In each dense and delirious issue of Eightball, Daniel Clowes was driven to perfectionism, ricocheting like mad from story to story and foretelling some of the comic medium’s possible futures.
Ed Park
The Complete Eightball:
Issues 1–18
by Daniel Clowes.
Fantagraphics, 528 pp.,
The comic book really is a perfect consumer item. It’s portable, flexible, cheap enough to be disposable, durable enough to last several lifetimes with proper archival care, lightweight, colorful and simple (no packaging or shrink-wrap required). Think in terms of the entire package, the structural cohesion of every component (from page numbers to indicia, etc.)
—“To the Young Cartoonist,” Modern Cartoonist (1997)
IN 1989 a two- dollar comic book called
Eightball debuted with the aggressive
subtitle “An Orgy of Spite, Vengeance,
Hopelessness, Despair and
Sexual Perversion.” True to the letter,
the five vices suffuse its thirty- two
black- and- white pages. In the surreal
opener, “Like a Velvet Glove Cast in
Iron,” our hero gets blindsided by a
creepy bondage movie, soul- kissed by
a filthy drunk, and arrested by sadistic
cops; he periodically flashes back to
the troubled face of some lost love or
phantom. Then there is “Devil Doll?,”
a takeoff on those tracts drawn by the
evangelical cartoonist Jack Chick that
proselytizers still leave on subway
seats—a campy- cruel three- pager in
which heavy metal, PCP, and D&D lure
a woman to a life of sin. (After getting
a pentagram tattooed on her brow, she
cackles, “I think it looks #@* radical!”)
Next comes a sleazy fable of adultery
and novelty gags (“The Laffin’ Spittin’
Man”), dressed to kill in angular midcentury
fashions and punctuated with
the airborne sweat droplets known in
the comics trade as plewds. The closing
feature is “Young Dan Pussey,” a
warts- and- all take on a superhero
comics mill—a meta- maneuver suggesting
firsthand experience. “Get a
move on, boys! Breakfast is ready!”
cries the taskmaster to his underpaid
team, bunked in the Infinity Comics
compound. “Pages are waiting to be
pencilled, written and inked!”
Varying in tone and ambition, each
of the comics in Eightball’s first issue
fixates on verbal zing and graphic
textures. Faces tend to be grotesque,
and the dialogue is often stylishly
rancid (“Yeah, stop fucking around,
Douche. . . I don’t want our sales to be
affected by this unreadable shit!”), but
the comics’ sheer beauty and mystery
can also knock you out. The opening
panel of the first story is a close- up of
a stunning, raven- haired woman, with
earrings that (on the third or thirteenth
read) turn out to be Thalia and Melpomene,
the classical masks of comedy
and tragedy. Her face is so hypnotic,
you miss what’s hiding in plain sight.
Eightball was published not long
after Art Spiegelman’s groundbreaking
memoir Maus (1986) and Alan Moore
and Dave Gibbons’s caped- crusader
deconstruction Watchmen (1987), when
the mainstream American press briefly
lauded the literary potential of comics,
but its word- drunk selection has little
in common with such monumental
works. It felt like the future, arrived
at through the past. The shading effects
were done cleanly in Zip- A- Tone
(a soon- to- be- discontinued adhesive
sheet), and the peculiar lettering could
look plucked from an earlier era, its
fussiness forcing readers to come
closer, slow down. At two bucks, the
comic was a bargain, dense and delirious.
Maybe too dense. In one story, the
hard- boiled narrator breaks the fourth
wall to grumble about space limits as he
contemplates his dire straits: “A good
question that deserves an answer—unfortunately
I only have 6 pages in this
issue so you’re gonna have to take my
word for it.”
The joke is that he has no one to
blame but himself. Everything in
Eightball was done by the artist Daniel
Clowes. He was twenty- eight and living
in his native Chicago, after a stint
in New York, where he studied at the
Pratt Institute—later lampooned in
“Art School Confidential”—and drew
comics for Cracked. (Unlike misfit penciller
Dan Pussey, he never served time
at a superhero outfit.) For the inaugural
issue, he signed his pieces Daniel
Clowes, D. G. C., and Dan Clowes. Future
issues ran bylines from Dan’l Clowes,
D. Gillespie Clowes, “Tubby” Clowes,
Young Dan Clowes, and more: an industrious
crew of misanthropic ink studs
and true artistes, all easily summoned
with a glance in the mirror. (“I’ve always
felt that I had all these different,
very unrelated parts of my personality,
and I wanted to be able to do stories
with each of these different parts of
my personality in the same book,” he
later said.) Covers and an occasional
feature were printed in color, for him
an almost masochistic feat involving
Mylar film, blue- lining, and the cutting
of transparent Pantone sheets. By issue
10, Clowes had divorced, remarried, and
relocated to Berkeley. The cover price
was fifty cents more.
Other adventurous comics found
their way to store racks in the late
1980s and early 1990s, and you could
detect in Eightball a tinge of the nightmare
logic of Chester Brown’s Yummy
Fur, the pop- culture mockery of Bob
Burden’s Flaming Carrot, the precise
body horror of Charles Burns’s Hard-
Boiled Defective Stories, and the midwestern
rue suffusing Harvey Pekar’s
American Splendor. (Lloyd Llewellyn,
swinging star of “The Laffin’ Spittin’
Man,” first appeared in a teaser included
in an issue of the Hernandez
brothers’ Love and Rockets.) But in
the spirit of that titular sphere, Eightball
defied categories, ricocheting like
mad from the start. Or is it that, when
shaken, it foretold some of the comic
medium’s possible futures?
From 1989 to 1997, Fantagraphics
published the first eighteen issues,
which have now been collected in one
bullet- stopping volume as The Complete
Eightball.1
1Five more issues appeared from 1998 to
2004. These later numbers concentrated
on single, long- form narratives (David Boring,
Ice Haven, and The Death Ray, all later
published as graphic novels) and are not
included in this volume.
The tentpoles are two serials
that proved Clowes could do pretty
much anything: the labyrinthine, Lynchian
Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron
and—beginning immediately after—
the indelible female friendship saga
Ghost World, both of which have been
issued as separate volumes (and, in the
latter case, developed into a much- loved
film). But it’s a richer experience to read
them in situ, interrupted by everything
else. Clowes was driven to perfectionism,
as well as to fill pages—deadline
as mother of invention.2
2The Complete Eightball includes a dozen
pages of illuminating notes and source images.
Of Eightball #6 (June 1991), Clowes recalls
that the printing was so abysmal that
he “threw the entire box of comp copies out
the window onto Division Street about two
minutes after cutting it open. Later, after
being told by the printer (now out of business:
HA!) that we couldn’t reprint until
these copies were sold, I went out in the
middle of the night and salvaged a few of
the copies that hadn’t yet been pissed on
by hoboes.”
Thus we find unhinged screeds (a
Clowesian proxy lists personae non
gratae in “I Hate You Deeply,” including
“People who don’t capitalize their
name,” while “The Future” forecasts
that “everybody who ever recorded
anything will at some point be called
a genius by somebody”—see today’s
oversaturated podcast market for
proof), instantly fizzling franchises
(“Hippypants and Peace Bear”), and
wry urban daydreams (“Marooned on
a Desert Island with the People on the
Subway”). There are slightly facile musings
on art- making (“Grist for the Mill”),
as well as emotionally plangent stories
that say more in a dozen pages than
most graphic novels can at ten times
the length. Of this last group, “Immortal,
Invisible,” “Like a Weed, Joe,” and
“Blue Italian Shit” are luminous memory
plays that, despite centering on different
characters, read like episodes in
a single sentimental education.
Impressive later works like “Caricature”
and “Gynecology” distill the
earlier misanthropy into compulsively
readable noir- tinged narratives.
They have the meandering magic of a
Cheever story like “The Country Husband”
or “The Day the Pig Fell into
the Well”: populated with curious
characters who enter and exit without
fanfare, told in a voice bursting
with regret yet also ecstatic with the
sheer talent expended in the telling.
The busy, fevered covers—everyone
looks deranged—practically shout for a
browser’s attention, in contrast to the
subtler ones gracing later Clowes books
like Wilson (2010) and Patience (2016).
Even the letters sections (“The Bulging
Mailsack”), prank- call contests, and
ads for mugs and T- shirts feel crucial,
providing a glimpse of the hustle and
flow of audience engagement in the
pre- Internet era.3
3Correspondents include fellow cartoonists
like Peter Bagge, whose Hate had its
heyday in the 1990s, comedian Margaret
Cho, a member of Yo La Tengo, Spike Lee’s
brother, and a Seattle woman who, after inquiring
about the pronunciation of Clowes’s
surname, adds, “Did I mention that you are
a white male and I hate you?”
The Complete Eightball
comes with no overarching table
of contents for its five- hundred- plus
pages, making individual pieces hard
to hunt down. (I developed an elaborate
system using shredded Post- its.)
The absence compels you to read the
whole thing in sequence, to regard it
as a polyphonic magnum opus tilting
at the monoculture, born under Bush I
and stretching into Clinton’s second
term. It’s a madcap portrait of the artist
as generational talent, recycling and
refining his themes, as well as a time
capsule bearing the moods and mores
of an American decade now so distant
it might as well be the age of Atlantis.
2.
[Comics] are in a sense the ultimate
domain of the artist who seeks to
wield absolute control over his imagery.
Novels are the work of one
individual but they require visual
collaboration on the part of the
reader. Film is by its nature a collaborative
endeavor. . . . Comics offer
the creator a chance to control the
specifics of his own world in both
abstract and literal terms.
—“So, Why Comics?,”
Modern Cartoonist
“To me, my art looks perfect when I
do it,” Clowes told The Comics Journal
in the summer of 1992.
I mean, it’s really what I see in my
head. To me it looks almost like a
diagram or like a coloring book or
something. It really looks very. . . I
don’t want to say bland, but it just
looks very perfect. It looks exactly
the way the world should look. And
I don’t see a style at all. I see it as
being each face is the way a face
really looks. . . . People tell me they
can recognize my style, and I don’t
understand what they’re talking
about. I don’t see my style.
The interview was published shortly
after Eightball #9, containing the penultimate
chapter of Like a Velvet Glove
Cast in Iron; the serial would reach
its shattering finish two months later.
Clowes’s confession- cum- manifesto,
as he nears the end of his landmark
work, is a mix of modesty and bravado,
the tone half- kingly, half- savantish.
His facility with multiple modes might
suggest the absence of a singular style
(in the same interview, he prioritizes
doing “all different kinds of drawing”),
but even in their variety, his panels are
always recognizably Clowesian—and
miles away from bland.
Glove is a startlingly original comic
that nevertheless trails numerous influences,
from the title (nicked from
Russ Meyer’s ferociously great 1965 film
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) on down:
a Manson- like cult, Lovecraft ian fishfolk,
a ubiquitous logo that recalls the
post horn in The Crying of Lot 49, not
to mention an important locale (Hourglass
Lake) that also figures in Lolita.
As in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet
(1986), a young man descends into a
twilight zone behind an explicitly all-
American façade.4
4It should be said that Clowes’s Eightball
characters are almost entirely white, and
the gaze (with the significant exception
of Ghost World) is unabashedly male—not
unusual for the time, but more glaring
thirty years on. Clowes is aware of the uncomfortable
embrace of nostalgia. In the
provocatively titled “Gynecology,” late in
The Complete Eightball, the artist Epps feebly
excuses his bias for the iconography of
yesteryear, including problematic images,
by saying, “I just like the innocence of those
old drawings.” And the fried- chicken fran-
chise Cook’s in the 2001 film Ghost World
(for which Clowes cowrote the screenplay)
is revealed to have originally had a racist
name, later fixed by changing one letter
A bric- a- brac connoisseur,
Clowes conjures a shadow
world of grim diners and collectible
tchotchkes, moronic ad copy (“Hey!
I Need a Liquor Store”) and periodicals
like The Octagon (newspaper) and
Luv Canal (girlie mag, named after
the infamous toxic dump site). Cryptic
storefronts do slow business at odd
addresses: you can find Yahweh’s Mistake
at 1977 Hair Street. Call it gentle
magic realism, a playful twist on the
everyday that prepares the reader for
more profound breaches of reality.
Clay Loudermilk is less of an innocent
than Jeffrey Beaumont, Kyle Mac-
Lachlan’s Blue Velvet character; the
story starts with him visiting a porn
theater, after all, and we piece together
that he’s divorced. What he sees onscreen
is not what he came for: a bizarre
S&M movie, entitled Like a Velvet
Glove Cast in Iron, with a mustached
man in diapers and a dominatrix who
looks alarmingly like his ex- wife. (We
don’t grasp this till later; we don’t even
learn Clay’s last name till episode 3.)
The masks of Melpomene and Thalia
pop up on the end credits, bracketing
the list of pseudonymous actors (Abel
Caine, Brock Thunder, Madam Van
Damme) and the name of the auteur:
Dr. Wilde. According to a restroom sage,
who dispenses advice—legal, dermatological,
and otherwise—from atop a
toilet seat, the company responsible for
that unsettling film, Interesting Productions,
is located in Blackjack County.
Which is where things really get weird.
Able- bodied, with a healthy head of
hair, Clay is nonetheless so staggered
by this celluloid version of his ex—is
it really her?—that for the rest of the
saga, he’s depicted with bags under
his eyes, desperate for a solid night’s
sleep. Some scenes, seen once, can’t
be unseen. This goes for the reader,
too. For all its visual wit and honed
banter, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron
unfolds as a series of dangerous visions,
designed to make us reel. It’s apt
that Glove’s first chapter delivers not
just forbidden sights, but monstrous
means of seeing. One of Clay’s friends,
ludicrously, appears with the tails of
“Asiatic sea crustaceans” flailing from
his sockets, to treat some ocular malady;
he explains that his doctor had
his eyeballs removed, and the creatures
were “there to eat out the bacteria.”
Later Clay sits handcuffed in
the back of a police cruiser when the
cops stop a mute, possibly somnambulant
woman who has three vertical
eye slits in her face. One figure sees
nothing; the other, too much.
The overall effect is startling. It looks
exactly the way the world should look.
At its most potent, Glove can feel like
it alters, even negates, seeing. During
these moments of high anxiety and
maximal weirdness, style is obliterated
or irrelevant. The images attack
too quickly for style to be processed, like
medicinal sea worms that dive straight
through the eyeholes and into the brain.
Like Clay, we want to see more, even
if it ruins us. His dark desire for the
truth—the imperative to cherchez la
femme—brings him into the fold of
conspiracy theorists, who see in a grocery
chain’s primitive logo the sigil
of some vast secret network, and into
a death cult prepping for the Great
Cleansing, an apocalyptic revolution
that involves the assassination of the
advice columnist Ann Landers.5
5In one of Glove’s rare off- key asides, the
revolutionaries take over the White House,
where they get annoyed by a freshly divorced,
foulmouthed Bill Clinton. Clowes
drew the panels in July 1992, months before
the election, and almost chose to depict
Ross Perot in the Oval Office instead.
Clay strays into the clutches of a seductress
or three as he hunts for clues. All
the while, he shows decency to those
he encounters, no matter how strange
they look: a lovelorn waitress who is
part fish, a genetically engineered pet
with no orifices, a crawling man who
helps him out with directions. As in
Faster, Pussycat!, violence erupts on a
hair trigger; but unlike the exhilarating
drubbings doled out by the Amazonian
Varla (Tura Satana), the ones
delivered by a testosterone- injecting
brute named Geat kill the soul.
Clay lodges across the street from
his quarry: Interesting Productions,
the secretive entity behind the tawdry
film. Through binoculars, he spies
a small, pipe- smoking girl at a desk,
perpetually writing. (Going through her
trash, he later discovers she’s simply
drawing the same picture of a horse
head, over and over.) When he gets inside,
his fate is sealed.
Once he enters the building, movie
titles are tacked to a corkboard, with
keys to corresponding screening rooms.
Clay takes three keys. The first film is
a bug- eyed rant (delivered, in fact, by
Dr. Wilde, the director); the second,
a perverse silent movie in which two
babies are made up to look like bride
and groom. He walks out of both. With
grim fairy- tale logic, the third selection
is the worst thing he could ever see.
Later, in one of the most devastating
reveals in comics, it turns out that—
spoiler alert—all of Interesting Productions’
plots, from insipid to sadistic
to literally murderous, come directly
from the pipe- chomping girl’s mind, as
transcribed by a slavering Dr. Wilde.
By the end, Clay is molded into a new
shape, his fate in line with his name.
3.
Think of the comic panel (or page or
story) as a living mechanism with,
for example, the text representing
the brain (the internal; ideas, religion)
and the pictures representing
the body (the external: biology, etc.),
brought to life by the almost tangible
spark created by the perfect
juxtaposition of panels in sequence.
—“To the Young Cartoonist,”
Modern Cartoonist
The snippets of letters that ran in
Eightball #11, responding to the end
of Glove’s run, read as though written
in a state of shock. “Exactly what
was that all about??” wonders one
reader, while another says it “left me
with the same feeling I got when I finished
100 Years of Solitude—life can
be so great, and yet fucked.” Clowes
later joked that #11 was “one of the
most incoherent issues,” and some of
it feels pro forma, as if he were depleted
after the labors of Glove. There’s
the interior monologue of someone
bored at a party; an Irish folktale “illustrated
by D. Gillespie Clowes”; “Why
I Hate Christians” (about what you’d
expect); and “The Happy Fisherman,”
who is nude from the waist down, his
privates cloaked by an open- mouthed
fish. Actual Hollywood interest in Like
a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron inspired a
satiric riff, “Velvet Glove,” but it’s a
dud, alternating scenes of a superheroinflected
revamp of Glove with ones of
Clowes getting pressured to, e.g., cast
Jim Belushi as Geat.
But then, on page 25, there is “Ghost
World.” The story stands out immediately,
its pages shaded in a delicate
blue to evoke the soft glow a TV casts
into a room at night, numbing but also
holy. Best friends Enid Coleslaw (dark
bob, glasses) and Becky Doppelmeyer
(blond) are recent high school graduates
trying to figure out their next
move, and the pleasure is in their fresh
faces and how they find diversion—
even fascination—living in nowheresville.
6
6The suburban milieu is geographically
vague—“a combination of Chicago and
Los Angeles. . .with decaying Midwestern
brick buildings and palm trees in the background,”
per Clowes. Aimee Mann’s song
“Ghost World” (2000), inspired by the comic
but released before the movie, suggests
the South: “If I don’t find a job/It’s down
to Dad and Myrtle Beach.”
Enid and Becky are witheringly
critical of bad music, retro diners, and
raw ambition. I was going to call them
sassy, but on the story’s first page,
Enid rips into Sassy, the magazine
du jour for their demographic: “These
stupid girls think they’re so hip, but
they’re just a bunch of trendy stuck- up
prep- school bitches who think they’re
‘cutting edge’ because they know who
‘Sonic Youth’ is!” To which Becky replies,
“You’re a stuck- up prep- school
bitch!”
Clowes initially didn’t think “Ghost
World” would be more than a one- shot,
but the voices must have been irresistible.
(He cites the charming if casually
racist 1964 movie The World of Henry
Orient, which follows two teenage girls
in Manhattan who are obsessed with
a concert pianist, as an influence on
his duo’s insular dynamic.) By their
second appearance, it’s clear that Enid
and Becky are trying to navigate the
uneasy life stage between school and
whatever lies beyond—and the newly
forming obstacles between them—by
directing their insecurities outward,
mocking their peers and especially the
adults around them.
They roll their eyes at do- gooder parents
and long- haired waiters, Satanists
and psychics and stand- up comics,
“guitar- plunkin’ morons” and the “pathetic
fucking loser[s]” who resort to
personal ads. (“I remember when I first
started reading these, I thought ‘DWF’
stood for ‘dwarf,’” Enid says. “I could
never figure out why so many dwarves
were placing ads.”) Enid sneers that
Becky’s foppish former beau seems
to have taken fashion cues from “a
gay tennis player from the Twenties.”
Browsing a free alt weekly sporting
the headline “In Bed with the GOP: A
Lobbyist Comes Clean,” Enid moans:
“People who are super- serious about
politics all the time give me the total
creeps! It’s like my dad. . . . I mean who
the fuck cares?!”
In earlier Eightball stories, when an
embittered Clowes stand- in goes
on a tear, you can feel like the hair’s
been singed off your head, even if his
bile matches your own. (“I wanted to
be kinda mean ’cause I’m really sick
of these people dominating my life,”
Clowes once said.) By having the
caustic observations come from two
young women whose lives are in flux,
and forcing these opinions to rub up
against social reality, the story achieves
a devastating poignancy while still displaying
Clowes’s gift for spite. Unfolding
in eight parts, Ghost World is the
spiritual opposite of Like a Velvet Glove
Cast in Iron. Though haunted by his
past, Clay Loudermilk remains something
of a cipher; living in the present,
in a world more closely conforming to
our own, Enid and Becky are both more
normal and deeply rooted.
The title came from some graffiti
Clowes passed daily near his home in
Chicago; after he moved to California,
the phrase floated to mind as he
began writing the story, and it memorably
captures that sense of being
out of step with what’s around you. It’s
as though, having plunged his talent
deep into Glove’s heart of darkness,
Clowes immediately turned it in the
opposite direction. A subtle but important
mirroring takes place between
the S&M mask in the first chapter of
Glove, which unzips to reveal Clay’s
ex- wife, and the black headgear that
Enid buys at Adam’s II, an adult store
that she begs her friend Josh to take
her to. That mask, divorced from its
intended use, looks like part of a superhero
costume: the sordid has become
adorable. Google “Ghost World,”
and one of the first images you’ll see
is Thora Birch as Enid in the 2001 film
version, winsome in a bat- eared mask.
Edward Gorey devised suitably
Victorian- sounding pseudonyms for
his morbidly wry stories from the
letters of his own name (Ogdred
Weary, Regera Dowdy, et al.). Vladimir
Nabokov inserted Vivian Darkbloom
into some of his books for an
enigmatic, anagrammatic cameo. For
Ghost World, Daniel Clowes, a serial
employer of pen names, rearranged
himself, lending his most enduring
and endearing heroine his letters. By
the end of the book, Enid Coleslaw’s
destiny is unclear, but she’s equipped
with all the wisdom and love her creator
has to offer.7
7. The affection is mutual, to a point. In chapter
3, Becky teases Enid: “Name one guy
who lives up to your standards.” “Somebody
like David Clowes,” Enid says dreamily.
“He’s like this famous cartoonist.” To
which Becky replies: “Yick! I hate cartoons!”
(Later Enid sees Clowes at a signing and
recoils in disgust.
4.
As we enter, voiceless and impotent,
a digital age of “instant access”
(or constant excess), the fragile
chemistry of this, our hand- held,
non- automatic pictorial narrative
device and its inherently sublime
nuances . . .appears to be in grave
danger. Reading a comic book as
God intended is a simple pleasure
and as such, our precious pictorial
pamphlet, like vaudeville and the
magic lantern, is just the sort of
thing that gets crushed in the gears
of progress.
—“The Future and Beyond,”
Modern Cartoonist
In May 2001, two months before Terry
Zwigoff’s film Ghost World hit theaters,
The Comics Journal ran a long interview
with Clowes, whom it had similarly
featured in 1992. This time, he
got to do the cover. Rather than a single
illustration of the kind he’s done
on occasion since for The New Yorker,
Clowes turned it into a mini graphic
memoir. In panel 1, he’s invited to be
the subject of an interview. (“Why did
I agree to that?” he wonders in panel
3. “I hate The Comics Journal.”) Later,
Clowes reads the results with dismay;
yet by the last panel, he’s somehow
agreed to do the cover illustration.
“What’s wrong with me?” he says at his
drawing board, composing the comic
we’ve just read.
In the interview, Clowes recalls the
arduous process of using Rubylith
sheets to get the distinctive color effects
for Ghost World. It was a bespoke
technique he learned at Pratt, and so
comically cumbersome that he muses,
“I might as well have spent four years
learning how to fix a cotton gin.” The
grumbling in both cases is tongue in
cheek, because the labors he undertook
worked. The Comics Journal cover—a
Möbius comic strip—is a witty master
class in the art form’s seductive
charm and narrative flexibility, and
Ghost World is what Clowes will be remembered
for.
Stuck in the pages of the final
issue in The Complete Eightball is
a stapled, fourteen- page pamphlet
called Modern Cartoonist. Easily detachable,
it’s a literal book within a
book, with publication attributed to
a fictitious Catholic group devoted to
the comic art form. On the cover, an
eyeshaded artist draws a goofy face
on the page before him, while outside
the window, a mushroom cloud looms
beyond a ruined cityscape. In a tidy,
minuscule hand, Clowes—the anonymous
author of the pamphlet—first
assesses the current (1997) situation,
deeming that there are at best “20– 25
[comic] creators producing work of an
extraordinarily high value,” followed
by “25 or 30 with noble aspirations,”
and around 2,950 others who are beneath
contempt—“teenage millionaires
who draw to create fodder for
‘development deals’ and those in waiting
to be same.” He praises the power
of the form (“Comics have an inherent
energy to them. . .a near- electric
charge”), and inveighs against sloppy
work, skewering artists who opt for a
more “iconic” style (mocked as “The
Adventures of a Featureless Blob”).
Just as the cultural change wrought
by the Internet becomes easier to
see, he makes a stand against the
“democratization” promised by new
technology, looking down his nose at
the “structural shift . . . in the reader’s
favor, giving him an exaggerated role
in the give- and- take between artist
and audience.”
It’s fitting that The Complete Eightball,
which contained a parody of Jack
Chick’s fire- and- brimstone pamphlets
in issue #1, should end with a tract
by Clowes himself in the final number.
Clowes has reminisced about buying
and consuming, in one evening,
about sixty of Chick’s tracts, telling
The Guardian it was “maybe the most
devastating comics- reading experience
I’ve ever had.” “I’d never been absolutely
convinced by a comic book before
in my life,” he told The Imp, Daniel
Raeburn’s sporadic but important
comics- crit magazine, in 1997,
but I was sure that he was right
and that I’d been crazy all along. . . .
To read that many in a row, this
overwhelming tidal wave of Christianity
coming at you—it’s an
amazing experience. Here was
this comic dealing with life and
death. The absolute most important
thing. I mean, he was pulling
out all the stops, there was no softpedaling,
he was just ramming it down your throat.
Never before had
I been affected like that by comics.
I find Chick’s work repulsive. But it’s
easy to see why Clowes found those
cheap tracts (eight cents a pop at a
Christian bookstore) so potent. Here
was someone who used the medium
to its utmost, harnessing the power of
words and pictures, to his own furious
ends. (Chick died in 2016.) Clowes’s religion
is comics itself, and every word
in Modern Cartoonist—and each panel
in The Complete Eightball—is a testament
to his godlike prowess. As he
told The Comics Journal in 1992: “I was
trying to almost create something for
myself that I wish existed, or to create
for the world something I wish
existed.” .
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
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