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Originally from Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, GRAHAM ANNABLE now lives in Berkeley, where he is an animator by trade, working in film, television, and computer games. Thanks to Alternative Comics (whose publisher, Jeff Mason, does double duty as a trial lawyer), Annable's books Grickle, Further Grickle, and Stickleback provide a different form of delight. Here's Annable's wry cartooning mind at play: A man sits in a courtyard, admiring a woman at another table and writing a tale in which a woman travels the world. He struggles to convey a suitable description ("She was so beautiful and lovely and very smart . . ."). Suddenly the object of his fancy is joined by a man. Our hero is distraught, but just for two panels. Then he considers what he's written, and admires it with a smile. It's a quintessential story for an artist whose imagination sometimes takes a morbid turn, as when a farmer plucks a baby from a vine, only to see it promptly die. Annable has been a hockey player since childhood ("Cartooning and hockey feel like a good balance to me") and is editor of the comics anthology series Hickee. His work appears online at www.grickle.com and www.serializer.net.

JEFFREY BROWN's sweet, sexy, poignant graphic novel Clumsy (Top Shelf Productions, www.topshelfcomix.com) documents a one-year love affair with deceptive simplicity. Though his graphic style is bare bones, Brown pays scrupulous attention to details that may cause readers to blush, feel embarrassed, know vicarious joys, and remember specific instances in our own sometimes halting, sometimes glorious lives. The Chicago-based Brown pokes fun at his own stories in a minicomic follow-up titled Be a Man, turning "sensitive and pathetic" scenes into ones in which the protagonist is blustering, crude, and macho. His Unlikely (Top Shelf, 2003) used the same format less successfully. (Reading it is a bit like seeing someone naked against your will, or like watching a train wreck in slow motion.) Brown's work is more recently featured with that of two other artists in the Drawn & Quarterly Showcase #2, the second of an annual series. Find more of Brown's work on www.serializer.net and at www.margomitchell.com/thc/jb.htm.

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