Sequential art pieces: From cavemen to Jeffrey Brown

by Hugo Reis, editorial assistant

Have a narrative settled into a real place coming from a significant memory, transform ordinary people around you into charming, sketchy, black-and-white characters, and make sequential art out of funny or touching everyday life moments.

         With all those elements together, you will have a comic book by Jeffrey Brown, a sequential art maker.

         “Everyone of the characters out of my autobiographical comics are based on real people, and real situations, at least as well as I can remember it,” says Brown. “Sometimes I will change things a little, or have one character saying something that someone else said, just to not introduce a lot of extra characters. Usually people are OK with it (becoming characters of a comic book). Once in a while, people object to how I draw their hair. They want cuter haircuts, I think. And once in a while they remember things happening in a different way. Mostly, I think they understand what I’m trying to communicate with the comics, and don’t take it too personally or seriously.”

         Comic books are less commonly known as sequential art. The term was popularized by Will Eisner, an acclaimed American cartoonist and entrepreneur. Eisner published a book called “Comics and Sequential Art,” in which he explains the academic principles of sequential art (focusing on comics) in eight chapters: “Comics as Reading,” “Imagery,” “Timing,” “The Frame,” “Expressive Anatomy,” “Writing and Sequential Art,” “Application (The Use of Sequential Art),” and “Teaching/Learning Sequential Art for Comics in the print and computer era.” Eisner also established comic books as a form of literature with his book “A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories.”

         What could be considered as the birth of the comic book industry happened during the Upper Paleolithic Age, somewhere between 15,000 and 13,000 B.C. The caves of Lascaux in southwestern France retain the first form of sequential art made in rocks by cavemen. It was a primary sketch of what would become to be comic strips, first, and comic books, later.

        The ancient Egyptians later came up on with another kind of sequential art known as hieroglyphs, which can be found in the tombs of the pharaohs in the Great Pyramids. The hieroglyphs in the tomb of the pharaoh Neferronpet on the west bank of the Nile, in Egypt, are dated from about 1300 B.C.

        The largest form of sequential art can be found on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, in Vatican City, Italy. The artwork made by the great Michelangelo during the High Renaissance was created between 1508 and 1512, and it consists on monumental paintings showing biblical passages, nine scenes from the book of Genesis. It tells the story of the creation of the world by God, just as a huge page of a comic.

         “I think the comics form is beginning to play a bigger role – as a form of communication that combines words and image,” says Brown. “It has the potential to be more important in a society that had increasingly combined words and image in advertising, instruction diagrams, and design in general. I think the comics play the same role as any other art form or type of literature.”

    Since its early beginnings, sequential art has always been a way of communication, and it has evolved through the centuries. Brown is one of the American contemporary artists who make the kind of sequential art that is most popular in the country: the comic books.

        “I started out drawing mini-comics and making Xerox comics that I sold at my local comic book store,” says Brown. “My first comic book was ‘Clumsy’, which I sent out to publishers, who all passed on publishing it. After talking to a friend (Chris Ware), I decided to self-publish, printing up 2,000 copies of ‘Clumsy.’ The book sold really well, and after a little while, ‘Top Shelf Productions’ took over publishing it, and began publishing my subsequent books as well.”

         Brown’s publisher, “Top Shelf Productions,” is based in Marietta, Georgia. It started publishing its first comics back in 1997, and its stable includes such artists as Alan Moore and Craig Thompson.

        Brown’s debut work, ‘Clumsy,’ was first released in 2000, and later re-released by “Top Shelf Productions.” The story opens in New York City, with subsequent events in Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Florida, and places in between.  It depicts a yearlong and long-distance relationship that occurred in Brown’s life between July 3, 2000, and June 27, 2001.

        “A lot of my inspiration to create my comic books comes from music, art, film and of course, books, both comics and prose,” says Brown. “The other source of inspiration, since I write a lot of autobiography, is the little moments of everyday life that are funny or touching.”

         Comic books combine literacy (dialogues), bolstered by visual stimulus (drawings). The Italian film theoretician Ricciotto Canudo published in France the manifesto known in French as the “Manifest dê Sept Arts,” in 1911, in which he classified cinema as the seventh art. Following Canudo’s classification, photography was later known as the eighth art, while comics (sequential art) hits the list as the ninth worldwide art. 

         The pioneers of drawing comic strips and comic books were artists from the 19th century, such as (Dutch) Rudolf Töpffer, (German) Wilhelm Busch, (French) Christophe Chabouté and (Brazilian) Angelo Agostini. Known as “história em quadrinhos” (or “banda desenhada”) in Brazil, “bande dessinée” in France, “strips” in Holland, “fumetti” in Italy and “manga” in Japan, the earliest known modern comic book (but not the first one) was "The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck,” published by Töpffer in several languages in Europe in 1837.

         Born in 1975 in Grand Rapids, Mich., Brown moved to Chicago, Ill., in 2000 to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for his Master of Fine Arts degree in painting and drawing.  The campus includes five buildings located in the immediate vicinity of the Art Institute of Chicago’s building, a museum with an extensive collection of Impressionist and American art. In addition to Brown, the school has a wide range of impressive well-known alumni, including the animator and founder of Disney, Walt Disney. Brown currently lives in Chicago with his partner and their ten-month-old son.

         “I met Ware (comic book artist and cartoonist) at a signing back in 2000 when I first moved to Chicago, and started showing my work to him,” says Brown. “He gave me advice, in addition to inspiring me. It was probably the biggest reason that I turned from so called ‘fine art painting’ to draw comics instead.”

         Brown’s work includes his 2003 Ignatz Award winner in the category of “Outstanding Mini-Comic,” “I’m Going to Be Small,” a collection of single-page and single-panel humor strips. Brown also was nominated for awards in the categories of  “Outstanding Artist” and “Outstanding Graphic Novel” in 2005 for “Bighead,” a super-hero parody, featuring the super-hero named after the novel, “Bighead.”

         “I draw almost always - 99.9 percent of the time - with Uniball Deluxe Micro pens,” says Brown. “I usually draw in blank hardbound sketchbooks, from a variety of markers, from local handmade books, to sketchbooks I've bought while traveling. I also like to shop at several stores in Chicago – “Chicago Comics,” “Quimbys,” and right near my apartment, “Darktower.”

         The Ignatz Awards are named in honor of the American cartoonist George Herriman, author of the comic strip “Krazy Kat,” that appeared for the first time in the American newspapers in 1913, and was continuously published until 1944. The Ignatz Awards have been awarded for 10 consecutive years (skipping a year in 2001 due to the tragedy of the Twin Towers on September 11).

          The winners are selected by votes cast by the attendees of the annual Small Press Expo (an alternative comics convention). The awards recognize the work of comics and cartooning by small press creators or creator-owned projects published by large publishers. Brown served on of the Ignatz Awards juries for the 2006 ceremony.

         The United States is currently the leading producer of comic books worldwide. Many of the comic books have spawned movies produced after comic books or based on them. Among these are: “Alien vs. Predator”, published by “Dark Horse Comics”; “Batman,” “Daredevil,” “Elektra,” “Fantastic Four,” “Ghost Rider,” “Hulk,” “Spider Man,” “Superman” and “X-men,” all published by “Marvel Comics,” along with “Josie and the Pussycats”, published by Archie Comics, and “Man in Black,” published by Aicel Comics; as well as many others. 

         “If I could be a comic book character, I guess I would like to be Wolverine, from ‘X-men,” says Brown. “He was always my favorite character when I was reading comics growing up.”

         Brown’s work steps out of the stereotyped super-hero comic books kind of novel  – with the exception of “Bighead” – to create bittersweet humorous autobiographical pieces. 

         “I like movies that come after comic books,” says Brown. “Some of them are entertaining enough, though not as much as some other comic movies like ‘Ghost World’ or ‘Art School Confidential.’ I don’t want any of my autobiographical books made into movies, necessarily, maybe just if it was the right director. But It would be fun to see a

‘Bighead’ or ‘Incredible Change-boots’ film. Maybe I would like to see Michel Gondry directing them.”

         Both of the comics cited by Brown as good comic movies were written and illustrated by Daniel Clowes of Chicago, one of his favorite writers. “Ghost World” became a movie in 2001, directed by Terry Zwigoff and featuring Scarlett Johansson, and most recently, “Art Confidential School” became a movie in 2006 and also was directed by Zwigoff. It featured John Malkovich.

         Zwigoff’s career as a filmmaker is mainly based off of movies and documentaries derived from comics.

         “Two of my favorite comic book writers are Ware and Clowes,” says Brown. “Besides, I would say (Canadian) Julie Doucet, (Canadian) Chester Brown, (American) Anders Nilsen, (American) Paul Hornschemeier, (American) Kevin Huizenga, (American) Renee French, (Scottish) Grant Morrison and (Canadian) Genvieve Elverum.”

         Many of them became well known from their autobiographical comics.

         In addition to the afore mentioned, “Clumsy,” “I Am oing to Be Small,” “Bighead” and “Incredible Change-boots,” Brown’s work also includes “Unlikely,” “AEIOU,” “Be A Man,” “Minisulk” and “Every Girl is the End of the World For Me.”

         His most recent work was released in 2007 and titled “Cat Getting Out Of A Bag and other observations.” It’s a “Cat Book” – that shows the joys of living with a cat  -, according to Brown.

         “Little Things,” drawn more recently but not yet published, is to be released in April of 2008. It features a story titled “These Things, These Things,” a phrase from a song by Andrew Bird.

         For Brown, Bird’s music became the thread running through the story because of the inspiration that Bird’s music gives him. Like Brown, Bird is from Illinois. Bird’s song that inspired Brown is titled “Headsoak.”

         “I used to work at Barnes & Noble, but I just quit my job to become a full-time cartoonist,” says Brown. “Right now I’m working on a book titled ‘Funny Misshapen Body,’ which is a memoir of high school / college / art school, and I guess tells the story of how I ended up drawing comics.”

         For future cartoonists, Brown offers four useful pieces of advice:

         “First, read a lot of comic, of all kinds, and see what’s possible, what’s been done,” says Brown. “You will learn a lot from the work of others. Second, concentrate on your work, don’t worry about who’s going to read it, or publish it, or what people will think of it. Make work that resonates with yourself. Third, send your work out to cartoonists and publishers whose work you like or whose work is similar to what you would like to do – ask for critiques and advice. And last, make a lot of work. Work whenever you can, draw and/or write constantly. The only way to improve is to keep making more and more work until everything clicks.”