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 started drawing at a very young age. Writing a story wasn't satisfying, but to actually draw our own world - it's like controlling your own dreams.
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.
Writing a screenplay, I'm like, "All I'm responsible for is that final script, and I take great effort and pride in that." But once I give it to someone to make, I can disassociate with it entirely and not worry that my vision isn't being represented, because I understand fully that that's not how it works.
Writing screenplays is very freeing from what you can do in comics in a lot of ways. You can change things around. I can take great delight in writing 40 pages, then just pressing delete and getting rid of it and not thinking about it ever again. Whereas in comics, if I had put that kind of effort into it, I couldn't go on.
I try to only work on the screenplays for a few hours a day when I'm in my most voluble mood, just sort of writing whatever comes into my head. It's a very freeing thing.
Believe it or not, the characters are all like people I went to art school with in the '70s.
When people get things for free, they tend to not take them as seriously.
Try letting a Kindle protect your heart from sniper fire!
That's the biggest part of doing comics: You have to create stuff that makes you want to get out of bed every morning and get to work.
That'll be my claim to fame: My grandmother-in-law is the oldest iPad user!
When I close my eyes to draw I always think Chicago in 1975.
Working on movies made me realize how fluid the medium of film was.
Usually when I put together a book like this Death-Ray hardcover or that Ghost World special edition, then I have to reread it and see if there is anything I want to change or any re-coloring I want to do. That's when I'm faced with the actual work. When I'm working, I'm too close to it. I'm sort of inside, and I can't see it at all. So when I have that experience of rereading it years later, it's jarring.
Before I could read, I remember trying to piece together the stories from the images. It was a very primal experience.