BETWEEN PANELS:

NOSTALGIA IN THE WORK OF DANIEL CLOWES

DANIEL MARRONE

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1+1 Canada BETWEEN PANELS: NOSTALGIA IN THE WORK OF DANIEL CLOWES

by Daniel Marrone a thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of York University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS ©2009 Permission has been granted to: a) YORK UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES to lend or sell copies of this thesis in paper, microform or electronic formats, and b) LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA to reproduce, lend, distribute, or sell copies of this thesis anywhere in the world in microform, paper or electronic formats and to authorize or procure the reproduction, loan, distribution or sale of copies of this thesis anywhere in the world in microform, paper or electronic formats.

The author reserves other publication rights, and neither the thesis nor extensive extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's written permission. IV

ABSTRACT

This thesis investigates the tendency of comics toward longing for the past. An understanding of sequential art as a unique system of signs undergirds attentive description of instances of nostalgia in the distinctive but wide-ranging work of Daniel

Clowes. Despite great variations in tone, this work shares a sense of ambivalence, an expectation of careful reading, and a corresponding proliferation of gaps, all of which is in some way tied to longing. In each of the books examined, longing is emphasised by the formal particularities of comics: the prevailing suggestion of this thesis is that the fundamental operation of sequential art mobilises and makes space for narrative interpolations in a way that is not only comparable to but in a certain sense mimics the historical interpolations of memory. It is the space between panels - which acts as a tangible analogue of memory - that makes comics uniquely suited to nostalgic stories. V

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sincerest thanks to Colin Mooers, Susan Ingram, and Ruth Panofsky for their nuanced advice, steady encouragement, and attention to detail. I am also indebted to Ed Slopek for recommending the work of Roman Ingarden and Kevin Dowler for introducing me to that of John Durham Peters.

Finally, a special thanks to Sarah Pinder for her constant support. VI

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract iv

Acknowledgments v

List of Figures vii

Introduction 1

1 The Grotesque, the Uncanny, and Nostalgia in Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron 15

2 Longing for Authenticity: The Camp Sensibility of Ghost World 37

3 Hypothesizing a Coherent Narrative: A Misreading of David Boring 57

4 Notes on Ice Haven 72

Conclusion 87 vii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: A page from Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (1993). 17

Figure 2: A page from Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (1993). 22

Figure 3: A page from Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (1993). 29

Figure 4: A panel from Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (1993). 34

Figure 5: A panel from Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (1993). 34

Figure 6: A panel from Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (1993). 34

Figure 7: A panel from Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (1993). 34

Figure 8: A panel from Ghost World (1997). 41

Figure 9: A panel from Ghost World (1997). 49

Figure 10: A panel from Ghost World (1997). 51

Figure 11: A page from Ghost World (1997). 53

Figure 12: A page from David Boring (2000). 61

Figure 13: Panels from David Boring (2000). 62

Figure 14: A panel from David Boring (2000). 63

Figure 15: Panels from David Boring (2000). 65

Figure 16: A page from David Boring (2000). 67

Figure 17: Panels from Ice Haven (2005). 74

Figure 18: Title page from Ice Haven (2005). 77 viii

Figure 19: Panels from Ice Haven (2005). 78

Figure 20: Panels from Ice Haven (2005). 82

Figure 21: A page from Ice Haven (2005). 84

Figure 22: A panel from Ice Haven (2005). 85 1

Introduction

This investigation springs from the conviction that the frequent appearance of nostalgia in many of the most popular and critically acclaimed comics is more than mere coincidence. The abundance of memoirs, period pieces, carefully researched chronicles, and otherwise historically inflected work (to say nothing of the longing for a lost home that defines superheroes as familiar as Superman and Batman) suggests that comics as a medium may be particularly suited to excavation of the past. Comic book authors have identified the significance of longing in their work - Seth has remarked that "the whole process of cartooning is dealing with memory" (Taylor 15); Chris Ware's introduction to his book Quimby the Mouse is openly homesick - but the relationship between nostalgia and comics remains almost entirely untheorised. While some critics take as axiomatic the notion that "art thrives on nostalgia" (Davis 73), the principal goal of this thesis is to investigate the ways in which sequential art thrives on nostalgia. Due to its thematic diversity and crossing of genres, the work of Daniel Clowes is extremely well suited to this investigation. Distinctive but wide-ranging, Clowes's comics are at times overtly nostalgic, but they often trace much subtler forms of longing as well. Although he boasts 2 at least one very popular and accessible work {Ghost World, adapted into a film in 2001), many of his less straightforward narratives have not been the subject of critical examination. This research focuses on several of his longer works, all of which were originally published serially, often alongside other stories, in his long-running comic book series Eightball. It is in these sustained narratives that the nostalgia in Clowes's work is able to fully develop and its inseparability from his medium of choice becomes most clear.

In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym provides, among other things, an indispensible history of the term: rarely associated with physical illness, "nostalgia" can be traced to Johannes Hofer, a Swiss doctor who coined the word in 1688 to diagnose a homesickness so acute it could lead to nausea, fever, and even cardiac arrest (3-4). Due to its obsessive tendency, Boym characterises the condition as a mania: the sufferer, invariably a Swiss soldier in these early instances, compulsively returned to thoughts of home (4). Curable at first by the longed-for return home, as it swept Europe this "mania of longing" (4) gradually shed its physical symptoms and by the eighteenth century became quite difficult to relieve (6). The need for a remedy, however, became less pressing as the affliction was enthusiastically adopted as a romantic attitude; Boym suggests "I long therefore I am" as "the romantic motto" (13). The nineteenth century saw the institutionalisation of nostalgia "in national and provincial museums and urban memorials," accompanied by the rise of "armchair nostalgia" and the popularity of furniture that allowed the owner to organise memories, such as curio cabinets and display 3 cases (15). Boym correlates this with the "fondness for herbariums, greenhouses and aquariums," all circumscribed mini-arenas that contributed to the museification of the home (16). This enabled private indulgence in nostalgia- "a sentiment of loss and displacement" (xiii) - without being displaced. Having become a saleable commodity, longing inevitably developed into a style, a mode (16). Taken at its Greek roots, nostalgia might be literally defined as an ache {algid) for the return home (nostos), but one of

Boym's first definitions is somewhat more precise: "a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed" (xiii).

The fictive, imagined home has much in common with the nation and, indeed, nostalgia has always had national stakes - Hofer could not help viewing the disease as a product of his countrymen's patriotism (Boym 4). With this correlation in mind, Matthew

Levinger and Paula Lytle's "triadic structure of nationalist rhetoric" is useful to any investigation of nostalgia. The simple but highly applicable structure consists of the

"glorious past," the "degraded present," and the "utopian future" (178). Like Levinger and Lytle's nationalism, nostalgia operates both spatially and temporally, unable to separate geographical and historical origins. As commonly associated with a return to the past as the return home, nostalgia is an "historical emotion" (Boym 7), a response to "the modern conception of unrepeatable and irreversible time" (13). Levinger and Lytle's

"nationalist rhetoric" is easily aligned with what Boym refers to as "restorative nostalgia," a breed of longing for the past which is in constant danger of becoming overdetermined as nationalist discourse. Restorative nostalgia, according to Boym, 4 positions itself as tradition and mobilises "a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home" (xviii). "Reflective nostalgia," by contrast, "dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity"

(xviii). Whether restorative or reflective, nostalgia is always rooted in ambivalence

(reflective nostalgia acknowledges ambivalence, while restorative nostalgia is a reaction against it).

Of course, nostalgia is by no means the only popular response to the contradictions of modernity: equally prevalent, and in certain respects more conspicuous, is irony. It is tempting to think of irony as double-edged since it seems to comprise a double meaning, but this is often not the case. While it may contain two meanings, irony has a single intent - its inherent contradiction is always resolved in a way that is not ambivalent, even if it is non-literal. In this way, irony is as conservative as restorative nostalgia, seeking to fortify boundaries in the face of ambivalence. Ambivalence, for its part, is closely related to obsession - this is Freudian territory, in which obsessive neurosis is "derived from ambivalent impulses" (Totem and Taboo 35-36, Freud's emphasis). Nostalgia is derived from these same impulses: it "tantalizes us with its fundamental ambivalence; it is about the repetition of the unrepeatable" (Boym xvii).

Ambivalence, doubleness, repetition, return, obsession, compulsion: like six sides of a die, these concepts are not quite synonymous but certainly inseparable, and, in this investigation, invocation of one almost necessarily implies the others. 5

Of these densely interrelated abstractions, the one most explicitly discernible in nostalgia is return, and it goes almost without saying that longing for a return, whether to a place or time, can only occur within the domain of memory. Arguably, the act of remembering is itself a thin fulfilment of the nostalgic urge - to remember is to return to the past (in another sense, memory can also be understood as a return of'the past). In "A

Berlin Chronicle," Walter Benjamin offhandedly defines "remembrance" as "the capacity for endless interpolations into what has been" (16). The prevailing suggestion of this investigation is that sequential art is in some way homologous to memory - that the

fundamental operation of comics, as a visual medium, mobilises and makes space for narrative interpolations in a way that is not only comparable to but in a certain sense mimics the historical interpolations of memory. In both cases, longing is spurred by necessary (structural) incompleteness.

For this reason, the analysis must always be moving toward an adaptable, carefully considered understanding of comics as a unique system of signs. This understanding, which seeks to connect Thierry Groensteen's System of Comics with the work of Scott McCloud and others, will undergird attentive description of instances of nostalgia in Clowes's work. Roman Ingarden's ontological investigation The Literary

Work of Art provides a broader theoretical framework that can be aligned with

Groensteen's work: Ingarden refers to "spots of indeterminacy" in literary works, gaps in meaning which the reader unconsciously fills. To contextualise this literary phenomenon more generally within communication theory, my research draws on the complementary 6 work of John Durham Peters, in particular "The Gaps of Which Communication Is

Made." In this article, Peters discusses "the gap between utterance and reception" (118), which may be understood as the ultimate source of Ingarden's spots of indeterminacy.

Peters seeks to invert the privileging of face-to-face interaction over mass communication through an analysis of the gaps inherent in both modes of communication. His primary point of reference is Plato's Phaedrus, though he also draws significantly on the parable of the sower attributed to Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels

(Matthew, Mark and Luke): in his reconsideration, interaction is exemplified by Socrates and dialogue, while mass communication is represented by Jesus and dissemination. He observes that the more suspended and indiscriminate the form of communication - in other words, the greater the distance between sender and receiver - the more "the audience bears the hermeneutic burden" (124). This "burden," however, is not really conceived as an encumbrance: Peters turns to Paul Ricoeur, in whose work he finds the useful notion that "distanciation is a necessary and productive part of all human discourse and experience" (129). In this formulation, distance, so often submitted as the hallmark of degraded communication, becomes indispensable; as Peters asserts, the "gaps at the heart of communication are not its ruins, but its distinctive feature" (130). Discourse, he concludes, "works only through distance and otherness" (130).

In literature, the interpretative obligation produced by this unavoidable (but fertile) gap between sender and receiver - author and reader - takes the form of more particularised gaps in the represented world of the literary work. Ingarden observes that 7

"while reading a work we are not conscious of any 'gaps,' of any 'spots of indeterminacy,' in the represented objects" (251). Indeed, "when we read we usually go beyond what is simply represented in the work" (280, Ingarden's emphasis). Jeff

Mitscherling, in his book on Ingarden's major works, explains that spots of indeterminacy "belong to the peculiar mode of being of the literary text and in fact make possible the creation of its 'reality'" (106). This "mode of being" is what distinguishes literary works from other narrative arts. Certainly there are spots of indeterminacy in any narrative, but other media are less suspended than literature for two immediately discernible reasons: (1) words on a page are not concretely representational, i.e. they do not resemble that which they represent, and (2) words on a page are static. Both of these characteristics demand that the reader be the sole animator of the text during the act of reading; though it has been conceived by an author, the represented world of the literary work is set in motion by the reader's attention. Sequential art occupies a rare position: it is fundamentally literary in its immobility, but it is also concretely representational.

The term "sequential art" is used here synonymously with "comics" and "comic books." As to what these terms designate, Scott McCloud's definition from

Understanding Comics provides an excellent starting point: "Juxtaposed pictorial and

1 "The essential structure of the literary work inheres," Ingarden states, "in the fact that it is a formation constructed of several heterogeneous strata" (20). These strata are as follows: "(1) the stratum of word sounds and the phonetic formations of higher order built on them; (2) the stratum of meaning units of various orders; (3) the stratum of manifold schematized aspects... (4) the stratum ofrepresented objectivities and their vicissitudes" (30, Ingarden's emphasis). "Schematized aspects" are those elements in the literary work that demand to be fulfilled, or "concretized," by the reader (Mitscherling 138). To elaborate any further on the various strata would likely lead too far afield, as Ingarden's ontological work is a component of "his entire realist rejoinder to Husserl," as Mitscherling succinctly calls it (109). 8 other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer" (9). Use of the word "juxtaposed" - meaning adjacent, consecutive in space - differentiates sequential art from film, video, and animation, which are similarly sequential, but only temporally (7). McCloud's book has yet to be surpassed, in North America, in terms of the scope and cohesion of its approach to how comics operate as a language, and his definition is often cited in English-language works on the subject (Varnum and Gibbons, Versaci). Beyond this seminal definition, McCloud also offers a detailed account of the function of the gutter - "that space between the panels" (66, his emphasis) - along with the closely related phenomenon of "closure," which allows the reader to "mentally construct a continuous, unified reality" (67).

However, as cogent and authoritative as Understanding Comics often is, it is nevertheless a somewhat self-contained work of common sense that is not fully in conversation with other theories of signs and representation. By contrast, Groensteen's System of Comics unmistakably engages with semiotic theory and brings it to bear on comics, ultimately advancing a new semiotic theory of the medium that is striking in its simultaneous

specificity and applicability. Briefly, Groensteen's key theoretical frameworks - which he identifies as "neo-semiotic" (2) and "macro-semiotic" (6) - are the spatio-topical system, which addresses the importance of space and place in comics, and arthrology, which refers to the specific relations that emerge between panels.

Despite marked methodological differences, Groensteen's work is by no means incommensurate with McCloud's; indeed, there is considerable correspondence between the two. Both emphasise what Groensteen calls "the active cooperation provided by the reader" (10) (which McCloud generally terms closure). McCloud would doubtless agree with Groensteen that sequential art is "founded on reticence. Not only do the silent and immobile images lack the illusionist power of the filmic image, but their connections, far from producing a continuity that mimics reality, offer the reader a story that is full of holes, which appear as gaps in the meaning" (Groensteen 10). The visual languages of motion pictures and comics are easily compared, but only comic books comprise static images spatially oriented on the visual plane (Groensteen would say "spatio-topia") in panels. Groensteen explicitly identifies that panel as "the base unit of the comics system"

(34); McCloud, correspondingly, devotes a chapter to the gutter and various types of

"panel-to-panel transitions" (70). "A panel is not presented as isolated," Groensteen observes. "It participates in a series (most often sequential or narrative) offered to the reader" (47). (This is true in a less literal sense even in the case of single-panel comics.)

The panel and the gutter are necessarily interdependent, and "it is between the panels that the pertinent contextual rapports establish themselves with respect to narration" (107).

It is possible to make several assertions: (1) the comics panel is not equivalent to either the cinematic frame or shot; (2) being juxtaposed (i.e. not a self-sufficient totality), the panel cannot be considered as a picture/painting; (3) being concretely representational, the contents of the panel cannot be equated with the traditional units of

2 Groensteen, however, uses "closure" differently from McCloud, to indicate the function of the panel's frame, i.e. "to close the panel," "to enclose a fragment of space-time belonging to the diegesis" (40). 10

literature, i.e. the letter, the word, the sentence and the paragraph. This last point in particular plainly invites a question: How should the contents of the panel be conceived?

As ever, McCloud is simple, direct, and persuasive - the constituent element of

sequential art is the "cartoon," which he defines as a specific iconic form that is

characterised by "amplification through simplification" (30). (His use of the term "icon"

encompasses both words and images, dissolving the distinction between the two.) The

cartoon provokes a certain kind of perception (31), acting as "a vacuum into which our

identity and awareness are pulled" (36). The unique properties of the cartoon, as both "a way of drawing" and "a way of seeing" (31), help distinguish comics from other static visual media, such as illustration. McCloud's account of the cartoon aligns with

Groensteen's suggestion that "comics lean toward a work of narrative drawing, and its

images generally present intrinsic qualities that are not those of the illustration or the picture" (105, his emphasis).

Having outlined the broad semiotic operations at work in sequential art, a

discussion of the various types of comics seems appropriate. In lieu of a history of comics

- a highly contested discourse3 which, even in brief, would demand as much space as a

short history of film - eight distinct genres are defined below. Many of the authors mentioned operate at the intersection of these classifications or shift from one to another with each new work. In certain cases, vastly different works have been consolidated

3 McCloud offers some interesting suggestions, stretching back thousands of years, though openly admits that he "has no idea where or when comics originated" (15). The widely acknowledged originator of modern comics in the early 19th century was Rodolphe Topffer (17), who, by geographical coincidence, was Swiss, like Johannes Hofer. 11 under a single designation; other subheadings may at first seem frivolous; and, of course, there are comics that do not quite fit into any of the following categories. Though it aims to be exhaustive, this is by all accounts a provisional typology.

1. Action comics: This is what many people think of when they encounter the term

"comics" - the genre encompasses a wide range of work, often long-running and

typically aimed at younger audiences, for instance the Donald Duck or Archie series.

This category also includes the costumed crimefighters popularised by artists at

Marvel and DC Comics (the DC series that introduced Superman in 1938 was called

Action Comics [Poulart 43]). Such superhero comics have, for the most part,

superseded other character-driven serials in popularity.

2. Newspaper comics: Refers to serialised strips (typified by the "three-panel" format)

and single-panel comics that appear daily alongside newsprint journalism. Highly

regarded American examples include George Herriman's Krazy andlgnatz, Charles

Schulz's Peanuts, Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes, and Gary Larson's The Far

Side. Daily comics typically appear in black and white on weekdays, and in colour in

a larger format (which accommodates two strips or larger panels) on Sunday.

3. Bandes dessinees: Franco-Belgian comics, which are numerous and diverse, and

enjoy a certain legitimacy - in France and Belgium, comics are sometimes referred to 12

as "the ninth art." Literally translated as "drawn strips," the best known bandes

dessinees is likely Herge's long-running Tintin series, recognisable by its ligne claire

("clear line") style of drawing (Sabin 184).

4. Manga: The term manga is generally attributed to Katsushika Hokusai, well known

for his woodblock prints, who is said to have first used it in 1814 to describe a book

of his "whimsical sketches" (Schodt 18). A more literal meaning is involuntary {man)

pictures (ga) (18). A telling and frequently cited statistic asserts that approximately

40 per cent of publications in Japan are manga (Gravett 18). Well-known innovators

include Osamu Tezuka, creator of Astro Boy, and Yoshihiro Tatsumi, known for his

alternative gekiga ("dramatic pictures").

5. Independent or underground comics: Sometimes referred to as "comix" in America,

work that exists outside or on the margins of mainstream publication. Comix pioneers

like Robert Crumb, Kim Deitch, and Art Spiegelman have become prominent authors

with an almost mainstream visibility. Contemporary independent comics are often

self-published by authors in zines/chapbooks or online.

6. Online comics: Also known as webcomics, online comics constitute what is likely the

newest variation of sequential art. Popular webcomics include Diesel Sweeties, Cat

and Girl, and Penny Arcade. Many print comics, particularly newspaper comics, are 13

archived online on official websites. (Conversely, the most popular online comics are

often anthologised in conventional printed books.)

7. Experimental comics: Work that expands the parameters of representation or

narrative. For instance, the abstract style of Mary Fleener or Richard McGuire and the

"automatic drawing" stream-of-consciousness storytelling of Chester Brown's Ed the

Happy Clown. There is significant overlap between experimental, independent, and

online comics, all of which operate outside the mainstream.

8. Literary comics: The most nebulous and permeable category, it comprises authors as

diverse as Edward Gorey, Lynda Barry, Alan Moore, Seth, Chris Ware, and Mariko

Tamaki. The term "graphic novel" has become fairly widespread when referring to

literary comics, which also include memoirs such as Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and

Spiegelman's Maus.

Although this investigation is intended to be generally applicable to sequential art as a medium, it cannot address all of the above genres. Clowes's work does, however, span three genres (independent, experimental, and literary) and incorporate elements of another two (action and newspaper). The various cross-pollinations yield surprising elaborations of nostalgia: Chapter 1 analyses Clowes's early experimental narrative Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (1993) and demonstrates that nostalgia encompasses the 14 uncanny, which in turn encompasses the grotesque; Chapter 2 examines the intersection of camp and longing for the past in Ghost World (1997); Chapter 3 traces restorative and reflective nostalgia in David Boring (2000); Chapter 4 offers several perspectives on the collaborative longing of Ice Haven (2005). The gaps around which these stories are constructed shape their diverse manifestations of longing - in each work, nostalgia is illuminated by sequential art's mode of being. 15

Chapter One

The Grotesque, the Uncanny, and Nostalgia in Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron

It is perhaps too facile to suggest that the grotesque, the uncanny, and the nostalgic fit together neatly, like matryoshka dolls, the first nested within the second nested within the third. None are closed, impermeable units and their concatenation follows the logic of ambivalence and doubling; the borders bleed, there is some of each in each. Nevertheless, the grotesque would seem to comprise a smaller scope of sentiment than the uncanny, and the uncanny is not as broad (or, arguably, as commonly experienced) as nostalgia. Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron constitutes a specific concurrence of the three, a dense and startling instance in which to examine their correlation. Originally published in the first ten issues of Eightball, from October 1989 to

February 1993 (Parille), the ten increasingly disturbing chapters depict a surreal series of events that culminate in the grisly mutilation of its protagonist, Clay Loudermilk.

Although the work can comfortably be considered "experimental" - outlandish scenarios, a menagerie of antic characters - it possesses a distinct clarity and coherence.

The plot constitutes Clowes's most sustained departure from rational realist storytelling, 16 but it is nonetheless as deliberate in its construction as a Dupin mystery. Of course, Like a

Velvet Glove Cast in Iron does not have a tidy resolution: from its awkward title to its strangely elegiac ending, every element of the story seems calculated to frustrate and unsettle the reader. It begins in a seedy porn theatre, where Clay is caught off guard by an unconventional, sexless film, which shares its title with the book (fig. 1). His mild

surprise turns to shock when, in the final scene, the female lead removes her zippered bondage mask and Clay recognises her as a former lover. In the ensuing search for

information about the film and its producers, Clay is abruptly thrust into a web of conspiracy theories, anarchist cults, and underground pornography.

The actual sequence of incidents is relatively linear, but Clowes quickly establishes an unnerving centripetal logic: in the first chapter alone, Clay consults a turbaned guru in a bathroom stall, borrows the car of a friend whose eye-sockets are being disinfected by Asiatic crustaceans, is appallingly accosted by a repellent drunk, and witnesses the rape of a three-eyed woman (who reminds him of his lost love) by one of two police officers who have mistakenly arrested him for driving under the influence.

These scenarios unfold as plainly as possible, given their nightmarish dimensions -

Clowes neither lingers on details nor obfuscates them, building a narrative momentum that contributes in no small way to the compulsive quality of the book.

Compulsion is one of the densely related components entangled with nostalgia, and also with the uncanny (or unheimlich). Both nostalgia and the uncanny orbit the home (heim), and both as well concern that which is familiar. Or, more specifically, that 17

ieter-vepe A* - lire yn>~b&ifVvs tfega- d»<- [—;

Fig. 1. Daniel Clowes, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1993) 9. 18

which is heimlich, ambivalently familiar and private (Freud, "The Uncanny" 222-23).

Freud ends the first part of his essay by observing that "heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until finally it coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich"

(226). Likewise nostalgia, a somewhat obsessive derivative of and longing for the heimlich. (Freud explicitly associates homesickness, or heimweh, with the uncanny in a discussion of the female body as a potentially unheimlich site [245]). Like obsessive neurosis, the doubling that so often accompanies the uncanny is rooted in ambivalence, an ongoing vacillation between two sentiments or qualities that might also be compared to the "intellectual uncertainty" identified by Ernst Jentsch (Freud 221). This uncertain doubling is interdependent with (compulsive) repetition, which is itself closely tied to return.

Both nostalgia and the uncanny are mobilised by a return, but where nostalgia mourns the impossibility of returning to the past (Boym), the uncanny comprises an unexpected return o/the past (Freud). In both cases, the past is heimlich; like nostalgia, the uncanny "leads back to what is known of old and long familiar" (220). In this way, the uncanny is never just strange or foreign, but rather "a peculiar commingling of the familiar and unfamiliar" (Royle 1). This blend is informed by one of the definitions that

Freud emphasises: "everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light." (225) This immediately recalls Boym's reminder that

"nostos is connected to the Indo-European root nes, meaning return to light" (7). It would 19 not seem to be an overstatement to suggest, as Susan Linville does, that the uncanny is "a double of nostalgia" (27).

In the same way that nostalgia exceeds its medical diagnosis, reproducing itself and extending across history and geography, the uncanny "overflows psychoanalysis"

(Royle 24). Even Freud's essay begins with an apologetic acknowledgement that the uncanny is not quite within the purview of a psychoanalyst (219). He identifies it as a concern of aesthetics, "undoubtedly related to what is frightening—to what arouses dread and horror" (219), to what is here aligned with the grotesque. Is it too much to suggest that while not all experiences of the uncanny are grotesque, all experiences of the grotesque are uncanny (and by extension somehow nostalgic)? Wolfgang Kayser traces the word "grotesque" to an Italian root:

La grottesca and grottesco refer to grotta (cave) and were coined to

designate a certain ornamental style which came to light during late

fifteenth-century excavations, first in Rome and then in other parts of Italy

as well, and which turned out to constitute a hitherto unknown ancient

form of ornamental painting. (19)

Excavation is by nature a rather uncanny activity, and the unearthing of this long-buried art form, something secret and hidden, "kept from sight" (Freud 223), is particularly so.

Geoffrey Harpham offers another association that fortifies the link between the uncanny and the grotesque: "The Latin form of grotta is probably crupta," or crypt, derived from the Greek word for vault, the verb form of which is "to hide" (31-32). "Grotesque, then, 20

gathers into itself suggestions of the underground, of burial, of secrecy" (32). In an

introductory passage that at once captures Freud's uncanny ambivalence and Boym's

longing for a place that may never have existed, Harpham relates that he came to regard

grotesque forms as "echoes of the ancient, mythic world that were heard in a modern

context. Our confusion in the presence of such forms reflected the fact that they

suspended us between 'worlds'" (xv).

Wilson Yates, in his working definition of grotesque art, suggests that it is

distinguished by its ability to evoke "feelings of uneasiness, fear, repulsion, delight,

amusement, often horror and dread.. .we have a sense of being played with, taunted, judged... We laugh at its comic features while sensing its dark implications" (Adams and

Yates 2); this is a range of reactions that any reader of Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron

will find extremely familiar. Indeed, much of Yates' page-long definition serves as a

veritable catalogue of the "paradoxical responses" to and principal techniques of

Clowes's images, which "most often embody distortions, exaggeration, a fusion of

incompatible parts" (2). In the end, all these parts interlock in a way that is compellingly

plotted, if unconventional.

The plot is set in motion by a moment of revelation - literally, an unmasking -

that is by turns nostalgic, uncanny and grotesque. The grotesque quality of the sequence

springs in part from the unseemly setting of the movie theatre (which has already made

the protagonist uncomfortable) but is due primarily to the tone of the film itself, the

creators of which Clay concludes must be "real sickos" (9). The reader scarcely has time 21 to agree with this estimation before Clay recognises the actor playing the main character

(fig. 2). The appearance of a woman onscreen is in some ways sufficiently uncanny in itself, inasmuch as the body of the other, as projected by the male gaze, is arguably the most convenient vehicle for the uncanny in a cinematic context.4 (Opening the story in a movie theatre, Clowes immediately introduces a distinctly male perspective comparable to the male gaze, which characterises much of the otherness in Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron). However, for Clay, the appearance of this particular woman, in this context, also represents something that, perhaps, ought to have remained unknown - that is, the involvement of his former beloved in a bizarre pornographic enterprise. While it is relatively easy to see the uncanny and the grotesque here, this is hardly a circumstance that many readers would readily label nostalgic. Nevertheless, it is the unsettling return of the past in this sequence that instantly illuminates Clay's longing for that past, which is indispensable to the story in a number of ways.

Nostalgia serves as a counterpoint, an intermittent reprieve that ultimately gives the darker aspects of the narrative an even sharper edge. The unveiling of "Madame van

Damme," as she is designated in the film's credits (11), prompts a memory of an intimate moment with her in the past, which is necessarily juxtaposed with Clay's (degraded?) present. The reader's perception of this complicated scene is strongly guided (in certain respects almost dictated) by the semiotic operations of sequential art. With regard to the

4 See Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" for a germinal discussion of the male gaze in cinema. 22

Fig. 2. Daniel Clowes, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1993) 10. 23 most essential of those operations, Groensteen speaks of his "two fundamental intuitions" about the medium: "that comics are composed of interdependent images; and that these images, before knowing any other kind of relation, have the sharing of a space as their first characteristic" (28). Concerning the first intuition, it is important to note that images, especially with reference to panels, are in fact simultaneously interdependent and independent - it is their separability, the existence of gaps, that makes them legible.

Nevertheless, "the ultimate signification of a comics panel does not reside in itself but in the totality of relations in the network that it maintains with the interdependent panels"

(53).

The foremost spatial relation is the sequence: as in most books, narratives in comics are generally presented and perceived as a linear succession of signs (even if the story denoted by these signs is circuitous or nonlinear). It is common, and maybe even appropriate, to refer to sections of a text as "sequences." The page depicting Clay's moment of recognition consists of this sequence (following Groensteen, the panel is taken as the irreducible unit):

First Row

Panel 1: A portly man wearing only underwear and socks walks,

blindfolded, on a downtown sidewalk. 24

Panel 2: An upside down, portrait-style image of a woman in a bondage

mask. Her hands are behind her head, which is at the very centre of the

panel. Two men in the background, below her, look on.

Panel 3: The woman has removed her mask - an "action-to-action"

transition (McCloud 70). Her head, still centred as in the previous panel,

has beads of sweat.

Second Row

Panel 4: The protagonist sits in a movie theatre, agape, his face

illuminated. Light from the film projector behind him shines in the top

right corner of the panel. Another patron leans in a seat in the background.

Panel 5: Like panels 2 and 3, an inverted portrait of the woman, though

she is dressed differently. (The frame of the panel is wavy, compared to

the ruler-straight frames of previous panels, and does not completely

contain the hatching of its contents.)

Final Row

Panel 6: The woman lies on the floor of a living room, wearing the same

shirt as in the previous panel, with the protagonist kneeling over her - a

"subject-to-subject" transition (McCloud 71). (Same wavy frame as

previous panel.)

Panel 7: The protagonist kisses the woman. (Wavy frame.) 25

A quick comparison between the actual illustrated page and the above annotation reveals not only Clowes's clarity and economy as a visual storyteller, but also some of the distinguishing features of sequential art. Chief among them is the arrangement of panels in a grid-like configuration - Groensteen calls this the "multiframe" - which allows significant relations to emerge between images that are not consecutively adjacent. While it may be assumed that, overall, the reader's eye moves from left to right, top to bottom, the linear order of the panels only begins to account for the ways in which a page might be perceived. "If there is a vectorization of reading, there is no unidirectional vectorization in the construction of meaning" (Groensteen 110).

A comics page is read both in terms of a linear narrative, following the order of the panels, and in a manner that is translinear, as a visual totality. Groensteen has developed a terminology that helps to clarify the difference:

Within the spatio-topical operation - that is, within the space that comics

appropriates and develops - one can distinguish two degrees in the

relations between the images. The elementary relations, of the linear type,

compose what we will call the restricted arthrology. .. .It is at this level

that writing takes priority, as a complementary function of narration. The

other relations, translinear or distant, emerge from general arthrology and

decline all of the modalities of braiding. (22, emphasis in original)

Clowes's unassuming use of braiding, in combination with other techniques, enhances the uncanny doubling at the heart of Clay's discovery. (The other techniques are the rather cinematic "reaction shot" of panel 4, showing Clay's surprise, and the stylistic shift that follows, which wordlessly implies memory and the past.) Panel 5, the first panel of

Clay's flashback, is a double of the panel directly above it (panel 3), which is itself a double of the panel that precedes it (panel 2). This simple but effective braiding of repeated images positions panel 3, the uncanny moment of revelation, as the cornerstone of the page. As well, this arrangement of panels 2, 3, and 5 is mirrored by the radiating light from the film projector in panel 4 (if this is not a deliberate parallel intended by

Clowes, it is a very harmonious accident).

As much as the visual languages of sequential art and film have in common, the coexistence of panels on a comics page - and the translinear relation among images that such a layout makes possible - marks a fundamental difference between the two media.

This difference determines the semiotic properties of the panel, particularly its defining element, the frame. "For its first function," Groensteen states, "the frame has to close the panel and, also, to confer upon it a particular form. In the exercise of this function, the comics frame is opposed to the cinematographic frame" (40). Although Clowes borrows, incorporates and parodies certain cinematic techniques, he does not attempt to mimic the cinematic screen with his panels. His presentation of "Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron" highlights the tension between the filmic and comic frame by submitting the movie to the logic of sequential art (fig. 1). Like the page on which they appear, the panels' height exceeds their width, seeming to crop the screen of the porn theatre. Unlike the camera's frame, however, the panel's frame does not actually exclude - there are no pre-existing 27 real objects appropriated for the purposes of the narrative reality, as there are in film.

"The frame of a comics panel does not remove anything; it is contented to circumscribe"

(Groensteen 40). Clowes's persistent circumscription of the film within the comic produces a visual claustrophobia that is not dispelled until the reader sees Clay, in the theatre, reacting. In effect, the panels depicting the film are recognisably comic book panels while the panel showing Clay's reaction approximates the dimensions of a film still; this formal reversal opens up the page considerably, using Clay's uncanny realisation to release visual tension.

Size is not the only attribute of the panel that Clowes uses to convey meaning: throughout the book, a particular style of frame is employed to indicate different strata of the narrative. Referred to in the panel-by-panel annotation above as a "wavy frame," a sketchy, undulating line framing the panel signifies that the contents depict an event occurring outside of the diegetic present. In its first appearance, this type of soft panel - which seems less solid, less certain than those with perfectly straight frames - signals that

Clay's encounter with the woman is an episode from his past, a memory. Presented with

Clay's point of view, the reader is led to interpret the contrast between the woman onscreen and in his memory as longing for the latter. (In this way, the first panel of

Clay's recollection is not only an uncanny double but also a nostalgic double of the panel directly above it.) Elsewhere in the story, the soft panel serves other functions, almost all of which pertain to the past (though not necessarily Clay's past): characters relate meaningful incidents from their lives, accompanied by first-person narration; the reader is given a glimpse into Madam van Damme's back-story, which is unavailable to Clay;

other panels show events that are understood to have taken place earlier in the narrative.

The most striking soft panels - and those most closely aligned with Clay's point of view

- are those that depict dream sequences. Ranging in length from several panels to two

pages, these interludes do nothing to advance the plot but nevertheless contribute

significantly to the surreal tone of the narrative. The surreal and the uncanny are not

synonymous, but they do share the stamp of ambivalence, caught between the familiar

and the unfamiliar. This commonality is very much on display in Clay's dreams, which

are likely the most obvious examples of Clowes's deployment of the uncanny - often by

way of the grotesque and non sequitur - to achieve a surreal atmosphere.

The grotesque is most discernible when it is embodied, and is widely

acknowledged as having been traditionally associated with the female body in particular.

In one of Clay's dreams, Madam van Damme, the focal point of his ongoing search, is

made explicitly grotesque (fig. 3). Margaret Miles notes that grotesque bodies "take on

precisely the characteristics regularly attributed to female bodies; they lose form and

integrity, become penetrable, suffer the addition of alien body parts, and become

alternately huge and tiny" (Adams and Yates 91). A parallel might be drawn between the

grotesque body and the comic book, the form and integrity of which is similarly uncertain. Conceiving of the comic book as a grotesque body helps to account for its

reputation as a mongrel form, a haphazard hybrid of words and pictures that is

necessarily fragmented. Mary Russo offers this useful contrast: "The grotesque body is 29

Fig. 3. Daniel Clowes, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1993) 72. 30 the open, protruding, extended, secreting body, the body of becoming, process, and change. The grotesque body is opposed to the classical body, which is monumental, static, closed and sleek, corresponding to the aspirations of bourgeois individualism"

(325). In its formal ambivalence, sequential art resists the ideal of seamless unity suggested by more homogeneous media such as traditional literature, painting, and even film.

This ambivalence is further highlighted by the use of non sequitur in the dream sequences: nearly unrelated panels are presented as though causally linked, which renders uncanny the sense of narrative linearity (fig. 3). Of course, this feeling of illogical causality is not limited to Clay's dreams. One of the overarching ironies of Like a Velvet

Glove Cast in Iron is that the dream sequences, while a very convincing approximation of the rhythms of the unconscious mind, are less disturbing than Clay's waking life. The dreams are engaged in an intratextual dialogue with the primary narrative that invites a constant comparison between the two; both build causal connections between seemingly disparate parts. The reader instinctively fills in the gaps, which, in an exaggeration of sequential art's fundamental operation, are uncommonly wide. Groensteen explains that, in comics, "the visibility of the intervals between these panels, that is to say, the locations where their symbolic articulation is carried out, function so that we are naturally inclined to credit narration to the sequence" (105).

All these effects - the uncanny and the surreal, as fuelled by the grotesque and non sequitur - combine with the mundane to produce a very particular American Gothic 31 that is easily aligned with the work of David Lynch (for instance, his 1986 film Blue

Velvet). Both Lynch and Clowes cultivate a mood that is simultaneously fearful and nostalgic. In Freudian terms, the wish and counter-wish are to escape the past and to escape to the past (i.e. return to it). The obsession that this ambivalent impulse engenders is most apparent in the artists' fascination with kitsch and Americana, which tend to exemplify the fusion of mundane and grotesque. Lynch, however, is not the only practical point of comparison, though he may be the most obvious. Like a Velvet Glove Cast in

Iron also has much in common with Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49, the plot of which follows the protagonist's search for the truth about WASTE, an underground mail system symbolised by a muted post horn (Pynchon 38). As the novel progresses, the concern becomes less about the nature of the WASTE system and more about whether it actually exists. Clay's investigations are likewise characterised by paranoia and likewise represented by a distinctive icon, Mister Jones (fig. 4).

Clowes's similarities to Lynch and Pynchon seem to overlap in Mister Jones, a cryptic symbol of obsession and conspiracy, but also a piece of kitsch. In chapter 2, the sadistic police that apprehended Clay in the first chapter brutally assault him and then carve a Mister Jones icon into his heel with a small utility knife (24-25). Clay begins to notice the symbol in a variety of contexts, which compels him to pursue an investigation into its origins, parallel to his primary investigation into the origins of the pornographic film. These twin inquiries are parallel in the truest sense, in that they do not intersect; their only point of correlation is Clay. As a character, Clay is something of a cipher: he 32 moves rather credulously through the story, borne along by the tide of overwhelming circumstance and nightmare causality. He registers a range of feeling, but even his strongest reactions - disgust, horror, anger - seem to have little effect on the seemingly inevitable course of events. In this way he is a double of the reader, who, similarly, can react to the narrative but is unable to control it. Clay's disposition makes him a perfect

"vacuum into which our identity and awareness are pulled" (McCloud 36).

Clay's acquiescence is typically verbalised with the words "I guess."

Occasionally, this is little more than a space-filler, a means of humouring another character, as in his conversation with a cult member (Clowes, LAVGCII37). More often, however, it seems to betray a willingness to be drawn into the unfamiliar. In the fourth chapter, Billings, a conspiracy theorist who claims to know a great deal about Mister

Jones, invites Clay over to his house. Clay agrees, largely out of curiosity, though not with any discernible eagerness: "Yeah...sure, I guess..." (58, ellipses in original).

Toward the end of the fifth chapter - as Clay approaches the centre of both the narrative and its driving enigma - a stranger enters his motel room at the suitably named Mystery

Lodge and asks if she can stay for a while: "Yeah.. .1 guess..." (74, ellipses in original).

This phrase, which Clay compulsively repeats throughout the story, indicates uncertainty but might also be read more literally. Clay spends the entire story guessing, attempting to find connections between events, which leaves him uniquely indecisive and susceptible to suggestion. Billings' dog, Laura, an uncanny animal with no orifices (fig. 5), follows

Clay to the Mystery Lodge, where he accidentally lets the creature die in his room 33 because he does not know how to feed it. Someone (the reader soon discovers it is

Billings' rival, Haskel) slips a note under the door, instructing Clay to shave the dog (87).

Without much delay or skepticism, Clay gathers the necessary materials and does as he is asked, which reveals a map on the dog's back (93). Clowes's brand of American gothic fiction, a kind of Midwestern Gothic, depends on these arabesque mysteries for its distinctive tone (notably, the American gothic story and detective story both find their source in Poe).

Although Clay may appear to have little in common with Philip Marlowe or Sam

Spade, he shares a number of important characteristics with such hardboiled protagonists:

"Generally lower-middle or working-class, heterosexual, and without family or close ties, he navigates his way through urban spaces figured as threatening, corrupt, even

'unmanning' " (Abbott 2). As a "solitary white man" (2), Clay meets three of the traditional criteria required to solve mysteries in literature. Haskel explains that "only male Caucasians with certain character patterns" can learn the "great secrets" of Mister

Jones (Clowes, LAVGCII97). Clay's position as a white detective is regularly emphasised by casual racism and odd encounters with the other. The first piece of information Clay receives about the film comes from a hyper-racialised sage who dispenses advice from a toilet in the porn theatre (fig. 6). Clay visits the address of the production company's office listed in a Blackjack County phonebook and finds it has been replaced by a Chinese restaurant; when he inquires about the previous owner, the man behind the counter is not helpful (fig. 7). (Both panels offer a direct perspective, 34

Fig. 4. Daniel Clowes, Like a Velvet Fig. 5. Daniel Clowes, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (Seattle: Glove Cast in Iron (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1993) 49. Fantagraphics, 1993) 58.

rr WAS HAAPE IA©T VEAIf BY AN \NDePENPGNT OUTPIT CALLEP iNreeesTiNe WOOUCTIONS--. THEIR OFPIceS ABE IN GOOSENECK HOLLOW- THAT'S A60UT 66 AMIES N0L?TH OF HEPE IN BLACKJACK COUNTY-

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vTtSuS SHA|/tS

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Fig. 6. Daniel Clowes, Z/£e a Velvet Fig. 7. Daniel Clowes, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (Seattle: Glove Cast in Iron (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1993) 13. Fantagraphics, 1993)48. 35 placing the reader in Clay's position.) In the course of his investigation, Clay acquires a

Mister Jones figurine at a curio shop called Chief Wampum's Tradin' Post (where he first encounters Billings). The owner introduces himself as Chief Wampum before explaining that "'Wampum' means 'money' in Indian!" (56). The gleeful delivery of this ludicrous catch-phrase - which not only misconstrues the significance of wampum but also elides any differences between differing Native American tribes and languages - perfectly encapsulates the fearful nostalgia of the book. The offhanded ignorance is unsettling, but it is also a respite from uncanny confrontations, and a reminder of a supposedly simpler

American past.

This is not, however, the only strain of nostalgia in the story: Clay's longing for his former lover - eventually revealed to be his wife (131) - operates as an emotional anchor for the reader and consistently propels the investigation. Here nostalgia is not some Hitchcockian MacGuffin that simply sets the plot in motion, but an essential part of the narrative that follows a trajectory of its own. Ultimately, Clay never discovers whether Madame van Damme is actually his estranged wife or only an uncanny doppelganger. The irresolvable longing of the narrative matches that of sequential art as a medium, the fundamental operations of which depend on its fragmented presentation. In the same way that the mystery is driven by gaps in knowledge, on a semiotic level the narration advances via the gaps between panels. In both cases, the reader animates the story by compulsively filling in the gaps, which at all levels reveal themselves to be necessary and productive components of narration. At once overwhelming and 36 incomplete, fearful and nostalgic, the story ensnares the reader in an obsessive,

ambivalent impulse. 37

Chapter Two

Longing for Authenticity: The Camp Sensibility of Ghost World

The sheer range of Clowes's output is demonstrated by the remarkable shift in tone from one serial narrative to the next. The same familiar concerns and fascinations persist (kitsch, doubles, the nightmare of the Midwest), but where they were previously laid bare in a bold experimental narrative, in Ghost World they are tempered by a very approachable realism. The eight chapters, which appeared in Eightball from June 1993 to

March 1997 (Parille), follow a pair of suburban teenagers as they drift idly around an unnamed but unmistakably American city the summer after completing high school. The more immediately compelling of the two is Enid Coleslaw: caustic and fickle, she is recognisable as a type but rendered distinct in moments of self-sabotage, insecurity, and sentimentality. Her counterpart, Rebecca Doppelmeyer, is milder than Enid but equally disaffected and frustrated. Clowes's great strength in Ghost World is his attentive, almost anthropological depiction of people. The story is undeniably character-driven, but seamlessly so; the characters are often ostentatious, but the writing is impartial (John

Ellis, for instance, a would-be iconoclast, endeavours to be as antagonistic as possible but 38 comes across as harmless and immature). The most "normal" of the main characters' acquaintances is Josh, in some ways the moral centre of the story, who becomes a focal point of sexual and emotional frustration. Families are peripheral, in certain cases more so than the town's peculiar inhabitants, who provide much of the fodder for Enid and

Becky's ongoing commentary. Another significant source of discussion is pop culture, which, like many things in Ghost World, is by turns meaningful and emptied of all meaning. Mimicking the experience of post-graduation aimlessness, the book has a somewhat plotless quality, propelled for the most part by Enid's patently nostalgic inclinations (e.g. a preoccupation with a 1950s diner, a hunt for a childhood record) and their corollary, a Caulfield-esque search for authenticity. The narrative is anchored by the protagonists' relationship, within which Becky is frequently positioned (or, more accurately, positions herself) as a sidekick and receptacle for Enid's logorrhoea. The prospect of Enid leaving town for college at the end of the summer is understood by

Becky as a tacit, abrupt abandonment and eventually leads to the dissolution of their friendship.

The book's title is perhaps most fruitfully read as a play on the term "ghost town," a particularly American expression that evokes an abandoned frontier settlement. Such sites are often turned into tourist attractions, physically intact, as though preserved in amber, temporally frozen metonyms of a history that is not fully accessible. Of course, the term ghost town is also frequently used in a rhetorical way, to deride drab places that are not literally deserted. In either case, a ghost town is understood as delimited, isolated 39

from a network of thriving towns. By contrast, the ghost world would be unbounded, not

a circumscribed zone but, somehow, an alienated totality, at once ubiquitous and set

apart. Enid's home has been labelled a "ghost world" by the graffiti that appears around

town throughout the book: a picture taken by Enid when she was eight years old shows

the words painted in large block capitals on her garage door (53). This is the largest panel

on the first page of Chapter 7, which finds Enid and Becky indulging in a typically

sentimental activity, looking through an old photo album. Significantly, it is Enid's

album and Becky, as ever, serves as a kind of chaperone to a past that is not her own.

Although the graffiti is a recurring image, this is the only instance in which it is directly

addressed by the characters. This need not be regarded as deliberate authorial emphasis,

but it is notable that the notion of the ghost world is brought to the reader's attention in a

densely nostalgic moment. Here, the ghost world is aligned with the past - both are at a

similar remove. Indeed, it would not be an overstatement to suggest that for Enid and

Becky the ghost world is a precise analogy for history, for the inaccessible past.

For the reader, conversely, it is the narrative that is most analogous to the ghost

world, as suggested by Clowes's metatextual presentation of a book of images within a

book of images (i.e. the photo album within the comic book). Just as the album contains the ghost world of the past for the characters, the comic book contains the ghost world of the narrative for the reader. In all literature, and especially in comics, the reader has not the full world of the story but fragmented, static, spectral traces of it. One of the photographs shows Enid as a child, holding the sleeve of a 45-rpm record, the record 40 player in the background (54). This fond memory of her past prompts one of Enid's numerous attempts to recover a physical trace of that past. She searches used record

stores but cannot find a copy of the elusive 45 from the photo. Returning home at the end

of the chapter, she discovers that her father has left the record ("A Smile and a Ribbon")

on her bed. Chapter 2 is similarly bookended: it opens with a garage sale (from the

garage on which "GHOST WORLD" has been painted), which seems less like an actual sale than an opportunity for Enid to be around objects from her past. These kitschy objects are

easily read as ghosts, which Enid brings to light in an (unsuccessful) attempt to forestall their haunting. The garage sale item that takes on the most significance in the chapter is

"Goofie Gus," a peanut-shaped figurine given to Enid in fifth grade. She has priced it at

five dollars, but, capricious as ever, decides that she does not want to sell it when a potential customer shows an interest. (In an intertextual nod to attentive readers, Mister

Jones, the enigmatic figure from Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, appears in miniature

among Enid's assorted kitsch.) She is by turns reverent and disdainful of her childhood mementoes, one moment referring to them as her "sacred artifacts" (15), the next leaving the garage sale unattended, declaring "I don't want any of that shit!" (16). It becomes

clear that her reverence is not entirely ironic and her disdain not entirely genuine. At the close of the chapter, having spent the day with Becky, Enid is reminded of the abandoned

sale and races back to her yard; to her great relief, Goofie Gus remains. As in Chapter 7,

she returns home to find the object that she feared was lost. 41

Toward the end of the book, Becky reluctantly accompanies Enid on a pilgrimage

to Cavetown, USA, a dilapidated theme park featuring life-size statues of dinosaurs and

cavemen (fig. 8), which Enid visited as a child with her father and his wife at the time,

Joanie. Though her father cannot recall the trip, Enid insists "It's like my only happy

memory of childhood!" (71). This exaggeration reminds the reader that Enid's childhood

holds a number of happy memories, that the past seems to be her only stable source of

authenticity. As a physical trace of her past that she wishes to recover, Cavetown is less

portable but no less tangible than "A Smile and a Ribbon" or Goofie Gus. Although it is

only depicted in three panels, Cavetown quickly becomes a complex, noteworthy site.

Firstly, it is a ghost town in more ways than one: it depicts a narrative, a version of

history, however distorted; it is completely deserted, Enid and Becky appear to be its only

patrons (73); and, like all ghost towns, it is a time-capsule of sorts, less for the primeval

Fig. 8. Daniel Clowes, Ghost World (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1997) 72. 42 past than for the late 1980s, the time of Enid's last visit. It is a double not only of the fake

1950s diners they frequent, but also of their town as a whole and the seemingly pallid prospects of life after high school.

Cavetown also represents a kind of overdetermined nostalgia: it manifests a longing for the prehistoric past, which may be rooted in a search for authenticity comparable to Enid's ongoing search, but is so artless as to have only a glancing relation to reality. In an instance of potent meta-nostalgia, Clowes has staged Enid's deeply felt return to her past within this return to a patently inauthentic past. It is, of course, not

Cavetown's caricatures of prehistoric life that Enid finds authentic, but its utter ineptitude, its failure to be either historically accurate or commercially popular. More than this, however, it is the genuine response she remembers having as a child, which far outstrips the dismal legitimacy of the place itself. On seeing a statue of a caveman, she recalls how frightening she found it as child. The caveman, an oversized caricature of essential masculinity, has all the familiar marks of savagery but more than anything else appears strangely placid, ultimately no more menacing than Goofie Gus. The sense of authenticity Enid obtains from her re-encounter with the caveman springs from her memory of the original experience.5 Despite Cavetown's evident lack of redeeming attributes, Enid characterises this return to (and of) her past as a "semi-religious experience" (73). As in the case of her garage sale detritus, an apparently disposable

5 Although Clowes is by no means the decisive guide to this investigation of his work, it is interesting to note his comment on the experience of re-watching favourite childhood cartoons: "My memory had turned them into something much more fascinating than they actually were" (Glenn). 43

cultural artefact serves as a conduit to the transcendental, just one of a number of

moments in Ghost World in which Enid identifies something as sacred.

This sanctification is accomplished most simply and forcibly by the statement that

something "is God." The reader is introduced to this abrupt, seemingly ironic form of

appreciation at the beginning of the first chapter, in which Enid and Becky watch a

distinctly unfunny stand-up comedian, Joey McCobb, on TV. They simultaneously deride

the comedian's act, picking apart its studied weirdness, and delight in its pitiable attempts

at "eccentric" humour. "He is our God," Enid declares (10). Initially, the reader may

perceive this as sheer irony. This is not to say that irony is not involved, just that the

remark itself is not, strictly speaking, ironic: there is little discrepancy between what Enid

says and what she means. If anything, the declaration is almost literal because ironic

appreciation is one of the few contexts in which she allows herself to be reverent. Here,

irony and sincerity coexist in a manner that can safely be identified as "camp." Sontag's

notes on the subject serve as a reliable point of reference. "[T]he Camp sensibility," as

she calls it, "is one that is alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken"

(281). Not all things. Sontag's fourth note is a list of examples from "the canon of

Camp"; among them are such items as "Aubrey Beardsley drawings" and "women's

clothes of the twenties" as well as, pertinently, "old Flash Gordon comics" (Sontag 277-

78). It is no doubt the tone of the Flash Gordon stories that are the source of their camp potential, but to what degree can a narrative's sensibility truly be separated from its

medium? There would appear to be something in comics, as a form, that lends itself to the double nature of camp. Perhaps it is the ultimate immobility and isolation of each panel, which induces the perception of sequential movement but at the same time is an invitation to pluck images, actions, and gestures out of context and give them a new interpretation.

Of course, to state that camp has a "double nature" is a potentially careless oversimplification. Irony is double: it comprises a literal meaning and an opposing, intended meaning. This is a sturdy, familiar structure (some might say too familiar).

Camp is like irony squared: it contains both the twofold ironic meaning and something akin to its inverse. Or, put another way, camp is like irony collapsed: the implied signification is no longer privileged over its literal counterpart. Where irony tends to secure or even reinforce hierarchical binaries by ascribing ultimate validity to one of two necessarily discrete meanings, camp has the capacity to hold a range of meanings, all equally valid. "One is drawn to Camp when one realizes that 'sincerity' is not enough."

(288). Likewise when irony is not enough. Each alone is too focused to accommodate a wide spectrum of experience. Unlike the blase sarcasm and defensive irony that is so often assigned to teenage characters in popular depictions of suburban life, the camp sensibility that Enid and Becky display in Ghost World allows for "high-spirited and unpretentious" appreciation (278).

This is perhaps most apparent in Chapter 5, which comprises two visits to Hubba

Hubba, a 1950s-themed diner in a strip mall on the outskirts of town. During their first meal there, they marvel at the incompetence of the stereotypical decor and harass their waiter about the historical accuracy of the menu. Their purest disdain is reserved for the saccharine music being played; three times in as many pages Enid and Becky draw attention to the songs, all of which are actually from the 1960s.6 As with Joey McCobb and Cavetown, Hubba Hubba is appreciated precisely because it is "pathetic" and

"clueless" (Clowes, Ghost World 39). "The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful" (Sontag 292). In these paradoxical moments, Enid appears to attain camp enlightenment: "This place is God" (Clowes, GW 42). In Ghost World, exercising one's camp sensibility is tantamount to a spiritual experience.

For their second visit, Enid and Becky convince Josh to take them to the strip mall in his car. Josh does not share their enthusiasm for the diner, suggesting that it is one of innumerable similar places. Enid's strong objection is telling: "This is the Mona Lisa of the bad, fake diners!" (43). In this purposeful mingling of high and low, Enid wrenches

Hubba Hubba into the realm of fine art, to be appreciated as such, a recontextualisation that renders conventional notions of authorial intent largely irrelevant. The proprietors do not intend Hubba Hubba to be embraced either as art or as an artless failure; Enid and

Becky's very presence assures the reader of this, as any degree of awareness would instantly drain the place of its appeal for them. It is the total miscarriage of intent that they respond to. On the very first page of Chapter 1, Enid rebukes Becky for owning a

6 Clowes offers snippets of the song lyrics in disembodied speech bubbles: the songs are "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" by the Righteous Brothers (1965), "Big Girls Don't Cry" by the Four Seasons (1962), and "Windy" by the Association (1967). To the inattentive or disinterested reader/listener, these songs might seem to align with the appropriate decade, but in reality the music heard in Hubba Hubba is simply as nostalgic for the '50s as the diner itself. 46 copy of Sassy - a glossy, not-quite-mainstream magazine for teen girls - which she finds offensive primarily because the editors "think they're so hip" (9). Hubba Hubba lacks any such self-consciousness; it seems entirely unable to anticipate anything but the most placid reaction, so it does not attempt to force any particular experience on its patrons.

Accordingly, it is perfectly suited to camp appreciation: "Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing" (Sontag 281). The reader of Sassy, conversely, will find her experience considerably more guided - she will have to admit that the magazine is trendy and self- aware, that it is "better" than I'M and Seventeen, in short, that it intends to provide a private zany experience. This knowingness crowds out potential counter-readings.

Knowingness and counter-reading are, of course, at the very heart of camp. The gleeful manipulation of the relation between authorial intent and audience interpretation that occurs in "THE ORIGINAL '50'S DINER" (Clowes, GW39) - as well as the smudging of the line between high and low culture - is fundamentally entangled with issues of authenticity. Joey McCobb, Cavetown, Hubba Hubba: these are all authentic failures, which, for Enid and Becky, possess infinitely more cultural worth than self-aware successes. Here self-awareness is equated with insincerity and opposed to aesthetic value, which is practically defined by an absence of knowingness. And yet camp itself is nothing if not knowing. Exhibiting none of the naivete they seem to prize, Enid and

Becky take nothing at face value. "Camp sees everything in quotation marks" (Sontag

280). About the spindly, homely waiter Allen at Hubba Hubba, Becky announces "I want 47 to 'make love' to him!" (Clowes, GW44). This is hardly sincere, but neither is it mean- spirited or entirely ironic. Becky may not sincerely want to make love to "Weird Al," as she and Enid call him, but she does sincerely love his bad haircut and the simple fact that he is a bow-tie-wearing server at an inept faux-50s diner. Enid too seems to genuinely like him as a person, leaving him a large tip (46). What they enthusiastically embrace about Weird Al is his unmistakable humanity; Hubba Hubba, because it is patently fake, acquires the realness of imperfection. The dissolution of the boundary between real and fake inevitably affects the experience of nostalgia, which is always haunted by the spectre of authenticity. Hubba Hubba, like Cavetown, is a fake version of the (supposedly) authentic past that it awkwardly strains toward.

Camp also leans toward the past; Sontag's list of camp items reveals as much. It is not simply Flash Gordon comics, for instance, but "old Flash Gordon comics" that she identifies. The adjective "old" could be applied to the majority of the articles in her camp canon, which also includes "Tiffany lamps" and "turn-of-the century picture postcards"

(277). She observes that "the relation of Camp taste to the past is extremely sentimental"

(280). This relation is repeatedly articulated in Ghost World- in many ways, the book is a catalogue of the various ways in which camp and longing for the past overlap in the lives of its protagonists. Camp may not be a double of nostalgia, but it thrives on it as much as art does. Of course, Sontag argues that what camp specifically thrives on is distance: "It's not a love of the old as such. It's simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment" (285). Could the same be said of nostalgia? For the nostalgic, the past is longed for precisely because it is inaccessible, at such a distance. This gap between past and present is comparable to that between intent and interpretation, which is in turn analogous to the gap between panels on a comics page. In each case, the gap mobilises the phenomenon in question, be it nostalgia, camp, or the seeming movement of a sequential narrative.

Sontag goes on to say that "things are campy, not when they become old—but when we become less involved in them, can enjoy, instead of be frustrated by, the failure of the attempt." Enid, however, does not seem detached. During an interview with

Clowes, Joshua Glenn suggests that someone like Enid "is more emotionally vulnerable than other people, precisely because she's worked to invest the crappy objects around her with meaning, and so she has more to lose." Enid has decisively filled the gap with meaning, which, for her, is often tangled with nostalgia. It is not surprising that this complicated longing also surfaces as a preoccupation with past cultural modes. As in many of the characters' nostalgic diversions, it is Enid who is most susceptible to the lure of the past, particularly in terms of personal appearance. In Chapter 3, Enid has what

Becky refers to as a "punk day" (22), complete with dyed-green hair cropped short, leather jacket, and safety pin earring. When she encounters an old acquaintance (a former anarchist turned business student) who tells her to "forget about that punk rock shit" (24), she is infuriated that he could not recognise the historical specificity of her outfit and that he assumed it was sincere (fig. 9). She goes on to express her desire to find a single consummate style that could be worn all the time: "I wish I could just come up with one 49

perfect look and stick with it... Like what if I bought some entire matching 1930's

wardrobe and wore that everyday..." (25, ellipses in original).

What does Enid's inclination toward purposely outdated modes indicate? Beyond

merely an insistence on meeting the world on her own terms, perhaps it points to an

inversion, or an internalisation, of the ghost world. By dressing the part, Enid makes

herself a ghost, a spectral trace of a past world, a slight interruption in the contemporary

world in which she lives. She recognises, however, the precariousness of such a pose, and

predicts that, ultimately, sustaining it would become an all-consuming chore (25). In the

first chapter, Enid disparages Becky's old boyfriends, one of whom "dressed like he was

from the forties": "You always go out with guys like that who have some lame fake

shtick" (10, Clowes's emphasis). These wardrobe anxieties reveal the persistent tension

Fig. 9. Daniel Clowes, Ghost World (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1997) 25. 50 in Ghost Worldbetween possessing knowingness oneself and being repelled by the knowingness of others; they also demonstrate the fragility of the past, and by extension authenticity, which for Enid is usually rooted in the past. This is mirrored by the fragility of her friendship with Becky, which, to a significant degree, is predicated on a shared knowingness. What they spend much of their time maintaining (and what helps to maintain their relationship) is a particular camp style. To be clear, this is not "style" in the sense of something opposed to "substance" but rather, as Sontag says elsewhere, style as a kind of "totality" (17). Style encompasses and, in some ways, can even be said to dictate substance; the two are inextricable.

Ghost World has a very distinctive style, which suits (and conducts) the substance of the story. Clowes's draftsmanship is clean and simple, almost elegant in its ability to depict such clear, realistic characters with a relatively narrow range of visual elements.

This restrained quality is shared by the rest of Clowes's work, which lends his oeuvre a certain refined sensibility, but Ghost World strikes a particularly delicate balance. The book does not contain the vibrant, full-colour layouts frequently associated with Sunday newspaper supplements, nor the more austere monochrome of many underground comix

(the former is on display in Ice Haven, the latter in Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron). In certain respects, it would seem to have much in common with Adrian Tomine's extremely tidy, high-contrast panels, although Clowes does not shy away from hatching or slightly exaggerated features. 51

What most distinguishes Ghost World is the way in which it is shaded: in every panel, the black and white drawings are accented by a ubiquitous blue wash. Not that blue supplants white in a continuous tint - the colour is expertly deployed to give the

images an understated depth. It is a light blue, not pastel but muted, and there are no

gradations; lips, irises, skies, and shadows are all cast in a single solid hue. This approach

significantly softens the images, at once highlighting and challenging the distinction

between "cartooning" and "illustration." For instance, Bob Skeetes, whom Enid identifies

as "Some creepy Don Knotts guy" (14), has what could easily be labelled cartoonish

features, but he is no more a caricature than any of the other characters in Ghost World.

The way in which he is rendered by Clowes illustrates, so to speak, his humanity (fig.

10). Ultimately, the monochrome shading is more than just augmentation; it represents a

Fig. 10. Daniel Clowes, Ghost World (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1997) 13. 52 totality. It is not simply an embellishment or a patina on the line drawings, although the uniform tone does evoke a faded cyanotype. Whatever is depicted (be it lunch in a diner, an incident from the past, a fantasy sequence) has the same melancholy appearance.

"Appearance" is an ordinary and often-used word that warrants some elaboration.

Appearance is active; it is the way in which a thing - in this case, a comics page, panel, or detail - becomes legible to the perceiver. In comics, appearance is a static becoming, or, to be more precise, a series of static becomings, which offers such a convincing illusion of narrative activity that it is difficult to say whether it can accurately be called an illusion. Under these circumstances, the analytical aim should not be to peer "beyond" appearance, regarding it as a surface below which a more fundamental truth about the work lies hidden. Rather than assuming that the appearance conceals or, at best, points toward meaning, it is necessary to recognise the potential for appearance in and of itself to contain meaning. The first visit to Hubba Hubba in Chapter 5, arguably the culmination of Enid and Becky's camp sensibility, is a scene worth examining in this manner.

It is an uncommon practice to simply look at the pages of a book without reading them, one that requires either great distraction or great concentration. As an exercise in perception, however, it can be revealing (in Ghost World, it is somewhat akin to watching a dialogue-heavy film without sound). In this diner scene, the panels depict the same situation again and again, with only slight variations in perspective and an extremely restrained colour palette (fig. 11). The images are motionless, of course, but even taking 53

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Fig. 11. Daniel Clowes, Ghost World (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1997) 40. 54 this into account there is very little in the way of action: the characters sit (as is often the case) and eat; when he appears, the waiter stands; the setting remains unchanged. "Read" in this way, the scene becomes claustrophobic, the image of Enid in her hat and sunglasses is somewhat oppressive, and the dialogue bubbles appear as a similarly overbearing presence. Overall, the sequence appears as a stuttering, almost compulsively repetitive utterance in which a very limited number of elements are insistently reinscribed. Much of the stuttering quality can be attributed to the gutter, which is far more apparent as an element on the page when one does not grant it its basic function of propelling the narrative in the customary way. Refusing to read, the reader will find the spaces between panels have nowhere to hide. Like a mild optical illusion, they appear at once as window frames through which the panels can be seen and, receding, as a single continuous background on top of which the panels sit. Even when all else is rendered immobile by this concentrated non-reading, the gutter remains restless, caught ambivalently between foreground and background, continuing to fluctuate.

The same might be said about the author, whose tendency toward ambivalence and repetition manifests itself most clearly in Chapter 3, in which he presents two opposing self-portraits of himself at a book-signing. The first is what Enid imagines he will look like - a ruggedly handsome, world-weary intellectual, essentially Humphrey

Bogart with glasses (29). This is in stark contrast to the person she finds sitting behind a low table at the back of the bookstore - a slouching scribbler with a crooked leer and a receding hairline. Enid herself is also positioned as a double of the author. The name 55

Coleslaw matches Enid's temperament - she can be as raw and sour as her namesake

salad - but "Enid Coleslaw" is also an anagram of "Daniel Clowes." Becky's last name,

is Doppelmeyer, which unmistakably suggests "doppelganger" (in fact, John Ellis refers to her as "Rebecca Doppelganger" [12]). Clowes has created twin doubles of himself, two protagonists that he has admitted frequently operate as vehicles for his less palatable

opinions (Glenn).

The reader is compelled to wonder which self-representation of Clowes is closest

to the truth, engaging in comparison and speculation. Does the romantic, pseudo-1940s

figure represent how Clowes wants to be perceived? Or simply what he imagines a teenage girl would want an obscure cartoonist to look like? And behind such particular

questions lies an overarching concern: what does all this uncanny self-doubling amount

to? It is tempting to read it as a splintering of the author, which might indicate the elusive

nature of identity or the unreliability of authoritative claims. However, this is not so much

a dissolution of authorial presence as a compulsive reinscription of it, a frenzied attempt

to record all the possibilities of identity. With so many versions of Clowes, should the

reader take the story as a dream (i.e. another kind of ghost world) in which every

character is the dreamer in a different form? The suggestion in this case is that all the

identities are authentic: Enid, Becky, the imagined Clowes, and the "real" Clowes are all, to a certain extent, accurate portraits of Clowes the author. Insular as it may seem, such a perspective need not strip the story of its literary value - Ghost World is by no means a 56

didactic inventory of the author's opinions and personality traits - but rather helps to reveal Clowes's willingness to embrace vacillation, contradiction, and ambivalence.

This willingness, which signals a particular kind of knowingness, helps to secure

Ghost World's, status as a discriminating exploration of camp, and decidedly not a work

that can be appreciated as camp. The same could be said about its relation to adolescence

- like Catcher in the Rye, it is not really written for teenagers, despite its protagonists.

However, like Sassy (which is written for teenagers), it leaves little room for counter-

readings: while the book is certainly open to interpretation, Clowes's self-awareness and

attention to detail cannot be ignored. What emerges most strikingly (though not always

clearly) is the intersection of camp and longing for the past. Both are attitudes, ways of

relating to worlds at a distance - bridging the gap to ghost worlds. Reading is also a way

of relating to a ghost world, i.e. the world of a narrative, which appears to the reader in

fragments and traces, structured around gaps. In comics, these structuring gaps are not just conceptual but also match the representational concreteness of the medium. It is these

tangible gaps that enable and, during the act of reading, enact Clowes's superimposition

of Ghost World's two reigning sensibilities, camp and nostalgia. 57

Chapter Three

Hypothesizing a Coherent Narrative: A Misreading of David Boring

In David Boring, Clowes seems to have reached a new level of comfort as a writer, reconstituting his knowingness and affinity for the uncanny into a beautifully rendered, unpredictably affecting book, which also reads as an extended exploration of the formal conventions of film, comics, and literature in general. "A Story in Three Acts"

(1), it was originally published in three instalments, each filling an entire issue of

Eightball (May 1998, February 1999, February 2000) (Parille). It is as much a puzzle for the reader as Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, but a puzzle of a different kind, far more palatable and in many ways more sophisticated. The grotesque clarity of Clowes's earliest work is supplanted by an enigmatic murk that invites multiple readings.

The story is recounted by a self-aware protagonist who addresses the reader directly, introducing himself as "your eponymous narrator" (2). It begins as a chronicle of his detached sexual exploits ("Since moving to the city I've had sex with six different women. Prior to that, nothing" [2].) and the development of a very specific "feminine ideal" (7). This account is quickly redirected by his high school friend, Whitey, who 58 comes to visit David from the country and is mysteriously murdered. David must return home to attend Whitey's funeral and, en route to the airport, encounters a local university student and candy shop employee who is the perfect embodiment of his feminine ideal.

(He traces the genesis of this ideal to an adolescent summer at his family's island cottage spent furtively stealing kisses with his cousin, Pamela). Following the funeral, David stops by his childhood home, where he anxiously dodges his mother and retrieves a comic book hidden in his old tree house. The comic, about a superhero known as the

Yellow Streak, is David's only trace of his cartoonist father, who "escaped when I was very young" (4). Back in the city, David tracks down his ideal woman, Wanda - his roommate and, seemingly, only friend, Dot, accuses him of stalking her - and the two begin dating. When Wanda abruptly ends the relationship, David sinks into a depression that is capped by a debilitating two-day migraine; shortly after his recovery, he is shot by an unknown assailant. So ends Act One.

Of course, this summary does not capture the depth and intricacy of the finely tuned story that Clowes establishes in his first act, which also effortlessly incorporates a fascination with cinema, a perverse scrapbook of David's, a professor of Wanda's, Dot's habit of seducing heterosexual women, a recurring bearded character, and a looming apocalypse. The second act relocates the story to Hulligan's Wharf, the island summer home of David's past, where his unavoidable mother has taken him to recover from the gunshot wound (and also possibly to escape terrorist attacks). Act Three finds David back in the city, where the developments of Act Two (murder, betrayal, family melodrama) 59 and the threads of Act One are engrossingly followed through amid doppelgangers, narrative symmetry and metafictional punctuation. The ending is one of Clowes's most poignant and ambivalent.

Given the story's film noir sensibility, it is not surprising that David Boring shares with Clay Loudermilk the three "constitutive attributes of the tough guy figure—his maleness, his whiteness, and his urban isolation" (Abbott 6). As with Clay, this is effectively where his similarities to the traditional hardboiled protagonist begin and end; nevertheless, the common traits are significant enough to warrant consideration. While

David is decidedly not a tough guy, he does demonstrate a certain degree of "street sense," especially in his ability to become quickly involved with the opposite sex. Indeed, the depiction of his physical relationships with women is the narrative's earliest and most consistent "attempt to consolidate and secure white masculinity through visual means"

(5). However, David is also by turns obsessed, depressed, and desperate, and, in several instances, he doubts his sanity (Clowes, DB 24, 86); as in much hardboiled literature,

"masculinity reveals itself as a hysterical structure" (Abbott 29). As does sequential art, to a certain extent. In the previous chapter, it was suggested that the comic book is a

"grotesque body" - might it similarly be considered a hysterical structure? Arguably, sequential art is better suited than any other medium to stories operating within the hardboiled mode, because such narratives frequently "implicate the reader through the hysterical nature of their texts" and "bid a readerly interaction, a filling of gaps" (Abbott

64). In David Boring, gaps are incorporated into the spatio-topia in a way that exceeds the customary spaces between panels - in certain instances, panels themselves are used as gaps, appearing completely black. This technique is introduced at the very beginning of

Act Two, in which David watches his mother and Dot from the backseat of a station wagon (fig. 12). Two of the three substantive panels in this sequence show David's point of view, which, in combination with the black panels, produces a strong blinking effect

(even though it is clear that considerable time has passed between the second and fourth panels). Black panels appear throughout the second and third acts for narrative emphasis, but also to indicate moments in which David slips in or out of consciousness. When

David is knocked unconscious with a baseball bat, or shot (for the second time), the action is followed by a cinematic blackout. These episodes recall numerous comparable occurrences identified by Abbott in Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe stories (Abbott

57). "Marlowe's moments of loss of consciousness are persistently connected to a feeling of nothingness, a void" (58), which is precisely how the blank panels of David's blackouts appear on the page. Notably, these panels are not actually missing or empty, not akin to the negative space of the gutter; they are conspicuous black shapes, substantive in their own right. Whereas the spaces between panels propel the narrative, the black panels slow it considerably. Each one constitutes an observable narrative vacuum that the reader cannot gloss over, an explicit invitation to construct what is not shown (to match the implicit invitation of the gutter). The reader's constructions are necessarily based on what has already been shown, as well as generic associations, 61

Fig. 12. Daniel Clowes, David Boring (New York: Pantheon, 2000) 37. narrative expectations, specific cultural touchstones and perhaps even personal lived experience. In effect, these constructions are "interpolations into what has been"

(Benjamin 16).

If the reader recognises the blackouts that prompt these constructions as

"cinematic," it is principally because sequential art is a visual medium. In Chandler's work, for instance, the reader is given a first-person description of the "void" of unconsciousness as opposed to a concrete representation of that void. As a visual story,

David Boring has less in common with hardboiled fiction as such than with its cinematic equivalent, film noir. This is perhaps most apparent in the fog-veiled cliff-hanger at the close of Act One (fig. 13). And yet, in the panels leading to this distinctly noir moment,

Fig. 13. Daniel Clowes, David Boring (New York: Pantheon, 2000) 36. 63

Clowes does not invoke a well-known film - rather, he cements the tone with an allusion to the Edward Hopper painting Nighthawks (fig. 14). This reference is instructive on a number of levels: first, it reveals the indeterminacy of genre, which does not adhere to established regulations but crystallises around (sometimes unexpected) associations; second, it demonstrates the powerful influence of a past America on Clowes's work and one of the ways in which he deploys longing for it; third, it exemplifies certain fundamental differences between film and comics. Chief among these differences is the immobility of sequential art, which allows the reader to linger on images without interrupting the narrative. As a result, Clowes is able to cite Nighthawks in a manner that is clear and evocative without being overdetermined and distracting. "The co-occurrence of panels within the multifrarne, their simultaneous presence under the eye of the reader" (Groensteen 105) prevents any one image, no matter how noteworthy, from disrupting

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Fig. 14. Daniel Clowes, David Boring (New York: Pantheon, 2000) 35. the flow of the narrative. This "co-occurrence" reveals the narrative progression from

one image to another in sequential art - "with cinema, when it is a matter of a clear cut, the moment of passage between two shots is not visible" (105-106).

With these significant differences in mind, it becomes clear that Clowes/David's

constant invocation of film is not borne of a convenient formal similarity between it and

comics. That David experiences and describes his life as though it were a plot is more than anything else an expression of his isolation and detachment, and his recourse to the

conventions of cinema seems primarily rooted in nostalgia. This is most apparent in the

story's melodramatic flourishes, which characterise his relationship with Wanda. Like

nostalgia - and like its double, the uncanny - melodrama "refuses repression or, rather,

repeatedly strives towards moments where repression is broken through" (Bratton et al.

19). The sequence that introduces Wanda is an over-the-top itemisation of David's

experience, which explicitly dictates sound effects, lighting and a swelling musical score

(fig. 15). His narration from one of their dates epitomises the way in which he views

himself (in both senses of the phrase): "Every moment with her has the texture of a

Hollywood melodrama. I find myself capable as never before of witty banter and rugged

charm, as though suddenly promoted from character actor to leading man" (Clowes,

David Boring 21).

David may see himself as a character in a movie, but, for the reader, he remains a character in a comic book. He tends to hierarchise the media, gauging his interest in film against his father's career as a cartoonist. Early in Act Three, when his life seems to have 65

Fig. 15. Daniel Clowes, David Boring (New York: Pantheon, 2000) 10.

reached a stable plateau - new apartment, new girlfriend, new film industry job - he goes so far as to say "Everything is okay, I'm better than my father. Movies are better than comics" (75). This statement is easily read as a self-protective measure, a deliberate attempt to shrug off the devastating destruction of his issue of Yellow Streak (fig. 16): in

Act Two, his mother finds the comic and reduces it to shreds, before informing David that his father is dead. By Act Three, all that remains of the comic (and of his father) is an 66 envelope containing nine or ten "disembodied frames" (73). The difference for the reader is negligible - even prior to Mrs. Boring's discovery, panels only appear intermittently and out of context. What the reader is able to glean from these random panels is a superhero story that is pure camp, a spirited blend of science fiction and soap opera. The very name of the hero puts the reader in mind of Sontag's "old Flash Gordon comics" and the colour-coded binary opposition that Clowes sets up between Yellow Streak and David

Boring places camp in direction relation to melodrama. David's story is the melodramatic film, depicted in glossy black-and-white, while the Yellow Streak inhabits a campy comic book shaded with crude colour-dots; both modes betray a longing for the past.

After he confirms that his father is dead, David becomes increasingly absorbed with the comic, straining (along with the reader) to piece together its story, but he is unable even to determine the Yellow Streak's super powers, let alone any specifics of plot. About the characters, he wonders: "What do they do between panels?" (74) This is the question that the reader of any comic unconsciously answers, indeed the question that permits a meaningful narrative progression. Groensteen refers to the process of answering this question as "hypothesizing a coherent narrative": "For the comics reader, the fact of presupposing that there is a meaning necessarily leads him to search for the way that the panel that he 'reads' is linked to the others" (113). David cannot find these links because the gaps are simply too great. In any comic, "the principle of the separation of images can never be truly denied...one could not connect the visual utterances if they were not distinct" (Groensteen 45), but for David each remaining Yellow Streak panel is an island, | OY THE J , COMICS ,

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Fig. 16. Daniel Clowes, David Boring (New York: Pantheon, 2000) vi. 68 not just separable from the others but almost entirely isolated.

Needless to say, the most prominent narrative island of David Boring is its second

act, a rather self-contained unit that takes place on a geographical island. David's urban

isolation in Act One is mirrored by the domestic isolation of Hulligan's Wharf (a

frivolous but also somehow ominous echo of Gilligan 's Island), which is a

claustrophobic setting, cut off from the outside world: "There are no phones, radios, etc.

and all the power is self-generated" (Clowes, DB 41). This model of self-sufficiency,

which is embodied by the island's burly, stoic caretaker, Mr. Hulligan, strongly suggests

a nostalgic masculine counterpart to David's feminine ideal. David's continuing attempts

to achieve this sort of autonomy only leave him emotionally remote. Nostalgia and

isolation coincide most seamlessly in David's mother, a "solitary, sexless" woman with a

"profound disinterest in all human activity" whose sole objective, David is convinced, is

"to get me back into the family home" in the country (53-54). Her successful removal of

him to Hulligan's Wharf, under the pretence that it will aid his recovery, is itself a kind of

domestic victory for her. While on the island, David has ample opportunity to reflect on

the events of Act One, but he is content to bury the past and shows no desire to determine who shot him: "Dot thinks Wanda had a jealous boyfriend on the side. Who knows? Why waste time thinking about it? This isn't a murder mystery..." (43, ellipsis in original).

This striking statement is hardly convincing, and succeeds only in reminding the reader

of the mystery of Whitey's murder. The inclusion of an ellipsis suggests that the matter is

"to be continued" and, in fact, Whitey's death takes on a new role in Act Three. It is by no means the only element of Act One to return in Act Three, the dense narrative progression of which strains summary but due to Clowes's proficiency is never confusing for the reader. After a brief respite from melodrama, David's past unceremoniously erupts into his new life in the form of an article in an academic journal.

The author is Ferdinand Karkes, Wanda's former professor, whom the reader is sporadically introduced to in the first act. The article is a mean-spirited analysis of

David's scrapbook of buttocks images, which he gave to Wanda at her request. David's discovery of the article leads him to the professor, who turns out to be the jealous boyfriend of Dot's suspicions, though Wanda has since abandoned him as well: "The shooting itself was not mentioned by name, and his most profuse apology came for the less-than-charitable analysis of my character in his scrapbook article" (81). Over the course of several meetings, David and Karkes decide to find Wanda and hire a private investigator, which leads David to Wanda's married sister, Judy. David begins to think of

Wanda as an imperfect double of Judy, with whom he begins an affair. Meanwhile:

David's girlfriend has left the country, fearing terrorist attacks; he and Karkes eventually visit Wanda, who is the only remaining member of a religious cult; local police scheme to frame David and Dot for Whitey's murder; Dot acquires a gun for protection. Each new plot point adds to the spiralling uncertainty.

David's response to this overwhelming ambivalence is a deeply restorative nostalgia, masked by narration that seems reflective but is in fact just appealingly articulate and wry. This is Clowes's great Nabokovian manoeuvre: an apparently unassuming and candid character whose compelling account of events cannot be trusted.

David's ostensible self-awareness solicits a corresponding attitude from the reader, whose perceptiveness is rewarded, often with allusions to art (Nighthawks) and literature

(David's obsession with a certain feminine ideal echoes Humbert Humbert's fixation on nymphets, both of which derive from a childhood romance). Even David's surname is a

deft bit of reverse psychology: the expectation of irony predisposes the reader to be

interested in the character. The reader is surprised at David's ability to charm so many women, but is just as readily seduced by his lively assortment of problems and nostalgic

responses to them.

David's restorative impulse is most evident in his attempt to reconstruct the lost narrative of the Yellow Streak comic. "I find myself trying to forge a narrative sequence

out of the remaining Yellow Streak panels that will suggest, and possibly even engender,

a satisfying resolution to my troubles" (98). This recalls one of Groensteen's assertions:

"Comics exist only as a satisfying narrative form under the condition that, despite the

discontinuous enunciation and the intermittent monstration, the resultant story forms an

uninterrupted and intelligible totality" (114). With so few panels, however, David is unable to behave as a reader and feels compelled to take on the more writerly role of constructing a coherent sequence. Of course, this act is not so far removed from

"hypothesizing a coherent narrative" - the difference between reading and writing becomes a matter of positioning. As a text, David Boring is open enough to accommodate a wide range of readings, some of which may be more writerly than others. 71

David offers a description of a performance that could be read as a warning against unquestioning acceptance of (his) nostalgia: "What follows is a vaudeville-style variety show: a series of acts (magician, plate-spinner) all taken entirely at face-value by an audience intent on eulogizing the imagined innocence of a moribund century" (107).

This scene takes place as both the twentieth century and David Boring draw to a close. "I could never come up with the right ending," David says of his efforts to decipher Yellow

Streak, moments before a climactic police confrontation and last minute ballistic rescue by Dot (111). David's own story ends, not surprisingly, with a return home; not the anxious country home of Mrs. Boring, but the site of his adolescent idyll, Hulligan's

Wharf, where he and Dot find his cousin Pamela alone on the island with a newborn.

According to David, this ending is a satisfying one, inasmuch as it can be acknowledged:

"We graciously accept this happy ending, and recognize it as such: a suspended pocket of stillness between climax and oblivion" (116). Is this insight about the position of endings a final bit of misdirection, or is it David's most trustworthy remark? It is left to the reader to interpolate meaning into what has been. 72

Chapter Four

Notes on Ice Haven

Ice Haven employs a narrative method that has become fairly common in contemporary literary comics (for instance, in the work of Seth, David Heatley and Chris

Ware). As Seth explains in his introduction to Wimbledon Green, "It's an approach wherein you tell a longer story through a variety of shorter, unconnected comic strips.

Cumulatively they add up to a bigger picture" (11). This technique mimics not only the process of serial publication - which remains a distinguishing feature of many comics genres - but also the very structure of sequential art. Most of the stories in Ice Haven, however, appeared not serially but in a single issue of Eightball (October 2001) (Parille).

The book published in 2005 is a reformatted version of the 2001 comic, supplemented by several additional stories; the seamless inclusion of these new strips suggests an ideal literary space that might be expanded indefinitely. In Ice Haven, individual stories are to the cumulative sequence as discrete panels are to the multiframe. To be clear, the multiframe is an elastic structure: "The strip, the page, the double page, and the book are all multistage multiframes, systems of panel proliferation that are increasingly inclusive" 73

(Groensteen 30). This macro-semiotic concatenation finds its narrative equivalent in the linked stories of Ice Haven; both make the most of the structural necessity of gaps and absences. Fittingly, the most dramatic event of the book, the incident that lends itself most readily to synopsis, is never depicted. This is the kidnapping of a seemingly vacuous local boy named David Goldberg, around which dozens of often tangential vignettes revolve. The many anxieties and disappointments of the characters are presented in a manner that is subdued and droll, but never detached.

Following Clowes, as well as Sontag, this chapter comprises many distinct but related parts.

1. Plot details aside, what is Ice Haven about? Unexpectedly, the most conspicuous topics are literary criticism and comic books. By way of Harry Naybors - a comic book critic who appears at the beginning, midpoint, and end of the book - wordy metadiscursive assertions frame the stories, many of which centre on characters with literary aspirations. (Indeed, the book's unshown crime is motivated by a frustrated desire for critical recognition.) Naybors is a satirical figure, certainly, but Clowes does not make an easy target of him: after introducing himself and his profession, he offers the reader a thoughtful suggestion about the combination of the written word and the image in comics

(fig. 17). His second, less declarative appearance is shared by Mr. Ames, one half of a husband-and-wife team of private investigators hired by David Goldberg's parents, who visits Naybors under the misapprehension that he writes "books for kids" (46). After 'AJHAT 6XACTLY A2E "dawiM"? 1X6 > AS6 COMICS A VALID FORM OF EXPPESS10M? ^ ALLE&6P AWIANAPPNSSS ASIPE, PEBHAPS IH W0ZD ITSELF PEMAMPS & MEASWfE TUB TUPY'S STILL CUT, I'M AFeAtP- THEeE J THAT SCHISM LIES THE WWPEBPINWIN& Of WHAT OF IBONY FSPM ITS USESfTHOUfcH EXISTS Fee SOME AN KNSPMFOPTA8LE jffl &IVES Y«MliS" ITS ENPUPANCE AS A VITAL FoeM= I P£?%OWAlLY FINP IT 4HPERIOE TO IMPMMTy IN THE £OM8IMAT|ON OF TWO -aSBj WHllS P?«SE TENW TOWABP Pu?6 "IMTEBlOPnY," THE VUWAC !»AI?KeTlN& SOS?IOUET FOBMS OF pirruee-weiTiMfc. (t,e. ^ COMIN& TO LIFE IN THE esADEP'S MlMP, AMP CINEMA aeAVtTATES TOVJAPP THE "ElneRioerrY" "6eftpmi NOVEL") - INSIPEES HAYE P1CT06RAPMIC CAI?TOON SYMBOLS VS. THE OF etPBZlEWTtAL SPECTA&6, PeKHAK 'WMICS," PESATEP THE TBf&VIUOLS&Y foe LeTTEB SHAPES THAT FOTM "WOWS") WHILE IN ITS 6MBPA

Fig. 17. Daniel Clowes, Ice Haven (New York: Pantheon, 2005) 4.

Naybors explains that he writes about comics that are intended for adults, that he is a

critic, the detective questions his right to pass judgment on others. Naybors, wearily: "My

criticism is not about 'passing judgment'" (46). Indeed, the substance of his criticism is

revealed, at the book's end, to be mostly biographical fallacy: Naybors is far more

interested in potential parallels between the narrative and Clowes's life than in Ice Haven as a work of literature. He has a "Clowes Wing" in his home, which contains not only all of Clowes's literary output but numerous photo albums, the apparent result of years of stalking. Nevertheless, Naybors is saved from caricature by his self-awareness: he wonders at the significance of his character in the context of the story and asks, "Is criticism ever really about its ostensible subject, or is it primarily an expression of self- definition?" (86). In this way, Clowes nimbly preempts conventional criticism and solicits an attentive reading. 75

2. The various stories that make up Ice Haven - some of which are as short as a four-panel strip - are drawn in a wide variety of styles, ranging from naturalistic to unabashedly cartoonish, many evoking the work of past newspaper masters like Herriman and Schulz. This heterogeneity is not forced: the visual particularities of the stories are interdependent with the nuances of their narrative content. As a result, the physical appearance of recurring characters varies slightly from story to story, as does the level of detail in clothing, backgrounds, etc. Each story is in colour and the palette is generally quite warm, though some stories make use of only one or two colours other than black and white; some pages are a sharp white, while others have the look of yellowing newsprint. The format of the book is short and wide: almost every page contains two standard-size strips, most of which consist of ordinary, framed rectangular panels (some incorporate circles, ovals, and more amorphous shapes without frames). All these details

- format, colour, specific visual allusions - recall Sunday comics pages, but it is the amalgamation itself, the way in which Ice Haven reproduces an accommodating space, that substantiates the nostalgic thrust of the book.

3. Like any story with a mystery (i.e. uncertainty) at its centre, Ice Haven quickly becomes a literary game played with the reader. In this instance, however, part of the game is that the mystery is not especially important: Ice Haven is not really a whodunit, even if it does accommodate a somewhat absurdist variation on the genre. The reader who wishes to search for clues and assemble a complete sequence of unseen events will 76 not be disappointed - Clowes provides just enough information to reveal the identity and motive of the kidnapper - but the "mystery" is presented without fanfare alongside other storylines and always in terms of unforced character development. Clowes writes as if under the assumption that the reader already knows the solution (and in fact the astute reader may have solved the puzzle long before the book's end) but it is on re-reading that the significant connections clearly emerge. There is no climactic scene in which the story's detective gathers potential suspects and identifies the abductor - Mr. and Mrs.

Ames's investigation does not even yield any suspects. David Goldberg's reappearance is as abrupt and unexplained as his disappearance: "They're not too clear on what happened," Vida tells the reader, "but he showed up safe and sound in Earley Park some time this afternoon" (74). As in his other work, Clowes credits the reader with a great capacity for perception and understanding; he also offers an extremely spacious narrative.

His fragmented storytelling offers so much material and so many gaps that his esteemed reader is left with the distinct impression of collaboration.

4. The restorative mindset, and its alignment with Levinger and Lytle's "triadic structure of nationalist rhetoric," is exemplified by Random Wilder, occasional narrator and self-described future poet laureate of Ice Haven. The glorious past (presumably, the past of Wilder's childhood) is epitomised by the "sheer perfection" of sitcoms from the

1950s, which Wilder does not simply watch in reruns but carefully selects from his extensive library (17). By contrast, he finds in the gruesome news programs of 77 contemporary television evidence of "a public imagination awash in... vulgarity" (19)

(though he is not above watching reality TV). Present-day degradation is even more apparent in the endless praise Ida Wentz, his next door neighbor, receives for her "florid banalities" (7), which are regularly published in Ice Haven's local newspaper. Wilder projects a Utopian future in which "historians will mock the current editors" of the ironically named Ice Haven Progress for printing Wentz's poems instead of his own (7).

The nationalist implications of Wilder's longing for a place in history are underscored by the book's nostalgic title page (fig. 18).

NEW YORK

Fig. 18. Daniel Clowes, Ice Haven (New York: Pantheon, 2005) 3. 78 5. The prototype for the kidnapping of David Goldberg appears to be the famous

1924 case of Leopold and Loeb — in which two wealthy university students murdered a

14-year-old boy - summarised in Ice Haven in "The True Story of Leopold and Loeb" (a book that Carmichael lends Charles). As Harry Naybors tells the reader, Clowes "grew up mere blocks from the Leopold and Loeb crime scene," and the archetypal figures of the case find their way into Ice Haven (84). The victim, Bobby Franks, "had been selected because of his unassuming stature" (15) - an attribute shared by David

Goldberg. Leopold and Loeb planned the crime "as a test to the superiority of their combined intellect" (15) - Carmichael asks Charles, "Do you believe that everybody's equal, or that some people are better and should do whatever they want?" (12). Cartoon doubles of Leopold and Loeb appear in another story, an alternate history in which they get away with the murder but find themselves overcome with ennui. They concoct a new scheme to give their lives some purpose, but before they can implement it "Leo" unexpectedly surrenders to the lure of innocence and joins a group of singing children

(fig. 19). This mirrors the moment near the end of book, recounted by Vida, when David

Fig. 19. Daniel Clowes, Ice Haven (New York: Pantheon, 2005) 29. 79

Goldberg is found alive and the people of Ice Haven join hands and sing "without any hint of embarrassment or uncertainty" (75). In both scenarios, the characters submit to a longing for unity.

6. Of the many characters in Ice Haven, only two correspond to the typical notion of a "cartoon character," that is, simplified and exaggerated in both appearance and behaviour. Significantly, these two characters (Rocky, a caveman, and Blue Bunny, a violent, foul-mouthed sociopath just released from prison) only appear once each, and are set apart from the other interlocking narratives. Their escapades do not take place in the

Ice Haven inhabited by the "real" characters, who behave in ways that are recognisable and occasionally extreme, but rarely cartoonish. Clowes's attention to emotional detail precludes caricature. Nevertheless, they are physically rendered in a manner that is consistent with McCloud's definition of the cartoon - amplification through simplification (30). Indeed, Clowes is as generous with cartooning shorthand as he is with inner conflict: Ice Haven abounds in sweat beads, onomatopoeic sound effects, action lines, and iminata (symbols in place of words). The product of this seemingly unconventional combination of modes - realistic characters, cartoon depiction - is entirely coherent; the cartoon elements do not detract from or conflict with the storytelling. As McCloud contends, the reader is drawn in. Jan Baetens' review of

Philippe Marion's work may help to account for this surprising coherence: 80

Marion argues that the reader has the ability to redo, to remake, or at least

to re-experience the enunciative work produced by the author for the very

reason that this production is based upon gestures and mechanisms which

every reader has known and practiced as a child, but which he or she has

forgotten as an adult. (Varnum and Gibbons 150)

The somewhat provocative suggestion of this argument is that simply perceiving comics constitutes a return to the repressed past.

7. Random Wilder is obsessed with The Honeymooners. Not only does he seem to own all the episodes - "Which one shall I watch tonight?" (Clowes, Ice Haven 17) - but the show also repeatedly finds its way into his poems. Vida, Ida Wentz's visiting granddaughter and an aspiring writer, happens upon some of Wilder's work at her grandmother's house and is struck by the "unexpected references," which appear "over & over & over" in his odes to Ice Haven (32). (She quickly becomes obsessed and begins spying on him.) Clowes includes his own unexpected, oblique reference to The

Honeymooners in an allusion to its descendent, which pretends to be its ancestor, The

Flintstones: the titular protagonist of "Rocky: 100,000 B.C." shares Fred Flintstone's haircut and orange animal skin garment. Propelled by an existential crisis that reflects

Wilder's regrets about wasted potential, Rocky resolves to "walk toward the edge of the world" (49) but, after an uneventful journey, only makes it as far as an as-yet-unnamed

Ice Haven. Here, exhausted, Ice Haven's first resident decides to dig himself a grave but 81 quickly abandons the endeavour, dying in a shallow hole. The story skewers the same overdetermined longing for the past found in Cavetown, USA, and highlights the relation between nostalgia and regret.

8. If Nabokov provides a literary template for David Boring, then Ice Haven is in a certain sense indebted to Chekhov. As much is suggested during the interrogation of

Harry Naybors, in which Mr. Ames cites Chekhov's comparison of critics to horseflies

(Clowes, Ice Haven 47), a recurring image throughout the book. Ice Haven's flawed characters are quite critical of each other, but Clowes does not "indulge in the luxury of passing judgment" (Davies 324) and, for the most part, the reader is inclined to follow his example. The stories are often funny, but not because they hold the characters up for ridicule: Clowes's greatest affinity with Chekhov is found in his carefully modulated irony. "Among the most pervasive elements in the writing of Chekhov is irony, especially the irony of unfulfillment" (328). The irony of unfulfillment is everywhere in Ice Haven

- every character is left with expectations somehow thwarted, and their longing for fulfillment resonates with the structural incompleteness of the book, which elicits from the reader an analogous desire to have literary expectations fulfilled.

9. Clowes's expertise is nowhere more apparent than in his occasional understated technical innovations. Perhaps the most elegant of the flourishes in Ice Haven can be found in a brief exchange between Mr. and Mrs. Ames (fig. 20), in which the contents of 82 a speech bubble are temporarily withheld from the reader. Working within the confines of a standard strip, Clowes ably deploys the familiar elements of the medium - panel, frame, bubble - to create a new effect and a memorable moment. This could easily be gimmicky, if it did not serve so many purposes: it draws the reader into the scene by approximating Mrs. Ames's experience, illustrates the possibility of loss, and, with characteristic economy, manages to clearly convey the impression of repetition without any actual duplication. As well, it encapsulates the campaign of withheld information so crucial to the book's evocation of longing.

Fig. 20. Daniel Clowes, Ice Haven (New York: Pantheon, 2005) 37.

10. Like Schulz's characters in Peanuts, the children of Ice Haven are of an indeterminate age, seeming to hover somewhere between childhood and adolescence.

They are never portrayed as cute or happy-go-lucky; neither are they paragons of maturity whose purpose is to ironically illustrate the shortcomings of adults. Rather, they are awkward, aggressive, concupiscent, morbid and contemplative. Charles, whose name is presumably a reference to Charlie Brown, emerges as the principal protagonist of Ice 83

Haven, appearing in more stories than any other character, regardless of age (closely followed by Random Wilder). His taciturn demeanour masks a turbulent inner life. He suspects that his classmate Carmichael killed David Goldberg and that he, Charles, may be the next victim. At the same time, he is consumed with longing for his new step-sister,

Violet, on which he expounds abstractly to his young friend, George (fig. 21). Charles understands longing as deferred lust, a byproduct of nature. Unlike Random Wilder,

Charles wishes to escape longing and nature, which he equates with a swarm of merciless horseflies. "Nature is not beautiful," he tells George. "Only the artificial and the man- made can be truly beautiful" (38). Though the reader reflexively associates childhood with the past, Charles's metaphysical agelessness creates a pocket of childhood in Ice

Haven that is oddly timeless; this ambivalence produces the impression of a seemingly eternal childhood.

11. Longing for the past consistently entails a corresponding desire for what is natural and real. Nostalgic writers seem to strain toward a stable referent (Doane and

Hodges 8) - in their texts, the past is "attached to other terms that make it a locus of authenticity" (9). Random Wilder is nothing if not a nostalgic writer, as evidenced by the poem that is recited by David Goldberg at the end of Ice Haven as a kind of coda (fig.

22). This is one of the only finished poems of Wilder's to appear in the book and the only occasion David speaks (as well as the only obvious indication that the former kidnapped U1 era' to I VI \l\l ffl'.ll.HIHA, HAVE YOU EVEP WITNESSED A I WONT LET IT HAPPEN TO SPECTACLE AS AWFUL AS THAT OF ME, fcEOPSS-'-VPU PONT HAVE I SUPPOPT AWYTHIN6 THAT A NOBLE STALLION 8EINS ATTACKED TO LET SSXHAL PESIPE CONTPOL

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OO -1^ 85 the latter). In the story that introduces Wilder and features his other finished poem, he laments: "The town I knew is vanishing before our eyes. ...Is there anyone left with the acuity to recognize a genuine artistic sensibility?" (Clowes, Ice Haven 9) Here, Wilder is already mourning a lost past, which is tied, as all pasts are, to a place. His authentic poetic sensibility is revealed to be one of extreme nostalgia: not only does the speaker of the poem affix himself and his past to the natural world - casting himself as a tree and the

Kramdens and Nortons as birds - he does so in an insistent cadence that begins every line with a solemn monosyllabic verb. At all levels, the poem exhibits a compulsion to return, repeat, and restore. Unlike the speaker in Lorine Niedecker's well-known poem "My

Friend Tree," who saws the tree down, the speaker of Wilder's poem is the tree sawed down, mourning itself.

Y5>ut? Housewives ANP se&es?yeH • WEIGHT MV UM&4 WHW THS NCSTS OF V

Fig. 22. Daniel Clowes, Ice Haven (New York: Pantheon, 2005) 89. 12. In his capacity as resident critic, Harry Naybors offers the reader this approach to understanding Ice Haven: "The most immediate commonality between these stories is their unified setting. We know that the author spent time in Chicago and rural

Michigan as a child. Is Ice Haven a conflation of those disparate locations or is this essentially an emotional landscape?" (84). If the latter, what does the town's geography suggest about its inhabitants? Following the copyright page, the first story is "Around Ice

Haven with Random Wilder," in which Wilder guides the reader around the distinctly suburban town. He begins the tour with an old saying used by "men of my father's generation" - "It's not as cold here as it sounds" - before bemoaning Ice Haven's current decline (6). He arrives at "our landmark and logo," the enormous rock locals call "Our

Friend" (8), which is shaped like a monumental pacifier and suggests an unchanging primeval stability. Everything about Ice Haven appears solid, reassuring, amicable - does this suggest a community that urgently longs for these qualities? Perhaps the most common assumption about towns is that they are places; it may be more precise, however, to think of them as discourses on place, in the Foucauldian sense of discourses as "relatively well-bounded areas of social knowledge" (McHoul 31). Ice Haven is a story told by its inhabitants about the kind of place in which they would like to live. 87

Conclusion

In the book-length works of Daniel Clowes, nostalgia is given ample space to

develop in a wide variety of different directions. The fearful nostalgia of Like a Velvet

Glove Cast in Iron, in which the mundane meets grotesque, is quite distinct from the

coming-of-age longing for authenticity found in Ghost World, which is filtered through a

camp sensibility. David Boring contains two very different kinds of nostalgia, restorative

and reflective, the one hiding behind the other. Ice Haven portrays nearly as many

versions of frustrated yearning as it has characters. Despite vast divergences in tone,

these works have much in common: an overriding sense of ambivalence, an expectation

of careful reading, and a corresponding proliferation of gaps, all of which is in some way

tied to longing. In each of the books, this longing is emphasised (if not determined) by

the formal particularities of comics.

The substance of sequential art, the cartoon, is a simplified image that many theorists argue engenders a specific type of reading. McCloud maintains that it

constitutes a gap, "a vacuum into which our identity and awareness are pulled" (36).

Philippe Marion goes so far as to suggest that, on perceiving a cartoon, the comics reader 88 is unconsciously aware of a forgotten catalogue of enunciative "gestures and mechanisms" acquired in childhood (Varnum and Gibbons 150). In both explanations, the cartoon is understood through the reader's past experience. The structure of sequential art also depends on gaps: the comic book is a grotesque body, a hysterical structure whose network of panels is at odds with the classical unity of more traditional media. Its fundamental ambivalence and heterogeneity - variety of icons, a fragmented presentation - is reconciled by the reader through the phenomenon of closure, which enables the construction of "a continuous, unified reality" out of disparate parts

(McCloud 67). Where the cartoon dictates reading within panels, closure is the aspect of reading that occurs between panels; both are carried out repeatedly. If comics are founded on reticence, as Groensteen suggests, then they are built by repetition.

In comics, the reader only has access to static, spectral traces of the reality of the narrative. These form a fragmented visual totality, within which the reader can follow the order of the panels as well as perceive translinear relations between panels. The narrative

- which is comparable to the alienated totality of the ghost world - emerges both linearly and translinearly through the reader's instinctive filling in of what Ingarden calls spots of indeterminacy. In Clowes's work, these gaps are consistently revealed to be productive components of narration/communication, derivatives of the communicative gap between utterance and reception discussed by Peters. The gutter is a concrete equivalent of this communicative gap: sequential art's principal distinction from other media is that its structuring gaps are not just conceptual but also match the representational concreteness 89

of the medium. Readerly engagement with the various forms of longing depicted by

Clowes is fortified by/in the gutter. It is this concretely represented space between panels

- which acts as a tangible analogue of memory, a receptacle for "endless interpolations"

into the past - that makes comics uniquely suited to nostalgic stories. 90

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