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Showtimes Behind the Eightball MUSIC Live music listings Concerts BY GUY LESHINSKI BEAT

Nightclubs For all the wizardly ARTS cartoonists working

Arts listings today, none can outconjure . LISTINGS The saucer-eyed Best Bets Californian is Merlin at COLUMNS the table. Every release The Anti-Hit List of his ongoing serial, Box Populi Eightball, of which a new Extended Play volume is imparted Love Bites roughly once a year, is Medium Cool quickly snatched off the racks by perspiring comics fans, ushered Moondoggie home and studied; not just for the skill with which Clowes crafts his The Panelist stories and characters, but in the ways he twists the medium's Pleasure Circuit clichés and jostles the form. Sample This Sign Me Up Clowes is best known for , the story of two teenage CONTRIBUTORS girlfriends growing apart in abject suburbia, which was made into a roundly applauded film by Crumb director . Despite CLASSIFIEDS heralding the nascent comix renaissance and winning bubbly MASTHEAD acclaim, the film rarely approached the penetrating wit -- the ADVERTISING INFO scalding satire and sharply observed dialogue -- of the original , a story Clowes had serialized in the pages of PRIVACY POLICY Eightball. Over its 15-year lifespan, EB has spun a worldview as idiosyncratic as any committed to ink. Restrained and surreal, psychosis humming just below the surface, Clowes' setting is overrun by pouty, precocious kids and disillusioned adults. He frames the maladjusted people at the margins of society in his pale, constipated panels. The young are far too cynical for their age; the old, slobs and neurotics hobbled by ignorance and failure.

Beyond shaping such tangible misery, Clowes also plays with the medium of comics, by turns exploiting and subverting its conventions. Eightball #22, released in 2001, is one of the masterpieces of the medium, a slim, dry book that hinges on a disappearance in the fictional town of , a square suburb in Illinois, the kind Clowes himself grew up near. The book is divided http://www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue_08.12.04/city/panelist.html 9/23/05 eye - Behind the Eightball - 08.12.04 Page 2 of 4

into separate strips, some a few pages long, others merely a few panels. Characters wind through each other's storylines as each strip builds on the one before in staccato starts and stops. Eventually, a three-dimensional world emerges with fully rounded inhabitants. The strips themselves, meanwhile, quietly celebrate (and skewer) cartooning's accumulated heritage. One vignette called "Rocky 100,000 BC" makes Fred Flintstone a mindless Neanderthal who stomps around a stone-age Ice Haven and pummels his neighbour into paste. Another is framed as an Atlas- style, 1950s romance yarn, while another borrows the anamorphic bunnies of R. Crumb. The typefaces, colours and layout trigger halcyon memories of reading the funnies in the back of the newspaper or curling up with a comic book in our lap. Some pages are even dyed sepia or pink to look old and smudged. But our nostalgia is summoned in a radically new context: a thoroughly adult environment.

Clowes' nearest antecedent may be David Lynch, whose work also vibrates on a separate frequency, and whose ascent to madness has found him toying with our understanding of character and narrative. Both artists imprint the lunacy of a dream onto their medium's skintight customs.

Eightball #23, which came out in July, uses the same vocabulary as its predecessor, though this time its target is the hallowed superhero genre. Andy, the teenaged son of a rogue chemist, discovers that cigarettes trigger in him a surge of super strength

("It was like my entire body got a giant boner," he says). The comic nonchalantly tags every trait: a plausible origin story (father fed infant some hyperactive compound), a sidekick (the passive- aggressive Louie -- in many ways, a male version of Ghost World's Enid), even a bulbous ray gun that evaporates people. At the same time, #23 works as a metaphor for adolescent angst and its lingering effects, as a mind-spinning fantasy or merely as a solidly crafted comic. Clowes has an enviable ear for small talk, and builds convincing characters and relationships from it. His graphic style is just as well honed: his clean line and pastel palette are much imitated, as is his penchant for oddly cropped panels and obstructed speech balloons, which tug on the reader's imagination and heighten the tension.

Time magazine recently put Eightball #23 on its list of top 10 "trashy summer novels," which exposes flaws in both the terms "graphic novel" and "trashy." The 42-page comic can be read in a single sitting, though it'll take several sweeps to pluck out the myriad subtexts and visual motifs. And despite its pulpy theme, the story is provocative and acutely depressing. That so celebrated a cartoonist can be so restlessly experimental shows how ripe the medium's potential remains.

Guy Leshinski invites you to join the discussion of this column at www.theculturalgutter.com. Email gleshinski eye.net.

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