January 4th, 2008
AVC: There are a lot of little details in your comics that aren't necessarily meant to be noticed the first or even second time through.
DC: I just try to make it for myself, try to give it some kind of unity throughout. That often involves tiny details. I'm never sure what's going to be obvious or what nobody will ever notice. I put stuff in my comics that I thought was blatantly obvious, and nobody noticed. And things that I think are buried in the background, everybody gets it. So I try to be consistently aware of every part of the frame.
AVC: How does it feel to see your influence in other people's work?
DC: I'm usually the last to see it. People give me stuff and say "Oh look, this guy's ripping you off," and I'm like "What do you mean?" Often I see the people that I've ripped off filtered into my own work. In other people's work, I can only see specific, tiny little instances of inflections stolen from another artist. I have a real blindness to my own work. When I look at stuff I did, three or four years later, it doesn't look anything like I thought it did. To answer in another way, it keeps me moving when I see people doing stuff that I see as "my" direction. I think, "Oh, it's been tainted. Now I've got to do something new." There's nothing worse than working on your own stuff and thinking that someone else is following you along.
AVC: Does working in comics affect how you view animation?
DC: I have a very low tolerance for animation. I'm used to the perfect integrity you get from drawing your own comics. There's something about that that animation always loses. I used to think I would never do any animation, and then later…
AVC: You did a video for the Ramones.
DC: Yeah, and that turned out well. I got the phone call about that project on the first of June 1995, and it was on TV the first of July. It was a month from knowing about it to it being so done it was on TV. It was insane. I would stay up all night drawing pictures for it. At 6 in the morning, this bleary-eyed messenger would come to my door and pick up the latest drawings, take them to an animation studio in Mill Valley, and then come back later and pick up more. I had to postpone my wedding to do that.
The greatest moment of my life was, somebody sent me a cable-access show from Chicago that had Joey Ramone on it showing that video. And he was talking about, like, [imitates Queens accent] "This guy Dan Clowes postponed his wedding for us. He's a great guy." [Laughs.] At that exact same time, Mr. Show wanted me to do the logo and opening animation. I would have done it, but I was so fried out by that. Now that's my biggest regret, because I would have loved to have been part of that show.
AVC: How does a story relate to its style? I'm assuming you didn't start Ghost World with the idea "I want to do blue now."
DC: I might have, actually. [Laughs.] You have to find the tone of the piece and modulate that. There are ways to indicate that—I try to incorporate the biggest range I can within the story, going from humorous to serious without it being jarring. That's the hardest part, to keep that balance. It requires being constantly aware of where you are in the story. You can't really do that in a movie: You can't slightly modulate the tone by the way the character's eyeballs look in this one scene. With this New York Times piece, I veer between drawing realistic eyes and little dot eyeballs, and it holds this strong unconscious meaning in the story. Or maybe not. Maybe nobody cares.
Sorry, it's very hard to talk about that. If you think about it enough to have a really articulate answer, you're not doing it right. That's how I feel about art. If your thought process could take you to knowing exactly what you're doing and why, there would be no point in making the art. It would become like propaganda. It's more nebulous than that.
AVC: Recently, a teacher in Guilford, Connecticut was fired for giving Eightball #22 to a student. Do you have any comment on this?
DC: When the Guilford story first broke, I was contacted by several journalists who wanted my take on the whole thing, and I decided I was the last person in the world who should be commenting on this case. Having no specific knowledge of any of the players involved, I thought I would spare the world another half-baked opinion. Any defense of the teacher's actions boils down, at some point, to an appraisal of Eightball #22, and I'm not the best person to do that. All I can say—and this comes more from my perspective as a father than an artist—is for parents and administrators to give so little value to the career of a public-school teacher—to allow him to be cast aside without exhausting every avenue to resolve the issue—is an obscenity worse than anything I've ever drawn in my comics.
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