Elijah Brubaker, who wrote and drew the acclaimed series Reich (Sparkplug Comic Books, 2007-2013) and the Eisner Nominated graphic novel The Story of Jezebel (Uncivilized Books, 2017), passed away on his 50th birthday, Aug. 28, 2025. Steeped in comics history, he often proudly reminded friends that he shared this birthdate with Jack Kirby.
The circumstance of Brubaker's life, detailed below, are hard to read about. From where I'm sitting, I know many cartoonists like Elijah: individuals who have carefully honed their craft and have something deep and affecting to say with that craft. This takes conviction and patience that is not available to all, and it most often does not come paired with another kind of conviction, a belief in one's self worth once you get up from the drawing table. We'd like to believe in an ecosystem of cartooning where those who are from economically precarious situations and still manage to work doggedly to express themselves creatively, those who have the patience to build their visual language and then go on to the much harder step beyond this formative phase, into the space of deploying that visual language to say things of great complexity and beauty — will be recognized, protected, saved, and advocated for. But this is not the world we live in. We live in a much colder world, and the warmth that is on offer and available to us all is often most vibrant in art itself rather than outside of it. The work itself, and the artists behind the work, offer a humanity almost in direct opposition to the world where the art itself will exist. And this is not to suggest a saccharine kind of art — Elijah's work was anything but — but instead one beyond cheap sentiment or cheap cynicism, work that is alive without pretense.
While reading through the tributes offered below, I recalled a specific sequence from Reich that I read 17 years ago. In it, a young Wilhem Reich is injured playing a game with a local peasant child. Reich's father, in response, mercilessly beats the child in front of Reich. Reich, appalled, cowers in fear. There is no heroic moment of confronting the injustice, by Reich or by our author. We all sit with the cruelty of the situation.
Brubaker draws this moment simply, unadorned, quietly. In lesser hands, this would be a beat to sell the reader, and to sell hard. Brubaker was not that kind of cartoonist: he understood vulnerability too well to deform it.
Jeremy Kemp, cartoonist and friend
My first memory of Elijah Brubaker was in Pat Snyder’s advanced art class at our high school in the mid 1990s. He was tight with a group of kids I looked up to consisting of artists and outcasts that I’d hoped to be part of someday. I heard rumors that he was a homeless kid who showed up to school whenever he wanted to, and though we didn’t share a class at the same time, I had the chance to see his art projects that hung around the studio unfinished for months in his absence. He had a knack for the irreverent and absurd and his talent as a draftsperson, even back then, I found exceptional and admirable.
It was a day in I think in 1996, I was smoking weed with a friend, Leif Brecke, at the cliffs overlooking the Pacific after a day at community college when he suggested we head to the Blue Moon diner. The tribe I wanted to join all congregated there. Among them was Elijah, who had returned from time away. I think he was living in the streets of Los Angeles, couch surfing where he could. I admittedly was shy crawling into the booth as we got there, finding them passing around a 9” x 12” stack of papers. They were comics Elijah had drawn. I showed so much enthusiasm to be the next one to look that Elijah finally relented, “You can read them but I need you to go wash your hands first” he said. I immediately hit the bathroom and when I came back I tried (and failed) to read every page while still staying focused on the conversation around the booth. Back then Elijah was creating the first issue of a short lived comic book series called “Monkey Wrench” (good luck finding a copy). These were his hard copies, not every page going into the finished issue. I’d been a fan of Marvel and DC as a kid and as a teenager I got more into graphic stuff like Simon Bisley. I’d dabbled in sequential art since I was about 7 years old. But when I looked through Elijah’s comics it was like nothing I was familiar with. I distinctly remember a page where a psychotic humanoid rabbit in boxing gloves was fighting him and his friends on LSD in a mental hospital. But then again I was pretty baked at the time. Either way, Elijah was the first person who got me to look at comics and ask, “We’re actually allowed to do that?”
Fast forward 10 years. I was living in Portland, Oregon, as was Elijah but our paths hadn’t crossed until a summer barbecue for our mutual friend Robin Morrison, who was in town. Robin invited me, and Elijah was ok with it. I had put comics aside for my entire college career, getting a degree in painting at Portland State. But now I was getting back into them, trying to draw the comic book version of a no budget film some friends of mine were making. It was all ball point pen and sharpie on photocopy paper. I was enthusiastic to show it to Elijah who had secretly become my model of cartooning in the years we hadn’t seen each other. He saw my stuff and offered encouragement, making a few recommendations for higher quality materials and advice on my technique that would save me time. After that I wouldn’t leave him alone. I wanted to learn anything he had to teach me. He was apprehensive at first but eventually I won his friendship in small doses. It helped that I was a fan of his work and always eager to see what he was creating next. But anyone who knows Elijah Brubaker knows he’s a complex guy.
To me Elijah was always enigmatic. Often he was secretive about different things in his life, the least of which was what he was working on at the moment. But I found patterns in his behavior I could rely on. Elijah hated the idea of people talking on his behalf (hence this entire piece I am writing is bullshit). He could be surly in the best way. Elijah was the only person I knew who could call you “motherfucker” and mean “I love you” (I’d like to think I was the only “donkey dick” in his life, but I’m sure there were others). Elijah had a soft spot for conversations on long walks, preferably on cold days, and making friends with every cat he passed that stopped to say hello. When it came to other cartoonists, you were a colleague whether you were a household name or starting out with a passion in your belly. Elijah didn’t judge people. He was pretty forgiving of strangers, even those who got under people’s skin. He might gripe on occasion but to him people were a culmination of everything in their life up until this moment. And most were doing their best with what they had. By no means was Elijah a bleeding heart though. Causes were for other people. And glad-hands with clipboards who stood on street corners he had no tolerance for whatsoever.
Elijah was the first person to give me the wise advice, “Don’t talk about having a plan, do it. Only after dedication, hard work, time, and often failure, do most of us realize how much farther we have to go to be truly good at something.” He never stopped being meticulous about his own drafting and he could never get enough of reading comics, sometimes for the story but almost always to study the technique of other cartoonists. When I took art history in college there was tons of memorization, identifying the work of Renaissance masters and contemporary artists alike. Elijah did the exact same thing on his own time with comic book artists (he was entirely self taught). He could pick up any random comic book and usually identify the artists who made it by name, especially in the underground scene where he found his community, making friends and connections anywhere he could.
By 2012 I was roommates with Elijah for a year. I was creating my own mini comic series that looked fairly legit by underground convention standards (which would never have existed were it not for his guidance). He was introducing me around to other cartoonists and even generously shared his table with me at Stumptown and Linework NW. By then he had finished his series Reich for Sparkplug Comics. He had his Hubert & Ray comics that he described as an endless endeavor, snippets of which he’d submit to underground publications. On the horizon he was beginning to research and thumbnail a bigger project about the biblical story of his namesake. Living with him, I found Elijah to be a courteous housemate, and it was common to find him spread out at the kitchen table with ink well and Ames guide. I didn’t drink and Elijah did and he was very respectful toward that decision. But it meant the rest of the time he quietly stayed in his room at his drawing table or at his computer where he podcasted his own The Movie Show so he could partake. I didn’t understand the nature of his habit until one month I gave him half a bottle of pain pills I hadn’t used from a previous back surgery. He had complained of having pain himself and throughout his career of mindless 9 to 5 jobs, none of which he stayed at long, I don’t think he ever had medical insurance. So he was happy to get them. Only months later was I alarmed to find out he took the whole bottle at once washed down with some booze.
Elijah lived hard much of the time. He had a nihilistic streak which I sadly learned had a lot to do with his upbringing. Many of the rumors I heard in high school were true. As a kid he lived in a shack by the beach with no plumbing. His parents were divorced and he lived with his father who was a Vietnam vet and horribly alcoholic and far from the best model of adulthood. Elijah slept on an old army cot until he was old enough to run away from home. It put the spirit of the nomad in him. Often in adulthood he had times when he was homeless and living off the charity of others until he could get back on his feet. Add to that a developing drinking problem and it seemed a little more of him was getting washed down the drain every year. There were more than a few times I tried to offer him help but he was stubborn. He was too broke for rehab and too much of a nonconformist for 12-Step programs. He was going to manage on his own.
By 2018 he was in Eugene, Oregon, making a decent living doing e-commerce. At the same time not only had he finished The Story of Jezebel and her turbulence with the prophets of Israel: a satiric recounting of the pious struggle of Elijah, Elisha, and Jehu as they fight for the immortal souls of their people based on the best selling book The Bible written by God, but his finished work earned him an Eisner nomination. Of all the people he considered to go to San Diego with him that year he chose me. I’d never been to San Diego and it was a novel experience. I got to see the sights and we rubbed elbows with old friends and celebrities alike. The night of the awards ceremony seemed to last forever. After several hours Elijah got almost no mention and another cartoonist won multiple awards by a landslide. I childishly stood on the sidelines thinking, “What the fuck?” But Elijah wasn’t resentful at all and gracefully voiced, "Hey, good for them.” To this day I still wonder if secretly he felt bitter but trudged on anyway.
In 2023 Elijah returned to Portland on a wing and a prayer after a rocky couple of years living in Los Angeles to sleep in the backyards of fellow cartoonists until Jesse Reklaw offered to share an apartment with him. Left behind in southern California was all his original artwork of Reich and Jezebel. The several hundred pages of Hubert he managed to bring with him. By then he’d produced a few issues of his Aftermath mini-comic that I felt lucky to get copies of. He was still cartooning but he felt he had slowed considerably.
The next two years I tried to make it like old times. Admittedly my own cartooning had dropped off when the pandemic started and I’d since gone back to painting in spades. But with my old friend back in town I tried to pick up where I left off, with the two of us meeting up periodically in bars or coffee shops to sit and draw and talk. Elijah had a stint working at a warehouse that shipped out nerd culture merchandise. One day he brought to my attention the ultimate irony that while he was struggling to get by financially he was shipping out crates full of copies of Jezebel. By then his drinking had reached a point where he was only drawing every so often because his hands shook. The majority of our time spent together involved him talking about the good old days of his and our youth. I found myself placing boundaries toward him, not wanting to enable him being in bars.
I have no explanation for waking up so early on Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2025. My work schedule got tweaked around so I had the day off. It got me out of the house and biking around town. I finished running errands and felt like I needed to be around people. By coincidence I was in Elijah’s neighborhood and shot him a text asking to hang out. It was actually kind of perfect as I could get him before he started drinking that day. He seemed annoyed I showed up almost unannounced, then finally relented, “Let me get some shoes on then we can walk to coffee.” He’d just quit a job working in a factory that made ice cream. We ended up at a place on SE Woodstock. It was the same place we used to hang out and draw when we lived together and the first place we met up when he returned to Portland homeless years earlier. It was a beautiful day and for once in a very long time it felt like it really was like old times. Elijah didn’t draw though. To my alarm weeks earlier he told me he had stopped drawing entirely. I compared it to Michelangelo refusing to sculpt until he reassured me he still brought his sketchbook and drawing supplies with him everywhere he went out of reflex. He hadn’t really stopped. Minutes later we were talking about comics. He was currently working on a story about the 1997 north Hollywood shoot-out but it was slow going. For the last few years he’d been making thumbnails for a story about an all girl cadre who perform a bank heist. And there was still that screenplay for his comedy The Most Beautiful Women in The World, starring Rae Dawn Chong and Lisa Bonet which he felt was still applicable even at their age. And of course there was his sci-if story that filled up so much space in his sketchbooks along with its main character, Acid Face.
I was going to work tomorrow but was curious, as the 28th was his birthday, what he had planned, but to him it was just another day. I offered to buy him a burrito if he got hungry later as he was worried about having enough money to pay his rent, “I don’t really eat much these days,” he said. By then it was late afternoon and we were talking about old friends and good times when he stopped mid-sentence and jerked like he was going to retch, putting the back of a violently shaking hand to his mouth, his eyes shut in pain. I was quick to ask if he needed help or if there was anything I could do. Slowly he composed himself giving a half smile, “yeah….I should probably wrap this up pretty soon. I’m sure you got stuff to do I’m keeping you from.” I was worried but I didn’t protest. I knew he had to go home and drink before it got worse. We got up and walked down the street to Caesar Chavez where we parted ways. We hugged and said our goodbyes, agreeing this was a good day and we should do this again soon. That was the last time I saw him alive. It was the following Saturday when I got the call from Jesse that Elijah had passed away on his birthday less than 24 hours after I saw him, of alcohol-related problems that destroyed his internal organs.
I took the news pretty hard. I’ve had a lot of friends that have died over the years and I’m sad they’re gone. But to me Elijah was a brother, a teacher, a mentor, and an example of what a lot of us are capable of if we put our minds and hearts to the task. Of course Elijah was a flawed human being but he lived his life to the fullest on his own terms. Days after his passing I realized I don’t hate destiny for taking him away, I’m grateful I got to know him in the capacity that I did. They only made one Elijah Brubaker and wherever he is now, I hope it’s a better place. Rest In Peace my friend.
Alissa (Nielsen) Hattman, poet, friend and former partner
Elijah and I were in a relationship from 2000–2008. During that time, we lived in Olympia, Seattle, and Portland. We were two creative people in our twenties, just trying to get by. We moved every time rent was raised or one of us lost a job, which pretty much meant we moved every year. He was always drawing. The best part of being in a relationship with someone who is restlessly creative is that it’s infectious. I think we inspired each other, I know he inspired me. Sometimes we’d collaborate. This minicomic was something we just tossed off one day…
Though we were pretty active in the zines/comix community, some of my best memories were the quiet nights we spent at home together. Rain outside, listening to Tom Waits, Elijah sitting on the loveseat, boots off and sketchbook open, while I made a spaghetti dinner, jotting down ideas for poems as the water boiled. I remember late-night conversations about the nature of storytelling and the importance of art, which he’d always undercut with some joke, never wanting to take art (or himself) too seriously.
I admired his narrative style, his pacing, his ability to bring humor and nuance to stories about tortured characters. Wilhelm Reich, Hubert, the prophet Elijah, Billy Gohl. Back in 2012, I interviewed Elijah for Gridlords [a comics art collective and performance series based in Portland]. Here’s what he had to say about writing complex characters: "I think the notion of likable characters is just a matter of degree. [Dan] Clowes said something like: ‘likable characters are only there to fuel an audience’s narcissism’ and I kind of agree with that. I also think, though, that likable characters are just characters we, as an audience, don’t get to know that well. I think everyone, when stripped of their façade and opened up to the world in an honest way, exhibit a lot of unpleasant and horrible behavior." Much like the characters themselves, Elijah’s expressive artistic style is difficult to pin down, but the emotional tenor always seemed to come from that desire to know, to depict in an honest way to wrestle with the contradictions that exist within us all. Elijah himself was hard to pin down, still is. He was sweet, and also mercurial, moody, prone to long stints of debilitating depression and self-destructive habits. He was a real cranky bastard, but boy was he lovable. I’m grateful for his art and those precious years we had together.
Diana Schutz, friend, comics editor and translator
It must have been the late Dylan Williams who introduced me to Elijah Brubaker, and it kills me that they’re both gone now … especially while I’m still here, racking up the years and mourning one loss after another. I guess it’s true that the good die young.
I can’t claim to have known Elijah very well, but I was a real fan of Reich, his twelve-issue series about controversial psychoanalyst and sex researcher Wilhelm Reich. In fact, even before the series ended, I’d already tracked Elijah down in Eugene, Oregon, to talk about publishing a collection. Sadly for all of us, it didn’t happen, but Elijah memorialized that conversation in his diary comics — more work I wish had been published for a wider audience.
I left staff at Dark Horse in 2015 and lost track of Elijah but for The Story of Jezebel, his Eisner-nominated biblical adaptation of 2017, which is hilarious — not an adjective usually applied to the Bible, but Elijah could skewer just about anything with his razor wit. We reconnected almost a year ago, by which time he’d been living in Portland for a while, sharing a place with fellow cartoonist Jesse Reklaw and Jesse’s blind cat Tango, a ginger whom Elijah loved dearly. This was before he took on his soul-crushing job at the local ice cream factory; money was tight, and Elijah was trying to drum up some commission work. So, we made a trade: my dough for his super-idiosyncratic, super-charming drawing of Supergirl, my childhood favorite. Needless to say, no matter the price, I got the better end of that deal.
Elijah was such a talented artist, and he really loved comics. I wish comics had loved him in return. Instead, like Jack Kirby before him, they broke his big heart — though he had only just turned fifty. We’d had coffee together a few times this past year and were planning to do that again soon, before summer’s end. Sadly, it wasn’t soon enough.
Brian Nicholson, comics critic
A few weeks ago I said, somewhat facetiously, that my favorite kind of characters were people who talked shit constantly yet were beloved, and people that everyone was mad at despite their not having done anything wrong. The person I was talking to immediately got that I saw myself in such characters. This dyad is present in Elijah Brubaker's work as well: For all of Wilhelm Reich's personal faults, which Brubaker's deeply researched bio-comic doesn't shy away from, the actual reasons for the suppression of his work seem basically like unfounded persecution; meanwhile, Reich's being a huge paranoid weirdo doesn't prevent him from having an active sex life. Brubaker's sitcom comic Hubert has a similar non-correlation between characters' hijinx, morality, and consequence. Brubaker offers no judgments of his characters, and any disgust you might feel for them in the moment does not preclude them being a good hang.
Besides his work, I only knew Elijah Brubaker in the context of social media posts where he was blessedly unconcerned with any kind of self-promotion of himself as a cartoonist, instead seeming like a guy working jobs unrelated to his art, living with roommates, and ruminating on the past in the sort of, "Damn I guess I am not young anymore" way that is eminently recognizable to me: Living a life in a way where one is not concerned with presenting a grand narrative of oneself as an artist can lead, without one's noticing, into life's getting away from you. Both the Hubert series and the Aftermath Magazine minis present these pages of the work as if the comics themselves had been sitting around for ages, uncollected. They stand as a document of a working class person's art: Thoughts that can't be given voice to in polite society point to the vastness of a person hidden beneath the surface of stumbling through a work week. Such thoughts can be the stuff of bawdy comedies (in the case of Jezebel) and also basic fantasies of violence, the comics about barbarian cavemen and slasher movie serial killers seen in Aftermath.
Reich is maybe the most visible of these comics, and also maybe the most "mature," the sort of thing that should be taken seriously and respected, but it's not an outlier. It's more like the work equivalent of a college degree a person has, that enables them to get a bunch of dumb jobs that transparently feel like wastes of a college degree. In this metaphor, to continue making bio-comics in hopes of a big book deal would be like going into debt to go to grad school, aka dumb.
The Hubert books got posted online during the COVID epidemic of 2020, issue 3 ends a note from the author: "I look forward to that time we can gather together in a backyard, eat good food, and be merry. It may not be in my lifetime so if I'm not there, remember me fondly and make as many bad jokes as you can."
RIP to a real one.
David Lasky, friend and cartoonist
I was in Portland last month for a small press comic book show, and didn’t think to seek out Elijah. I was half-expecting him to show up or be tabling there, but he didn’t and wasn’t. A lot of people had stayed home because there was a heatwave happening that weekend. I heard from Tim Goodyear that Elijah was working in an ice cream factory. I figured I’d run into him on a future visit to Portland — he seemed like someone who would always be around. About a week later, he was dead. It was a shock to say the least. I now of course wish I’d sought him out.
Elijah was part of a new wave of young cartoonists who materialized in Seattle in the early 00s, about a decade after I’d journeyed there myself as a young wannabe cartoonist. This new group of alternative comics kids was similar to the group that I had been a part of in the 90s, but so much more community-minded. They were involved in the zine archive (ZAPP, then located in the basement of the Richard Hugo House), they had an anthology (Moxie), and a reading series (“Slide Rule”), hosted 24-Hour-Comic sessions — and Elijah was closely tied to all of those things. I remember learning that he had hand carved the Moxie logo into a piece of rubber (maybe?) so that it could be hand-stamped onto the cover of each issue. And it dawned on me just how dedicated he was. I feel lucky to have been a part of that group and to have known Elijah even a little bit.
Like most alternative and underground cartoonists, he was introverted, and more than a bit cynical in his humor. He was “less talk and more rock” when it came to drawing — he was always honing his craft, always improving. But beneath a somewhat gruff veneer, he was unafraid to show his beating heart. He lived in Seattle with his then-partner Alissa, who was a poet and much less introverted than he was. They had a kind of yin-yang personality balance, but shared a quiet, burning enthusiasm for telling their stories and expressing themselves in their respective art forms. His drawings of people, which very often included himself and Alissa, FELT like those people. His drawing style was based less in observable reality and more in exploring and capturing the feeling behind what he was drawing. (One can see that in his more recent superhero drawings on Instagram.)
Elijah was only in Seattle for a few years and then he and Alissa moved to Portland. I’d see him there at small press conventions, often at the Sparkplug table when his series Reich was being published. He was working on that biographical series around the same time that Frank Young and I were working on our biographical Carter Family graphic novel. I thoroughly enjoyed each issue of Reich as it came out, and wanted Elijah to receive at least the same kind of recognition that Frank and I had received for Carter Family. Reich never came together as a published book, which made me sad.
It was only after learning of Elijah’s death, a week ago, that I learned he had completed a graphic novel about his namesake prophet, Elijah, entitled The Story of Jezebel, and that in 2018 it had been nominated for an Eisner Award. My first thought was: “Knowing how introverted and cynical he could be, I bet he didn’t go to the ceremony.” But looking at his blog entries from 2018, I saw that he actually did go. His beating heart had won out. As weird as it can be for a small press artist to receive validation at SDCC, which is dominated by big business entertainment industries, I’m so glad he was able to receive that recognition in his lifetime.
His social media posts were true works of art. I wish he, like so many of us, hadn’t felt the need to delete his Twitter and Facebook accounts. Here’s one that I was able to salvage from twitter, from the summer of 2016: “Experts say anger and sadness are the only emotions left and even sadness is dwindling. More at 11.”
I may be misremembering, but I think it was Elijah who wrote a FB post that went something like: “It was a great day on the internet. Good job, everyone! See you tomorrow.”
And it was Elijah who, in a memorial post, remembered that his publisher, Dylan Williams, during a road trip conversation had offhandedly remarked: “Life’s too short to be an asshole,” which is a great epitaph for Dylan, and in fact, became the title of The Comics Journal’s article on Williams’ legacy (in issue 302). It makes a good epitaph for Elijah as well.
Jesse Reklaw, friend, cartoonist and roommate
I was introduced to Elijah’s comics by Dylan Williams, who knew Elijah from when they lived together in Olympia. And of course, through comics. We all knew each other through comics. In the '90s Dylan showed me some of Elijah’s autobio minis and I thought they were the dopey works of a young person (just like mine, of course). But I kept them, and I continued to add his comics to my collection. Later Dylan published Elijah’s Reich series, which always impressed me with his original cartooning styles, effortlessly assimilating early 20th century modern art techniques into the language of comics … a perfect visual match to the oddball life of the subject, Wilhelm Reich.
A few years later I read Elijah’s minicomic about his relationship with his dad, and was struck by the wisdom and depth of emotion for someone so young. Oddly, Elijah was from the same small town that my father and his mother grew up in, Coos Bay, Oregon. A perfect place to soak up child abuse it seems. I once told him, “My great uncle Sonny was the town drunk of Coos Bay!” And he replied, “Which one?”
I was stunned by the emotional honesty and raw sex life details in Elijah’s Blue Moon mini comics. This was Joe Matt level of exposure, and probably hurt some feelings by being so open about other people’s lives. But it showed his great devotion to comics. His willingness to sacrifice himself as a person for his art.
The Story of Jezebel (Uncivilized Books, 2017) was hilarious. I read it twice. So much biblical detail reduced to slapstick and one-liners. Elijah knew well that dark secret of humanity: that we all suffer, but very few have the empathy and the perspective to really get that. He never labored the reader with obvious details or brutish sentimentality. One of his jokes was: “I hate coffee. It just makes me go to sleep faster.” A lot of his humor took me a second to grok, but he had to explain this one to me (it’s because coffee makes you do everything faster).
He and his longtime girlfriend split up about the same time that I and mine did. One night we both left a party in Southeast Portland, and as I walked home opposite Elijah, I collapsed, crying about my current tragedies. He walked back to me and asked, “Are you okay, man?” A simple gesture, but one that takes a lot of courage and a lot of awareness. Elijah got out of Portland and moved to Eugene, but we’d keep in touch by email or social media.
One time I visited Eugene for a weekend. We had pizza the first night, and the next night over drinks he asked, “Waitaminnit, did you come to Eugene just to see me?” Well, yeah, duh! But if you weren’t as cool as I thought you were, or you weren’t available, I had other things to do, of course. It was a blast having cheap drinks and talking comics while we drew. Felt like family. Of course we both went home with aching guts, both promising to cut back.
He spent about a decade in Eugene, then moved briefly to Los Angeles. I offered him a place to stay in Portland when he returned to Oregon, and shortly afterwards we moved in together. He got along famously with my cat, Tango. I’d often come home to find them asleep on the couch (or the floor), curled together. We drew, inked, and painted comics at the table, his side with a Hubert story, some Star Trek jokes, or the last piece he was working on, about some heavily-armed LA bank robbers.
I’m sitting here crying in an empty apartment, sad that my friend is dead. Sad that there won’t be any more Elijah Brubaker comics. Sad that there won’t be any more subtle puns and self-effacing humorous posts from E-Dog. But it’s also very sad that there isn’t more outreach for people so hurt and isolated that they can’t protect and care for themselves. Depression, anxiety, and stress can lead to a lot of health issues.
Could I have done more? Yes, absolutely. But did I do enough, I have to ask myself? I think so. I mentioned to him my friends in AA who’d be happy to talk with him, I suggested he might also have PTSD and it would be worth it to read a book about it, or talk to a therapist. I talked about how gratitude and mindfulness helped me step a bit out of the darkness.
But we all know you can’t force someone to change. After his hospital stay for 5 days in April, we both knew he was gambling with his life with every purchase of a 2-liter bottle of cheap vodka. It’s an awful feeling when you put all the details together and see the whole, tragic picture. That perhaps Elijah did not come to live with me, but he came to die with me. Ultimately there’s nothing more to be said than I loved him very much, and I wish he were still here.
Aron Nels Steinke, friend and cartoonist
The Elijah Brubaker memory that I keep returning to is when we saw each other at the 2018 Will Eisner Awards. Elijah’s graphic novel The Story of Jezebel was up for Best Graphic Album, and Elijah was there to celebrate this recognition by the comics industry’s biggest awards ceremony. Emil Ferris would go on to win in his category for My Favorite Thing is Monsters, but I remember Elijah looking really happy and maybe just a touch out of place. But isn’t that how all of us comics weirdos feel? I was so happy for him that evening. I didn’t know Elijah super well, but we will forever be connected through our late publisher/cartoonist and friend Dylan Williams. Dylan’s Sparkplug Comics had published Elijah’s fantastic comic series Reich, at around the same time Dylan had co-published one of my books. That Dylan Williams bond is real, and I feel that same affinity with nearly everyone Dylan pulled into his orbit. Elijah was a great cartoonist. I know Elijah had been making new work for years, and I’m sorry I haven’t kept up. I just now looked at his website and near the bottom is a link to another TCJ in memoriam article. That one is for the late Tom Spurgeon. RIP, Elijah. Love you.
Emily Nilsson, friend and publisher
Lark Pien, friend and cartoonist
At Comic Con, I made my way to the cartoon art museum's booth, where i would sit and draw and meet visitors for the hour. Elijah was there as a guest artist too, already drawing. He looked up and smiled. we made only a little small talk, and I remember the throngs of crowds before us, their cacophonous tide. But I remember more the warm silence at our table as we sat and sketched for the CAM. As i experienced it, Elijah and i became friends, bonding over our shared slowness and quietude. That was many years ago.
More recently he came and stayed briefly where I lived, and I learned more of who he was in that time. He had a romantic view of the world and was especially fond of cats. He was kind and gentle, though sometimes in a melancholic way. when we drew together he would become chatty and his spirit would lift. I am truly saddened he is not here to be my friend and neighbor anymore. may your spirit find lightness and peace, dear Elijah.
T Edward Bak, friend and cartoonist
Elijah and I lived in Eugene at the same time. This was a few years ago; Dylan Williams had introduced Elijah and me to each other about a decade or so before this. Anyhow there weren’t any other cartoonists around Eugene — at least none that either of us knew — so Elijah and I would get together every couple weeks to catch up and drink and draw.
He was an incredibly prolific artist. I remember I would often show up with a single drawing I had been scraping away at and toiling over like a drooling dolt for days while Elijah would be there with page after page of new drawings and sketches and several comics pages of a graphic novel (Jezebel) he had completed since our last session.
His output and consistency in style and approach were clear and confident and his commitment and work ethic were impressive, especially because he also went to a regular full-time job everyday.
He was hilariously and bluntly philosophical about working as a cartoonist. I confided over drinks that I was giving thought to giving up and walking away from comics.
Elijah laughed.
“What? You can’t quit,” he said. “Look at yourself. You’re a junkie.”
I hadn’t thought about it quite like that before.
“Imagine walking away for a week. Imagine that week turning into a month. A year. Then what the hell are you going to do? Work some dumbass job and never draw comics again?”
I shrugged.
“Probably I will just go paint.” I tried to convince him. Really to convince myself.
“Think about it. How long do you think you could last?”
He didn’t wait for an answer.
“Bullshit. You can’t quit.”
Still true.
Chris Cilla, friend and cartoonist
I first met Elijah in person at a comics drawing meet-up at Zack Soto's place in the early 2000s. I'd already seen his minicomics work, the confident stylization with his natural cartooning sense stood out, here was someone who loved line! Elijah had brought the first rough part of what would become his Sparkplug comic book series Reich, and I had just gotten into Listen, Little Man, so we chewed the fat for a good part of the night. He had plenty to say about Wilhelm Reich and the writings and related community he was digging into for that project. I was always glad to see him when he dipped into the comix art social scene in those days, but he soon split for Eugene. Somewhere in there I colored a piece of his art for publication in a free sex paper thing; he told me he had a hard time letting someone else work on his comic, but liked the job I did. We exchanged some mail while he was out of town, and I got a handful of his zines & some art. It was not easy to keep up with his prolific output! He was committed to the comics, you can see the veins of thought flowing into all his work. He always wanted to make you laugh, even in the darkest stuff, a grim humor that's more like an uncomfortable vibration than laughter. He was a skilled diarist, forming some difficult material into a thoughtful reading experience. He came back to Portland recently, and I saw him a couple times, we talked about moving into middle age while still living this marginal cartoonist existence, some rough patches, but he seemed to be looking forward. It's terrible to know that I won't run into him at the comic shop or wherever anymore, but fucking hell, a grim consolation, we've always got the comics, another one lives in the stacks.
Greg Means, publisher
I had come across Elijah’s work a few times in compilations but he didn’t make a real impact on me until I read the early zine version of the first issue of Reich. It hit me right away with how smart and funny it was. I liked how he would lean into difficult scenes and character moments that most authors would shy away from. He never judged the character’s bad behavior or flights of lunacy. To him, it was as natural as someone sitting down for breakfast or crossing the street. To him, it was just the way people are.
When I started publishing the anthology Papercutter, Elijah was one of the first people I asked to contribute. His semi-autobiographical Hubert and Ray stories became a recurring feature. This was the first time I realized that the gentle, friendly, Star Trek-loving guy I knew from Portland’s comic scene had a serious dark side.
On social media and in person, Elijah would sometimes hint at the thousands of pages of unpublished comics that he had just lying around his apartment. I hope with his passing those pages aren’t lost.
Elijah liked to portray himself as a wild man and scoundrel, and I’ve heard many stories that back that up, but as a cartoonist, he was always professional and hard work and brilliant. As a friend, he was always helpful and patient and kind. I’ll miss him.
Davey Oil, friend and cartoonist
EEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelijah J Brube was a very good friend. He was loyal and fun and curious about his friends. He was supportive of artists, and had useful things to say about the work of every cartoonist, zinester, poet, punk musician that we knew. He was kind to those he saw as his people. He was also one of the most grumpy and opinionated people that I ever knew. He and I spent a lot of time together at ZAPP, the old Seattle Zine Library where we both volunteered and worked. He was kind to artists, but he was often hard on art. We read every minicomic in the collection and Elijah J had something critical but fair to say about each one. He especially disliked mainstream comics, along with almost every popular film and tv show. He was the least nostalgic Gen X-er I know, and he was critical of juvenile and regressive aesthetics. He LOVED comics though, and I could always get a chuckle from him with a Hogan’s Alley or Skip Williamson page. He liked our history.
When I think of spending time with Elijah J, I think of walking the neighborhoods. Capitol Hill and Pioneer Square and Fremont and Queen Anne. All of Seattle. When on foot, Elijah was always talking, usually about art. Or complaining about politics. He was a punk, but an unpretentious one. He didn't wear anyone else’s costume. He wasn’t a joiner. He was a working class guy. He grew up a little hard. He often talked about his hippie mom and his counterculture upbringing. He appropriately resented and disliked the wealthy and corrupt.
When seated, Elijah talked a lot less. Probably because he was drawing. He was a sketchbook person and he was always drawing. For such a funny person, Elijah was pretty shy, and if ever you went to a party or gathering with him he was sure to slink out, eventually. He’d escape, without saying goodbye. I don’t think he expected people to miss him. I don't think he expected people to like him. I did. Lots of people did.
Elijah was a shockingly talented cartoonist. I remember early in our friendship we were tabling together at an early Olympia Zine Fest and everything he had brought was autobio, sketchbook diary stuff. At the time there were a lot of those kind of comics being made, but you could tell there was something special about his. He had a loose and minimalist style. Lots of white space and clear intent. But his figure work was all noodley elbows and caricatured big-nose people. It was like if Elzie Seagar had been reading King Cat. The slice of life of a broke artist narrative was very Cometbus, or Peepshow. Interesting that so many influences came from artists associated with the Great Lakes region! I don't know if EJ ever lived in Chicago. I’m pretty sure he grew up in LA? I know he was there before Seattle and after Seattle he lived in Portland and Eugene.
His voice sounded like a voice actor was putting on a wry guy in a brimmed hat. It was an unbeautiful voice. I loved it.
His pen was precise and lyrical. It was softer than his voice, and more honest than his words.
His intellect was singular. His analysis was cynical. He could be seen as a misanthrope, but I think his anger was mostly reserved for himself.
Like so many cartoonists, he was underappreciated. His story, and his talent deserved more. Of course it was Dylan Williams and Sparkplug that caught EJ’s best work, Reich, and got it printed and into shops and in front of readers. Dylan is dead. Elijah is too. Wilhelm Reich’s life ended in tragedy. His cartoon biographer’s does as well.
Elijah and I lost touch over the last decade. Partially this has to do with my more or less quitting comics, and us having a little less in common. Being an artist and trying to do something with your art requires a seriously delusional amount of self-belief. It can be alienating to be the one to give up, and be seen as giving up. It can also be frustrating to keep working to save your own unhealthy marriage to comics when your friend wants to talk about how happy they are with their divorce.
It wasn’t just comics that cost us our friendship. If I am honest, it was hard to be his friend sometimes. He was a hurt person, and I didn’t know how to help him. If I could go back and try again, would I? I really don’t know. I know I loved him, and I know that I wish he was still alive.
I wish he was happy. I wish he was alive and comfortable and appreciated for his gifts.
He was his mom’s baby. He was my friend. He was a gifted cartoonist. He is dead. Maybe I should draw comics about it. We should all draw comics about something.
Tatiana Gill, friend and cartoonist
Elijah Brubaker was one of those rare cartoonists who mixed serious topics with a cartoony style and a twisted sense of humor. His pen and ink drawings were inspired by the comic strip classics. He covered everything from metaphysics, religion, history, politics and slice of life. Hell, sometimes he covered all of them at once. Elijah made it look effortless.
Elijah was one of the first of many cartoonists I befriended when I moved to Seattle. Whenever I visited Portland, I would crash on his couch and we would watch classic horror movies such as Killer Klowns from Outer Space and other terrible but great B-movies. He was a kind, quiet person but once you got him started on comics, that’s when you got to know him.
One day we were walking down S.E. Division and we saw a vintage copy of Archy and Mehitabel in a used bookstore window (whose name escapes me). Illustrated by George Herriman, we immediately started on how Krazy Kat is one of the greatest comic strips of all time. After a deep and nerdy dive into the classics, I brought up The Kin-der-Kids by Lyonel Feininger and Elijah’s eyes lit up. At the time, reprints of the strip were difficult to come by and he had been looking for the Dover edition of the strip (I gave him my extra copy later on). I ended up buying Archy and Mehitabel and it still sits on my bookshelf to remind me of my conversations with Elijah. He knew and loved comics.
It’s a shame his work has never been properly published and distributed to a wider audience. He was truly a mini-comics cartoonist. He deserves to have his comics collected into a volume so the world can read the potential of comics he had realized.
Unfortunately, Elijah drowned his demons with whiskey. His addiction overwhelmed his love for comics and costed him a few friendships. The drink eventually took away his voice and art. We cannot afford to lose any more people like Elijah. Please seek help and know we are rooting for you.
Stefan Gruber, friend and animator
There's a story about my friend Elijah Brubaker.
He worked the bar and café at Hugo House and he was cleaning up after a really big party when I visited in the morning just to say hi.
Elijah was drying dishes with a rag and he just said “You want a goldfish?” and I said maybe and he took a vase with a goldfish in it and he placed it in front of me. This big glass vase with a goldfish swimming around in it. And I went: "Where did it come from?"
And he said that there was a huge party the night before. Everybody trashed the place.
And when he came in to clean up, the sink was filled full of water and a goldfish was in it. So I adopted that fish, and I named it Brubaker, and it lived for a couple years, and I treated it like my own kid.
Elijah and I collaborated on comics together and made some animations. I bought a drawing he made of Astro Boy that is hopeful and cleverly drawn. He could make a show of motion through distorted proportions in his line work that was so lovely and swimming.
Brubaker was my first fish and Elijah was a sweet and talented friend that slipped away from us.
Robin Morrison, friend
Many of you are broken. I am. We make things that do not exist so that they will, and we texture our world with ourselves despite that doing so means it is not yet designed with us in mind. This has never been a process of the perfectly functional, but instead a structure needed to create, inflict, beg, and even to spite. Get the joys or the sads, imagine else, write it down or draw it out, play it, unglue and reform.
He drank. I loved this man and he drank and made things. I’ve been close friends with him for over three decades. We were childhood cohorts. Our brains hadn’t finished forming yet and we were preemies hanging out, scabbed over with a delusion in which adults did not exist. We joked when we weren’t supposed to and we took irreverent things seriously. We didn’t drink then, but we did later. We nearly died together a few times. I got him in a couple of car wrecks. We went through breakups that felt surgical or bombastic, and we tried and failed to not talk about them. Once, we found a baby possum on the ground, abandoned by its mother, and it was just about at its end. It could barely lift its head and it just looked up at us in a way nothing has since. That fucked us up for days. We got drunk that night.
I never got a boner when we hugged, or anything, but I’d tell him I did, for certain. Humor was our language and we were incessant riffers. Everything worked the same way, whether conversation, joking, emotions, ideas, or flaws: You, then me, then you, then me, then you ... It got dark in there. Comforting. We were outsiders due to childhoods that malfunctioned, and our dilemmas matched, and we were never quite well, but I relentlessly made him my friend the moment we met. We had a large group of friends that changed everything for us. They’re in pain right now, too. They drink. Some more than others. Some a lot.
He’s been gone a week now and I’m not certain our sickliness made for the best people, just anomalous ones. I think we were always good, just in need of repair when no one was looking. Instead of repair we got praise and love and friendships. Our turvy behavior got us things. Probably for the best, but prices vary. He drank, though not at first.
I loved his art. I was never certain he did, but he kept returning to it with a diligence that was august. He’s one of the few people who would read my terrible attempts at novels, way back in my just-developed-chest-hair days (an aside: Elijah was hairy long prior to that and I suspect he had chest hair at 3). We never really went anywhere without making things. Routinely, in a small, isolated town with nothing going on, we would hit up restaurants and the 24-hour place. Coaster art. A classic. We’d haunt our hangout spot, and he’d draw and work on various skills and ideas, always fucking around with things he hadn’t yet done, and I’d write janky little poems he’d avoid reading (for good reason). We were practicing adults and practically fine. We drank. This man loved me, and we drank and had adventures and analyzed things and self-deprecated and jabbered until sunrise. Holy shit, we were talkers. Nonstop all night. Others would arrive. Sometimes we led the party. We were self-selfish, self-aware, and good at reading rooms. I was an energetic attention whore, and he was even keeled and stoic, but somehow, we matched up and years of laughter and art poured out of that.
There have been gaps. Elijah has always been a disappearance specialist. He was good at separating friend groups so there’d be little overlap. He liked having zones between work and friends and else. He would occasionally burn his life down. I saw it many times. I thought he and I likely suffered under a similar mental illness, one that crept, or rose slowly like water until, surprise, it began pouring over the top of the dam. He disagreed. But he burned his life down here and there. It would start with a job quit, then a relationship ending, then housing becoming questionable, and would end with a sudden move to another place, sometimes very distant. Every handful of years. The move would be the beginning of the gap. He’d be tough to get in touch with. Maintaining contact was work. I’d love this guy from a distance. I wouldn’t doubt him at all. He’d go a year without communication, and then there he’d be, returned in person or else all up in my inbox. During these gaps he drank. When he returned from his adventure, he’d clean up quite a bit and dive into comics and publishing, all sorts of renewed. We’d hang out like people doing things, only 20% wannabe while the rest was a big thumbs up.
This last gap, he had trouble finding a place to live. I offered, no strings for as long as needed, but he never took me up on help. I think it quietly bothered him when I offered. I could read that, so I pulled back. Friends. It would have bothered me, too. I wonder if the gap followed him this last time, and it didn’t want to let him go. Something drank him, too. What an ugly thought.
He had a serious health scare, a close call, earlier this year, and pouring out the booze was the thing to do. He knew that. Anyone would. He texted me from the hospital and told me he loved me. This scared me. It was a communique that wasn’t like us. When my father died, back in my 20s, Elijah was the first person I contacted (as in, right after I hung up the phone from the call we all dread). I think it worried him. It was a communique that wasn’t like us. I had needed to feel normal for a moment and I always felt right when he was around. So there, we both did it after a Big Thing. A powerful “there there, I love you.” My point is that I couldn’t feel busted with Elijah as my friend; our oddities were a selling point, not a humiliating miss at fitting in. I hope I was able to ease his suspicions or shames about his own fractures, here and there.
While we began as art class dorks in our early teens, there came a point in which our childhoods were just old things that rusted beneath the porch. We were men, which seemed crazy. I married and started raising children! That’s all the way grown up. Elijah and I each had parents for a little while, but they died in different ways, and I can’t figure out which of them went above or below. It could go either way, but I think maybe our moms were mostly gold, if at a distance. Through all the life things, we became older adult friends. Then middle-aged friends. We would have been absolute geezer friends one day; I have no doubt. I would have fucked with him without mercy in the nursing home. There’s a surreal vibe when you’ve known someone so long that you’ve begun to forget the beginning. It had already begun.
I can’t hold it against him that he didn’t or couldn’t go dry. I’ll chalk that up to Elijah being Elijah, because that’s the thing about our relationship: Sometimes a friendship goes long, and can hover around catastrophe, and in an unexpected way, make a thing the better for it. We own the bonfires we set, even if they start because somebody else happened to throw two matches in the same direction. Elijah fucking Brubaker has been my ride-or-die for 30+ years; I can’t hold anything against him. I can only miss him and his bullshit and how it tetris-blocked together with my bullshit so, so well.
This is not the first time I’ve had to miss him, but it is assuredly a sadness in its adult form. This one will go with me all the way to the end. We made things together sometimes. There were little eras in which I thought he was the only person on this planet who saw me. Enough of that.
I’m angry and he drank. Not so much at first, but later, when systemic life began to show its teeth; the dull, chewing ones you think you can avoid if you’re good enough and diligent. Listen, this place is not made for us; we have to convince it. It’s selfish and it’s made of us, and it can drain us. Here’s the closest I can get to Hallmark: Be broken. That’s the big thesis here I want to say to my dear friend’s friends. Be broken and hurl yourself at everything like a sexy comet, and rest when you need, and get old, go ahead. Isolate or run the party. Quit or achieve. Be the old bitch who runs the tower a young bitch has to clean, but for fuck’s sake, ease back on the drinking. For some of us, the passions are destructive. The best things usually are, but someone with a deeply bruised heart will miss you the way I miss my dear friend.
Goddamn, I miss you, E. We were gonna be Statler and Waldorf. Dude, I still feel like I have lightning for blood, but it flickers with me away over the hills, and I thought we’d talk about your lightning, too. Instead, something else. Your isolated end rumbles through my head like an in-joke and I can’t shut it off and the Bafflers are watching while God eats paste in the corner. Fuck, man. I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry. I love you like crazy and that’s what it is.
I’ll just drop this final thing. It’s a direct quote from our text message thread, about a week before he died: “I usually stay in decent shape and eat pretty healthy so without the booze, I'm thinking I'd live to 100 and be a genius, but it went overnight from partying with hot sluts to my blood being poison.” I joked that this is what I would one day print on his gravestone or bronze marker or whatever ended up commemorating him. He told me to do it. Kind of just did.
