Little Things: A Memoir in Slices

A comics memoirist in the slightly worn-out quotidian mode pioneered by Harvey Pekar, Brown has already produced a series of books about his relationships with women. This one's a bit more scattered—it's a collection of short pieces about the last two years of Brown's life, including some medical troubles, a camping trip, various interactions with his cat and a lot of not-particularly-momentous conversations with friends. It doesn't quite cohere into a narrative, although the final section, “A Little Piece of Myself,” gives his relationship stories some closure, showing Brown as a new dad meeting his girlfriend's father. Like his earlier autobiographical books, Little Things is drawn in quick pen doodles—Brown's big-headed, stubbly, emotionally fraught self-caricature appears in almost every panel, and he loads his images with evocative physical details. The ultra-casual style occasionally pays off in comedy, as when he captions a scribbled sketch of a driver who hit his friend's car “actual expression may have been smarmier than appears.” But a handful of his anecdotes veer into tedious accounts of his life as a cartoonist, and most of them ramble aimlessly for too long; his ability to minutely recall his experiences of various kinds of day-to-day ennui doesn't make them interesting. (Apr.)