I’ve been writing reviews (properly) since 2019. Mostly focused on new releases, I was shocked when I found out about this guy called Brian “Box” Brown. Mostly about how much I didn’t hear or read about him in mainstream comics media.
Brown has been publishing comics since 2009, starting his journalistic work in 2014, with André, The Giant, a comic biography of the famous wrestler. The first of Brown’s works I ever read was Tetris which explains how the creation of Tetris, the video game, was cause for bureaucratic chaos during the Cold War.
What Brown does in his comics is not at all close to more famous journalistic works in comics such as Persepolis and Maus. He normally pertains to a more objective retelling of facts keeping the focus on the exposition of information more so than how it all reflected on someone.
In this vacuum of articles about Box Brown, I’ve decided to write on myself with the idea of briefly comparing his journalistic work with his fiction comics, more specifically: The He-Man Effect: How American Toymakers Sold You Your Childhood and An Entity Observes All Things.
An Entity Observes All Things is a collection of fictional stories with a somewhat loose theme. The book bears obvious influence from classic science fiction as well as video games and Japanese pop culture. All of the stories have familiar elements but some are more distant from our own reality than others, very similar to what happens in some episodes of Adventure Time.
Brown’s art style is minimalistic and may be called “corporate” but the artist shines the most in the coloring. The palettes are somewhat restrained – and sometimes nonexistent – but each color is carefully applied and chosen to convey the right tone of the story and provide an instigating visual contrast. Brown also takes a very charming approach to lettering, with simple fonts. Reminiscent of when a child plays with their toys and makes the sounds along. Since it is a cleaner art style, color and writing take the front stage in the comic book, leaving the lineart as a sort of backdrop which works perfectly in his journalistic comics.
In the He-Man Effect, Brown shows how the marketing industry took advantage of children’s TV to aggressively promote toys. It was a revolutionary moment in the industry’s history and changed how ads for kids were treated forever.
The writing for this journalistic comic – as well as for most of his others – is very direct, presenting a sequence of events and reflections, not necessarily in chronological order but in a way that makes the contents much clearer for a newcomer to whatever subject is being commented on.
The illustrations bring examples that are being discussed on the page or present new important characters. In more drastic moments, the line art is used to underline the gravity of some facts. Although the style is equally minimalistic, Brown displays a lot of range in what he draws when it’s necessary to reproduce a famous poster or commercial in his own style.
The art is not much to comment on, but holding one of Brown’s comics you have in your hand a very succinct and fun-to-read guide on whatever theme he decided to write about. If the reader is not satisfied with the contents of this guide, Brown always adds his research material at the end of books, so the reader can keep reading about the matter and come up with their own takes.
Reading Brown’s journalistic work is a lot easier than his fiction. I believe that ends up happening due to the objective nature of his writing. That, along with the heavy research, makes it so Brown doesn’t have to worry about the plot, but more about organizing the facts in a comprehensible way. The underlining here and there, merely gives some pause to the reader in a sea of information. In his fictional work, however, Brown opts for a more vague plot altogether which makes it so that the reader needs to pause and absorb what was just read.
His line art in both types of comics is practically the same. The main difference is that in the fictional work, Brown can up or down the level of detail to his drawings at his own will, since there is no inherent need to reference some famous iconography. In this type of comic, the artist tends to add details for complexity and contrast.
The He-Man Effect is in black and white having only some dots for texture or light shadows. But even if we look at Tetris, which is in yellow, white, and blue, it’s still just a simple swap from the black to the yellow. In An Entity Observes All Things, Brown colors more in the traditional sense and it is evident the artist gives himself a wider margin for what and how he can color.
The fictional short stories are a delight for the eyes but I still feel like Brown’s journalistic work is really where it’s at. Like it or not, the flow of the reading is a great factor in, at least, my experience with the comic. In any case, be it fiction or fact, Box Brown is a breath of fresh air in the comics medium and I recommend whatever you decide you’ll like best when it comes to his work. He’s a very talented comic artist with a lot to say and it’s worth at least a shot.
