Daniel Clowes: Interview
By James Norton
Artists mature at radically different rates.
Pablo Picasso's 20s and 30s were among the artistically richest years of his life; much of Goya's greatest and most disturbing work was done in his 70s. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was dead by 35; Joseph Haydn didn't start writing his best work until his 50s and 60s. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote "The Great Gatsby" when he was 29, but Cervantes didn't publish Part II of "Don Quixote" until his late 60s.
Despite having been a nationally respected cartoonist for years, you get the sense that Daniel Clowes is just starting to hit the stride he'll be remembered for. He's tackling bigger projects. He's successfully crossed over into Hollywood screenwriting. And his newest book, "Ice Haven," reveals a disciplined narrative that is more reminiscent of a tightly wound novel than a collection of comic strips riffing off of a central theme.
"It's kind of a byproduct of now having written stories for 20 years of my life and slowly getting the hang of what works and what doesn't," says Clowes. "I've learned how to cut out things that in the past I might have left in."
Clowes reached back into the 1950s to find his initial inspiration for "Ice Haven," mining the fading pages of old newspaper comics.
"I was sort of poring through these things, and there were all these sort of disparate strips sharing the page with each other," says Clowes. "There'd be Nancy on one page, and then there'd be Prince Valiant, and then Mandrake the Magician and then Blondie... all these very different intents with each kind of story. You'd have dry historical fiction and then you'd have a light little strip with little kids on the next page."
But a sense of style, says Clowes, united the strips.
"Somehow there was this cohesion just because they used the same kind of artistic tropes, and they were printed on the same press, and using the same colors — they all seemed linked together," he says.
The vivid colors on fading paper were the inspiration for "Ice Haven's" vintage feel.
"I thought that that was a sort of worthy endeavor, to create something that had that sort of colorful variety going on but that also had one continuous story," Clowes says. "So it could be sort of serious in one instance and flippant and tossed off in the next... and yet somehow it's all about the same thing."
The emotional heart of "Ice Haven" is the disappearance of young David Goldberg, whose presumed death echoes the sensational Leopold and Loeb murder of 1924. For Clowes, the crime was more than an abstract historical event to be strip-mined for his writing — it was a touchstone of his Chicago childhood.
"It took place about three blocks away from where I grew up in Chicago," he says. "I'd be walking around with my dad, and he'd say: 'That's where Leopold and Loeb did their thing.' He'd make Leopold and Loeb jokes, like that was going to happen to me... he had sort of a sick sense of humor. It was one of those things that just kind of permeated my childhood."
Clowes is a funny guy, and "Ice Haven" has its share of light moments. But at the heart of the story is a reflection on the capacity for violence within every human being, something that the Leopold and Loeb murder evoked within the young Clowes.
"The high school that I went to was sort of an offshoot of the high school that [the killers] had gone to," he says. "The place they had gone had closed down in the '40s, I think, so all the kids from there had wound up going to the high school that I went to. So it was as though I was going to school with the Leopolds and Loebs of 1972. It was just something — I knew it was within the capability of each of these kids to murder me."
Although Clowes is a long-time resident of Oakland, Calif., ("Oakland is really in many ways the Chicago of the West," Clowes says), the fictional community of Ice Haven draws its inspiration from the Midwest.
"When I close my eyes and think of the world, I see the South Side of Chicago," he says. "And when I think of rural areas, I think of the places I went in my childhood, like in western Michigan along the lakeshore where my grandparents had a house. Ice Haven is in some sort of limbo between those two worlds, I think."
Clowes is among a pack of distinguished cartoonists with a strong Chicago connection. The fact that artists such as Chris Ware, Herblock and Ivan Brunetti are linked to the city is no surprise; as culture snobs view cartooning as a second-tier artform, Chicago has long been known as the Second City.
"Chicago has an inferiority complex... certainly growing up, I was terribly jealous of New York," Clowes says. "I was obsessed with comic books and Mad Magazine and publishing and everything... you'd look at the copyright information, and they were all from New York, all from Madison Avenue. I just had such romantic notions about what New York was like. And of course I wound up moving there the second I got out of high school.
"I had this kind of chip on my shoulder about being from this second-rate city," he says. "As a result, I think I've always kind of related to things that were in second place — I've always liked the Monkees better than the Beatles."
Like the tension between Chicago and New York, Clowes's career straddles at least two different worlds, leaping the partition between cartooning and screenwriting. He's the writer of Ghost World and Art School Confidential, a new film due to be released in March, 2006. Both are adaptations of his illustrated work, made in partnership with director Terry Zwigoff (Crumb, Bad Santa).
The jump from the low-stakes, often obscure, self-flagellating world of independent cartooning to the high-stakes and glossy world of Hollywood has been surprisingly easy for Clowes. Part of it is due to Zwigoff, a director known for making small, intelligent films that are as unpretentious as they are entertaining.
And part of it, he says, is the movie industry's odd brand of artistic freedom — the freedom to lean on others.
"I feel almost more free in the movies than I do with my comics," Clowes says. "In my comics, I censor myself to some degree, and I worry about: 'Is what I'm doing communicating?' And I have no checks and balances. Nobody reads anything I do until it's published. Even my publisher doesn't see it until it's completely at the printer. And so I'm constantly second-guessing myself as to whether what I'm doing will translate to another human being."
The communal nature of movie-making, Clowes says, is like a safety net.
"In the movie process, I feel very free, because there are always people reading it, people examining what you're doing all throughout the whole process, so you can find out very easily whether that kind of thing translates or not," says Clowes. "In neither of these films have we done anything to attract a marketplace, or to meet some kind of financial goal."
He chalks this up to indifference and inflexibility.
"As any producer will tell you when looking at these two screenplays, we've made no concessions to the marketplace at all, because we would have no idea how to do it," says Clowes. "We'd be the last two guys in the world to try to do that. We're basically just trying to amuse ourselves."
His declared lack of popular ambition extends to the genre of cartooning as a whole, a medium that has recently gotten increased positive attention from cultural gatekeepers such as NPR, the New York Times and the New Yorker.
"It's something I try not to think too much about because it will ultimately lead to tears and disappointment," he says. "There've been a few of these things that have sold well, and generally it has more to do with the subject than with the way that it's done. 'Jimmy Corrigan' did very well, which is all because of Chris [Ware]'s artistic skill. But something like 'Persepolis' [by Marjane Satrapi] sold well because it's — she's not a brilliant stylist, by any means, but it's about a subject that people wanted to read about. That's what propelled it into huge sales."
The money, Clowes says, is the key to the genre's seeming recent boom.
"All of a sudden publishers are smelling money and they're signing up everybody," he says. "I hear stories of kids who've done like three mini-comics who are now getting two-book deals with Simon & Schuster, things like that. That's not going to do anything for anybody. None of these books will meet their big advances, and then the publishers will say, 'Oh well, that didn't work out,' and then they'll give up. People have to understand the market, and I don't think these mainstream publishers for the most part understand the market at all."
Clowes is deliberately obscure about his next illustrated work, declining to comment on the project other than to say that it will be bigger than "Ice Haven," and occupy him for the next couple of years. If Clowes's sprawling back catalogue is any indicator, it'll be worth the wait.
E-mail James Norton at jim@flakmag.com.
— graphic by Daniel Clowes
