"'Not everything in here is true,' it says in the indicia, but enough of it feels true that Brown's well-earned reputation as one of today's better autobiographical cartoonists is secure." — Alan David Doane, Comic Book Galaxy
Jeffrey Brown takes a break from books about girls for this humorous short story collection featuring fiction, gags and autobiography. Included are such gems as "My Brother Knows Kung Fu" and "Action Television Show."
July 1, 2005
Brown follows his bad-relationship graphic novels, " Clumsy" (2003) and " Unlikely" (2003), and his superhero parody, " Bighead "(2005), with a pocket-size gathering of extremely short autobiographical pieces dealing with everything from his coffee addiction to the aftermath of an auto accident. Roughly half the strips concern utterly normal childhood events. Relatively lengthy ones depict, say, a disappointing birthday party, or being restless in church, while tiny ones resemble " Peanuts" sans punch lines. Their considerable charm arises from their commonality, not from any surprises. The one seemingly non-autobiographical story, about an encounter on a bus trip, is also the longest and the least successful. The book" "is, however, more out-and-out funny than Brown's others; even the strips portraying his dealings with women--the obsessive focus of most of his previous work--are uncharacteristically angst-free, more likely to be about an innocent crush than about the clingy neediness he has previously displayed. What isn't different is Brown's appealingly informal, deceptively casual drawing style, whose seeming awkwardness conjures an aura of disarming honesty.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)