Dan Clowes is perhaps the most distinctive
and original cartoonist of his generation, specialising in painfully
honest chronicles of life in small town America. Not that he believes
the hype though, as Suzy Prince found out.
Future historians could do a lot worse for themselves than to sit
down with the entire back catalogue of cartoonist Dan Clowes. His
work is described by noted comics historian Roger Sabin as a ‘corrosively
satirical vision of an America cracking apart, (which) confirms
Clowes as a worthy successor to the underground greats of the 1960’s.’
Meanwhile, his cartooning contemporary, Chris Ware, has described
him as ‘easily the best cartoonist in America’. And
you won’t find any disagreement here!
Then there’s Ghost World, which features at the top of my
mental list of ‘best books ever.’ Over 100,000 copies
of Ghost World have been sold to date, and in 2001 it was made into
a film, which brought the cartoonist to a much wider audience. And
now, there are various projects in the pipeline and a new book has
recently hit the shelves…
In Ice Haven, Clowes takes the familiar setting of a typical US
town, and populates it with an eclectic bunch of characters, including
- as it describes on the book’s cover - Charles (complicated
guest), Carmichael (troubled youth) David Goldberg (tragic victim)
and Ida Wentz (local treasure). So far, so Clowes: he’s at
his best when he’s depicting such smalltown life. This time
the book is based around the story of Leopold and Loeb; infamous
murderers who confessed in 1924 to the kidnapping and murder of
a 14-year-old boy for an ‘intellectual thrill’.
Nude: Your characters are immediately familiar and recognisable.
Does the creation of the people who inhabit the worlds within your
comics stem from watching the people around you?
Dan Clowes: It’s certainly not from conscious observation.
I’m not taking my notebook and walking around the streets
of small town America looking for subjects to be exploited through
my work. It mainly comes from different parts of my own personality
taking shape as characters, and then going off on their own and
developing their own separate lives. I feel like I’m an actor
playing all the parts; like one of those Alec Guinness movies where
he plays nine characters.
Nude: The way that you deal with a lot of your characters could
be described as an affectionate ribbing of people who take themselves
too seriously. One that I loved was Harry Naybors the comic book
critic from Ice Haven (Naybors is somebody who spends his days pontificating
about the comic book genre. He’s a rather pompous walking
textbook).
DC: Harry Naybors is an interesting character: I wanted to have
a comic book critic that I could make fun of, and very early on
that got to be not interesting at all - such an easy target. So
I made him say things that I sort of agree with, and then that I
didn’t exactly agree with, and he became something else. So
in a certain way I feel a great affection for Harry. In some ways
he’s obnoxious but then he’s a smart guy, and I like
people who are off in their own little obsessive worlds, spending
hours on the internet every day arguing with people about the nomenclature
of comics.
Nude: A lot of people talk about you detailing mostly people who
are dispossessed or miserable but I don’t agree. I think it’s
more that the people that you create are usually introverted, in
the sense that they have just a few very close relationships as
opposed to big social networks. That doesn’t mean that they’re
necessarily isolated. 
DC: That’s not a conscious choice. I think it’s to do
with the environment in which I was raised. You see these people
that were raised in big families, and in comic terms you see that
every panel has four or five characters running around in it; there’s
a certain way that they perceive the world. I’m not an only
child but my brother was much older than me and I spent a lot of
time on my own as a kid, so I tend to have these uninhabited panels.
I’m recreating my childhood or something.
Nude: These very intense friendships between children or adolescents,
like Ghost World’s Enid and Rebecca: did you experience anything
like that?
DC: Yes, but I didn’t even have anything close to Enid and
Rebecca. I had one or two friends that I was fairly close to; that
feeling of intense camaraderie. When nobody else understands, there’s
always one other isolated character that you can drag into your
own miserable world! (laughs). What’s dramatically interesting
is that it won’t last. Ultimately they’ll betray you
and then go off on their own
Nude: Do you think that your books generally end on a low note?
DC: Well, with ‘Ghost World’ I took that as a happy
ending. Enid figures out how to grow up, and then with Rebecca she
has this friendly thought towards her, and you can tell that she
wishes her well.
In 2006 the eagerly awaited Art School Confidential film will be
released. Written by Clowes and directed by Terry Zwigoff, it’s
follows the fortunes of a rather average art student. Clowes himself
studied art at the Pratt institute in Brooklyn, but considers himself
to be largely self-taught.
DC: Art School Confidential started out as all of four pages in
Eightball. If we translated the original work into a film directly
it would be about two minutes long! In some ways I prefer screenwriting
to comic writing because you don’t have to think about the
visual side in the same way. It’s good to be working with
Terry Zwigoff again - we had a great time on Ghost World. It’s
one of those happy working relationships that just seems too good
to be true.
Nude: So you’re happy with how this film turned out?
DC: Yes, Ghost World was much more of a learning experience. Terry
had never really directed a film before, and I certainly had never
been involved in that kind of thing. It was really a trial by fire.
With this one we both knew what we were doing to some degree, so
it’s much more the case that the initial vision that we had
for the film is the one that finally ends up on screen, rather than
Ghost World which took many tangential routes.
Nude: So, what’s next?
DC: I’m lucky. I have a huge list of projects to pick and
choose from. If I wanted to I could be busy for the rest of my life.
Extracted from a far longer
feature which originally appeared in Nude, issue 7 (Winter 2005).
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