Most Helpful Customer Reviews
22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Little moments of pleasure and pain..., October 15, 2003
This review is from: Clumsy (Paperback)
I picked up "Clumsy" after hearing Jeffrey Brown interviewed by Ira Glass on "This American Life." Brown's autobiographical debut is one of the most disarming and honest books you'll ever read. Anyone who's ever been in love (and then watched it fall apart) will identify with Brown, who tells the story of his doomed long-distance relationship with Theresa through a series of mostly one page comic-strip vignettes. Each perfect, simply drawn page captures the tiny moments that make up a relationship, the kind you look back on in retrospect. The story is not linear (though a timeline/map is included at the back of the book for the obsessives among us) and scenes jump back and forth to different points in the relationship (largely at random but sometimes with intent). Somehow, though, it all makes sense. So many of these moments hit close to home, echoing scenes from both past relationships and the one that took. My fiance (now my wife) also loved the book and elicited many exclamations of "Oh my God...we've been there." I've currently got Brown's follow-up, "Unlikely," which details the loss of his virginity, and his limited edition latest "AEIOU: Any Easy Intimacy..." (declared "the last of the girlfriend books") on order. I'll review them soon.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
low-fi masterpiece, March 18, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: Clumsy (Paperback)
This is the best graphic novel I've read in a long time. I can't say enough good things about this book. Clumsy tells the story of a first love relationship through a series of small, everyday moments. It's the kind of thing that could easily become indulgent, but Brown's writing is so precise and poetic that you can't help being moved by it. Most love stories focus on big dramatic developements--but that's not the way most of us actually experience love. Clumsy shows the whole arc of a relationship without resorting to a conventional dramatic structure. Clumsy is also one of the few artistic accounts I've ever seen of the quiet joys of intimacy, of just being with someone you love, sharing their time. For the unassuming way the story's told, it makes remarkably compelling reading. I've given this book to many friends. Most tell me that they couldn't put it down. And every one of them has favorite moments, vignettes that remind them of their own experiences. The drawing style is simple but by no means simplistic, as one reviewer suggests. Brown's style strikes me as a refreshing antidote to the overdrawn post-R. Crumb groutesqueries of too many other independent comics. Oh, and buyer beware, the reader from Collingswood NJ who hated this book, saves his 5-star reviews for comics like THE HULK and THE PUNISHER.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Read it the same day I bought it., March 19, 2005
This review is from: Clumsy (Paperback)
I read the whole book through the same day I bought it. I couldn't put it down, well only because my eyes got tired. I was almost embarassed to read it on the subway because it had explicit content everywhere, but it wasn't explicit like porno just more like how one thing leads to another and...
This is a good 'graphic' novel because you really get to know Jeffrey and Theresa as they struggle through their relationship. Brown doesn't try to make sense of their struggles or their fun times, but rather he lets the images and conversations spill out into the pages and lets the reader's imagination decide. I could begin to see the points where Jeffrey and Theresa's relationship was beginning to come apart even when Jeffrey and Theresa didn't know it themselves. One can begin to sense the pressure of time and the unraveling of their relationship which Brown shows us for all to see. When Chris Ware talks about Brown's "insatiable need to put it all down on paper," I can hardly think of a better word to describe the heart and fury with which Brown strokes the page with unpretentiousness and innocence. Jeffrey Brown draws with such rage that we can see how much Theresa meant to him from the energy of his not-so-clumsy lines.
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