January 4th, 2008
Daniel Clowes' comics express every kind of alienation known to man, but in person, he's more affable than apoplectic: Think Mister Rogers with a black sense of humor. Over the past two decades, that humor has frequently surfaced in projects like his graphic novels Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron and David Boring and his comic-book series Eightball, as well as Clowes' screenplays for Ghost World and Art School Confidential, both of which he adapted from his own comics. His latest comic strip, Mister Wonderful, runs serially in The New York Times Magazine through January 2008. It's also available online. The A.V. Club recently caught up with Clowes in Oakland to discuss the benefits of censorship, having a low tolerance for animation, and putting off his wedding to do a Ramones video.
The A.V. Club: How did you get started with Mister Wonderful?
Daniel Clowes: The New York Times has been doing the weekly comic strip for two years. I was the second person they asked, after Chris Ware. I was going to do it about a year ago, until I had to get open-heart surgery. The next opening was in September. I'd always wanted to do a weekly strip, or a strip that was in installments like that. It's been fun trying to figure out how to make that work. Their standards are so prissy that they won't allow me to use all kinds of language. Not only can you not swear, this morning I was informed I couldn't use the word "schmuck." I couldn't use "crap," "schmuck," or "get laid." Those three were beyond the pale. But you get around that, and it comes out better. I can't quite explain why.
AVC: Censorship helps, then?
DC: Were I writing a character that couldn't be this repressed, it would be disastrous. I don't know what I'd do. But I enjoy the opportunity to use swear symbols. The reader reads into them something worse than what you normally would have. They work as this outburst of incoherent anger. I've found ways to write around swearing that are much more effective, rather than going for what someone really would say. [Laughs.]
AVC: Or using cigarettes to indicate somebody's an outsider.
DC: You can't do that any more. I used to use cigarettes a lot. It gave somebody a seedy, disreputable, almost suicidal quality. Now cigarettes are so unused––you can't have anybody indoors smoking. If you drew that in a restaurant, you'd have to have a panel where the manager comes over and kicks them out. Unless it's set in Europe, you can't really do that. Characters who smoke––it dates it, somehow. You can have teenage kids smoking, because they still smoke, but that's about it.
AVC: The Death Ray would be the obvious example.
DC: Yeah, but that's set in the '70s, so you can get away with it there. It was a story I kind of wrote when I was 16; it didn't have any real similarities except for the basic plot. It was something that was stuck in my head ever since I was that age, but I never quite did. So it seemed best to set it in its natural element.
AVC: How does the serial format change how you can tell the story?
DC: You have to keep it simple, so if a reader misses a couple installments, they can still follow along. I can't tell if that's happening. It's hard to tell if anyone's interested in reading a serialized story. But it's interesting to put in a cliffhanger each week. That was popular in old comic strips. They'd write a weekend story different from the daily strip. So people follow one story day to day, and a separate story on weekends. If you read them, you think "I'll read two more." Then you're like "I gotta find out!" And you read 500 more.
AVC: Mister Wonderful is also available on the New York Times website. How do you feel about that?
DC: I think it looks better in the magazine. The colors are designed to be on paper, not illuminated on screen. I don't like the aspect of people reading it for free. When people get things for free, they tend to not take them as seriously. But I don't know. I'm sure 10 times more people are reading it online than in the actual paper. People have complained to me, like "Man, that's expensive. Five bucks for one page." Well, you do get a thousand pages of interesting stuff in addition.
AVC: A lot of your protagonists are between 18 and 21. What about that age interests you?
DC: I see a lot of possibilities in that age. You have a window of opportunity when you leave your childhood behind and have this chance to become what you always wanted to be. For me, that was a time when I could have gone many different ways. I was in flux and deciding what kind of person I would become. There's something interesting about the vision of what that will be and the reality of making that happen, and how you really are what you are. Unless you're "in character," it's impossible to get around that. I can see it in my son. He's 3 years old and has such a clear personality. I don't think it has anything to do with our influence. All we can do is inflect it somehow, but he already is his own person. I always tried to interpret my childhood, to find what events turned me into the person I am today. Now I see that probably none of them did. I probably would have gone in the same route, personality-wise, no matter what.
AVC: What can you do with comics that you can't with other media?
DC: I never feel there's anything I can't do. There are certain things in comics that you can't do in any other medium: for instance, in Mister Wonderful, [Marshall's] narration overlaps the events as they're going on. That would be difficult in film; you could blot speech out with a voiceover, but it wouldn't have the same effect. That's always of interest, to see what new things you can do in comics form.
AVC: What are its limitations, then?
DC: I hate to say there are any. Comics seldom move me the way I would be moved by a novel or movie. I say this as someone who would rather read comics than watch movies, listen to music, anything. But it's not an operatic medium. I hear other people talk about being moved to tears by comics. I can't imagine that.
AVC: Even for something like Jimmy Corrigan?
DC: I couldn't see it as such a tragedy. I found it very funny. Even the parts that were really miserable, I saw a sick humor in them. Maybe that says more about me as a reader than the actual comics. [Laughs.]
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