might be easy and fun to see what his characters were up to a few years after the conclusion of the series (which of course was collected by Top Shelf in one massive tome), but he abandoned this path as well. This mini represents a few pages from that attempt, packaged as though Robinson had never stopped doing the series as minicomics. It's clever and a delightful little gift for fans of the series. All of the BOP trademarks are there: interstitial stories focusing on one character, character surveys, a guest pin-up, a letters page, and a page from another abandoned Robinson project, a sequel to Lower Regions. Seeing some of Robinson's tricks like temporarily abandoning a realistic style for cartoony anger or filling up pages with thought balloons was also quite welcome. That said, I can understand why he abandoned the project: he wasn't saying anything new. He had a fairly definitive ending for BOP, and while it might have been tempting to see if protagonist Sherman Davies could be rescued from a hellish existence with his girlfriend Dorothy and find a healthy relationship, I thought that originally downbeat ending was a more appropriate way to leave the character. It was still nice to see the sprawl of characters even in this short minicomic; this is where Robinson has always excelled as a writer. That's why I prefer BOP and especially Tricked! over Too Cool To Be Forgotten; being able to explore a number of different emotional states and personae seems to be precisely the kind of challenge that pushes Robinson to evolve.


Our Fantastic Universe, by Lizzee Solomon. This odd little comic is the black & white version of a story that's going to be published in a collection dedicated to extraterrestrial sex. This version puts the emphasis on Solomon's grotesque linework, balanced against the amusingly sedate and even detached narration of the "host" of this "series" about alien sexuality. The story details the mating habits of cactus-like creatures called Milchigs and tiny, airborne creatures called Fleart, as the two species have a synergistic relationship. In pulsating, undulating and throbbing detail, Solomon shows us both the typical, nature-show style side of their sexuality as well as some unexpected aspects of their lives. The Fleart, once ingested by the Milchigs, engage in frottage. The Milchigs, once engorged by having ingested Fleart, engage in an extreme form of S&M that not all of them survive. The effect is a variation on body horror, where instead of physical transformation being a source of fear or dread, it's a source for pleasure. For the reader, it's no less strange an experience to read and just as unsettling.


King For A Day, by Rob Kirby. This comic is an interesting departure for comics veteran Kirby, best known for his slice-of-life relationship comics as well as for helming the queer-themed anthology Three. This is a silent comic about a man who is literally shat upon who then finds a crown. That suddenly inspires instant worship and admiration from everyone he happens to come upon. Of course, this sad sack character can't quite end up with a happy ending, even in his own dreams, and Kirby takes great delight in piling on a series of catastrophes, humiliations and general physical comedy. His art is simple and classically cartoony, with rubbery character design that expands into full-out exaggeration during certain scenes. The way he varies line thickness is a big key to the success of the comic; a thicker line usually indicates something significant happening, but that slight variation also makes the lines comprising his characters pop out on the page. The result is a delightfully charming comic that makes the most of a thin premise thanks to funny drawings on nearly every page.


Old-Timey Hockey Tales, by Rob Ullman & Jeffrey Brown. This is a comics rarity: a straightforward series of stories about sports. It helps that cartoonists Brown & Ullman chose to write about the most visceral of major sports, ice hockey and that its early participants were kind of crazy. The design of this mini is typically handsome, thanks to Ullman's eye for detail. Ullman selected items that were more anecdotes than narratives, like a strip about Maurice "Rocket" Richard being banned from the NHL and the ensuing series of riots, or a tight-fisted owner resisting the league mandate to put the names of players on the back of jerseys and protesting with names that were the same color as the uniforms themselves. Brown favored more sustained narratives, like when how the Detroit Red Wings wound up playing a group of prisoners; how one player got revenge on a coach who tried to trade him; and why anyone who messed with Gordie Howe was an idiot. Ullman's story about the great goalie Terry Sawchuk (originally published years ago in an SPX anthology) is still one of his best, documenting Sawchuk's skill as a player and how awful he was as a person. At 28 pages, this mini left me wanting more, especially because the two cartoonists have art styles and approaches to narrative that are so different. I'd love to see an all-sports comics anthology; Dan Zettwoch has done interesting work about basketball & baseball (if I had a million dollars, I'd commission Zettwoch to create an illustrated version of the book Loose Balls, an oral history of the ABA), while Dennis Eichorn has written a number of stories about football. This would be truly "mainstream" work, given America's love of sports.

Means of Production: Living Things & Oscar

One advantage to working in the minicomics world is that it's so democratic. Anyone with a pencil or pen and access to a photocopier can make and publish them. As cartoonists grow more ambitious, the main obstacle in front of them tends to be publishing. In particular, how can they make a comic that looks just how they want it and afford to publish it? In the rapidly shrinking world of print publishing, alt-comics have taken on a status not unlike vinyl in the music industry. A small but highly dedicated niche audience keeps vinyl alive as a distribution point for music, as well as a small network of independent record shops that tend to ally with music venues. Networks of networks, connected by the internet, have led to a small but thriving scene. In much the same way, networks of cartoonists, fans and retailers have started to form. The comics shops that will survive are those that have already diversified beyond the standard superhero comics. Regional alt-comics shows are springing up everywhere, allowing cartoonists to sell comics and merchandise to a focused and motivated group of fans. Most interesting to me is the recent trend that's seeing cartoonists finding new ways to control the means of production.

Zak Sally, for example, has his own printing press. Then there's the case of Emily Wismer. A former zinester turned teacher, she moved from Chicago to Asheville, NC to set up her own print shop with an old tabletop Pilot press. She hand-makes cards, invitations, etc. and recently published a new minicomic by Jeffrey Brown called Oscar. It's simply beautiful to hold, with each page just soaking up ink. Running one's fingers over each page allows one to feel the the grooves that the ink creates, which is heaven for anyone who's a print junkie. The comic comes in a brown paper envelope that acts as its cover. The cover itself quickly reveals what this comic is about: little pearls of humor from Brown's young son Oscar, as recorded by "Oscar's dad". While cute in the way that one would expect a comic about a little kid would be, Brown has an ear for some of Oscar's weirder and more outrageous quotes. There's one page where Oscar pretends to dial a phone and says "Hello? Yes, Mommy's crazy." It's the usual string of funny Brown observations done in a format that I suspect many cartoonists will find appealing.

Little Otsu is a publishing concern, like Ladypilot Letterpress, that focuses on printing cards, calendars and other paper-based products as well as comics. As such, their comics all have careful attention paid to them so as to present them as art objects. Their Living Things series fits into their paradigm of comics and other printed matter related to nature. Each of the four issues published to date has the same trade dress and logo, even as each issue has featured a radically different style of art. The first issue, featuring Lizzy Stewart, purports to be "A Guide to Eastern European Wildlife" that begins with naturalistic depictions of bears, wolves and owls but slowly becomes more whimsical, with fur hat-wearing rodents and a moose with a clothesline hanging from its antlers.

The second issue features Jo Dery and is about pheromones. This is an inventive and charming comic, with each page setting up a different visual challenge and solving each one with a variety of color schemes. Dery switches between full-color pages (done in colored pencil, perhaps?) and single-color pages (a forest green) with more detailed line art. Hannah Waldron is featured in the third issue, titled "The City". This one's all about lines, with a young man entering a brownstone and experiencing his environment as a series of horizontal lines (through a shade) and diagonal lines (as the city becomes abstract). Waldron alternates close-ups of small objects and fade-outs of the city itself, creating a number of pages that resemble a study for a Mondrian painting. Like the other comics in this series, there's not much of a narrative to speak of, but it's a beautiful and intriguing thing to look at.

The best of the four issues, not surprisingly, is by Lilli Carre'. The talented artist contributes "Shifting Shadows", which puts her off-kilter sense of humor on full display. The concept is simple: shadows coming to life in unusual ways apart from their original source. In some of the images, the shadows are living images drawn from an unusual arrangement of objects. In others, the shadows reflect the true emotional natures of their source, like the wild, ecstatic flailings of shadows coming from a row of office workers trudging toward their jobs. This is a delightfully witty series of variations on a theme by an artist who takes full advantage of the production values provided to her by a publisher committed to creating beautiful objects.

TCJ Post #5: Sulk 3

Here's a link to my fifth post at the Comics Journal.

Sequart Reprints: I Am Going To Be Small/Art D'Ecco

Jeffrey Brown is best known for his episodic, autobiographical comics about assorted relationships. While the relationships inevitably go down the tubes for poor Jeffrey, he is often able to mine a lot of humor from his travails. Still, someone who just read Brown's books like CLUMSY, UNLIKELY, ANY EASY INTIMACY, etc. would come away thinking that he's incapable of doing anything but humorously bitter relationship comics. However, anyone who's read one of his many minicomics over the years would see a very different, absurd side of Brown. Nine years worth of these comics was just collected by Top Shelf in I AM GOING TO BE SMALL, a massive brick of a comic with rapid fire, one-off gags on page after page.

New Zealand's Andrew & Roger Langridge, on the other hand, have always been known for their linguistically & visually dense humor. The two were long a well-kept secret in the comics world, as their ART D'ECCO and ZOOT! series were never big sellers. Roger would continue on in comics and illustration, achieving some success with his later FRED THE CLOWN series. However, the writer-artist combo of Andrew & Roger's trio of characters from ART D'ECCO have been collected in one glorious volume by Fantagraphics: THE LOUCHE AND INSALUBRIOUS ESCAPADES OF ART D'ECCO. (That's "disreputable and unwholesome" for those scoring at home.)

Both books are very funny, and while one could say that both are similar in that they are primarily gag books, their approach and execution is completely different. The very experience of reading each book is almost viscerally different. One flies through the breezy gags in Brown's book, while each thick pen line from Roger Langridge and every absurd scenario and painful pun from Andrew Langridge encourages the reader to not only linger on every panel, but to read each story multiple times. While both books enthusiastically mine the absurd, many of Brown's gags are still rather personal. The Langridges, meanwhile, seem to draw their inspiration from a tradition of visual and verbal tomfoolery. While Will Elder's "Chicken Fat" visual style is an obvious influence on Roger, the strip as a whole seems to be more influenced by TV and radio comedy than any comics in particular.

SMALL is a reflection of Brown thinking up and trying to get down gags as quickly as possible, while the ideas are still fresh. It has a sketchbook quality, and it seems like a lot of the quasi-autobiographical gags came from pages he was working on for other projects. His plain, sketchy art style draws the eye from gag to gag quickly. The book is so huge (300 pages plus) and has so many gags that this carpet-bombing strategy works well. If a joke fails, the eye quickly moves on to the next one. The visuals here are mostly in service to the verbal component of the gag. For example, a panel captioned "On Great Sex" had a woman ask a man "Are we too different?" The man replies "No" but is thinking "Yes", but isn't about to admit it. Another panel is a parody of the infamous cat poster "Hang in There"--except that instead of a cat hanging from a branch, the branch is empty. A pimp walks down the street and thinks, "These bitches practically sell themselves". The visuals give just enough information to set up Brown's jokes and wordplay.

Yet Brown is not merely a writer who draws. What makes his comics work is his keen understanding of the rhythms of comics. It's long been his greatest skill as an artist: his ability to set up a situation, set up a beat, set up another beat and then finish up a joke or anecdote with a satisfying conclusion. He's also great at modifying the mood of his panels with subtle facial expressions, especially in his eyes and eyebrows. Even in his more rapidly-produced panels, the expressiveness of his characters is essential to making his jokes work.

Brown's understanding of timing & pacing, his fatalistic sense of humor and his expressive character work are best encapsulated by "Cuticle", an extended section of the book. There are four character: a bunny, a bear, a bird and a cat. The bunny and cat are girls, the bunny and bird are boys. Frolicking out in the woods, Brown puts the four through a parody of every relationship drama he's ever written about, and then some. The bunny tells the bear that she'll go to the concert with him, but "just as friends". There's a silent panel after that (a pause for a beat), and the bear replies "Afterwards, can we have sex just as friends?" Later, bunny wonders to bear why she hooked up with a particular guy, saying that he "exudes this kind of sweetness". Bear replies "yeah", then there's another silent panel, then he adds "Like rotting fruit." Bird is a repulsive character full of fratboy machismo, which is funny because he's tiny compared to the other characters. When Bunny accuses him of being homophobic, he denies it, noting that he owns gay porn. When Bunny rolls her eyes (in yet another silent panel), he indignantly blurts out "What? Girl on girl is still gay."

What's interesting about the Langridge brothers is that while one can spot a host of influences in their work, the end result is entirely unique in the world of comics. Roger Langridge has talked about how important Spike Milligan and the Goon Show were in forming his comedic sensibilities, and one can also see evidence of Monty Python-style absurdity and obscure references in the jokes Andrew throws in. He doesn't care if the average reader gets all of his references, and in truth it doesn't matter. The situation itself is so funny, and the visuals by Roger are so dazzling, that every single panel is still funny on its own. Like a Will Elder comic, each page is so densely packed with visual and verbal jokery that it can take multiple readings to unpack everything. Even then, one may not recognize a reference or two until much later. Despite that, one can follow the surface of the narrative and still thoroughly enjoy it.

That said, this experience can be an exhausting one. Their style of humor can be unrelenting; I found that reading the book in small doses was the best way to fully enjoy it. I mentioned Will Elder before; while the visuals on the page are packed the way Elder is, the way stories play out is more like a Looney Toons creation. The narratives are paper-thin, just frameworks to allow the fun to unfold and to give the characters a place to interact. Everything flows from the main three characters, in various combinations. There's the eponymous star of the book, Art d'Ecco, a white-tuxedo wearing sleazebag who's the amoral straight-man. There's his opposite number, Art Nouveau, a black-tuxedoed creature who's d'Ecco's frequent antagonist and walking Dada event. Lastly there's the Gump, a triangle-shaped pile of naivete, idiocy and sheer filth. Their actions, reactions and retaliations provide the bulk of the first level of humor in the book.

This combination allows the Langridges to go in any number of directions. They can get scatological, absurd, referential, punny or philosophical--sometimes all on the same page. There are several brief stories in the collection, but the meat of the book is in four stories. The first (done for this collection) sees D'Ecco trying to track down back issues of the original comic because someone is paying big money for them on eBay. On one page, we learn that famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma was the original letterer of the comic. When the Gump suggests that d'Ecco could buy a llama if he could find more copies of the comic, Art replies "There's no cause for a llama". Things do not go well for our Mr. d'Ecco when he forks over money to one collector to buy a few.

The story that has the most absurd asides is "No Erect Penises", a tale of d'Ecco simultaneously pursuing a career of writing pornography and leading a censorship campaign. Non-sequitur joke panels pop in out of nowhere, like "In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is skiing", and indeed there's a panel where a bunch of blind people are oblivious to a skiier above them. Then there's a laugh-out loud panel of a classic Ditko/Romita Spider-Man pose (when he's dressed as Peter Parker but we "see" half a Spider-Man face to indicate his spider-sense is a-tinglin') and earnestly lamenting "Why are the nice guys always straight?"

The masterpiece of the book is "La Trahison des Images". The title is a reference to the famous Magritte painting of the same name, and its English translation is "The treason of the images". The layman will know it well: it's a drawing of a pipe that underneath it says "This is not a pipe". And of course, it isn't a pipe, it's a painting of a pipe. The image is not reality, and the Langridges take this concept and run away with it. The story concerns d'Ecco's quest to find the Gump after he disappears with his housekey. He later teams up with a woman (who later refers to her new name as (groan) "Eva Prawn") to track him down to a cult leader's fortified compound in the middle of the desert. Said leader turns out to be Art Nouveau, whose awesomely nonsensical "sermons" are the highlight of the story. I especially appreciated the Sly & the Family Stone reference thrown in there.

The most straightforward story set-up is "The Secret History of the World", a desert island tragi-comedy starring the Big Three. Their attempts at setting up governments, economies, alliances and systems of punishment feel the most like a Bugs Bunny cartoon. The oily nature of each character prevents them from even noticing that another cast-away has joined them on the island, and she manages to escape without them ever realizing she was ever there.

Roger's style in this book is less decorative than it is in his own Fred the Clown comics. Like Jeffrey Brown, facial expressions drive everything he does. The three stars of the book have a settled, iconic look and it's up to their faces to sell the comedy. Unlike Brown, Langridge uses a lot more exaggeration in his facial expressions. This works especially well with the Gump, whose lack of normal human physical characteristics makes it easy to twist him around like a baloon animal. Even if this book is less lush-looking than his other work, his ink line is astonishingly assured and beautiful to look at. His use of negative space, his panel design, his composition and understanding of panel-to-panel continuity allow the reader to navigate through a lot of detail. His pages are always busy but rarely cluttered, and he just has a way of being able to guide the reader's eye to where it needs to go. About the only other humorist I can think of today who makes comics that are as beautiful to look it is Michael Kupperman.

Reading the Langridges' book, we are immersed in their crazy world. We may not know biographical details about the authors after we have read it, but having an understanding of the mechanics of what they find funny is enlightening on its own terms. With Brown, the biographical details he reveals are incidental and entirely in service to his jokes. It's not that his ego is so staggering that he has to work himself into even his gag work, but rather that this is the medium in which he does it. Humor is often derided in critical circles because of a supposed lack of profundity, but I would argue that for great humorists, the body of their work is often quite revealing of depth. In a documentary made about him before he died, Jacques Derrida made a reference to Heidegger when asked about biographies of philosophers and what should be in them. Heidegger said that the proper biography of a philosopher is as follows: "He was born. He thought. Then he died. The rest is anecdote." What he meant was that the work tells us all we need to know. In much the same way, the Langridges and Brown were born, they made people laugh, and one day they will die. Thankfully, they're still making me laugh.