AEIOU: Any Easy Intimacy (The Girlfriend Trilogy) - Softcover

Jeffrey Brown is the best selling author and illustrator of the middle grade Jedi Academy series, as well as the Darth Vader and Son series. When he was a kid, Jeffrey always dreamed of growing up to draw comics and make books for a living—and now he’s living that dream! Jeffrey has written a number of autobiographical books for adults (Clumsy, Unlikely, and A Matter of Life, among others, all from Top Shelf Productions), humorous graphic novels about cats (Cat Getting Out of a Bag, Cats Are Weird, from Chronicle Books), and parodies like Incredible Change-Bots (and its two sequels, all also from Top Shelf).

His most recent project has been 40,000 years in the making: Lucy & Andy Neanderthal! Lucy and Andy are a brother and sister living in the stone age, where they struggle to survive mammoths, cave bears, and their own sibling rivalry. Lucy & Andy Book Two: The Stone Cold Age is available now.

Apparently, one of the side effects of dating Brown is that he draws a comics memoir about you afterwards. This work, originally published in a limited edition, is Brown's follow-up to his previous dating books Clumsy and Unlikely, and documents the author's relationship with his third girlfriend (a co-worker at a video store) in detail, dredging up some emotionally loaded details. Like those other works, it's drawn in a deceptively low-key, dashed-off-looking way, with one or two little square panels on each page; and it again focuses on the banalities of predate small talk, mid-relationship kidding around and angsty postcoital chatter. Brown and Sophia hang out, have sex, break up, talk on the phone about their relationship, get back together, break up again, make out, argue, etc. There's no plot and no resolution, just a series of snapshots of the moments of intimacy that stick in a lover's memory. Brown draws beautifully—offhand-looking doodles have a magisterial sureness. There are a couple of fine set pieces, too, especially a section called "The Long Pause Before a First Kiss." Ultimately, though, Brown adds little to his previous observations on relationships. (June)
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