The Complete Eightball 1-18: Issues 1-18

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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. Daniel Clowes writes either the funniest sad comics or the saddest funny comics in the world.--Sam Thielman 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. Some of the humor remains laugh-out-loud funny, but it perhaps isn’t surprising that some of it has not aged well at all, and will likely make today’s readers cringe. Sometimes it’s remarkably prescient, such as the prediction of a future in which nothing is new—it’s simply endless re-making and re-mixing of past entertainment.

Clowes is the Man. And as if to nail that title down, we now have a two-volume hardcover edition of The Complete Eightball 1–18, which originally ran from 1989–2004. It’s an early but by no means immature work, establishing Clowes as perhaps the best exemplar extant of the underground-comic sensibility of the late 20th century.... Eightballis not just a record of one obsessive’s tussle with the comics medium, but a kind of history of that medium as it comes to maturity.” 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 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. 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. Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, Devil Doll, The Laffin' Spittin' Man, Young Dan Pussey, What is the Most Important Invention of the Twentieth Century?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

I'm looking forward to this release, another excellent idea from Fantagraphics, and the first book Daniel Clowes has released through his original publisher for several years. This is a deluxe boxset of hardcovers collecting facsimile's of the entire 'anthology'-run of 'Eightball' -- issues 1 - 18. 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. The stories you were doing in “Eightball” cross many genres, use different drawing styles, and are of varying length. Was it your intention to try out different approaches each time? 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. 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."The cornerstone stories of Eightball are, of course, the eerie, oddball comics noir of “Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron” (running from issue #1 to #10) and the “best friends” story of “Ghost World.” The former is a dark-hued tale of paranoia, religious cults, sexual fetishism and, ultimately, bloodless violence. The story’s protagonist, Clay, is ostensibly searching for his lost wife after catching a glimpse of her in a porno film, and his sojourn drops him into a disturbing wonderland of adventure and perils inspired by Clowes’ dreams. Eightball is a comic book by Daniel Clowes and published by Fantagraphics Books. It ran from 1989 to 2004. The first issue appeared soon after the end of Clowes's previous comic book, Lloyd Llewellyn. Eightball has been among the best-selling series in alternative comics. 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. ↩