Daniel Nicolás Ferreiro Relational Genres, Gapped Narratives, and Metafictional Devices in Daniel Clowes’s David Boring

Daniel Clowes’s comic books have always been characterized by their juxtaposition of different artistic expressions. Since his beginnings as a cartoonist in the mid 1980s, Clowes’s works have continually revealed echoes from films, painting or literature, blended with different forms of popular culture. Not interested in creating a realistic approach, his comic books highlight fictionality, a process that has strong implications in the development of highly experimental storylines. This article analyses Clowes’s graphic novel David Boring (1999) and its narrative appropriations of the superhero genre, embodied in the inset superhero comic book ‘The Yellow Streak’. This meta-comic book is a recurrent motif which challenges our expectations as readers. Focusing on intertextual processes of re-working already existing materials, the aim of this study is to research the different ways in which ‘The Yellow Streak’ could function within the frame of David Boring: firstly, as a superhero comic book per se, since it both follows and subverts traditional aspects of the genre; secondly, as a family biography which mirrors the events in the main story; and finally, as a metafictional comment on how a gapped narrative can be the subject of endless interpretations, requiring a sort of ‘detective work’ on the readers’ part in order to achieve meaning.

Imagine trying to distil [David Boring] down to a one-sentence pitch. ‘It’s like Fassbinder meets half-baked Nabokov on Gilligan’s Island’.1

In an interview for The Comics Journal magazine, Daniel Clowes mockingly used these words in trying to define his comic book David Boring (1999).2 Although they might be too reductive of its narrative complexities, they give the idea that its plotline relies on the convergence of different genres, a process which subverts readers’expectations and shapes the plotline. Films, TV series, superhero comic books, and detective novels converge in the story, and their particular codes are used in order to widen its narrative strategies. Published as a serialized story in 1999 and collected as a full volume in 2002, David Boring is a problematic graphic novel in that its recurrent use of different genres outside the comic book genre makes readers wonder if this is in fact a conventional example of the genre. But at the same time it is a self-reflexive work of fiction that makes continuous references to the creation and interpretation of comics as opposed to other

1 Matt Silvie, ‘The Velvet Gloves are off: A Boring Interview with Ghost World’s Daniel Clowes’, The Comics Journal, 233 (2001), 52-77 (p. 66). 2 All panels from David Boring by Daniel Clowes (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002). David Boring copyright © 2000 by Daniel Clowes. Reprinted by permission of Jonathan Cape, a division of Random House. 186 Daniel Nicolás Ferreiro narrative expressions, emphasizing the difficulties that exist when representing reality through fiction, or even when representing fiction through fiction. This tendency has been recurrent in Clowes’s production since he started his career as a cartoonist in the mid-1980s. His comics always feature allusions to different subgenres within the comic book domain, but also to artistic expressions outside the genre. Since the 1960s, literature has experienced an increasing concern with the idea of borrowing materials from other cultural manifestations, a tendency that has continued in the first decade of the 21st century. Parody, pastiche and deconstruction of previous texts as a way to problematize the concept of literature as ‘fiction’ are a common trend in the present works of many authors, and Clowes belongs in this tradition. In his early series Lloyd Llewellyn (1986-89) he worked with materials such as detective stories, science-fiction films or beat-generation graphic aesthetics. In his acclaimed graphic novel Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (1990) he employed surrealist literature, American underground films, and TV shows. All of his works could be said to belong to the postmodern tradition: Clowes, like Thomas Pynchon or John Barth, does not want to make his stories seem ‘real’, since all of them emphasize their status as ‘constructs’ formed by the convergence of diverse narrative and graphic genres. His understanding of Western culture makes him focus on the fact that this is a culture fascinated with artificiality, where reality and fiction have become interchangeable and where fiction can be more revealing than reality, as he has expressed in recent interviews: ‘[…] a lot of the artists that I am interested in […] are trying to give some cohesion to […] the seeming randomness of the world, trying to put all the pieces together and organize it in some way’.3 In Clowes, one of the ways this ‘randomness’of the world achieves coherence is by becoming a part of a work of fiction and its intertextual genre relationships. By following a set of conventions and then subverting them, Clowes can turn ‘random’ people and situations into a meaningful comment on Western culture. Thus, in his works fiction becomes a way to order the arbitrariness of reality. In these terms, both an intertextual and a metafictional approach to his comic books are valuable in understanding more deeply their opaque narratives. Intertextuality has been a major concern for literary criticism and cultural studies throughout the 20th century, foregrounding the processes of borrowing and re-using pre-existent materials in a given text. Every ‘language’ we learn is based on our knowledge of previous ones, and every new text we are confronted with as readers is a construct formed by the

3 Ken Parille, ‘A Re-Reader’s Guide to David Boring’, Comic Art Magazine, 7 (2004), 68- 78 (p. 77).