The Complete Eightball 1-18: Issues 1-18

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Velvet Glove, Ghost World, The Party, The Fairy Frog, The Happy Fisherman, Why I Hate Christians, Ectomorph Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, I Love You Tenderly (Lloyd Llewellyn), The Future, Dan Pussey's Masturbation Fantasy, Sexual Frustration, What Do You Do for a Cold? 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. Ice Haven (Pantheon, 2005, ISBN 978-0-375-42332-1) – A reformatted version of the contents of Eightball #22

Velvet Glove" is a parody of bad film adaptations, using the just-completed Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron as its source, with behind-the-scenes segments showing an increasingly anxious Clowes in talks with a clueless Hollywood producer, and scenes from the resulting movie, in which Clay is a tough, sarcastic police detective who plays by his own rules and makes pithy remarks (such as "what are you lookin' at?") before shooting his enemies. Tina is recast as a space alien who gives "Clay" a ring of power. Can you talk about one of the cohesive elements you see now in your work that you may not have seen at the time?

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With that criticism aside, Clowes is a master of the comics form. His art is astounding and somehow gets better throughout the collection. I also think his plots are mundane in the best way possible (aside from Velvet Glove which I’ll get to). Ghost World is the pinnacle of Clowes in this period of his career. It’s mundane and relatable in the best way possible with great humor and a dash of angst that makes it such a joy to read. The more introspective elements of Ghost World evoke a self reflection not many other pieces of media incite in me. Ghost World hits its demographic where it hurts which is 100% it’s intention. It displays growing up and not knowing what to do with yourself better than any other piece of art. Ghost World captures that weird feeling after high school where you realize to become your own person you need to shed what other people think about you, you need to get rid of some things that make you happy too. As a screenwriter, he has been nominated for an Academy Award and written the films Ghost World (with Terry Zwigoff), Art School Confidential, and Wilson. His illustrations have been featured on a wide-ranging array of posters, album covers, and magazines, including many covers for The New Yorker. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife and son. 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. Ghost World was adapted by Clowes and director Terry Zwigoff into a 2001 feature film of the same name, for which Clowes and Zwigoff were nominated for an Academy Award for screenplay writing. Additionally, the 2006 Clowes/Zwigoff film Art School Confidential was loosely based on a short story of the same name which appeared in Eightball #7. 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.

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. 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.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. Once the Ghost World stories start to pop up though, there is a noticeable shift. There's still the anger but it's more cast inward. The barely concealed self-insert characters that Clowes is so fond of grow more introspective. The stories have a sadness to them, a melancholy that gets into your bones. The first Ghost World strip may have a lot in common with the earlier rants but the ending of it does not. I don't think you can see the growth of Clowes' work if you were to read the stories in a format not in the original serialization. Hell, you can see the growth just in the covers as the issue numbers get higher. When you created the stories serialized in “Eightball”—such as “Velvet Glove” or “Ghost World”—did you intend then for them to be short pieces, or did you have a sense they could continue into a longer narrative?

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.Daniel Clowes writes either the funniest sad comics or the saddest funny comics in the world.--Sam Thielman These speculations are usually gloomy — but absurdly so. In Clowes' future, gender ambiguity will become so mainstream, regular guys will wear Doris Day wigs while watching sports bloopers. "There will be nostalgia for the nostalgia of previous generations" — which is actually one facet of The Complete Eightball's appeal. As for trends, "teenage boys will adopt the 'balding, paunchy, fortyish businessman' look."

What specifically comes to mind, in terms of the kind of drawing that you didn't try then and feel comfortable with now? It always depresses me to see the stuff that hipsters have on display in their apartments," he broods, surveying a collection of kitschy toys. "It always seems so childish and unoriginal, but it's really not much different from my stuff." He might as well be talking about psychic baggage. Clowes is as hard on himself as he is on everyone around him — or most people around him. The exceptions are bullies and people who buy into the American consumerist mythos. 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. 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 Planetbut 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. Clowes offset cynicism with sympathy as he cast an outsider’s eye on members of society some might classify as ‘the dregs.’ As the anthology developed, Clowes proved himself a master of the short story in comics form...”