‘Bighead’ skewers superhero genre

Jeffrey Brown drops formal art studies to give comics a go

By Joseph Gallivan

The Portland Tribune, Nov 30, 2004, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Jeffrey Brown can draw.

You wouldn’t think so, looking at his new comic book, “Bighead.” The tights-wearing superhero with the diminutive cephalic index fends off the likes of Bullman, Heartbroke and brainy kid Mister-Mind from within the bounds of wobbly, hand-drawn panels.

The shading has shades of R. Crumb on a very bad day. Faces and text look like they’ve been executed left-handed, and the characters are constantly collapsing into self-parody. But that’s the point. “Bighead” is a parody of a superhero comic.

Brown, 29, studied painting and drawing at the respected School of the Art Institute in Chicago, getting his MFA in 2002.

“I went back to school because my painting was not expressing what I wanted to express,” he says.

It didn’t quite work out.

In his first year, after he and his painting received a bad critique, he fell out of love with the medium and followed in the footsteps of Chris Ware, who had become known at the school for his alternative comics.

“I wanted to unlearn drawing and be as expressive as as possible,” Brown says. “I wanted to draw like you do when you’re a kid.” He says he found immense freedom in not worrying about issues of representation, technique or style.

His comics, such as the graphic novel “Clumsy” (2002, in its third printing), started focusing on his relationships and feelings. “Clumsy,” rather like Craig Thompson’s popular “Blankets,” deals with a naive love affair. (Brown has become friends with Thompson, who comes from the Midwest, too, and will stay at his home when Brown comes through Portland on his book tour. In a world of $500 advances, the authorial couch surf is common.)

My hero!

“Bighead” is laid out as a fake compendium of short superhero comics, although the stories never came out individually. Toward the end of the book Brown includes some of his drawings from 1993, when he first came up with the character, one drawing per page.

“I was poking fun at splash pages,” he says, referring to the superhero convention that reserves one page for a single spectacular image. That earlier mocking of the people who collect “Spider-Man,” an easy target, gave way to a formal experiment in storytelling and subject matter when he took up “Bighead” again as an adult.

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