Clowes Call
The creator of 'Art School Confidential' on superheroes, museum shows, sad fans, and the appeal of H
He's learned to endure this. Daniel Clowes is pleased, but not ecstatic. And he has not greeted crossover success with the horror and disgust one might expect from an underground comics artist whose early work included such misanthropic titles as "I Hate You Deeply," "My Suicide," and "Why I Hate Christians." He is not Kurt Cobain reaching for a shotgun. Mr. Clowes feels fine.
That's how he seems this afternoon, as he swivels slowly beside his drawing table in his upstairs home studio in Oakland, surrounded by bits of ancient pop culture and his collection of books and comics. Somewhere in the house are his wife and toddler son, who sometimes wander past to smile and say hello. It's the picture of domestic bliss. And why not? It is no more unlikely a life trajectory than Clowes's new existence as a Hollywood screenwriter, first for an adaptation of his acclaimed graphic novel Ghost World, and now for the upcoming Art School Confidential, set for release on April 28.
The man has lost none of his wiseguy edge. He remains the same person who subtitled one issue of his ongoing comic book Eightball with: "Maintaining an icy distance between artist and reader since 1989." But the satire of his work has long been balanced by a profound awareness of the humanity in his characters, as with the teenage girls of Ghost World, who faced the uncertainty of adulthood and an imperfect world.
If there remains anger in his work, there is also a real measure of compassion, which contemporary comics artist Charles Burns has watched from the beginning. In the mid-'90s, Burns was deeply struck by the complex story structure in "Caracature," a story rich with feeling for characters that were pathetic and real. "It was this amazing, breakthrough story for me," remembers Burns. "It was this devastating beautifully constructed story, and it just nailed down the fact that this guy was working really hard and growing significantly every single time he put out a new issue. He wasn't afraid to experiment and try new ways of writing. He's continued to do that, which is really pretty amazing. He's one of the best."
Clowes is working on more screenplays and is even considering directing a film himself. But comics remain a central concern. Last year, he released Ice Haven (Pantheon), much of which originally appeared in a single issue of Eightball. And he still spends half his day working at the drawing table.
Your work is sometimes described as angry. Would you say that's accurate?
I like characters that are angry. I like people that are angry. I'm always interested in and can befriend people that are extremely angry - whereas most people are repelled by that person, I find it somewhat endearing. And so I have a lot of friends who are seethingly, bitterly angry and pessimistic and dismal to be around, and I like that. And I hear that about my characters a lot, that these are just one horrible, dismal character after another. To hear that is very odd.
You've said that your original strip of "Art School Confidential" was inspired by your own experiences as a student at the Pratt Institute, and how the idea of a comics career was dismissed by the faculty then.
I did that strip literally a week after I had to pay off my student loan, at the threat of legal action. I had to take every nickel I had made from comics and just scrape it together and start paying these huge installments. And I was very frustrated: "I want to get back at them, and make people not go to art school, and lose the amount of money they were making me pay." I'm guessing that strip has made more people want to go to art school than not. I think it makes it seem like fun, which it is, that's the sad truth.
Comics and graphic novels are now the subject of museum exhibitions. Even The New Yorker has issues dedicated to comics. Is this a kind of victory?
Seeing comic art on the wall is really interesting as a cartoonist. But I really don't like people reading my work on a wall. It's not how it was intended to be seen. I've seen too many people read one isolated page of Ghost World on a wall in a show and laugh at the end, knowing that they're getting a joke that doesn't actually exist because it's the middle page of a story. It doesn't seem right.
Do you feel kinship with other artists or feel part of a community?
To some degree, sure. Mostly I feel a kinship with the artists of my generation and some of the younger guys. You feel like, all of us just sort of came out of nowhere at around the same time, and there is something really exciting and interesting about seeing all of these new artists all of a sudden.
It's ironic that cartoonists still get disrespect from some quarters, since you not only have to draw well, but construct a meaningful story that can stand on its own.
You have to be able to come up with an unbelievable amount. And what I've really been learning lately is, is sort of the dramatic stuff: How to create drama and somehow keep a story going. My interest is in doing comics so that people forget they're reading a comic after awhile, and all of a sudden they're in the story. And to me that's success, if you can do that.
In the most recent issue of Eightball, the story involved a quasi-superhero character. It's an idea that you returned to a couple of times, looking at the consequences of what that might be like in the real world: very dark and very weird.
As a kid, I was really attracted to superheroes, but I never read the comics. I'd buy every single comic, and I had some connection to it, but I didn't like them, really. I remember talking to my other friends who read superhero comics, and they liked them on such a different level than I did. They were like, "Yeah, when Iron Man fights the guy, and punches him in the face, it's so awesome!" But it had this pop-art iconographic quality to me that was really charming, and I just loved that aspect of it. I always gravitated towards that part of it, and I could never quite get past that, and that's what I was going for. I wanted to create a story that lived up to the iconography, but also had something else going on.
Even in Ghost World, Enid has that sort of superhero image when she put on the catwoman mask. There's something sort of striking about the image of a grown man in the suit who looks ridiculous.
I love that. I love when people send me pictures from websites of middle-aged men with real serious expressions dressed as Captain America, with stubble and stuff. To me that's what superheroes are all about. To me, the superheroes I liked the most are, like, George Reeves as Superman, where he's a 45-year-old dad. He looks like he's going to yell at you for playing on the lawn or something. He's got a paunch, and he looks more like a wrestler than like a superhero.
Are you generally comfortable meeting your fans? You've attended the San Diego Comic-Con ...
With the Comic-Con, it's like not my people somehow; it's just endless people who come up to you and want you to draw in their sketchbook and don't know who you are ... . I've seen some images there that will stick with me forever. I was looking down just as the costume contest was letting out, and I saw this middle-aged, overweight guy dressed as Green Lantern walking dejectedly out of the hall holding hands with his mother.
Has your movie career been any kind of distraction from your comics work?
I remember seven or eight years ago, Robert Crumb wrote me a letter and said, "If I had any advice to give to somebody your age, I would say do something else for a while. Like, take a couple of years off to do pottery or something like that, some other art form, because you'll get really burned out on comics ... . You just get so locked into sitting in a room all day that it's very hard to have any input in your life, and it's so helpful to have some kind of other discipline informs your work." And I remember thinking at the time, Ah, that's just a bitter old burned-out hippie. I realized later that that's very true, and it's been really inspiring to my comics to do this kind of outside stuff. And right before I started working on Ghost World, I was really starting to feel oppressed by sitting in a room staring at a blank page for the first time in my life.
One early strip of yours, "Just Another Day," imagined a version of yourself as a Hollywood deal-maker. What do you think of that idea now?
I guess I'm very interested in those people. I find that if anyone wants to have a meeting with me, the sleazier the better. I love to do that. It's like a living theater or something. It's really fascinating to see the way these agents and people like that work, like, this intense level of insincerity. It's almost charming.
Not a movie one, but that's certainly a sort of master plan. It's a subject that I feel like I know.
Published: 02/16/2006
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