Brown, Jeffrey – Undeleted Scenes

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Undeleted Scenes

I wasn’t expecting much of a “theme” out of this.  After all, it is “undeleted scenes,” meaning mostly odds and ends from anthologies, notebooks, and whatnot.  Still, by the end of it I had more of an impression of his overall life than I’ve gotten from any one of this graphic novels, and that’s saying something.  The material ranges from his early days to his having a baby (well, not him, but you get the idea), to the actual raising of the child.  Granted, it often came in more of a “drive-by” format, as there wasn’t space to delve into everything in minute detail, but it painted an impressively revealing whole.  For all you fans of his work out there (and why else would you be reading this?) , if you own the following comics you already possess the bulk of this collection: “Be a Man,” “Feeble Attempts,” and” Minisulk.”  If you just buy the graphic novels and don’t get the individual comics there will be plenty of new material in here for you, although I guess “MiniSulk” was more of a “graphic novel lite,” what with the size and all.  Even if you have all of that, you’re still looking at roughly 100 pages of material that’s new to you, and there is some fantastic stuff in here.  “Be A Man,” for those of you who don’t know, was Jeffrey’s answer to criticism that he was too wimpy in “Clumsy.” It is a thing of sheer beauty to see him turn all faux-macho for 30+ pages, so that’s worth the price of admission right there.  His story about being unable to eat ramen noodles should resonate with anybody who was ever a poor college student, or possibly is still poor now (hey, I bought some just last month!) Then you have his grandma’s reaction to the nudity in his comics (always wondered about that), a lengthy story about bum avoidance and conversations, another weird pseudo-relationship, him almost getting into a drunken brawl (well, the other guy was drunk anyway), fun with medical insurance, and listening too literally to the word of god.  And that’s just the stuff that is pretty much guaranteed to be new to you! “Feeble Attempts” was just a regular old comic, so maybe you missed it, but there’s plenty of good stuff in there that now has a home here.  Really, at the end of the day your only questions should be “Is this good enough for me to buy” and “Is there enough new material to make it worth my while”?  The answer to both of those is an emphatic “yes.” If you’ve never heard of Jeffrey Brown, welcome to the land of the living and maybe check out “Clumsy,” “Funny Misshapen Body” or “Bighead.” You’ll come back to this soon enough, although I guess it may be just a little confusing for new readers (the “Be A Man” stuff in particular would make people think Jeffrey is an a-hole if they weren’t in on the joke), but for everybody else, yeah, I’d say this is required reading.  And it is over 350 pages for $15, so it’s a bargain too…