New Physics by Box Brown
Yeah Dude Comics
Number 2 by Box Brown
Retrofit Comics
Here at Panel Patter we've enjoyed the group of Yeah Dude Comics mini-comics that were funded via a Kickstarter. We're also fans of Box Brown's work, so put the two together? We had to take a look.


Brown recently also published Number 2 as part of his Retrofit line of comics. (There will be a Retrofit Spotlight soon.) In this issue he tells 2 insightful stories, both with a distinct air of loneliness to them.

The second story (called Elroy Mirrors' Big Score) concerns (not surprisingly) Elroy, a documentary filmmaker. The story covers a few days in his life (while his wife is away) as he's interviewed for a podcast, follows film-specific media and other social media obsessively (and harbors resentment at all of the attention his friend and fellow filmmaker Keren is getting). He plays video games, works on his documentary, and begrudgingly takes a gig helping out another filmmaker with lighting work for that person's documentary. During the course of this story, we see Elroy's disdain and judgments towards the subjects of these films, and at the suck-ups on social media who aren't sucking up to him enough. At the end of the story we see him in bed, with his dog, talking to his wife. Naturally she asks about Keren.

These are both excellent short stories. By contrast to New Physics, both of these stories are black & white, but Brown brings a great deal of creative, design, layout and visual narrative skill to both of these stories. Both stories seem to be dealing with people who aren't entirely happy about how their lives have turned out (a fertile ground for storytelling). The approach is different though, as SK8R H8R tells a much more narrow story about a specific episode in Rose's life. However, just a few quick points (she's 33, riding a skateboard home drunk, and stopping at White Castle) give the reader something of a picture into her life and the bad day she's having.
By contrast, Elroy Mirrors' Big Score accomplishes a great deal in 30-something pages. I don't know if there's any biographical element in this, but it feels very emotionally honest look at the life of a working creator. Elroy seems to be working successfully at his craft (he's being interviewed by podcasts and gets some attention as a filmmaker), but the truth is that in any endeavor (creative or not) there's always going to be someone who gets more attention and has more success than you do.
A lot of us probably spend more time than we should not appreciating what we have, and instead obsessing over the attention that others are receiving. Brown also focuses in Elroy Mirrors' Big Score on the role of social media and the way it pervades our lives and sense of self. These stories have a "warmer," less angular feel to them visually than New Physics (probably because they take place in the present day) but particularly in Elroy Mirrors' Big Score Brown uses some ambitious sequential storyteling. During the course of the story, we see the actual blogs and social sites that Elroy follows (along with snippets of texts between him and others), and then at some point we see an entire page where he imagines 2 different blogs he could start, complete with comment sections (with some terrific, spot-on humor in those comments sections).
These are all great books; Brown is a talented, insightful creator and these are short stories but full of ambitious ideas. If you see Brown in person at SPX, or want to order them online, New Physics and Number 2 are well worth a look.