Twentieth Century Eightball

AUTHOR: Clowes, Daniel

ARTIST: Daniel Clowes (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Fantagraphics Books

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1988-1996 (partially published in Eightball)

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2001

Publication History

Eightball was Daniel Clowes’s second series for Fantagraphics Books, the first being #$@&!: The Official Lloyd Llewellyn Collection (1989). Whereas Lloyd Llewellyn is based around a single character and has a consistent style, Eightball is an anthology comic with varied content: Most issues contain one part of an ongoing narrative strip plus several shorter, one-off strips, sometimes in the style of newspaper “funnies.” Issues 1-10 feature Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (1989-1993), while issues 11-18 serialize Ghost World (1993-1997), both of which were later collected in book format. The style also leaves room for some relatively long one-offs such as “Caricature” (issue 15) and “Gynecology” (issue 17), which were later collected under the title Caricature (1998).

After Clowes completed Ghost World, he stopped including shorter strips in Eightball, and issues 19-21 were entirely given over to the three parts of David Boring (1998-2000). In issues 22 and 23, Clowes fused the two approaches. Each issue is a single narrative but is told in a kaleidoscopic style via a series of short strips, using varying styles and character viewpoints (often presented as if they were one of a regular series starring those characters). The last issue (23) was published in June, 2004.

The Twentieth Century Eightball book, published in 2002, collects short strips from Eightball, issues 1-16, all of which are five pages or less (Caricature had featured strips of six pages or more), with the emphasis on humor. A handful of the strips were published in places other than Eightball. For example, “The Operator,” was published in Twist, issue 3 (October, 1988); “Frankie and Johnnie,” in Young Lust, issue 7 (1990); and “Curtain of Sanity and Zubrick,” in National Lampoon (April, 1991, and May, 1991). The book also contains some new material in the form of six newspaper-style strips in the back of the book; a two-page story called “Little Enid,” starring a younger version of the character from Ghost World; and a four-page story about Clowes putting the book together, which also serves as a title page, a contents page, a copyright page, and a back-cover blurb, making the book entirely comics from cover to cover.

Plot

Twentieth Century Eightball is not a single narrative, and many of the strips are not even “stories” as such. Several are satires and think-pieces on a subject. “I Hate You Deeply” features Lloyd Llewellyn simply listing things he hates (the text acknowledges that he is acting as a mouthpiece for Clowes). Its companion piece, “I Love You Tenderly,” starts off as a counterbalancing list of things Llewellyn loves, but drifts into a supplementary list of hates. “Art School Confidential” casts itself as an exposé of the pointlessness of art school, mocking the institution itself and the people who go there. “On Sports” explores sexual symbolism in sports, with explicit pornographic illustrations. “A Message to the People of the Future” is a brief survey of modern life addressed to people in the year 2293. There are also pieces on death (“My Suicide”), unconventional attractiveness (“Ugly Girls”), Clowes’s hometown (“Chicago”), and religion (“Why I Hate Christians”).

Several of the strips are observational. “The Stroll” and “Marooned on a Desert Island with the People from the Subway” are both stream-of-consciousness strips showing the point of view and thoughts of a character on an uneventful journey. “The Party” takes the same approach but changes the setting. Clowes goes on to subvert this observational style in “Just Another Day,” in which he addresses the readers and ridicules them for identifying with the piece and then presents a series of increasingly absurd visions of the “real” Clowes. Only a few strips have a straightforward narrative: “Devil Doll?” concerns a teenage satanist who eventually finds redemption, and “The Happy Fisherman” is the surreal tale of a wandering fisherman who has a frozen carp stuck on his penis.

The shorter strips tend to be based around a one-joke character (or characters). These include “Sensual Santa,” “Grip Glutz and Shamrock Squid,” and the self-explanatory “Needled—k the Bug-F—-er.

Characters

•Lloyd Llewellyn is a sharp-suited film noir-style character who starred in his own book, which was written and drawn by Clowes before the Eightball series began. In his two Eightball strips, however, Llewellyn is used as a mouthpiece character for Clowes.

•Zubrick and Pogeybait are roommates. Zubrick is a misanthrope and borderline agoraphobic; Pogeybait is an eccentric with enormous hair and prominent underwear. They originated in a series of monthly adventures in National Lampoon, one of which is included in this collection.

•Feldman, a nerdy man who uses a mobility scooter, is noteworthy as he appears in two strips (“Feldman” and “Squirrel Girl and Candypants”) and went on to be a character in the Ghost World (2001) film.

Artistic Style

Clowes’s characteristic style has a cartoonlike quality uncluttered with simple, light lines. Although he has described himself as a “cartoonist,” his narrative work tends to be subtler than his cartooning by presenting figures who are both plain striking in their slight physical imperfections. Nonetheless, the shorter strips in Twentieth Century Eightball have a wide variety of styles. Whereas Clowes’s long narratives tend to use the most unobtrusive version of his style, the shorter strips often have an overt, baroque style befitting their broad and surreal humor.

While some strips use Clowes’s “normal” style (the “observational” ones especially), much of Twentieth Century Eightball is cartoonlike and represents figures in a variety of different ways. “Playful Obsession,” a parody of newspaper funnies and children’s comics (the target being such strips’ one-dimensional nature as well as the inherent obnoxiousness of Richie Rich), is a direct stylistic pastiche, including Ben-Day dots in the coloring; like any pastiche, the work’s ability to reproduce the trappings of its target makes it funny. Others pieces, such as “Sensual Santa,” seek to enhance the humor through visual grotesquerie.

Lloyd Llewellyn is sleekly depicted in a stripped-back pulp style, far neater and more angular than the typical Clowes figure. In “Why I Hate Christians,” Clowes adopts a heavily stylized, 1960’s-esque approach to drawing his central character using an oval-shaped head and almost cubist cartoon features. Both examples occur in strips that feature a Clowes avatar—perhaps allowing for a measure of detachment between artist and subject.

The stylistic experiments of these short strips fed back into Clowes’s long-form work such as Ice Haven (2005) and The Death Ray (2011). The aesthetic shifts in these strips, as Clowes moves between central characters, allow him to present the world as those characters see it. Having started out as a disparate collection of material united only by its status as the product of a single writer-artist, Eightball eventually became a coherent entity while simultaneously retaining its original identity.

Themes

The strips in this collection are diverse, but the humor strips are largely written from a viewpoint of misanthropy, expressed for comic effect. The most obvious examples are the Lloyd Llewellyn strips “I Hate You Deeply” and “I Love You Tenderly,” which mock their own misanthropy by bitterly complaining about “people with personality, magnetism, and charisma” in between more reasoned gripes and implicitly criticizing the author for hiding behind a cartoon character to make such criticisms.

The stream-of-consciousness strips are also disproportionately judgmental, reflecting people’s tendency to regard themselves as reasonable and others as unreasonable. These are juxtaposed with parody strips such as “Playful Obsession” and “Needled—k the Bug-F—-er” that mock the way that humor strips tend to reduce their characters to a single characteristic, which is not that different from how people treat those they do not really know by judging them based on whatever they happen to be doing at the moment one encounters them.

The overall viewpoint of dissatisfaction with everything carries over into “Cool Your Jets,” a strip in which two characters discuss the impossibility of finding the perfect woman, and “Give It Up!,” which asserts that everyone’s life is essentially futile. “Art School Confidential” targets everyone in an art school—the teachers and the students, the talented and the talentless, the professionals and the amateurs, the ugly and the beautiful, the men and the women. Clowes’s satire is not tied to any specific agenda. It seeks to undermine almost everything, even himself and the act of undermining things. This is leavened only by sympathy for the underdog, expressed in “I Love You Tenderly” and in “Ugly Girls.”

Impact

Since the underground comics movement of the 1960’s, independent anthology comics generally featured work by a variety of creators. Love and Rockets was produced by a tight-knit creative team, but Peter Bagge’s Neat Stuff (1985-1990) was the major forerunner of Eightball as an anthology in which diverse content was linked only by being the product of a single writer-artist. Progressing from the more focused Lloyd Llewellyn, Clowes used Eightball as a vehicle for almost anything that interested him.

The format has since become popular, with titles such as Adrian Tomine’s Optic Nerve (1995- ) and Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library (2005). The former features low-key narratives of young people, similar to Ghost World, while the latter makes use of cartoon styles in a way that is similar to Eightball by playing up the contrast between style and subject matter. Alan Moore’s Tomorrow Stories (1999- ),written by Moore but illustrated by a variety of artists, features a similar mix of experimentation, parody, and humor and incorporates retro styling.

The influence of Eightball can even be seen in DC Comics’ Solo series (2004-2006), which gave artists an issue each and allowed them to use any DC character. Many contributors elected to fill their issue with strips of varying genre, length, and style, demonstrating that this “authored” approach (which also incorporated pastiche) has reached the mainstream.

Films

Art School Confidential. Directed by Terry Zwigoff. United Artists/Mr. Mudd, 2006. The film is loosely based on the four-page strip from Eightball, issue 7, which had no story but was merely Clowes mocking his art school and fellow students. Scripted by Clowes, the film expands the view of art school seen in the original strip, including the student archetypes, the problems presented by art-school girls, the absurdity of what some students pass off as work, and students’ desperate delusion of one day being successful. However the narrative spine bears more resemblance to another Eightball strip, “The Truth,” in which an aspiring artist’s conscious efforts to do quality work meet with failure before he stumbles on success accidentally. In the film, this kind of unwarranted success occurs twice—both when lead character Jerome (played by Max Minghella) is suspected of being a serial killer and when the undercover policeman trailing him is hailed as a naïve genius.

Further Reading

Clowes, Daniel. Caricature (2002).

Matt, Joe. Peepshow (1992- ).

Ware, Chris. Acme: Our Annual Report to Shareholders and Rainy Day Saturday Afternoon Fun Book, a Library of Novelty (2005).

Bibliography

Hignite, M. Todd. In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006.

Oakes, Kaya. Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture. New York: Henry Holt, 2009.

Sacks, Mike. And Here’s the Kicker: Conversations with 25 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 2009.