One Panel Per Day #11 : Clumsy

Clumsy, by Jeffrey Brown. It's easy to dismiss the crudeness of his artwork, but the more you look at it, the more you realize it's a put-on. As a general strategy I'm not sure what I think of that, but in this first OGN it works perfectly. Clumsy is a raw portrayal of a love affair written and drawn immediately after its end, and the artwork perfectly conveys the jumble of emotions that the artist clearly needed to work through at the time.

Reading it, I see so many familiar moments, one that bring back happy memories and others that make me smack my forehead and think, oh yeah, what was I thinking? Brown portrays himself as alternatively smitten, sweet, demanding, bullheaded, and insecure, and includes all/most of the ups and downs of a love affair in a more down-to-earth fashion than, say, Blankets. Not as beautiful as Thompson's celebrated volume, of course, but an immediate, intimate and wrenching depiction of another real-life relationship.