Precision Ennui in the Funny Pages:
Too Clowes for Comfort
Book feature, 1/13/99
Caricature
by Daniel Clowes
Fantagraphics, $29.95 (hardcover)
Let us now praise Daniel Clowes, one of the reigning American masters of visual perfection and human imperfection in the graphic-novel field.
Clowes emerged from Chicago in the ’80s with Lloyd Llewellyn, a private-eye spoof series full of fab ’50s architecture, pre-cocktail-revival hip men’s clothes, and gag stories built around a combination of early MAD Magazine subtle outrageousness and postpunk hip irony.
For many an aspiring alterna-cartoonist back then, a modest success like Lloyd would’ve been the cornerstone of a career. But for Clowes it was just a start.
Encouraged by Fantagraphics Books to phase out the limited Lloyd format in favor of a broader pallate, Clowes launched the anthology comics series Eightball in 1990. The first few issues contrasted Lloyd-style gag humor with darker, scarier drama pieces (such as the story Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, serialized for over two years) and first-person illustrated rants and fantasies (“On a Desert Island With the People on the Subway”). By the time Velvet Glove finally ended, Clowes had constructed a recipe for low-key, high-anxiety tales that married precise, tight drawings with all-too-flawed characters moving through an urban landscape of loneliness and forever-dashed expectations.
Over the past six years, Clowes has continued to perfect this style; with more than a little influence from another Chicago-based Fantagraphics cartoonist, Acme Novelty Library creator Chris Ware. Eightball continued to combine the outrageous with the comitragic, particularly in the series’ five-year serial Ghost World.
Which brings us to Clowes’s newest Eightball collection, Caricature. It collects eight one-shot stories from pastEightball issues, plus one similar piece (“Green Eyeliner”) commissioned for last year’s Esquire summer-fiction issue.
The title of Caricature fits both the topic of the lead story (a once-promising commercial artist now reduced to drawing faces for hire at crafts fairs) and the book’s overall tone. In front of all of Clowes’s exquisitely-composed frames of strip-mall landscapes, motels, and “restored” blocks of former urban decay, the faces of his characters hauntingly stare straight out at you, as if pleading for your understanding. In most cases, they’re the jaded, tired faces of men and women who’ve been either burned by life, frozen out of life, or both.
These characterizations go far beyond the one-dimensonal square-bashing Clowes once practiced with gag characters such as Young Dan Pussey (the ultimate alternative-comix-world putdown of geeky superhero-comics fans). The characters in Caricature, no matter how pathetic, antisocial, or cruel, are all given a degree of human dignity by Clowes that they lack in their own lives.
Many of these going-nowhere people go through quite a bit of plot twists in their brief tales, mostly minor tragedies that leave them even more jaded and confused than before. In the collection’s longest work, the 22-page “Gynecology,” Clowes employs flashbacks, flash-forwards, asides, asides within asides, and suplots often lasting a single ninth-of-a-page drawing frame to relate the complicated, yet ultimately futile, lives of a lonely doctor’s wife, the cynical gallery painter with whom she’s cheating, and their assorted friends, spouses, lovers, rivals, and enemies. This story, like all the stories here, is a masterwork of the comix-narrative form, bouncing images and words off of one another and using sequential drawings to juxtapose subplots and ideas, only to neatly bring it all back together in the last two pages.
It’s also a bookend to the title story, in a way. The title of “Caricature” implies a seemingly shallow impression of a public face which can actually reveal much (maybe too much) about the person’s soul. In “Gynecology,” the doctor’s wife’s lover complains that her husband can coldly stare at other women’s private parts with no emotional response, that there’s something wrong about “a man who can turn off natural human impulses like a light switch whenever he feels like it.”
While Clowes never gives his characters an alternative to their Hobson’s choice between snide sarcasm and jaded reserve, his drawing and his writing offer such an alternative to us. It’s the opportunity to see the world directly around us with a little more compassion, a little less self-centeredness.
