A Matter of Life

Jeffrey Brown has been detailing his life in scratchy small panels since sometime in 2002. He’s gotten quite famous now, with his cutsey Darth Vader & Son/Daughter gift books, but he keeps on plugging away at the autobio stuff and, like a lot of that genre’s more successful practitioners, manages to keep his fans coming back for more despite not very much happening.

It’s a perennial problem.  Your typical autobio type has spent 50% of waking hours since adolescence drawing and the rest of the time divided between the classic indie pursuits of working shit jobs, mooning over some guy/gal, getting wasted and bemoaning their lot. It’s with this thin fare that the best serial autobio folk pull their most audacious trick – parting you with your hard-earned in return for a further glimpse into their mundane existence.

It’s not immediately obvious what draws anyone into following Jeffrey’s life for ten years or so (which I’ve done). His first major books, Clumsy and Unlucky, classics in the mooning over some guy/gal genre, are very crudely drawn and self-indulgent, as, over hundreds and hundreds of pages, Jeffery details every meeting, grope, fumble, snooze, and row with various unsuitable  girls. He’s quite hard to like in these first books, naive, passive-aggressive and bit of a puritan, but the meticulousness of it, the record of every hurt feeling, every let down, every mix tape sent, the pure, near autistic, drive to record that possesses so many underground and indie cartoonists, the barely mediated honesty of it, keeps you turning the pages. And buying the next book…

Inevitably for the follower of this sort of thing, picking up the latest stories year after year, it all gets a little soapy, and I found myself flicking through the latest Jeffrey Brown, A Matter of Life, clucking away to myself, “ooh, he’s got married”, “ooh he’s got a kid now”, “ooh look at all these pictures of him and his dad”.

Which is what’s happened. Over the years Jeff’s had his edges knocked off, he’s settled down and his style has become (very) slightly more polished; his sense of proportion (events, not anatomy, art lovers!) and focus has improved.

This comparatively slim volume (in Brown’s oeuvre, editions of over 300 pages aren’t uncommon) presents itself as a meditation on fatherhood and faith. Meditation, as those who’ve attempted it will attest, is a bastard tricky thing, requiring discipline, concentration and loads of the aforementioned focus. Though not an unenjoyable comic, A Matter Of Life doesn’t manage to pull this off.

There are some very pleasant moments, for sure, but Brown hasn’t moved far enough from the journal/diary style of his earlier autobio material. It’s all too episodic and unstructured. From a very promising start detailing his slow alienation from his family’s church (his dad was a minister), the comic declines into a succession of anecdotes, sometimes engaging, to be sure, but the order and pacing are so random, that as Jeff ponders the big issues, contemplates God and the infinite, fatherhood and his father, nothing meaningful or coherent comes out of it.

I wouldn’t be surprised though if this manages to shift a few copies. Brown’s profile’s been raised with his Star Wars books  and it’s an attractive little volume, nicely coloured, and as, mentioned above, his art is definitely getting better, without sacrificing any of its early, super naive style. I think its main USP – “Fatherhood and Faith”, in big letters over the back cover – isn’t delivered on, but its promise could well pull in some punters, who while they may not get anything particularly meditative, let alone transcendental, will  get a diverting half-hour or so of autobio soap.