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90s Indy, 90s Indy Stuff

Daniel Clowes’ “Eightball” — A Personal Reminiscence : Part Five

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So — how cringe-worthy would it be if I started this installment of our ongoing Eightball retrospective by saying something like “Hey, we want some Pussey — Dan Pussey, that is!”?

I admit, I thought about — for all of about a second. Then I decided not to. Then I (sort of) did it anyway. And that, friends, is the evolution of the creative process in microcosm (even if it’s a hell of stretch to call what I’m doing here “creative”).

For a longer-running (and, obviously, better) example, might I direct your attention to Dan Clowes’ five-year stint chronicling the exploits of the aforementioned Mr. Pussey, something of a “stand-in” character for any number of “young hot-shot” comic book artists that his creator had the misfortune of having to rub elbows with at various conventions and signings over the years — and perhaps even for said creator himself,  if he’d chosen to follow only a slightly different career path and hawk his wares in service of “The Big Two” rather than striking out on his own with more personal (as well as infinitely more relevant and, yeah, better) independent efforts.

To be completely fair, I’m not sure how much of a “dear God, this could be me!” viewpoint was running through Clowes’ mind when Pussey made his first appearance in 1989 in the pages of Eightball number one, but something very akin to sympathy does begin to sink in by the time the character “dies,” in 1994, in issue fourteen. Oh, sure, there’s still something of a “shooting fish in a barrel” vibe going on even at the end, but by then Dan C. has put Dan P. through the wringer in his various occasional appearances over the years, and when he exits a future Earth broke, forgotten, and warehoused in a gigantic nursing home, there’s an almost wistful sort of tone to the proceedings, as if the author is telling his creation “sorry I was so rough on you, buddy — maybe you were, sorry to say,  too easy of a target — so let’s just end things now.”

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Lending a bit of credence to my “there but for the grace of whatever higher power you believe in go I” theory is the fact that Clowes introduces us to himself before we meet his (at least possible) warped alter ego at the outset of Pussey’s first appearance, with some windbag asshole (who later wrote a letter to the artist when he recognized himself — a letter that Clowes actually, and memorably, printed) telling a bemused “alternative” cartoonist that he has a million ideas for comic scripts and that he should drawn them for him in exchange for “a percentage of the profits” — but as the douchebag makes his departure, our artist crosses paths with another clueless dolt — and our “camera” follows that dolt to the decidedly dingy offices of the Infinity Comics Group, where he and his fellow conscripts have been recruited from the ranks of low-print-run fanzines to begin a “new era” of super-hero storytelling (with titles like “Marionette Squad” and “The Ten-Year Robot War”) being spearheaded by an octogenerian Stan Lee clone named, you guessed it, Dr. Infinity (who would later “star” in a segment of his own where he was shown to be the living personification of every shitty, despicable move made by management against the comics creators who kept them in business, from DC brass screwing Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster out of the rights to Superman to an admittedly heavily-fictionalized re-telling of William Gaines hanging his EC artists out to dry during the congressional witch-hunt against that publisher, and the industry in general, in the 1950s).

And so begins Dan Pussey’s “alpha,” but there were a number of quite entertaining, incisive, and sometimes even poignant moments to enjoy in the “on-again, off-again” appearances he would make over the years before getting to the “omega” we already mentioned. Like his ultimately-fruitless quest to find an authentic artistic “voice” of his own Eightball number three — his pathetic, superheroine-based masturbation fantasy in number four — his dalliance with the “gallery world” in number nine — the flashbacks to his pathetic childhood in number twelve — so many memorable tales of haplessness to be had.

It may sound — okay, it does sound — corny, but re-reading all of these again in The Complete Eightball Issue Numbers 1-18 (note that the Dan Pussey stories have also been collected, by themselves, in the Pussey! paperback collection issued by Fantagraphics and pictured at the outset of this write-up) both brought a huge smile to my face and threw into sharp relief the more considered — and less caustic — tone that Clowes took toward his hard-luck “hero” as the stories unfolded.

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Of course, then-current events in the “comic book landscape” made their way into the Pussey narrative, as well, with Dan functioning as a doppleganger of sorts for the Image creators who were at the “top of the heap” at that time, but Clowes had the good sense to foresee the inevitable collapse their glut of garbage would have upon the industry, and that scenario plays a large part in, as the character himself  claims it’s pronounced, “Poo-say”‘s demise, so this series of strips — in addition to being the only holdover between “phase one” and “phase two” of Eightball, as we’ve previously discussed, gets bonus points for being eerily prescient, as well. Clowes not only had his “finger on the pulse,” he knew what would happen once he pressed in.

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And so it is that the wonderfully sporadic misadventures of Dan Pussey probably have the greatest amount of sheer nostalgia value of anything in the pages of Eightball. Everything Clowes depicted either had happened, was happening, or would happen soon enough (in relative terms, of course — by now, it’s all happened), and while it would be a definte reach to say that the real Dan ever lost his contempt for the fake Dan entirely, by the time it was all said and done you could definitely sense that he viewed him as something of a tragic, rather than a purely sickening, figure.

Such a process of “warming up” to his characters would play an ever-greater role in Eightball as a whole, and we’ll delve into that more deeply next time when we take a look at the modern masterpiece that is “Ghost World.” Looking forward to seeing you then!

 

 

 

90s Indy, 90s Indy Stuff

Daniel Clowes’ “Eightball” — A Personal Reminiscence : Part Four

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Perhaps the weirdest thing about devouring the contents of The Complete Eightball Issue Numbers 1-18 in the way that I’ve chosen to do so — one issue at a time, cover-to-cover, in the order originally published (and presented) — has been my discovery that the short-form humor strips that used to make me laugh my ass off (from the quick-fire half-pagers and full-pagers like “Fuckface” and “Needledick, The Bug-Fucker” to the longer three-and four-pagers like “I Hate You Deeply” and “I Love You Tenderly,” both of which employ Lloyd Llewellyn as an obvious stand-in for the author himself) don’t quite “do it” for me in the same way that they once did, while some of the strips that I thought to be “lesser” efforts at the time (issue three’s “The Stroll,” issue six’s “Marooned On A Desert Island With The People On The Subway,” to cite just a couple of examples), are ones that  I now find quite a bit of merit in.

Part of that is probably just down to the fact that I know all the jokes in the humor strips more or less by heart, and so they’ve lost their “punch,” but I think a big part of it is me just finding the whole shtick of taking aim at painfully obvious targets to be a lot less amusing in my forties than I did in my teens and twenties. To be sure, those strips that I’m less “wowed” by today are still pretty goddamn funny, and if I were reading them for the first time I’d probably still chuckle — but I doubt I’d loudly guffaw at them for months on end as I did when they were first published. My head’s just not in the same place anymore.

I leave it to you to decide whether or not that means I’m “maturing” or just becoming a stereotypical “stick in the mud,” but on the other side of the coin, the fact that a good number of strips that I once considered “one-and-done” reads I’m now able to enjoy on a level I didn’t previously speaks to the fact that Dan Clowes was , in fact, constructing with this series something that would stand the test of time and offer readers of just about any age bracket something worth sinking their metaphorical teeth into.

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A definite tonal shift occurred in the short-form works as the series progressed, as well , with the overtly sarcastic comedy of first few issues giving way to the more bleak and hopeless “gallows humor” found in issue eight’s “My Suicide” and issue ten’s “A Message To The People Of The Future.” At the time of these strips’ initial publication I was a relatively care-free, hard-partying college kid, and so the rapid-fire transition into more overtly morose subject matter sort of “lost me,” but now that I’m older and have both “been through some shit” and come out the other side of it, I’m able to appreciate the sort of resigned-to-one’s-fate nature of the aforementioned “downer” stories simply because, hey, there were points in my life where I was there, too, and I’m able to relate to where the artist himself was so obviously coming from when he sat down to make them.

In addition, the fact that “the bad times are behind me”(knock wood) gives me a sort of “been there, done that” disposition in terms of evaluating them, whereas if I were still in the depths of some depression-induced downward spiral, they might actually hit a bit too close to home and make for an uncomfortable reading experience. In short, I think I’m catching these particular strips again at precisely the right time to take them for what they were,  whereas earlier on I had a bit more difficulty because I was having to accept them for what they are — and, unlike the the serialized “major” works that ran in Eightball‘s pages, which always seemed to mesh smoothly with where my own interests and obsessions were at the time, I was mentally and emotionally “out of synch” with where a number of these more admittedly “minor” efforts were coming from.

I just hadn’t lived enough yet, I guess. But now that I have, I find at least something of interest and/or merit in, to be honest, all of them — and very frequently there’s even a kernel of out-and-out brilliance to latch onto.

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As “phase one” of Eightball, anchored as it was by “Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron,” gave way to the more pre-planned, formalized (damn, I’m making that sound like a bad thing, but it wasn’t) structure of “phase two,” which was tethered to the ongoing exploits of Enid and Rebecca in “Ghost World,” (which we’ll be coming to in, I would imagine, the not-too-distant future here) the short-form stories also “grew up” a bit, incorporating elements of the decidedly bleak nature of the aforementioned “My Suicide” and “A Message To The People Of The Future,” but transposing them into actual stories about actual characters rather than coming at us directly from the mouth of the artist himself in “graphic rant” form. It made for a welcome switch, and led to some genuine classics, but we’re probably getting just a bit ahead of ourselves at this point if we delve into them too deeply.

It’s worth noting, however, that Clowes and his editors at Fantagraphics were able, with the benefit of hindsight,  to pretty clearly delineate this tonal and structural shift when re-evaluating them for reprint collections,  and packaged them accordingly when,   some years ago,  the (arguably, I suppose) less substantial efforts of the earlier issues were collected in Twentieth Century Eightball, and the (again, arguably) more mature shorter works of later issues were bound together in Caricature. Some things, it would seem, are obvious to everyone.

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I should take at least a moment here, however,  to iterate that there are plenty of these shorter works that hit that “sweet spot” for me both then and now — “Devil Doll?” from issue one, “Ugly Girls” and “Grist For The Mill” from issue eight, and, of course, the legendary “Art School Confidential” from issue seven seemed like works of absolute genius to me at age 17, or 20, or 22 (or whatever), and haven’t lost an ounce of their impact in my estimation as an (early, I assure you) 40-something.

And then there’s Dan Pussey. The one character who “bridged the gap” between “phase one” and “phase two” of Eightball, and who started as an object of scorn and derision on the part of his creator before slowly-but-surely morphing into a figure of, believe it or not, sympathy. But Dan probably deserves an entire segment of his own in this retrospective, and ya know what? Enid and Rebecca might just have to wait their turn under our microscope, because Dan’s “tragicomedy” would probably make for the perfect subject for our next installment — see you here in about a week for that one!

 

90s Indy, 90s Indy Stuff

Dainel Clowes’ “Eightball” — A Personal Reminiscence : Part Two

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What were your comics reading habits like in 1989? I was still in high school, but man — was I ever in the mood for something different. At that point, Watchmen was hardly the distant memory it seems today and the reverberations of what Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons had done were still being felt far and wide across the mainstream super-hero landscape. Yes, the superficial trappings of that already-seminal-by-then  work had been effectively cheapened and co-opted by “The Big Two” almost across the board — most books were suddenly much “darker” and “more realistic” — but by and large it seemed like DC and Marvel were in the early stages of trying to figure out “okay, where do we go from here?” now that their entire formula had been so successfully deconstructed right in front of everyone.

I would argue, in fact, that they’re still trying to answer that question some three decades later. Grant Morrison was doing his level best to respond to it in Animal Man (and would soon do the same with Doom Patrol),  while Neil Gaiman was successfully building upon the classical- literature foundations of Moore’s prose in the pages of The Sadman, but for the most part it seemed like no one was willing to pick up the gauntlet Moore and Gibbons had thrown down. Vertigo was still just a pipe dream in Karen Berger’s mind and the publishers still had nothing like a firm grasp on what a “mature readers” comic really meant even though they’d just published one that, essentially, blew the doors open and should have resulted in a veritable onslaught of genuinely good and interesting titles.

Rather than embrace this new reality fully, though, DC and Marvel opted to do what they pretty much always do — batten down the hatches, keep pumping out more of the exact same shit they’ve been doing for decades, and hope to dumb everybody back down to the point where predictable dross seems normal. Sadly, it worked — and it continues working to this day.

Fortunately, there was a burgeoning “alternative” comics scene that started to blossom in the early ’80s,  thanks in large parts to the efforts of brothers Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez (and, early on, third sibling Mario) in the pages of their magnificent Love And Rockets, and these guys felt no need to tap into the current zeitgeist of superhero comics because, well — they just plain didn’t give a fuck. Soon, their ranks were buttressed by the likes of former Weirdo editor Peter Bagge, who unleashed his first “solo” series, Neat Stuff, in the middle part of the decade,  and one Daniel Clowes, whose early “professional” work saw print in Weirdo (among other places —including, would’ja believe, Cracked, during the legendary editorship of Mort Todd). This new generation of “non-mainstream” cartoonists was far more influenced by the likes of Robert Crumb and his wife, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, as well as by Kim Deitch, Mary Fleener, S. Clay Wilson, and assorted other underground luminaries, than they were by, say, Gerry Conway, Roy Thomas, or any of the other (sorry, but it’s true) second-rate, highly-derivative superhero comics creators of their youth. You know who I’m talking about — the guys who drove the bus into the ditch that Moore and Gibbons had just tried to pull out of.

Weirdo gave these artists and others (like Clowes’ good friend, the criminally-underappreciated Rick Altergott) the chance to rub elbows, metaphorically speaking, with a number of the great just-referenced underground cartoonists of years past  by putting all their work side-by-side in the same magazine, but by the late ’80s many were certainly looking to spread their own wings a bit further than a standard multi-creator anthology series would allow. The Bradley family had proven to be popular characters in Neat Stuff, and Bagge soon sent eldest brother Buddy off on his own to join (and in some cases to invent significant parts of) the nascent “Generation X” or “slacker” scene just underway in Seattle in his own solo book, Hate, while Clowes created Lloyd Llewellyn, a magazine-sized series starring a perpetually-disinterested, “too-cool-for-school,” proto-aging-hipster named — well, you guessed it.

It went just about nowhere. After seven issues its publisher, Fantagraphics Books (pretty much the “go-to” publishing house for independent cartoonists at the time, with Drawn + Quarterly still a few years away from bursting onto the scene), lowered the boom on poor old Lloyd citing poor sales, but head honchos Gary Groth and Kim Thompson, who had maintained a somewhat tight editorial control over the just-failed series, were amenable to giving their writer/artist more free reign with his next project. He’d played things their way and it didn’t work. What harm could there be in trying things his way this time?. Forget commercial considerations, Clowes figured, they’re hardly relevant in the world of marginally-selling indie comics, anyway (or at least they weren’t at the time). If he was only going to get one more crack at this whole thing,he was going to do what he really wanted to do .

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What he really wanted to do, as it turns out, made its debut in Eightball #1, cover-dated August of 1989, and it was a book with no real set “format” — just a loose collection of stories that were in no way affiliated with each other apart from coming from the same mind and pencil (and, okay, pen). Clowes’ intentions were clear — he’d  be making it up as he went along, following his own muse, and the publishers could either take it or leave it.

They took it, and we should all be damn glad they did. In the first issue alone we got the opening salvo of the surreal David Lynch-ian nightmare that was “Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron,”  we met uber-stereotypical “young hotshot” comics creator Dan Pussey (and his boss, an octogenarian sleazeball named Dr. Infinity who was obviously based on Stan Lee), we were treated to the Jack T. Chick-on-crack religious fanatacism of “Devil Doll?” (later reprinted in  traditional tract format for inclusion inside a Jello Biafra spoken word album), and hey — Lloyd Llewellyn even made a brief return appearance to help bridge the gap.

It was amazing. It was astonishing. It was every other time-worn superlative my brain can’t think of right now. And you know what? It still is.

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Oh, sure, Clowes didn’t invent the single-creator anthology by a long shot — there were, in fact, several others running at the time — but he absolutely got the balance exactly right here. The long-form narrative grounds the book and ensures readers will be back for more. The shorter works take aim at easy and popular targets (Christian fundamentalists, the comic book industry) with as much flair and panache as they do well-deserved venom. Toss in a couple of one-or-two-page gag strips to keep the old-school underground fans happy (I particularly loved the visual adaptations of interviews with nursing home patients that Clowes cobbled together from David Greenberger’s Duplex Planet ‘zine), and you’ve got a winner.

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Okay, make that a modest winner. Eightball #1 wasn’t exactly the talk of the comics world when it hit, but it sold out its initial run of something like 5,000 copies and went back to press no less than five times. Good luck finding a first printing at anything like a reasonable price these days (still got mine! Hah!) No earth-shaking tremors reverberated out of it, by any means, but   it definitely went some way towards cementing the idea that, while the mainstream was definitely moribund on the whole, there were interesting things happening in comics at the margins. And they were about to get exponentially more interesting pretty quickly.

I talked in our first segment about the four creative “phases” Eightball went through in its 15-year history, and “phase one” began right here. For lack of a better term we’ll call if the “Velvet Glove Phase,” and we’ll take a nice, long look at the story that was at the heart of it in our next segment. Hope to see you all back here then!