Every Girl is the End of the World for Me, Jeffery Brown

Maybe I'm just obsessed with other people's lives. Maybe it's that I really, really just want to live off of my art and these guys may not be doing that exactly, but at least they're putting shit out.

Okay. Maybe it's just that Jeffrey Brown has an odd, disconnected way of telling the story of his life. 'Every Girl is the End of the World for Me' is yet another of his little masterpieces where you can feel the discomfort. In a lot of his earlier work, you're stuck with the idea that he's an angsty guy (because, really, he is), but with 'Every Girl' we're treated to a sort of collage of his hits and misses with girls over the course of a year—from the cute waitress to his ex, Allyson—and how he drifts through his days without any real direction (in terms of romance). He flirts and is flirted with a total of nine girls throughout the narrative and, essentially, still ends up alone.

Fun stuff.

Of all of the little one-shots I've been picking up by cartoonists, I have to say that Jeffrey's are some of the few that will stay in my library; often I get a tip on some 'really good' issue by some teenage girl cartoonist, buy it, and realize that it's a waste of my time—to some people (myself included), cartooning is a journal method. To others (Brown and Kochalka) it's a way to express your world your way, however mundane. I don't want to spend thirty panels reading about post-pubescent, pre-world love life when Jeffrey can show us the same emotion, thought, and detail in six.

Moral: be warned when people recommend comics. Unless Captain America is involved. Cap is always good.