As always, Clowes reserved a little venom for himself. Eightball #11.Įightball #11 (1993), for instance, includes “The Party,” a satire about a hipster get-together “Velvet Glove,” a comedy about what would happen if Clowes’s Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron received the Hollywood treatment “The Happy Fisherman,” an obscene “pantsless naïf meets sinister hobo” tale “Why I Hate Christians,” a look at Clowes’s beliefs about religion “Ghost World,” a coming of age story about the friendship of two teenage girls during their post-high school graduation summer “The Fairy Frog,” a haunting adaptation of an Irish fairytale and “Ectomorph,” a strip about skinny men that apes the famous Charles Atlas muscle-building ads.Įightball delivered Clowes’s sardonic take on American culture, celebrating outsiders, freaks, and misfits while skewering nearly every All-American type: the macho creep, the sports fan, the fashion plate, the slick televangelist, the nostalgia hound, the mindless herd-following consumer, the ironic slacker, etc., etc. Clowes moved effortlessly among genres such as autobiography, gag cartoon, and rant as well as fairy tale, short fiction, and cultural satire. A typical issue included five to seven short stories drawn in diverse styles, just as each Mad issue contained work by several artists with distinctive styles.
And the proof was Eightball, perhaps the most important American alternative comic to emerge from the twentieth century.ĭuring its first decade, Eightball was a Mad magazine-esque free-wheeling anthology. But I also had the theory that if it was all by the same artist, and the artist was trying to be truthful or willing to let his unconscious or his intuition decide what was going to happen on the pages, then it would all kind of come together in a cohesive way. different styles - if you combined the serious stuff with humorous stuff - that the result would be kind of discordant. “The thought was,” Clowes recently observed, In the ’80s, prevailing wisdom held that a series needed to focus on a single character and maintain a consistent look. Freed from churning out short comedic adventures featuring the same cast of characters, he’ll finally be able to develop a more personal and wide-ranging approach to comics. Daniel Clowes’s Lloyd Llewellyn series has come to an abrupt end, canceled by the publisher. Features Daniel Clowes and Eightball, 1988-1998: Highlights, Mysteries, and Fun-Facts
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