|
CBG SATELLITES
The ADD Blog by Alan David Doane
|
 PLEASE SUPPORT COMIC BOOK GALAXY BY VISITING OUR SPONSORS
AEIOU
Brown’s greatest weapon in telling this tale of a
relationship gone by is his almost painfully direct
art style. Like many cartoonists Brown’s style is one
based on simply drawn characters in a simply drawn
world. “Chicken scratch” is one way Brown’s style has
been described as. This might seem unskilled but it
does in fact lead to great comics. One way to go about
accomplishing great art is about having a distinct
vision and communicating it well with your audience.
This raw art style is one of the best ways many
cartoonists achieve this. Brown, Sam Henderson, James
Kochalka and Tom Hart all employ an incomplex style
but if you have all of them draw the same comic
there’s no way you could confuse one with the other.
They’ve all achieved a singular fashion of drawing
that compliments their storytelling and their
talent.
AEIOU (or, as it is known on the front cover,
Any Easy Intimacy) is a series of vignettes
about Brown’s relationship with a woman named Sophia.
The narrative is broken up by just seemingly unrelated
scenes from the relationship placed one after the
other. It is Brown’s own manner of autobiography that
benefits from this. There seems to be no second
guessing when it comes to relaying this private and
personal information to us readers. Every sequence
feels as if it just happened to Brown and he quickly
scribbled it down on a napkin to get his true feelings
out before his midned starts clouding up things. Many
times things will happen between Sophia and Brown that
are so important to the continuation of their
partnership that you immediately wonder how they work
it out, until you find that this book is how half of
that relationship is working it out. All of Brown’s
personality, from his sweetness to his naiveté, is on
display here. Sophia is treated with the same honesty
but she, as well as everybody else, is portrayed
through Brown’s eye. The book resides in a place
between detached and one-sided. That tension makes
for a really fascinating read.
Brown writes in the end that Sophia’s side of the
story is “necessarily lacking.” Perhaps reading this
she will be inspired to tell her side of the story
(one of the great things about Brown’s art is that it
says “anyone can do this”). At the very least we can
hope that Brown continues to inspire many younger
cartoonists to create comics as good as this one.
Send review copies to:
|
When someone is taking a look at an artist’s latest
book it is tempting to see how it stands up against
the rest of the books in that artist’s oeuvre. That
can definitely lead to some insightful criticisms but
sometimes it can be unfair to the artist, especially
since most of them would want each book to stand on
their own. Jeffery Brown’s latest work is similar
enough to his past books like Unlikely and
Clumsy that many readers would dismiss it and
for someone who have followed this cartoonist’s career
I can sort of sympathize with that take on
AEIOU. On the other hand, for someone who has
read only some or none of Brown’s work this book will
have a very different feel to it. It’s worth
considering this book on those terms.