{"id":23,"date":"2007-09-24T17:46:00","date_gmt":"2007-09-25T00:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hoodedutilitarian.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/as-it-is-seen-by-toads\/"},"modified":"2007-09-24T17:46:00","modified_gmt":"2007-09-25T00:46:00","slug":"as-it-is-seen-by-toads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hoodedutilitarian.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/as-it-is-seen-by-toads\/","title":{"rendered":"As It Is Seen By Toads"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since I’ve been talking about Dave Sim<\/a>, I thought I’d reprint an essay that the man himself hated. This is a review of Jeff Brown’s “Every Girl Is The End of the World for Me.” It first ran in TCJ #279. (A link to Sim’s \u2014 and Brown’s \u2014 response is at the end of the post.)<\/p>\n

The Art of Depicting Nature As It Is Seen By Toads<\/p>\n

Autobiography doesn\u2019t have to suck. The genre has been used to talk about everything from the nature of evil (Saint Augustine) to the nature of the postal delivery system (Anthony Trollope, god bless him). It has been used for the promulgation of the most sublime nonsense (as in Mark Twain\u2019s *The Innocents Abroad*) and for the elucidation of the most earnest moral and social analysis (as in James Baldwin\u2019s *The Fire Next Time*.) In a couple of works, like Phillip K. Dick\u2019s bizarre *Valis*, or Charles Mingus\u2019 *Below the Underdog*, autobiography has even managed to absorb some of the formal innovations of modernist fiction and poetry.<\/p>\n

And yet, despite these glorious examples from the past, autobiographical comics, in disproportionate numbers, suck, and suck exceedingly. The worst ones \u2014 such as Jeffrey Brown\u2019s latest effort, \u201cEvery Girl Is The End of the World For Me\u201d \u2014 are so bad that they seem to invalidate not merely autobiography, but all of comicdom. If this is the sort of thing that\u2019s wowing the critics and showing up in all the hip anthologies, maybe the medium is just a wash, and we should all abandon it for a less disgraceful pastime \u2014 rhythmic gymnastics, say, or grave-robbing.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that Brown\u2019s book is repulsive, exactly. It doesn\u2019t have the visceral, soul-crushing monotony of David Heatley\u2019s endless \u201cMy Sexual History,\u201d nor is it an inglorious, overweening pratfall, like Art Spiegelman\u2019s *In the Shadow of No Towers.* Sure, Brown\u2019s sensitive-new-age-guy persona is distasteful. And, yes, I was annoyed by the repetitive scenes of him being hugged, kissed, and flirted with by a series of virtually indistinguishable hipsterettes. And I was just about ready to scream if Brown told me one more fucking time how much his acquaintances admire him as a cartoonist. All right, already; everyone you know loves your books. That\u2019s why God created back covers \u2014 so you\u2019d have a place to put your testimonial blurbs without bothering your readers. <\/p>\n

These are basically petty irritants, though; ten years from now, I\u2019ll still hate the Heatley and Spiegelman projects, but I doubt I\u2019ll even remember this particular Brown comic. It\u2019s simply too small (physically and otherwise) to fail in a grandiose way. Indeed, the book\u2019s lack of ambition is its whole reason for existence \u2014 Brown seems to be constantly nudging you to let you know he\u2019s not really trying. The very first sentence of the first chapter is a study in run-on incompetence: \u201cIn early December I got an email from an old friend from my hometown about a book I wrote about my first girlfriend Allisyn.\u201d<\/p>\n

Refusing to correct such a clunker is simple laziness \u2014 a laziness which is reflected everywhere in what, for lack of a better word, we must refer to as the narrative. Brown\u2019s comic is about nothing \u2014 and not an interesting existential Beckett nothing. Nor is it a witty, detour-laden Tristram Shandy nothing. It\u2019s more like the smarmy sit-com nothing of Seinfeld, but even that comparison is too kind. Brown drifts from day to day, showing us his humdrum existence without any attempt at humor, interest, drama, or intellectual engagement. He hasn\u2019t even bothered to give himself a personality. Instead, in the book, the character Jeffrey Brown is a barely-drawn art-school-grad-stereotype; we know he feels deeply because, well, we know guys like him are supposed to feel deeply, I guess. His main identifying characteristic through most of the book is that he has a cold.<\/p>\n

If the male narrator is a bland nonentity, you can imagine the fate of the females. As I mentioned above, the girls who supposedly constitute the comics\u2019 raison d\u2019etre are interchangeable. It\u2019s not just that they\u2019re visually hard to distinguish (though they are.) It\u2019s that they have no personalities, no idiosyncrasies. Brown\u2019s relationships with them are almost entirely unexplored. Allisyn, his first girlfriend, is a little more fleshed out — she has a tattoo, and Brown seems to have more of an attachment to her. But ask me to explain how, as a personality, she\u2019s actually different from Lisa or Nicolle or whoever, and I have to admit that I (a) don\u2019t know and (b) don\u2019t give a shit. (Brown does provide a score-card of sorts listing all the female protagonists, presumably because he realized that you can\u2019t tell the characters apart without one).<\/p>\n

Brown\u2019s art is every bit as gratuitously slipshod as his writing. His drafting skills are lousy, of course, but that\u2019s not quite the point \u2014 if you\u2019re creative and willing to expend a certain amount of effort, you can produce a fine comic without being able to draw especially well (thank you, Gary Larson.) But Brown doesn\u2019t work around or within his limitations, or struggle to minimize them. Instead, he just lets them sit there proudly, like a three-year old who\u2019s taken a dump and wants to show you the turds. Like a good little autobio-comic drone, Brown\u2019s layouts are a basic, brainless, four-equal-panels-per-page grid. The images themselves repeat with the grim regularity of a Doonesbury strip \u2014 here\u2019s Jeff Brown sitting at his keyboard \u2014 oh, there he is sitting at his keyboard again \u2014 and, yep, there he is sitting at his keyboard again. When portraying himself using e-mail, Brown, as an artist, is too damn lazy to even rotate the perspective so you can see the words on the monitor; instead, he just has a kind of lame speech block coming off of the computer.<\/p>\n

Scenes where Brown is talking in person to his friends are equally ham-fisted; in a typical Brown image, two heads face each other at the bottom of the panel, while the rest of the space is taken up by a crappily rendered, completely uninteresting room. Often, the backgrounds just seem to be there so he\u2019ll have some place to put the speech-bubbles. Indeed, hardly any of the visual decisions seem designed to create an effect of any sort. There are pictures solely because it\u2019s a comic. And why is it a comic? Because there are pictures. The rare exception \u2014 as in a sequence where Brown fixates on his friend\u2019s breasts, which occupy a larger and larger portion of each frame \u2014 is such a relief that you can almost forgive its other failings. Sure, to devote two whole pages to the relationship between guys and boobs is dumb and sophomoric, and it\u2019s not done with any particular panache. But at least Brown is making some sort of effort to put form and content together to say *something*.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery Girl is the End of the World to Me\u201d lacks just about everything that you might conceivably look for in a work of art \u2014 craft, joy, insight, wisdom, the works. Which raises the question \u2014 who wants to read this crap? Or, to put basically the same question another way: what on earth does Jeffrey Brown think he\u2019s doing? When I first saw his cartoons several years ago, I presumed that he was just a talentless hack who wrote and drew this way because it was all he had in him. But over the years I\u2019ve discovered that such is not the case. His superhero parody, *Bighead*, is no *Flaming Carrot*, but it is both funny and charming. And though I\u2019ve only seen a couple of panels from his fan-fic Wolverine vs. the Zombies story, those few images were thoroughly entertaining, and even somewhat stylishly drawn.<\/p>\n

In other words, Brown can create decent comics if he\u2019s doing less personal work. With super-heroes he\u2019s willing to cut loose, play around, even look like he\u2019s trying But as soon as he turns to autobiography, he clenches up as tightly as if every guitar ever strummed by every sincere emo frontman in the nation has been simultaneously shoved up his ass.<\/p>\n

In general, if you find an artist with this level of aesthetic constipation, you\u2019ve found an artist whose bowels are in the grip of an unforgiving authenticity claim. For alternative comics creators, this claim seems to be that sincerity and truth are best expressed by abandoning all the hallmarks of artifice. Thus, for example, Jeff Brown\u2019s fan Chris Ware has tossed aside his more complex layouts and quirkier subject matter for a basic grid and boring narratives.<\/p>\n

The drawing style of Brown and his autobiographic ilk isn\u2019t realistic, of course, but by denigrating beauty and craft in favor of natural, untutored expression, these comics are essentially a branch of realism \u2014 the artistic movement which Ambrose Bierce acidly defined as, \u201cThe art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads.\u201d Brown\u2019s work is supposed to be so dull, so insipid, so incompetent, that it dazzles us with its humble insights. Its very lack of effort is a sign of its genius. It\u2019s so bad it\u2019s good. In theory.
*************<\/p>\n

For those interested, Dave Sim condemned this piece here<\/a>. Oh, and if you keep scrolling you can see Sim also sneer at my enthusiasm for Dame Darcy. The review in question is reprinted here<\/a><\/p>\n

And, of course, Jeff Brown also agrees that I’m a dick<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I mentioned Brown in another review a while back (Brown talks about it in his response.) You can read it here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since I’ve been talking about Dave Sim, I thought I’d reprint an essay that the man himself hated. This is a review of Jeff Brown’s “Every Girl Is The End of the World for Me.” It first ran in TCJ … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jeff-brown","category-noah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoodedutilitarian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoodedutilitarian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoodedutilitarian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoodedutilitarian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoodedutilitarian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hoodedutilitarian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoodedutilitarian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoodedutilitarian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoodedutilitarian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}