The Complete Eightball 1-18: Issues 1-18

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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. Pussey!: The Complete Saga of Young Dan Pussey (Fantagraphics, 1995, ISBN 978-1-56097-183-2) – Stories featuring Clowes' character Dan Pussey I wavered between 4 and 5 stars for this one. Much of it IS 5 star material (especially the perfectly surreal and creepy Velvet Glove), but a lot of the satire in the shorter strips haven’t aged well, at least for me. Some of the humor just comes across as overly self righteous and mean-spirited, which I suppose is more digestible when you’re reading one issue every few months or so. But it becomes a bit exhausting when consuming the entire run in a short span of time. Still, this is essential for any fan of 80s/90s Clowes. And it was cool seeing his art style and unique brand of cynicism slowly evolve, as was seeing the occasional famous name (in the indie comics world, anyway) like Crumb and Woodring in the letters sections.

Clowes is a genius storyteller and artist, but his gifts include design as well [As with every other aspect of comic-crafting, however, Chris Ware has long since surpassed -- in terms of popularity -- his friend and laissez-faire mentor as a book designer. In 2000, when David Boring and Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth were released simultaneously by Pantheon, Ware was a still just a distant rumble on the horizon, and Clowes was in the ascendant. Ghost World was being filmed by Clowes and Terry Zwigoff, and his (in my opinion) masterpiece was being published as a beautiful hardcover. Along with Ghost World, Caricature, and the book that would immediately it, Ice haven, David Boring represented the peak of Clowes' creative output to date. Within a few months, Ware's Jimmy Corrigan was being hailed as one of the greatest examples of sequential art ever created, and David Boring was largely overshadowed]. Enid and Rebecca share relationship woes as they roam about their unnamed hometown, ridiculing pop culture and musing on the lives of people they run across even while they question their own futures. Clowes fills the book with a colorful supporting cast, like the soft-spoken Josh, with whom both girls are romantically infatuated; former classmate Melorra; and antagonist John Ellis, a caricature of the 1990s-era zine publisher obsessed with serial killers, circus freaks, and firearms. “Ghost World” is an endearing and insightful look through the window of adolescence, sometimes overly dark and disconcerting as the characters explore the petty resentments of friendship and the paradoxes of modern life. The comic’s critical and commercial success led to a 2001 movie adaptation by filmmaker Terry Zwigoff with an Academy Award-nominated screenplay written with Clowes and starring Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson, and Steve Buscemi. The stories you were doing in “Eightball” cross many genres, use different drawing styles, and are of varying length. Was it your intention to try out different approaches each time? Some of the humor remains laugh-out-loud funny, but it perhaps isn’t surprising that some of it has not aged well at all, and will likely make today’s readers cringe. Sometimes it’s remarkably prescient, such as the prediction of a future in which nothing is new—it’s simply endless re-making and re-mixing of past entertainment.

Features new covers by Clowes, and ‘Behind the Eightball’: the author’s annotations for each issue, heavily illustrated with art and photos from his archives. 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.

Once you finish your current project—the one you said you didn’t want to discuss—is there anything you’re looking forward to doing? Do you have some wish like, “I want to go play the kazoo in a band,” for example? 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. One of those important works that almost comes across as unassuming in the earliest issues. Clowes starts out as kind of the usual angry underground comic artist that was so common in the era. Lots of rants and spite thrown out at various targets. There's also the very strange Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron to balance that out, where it's mainly weird atmosphere that never quite tips over into straight horror but has a nightmare-ish dream-like feeling to it. Maybe in the vein of a David Lynch film. It's interesting to see that in a comic, even if it doesn't seem to have a real point or conclusion, just an excuse to be kinda strange. Ice Haven (Pantheon, 2005, ISBN 978-0-375-42332-1) – A reformatted version of the contents of Eightball #22 Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, Devil Doll, The Laffin' Spittin' Man, Young Dan Pussey, What is the Most Important Invention of the Twentieth Century?Of course, some fans of Clowes discovered his work through “Ghost World”—a serialized story that appeared starting in Issue 11 of Eightball after “Like A Velvet Glove…” wrapped up. If you haven’t seen the film based on the comic, “Ghost World” focuses on two cool young women during the summer after they graduate from high school. Clowes uses his sharp dialogue and characterization skills to present their conversations, thoughts, desires, and caustic and often hilarious judgements of others as they go about their lives. Published in 1997 as a graphic novel, Ghost World is Clowes best attempt at presenting female characters as more than objects of desire or derision. And it’s brilliant. The 2001 film (directed by Terry Zwigoff) deservedly won Clowes an Academy Award nomination and if you haven’t seen it, you really should. Thora Birch is charming as Enid Coleslaw and Steve Buscemi is always a joy to watch. In 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. ↩ This is a masterwork in its ability to stay with stories, telling them over years, or simply telling a fantastic story that touches on something in the reader's core. The stories within vary so much there's bound to be a gem in here that will capture your imagination.--David Brooke 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 4. Clowes is the Man. And as if to nail that title down, we now have a two-volume hardcover edition of The Complete Eightball 1–18, which originally ran from 1989–2004. It’s an early but by no means immature work, establishing Clowes as perhaps the best exemplar extant of the underground-comic sensibility of the late 20th century.... Eightballis not just a record of one obsessive’s tussle with the comics medium, but a kind of history of that medium as it comes to maturity.”

Eightball is a comic book by Daniel Clowes and published by Fantagraphics Books. It ran from 1989 to 2004. The first issue appeared soon after the end of Clowes's previous comic book, Lloyd Llewellyn. Eightball has been among the best-selling series in alternative comics.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.

The cornerstone stories of Eightball are, of course, the eerie, oddball comics noir of “Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron” (running from issue #1 to #10) and the “best friends” story of “Ghost World.” The former is a dark-hued tale of paranoia, religious cults, sexual fetishism and, ultimately, bloodless violence. The story’s protagonist, Clay, is ostensibly searching for his lost wife after catching a glimpse of her in a porno film, and his sojourn drops him into a disturbing wonderland of adventure and perils inspired by Clowes’ dreams. Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, Ugly Girls, Grist for the Mill, Dan Pussey Presents Komic Kollector's Korner, Nature Boy, Give it Up, My Suicide, Dialogues from Duplex Planet This is a two-volume, slipcased facsimile edition of the Daniel Clowes comics anthology; it contains the original installments of Ghost World, the short that the film Art School Confidential was based on, and much more. Great art, great writing, inventive stories, and very disturbing nightmares... Do I need to describe the indescribable to you? Suffice to say his stories have everything you could possibly want from comic books and a lot of things you don't. So much misanthropic joy! ...I can't imagine what sitting down with all of those issues compiled into one book could do to your brain... probably good things. If you like surrealism, humor, self-hatred, and living in the world with nothing making sense, then this is the book for you! If you don't like those things, you might like it even more.--Sonia Harris 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.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 soft-pedaling, he was just ramming it down your throat. Never before had I been affected like that by comics. Before he rose to fame as a filmmaker and the author of the best-selling graphic novels Ghost World, David Boring, Ice Haven, and The Death Ray, Daniel Clowes made his name from 1989 to 1997 by producing 18 issues of the beloved comic book series Eightball, which is still widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential comic book titles of all time.