Comics creator Daniel Clowes sat down with me at the Small Press Expo (SPX) in North Bethesda, Md. to chat about time travel, trusting your gut, and the beauty of solitude.
Cover of Patience, (Fantagraphics 2016) by Daniel Clowes.
LA: Your new book Patience deals with time travel as a way to fix your life. If you could travel back in time, what advice would you give 20 year old Daniel? Would you change anything?
DC: I thought about that a lot working on this book because this book really is about the dialogue between the older version of a person and the younger innocent naive version of that person. But I donāt know, I think things sort of fell into place in this miraculous way in my life, so I would hate to upset that. And anyway I would hate to say, āDonāt do that, thatās stupid!ā because that might have been the fulcrum that everything hinged on that allowed me to be still drawing comics at 55 years old.Ā
I just remember what an awful person I was, and everybody is, when theyāre in their early twenties. They just donāt know how self focused they are. Maybe itās just because Iām reflecting on how I was at that age, but I was so incredibly living in my own head, completely unaware of how much of an effect I have on other people. It was just all about my own tortured soul at that young age, and itās hard to look back on your early work and not see that and think, āOh come on man, get over that.ā
Panel from Patience by Daniel Clowes.
LA: Ā Do you think that itās important to be like that a little bit in order to do anything so crazy as start your own comic series and do your own thing that no oneās done before?
DC: Itās kind of one hundred percent part of it. I think you have to be a little bit of a delusional megalomaniac to ever think like, āIām going to sit in my room for months and draw this, and then everybody is going to love it and Iāll make a living off doing that and Iāll find a mate in the world!ā I think you have to be in that mindset a little bit at that age and itās a stage of growth that if you donāt go through this kind of crazy time where youāre examining who you are in the world and trying to figure that out that you will just sort of stay stuck in that time of life.
LA: Do you ask for feedback now that youāre older?
DC: [Laughs] No, I donāt. I mean thatās kind of what I love about doing comics is that the stakes are low enough that thereās nobody micromanaging what you do. Thereās no money invested it in it at all. Itās not like they have to hire focus groups and things like that before you even get startedā thereās no overhead. My only overhead is like buying paper so itās the cheapest. I just donāt like to get anybody else involved in the processā itās too much to put on them. If I were to have to bounce things off of my wife, Iād be mad at her all the time. You just have to trust yourself because thereās no other way to do it I donāt think.
Two-page spread from Patience by Daniel Clowes.
LA: Any advice for young artists out there?
DC: Ā The purpose of art for me, is to be able to see the world from an inside somebody elseās head. I think you should just make sure that what youāre drawing is really youā really personal, really intimate, really honestā and drawn in the way that you actually see and feel the world, and not based on something else.
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