Barbelith Underground > Comic Books

I have been challenged to take the comics forum forward (by Flux), after suggesting that it is rather too full of nonsense and trivia, and later adding that it is also prone to instant response and lacking in the more thought out view.

For complicated reasons (tendency to equate lycra and trivia, easy cross referencing between Film and Comics) I threw up Ghostworld as an example of something that I felt had been quite ignored in Barbelith; but it was something I have taken seriously, preparing for the film by watching 'Crumb' (Zwigoff's other movie) , and harrassing my local Odeon for not showing the thing at all. So here is my DG Clowes essay.

First Contact
Ghostworld the GN was bought in a local bookstore on sale £2.99 on the principle that a cheap GN is a fair bet. Almost put of by the cover, featuring that stupid batman type mask, and the artwork which in part struck as Charlie Brownish and sepia dull. But I read it, and became absorbed into a story of a stupid sepia dull small town life; I first accepted the form as part of the critique, and then grew to like it, rather in the way that I first hated Eddie Campbell's drawing and then grew to envy it.

I like transcendence in my fiction; my key phrase in all Grant Morrison work is 'There is another world, a better world, there must be'. I like to see things transformed by moral actions, I love surreal extravagance, my favourite Eddy Cambell features The Eyeball Kid. I enjoy the dramatic intensity and high focus of paradigmic conflict.

It is by omitting all of these extraordinary things that Clowes establishes that the banality of the ordinary, and drags it into a negation of authenticity while accurately capturing real life. I am sharply reminded of Doom Patrol 63, where Jane is sent to a hell of ordinaryness, which is our world and also very like Clowesworld, with antidramatic sniping and rivalries as subtitutes for moral context, and random banal disregard for others which arises from understanding. As in Clowesworld, leaving and death are associated. Things are rendered ghostly and insignificant and the key characters are permeated with a sense of unfocussed grief.

Big Decision
Whether or not to share this with my daughter (now 12, loved Zero Girl). If she was keen enough I could get her into the movie. Give her the GN in a low key way, but it didn't mesh with her; I guess Enid and Rebecca are just to grumpy and whiney and unglamorous.

Second Contact
The film is a strange trick. It tells exactly the same story, establishing a very similar mood, with a complete different set of events. My only complaint is that the retro fifties diner seems to have spread to everything; in quite a PK Dick way the present is rendered unreal by being invaded by the past. The girls swear less but are themselves. I need to see it again.

EightBall 22
This seems to be structurally closer to the GW movie than GW comic; spinning a spirally, intereferenced narrative, with quite a few baroque strokes (like the Blue Bunny) and the wilfully self satirising critique. It has the young woman enamoured of the older man theme from the GWmovie, and the same sense of the glueyness of place. If Clowes were to write SF I'm sure he would be tempted by one of those folded time/space stories of prisoners whose every attempt to leave returns them to their comfy cell. Here the forces binding people are as tenuous and compelling as dreams.

I'm a Clowes beginner. I have taken to his work even though it runs against the grain of my general reading. And want more.