What Daniel Clowes Is Made of

Rightly named among those responsible for making comics such a vibrant, growing medium over the past few decades, Daniel Clowes proved his ambition with his first significant work, Lloyd Llewellyn. The noir-inspired series mixed acerbic humor with a free approach to genre and storytelling style, and it foreshadowed Clowes’ next major project, Eightball. A one-man anthology combining serialized narratives, short stories, short humor pieces, and whatever else Clowes wanted to include, Eightball ran for 23 issues between 1989 and 2004 and included long-form works such as Ghost World, Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron, David Boring, Ice Haven, and The Death-Ray, all subsequently reprinted as independent volumes. Since the end of Eightball, Clowes has published Mister Wonderful, a surprisingly sweet middle-aged love story originally serialized in The New York Times Magazine, and Wilson, a stylistic tour-de-force in which one difficult character confronts his own mortality.