In Which You are Badgered by a Wombat on Groundhog Day
Dan Clowes continues to ascend with Eightball #22. We know what you're going to say. You saw the Ghost World film and you liked it and if you like see his stuff around you'll take a gander at it like when it's in the New Yorker or something, and maybe you'll even pick up that David Boring book in the bookstore and leaf through it...but really, go out of your way to buy a single issue of a comic book? For $4.95? Please.
Well, shut up a minute. Eightball #22 is Clowes' best work to date, better than the original of Ghost World (which the movie couldn't really reproduce). Early issues of Eightball-- before he began serializing Ghost World -- often featured hilarious one-page (or even half-page) strips, gemlike parodies of what a comic "story" might or ought to be. Often these came in the guise of outtakes from some sadly forgotten, demented kids comic from the late 50s or early 60s.
After running these as accompaniments to the unfolding surrealist melodrama "Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron" in the first ten issues of Eightball, Clowes seemed to get increasingly impatient with these whimsies, and focused on longer narratives, devoting most of each issue to one or more: the run of the now-famous Ghost World, plus stories like "Cariacature" and "Like a Weed, Joe." The melancholic sensibility dominated: leavened with the unique, acerbic style and the gestures toward comics of the past. But the little sideshows, which had been so great a delight, were less and less in evidence. Eightballs #20 and 21 were entirely devoted to David Boring-- which combined the adolescent character study of Ghost World with some of the fever-dream quality of "Like a Velvet Glove Cast Iron." No little extra comics at all.
When we picked up Eightball #22, we at first thought that what Clowes was offering was an oblique return to form, a collection of detritus left over after the production of all of his recent extended pieces. Twenty or more little stories, hilarious and morbid, rendered in a cheery, strong style that bristles with a smiling menace, each ending abrubtly, but not before creating a perfectly rendered, enchantingly odd scene. It's only after a few pages that the method is obvious -- a deftly constructed puzzle of a narrative, with multiple points of view and competing narrators, emerges. Disparate characters pop up in one another's stories. There's a dysfunctional version of The Thin Man'sNick and Nora Charles. We meet a frustrated 'zine publisher, and an even more frustrated middle-aged poet who puts off work on his opus to watch Temptation Island. There's a version of Linus van Pelt with a burning, burning sex drive. There's Leopold and Loeb. Mysteries are created, investigated, and eventually dispelled. A stock device for generating tension is deployed, but with a light, almost careless touch: as if Clowes' concern isn't really with his plot (despite how well the plot works to pull everything together), but on the eccentric orbits of all the little planetoids in this cluttered mini-universe. The last page alone is worth the price of admission. When you read it, you'll know why it immediately became so dear to our wrinkled and critical heart.
Posted by B T at February 02, 2002 12:29 AM