Review: Love Is A Peculiar Thing

Yet another comic book about how someone’s life was imperfect growing up but they found someone to love and things are a lot better now. We’ve got enough of these cluttering up the discount racks of the nation’s comic book sellers at this point, don’t we, so why bother with with this, from a guy you’ve likely never heard of?

Well, Box Brown is very, very self-aware and willing to pillory himself for a laugh pretty thoroughly as he takes snapshots from his life and assembles them in thoughtful, thematic stories that run the gamut from “I’ve found the love of my life and am having difficulty settling into the new town that we call home” to discussing his fucked-up relationship with money.

I also found that this book had a surplus of that oft-missing element known as charm. Ben and Ellen are people you want to spend time around, not hipster ciphers with punchlines and references instead of dialogue. Ben’s willingness to joke about himself and his circumstances instead of treating everything as a relevatory moment reminds me of a less-deadpan version of Jeffrey Brown. Obviously, none of this would work without Brown’s artwork, a helps underpin everything very nicely, using incidental details and a minimal, cartoonish aesthetic that reminds me of Ivan Brunetti without aping him beat-for-beat.

This self-published work is available in the current issue of Previews. You can see more from Brown on his own website as well as Top Shelf 2.0 and in the rather-excellent Harvest Is When I Need You The Most minicomic.