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There are some really great comments and observations in this thread - love the stuff about comparing the insertion of the author into the text/creation of fantasy figures in Clowes to Morrison's handling of the same. Very nice stuff. I particularly like the idea that the Enid/Seymour relationship in the Ghost World movie is in some ways a more developed/full-blooded version of the comic book scene featuring Clowes – I’d never thought of it that way, but it makes quite a lot of sense as a comparison.
I slightly prefer the Ghost World comic to the movie verison, but there’s not much in it. I think I just get a little bit more out of the focus on the relationship between Enid and Rebecca than I do out of the Seymour/Enid set-up, but this is mostly just a personal thing – the movie did a great job of getting the feel of the comic right and taking it in a bunch of slightly different directions, I think.
Caricature is normally the first Clowes work I pass out to friends who are curious about his work - that or Ghost World, depending on the person in question. It's great, and with quite a bit of variety to it - you'll love it.
The thing that I like best about Eightball #22 at the moment is that all of the lovely narrative playfulness is never used as a shield or screen – it always enriches and plays off of the overlapping narratives in a lot of really brilliant ways. It would be easy (and also pretty fun) when writing something as self-aware and complex as Eightball #22 to just make it clever for its own sake*, but I don’t think Clowes does that here. I think this is why this comic – so full of different characters and styles – feels so full as it does, despite being so relatively short and compressed. The self-awareness of, say, the Charles sections, adds to both the humour and the sadness of that character, and even the sillier, more baroque moments play off the rest of the piece in at least one or two interesting ways. As far as I’m concerned it’s both the best thing Clowes has done so far, and easily one of the finest comic books ever made. There’s just so much that could be talked about in terms of theme, character, and from. More importantly than that, the thing reads so damned well. It’s so simple and funny and sad, and yet it rewards re-reading like very little else out there does.
About David Boring – a lot of people throw David Lynch’s name out there when they’re talking about this one, and I’m never sure if they’re just doing this because this is a ‘weird’ story or if they’ve got more to say on the matter. I really hope it’s the latter, because there’s all sorts of interesting stuff going on here in terms of how Clowes uses what feels like a very crime noir mode of storytelling to tell a story that has very little to do with that genre (something Lynch does quite a lot, I reckon) and in how it presents its stranger elements in such a matter of fact way… did I once read Clowes describing this story as being “half-baked Nabokov meets ‘Gilligan’s Island’” or am I just making that up? Either way it’s an oddly fitting description, in a throwaway way.
I definitely need to re-read this sometime soon, because it’s been a while and I think I could get a lot out of a deeper analysis of this one.
You know… I’ve still not read Pussey. Hmmm. I’d all but forgot about that one.
*There’s nothing wrong with this as an approach, by the way – a lot of my favourite stuff is just playful, clever fun. I just think that it’s important to notice that Clowes is up to something else in work like Eightball #22. |
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