Jeffrey Brown Interview

by Brandon Huigens
March 2006

Occasionally – every once in a great while – Jeffrey Brown has trouble with girls. And not the trouble Hasselhoff had in “Knight Rider.” We’re talking Opie on “The Andy Griffith Show.” That kid never got any bitches. And when Opie did get them later, on “Happy Days,” I’d bet one girl explained sex with him as possibly “just another means of self-laceration”.

Damn. That is some cold shit.

Reading a Jeffrey Brown comic is like taking a refreshing walk through a huge museum of super intimate crap you’ve purposefully forgotten about in past relationships (but still hold dear in a creepy way). His scratchily-drawn autobiographical comics about intimate, often ignored moments in a relationship have most likely inspired more emo haircuts than Brown would care to consider. Still, Brown presses on, his entirely unique perspective, sense of hilarity, and artistic style becoming noticed and lauded by comics readers the world over. Modest Proposal caught up to Brown while he was touring in France promoting his first-published graphic novel, Clumsy, being translated into French.

Has making comics about your ex-girlfriends made them contact you to tell you what they thought?
Yes. Of course, this being a family magazine, we can’t print what they had to say here.

Do you find girls more or less interested in you because of “The Girlfriend Trilogy”?
Yes, I do find them more or less interested in me. I think it’s better to have met a girl who didn’t really know about the trilogy before meeting me.

Do you now intend to stay away from making comics about relationships? What type of work are you interested in creating now, thematically?
I think I’ve done enough whining about girls breaking my heart, so I’m moving on to other parts of life. I’m particularly interested in tiny, inconsequential things that in context become more meaningful.

Have you ever made comics specifically to impress a girl?
Never. But I have created elaborate schemes with my friends to appear as though I were a wealthy heir in order to impress a girl in high school. But then she found out, and she left me, not because I wasn’t rich, but because I had lied to her. In the end, though, she realized she loved me and I loved her, and that was all that mattered.

Have there been any changes in Marvel’s stance not to publish the Wolverine story you did? What was their reasoning behind not publishing it?
No, they still don’t want to publish it. I took too many liberties with the characters. I mean, if Wolverine is a character who also cuts himself, how are they going to convince Pepsi to put him on their cans and bottles when X3 comes out?

Editor’s Note: Jeffrey self-published a 20-page comic book called Wolverine: Dying Time and submitted it to Marvel Comics. Wizard magazine named it one of the best Indie books of 2004, but Marvel refuses to publish it, due to the dark content. Click here for an excerpt from that book.

If you stopped drawing today, how many years would you be able to fill with your unpublished work?
Only one year. One year where my massive 25,000 page magnum opus of unpublished work comes out.

You’re in France. Has your work been translated into French recently? Are French girls empirically hotter due to their accents?
Clumsy just came out in French from egoCommeX. I don’t know about French girls. My girlfriend was with me while I was there, actually. She’s empirically hotter because she tolerates all of my nonsense.

What are your plans for 2006 book releases and touring? Are you anticipating being able to quit your day job or have you already?
I still work part time, so I can have insurance. Every Girl Is The End Of The World For Me will be out in April, and later this year my expanded gag collection I Am Going To Be Small will come out. I’ll continue contributing to the Fantagraphics MOME anthology. We’ll see what else I finish and get printed. Also out around April will be an animated music video for “Your Heart Is An Empty Room” by Death Cab For Cutie, part of their Directions project.

Which Back To the Future sequel did you like best: II or III?
I think it was II? Not the cowboy one.As you can see, two things become glaringly obvious about the 28-year-old Chicagoan: Brown is staying away from making comics about broken relationships like Robert Downey Jr. is staying away from coke. Neither of them can say no. Apparently, he’s never seen either of the Back to the Future sequels, either.