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).