On the front cover of Clumsy, you describe the book as ‘A Novel’; are comic books novels?
I subtitled it ‘A Novel’ half as a joke, and half to question what terms like ‘novel’ and more specifically ‘graphic novel’ meant. I think some comics can be novels, but it’s not necessarily the case. I thought of Clumsy more as a collection of poems while I wrote it, but I was working in a book store and I kept seeing books that very insistently announced themselves as novels on the cover, which started to seem redundant and silly.

Is your work ‘art’?
I think so. Or it’s literature. I probably lean toward describing it as art. I don’t think about it much, I figure whatever labels people want to put on it they will. I can’t control which labels will end up sticking, so I focus on making comics that express the ideas I want to express as best as I can.

Do you find inspiration in more traditional forms of art?
Certainly. Coming from a fine art background, I’m just as inspired by artists like Robert Motherwell and Francis Bacon as I am by Chris Ware and Julie Doucet.

Clumsy portrays the intimate details of a sexual relationship. How easy was it to open up your life like that? How did Theresa react?
It was easy because I didn't plan on publishing it until after it was finished, and Theresa was reading it as I wrote. It goes back to my fine art background; I was thinking the book would exist as a single art object.  When I published it, it wasn't so hard, because there's a certain sense of unassailability that came with being honest and making myself vulnerable.

James Kochalka wrote of the book. ‘The frailty of the drawn line perfectly matches the human frailty portrayed within the story.’ Is this why you draw how you do?
That’s a big part of it. When you’re writing about your flaws it makes sense to allow mistakes and inadequacies to show through the drawing. It was also a reaction to art school, my feeling about some of the work I was seeing and my own frustrations at not being able to get at the ideas I wanted to with my work. So I decided to start over by going back to when art was most fun and felt most right, which was drawing comics as a kid.

Why don’t you use colour?
I’ve always preferred to draw in black and white, and have never been particularly interested in colour. With the autobiographical work, I feel like the line work has a stronger emotional quality on its own.

How long did each episode take to draw?
Pages in Clumsy took me as little as fifteen minutes to draw sometimes, but as time has gone on my style and methods have changed and pages usually take an hour or more. That doesn’t include the writing side - scripting, plotting, and planning- which usually takes more time.

How difficult is it to replicate everyday speech in your comics?
I guess it’s easy, because I have a self imposed rule of only writing what I remember, so everything has a sense of being grounded in reality. That’s another thing that’s changing a little, but I still try to keep it based on what I remember, and the other rule is to just keep it short and simple.

You’re now teaching at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, what’s it like teaching students to create comic books?
It’s been interesting. Most of the class are really good, which makes things easier. The nice thing is that it forces me to articulate things about making comics that I’ve known intuitively or taken for granted, and it allows me to reassess my own methods and philosophies.

What’s the perfect comic book?
Hm. I think that question might be too loaded but there are some out there, like Jimmy Corrigan, Eightball #22, Maus.

Jeffrey Brown’s new book, Cats Are Weird, is out now.