I Am Going To Be Small by Jeffrey Brown

As I've said before, I like emo comics. I appreciate the earnestness of a guy writing "about cooking pasta alone on a rainy night", if he's writing the truth. The main drawback to emo comics is that they are never funny enough. These books are so busy taking everything so seriously that they forget how silly someone looks when they are in love. To pick on someone whose work I really enjoy, Craig Thompson is an example of a guy who is ripe for laughing at because he too seldom laughs at himself in his comics. Again, I enjoyed Blankets, and I think that Goodbye, Chunky Rice is a very good comic, but I think that Thompson will really hit his stride when he learns to inject his work with a little more humor.

Now Jeffrey Brown is a guy who broke out by doing some very earnest comics, Clumsy and Unlikely. The humor in those books was limited to inside jokes and cutesy moments. While making these twee little books, he was apparently also amusing himself with gag books. The title reviewed here is a mini-comic that he expanded for this "official" release through Top Shelf.

Brown can be very funny. His self-parody comic, Be A Man, exposes the id of the Jeffrey Brown character that is the protagonist of Clumsy, and it works perfectly at extracting laughs. It's much funnier than the parodies of his work that I've found in Krayon's Ego or Comic Book Apocalypse. He shows that he's capable of seeing the self-seriousness of his work, and tears it apart.

The book at hand, unfortunately, misses the mark more often than not. It might be that this book is the comic book equivalent of the deleted scenes portion of most DVDs. You watch these scenes, and most of the time you understand exactly why they were cut from the final film. The gags that this book was expanded to incorporate are on the same level. An occasional chuckle, but much more frequently limp jokes. The art is as strong as the last several books that Brown has released, and there are many panels that aren't very funny that are saved by the appearance of his drawing style for the reader familiar with his oeuvre. To see the same illustrations that portrayed such earnestness portray such silliness can have a positive cumulative effect, and he has an understated style that lends itself to the absurd, and makes palatable the jokes which only Brown or his friends could possibly understand.

There is an entire section at the back of the book that is devoted to an approximation of an indie comic gag strip with recurring characters. The problem is that the characters, all cutesy anthropomorphic of woodland animals are completely interchangeable, with no individual personality amounting to anything. In fact, the two female characters are illustrated with fur-covered breasts, just in case we forget that they are supposed to be the females. Each gag is set up as a generic joke, feeling like they were something that Brown thought was funny while writing his autobio books, but they weren't "true" enough to make it into those books. Each time the male characters, the bear or the bird, are talking, they do nothing to distinguish themselves from one another. The females, the bunny and the cat, are just as indistinct. It might be that Brown is intending for this to be another self-parody, turning himself and his relationships into gags, but if that is the case, Be A Man is the much more successful example.