#eightball comics

[danielclowesreader]

#1

30 years ago, in August 1989, Fantagraphics releases one of the most important comic books of the 20th century: Daniel Clowes’s Eightball #1: 

[danielclowesreader]

Ross Perot died. Here’s a Clowes panel from “The Party” (Eightball #11, 1993):

[danielclowesreader]

‘When the Hard-Boiled Exterior Can, Inevitably, No Longer Maintain Itself’

[danielclowesreader]

On her way . . .

“Bigger Little Enid Doll”

Coming soon from the Japanese company Press Pop. See here for details.

[danielclowesreader]

From the Eightball Postcards set, 1993. The set’s cover:

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Death-Rays  - Cover Sketches for Eightball 23

Printed version:

[danielclowesreader]

Hmm . . .

The cover for The Peace and The Panic, a new record by the band Neck Deep, has been making its way ‘round the internet: 

Some folks wonder if the illustration is by Daniel Clowes, while others call it out as a knockoff, as, in their words, “Fake Clowes” and the work of a “blatantly shitty ripoff artist.” A few have noted its heavy debt to late-1980s Clowes on the left and late-’80s Charles Burns on the right, with a very Clowesian backward-facing man (a figure the artist has drawn dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times) in the center. Here’s a detail from the record cover followed by one from a 1988 Clowes comic:

The cover followed by a panel from Clowes’s Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (1993):

The Neck Deep cover art is by Ryan Besch. For your consideration of what’s known as “the problematics of influence,” here is some of his recent art side-by-side with Clowes’s work, from 1990-96.

Besch’s Weird Sin followed by Clowes’s Misfit Lit cover (1991) and a panel from Clowes’s comic Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (1993):

A detail from the Besch cover followed by Clowes:

Besch followed by two images of a familiar Clowes type c.1987-1996, the “tough woman looking over shoulder at viewer” (Eightball #13 cover, 1994; Orgy Bound title page, 1996):

The same image followed by a detail from Clowes’s "Ink Studs" (Eightball #9, 1992) with the Clowes panel flipped:

Besch’s “Life Form”:

A detail from Clowes’s Misfit Lit cover followed by part of the above image:

A detail from Clowes’s Eightball #9 cover (1992) followed by a detail from ”Life Form”:

Note the watch.

[danielclowesreader]

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From the back cover of the current paperback edition of Pussey!, Daniel Clowes’s satire of the superhero comics industry - it was serialized in Eightball in the late ‘80 and early ‘90s and collected as a graphic novel in 1995.