REVIEW: Eightball: The Complete Collection by Daniel Clowes

I’ve been a fan of Clowes for about ten years now, having discovered him (I think) via the movie Ghost World. He was a random but life-changing find for me as a depressed adolescent in the early 2000s. His fiction is weird and sometimes even incomprehensible - it’s probably best compared to the films of David Lynch - but even when I had no idea what he was going for, something about the atmosphere of it all always stuck with me. His comics capture a certain existential malaise, misanthropy, and melancholia that I connect with.
 
Eightball: The Complete Collection is a bind-up of the first 18 issues - for some reason the ones after that aren’t considered “true” Eightball - of Clowes’ comic of that title, published thrice yearly throughout the ‘90s. It includes the strips that would eventually be collected into three novels and a book of short stories - Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, Pussey, Ghost World, and Caricature, respectively.
 
Velvet Glove is a surrealist work whose basic narrative follows a man as he searches for his ex-wife after seeing her in the bizarre fetish film of the title. The work is completely dream-like in its logic, involving (among many other things) conspiracies whereby policemen carve popular mascots into people’s flesh, a cult run by a nudist plots terrorist incidents, and a woman lives uneasily with her sweet but deformed, fish-like daughter.
 
I hadn’t read Velvet Glove before receiving this bind-up. It confirmed my suspicions that it’s a minor Clowes work, before he hit his stride. But it’s still delightfully weird and esoteric in that Clowesian way, with a classic male dullard protagonist in Clay Loudermilk, who feels almost like a dry run for David Boring, the titular star of one of Clowes’s most renowned novels.
 
Pussey is a satire of.life as a comics artist and the history of the medium. It’s a fictional biography of Dan Pussey (pronounced Poo-say), nerdy penciller hired by wily old predator Dr Infinity, who keeps his artists in a sweatshop and talks about producing a new line of “super-champion” comics.  
 
The satire is hilarious but also BRUTALLY scathing. For me the most memorable section hardly involves Pussey, but sees Dr Infinity give a speech at a gala honouring artists, his idealised reminiscences interspersed with what really happened, including an artist told to literally kiss an editor’s shoe in exchange for work.
 
Ghost World remains one of my favourite novels, comic or otherwise. The film is also brilliant, though a more straightforwardly comedic and romantic teen movie. The original comics, bathed in a haunting blue glow meant to resemble television screens at night (apart from one orange-toned strip, due to a printing error faithfully repeated for this collection), can be breathtakingly morbid and even sick. One subplot about a paedophile priest will probably cross the line for many readers (not that they’d be reading Eightball anyway).
 
Still, the story of best friends Enid Coleslaw (no prizes for guessing what that’s an anagram of) and Rebecca Doppelmeyer, two high school friends wandering about in the aftermath of graduation and trying to stave off adulthood, is an exquisite portrait of youthful alienation. The “plot” is little more than their day-to-day mooching between various rundown diners, sex shops, and former classmates. Yet it’s often very funny, both girls picking apart the phoniness of everything around them, and most of all painfully true. I normally hate coming-of-age stories because they always lie, acting as though the “best years of your life” are really that. Ghost World doesn’t lie; it captures the ennui of those latter teenage years better than anything else I can think of right now.
 
Caricature is almost on a par, and was probably the book that really made me appreciate that comics can be just as engaging as prose fiction. The stories include the titular, about a divorced caricaturist who has an ill-advised flirtation with a young fantasist, and two of my favourite Clowes shorts: Blue Italian Shit and Like a Weed, Joe. Both of these stories are about the same character, Rodger Young, who narrates periods from different parts of his childhood and young manhood.  
 
Shit sees him as a young man moving between roommates and Weed covers a summer when he was 13. It’s hard to explain what the stories are about because nothing really happens. Young is another Loudermilk, Boring, et al. An aimless guy with no particular feelings about anything, whose passions are so repressed they’re almost non-existent.
 
Better than most, Clowes evokes the essential ennui of life in the very last years of the 20th century. He’s Generation X distilled.  
 
The Eightball comics contain many other enjoyments, including mocked-up letters to the editor, fake advertisements, a LOT of extremely politically incorrect humour, and behind-the-scenes interludes exclusive to The Complete Collection where Clowes goes into his inspirations. Well-worth adding to your library if you enjoy alternative/underground comics.