Lowlife

I recall picking up a lot of autobio and autobio-adjacent indie work in the early 90s, including Brubaker's Lowlife. The art on the page you posted here is more impressive than the art I remember in my head. It's not quite up to the level of peers like Joe Matt but it's solid, effective cartooning. Brubaker's career trajectory is really something!

We definitely had similar tastes back in the early ’90s. Dan Clowes, Chester Brown, Joe Matt were always more capable draughtmen  but your are right about effectiveness – “fitness for purpose,” as they say. Thank you for your comment.

Very Cool!!!

Coming from an accomplished artist that is high praise. Thank you.

For every one of these writer/artist persons that succeed in getting their voice out, there are plenty of the great writer / stick figure artists that will wash out if it becomes incoherent in the visual storytelling.  Bad art ruins good stories and good art raises the writing in the comics medium.  Here is EB's work showing that he has skills in both and it got him offers to write, but not draw superheroes.  It doesn't diminish his art here at all, as it is his own unique creative voice in thise story.  If anything, it shows that he can write to the strengths of an artist which is a skill unique to comics writers.             

Wow, what a comment! This is exactly what I should have replied to that other letterhack all those years ago if I had only one iota of your intelligence, tact, and breadth of comic knowledge. Proof, if ever it were needed, that it is not what you say but the way that you say it. Thank you.

I was buying and reading many indy titles back when this came out and I enjoyed Lowlife, but not as much as Journey, Flaming Carrot, Cerebus, Peepshow, Stray Bullets, etc.  If you told me at that time that Brubaker was going to become one of my favorite writers over the coming decades, I would have been pretty skeptical, but that's what happened.

I followed all those titles too and it is strange how they all just fell away (or in the case of Cerebus came to their planned natural end) when Ed Brubaker just pushed on by diversifying. His stamina and output is phenomenal.

Wow, thanks for posting this 3 page Secret Hours story, which I don't remember.  Interesting to see, way back in '96, Brubaker incorporating both an implied future SF trope of Orwellian government control (sort of ike Sleeper or Incognito) and a comic-within-a-comic motif (like Criminal Bad Night, Deadly Hands of Criminal, Savage Criminal, etc.) prefiguring themes of his amazing comics with Phillips 

Thank you for reminding me that Ed Brubaker has always been meta in the way he deals with his subject matter and your comment is particularly enlightening in bringing up 1984 because I now realise that the main character in Secret Hours is probably one and the same as the main character from Lowlfie and it is just that, like Winston Smith, he has been brainwashed/lobotomised. Or at least that is the way I read it.