Review by Graham Johnstone
Stranger Than Life collects the quirky comics and (mostly) cartoons of Mary Kathleen ‘M.K.’ Brown.
Unless you followed National Lampoon in the 1970s you probably don’t know her by either name. She was the first wife of B. Kliban, bestselling Cat cartoonist, and acknowledged influence on Gary (The Far Side) Larson. The less famous Brown shares a sense of humour with both, but goes beyond single panel cartoons into comics. Brown also created Dr. N!Godatu, a series of animated shorts for The Tracey Ullman Show. It shared cast and crew with, and debuted alongside, the show’s other animated short – The Simpsons. It even earned an offer to ‘do something’ for Stephen Spielberg’s TV company. Brown’s near misses would have been suitable subjects for her deadpan, ironic comics.
This collection, tersely subtitled ‘1970 to 2013 Cartoons and Comics’ is curated by Brown herself, and while publication history is absent her anecdotes are far more entertaining. Lampoon editors, she notes, were encouraging and open-minded. They commissioned pieces on ideas as embryonic as – ‘two flies in Hollywood’, and (long before Snakes on a Plane), ‘Snakes in the Bathroom’. Some work appeared in Playboy and Playgirl, though the most racy thing here is shopping for a bra. Her (thoroughly unreliable) ‘Self-Portrait’ was a highlight of Arcade, itself a highlight of comics anthologies, and Bill Griffith its co-editor (with Art Spiegelman) provides an introduction here.
Brown’s comics are indeed strange, but appealingly strange, and despite their visual consistency, strange in numerous different ways. Like Lampoon colleague Rick Geary she revels in micro-observations, and combinations of the everyday with the decidedly odd. Brown’s comics include shaggy dog stories, verse, stream of consciousness, lateral thinking, details both prosaic and surreal, and the sheer joy of depicting odd things. She avoids punchlines, unless, as noted below, they are a sucker-punch.
Perhaps the best representation of Stranger Than Life is the single page story that provides its title. A woman is hosting “an afternoon brunch”. The name suggests a degree of formality and orderliness contrasting the apparent indignity of events. The hostess is sucked, slowly, but inexorably, backwards through her house and out a window. The comedy, though, comes less from the scenario, than from Brown’s execution. The hostess’s departure is aptly through the kitchen window, and captured in the perfect moment – her legs still inside and soberly accessorised with strapped court shoes. The story’s ‘turn’ involves a literal turn, from the hostess being sucked passively backwards, to pivoting and, flying (pictured left)… “like Superman”. The affable but unreliable narrator ignores the oddness of the brunch continuing regardless, but notes, “It was so strange we talked of nothing else”, and here’s the masterpiece of understatement, “all afternoon.”
Despite Brown’s range, her work has a commonality across the differences, that’s exaggerated by her distinctive art. It evokes its 1970s-1980s era, but passing decades have added analogue charm to her appealingly hand-drawn, intricately composed, and delicately water-coloured pages. Binge them and they feel repetitive, even sickly, but savour them one at a time and you’ll be charmed, bemused, perplexed and amused for months.
M.K. Brown is a poet/philosopher. Maybe even a ‘phenomenologist’ – attempting to describe subjective experience: the odd tensions between what is known, remembered, assumed, misremembered, imagined, invented and reinvented. That’s all played to perfection in the last and best comic here ‘Self-Portrait’ (pictured). It is so poetic, absurd, contradictory, and all-encompassing as to be surely stranger than the life of even Mary Kathleen Brown. Now in colour, it alone is worth the price of this already strangely good book.