Daniel Clowes
Daniel Clowes
Daniel Gillespie Clowesis an American cartoonist, illustrator, and screenwriter. Most of Clowes's work first appeared in Eightball, a solo anthology comic book series. An Eightball issue typically contained several short pieces and a chapter of a longer narrative that was later collected and published as a graphic novel, such as Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, Ghost World, and David Boring. Clowes’s illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker, Newsweek, Vogue, The Village Voice, and elsewhere. With filmmaker Terry...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth14 April 1961
CountryUnited States of America
I've felt that in the past, where I just felt like I had to keep drawing in the same way to maintain this sameness and rhythm throughout an entire book, and it was not really necessary.
I think if you had different artists approaching the material in different styles, that's very different. I think it's an interesting thing to discover, what's present in the work even when you're shifting the styles. I've just found it a much stronger way to work.
My feeling is that it's one of the very few things that comics can do that you really can't do in any other medium. I feel like the reader accepts all of these styles, and after a certain point you can flip the pages and see a character rendered very differently than you saw on an earlier page, and it's not jarring. It suggests things that you can't suggest just in the writing or in the plotting.
I think that gulf is what makes the work interesting, but as a creator it's endlessly frustrating because I'm starting out with this goal, this thing I'm trying to create, and then the thing I actually do create is very, very different. It's always painful, in some ways, especially when it's just finished.
I think I have a very clear vision of what I want things to look like.
Avatar is a total nerd thing, and yet our popular culture has somehow made all that stuff acceptable.
When I go back and reread the stuff, I'm always floored by how deeply personal and revealing it actually is.
One of my weekend hobbies is to go look at old houses when there are open houses around here. Just to go look at the architecture. And you can see how many houses were built around 1977, the year where everyone said, "Let's put in these aluminum windows instead of beautiful hand-made wood ones."
I was thinking the other day that there will never be another form of music that everybody has to respond to - like disco.
I'm always hiding the books in my closet, and my art's always turned upside down in my drawer.
As soon as I'm finished with it, it feels like an impersonal project. Like, "Well, I did another book."
I feel like a lot of my aesthetic was in response to feeling the awfulness and cheapness of that [ the 70'th].
There are certain things in there that no one else would recognize, really. I see details of my life that I didn't even intend to put in when I was doing the work. For example, I noticed that every single kid in the high school in The Death-Ray is based on somebody I went to high school with.
Often I'll do research just to get a time period correct, but I didn't have to for the '70s. I feel like I can close my eyes and still see it so clearly.