Go Back In Time and Fix Stuff
by Jeffrey Brown

We're on the plane, reading our aquisitions, and Marcos leans over Kenny to punch me in the shoulder.
"Did you get this?" Jeffery Brown's "Go Back in Time and Fix Things?Pre-Clumsy Comics."
"I did, but I didn't read it yet. I felt like a freak giving him my book, and I need to get over that first."
"Read this, you fuckin' pussy."
It's opened to "Can You Feel Jesus In your Heart?"
I almost start crying, I'm laughing so hard. Laughing. Laughing everytime I read it. Laughing right now. "RARRRRR!"
The easiest thing to forget (or not notice) in the world is that Jeffrey Brown is a great artist. Top-notch all the way up. The sort of improvisational style he uses a lot is intentional (although, I wouldn't be surprised if he said somewhere he's just not a very good artist?but that's why he's so contemptable. He's very, very good.). It's an attempt to take something often said about Charles Shultz's work and what Speigleman has said about his own work on Maus and apply it to makink comics. What Brown does in his best-known works is render his drawings as writing. It's a way of aproaching pure cartooning. For the images to become words, he draws them as though they were. A figure is signified by litteraly crossing the eyes and dotting the tees (and occaisionally dotting the tees and crossing the eyes). His appearance isn't defined by it's litteralness, nor is it defined by the words around it. Rather, the narrative and dialogue are the quoted materials surrounding a visual description. The angry, shaggy haired, unshaven bully grabs a cowering man by his shirt and demands "What's the magic word?" Except, well, because those descriptors are right there in the art (along with several others I left out), the messsage has greater immediacy. The words don't have to be eloquent because the image can be. That and more.
Anyway, this has been a long way around getting at this: Check out that cover! Now that's a drawing. That's Crumb and Sacco and some of the great classical illustrators all coming together to make one fantastic image. The image of a derranged man who thinks he can "go back in time and fix things."
Wham.
The book opens to reveal some nice early cartooning on the first page, but almost hidden on the lower right-hand corner is a fantastic life drawing of a baby in a car seat. The strips document some weird perversions and an attraction to genre elements one wouldn't nnormally associate with Brown (unless they read Bighead or saw that awesome Wolverine story he did?what a snob those Alt. cartoonists can be!).
There's strips of Brown trying to find his voice, there's plenty of the dark humor he is all too unknown for (There's that Jesus piece again,. Wow. just wow.), some more text heavy pieces that seem so weak compared to what might have been written in images instead, some weird relationship moments, a moment where he had a meeting with Chris Ware that seemed too familiar, and the "Secret Worlds of Jesus" (oh my!)?amongst others.
This is a collection of early outtakes. It's Lou Reed recording the first demos of the Velvet Underground in his bathroom by himself. before the band even existed. Sime of it's rough. Some of it is taken from scetchbooks (if not all) and all of it is worth looking at. It's the kind of stuff you wish you'd discover at APE before anyone ever thought of asking Brown to appear as a guest of honor or 'big draw'.

—Justin J. Fox