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A review by dkmode
The Complete Eightball by Daniel Clowes
4.0
It's interesting to see a creator's life's work just laid out like this. Clowes is a legendary comic creator, and for good reason; his work here oozes talent from the very first issue of this anthology. But, importantly, he's improved a lot since he started.
The early issues of Eightball have two speeds: eerie, hallucinatory horror and extreme Generation X nihilism. The former is incredibly engaging, all these weird misshapen characters bumping up against each other in tales of mundane dream-logic. These are grotesque, tragic, and with a narrative distance that makes them all the more unsettling. The first long-form piece, Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron, is a masterpiece of this format.
The latter...well....look, Clowes is a bit elusive and hard to parse already. All of these nihilistic rants are caked in irony, and he's delivering them at all times with a slight smirk and a heap of self-awareness. Oftentimes, in the middle of them, he'll have outside characters refute his claims, and have his own stand-ins admit that they're mostly just being assholes. Still, despite being pretty entertaining on their own, in the repetitive context of this collection, it starts to become boring, and more than a little vapid. One can only take so many screeds about how the author hates everything before the edge starts to wear off. I can appreciate it for what must have seemed pretty cutting at the time, but now it just comes off as sophomoric. His digs at the mainstream comic book industry remain sharp, though.
Later, the comics start to branch off and mature, benefiting from a less preachy tone and improved ability to look inward. Clowes is really exploring a particular generation - the one that grew up in the suburbs, dreamed of something better, but in the end never really wanted to leave all that badly anyways. He wants to plunge into what makes these people - obsessed with the elevation of junk from generations before them, only able to express themselves under a thick veil of irony and sarcasm - tick.
It all culminates in Ghost World - still the best story in here - which feels like him taking one of the characters from his early years and giving them an honest internal life. It's still a terrific coming-of-age story, melancholy and personal but also universal to anyone forced to grow up in the boredom of the suburbs. But being able to read all the stuff that came before gives it a new, more thorough context. Even just for that, this collection is entirely worth it.
The early issues of Eightball have two speeds: eerie, hallucinatory horror and extreme Generation X nihilism. The former is incredibly engaging, all these weird misshapen characters bumping up against each other in tales of mundane dream-logic. These are grotesque, tragic, and with a narrative distance that makes them all the more unsettling. The first long-form piece, Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron, is a masterpiece of this format.
The latter...well....look, Clowes is a bit elusive and hard to parse already. All of these nihilistic rants are caked in irony, and he's delivering them at all times with a slight smirk and a heap of self-awareness. Oftentimes, in the middle of them, he'll have outside characters refute his claims, and have his own stand-ins admit that they're mostly just being assholes. Still, despite being pretty entertaining on their own, in the repetitive context of this collection, it starts to become boring, and more than a little vapid. One can only take so many screeds about how the author hates everything before the edge starts to wear off. I can appreciate it for what must have seemed pretty cutting at the time, but now it just comes off as sophomoric. His digs at the mainstream comic book industry remain sharp, though.
Later, the comics start to branch off and mature, benefiting from a less preachy tone and improved ability to look inward. Clowes is really exploring a particular generation - the one that grew up in the suburbs, dreamed of something better, but in the end never really wanted to leave all that badly anyways. He wants to plunge into what makes these people - obsessed with the elevation of junk from generations before them, only able to express themselves under a thick veil of irony and sarcasm - tick.
It all culminates in Ghost World - still the best story in here - which feels like him taking one of the characters from his early years and giving them an honest internal life. It's still a terrific coming-of-age story, melancholy and personal but also universal to anyone forced to grow up in the boredom of the suburbs. But being able to read all the stuff that came before gives it a new, more thorough context. Even just for that, this collection is entirely worth it.