Jeffrey Brown

Bio

Cartoonist Jeffrey Brown has spent decades of his career finding humanity (and belly laughs) in the machine. Starting in 2007, his graphic novel series Incredible Change-Bots offers a glorious hybrid of non-sequiturs and absurdity wrapped in wires and self-awareness. The trilogy follows automatons (who may parody a certain megapopular ‘80s toyline) as they transform change into reflective farmhands and more—lost mechanical souls learning the coding of empathy and agriculture.

Similarly, the six-volume Star Wars: Darth Vader and Son searches for the soul in the circuits, reverse engineering the infamous Sith android Lord to discover a Dad raising his toddler Jedi-in-training. Spoiler alert: you can still find the Force in the mundane corners of Father’s Day and interstellar road trips.

Brown’s layered style bolsters the innate humanism of his work; rich colored pencils unfurling a topography of texture, wrapped into illustrations that veer wildly from cartoon simplicity to eye-rending detail. (For an especially vivid look at that aesthetic, check out the Brown-directed video for Death Cab for Cutie’s “Your Heart Is An Empty Room.”)

But Brown’s most recent opus subverts his focus with a new question: can humanity free itself from the machine—or more precisely, machine learning? Currently on Kickstarter and available for late pledges, “Climb Every Mountain” is a mini-comic tribute to the human process of creation, illustrating how AI robs creators from scaling their own creative peaks. Printed on vivid Risograph, Brown’s project articulates the beauty of learning and failing and producing and… humaning; Chat GPT and Claude may offer immediate gratification, but at a far greater existential cost.