...and still do. DP is a tragic figure, instantly recognizable to anyone who has spent any time around comics, or for that matter, any "social scene" based upon collectables (video games, stamps, ducks). And that mouth... those teeth... that nearly unbreakable faith in his powers. And oh yeah, "Pussey!" is also the best send-up of the comic/convention/geek scene ever written. Not to take away from Clowes' undeniable genius as an artist and writer, but much of Pussey!'s effectiveness is due to the medium itself, which as Clowes himself writes is "the most versitile art form" and puts into several panels what might take a "pure" writer several chapters (or more likely, none at all).

Clowes pulls no punches. We have met Pussey, and he is us.

Yes, this comic is possibly the most hysterical thing you'll ever read, if you've ever read comics or had a lingering doubt you might be a nerd. I idolized the comic's hero Dan Pussey immediately as an archtype par extraodinaire. I recommend the book to those in their late thirties and ready to laugh comfortably at what they once were. Or at least I was.

the best send up of the comics industry ever, includes moronic super-hero artists, opportunistic publishers, and a glimpse into the future....

Not being a fan of underground comics at all, I was a little hesitant to even open this book. Within seconds though, I found someone else out there was equally as twisted and full of angst as myself - and funny as ever. This is a 'best-of' type collection of some fantastic and well-contrived comics with a strong and bitter dark sarcasm throughout. Touching on many modern American social issues, this guy Clowes hits the nail on the head every time with his twisted insight into the human condition. No household is complete without this work.

Discovering the work of Daniel Clowes was like when I first heard The Replacements. I was actually angry I hadn't known sooner. This collection won't have everyone's favorite "Eightball" moments but it's an amazing collection.

Extremely entertaining with a dash of looking over your shoulder paranoia, Reminds me of what David Lynch would do if he was a cartoonist!

The "Lloyd Llewellyn" stories are some of the funniest and sharpest stories iv'e read in comics.Clowes is a man that has no problem making his stories flow seamlessly in terms of his narrative and art. It is always interesting and enjoyable. this book is seconded only by one of his other books "like a velvet glove cast in iron". this is a lighter story about and out of luck writer and his adventures. Its feels honest and, like so much of Clowes' work it has a strange haunting quality that only Clowes can get.

But, so was Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum." Only time will tell if his work will be included amongst such august company, but for the time being, Daniel Clowes stands at the top of the heap of today's comic book artists.

Twentieth Century Eightball is an omnibus, "best of" collection of his comic panels from his Fantagraphic comic book series "Eightball" which was issued semiannually from the late 1980s through the 1990s.

Clowes' rapist (pun intended) wit is in overdrive here, as he expounds on his endless lists of things he hates, often in the guise of such stand-ins as the now-classic Lloyd Llewellyn. "I Hate You Deeply" and "I Love You Tenderly" will have you howling like a banshee, as you follow Lloyd through one of his ranting diatribes against sports figures, corporate greed, hippy sellouts and lowest-common-denominators.

And that's basically the whole book: Thinly-veiled attacks on all the things that bother the idosyncratic Daniel Clowes. But, so what: They deserve bashing! My favourite targets of his ire were post-modernist talentless art school poseurs, violently agressive hippy burnout peaceniks, "hip" people, Chicagoan "Jim Belushi" types, dumb jocks and pretentious Americans such as I who use the British spelling of words (e.g., "colour" instead of "color"; "kerb" rather than "curb").

Some of the material is just too bizarre to describe here -- I don't want to give away the weirdness, so find out for yourself about "On Sports," "Pogeybait," "The Happy Fisherman" and other such sundry freakishness.

But this book also reveals a soft-spot in Clowes' heart, particularly in the short "Ugly Girls," in which he questions society's norms of "beauty." Though he doesn't use the name "Enid," the reader can tell that Clowes has long been entranced and obsessed with the raven-haired, bookish, bespectacled wallflower type. I agree: She *is* much more stunning than those trophy blondes.

I love this book, it has 46 stories in all. If you goto fast you will miss something. it shows Mr. Clowes early work and most of it has him in it. Some of my favorer works are Art School Confidential, Why I Hate Christians, The Stroll and Hippypants and Peace Bear. I'm sorry to say that I haven't read them all yet, it just wouldn't seem right. The nice thing about these stories is that there all different and if you a fanatic like me you can find links with others comics by Clowes. Also if you got pulled in to comics from the movie Ghost World then you can find some of the faces in the movie were first seen in Eightball. This is an amazing collection and I'm sure you will be able to relate and feel connected to it. I wouldn't give it to a child because like most of Mr. Clowes work it has nudity, sex, drugs, and some language. Don't lit that get in the way of the dialog and always stay open minded when reading.
-Madalyn

I have recently started reading screenplays, and this was given as a gift after having seen Ghost World four times. This is an excellent movie and I recommend it to most anyone.

The screenplay itself is just a screenplay, but a well written one. There are a few scenes that were either cut or shortened, and I really enjoyed them. But the best part of the book was all the extras, like introductions by Daniel Clowes and Terry Zwigoff. Plus there were a lot of pictures, and all the scene notes at the end were very interesting.

If you liked Ghost World, or you just like screenplays, check this one out. It's one of the best that I've read.

So, you're a despondent teenage girl, fresh out of high school, and you and your best friend in the world have little to do beyond hang out at coffee shops and mock your fellow humans while hovering on the fringe of acceptable society. Our heroine Enid Coleslaw and her best friend Rachel Doppelmeyer are not glamour girls, are not part of the popular crowd, but seem quite happy with their roles of caustic observers.

Ghost World covers that simultaneously fragile and empowering period of life immediately following graduation from high school, before having to head off to college or a job or whatever the future may bring. While it would be easy to dislike Enid and Rachel for their sarcasm, their overactive imaginations, their snide cruelty, Clowes does an excellent job of bringing out the insecurities and the fears behind the girls' bravado.

In some unquantifiable way, Clowes's artwork matches the story and the characters perfectly. A little off, a little oddly out of proportion at times, sometimes beautiful, sometimes awkward. All in all, a great mix, and certainly worth a read.

First, I'll compare the book to the movie. There are so many things that are exactly the same in the book and in the movie: 50s diner, Weird Al, Goofy Gus, Satanists, the list goes on. However, the storylines seem to be different. In the movie, Enid falls in love (maybe that's a bit too strong, but hey) with Seymour and her relationship with her best friend Rebecca falls apart. In the book, Enid and Rebecca share feelings about Brad, and their relationship falls apart, while they insult and mock everyone around them. Sure, in the book Enid does play a trick on a weird guy (his name is/was unknown), but that was it. I think I liked the storyline in the book a little bit better in the book; it just seemed more real than in the movie.

What I liked most about Ghost World, is that it shows what life's like, from an outcast's point of view. It's not the stereotypical mainstream kind of teen story with no plot. Which is why I know those types of teens wouldn't like it, even if they did understand it. Daniel Clowes must have been someone like Enid, to know what life is like for people like her, so well. Which, is not a bad thing.

There's not really much to say about the illustration, but that it was really good. You can just see the visual connections between the book and the movie. It depicts how life might be seen by Enid or Rebecca. Good work, Daniel Clowes.

Not to say anything bad about the movie, but see it first, and then read the book. You'll appreciate both much more if you do.

This is the first graphic novel that actually made me feel sympathy for some of the characters - made me care about them and their experiences. There's a point in the story that the girls go to a strangeish retro diner that has a hippie for an employee. One of them seems to realize something about this happy-happy seeming middle-aged man and spends some time leaving a large tip. It then flashes to a couple panels that depicts this man - no longer smiling and all - cleaning up and collecting the tip then depositing coins into a machine. I must've read those 1 or 2 pages a dozen times. I can't quite put it into meaning the reason I stuck to those pages but it really meant something to me. I guess the author just fleshes out the characters to such an extent that you just have to care about them. There are many other notable scenes too. Ghost World is simply a brilliant book about people and their "real" lives as opposed to the ones other people think they lead. Don't listen to the haters because this graphic novel changed my opinion about comics once and for all after reading an umpteenth amount of pulpy Batman ishes. They really can have heart and meaning about them and that's the important thing. Get it.

Like a Velvet Glove cast in Iron is an extremely good book. One of the reasons is how much it makes you think. This is the kind of book that you have to go back and reread to understand certain parts...not thats its incomprehnsable entirely. Rather, everytime you go back you discover something new, surprising, and maybe even disturbing. I highly reccomend this along with all other Danial Clowes books.

You have to be appreciative of either Eightball or Dan Clowes (if it's possible to separate the two) to like this.

It was serialized in Eightball and was a hefty portion of many issues. If you read them in order and liked it, maybe buy this. I'll admit - I was familiar with Twentieth Century Eightball only, and I wanted to read this from the beginning. Since then, I have been buying up back issues.

It's not as shocking as many people say. It is, however, as confusing as many people say. You have to use your imagination, inductive logic, and movie-watching experiences to really glue it all together.

And by the way, the people who compare this to Twin Peaks are insane. Twin Peaks cannot be messed with. And I love this book.

Worth it alone for the reactions I have gotten from people at school that I have shown this book to. But seriously, let's talk about the story...

Velvet Glove starts off normally enough-Clay Loudermilk, with nothing better to do, goes into a B-movie theatre, where he steps in icky stuff on the floor, tries to look unapproachable for the other patrons, and wonders why there is a line forming in the men's room. So he's watching this movie and feeling all disgusted with himself, and then the second feature comes on, a movie he's never seen before, a movie of the same title as the story. In this movie, which features no nudity or sex but is somehow just as sickening, a masked woman in a bondage outfit appears to behead two other people in the movie, one of whom kinda looks like Hitler and dresses in baby clothes. Then the woman in the bondage outfit removes her mask and turns out to be--Clay's ex-lover.

Clay's quest to find out what in the hell his old girlfriend was doing in that movie takes him on a surreal, psychotic voyage. On his way, he encounters a cult of nymphos bent on triggering the ultimate war of the sexes and an eccentric middle-age man who thinks a corporate logo holds the key to the origin of the universe.

Love Clowes' character images. Very snazzy faces. He can draw some disturbing and ugly images, too. Had to note the art somewhere.

Try to find this book or the issues of Eightball it is serialized in. It is worth the effort. If you do get the individual issues, be sure to get all of the first ten of Eightball so you get the complete story, because you need to down it all in one gulp. For the longest time you will plod through this book thinking something does not make sense or you'll wonder what that was doing in the story altogether. Don't go back trying to understand what you don't get right away. Just keep reading to the end where everything is neatly wrapped up more than you expected it to be, and be prepared for a kick in the head.

But even at the end "makes sense" is a term used in the loosest way possible. If you want a realistic story, it's not here. This book ends nowhere near as normally as it began.

Although I'm an ardent admirer of Clowes, Caricature left me disappointed. Out of the nine stories in this collection, I was only really impressed by and interested in two. One of which was the title piece, which told the somewhat charming, somewhat unnerving story of a cartoon artist who makes his living drawing caricatures at carnivals and his odd relationship with a teenage girl who's in awe of his work. In typical Clowes style, all of these stories feature characters that are obsessed, alienated, and depressed, but unfortunately most of them (such as MCMLXVI, which is nothing more than a guy ranting about his preoccupation with 60's pop culture) feel tedious and don't really seem to go anywhere. Clowes is a brilliant cartoonist, but this collection isn't his best work.

Clowes has always been an excellent storyteller, but the brilliance of his work is not in his stories (which are often mundane and uneventful) but the rich and poignant display of emotions that play underneath the narrative. This was certainly the case in "Ghost World" and "David Boring" in that the exploration of loneliness, adolescent angst and self-loathing took place in the nuances of facial expression and the subtext of spoken word, and not in the unfolding of the plot. "Caricature" is no different, but with the added advantage of Clowes working without the burden of having to tell a story. Being less constrained by the demands of a longer, more cohesive narrative format, Clowes in this collection of nine vignettes is able to explore his themes with greater freedom and whimsy. Thus, many of the stories here take on a dream-like quality and even the more grounded ones have a strong sense of unreality. And indeed, it is in the weird plane of reverie where the emotions he means to convey are best communicated. This is stream-of-consciousness in the form of the graphic novel and more than in any of his other work he communicates at the level of the subconscious. Needless to say there are moments in this book that are transcendental.

How does Dan Clowes manage to tell pointless, meandering stories about monstrously defective people and still make them entertaining? Beats me. I'm just glad to know that, as messed-up as I may be, I'm not anywhere NEAR as bad as the folks portrayed in Caricature....For instance, Clowes introduces us to Mona Beadle (Green Eyeliner), a former fat-girl who has devoted her life to a strange revenge fantasy, which fails miserably. Or there's always the malcontent who just rants about how every year after 1966 was no good. Or Mal Rosen, a caricature artist who meets a severly messed up girl who may or may not be: 15 Years old, 22 Years old, the daughter of a famous artist, battered by her boyfriend, etc. And don't forget the luckless Super-Hero and the strange trick-or-treater...

In addition to great storytelling and lovely art, Clowes also delivers the reader a feeling of inner peace....because no matter HOW bad your life may be, Clowes shows you it could always be worse. Highly recommended!

The whole story is set against the year of 1999, leading to its end. The threat of a terrorist act and killings underscore the human follies of this funny, but sad story. The cataclysmic apocalypse of the world takes a secondary importance to being left over by love, in loneliness. A very lyrical and interesting juxtaposition.

Daniel Clowes has a tremendous gift as a storyteller, and in this comic book, he conscientiously chooses the 3-act screenplay form, both using it as a legitimate vehicle for his story and also as a deconstructive techinique. His characters are wonderfully three-dimensional, and the way they go in and out of love is always shown through a sympathetic, but detached view. The mistakes the characters make, the yearnings and losses... approximate the real human experience. The ending is a hopeful one - even as the end-time seems to be near, another possibility of love keeps David Boring afloat. Although Chris Ware seems to have caught the public and critical acclaim, when it comes to telling stories of modern alienation, there is no graphic artist to best Daniel Clowes. Not yet. Impressive.

David Boring is searching for something. His father, that perfect girl, meaning. His meaningless sexual encounters, his collection of things (scrapbook, comic book), his life as a movie, his friends, his fear of his mother all culminating in a story that is anything but boring. David's life is like one of his old movies, which we are taken through from start to finish. As the world slowly revolves without his noticing, much to annoyance of some of his friends, he can't seem to find what it is he wants.

This comic written as a whole story, rather than the vingettes of Ghost World provide a detailed narative that is quite satisfying. Every character is detailed, to the point of having a list of credits at the end (Daniel Clowes makes a cameo, but where I don't know.) The three acts give a clear path through which to solve the enigma of what David is searching for. I won't tell you if he finds an answer at the end, you'll have to read it for yourself.

Daniel shows us another excellent window into the lives of teenagers and young adults in the post-modern meaningless world that we all inhabit. Although some of the panels may shock you in their graphic nature, it is a real world, a real place that we live in and not a fake, cliche/angst ridden hell hole that some may have us believe.

Marvelous! This graphic novel documents the journeys of David Boring, a quirky 20 something security guard who has an obsessive manner and is enthralled by women's rear ends... The plot is sprinkled with strange twists and endless black humor, leaving you tickled pink. The art is fantastic, as is typical from Clowes (author of wildly popular Ghost World and Eight Ball). From murder to apocalyptic premonitions, to having sex with god, this book has it all, but not in an obviously absurd way. This graphic novel should not be passed by.