Clumsy

AUTHOR: Brown, Jeffrey

ARTIST: Jeffrey Brown (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Top Shelf Comics

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2002

Publication History

In 2000, Jeffrey Brown left Grand Rapids, Michigan, at age twenty-five to pursue an M.F.A. at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Although a lifelong comic book enthusiast, Brown came to Chicago with ambitions to be a serious, commercially viable painter. At the same time, he kept carefully bound volumes of diary-like sketchbooks in which he recorded his emotional life. A year into the program, Brown began to feel as if his studio paintings did not reflect his best work and were not generating enthusiasm among his teachers. He met Chris Ware, only five years his senior, whose groundbreaking graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000) had just been released. With Ware’s encouragement, Brown decided to develop his sketchbooks.

As Brown was in the midst of a catastrophic breakup of a year-long relationship, the material that came most readily to him was the raw elements of that relationship. He shaped the experience into a manuscript that related the breakup in a nonlinear narrative of more than 100 one- and two-page vignettes, accompanied by his own deliberately crude, childlike drawings. The work became his M.F.A. thesis. It was initially rejected by publishers, most notably Top Shelf Comics and Fantagraphics Books. At Ware’s suggestion, Brown photocopied one hundred copies at a Kinko’s and circulated them himself in small comic book outlets around Chicago. A producer for This American Life, an influential syndicated talk show on National Public Radio, happened on a copy and pursued Brown for a segment. The exposure caused an upsurge in demand, as did Internet buzz about the book’s originality and its frank treatment of adult relationships. Brown was subsequently signed by Top Shelf Comics, which released Clumsy in 2002.

Plot

Clumsy chronicles a one-year, largely long-distance relationship between Jeff, a hypersensitive graduate student in art and design who suffers from Crohn’s disease (periodic inflammations of the digestive system), and Theresa, a freelance ceramist. The plotline frustrates retelling, as Brown mirrors the fragmented logic of recollection by using a nonlinear narrative. Events during the relationship are recounted in apparently random order, although later editions of the book provide a time line. Thus, reading the novel mimics Jeff’s own memory, itself clumsy and inefficient, as readers move through emotional highlights, both wonderful and painful.

Jeff and Theresa meet during a summer road trip with two mutual friends. Jeff is just four months past a long-term relationship and is initially put off by Theresa, who looks to him like a renegade hippie. However, during the course of the trip, in the close confines of his friend’s camper, Jeff and Theresa find their attraction irresistible. When they make love for the first time, they only know each other’s first names.

The vignettes reveal tender moments. They huddle close in a steady rain to watch airplanes land, comb a beach for shells, and doodle on placemats in Arby’s. Theresa gives Jeff a haircut. They exchange Valentine’s Day gifts. She poses nude while he sketches her. They go on a series of increasingly competitive dates that include air hockey, bowling, go-carts, foosball, and miniature golf.

There are also moments that recount with unflinching candor the couple’s quickly escalating sexual life, including mutual oral sex in Jeff’s bedroom at his home while his parents are in the other room, making love during Theresa’s period, Jeff’s inability to enjoy sex while wearing a condom (and the subsequent pregnancy scare), Theresa’s gratitude following a tectonic orgasm, and phone sex (as most of their relationship is long distance). There are also petty fights over her smoking, his neediness, her fantasies about sleeping with female comic book heroes, his inclination to pout, and her obsession with the imperfections of her body. If there is a narrative center, it is the revelation late in the story that Theresa, too, has been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease.

The breakup, in the closing pages, is executed over the phone, appropriate for a relationship that has been long distance. Jeff calls Theresa at her Florida home. Her mother summons her to the phone, saying that “John” is calling. Paranoid, Jeff asks anxiously about John, and discovers that he is a friend who has been calling Theresa recently. This leads to a conversation in which Theresa ends their relationship, saying that she is tired of the pain that she and Jeff cause each other. The closing vignette is an earlier phone conversation during which Jeff and Theresa joked lightly about getting married, and the last frame shows Jeff alone on his single bed, the phone at his feet.

Jeff is portrayed as overly sensitive and needy, a depiction that some critics have found to be melodramatic. Partially in response to this criticism, Brown published a kind of parody of Clumsy in 2004. Titled Be a Man, it offered a much different take on Jeff, using the same experiences but portraying him as something of a chauvinist who will say anything to get Theresa into bed.

Characters

•Jeff, the protagonist, is a twentysomething art student living in Chicago. His face is shadowed by a “retrogrunge” stubble, and he carries an unflattering paunch. Socially clumsy and introspective, Jeff is given to sweet gestures rather than earnest communication, often communicating his emotions via his sketches or with long, meaningful stares. In his first serious relationship, the sensitive Jeff evinces his radical neediness, a smothering attachment that masks the emptiness of his larger life and creates inevitable friction in his relationship.

•Theresa, Jeff’s love interest, is a twentysomething ceramist who specializes in freelance pottery work. Seen objectively—that is, not through the lens of Jeff’s obsession—Theresa is something of a whiner with significant self-esteem issues; she harps on the fact that she did not finish high school and is uncomfortable with her body, seeing herself as fat and considering her body hair to be unsightly. Despite this, she is quick to use sex as a substitute for intimacy. Against the spongy and effeminate Jeff, she is cool, less enamored with the romantic. Nothing about her is typically feminine. She is fiercely competitive on their dates and in bed, is forthright about sex and frank about her orgasms, and is drawn to female superheroes such as Jet Girl andXena.When Theresa learns that she has Crohn’s disease, she does not indulge in self-pity, but rather is matter-of-fact about the diagnosis.

Artistic Style

Brown creates a visual format that reflects the naïveté and vulnerability of his fictional persona. The artwork consists of rough black-and-white pen sketches that mimic the slapdash composition style of an adolescent, resembling more the immediacy and untutored honesty of study-hall doodling than the work of an M.F.A. candidate. The handwritten dialogue, rendered in clumsy bubbles, is irregular, cramped, and difficult to read at times, as Brown uses the visual text to impede communication with the reader and thereby underscore the growing emotional distance between his two characters. Some dialogue is actually scratched out, or inserted into the text with a caret. Lines carelessly violate the frame, perspective within the frame is skewered, and everyday objects such as telephones, tables, and windows are rendered without realistic detailing.

The bodies, critical given the frank sexual content, are decidedly nonerotic. Leg hair looks like lesions, Jeff’s facial hair resembles runaway acne, and Theresa’s pubic hair is a shocking, even angry, cross-hatching of scribbled lines. Visually, each page creates a sense of absence and isolation. The six tight panels on each page underscore the loneliness at the thematic center of the work: Each frame maintains its own integrity, never touching another, and each page is latticed with overly generous white space.

Themes

As a “perzine,” that is, an autobiographical work (a “personal zine”), Clumsy does not aspire to grand themes. Rather, much like a talk show that is earnestly invested in revealing the joy and agony of relationships and the risks of intimacy, Clumsy finds its deepest rapport with readers who share Brown’s disarmingly honest perspective on the realities of a young person’s first serious relationship. The Seinfeld-esque vignettes record the entire arc of such a relationship, revealing ordinary elements with wrenching realism: the small gestures of caring, the thrill of discovering sexual intimacy, the squabbles over trivia, the settled routine of dating, and the special tensions of relationships maintained across distance.

Honesty, then, is perhaps Brown’s most compelling theme. He neither pretties up his persona’s character nor distorts his former girlfriend into a convenient villain. At one point, Jeff and Theresa attend a Chicago taping of The Jerry Springer Show, in its day the epitome of trashy talk shows, in which cartoonish guests offered the most lurid and extreme examples of relationship nightmares. Although they join the audience in shouting at the guests, both Jeff and Theresa are disappointed, finding the show to be dishonest and silly. In this way, Brown underscores his own decision to maintain an honest account of a relationship and to resist the cartoonish, an ironic gesture given his medium. Like viewers of more sophisticated talk shows, readers of Brown’s novel can certainly gain some insight (be less possessive, more considerate, and more patient, for example), but Brown does not insist on such themes. The theme here is broader: Brown’s assertion that the most personal stories of love are significant in and of themselves.

Impact

That Brown grew up enthralled by the superheroes of classic Marvel Comics and the Transformers series is a reminder of the dimension of his impact on the graphic novel. Clumsy counters the assumption that graphic novels must indulge in extravagant fantasy or escape into grandiose conceptions of alternative realities animated by high-tech innovations and peopled by caricatural superheroes and supervillains. Rather, it introduced into the graphic novels of its era the concept of an intimacy between the writer and the reader. Clumsy is a novel created by the writer’s decision to use the format to share the most intimate details of his personal life, details that would find resonance at the most intimate levels of readers. Despite its disarmingly childlike drawings, Clumsy required a mature appreciation.

Although it was hardly the first such autobiographical effort, Clumsy created a receptive audience for low-key graphic novels about the complex relationship issues experienced by the adolescent readers who comprise the genre’s main demographic. Much like the minimalist short fiction of a generation earlier, in which writers pared down the presentation of character and plot to reveal the hard realities of intimacy with often-uncomfortable directness, Brown’s novel suggests that the graphic novel genre could tackle thorny coming-of-age experiences without relying on splashy, colorful sheets. Clumsy is a forthright treatment of sex, which had long been the province of traditional novels.

Brown returned to the genre to finish publishing what has come to be described as his “girlfriend trilogy,” which includes Clumsy; Unlikely (2003), a prequel about Jeff losing his virginity a year before he meets Theresa; and AEIOU: Any Easy Intimacy (2005), a sequel about another relationship, this one with a video-store clerk named Sophia. These are not happy narratives. Brown created for Generation X a subgenre of the graphic novel that follows a circumscribed arc in which relationships apparently cannot resist the centripetal pull toward disappointment. The books thus generate an oppressive sensibility in which Brown’s readers are left to return to a grown-up world, one that diminishes rather than rewards expectations and leaves sensitive hearts profoundly alone.

Further Reading

Brown, Chester. I Never Liked You (1994).

Clowes, Daniel. Ghost World (1997).

Doucet, Julie. My New York Diary (2004).

Bibliography

Brown, Jeffrey. “When Jeffrey Was Brown: An Interview.” Interview by Ian Brill. Comic Book Galaxy, 2010. http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/jbrown.html.

Montero, Patrick. “Comic Book Artist Jeffrey Brown: More Than Meets the Eye.” New York Daily News, November 1, 2007. http://articles.nydailynews.com/2007-11-01/entertainment/17905837‗1‗comics-fantagraphics-graphic-novel.