“Ah, Jeffrey Brown. For quite some time Mr. Brown was writing and drawing some of my favorite comics. His autobiographical stuff was great. Honestly, I’ve never watched someone grow up on the page the way I have with Jeffrey Brown. His first few books, a common complaint was that they were somewhat similar, all about a relationship he had with a girl that had so many feels. For me, it was great. For an artist to do these similar books, it meant you could almost watch him refine and redraft his earlier works, a really interesting process that doesn’t always happen on the page or on the bookstore shelves.
Not to mention that things written about girls that involve emotions are kind of my thing. It’s a symbiotic relationship. You have a book where a grown man reflects on the most significant relationship of his mid-20’s? Just so happens that I have an afternoon of bath tub weeping to fill. Coincidence can be beautiful, or at least as beautiful as possible when we’re talking about an adult male with questionable grooming eating Starburst jelly beans in the bathtub while reading comics.
In the last few years Jeffrey Brown seems to be mining cute family material rather than the corpses of relationships long gone. It’s got to be a natural progression. In a way, it’s nice. After reading some pretty sad stuff for a decade or so, it looks like things are working out for Jeffrey Brown. But again, and I don’t want to get more detailed on this bathtub business because it may cross over from embarrassing to downright humiliating, I prefer the sadder stuff.
The work’s still got a heart to it, and Brown’s getting even better as an artist. But I think it’s time for Jeffrey Brown and I to ride off into our respective sunsets, his being fatherhood, mine being a journey of the soul accompanied by candle with the obnoxious fragrance name “Sunset” sitting on the side of the bathtub.
Told you it gets humiliating.”