By Zack Quaintance — For the first time ever, cartoonist Jeffrey Brown — who you may know from his adorable kid-friendly Darth Vader and Son books — is compiling his early-career autobiographical sketch comics about relationships into one new giant edition. Dubbed Loved and Lost, the book is slated for release on June 14 via Top Shelf/IDW Publishing, and it will include Clumsy, Unlikely, and Any Easy Intimacy.

The work collected in Loved and Lost is, of course, very different from the mainstream Star Wars comics upon which Brown has built much of his career. First published 20 years ago, these comics are pioneering-works of graphic autobiography, the first of which were made in a single sketchbook after Brown grew frustrated as a painter. They’re mostly about relationships and intimacy in ones early 20s, and they’re strikingly honest, detailing nakedly (for lack of a better word) Brown’s infatuations, embarrassments, and couplings. Fueled by great sincerity with a good amount of angst and touches of witty humor, Loved and Lost now feels like both a relatable snapshot of a very distinct phase of life as well as a precursor to so many comics, graphic novels, and webcomics that came after.

I was particularly interested in how Brown feels about these memories now, as well as what the young-self we get to know so well in these stories might think of his later career. Brown recently made time to talk with me over the phone about all of this and more, in a wide-spanning conversation, the highlights of which you can find below…

INTERVIEW: Jeffrey Brown talks LOVED AND LOST

In preparation for our conversation, I read Loved and Lost in its entirety, and what I was most struck by was how relatable it all felt, how familiar and how reminiscent of a certain period of my own life, even though the exact details were so specific to Brown’s own experiences. For me, the rush of love and infatuation of my early 20s has been a dynamic memory, one that has stayed with me but changed in relation to newer wisdoms I’ve developed as I’ve gotten older. I was curious what Brown’s own experiences was like, thinking about these comics again in preparation for publication roughly 20 years after he first made the earliest of the books in the new collection.

Brown had this to say, at first explaining how he had to revisit these comics to prepare them for publication:

It did require some work. The third book — Any Easy Intimacy — had to be reformatted to get the page count a lot lower and to keep the book from becoming too unwieldy. There was also making sure that all the files were there, just double-checking things, but I didn’t want to do a deep re-read and go over every little bit, partially because I wanted to not change things. I didn’t want to remake the work, and I wanted to keep it true to what it was. But it’s also because it is weird to look back 20 years at work that I was making when I was such a different person. The work is about a different me. It’s just a weird thing to be confronted with, with these past selves, in a way.

And as for whether his own relationship to this work has changed over time…

In some ways, it hasn’t. I still feel protective, like these works are…I’m trying to find the right metaphor, saying they’re my children seems weird…but I feel like there’s a preciousness to them for me. I feel close to them, in a way. Yet, over the years, something about making these memories into comics turned them into something different. It’s like my real memories have been replaced by my memories of the comics. They’ve been formalized into something else.
Growing older, it’s sometimes hard to know if my memory is different because of the comics, and how I’m looking at the comics and thinking of the memories in that context, or how much of that is just that I’m older now and my brain has less space for things from 20 years ago.

I was also struck by the timing of this new collection. While Brown notes that he and Top Shelf had been discussing this for five years, and, certainly, the 20th anniversary of the original publication made now seem appropriate, Loved and Lost in some ways feels more poignant amid pandemic times. These are, after all, stories about intimacy, and long distance relationships, and wanting to be nearer to people, both physically and psychologically.

Loved and Lost being published in 2022 also makes for an easy comparison to the scores of autobiographical comics that are now widely available via webcoimcs and social media platforms, which wasn’t the case when these stories were first made, sold as they were in the back of shops where Brown lives in Chicago.

Brown reflected on all of this, on putting these comics out again into a changed world, saying:

It is such a different world. The very very first version of Clumsy was just Xeroxed. I just sold it at a few shops around Chicago, and the feedback was someone finding the book at the store Quimby’s and getting my information from Quimby’s to get in touch. Now, everything is so instantaneous and it’s so easy to connect with people through email or social media. There’s a difference of just how the work entered the world and the accessibility to it. It used to be all the really weird, obscure things were truly you would just find them hiding in the back corner of some strange comic book shop. Now, it’s much more accessible. Doing such deeply personal work, it’s hard for me to say how I would have approached that if it was entering the world the way webcomics enter the world now, posted regularly with feedback that’s instantaneous.

In the time since, Brown has continued to publish autobiographical comics, albeit about different themes than those that appear in Loved and Lost. His book A Matter of Life, for example, is about fatherhood, both in terms of his own relationship with his dad and about him becoming a dad himself.

But Brown says he’s not sure he’ll be putting out any new autobiographical comics any time soon, although it can be hard to predict:

After doing all the Star Wars and kids stuff I’ve done the past 10 years or so, I’ve drifted away from doing autobiographical work, which was partially a conscious decision because I’ve done so much of it previously and I wanted to change directions anyway. Even in my sketchbooks I had stopped doing much, but I started doing short comics I posted on Instagram, very one-off and less emotionally involved.
[A Matter of Life] was a book I’d wanted to do for a while, and it was something that was deeply personal. After I finished that, I didn’t have a particular something else about life that I wanted to write about. I’d written about art school and being an artist, I’d written about health issues — I’d kind of covered the different things that I’d wanted to write about already. I’m not going to sit down and just think I need to do something autobiographical again. Those books were always more about what came to me. I had an urge to write about it, so I would write about it. I just haven’t had an idea that struck me that I felt like I just had to get it down on paper.

That said, it’s not as if the work Brown has done on properties like Batman and Star Wars (for which he has won Eisner Awards) has been detached. These works are personal and honest as well, although he noted that the nature of the biography is different, coming from his own life to shape the stories he tells with these familiar characters.

In a way, I’m still always writing about myself. With Star Wars and the Darth Vader and Son books, it’s basically writing about myself as a dad, about being a parent, taking things out of my own personal experiences. Even though it’s Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, it’s still autobiographical. There are stories in Jedi Academy based on actual things that happened to me in middle school and high school.
To some degree, I’m always trying to pull something out of my own experiences and life to put it into the work.

Loved and Lost, however, is such a personal work that it’s easy to finish it and feel like you know Jeffrey Brown, or at least the Jeffrey Brown of his early 20s. With that in mind, my last question for Brown was what would his young self think of his career trajectory. Brown had this to say:

My career is surreal the way it’s worked out. I couldn’t have possibly planned things to work out the way they have. When I was a kid growing up, my childhood dream was drawing Star Wars and superhero comics, and I’ve had the chance to do that but in a way that was also very personal and very much my own way of doing it. In high school and college, I started thinking about fine art and I was able to make these autobiographical books that are right in line with that. I’m kind of amazed the me of back then had that much faith in myself, just kind of going along and taking the opportunities as they came, thinking it would work out and continue to work out the way it has.

Loved and Lost is out June 14 from Top Shelf/IDW Publishing, and you can find more info about the book below…

Order Loved and Lost by Jeffrey Brown now!

Loved and Lost by Jeffrey Brown

Loved and Lost
Writer/Artist: Jeffrey Brown
Publisher: IDW Publishing/Top Shelf
A pioneer of 21st-century graphic memoir, Jeffrey Brown captures timeless insights into love, intimacy, and vulnerability in three unforgettable relationship portraits.
Twenty years ago, young painter Jeffrey Brown grew frustrated with the expectations of the art world and wanted desperately to make something real. In a single sketchbook, working directly in ink, he began recording his memories of a recent long-distance relationship, matching the emotional frailty of the young lovers with painfully honest writing and art.
As that book, Clumsy, struck a chord with readers and spawned the follow-ups Unlikely and Any Easy Intimacy, Brown’s work proved a watershed for the emerging form of the graphic memoir. Chronicling the awkward mess of romantic relationships in unsparing and explicit detail, these works also reflect the fragmentary nature of memory, the risk of opening ourselves to pain, and the giggly rush of falling in love.
Now collected into one volume for the first time, this Relationship Trilogy is a bittersweet reminder of the everyday joy, heartbreak, and humor that — despite everything— keep us coming back for more.
Collects Clumsy, Unlikely, and AEIOU or Any Easy Intimacy.
Publication Date: June 14, 2022
Buy It: Paperback / Digital

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He has written about comics for The Beat and NPR Books, among others. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.