Discover Top Posts Tagged with #mk brown

STRANGER THAN LIFE!

The wild world of MK Brown, from @fantagraphics

#mk brown #stranger than life #comics #comixology #fantagraphics

Love: It Makes the World Go 'Round

by MK Brown

#MK Brown #Comics #National Lampoon #New Yorker #I Like That #RJ Casey

Camel Racing in the Desert

by MK Brown

#MK Brown #Comics #National Lampoon #New Yorker #I Like That #RJ Casey

Week 7 - MK Brown

If you’re like me, you’ve danced in front of the mirror a time or two. You might have even winked at or mean mugged the face staring back at you. In those brief, fleeting seconds, you became an MK Brown drawing. For she is the patron saint of peculiar expressions, herky-jerky movements, and questioning what is normal.

MK Brown’s comics, gags, and drawings have appeared in such places as the sometimes-seminal National Lampoon magazine to the constantly quintessential New Yorker (or is it the other way around?). Truthfully, I would rather see Brown draw feet, hands, and hair over any other artist. I consider her on my “Mount Rushmore” of comic creators, but I can’t help but do something that I generally dislike to do — compare her drawings to other things. You know those bumbling, grey-scaled “before” actors in infomercials? The ones who spill the spaghetti on the couch or drop the ring of keys down the gutter? Those unfortunates remind me of the way Brown’s characters exist on her pages. Have you ever seen a modern art piece in a dentist’s office? A bright neon pink streak scurrying through a tacky turquois backdrop? MK Brown’s watercolors often bring these to mind and they’re all the better for it (especially in my favorite comic of hers, Snakes in the Bathroom). Carrot Top pulling a Freaky Friday with Lady Gaga? Yeah, that could make some dough-faced eccentrics only worthy of a MK Brown gag panel.

I make these associations because Brown’s art forces your brain to do so. She sets you up in familiar places or tropes — business meetings, vacations, old Westerns — then pulls the rug out swiftly and so astutely that you don’t even feel it. One minute you’re standing on your nice Parisian, the next, you’ve got your head stuck in a bottle. MK Brown’s art takes the world we all live in and slightly alters it to escalate the charm, build up the curious contentment, and amplify the absurd. All doing this while it still appears to us, the readers and examiners, that our feet are still planted in a comfortable place.

Whether it’s people acting as things or things — neck ties, tortillas, laundry hampers — acting as people, MK Brown’s art is always bizarre and delightful. Her range of skills in writing (which could fill another entire page), pacing (ditto), cartooning, and water coloring deserve to be read, explored, and most of all, treasured.

#MK Brown #Comics #National Lampoon #New Yorker #Art #I Like That #RJ Casey

Fantagraphics artists and authors have taken a run at a few museums! Visit the flog to see more pictures from shows featuring MK Brown (Stranger than Life), Janet Hamlin (Sketching Guantanamo) and Jacques Boyreau (SuperTrash, Sexytime).