I’ve raved about JEFFREY BROWN on this site many times before as he is one of my all time favorite artist/writers…and I thought he was a great counterpoint this week for Artist of the Week to last week’s pick of JAMES JEAN. 

Brown and Jean really could not be more different, and yet their works are singularly powerful, emotional, and beautiful.  As a fan of clean lines and beautifully organized postive and negative spaces that artists such as JAMES JEAN and ADRIAN TOMINE and even ADAM HUGHES so excel at, I would never have thought years ago, before I discovered JEFFREY BROWN that I could fall in love with such a messy, sketchy, non-precise style.  But from the first pages of Brown’s UNLIKELY, I was absolutely in love.  I think the secret for me in what works in Brown’s style is the combination of story and art…the art on its own is easy to dismiss if you aren’t drawn to his style naturally, but combined with his poignant stories about love and loss and all the dimensions inbetween, it’s impossible not to appreciate the rawness of his style.  In simple black and white lines (and with not a ruler in sight) JEFFREY BROWN conveys more emotion in a single panel than most artist can manage in an entire book.  It’s a beautiful sight to behold, and I just never get sick of it. 

Discovering JEFFREY BROWN was one of those transformative moments for me as an artist, as a writer, as a reader, and even just as a person.  My whole world opened up to something I hadn’t even known existed.  It’s an amazing thing to just go to the comic book store one day and have an entire world open up to you in the pages of a simple book…it’s the kind of moment that doesn’t just come around every day and so when it does, you really must treasure it…