Undeleted Scenes

April 19, 2010
Thoroughly engaging and loaded with charm to burn, this latest work from Brown (Clumsy
) is a perfect example of how to do autobiographical comics right. The appealingly simple “cartoony” art serves to draw the reader into Brown's world, taking its ordinary protagonist from the daily tribulations of childhood to the self-discoveries of adolescence and college, and on through encounters with a number of girlfriends, eventually resulting in unexpected parenthood. Brown's journey is initially told in snippets that perfectly capture the sometimes disjointed flashbacks one has to one's own formative years, but the narrative's stories soon expand to lengthier pieces that wholly invest the reader in the “now.”. In turns wistful, frank, embarrassing, and funny, some highlights include the cautionary recounting of “David Lynch's Dune
Drinking Game,” run-ins with local bums and winos, and an account of his future wife's pregnancy from a confused and somewhat on edge male perspective. An unexpected and very pleasant surprise, this is good stuff that solidly resonates with a palpable and universal humanity and bears repeated readings.

May 15, 2010
Continuing his low-key exploration of the quotidian, Brown offers another grab-bag of short, autobiographical strips. A few depict childhood events, but most revisit his generally unsatisfactory encounters with various women, who are inexplicably attracted to the rather hapless slacker that Brown self-deprecatingly portrays himself as being. Some strips come from previous collections, minicomics, and such serial anthologies as Kramers Ergot and McSweeneys; others are first publications. Theyre pretty much of a piece, bonded together by Browns consistently diffident tone and, above all, his familiarly scratchy, childlike drawing style, which has, remarkably, lost none of its awkwardness. At the end of Little Things (2008), he surprisingly entered the decidedly grown-up realm of monogamous parenthood, leaving his fans eager to see how hed cope with this challenge to his heretofore irresolute existence. Now that this entertaining but familiar retrospective is out of the way, heres hoping that the next volume in his ongoing saga shows us new facets of the sympathetic naf readers have come to know over the course of the past decade.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)