Ice Haven

AUTHOR: Clowes, Daniel

ARTIST: Daniel Clowes (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Pantheon Books

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 2001

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2005

Publication History

Ice Haven first appeared in issue 22 (2001) of Eightball, an alternative comic book published by Fantagraphics Books that was written and drawn by Daniel Clowes. Issue 22 was the first issue of Eightball to feature one story in its entirety and was divided into chapters designed to look like old newspaper comic strips, using a variety of connected characters and graphic styles. The 2005 Pantheon Books publication included all the original material from Eightball, issue 22, along with eight new strips. Some of the original strips were edited and redrawn, and a new cover, title sequence, and final chapter were added. The closing sequence illuminates the central mystery of the story, the disappearance and reappearance of a young boy.

Plot

Ice Haven begins with a walking tour led by Random Wilder, a pompous poet dressed in a seersucker jacket and straw hat. Wilder reveals his rivalry with Ida Wentz, a cheerful grandmother whose more popular poetry he scorns. Wilder is horrified to learn that Wentz has received a poetry prize.

In a sequence titled “Our Children and Their Friends,” adults appear only as offstage voices. David Goldberg, a strange and silent child, is encouraged (presumably by his mother) to play with Charles, a serious-looking boy who is bouncing a baseball. David runs away, and Charles is next approached by Carmichael, a belligerent boy who claims to have had sex with Paula, a girl in their class. Carmichael gives Charles a paperback book, The True Story of Leopold and Loeb, a true-crime story that is dramatized in the next strip, complete with a 1950’s-style cover. The book describes the famous 1924 murder of a boy by two young men who killed to prove their superior intellect. Following the Leopold and Loeb sequence, Clowes cuts to Random Wilder watching a television news report about the real-life 1996 murder of child model JonBenét Ramsey (one of the few modern references in Ice Haven). Wilder is most interested in the close study given to the ransom note and wonders aloud whether child murder is the only way for a writer to get an attentive reading of his work. Wilder writes an anonymous note to his neighbors, complaining about their teenage sons’ band.

Love-obsessed teenage girl Violet van der Platz is introduced in the next strip, “Seventeen.” Violet is Charles’s new stepsister, as her mother has married Charles’s father. Unhappy in her new high school, Violet spends her time daydreaming about her boyfriend, Penrod, and writing letters begging him to run away with her.

Meanwhile, Charles learns that David Goldberg is missing. He suspects that Carmichael killed David and imagines he will be killed by Carmichael or accused of collaborating with him. Two short sequences follow: a black-and-white cartoon about the further adventures of Leopold and Loeb and a scene in which Paula tells Charles that David Goldberg is better off dead, since kidnapped children who do return are psychologically damaged. The next chapter, “Vida and Her Grandmother,” focuses on Ida Wentz’s visiting granddaughter, a recent college graduate who self-publishes a small “’zine” about her life. Unemployed and bored, Vida becomes obsessed with Random Wilder and spends a day following him.

In the next section, “Mr. and Mrs. Ames, Detectives for Hire” come to investigate David Goldberg’s kidnapping, but internal tensions dominate this sequence; Mrs. Ames feels neglected, and Mr. Ames threatens a hotel guest with a gun for playing the radio too loud. In the moody, monotone strip that follows, Charles confesses his desire for his stepsister, Violet, who secretly marries Penrod in the next chapter, “Violet in Love.” Following the ceremony, she returns to her stepfather’s house without telling anyone she is married. Mr. Ames investigates Harry Naybors, a comic book critic who is defensive about his occupation.

In “The Hole,” Carmichael and Charles visit a landmark rock formation. Carmichael confesses to Charles that he killed David Goldberg and threw his body in a hole; he then threatens to kill Charles if he tells anyone else.

In “Seersucker,” Vida works up the courage to give her writing to Random Wilder, who accepts her magazine politely, then tosses it aside contemptuously when he goes inside. Meanwhile, Mr. Ames continues to investigate Ice Haven’s citizens and to ignore the significance of finding what looks like his wife’s panties on a town police officer’s bed. In a moody sequence drawn in shades of pale red, Charles agonizes over his guilt and thwarted longing for Violet. In “Convenience Store,” Kim Lee, a young Korean shopkeeper, displays his contempt for his customers, either pretending not to speak English or commenting on embarrassing purchases such as condoms.

Random Wilder finally reads Vida’s writing and finds it so much better than his own that he is thrown into despair. He throws her magazine in the trash, where Vida later finds it. Charles sees a therapist who tells him to imagine the ideal solution to his problems; Charles fantasizes Carmichael’s death and the divorce of his father and stepmother, leaving him free to marry Violet.

Mr. and Mrs. Ames appear on a television talk show to discuss the ransom note given to David Goldberg’s parents, and their analysis drives Wilder into a frenzy of self-hatred. He tries to flush his poems down the toilet, and, failing that, attempts suicide by carbon-monoxide poisoning.

In the next chapter, “David Goldberg Is Alive,” all of Ice Haven celebrates when the boy is found alive in the park. Carmichael tells Charles that he has had a religious awakening and now loves everybody; Violet realizes that her relationship with Penrod is over, and, soon after, her mother and Charles’s father divorce. Violet looks forward to moving to Hawaii, and she rides away, leaving a heartbroken Charles behind. Vida, too, leaves Ice Haven, happily willing to sell out when an unexpected Hollywood offer comes along.

Clowes includes two additional chapters: “Harry Naybors Explains It All,” which appeared in the original issue of Eightball, and an untitled sequence with David Goldberg, which was added for the book publication. In the first, the fictional comic book critic discusses the story in which he has just appeared. In the second, a sequence powerful in its stillness and understatement, David Goldberg speaks his first words, a poem.

Characters

•Random Wilder is a pompous poet who serves as a narrator for only his own chapters. A middle-aged, pudgy eccentric, he lives alone. Though he seems to be a harmless, comical character, his need for recognition sets the story’s main event, the kidnapping, in motion.

•Vida, is the visiting granddaughter of Ida Wentz. She chronicles her life in an ongoing magazine and sends review copies to major magazines, hoping to be discovered.

•Charles is a young boy and has a secret love for his teenage stepsister, Violet, and worries about his complicity in the imagined murder of David Goldberg. Around adults and his peers, he is quiet and spends most of his time bouncing a baseball.

•Violet van der Platz, Charles’s stepsister, is a teenager who spends most of her time writing to her old boyfriend, Penrod, and daydreaming of him coming to her school to take her away with him.

•Mr. Ames is a private eye who is cynical and quick to anger.

•Carmichael, a friend of Charles, is a troubled boy.

•David Goldberg is a silent, socially withdrawn boy who is a small, pudgy child with long hair, a fuzzy sweater, and a perpetually miserable expression.

•Harry Naybors, is a comics expert and a nerdy type with thick glasses and a wall-to-wall collection of comics. In a final metafictional twist, he appears at the end of Ice Haven to analyze the story and its author.

Artistic Style

Clowes deliberately varies the look of each chapter, using subtle variations in inking, shading, lettering, and detail to give each character’s story a distinctive look. The chapter “Harry Naybors, Comic Book Critic,” for example, uses a three-dimensional “superhero” title font and dresses the characters in bright primary colors of yellow, blue, and green to give a 1950’s or 1960’s feel. The sequences with Mr. Ames use darker colors, with panels depicting blue-shaded night and rain scenes reminiscent of a 1940’s noir film.

Some sequences pop with a bright, four-color comic-book palette; others have a blue-shaded or red-shaded monotone style, similar to Clowes’s Ghost World (1997); still others use pale, faded colors that give them the feeling of Sunday comic pages from old newspapers.

Chapters featuring Charles have a stripped-down and cartoony look, reflecting a child’s view of the world. In one panel, a giant exclamation point appears over Charles’s head to indicate surprise; in another, flying sweat droplets illustrate worry. Violet’s segments are relatively realistic, with a warm range of colors, but her daydreams of Penrod are rendered in wistful shades of blue. Despite the medley of styles, Ice Haven is colorful and light in tone. The lines are clean and classic. Taken as a whole, the comic has a retro look that is also essentially timeless. Little in Ice Haven would be out of place in 1965, for example, yet there are no overtly nostalgic details.

Themes

Ice Haven explores themes of community and isolation, innocence and experience, and the meaning that art can give to life. Significantly, many of the major characters in Ice Haven are writers: Random Wilder and Ida Wentz are poets, Vida writes both prose and poetry, Harry Naybors writes critical essays on comic books, and Violet pours her teenage heart into love letters to her boyfriend.

Innocence and its loss is another major motif in Ice Haven. A quick glance at the lettering and style of “Our Children and Their Friends,” one of the Charles chapters, might lead readers to expect a cheery comic strip. Instead, Charles is wrestling with adult questions of sex and death. When he imagines Carmichael having sex with Paula, he pictures them standing next to each other, motionless and fully clothed. Later, Charles daydreams about Carmichael’s death. When he dreams of meeting Violet in the future, he pictures them in a Jetsons-style future, with moon rockets and flying-saucer-shaped buildings.

The difficulty of truly connecting with other people is perhaps the overriding theme of Ice Haven. Each character inhabits a vivid but solitary world, where self-knowledge is a struggle and knowledge of others almost impossible. Many of these people are literally neighbors, yet their interactions with each other are awkward and distant. Vida is crushed when she finds her work in Wilder’s trash, never knowing that her words have so moved Wilder that he loses all faith in his own work and attempts suicide. Mr. Ames claims to love his wife, yet he remains oblivious to her growing boredom and unhappiness. Violet romanticizes Penrod in her letters and daydreams, but after one night together, they drift apart, and by the end of the story she can no longer remember what he looks like. At the same time, Violet is completely unaware that Charles has feelings for her.

David Goldberg is the ultimate symbol of Ice Haven’s isolation. He refuses interaction with other children and does not even respond to his parents. Ironically, this solitary child’s kidnapping and return bring the town together. In a scene presaged by the cartoony “Leopold and Loeb” sequence, David Goldberg’s return makes Ice Haven’s residents smile and embrace each other. In a panel reminiscent of classic children’s holiday cartoons like A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), all the people of Ice Haven are shown holding hands and singing, faces lifted to the stars.

Impact

Although Ice Haven is not as sexually explicit as many of Clowes’s other works, it gained notoriety when a high school teacher in Connecticut was targeted for a police investigation after giving the book to a thirteen-year-old student. The teacher ended up leaving his job, and the censorship story made national headlines when the student’s father described Ice Haven as pornography. Clowes declined to comment on the specifics of the case or the merits of his work but simply said that the disregard for the teacher’s career was an obscenity greater than anything he had ever drawn in a comic.

When Ice Haven was revised, expanded, and published as a graphic novel in 2005, critical reception was favorable. A few reviewers found the book overly fragmented and self-referential, but most praised Clowes for his range of styles, his ability to pay homage to vintage comics without parody, and his use of the town as a kind of character in the story.

Further Reading

Burns, Charles. Black Hole (2005).

Tomine, Adrian. Sleepwalk: And Other Stories (1998).

Ware, Chris. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000).

Bibliography

Clowes, Daniel. “Conversation Four: Daniel Clowes.” Interview by Mike Sacks. McSweeney’s, 2009. http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/sacks/clowes.html.

Clowes, Daniel, Ken Parille, and Isaac Cates. Daniel Clowes: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.

Hignite, Todd. “Daniel Clowes.” In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006.

Lukich, Mike. “Ice Haven,” PopMatters, February 6, 2006. http://www.popmatters.com/comics/ice-haven.shtml.

Parille, Ken. “A Cartoon World.” Boston Review, January/February, 2006.

Schwartz, Ben, ed. The Best American Comics Criticism. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2010.