Jeffrey Brown is the Ignatz Award winning author of over a dozen comic books and graphic novels, including Cat Getting Out of a Bag, Little Things, and Clumsy, which was featured on NPR’s This American Life. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s, the Best American Comics series, and Fantagraphics’ MOME anthology, and has been exhibited in LA, Chicago, New York and Paris. His most recent book is Funny Misshapen Body, published by Touchstone.

What initially drew you to the language of comics? How would you characterize your particular approach to the form?

JB: I grew up reading comics, starting with Garfield in the newspaper, moving on to comic books from Marvel, and then to some of the more mature European comics and the alternative comics of the 90s in the U.S.… so I feel like I’ve loved the form as long as I can remember, and my earliest dream job was to draw comic books. I guess for me it was a love of books and reading instilled by my parents, as well as a love of drawing I’ve had since age two, that made comics an obvious choice for me. I would characterize my approach as greatly informed by the goals of the expressionist movement, and with an interest in immediacy and directness. Especially lately I’ve been using more varied styles and formats with my work, so I feel like it’s becoming harder to categorize in a general sense.

So many of your comics are intimately autobiographical (such as your graphic novel, Little Things), including the one you did for this series. Do fictions or false memories ever seep into stories you recount? How do you decide which moments to depict?

JB: So far all of my autobiography has been absolutely true and honest as far as I can remember it, and part of the reason for this is to create a certain amount of trust between myself as an artist and the audience for the work. Fictionalizing can be just as true and meaningful, but for my own art I wasn’t able to achieve that until I started writing explicitly about my own life and experiences. I think eventually I’ll turn more to fiction, but I feel like what I’ve written so far will only help make the work I create in the future more honest and valid. I don’t have any specific method for choosing what to write about, mostly it comes down to instinct, and trusting that if something nags me enough to keep thinking about turning it into a comic, it’s important somehow.

Do your friends and family ever object to the way they’re portrayed?

JB: Not really… there’s been a couple times where people have been bothered by something-or-other, usually something minor in my eyes, or having to do with how something could be interpreted, but something that I haven’t had a problem changing or fixing. The usual response from people, though, is interest in how I saw things compared to how they remember the experience. Of course, it’s possible that there’re people who are very angry, but they’d be the people I’m no longer in contact with.

Your comics have a childlike expressiveness to them, even when taking on rather adult subjects. How did you start working in this way, and what has it enabled you to do?

JB: I was in art school and art had stopped being as enjoyable, and also I felt the art I was making wasn’t as honest as it could be. The time I remember art being the most fun and the most honest is when I was a kid, and I wanted to get back to that. I wanted to get past all the Art concerns and make work that was as direct and expressive as possible.

Even when your comics are dark or serious, they tend to elicit an uncontrollable smile in their readers—one might call it a balance of cynical realism and genuine lightheartedness. Is this an important contrast for you?

JB: Definitely. It’s like Monty Python’s The Life Of Brian: always look on the bright side of life… I want to acknowledge that life is hard and can be horrible and unforgiving, but at the same time I want to express the idea that life is still good even when it’s bad, and you can find happiness whatever your circumstances. Or something like that.

Your comic for this series, Not If, But When, suggests (rather gloomily) that another mass extinction—like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs—is inevitable. Some might say that this perspective makes it difficult to motivate people to make positive changes in their lifetimes. How would you respond to this? Are you really this honest with your son about the ultimate fate of our species?

JB: Well, I’m not that honest with him yet—I mean, he’s two! This piece is trying to capture a sentiment that I’d like to expand on someday; there’re some people who feel that atheists don’t value life or think it’s pointless, or that death—or extinction—makes life meaningless. I think the opposite is true: that if you believe that there’s no afterlife, life is even more meaningful—there’s even more reason to make something good of this life. As far as we know, death is inevitable in all cases, so coming to terms with that is an important part of finding meaning in life. It can be disheartening to think about it, but I think it underscores just how precious life on Earth is, and having a son has made me all the more aware of that.

What are the issues facing us today that you’re most interested in, concerned about, or motivated by as an artist? What should we be paying attention to?

JB: I think we should be paying attention to whatever issues we can—I think narrowing the concerns of art down is counterproductive, and artists should follow whatever their interests are, because there’s room for it all. As soon as artists start consciously trying to make their art about that one huge, all-important issue, their art starts to become less powerful. I think for the most part I’m motivated to make art that is about trying to understand life, as filtered through my own sense of what it means to be a good person. Mostly, I try not to over-think what I’m doing, and follow my own particular interests wherever they might lead.