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  • Published: 19 July 2022
  • ISBN: 9781603095068
  • Imprint: IDW Publishing
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 608
  • RRP: $72.00

Loved and Lost: A Relationship Trilogy

(Clumsy, Unlikely, Any Easy Intimacy)



Twenty years ago, young painter Jeffrey Brown grew frustrated with the expectations of the art world and wanted desperately to make something real. In a single sketchbook, working directly in ink, he began recording his memories of a recent long-distance relationship, matching the emotional frailty of the young lovers with painfully honest writing and art.
 
As that book, Clumsy, struck a chord with readers and spawned the follow-ups Unlikely and Any Easy Intimacy, Brown’s work proved a watershed for the emerging form of the graphic memoir. Chronicling the awkward mess of romantic relationships in unsparing and explicit detail, these works also reflect the fragmentary nature of memory, the risk of opening ourselves to pain, and the giggly rush of falling in love.
 
Now collected into one volume for the first time, this Relationship Trilogy is a bittersweet reminder of the everyday joy, heartbreak, and humor that — despite everything— keep us coming back for more.
 
Collects Clumsy, Unlikely, and AEIOU or Any Easy Intimacy.

A pioneer of 21st-century graphic memoir, Jeffrey Brown captures timeless insights into love, intimacy, and vulnerability in three unforgettable relationship portraits.

Twenty years ago, young painter Jeffrey Brown grew frustrated with the expectations of the art world and wanted desperately to make something real. In a single sketchbook, working directly in ink, he began recording his memories of a recent long-distance relationship, matching the emotional frailty of the young lovers with painfully honest writing and art.
 
As that book, Clumsy, struck a chord with readers and spawned the follow-ups Unlikely and Any Easy Intimacy, Brown’s work proved a watershed for the emerging form of the graphic memoir. Chronicling the awkward mess of romantic relationships in unsparing and explicit detail, these works also reflect the fragmentary nature of memory, the risk of opening ourselves to pain, and the giggly rush of falling in love.
 
Now collected into one volume for the first time, this Relationship Trilogy is a bittersweet reminder of the everyday joy, heartbreak, and humor that — despite everything— keep us coming back for more.
 
Collects Clumsy, Unlikely, and AEIOU or Any Easy Intimacy.

  • Published: 19 July 2022
  • ISBN: 9781603095068
  • Imprint: IDW Publishing
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 608
  • RRP: $72.00

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Praise for Loved and Lost: A Relationship Trilogy

"Mr. Brown seems to understand perfectly the day-to-day rhythms of the modern 'young adult' relationship. Unlikely, like his first book Clumsy, is pretty much impossible to put down." -- Dan Clowes
 
"Something about the way Jeffrey Brown draws these stories makes the saddest, dirtiest, most humiliating things that can possibly happen to a person seem weirdly innocent. The scratchy simplicity of the drawings makes the people in them all seem guileless and sweet. You feel like you're reading about some very well-meaning children who also happen to have sex, smoke pot and drink. Maybe it's just that Jeffrey Brown is a very nice man, and he projects this niceness onto everyone around him, even people who aren't treating him so well. You can open to any page and find something unusually bare and honest about these stories. They're surprising, even though half the moments in the book are ones you've probably experienced yourself. Hard trick to pull off." -- Ira Glass, This American Life, NPR
 
Any Easy Intimacy... is an unmediated, raw and immediate account, and rings so very, very true that I cannot imagine it not speaking, directly and movingly, to anyone who has ever loved and lost.” — Neel Mukherjee, The Times (UK)
 
“Jeffrey Brown’s work is charming and fantastic.” — Whitney Matheson, USA Today
 
“Funny, sad, and a little embarrassing, Jeffrey Brown... delivers the look at real life that other forms of ‘reality’ entertainment falsely promise.” — Andrew Arnold, Time