Kids Are Still Weird by Jeffrey Brown

Some books are set in normal linear time; some try to hold it back. Anything in the rough territory of memoir has to be looking backwards, at least a bit, just by its very nature.

I'm pretty confident that Jeffrey Brown's two sons, Oscar and Simon, are probably at least tweens at this point, in the early fall of 2024. Brown's previous book about his family, Kids Are Weird, was published in 2014 - ten whole years ago; half the length of a childhood - and featured stories about Oscar in his preschool years and some appearances by a brand-new Simon. Say Brown made those stories mostly in 2013, about the years just before. His Wikipedia entry doesn't list the birthdates of his children - which is a good thing; I was half expecting it but happy to see privacy still exists in small pockets here and there - but let's guestimate Oscar was born around 2008-2010 and Simon two to four years later.

We can do the math ourselves. It's not impossible that Oscar already has a driver's license.

But, here in Kids Are Still Weird - which officially publishes today, from NBM - they're both much younger. These are stories of little kids: their enthusiasms and malapropisms, their attempts to take control of the world around them, and especially the quirky things they say and think.

This one is mostly a Simon book, as the first book was mostly Oscar. I wonder if Brown and his wife had saved up Simon stories from his younger years, and Brown realized getting them down on paper had a time limit: everything has a time limit, with kids; they don't stand still for one second.

However it came out, Still Weird is a clear sequel to the first book: the same family, the same situations, the same personalities (plus Simon, obviously; he didn't really have a personality as he appeared in Weird), the same slice-of-life cartooning and random small moments that Brown has always liked to focus on.

It is primarily a comics version of "funny things these kids said" - a subgenre that has never been large, but has been durable for several generations. Kids do say funny things as they work out the ways the world works; the point is to remember them and present them clearly. Brown has always been a cartoonist of the everyday, so his skills are well-tuned for that: these are all moments from a life, full of people sitting on couches and at the dining-room table, walking around the neighborhood, just existing in their house.

It's funny without being pushy about it: some funny-kids stuff goes big, but Brown is a quintessential cartoonist of the small. These books compare interestingly to Guy Delisle's similar work: Delisle focuses on himself as an imperfect parent; Brown focuses on the kids' enthusiasms and energy. Brown also works entirely on single pages - each page is a vignette, a moment, and there aren't any longer stories or narratives here. It makes the book a collection of things remembered, that-funny-thing-Simon-said-yesterday kind of thing.

Kids are weird; these kids are amusingly weird, and Brown is great at finding, remembering, and presenting the quirky little moments that showcase that weirdness. This book is amusing and real and lovely, for anyone who's ever dealt with small kids.