The Complete Eightball 1-18: Issues 1-18

Product Information

I mean, it’s really what I see in my head. To me it looks almost like a diagram or like a coloring book or something. It really looks very…I don’t want to say bland, but it just looks very perfect. It looks exactly the way the world should look. And I don’t see a style at all. I see it as being each face is the way a face really looks…. People tell me they can recognize my style, and I don’t understand what they’re talking about. I don’t see my style. Clay lodges across the street from his quarry: Interesting Productions, the secretive entity behind the tawdry film. Through binoculars, he spies a small, pipe-smoking girl at a desk, perpetually writing. (Going through her trash, he later discovers she’s simply drawing the same picture of a horse head, over and over.) When he gets inside, his fate is sealed. Features new covers by Clowes, and ‘Behind the Eightball’: the author’s annotations for each issue, heavily illustrated with art and photos from his archives. Clowes parodies his own work with the clever issue #11 story “Velvet Glove,” which uses his previous story as a reference point in the tale of a movie based on “Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron,” a shabbily-made commercial bomb that shares little with the original story and includes disparate elements of the hard-boiled detective and science-fiction genres. Clowes even appears as himself in the story, talking with ignorant Hollywood producers sniffing around for an easy dollar. By contrast, “Ghost World” (which ran from issue #11 through #18) is a story of interpersonal relationships that is as realistic as “Velvet Glove” is absurd. “Ghost World” follows the daily lives of fictional high school grads Enid and Rebecca in the late 1990s, both young women unmoored from “straight” society, alienated, witty, pseudo-intellectual, precocious, and cynical beyond their years. These speculations are usually gloomy — but absurdly so. In Clowes' future, gender ambiguity will become so mainstream, regular guys will wear Doris Day wigs while watching sports bloopers. "There will be nostalgia for the nostalgia of previous generations" — which is actually one facet of The Complete Eightball's appeal. As for trends, "teenage boys will adopt the 'balding, paunchy, fortyish businessman' look."

Comics] are in a sense the ultimate domain of the artist who seeks to wield absolute control over his imagery. Novels are the work of one individual but they require visual collaboration on the part of the reader. Film is by its nature a collaborative endeavor… . Comics offer the creator a chance to control the specifics of his own world in both abstract and literal terms. Of course, some fans of Clowes discovered his work through “Ghost World”—a serialized story that appeared starting in Issue 11 of Eightball after “Like A Velvet Glove…” wrapped up. If you haven’t seen the film based on the comic, “Ghost World” focuses on two cool young women during the summer after they graduate from high school. Clowes uses his sharp dialogue and characterization skills to present their conversations, thoughts, desires, and caustic and often hilarious judgements of others as they go about their lives. Published in 1997 as a graphic novel, Ghost World is Clowes best attempt at presenting female characters as more than objects of desire or derision. And it’s brilliant. The 2001 film (directed by Terry Zwigoff) deservedly won Clowes an Academy Award nomination and if you haven’t seen it, you really should. Thora Birch is charming as Enid Coleslaw and Steve Buscemi is always a joy to watch. Clowes is a genius storyteller and artist, but his gifts include design as well [As with every other aspect of comic-crafting, however, Chris Ware has long since surpassed -- in terms of popularity -- his friend and laissez-faire mentor as a book designer. In 2000, when David Boring and Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth were released simultaneously by Pantheon, Ware was a still just a distant rumble on the horizon, and Clowes was in the ascendant. Ghost World was being filmed by Clowes and Terry Zwigoff, and his (in my opinion) masterpiece was being published as a beautiful hardcover. Along with Ghost World, Caricature, and the book that would immediately it, Ice haven, David Boring represented the peak of Clowes' creative output to date. Within a few months, Ware's Jimmy Corrigan was being hailed as one of the greatest examples of sequential art ever created, and David Boring was largely overshadowed]. Ghost World was adapted by Clowes and director Terry Zwigoff into a 2001 feature film of the same name, for which Clowes and Zwigoff were nominated for an Academy Award for screenplay writing. Additionally, the 2006 Clowes/Zwigoff film Art School Confidential was loosely based on a short story of the same name which appeared in Eightball #7. As a screenwriter, he has been nominated for an Academy Award and written the films Ghost World (with Terry Zwigoff), Art School Confidential, and Wilson. His illustrations have been featured on a wide-ranging array of posters, album covers, and magazines, including many covers for The New Yorker. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife and son.When you created the stories serialized in “Eightball”—such as “Velvet Glove” or “Ghost World”—did you intend then for them to be short pieces, or did you have a sense they could continue into a longer narrative? Pussey!: The Complete Saga of Young Dan Pussey (Fantagraphics, 1995, ISBN 978-1-56097-183-2) – Stories featuring Clowes' character Dan Pussey Velvet Glove" is a parody of bad film adaptations, using the just-completed Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron as its source, with behind-the-scenes segments showing an increasingly anxious Clowes in talks with a clueless Hollywood producer, and scenes from the resulting movie, in which Clay is a tough, sarcastic police detective who plays by his own rules and makes pithy remarks (such as "what are you lookin' at?") before shooting his enemies. Tina is recast as a space alien who gives "Clay" a ring of power.

Velvet Glove, Ghost World, The Party, The Fairy Frog, The Happy Fisherman, Why I Hate Christians, Ectomorph In one of Glove’s rare off-key asides, the revolutionaries take over the White House, where they get annoyed by a freshly divorced, foulmouthed Bill Clinton. Clowes drew the panels in July 1992, months before the election, and almost chose to depict Ross Perot in the Oval Office instead. ↩ Once the Ghost World stories start to pop up though, there is a noticeable shift. There's still the anger but it's more cast inward. The barely concealed self-insert characters that Clowes is so fond of grow more introspective. The stories have a sadness to them, a melancholy that gets into your bones. The first Ghost World strip may have a lot in common with the earlier rants but the ending of it does not. I don't think you can see the growth of Clowes' work if you were to read the stories in a format not in the original serialization. Hell, you can see the growth just in the covers as the issue numbers get higher. With that criticism aside, Clowes is a master of the comics form. His art is astounding and somehow gets better throughout the collection. I also think his plots are mundane in the best way possible (aside from Velvet Glove which I’ll get to). Ghost World is the pinnacle of Clowes in this period of his career. It’s mundane and relatable in the best way possible with great humor and a dash of angst that makes it such a joy to read. The more introspective elements of Ghost World evoke a self reflection not many other pieces of media incite in me. Ghost World hits its demographic where it hurts which is 100% it’s intention. It displays growing up and not knowing what to do with yourself better than any other piece of art. Ghost World captures that weird feeling after high school where you realize to become your own person you need to shed what other people think about you, you need to get rid of some things that make you happy too.Do you feel like your work has become more personal over the years? As you built a persona as an artist, have you been able to push the line you were talking about—whether readers get it or not? but I was sure that he was right and that I’d been crazy all along…. To read that many in a row, this overwhelming tidal wave of Christianity coming at you—it’s an amazing experience. Here was this comic dealing with life and death. The absolute most important thing. I mean, he was pulling out all the stops, there was no soft-pedaling, he was just ramming it down your throat. Never before had I been affected like that by comics. As we enter, voiceless and impotent, a digital age of “instant access” (or constant excess), the fragile chemistry of this, our hand-held, non-automatic pictorial narrative device and its inherently sublime nuances… appears to be in grave danger. Reading a comic book as God intended is a simple pleasure and as such, our precious pictorial pamphlet, like vaudeville and the magic lantern, is just the sort of thing that gets crushed in the gears of progress. Ice Haven (Pantheon, 2005, ISBN 978-0-375-42332-1) – A reformatted version of the contents of Eightball #22

Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, Ugly Girls, Grist for the Mill, Dan Pussey Presents Komic Kollector's Korner, Nature Boy, Give it Up, My Suicide, Dialogues from Duplex Planet One of those important works that almost comes across as unassuming in the earliest issues. Clowes starts out as kind of the usual angry underground comic artist that was so common in the era. Lots of rants and spite thrown out at various targets. There's also the very strange Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron to balance that out, where it's mainly weird atmosphere that never quite tips over into straight horror but has a nightmare-ish dream-like feeling to it. Maybe in the vein of a David Lynch film. It's interesting to see that in a comic, even if it doesn't seem to have a real point or conclusion, just an excuse to be kinda strange. One of my favorite single panels of all time, from one of my favorite comics: Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron) This is a two-volume, slipcased facsimile edition of the Daniel Clowes comics anthology; it contains the original installments of Ghost World, the short that the film Art School Confidential was based on, and much more.Great art, great writing, inventive stories, and very disturbing nightmares... Do I need to describe the indescribable to you? Suffice to say his stories have everything you could possibly want from comic books and a lot of things you don't. So much misanthropic joy! ...I can't imagine what sitting down with all of those issues compiled into one book could do to your brain... probably good things. If you like surrealism, humor, self-hatred, and living in the world with nothing making sense, then this is the book for you! If you don't like those things, you might like it even more.--Sonia Harris Clowes offset cynicism with sympathy as he cast an outsider's eye on members of society some might classify as 'the dregs.' As the anthology developed, Clowes proved himself a master of the short story in comics form…" — Jake Austen - Chicago Tribune Clowes offset cynicism with sympathy as he cast an outsider's eye on members of society some might classify as 'the dregs.' As the anthology developed, Clowes proved himself a master of the short story in comics form...--Jake Austen Edward Gorey devised suitably Victorian-sounding pseudonyms for his morbidly wry stories from the letters of his own name (Ogdred Weary, Regera Dowdy, et al.). Vladimir Nabokov inserted Vivian Darkbloom into some of his books for an enigmatic, anagrammatic cameo. For Ghost World, Daniel Clowes, a serial employer of pen names, rearranged himself, lending his most enduring and endearing heroine his letters. By the end of the book, Enid Coleslaw’s destiny is unclear, but she’s equipped with all the wisdom and love her creator has to offer. 7 4. Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, I Love You Tenderly (Lloyd Llewellyn), The Future, Dan Pussey's Masturbation Fantasy, Sexual Frustration, What Do You Do for a Cold?