An Interview with Daniel Clowes Downloaded from by Guest on 01 October 2021

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spring warren From Ghost World to Your World

An interview with Daniel Clowes Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/2/2/13/381266/boom_2012_2_2_13.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

Oakland artist and graphic novelist Daniel Clowes was born in Chicago. He launched his career with the comic series Lloyd Llewellyn, about the adventures of a private detective, then went on to create the comic series Eightball, which included such seminal works as Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, Ghost World, and Death Ray. Ghost World, the 2001 movie based on Clowes’ screenplay, was nominated for an Academy Award. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Time, and Newsweek, and in 2011 he was awarded a PEN Literary Award for Graphic Literature. His most recent book is Wilson (Drawn and Quarterly), the story of a lonely, middle-aged malcontent. In April the Oakland Museum of California opened the exhibition Daniel Clowes: A First Survey, on view through 12 August of this year.

Spring Warren: You were born in Chicago, but you’ve been in California now for going on twenty years. What brought you here?

Daniel Clowes: I came to Berkeley for a reading on a particularly nice day in February. It was 80 degrees and I wound up meeting my future wife at a signing.

Warren: Wow. Love and weather.

Clowes: Yeah. We had a long-distance relationship and then she said why don’t you come out to Berkeley and I couldn’t think of any reason not to, you know? The first time I went back to Chicago, there was freezing rain and I had to walk to a bookstore to do a signing where I knew nobody would be because it was the worst weather in the world. I just wondered how people ever settled there.

Warren: Now you’re living in paradise.

Clowes: That’s right.

Warren: You once said that when you close your eyes, you see Chicago. Not California?

Boom: A Journal of California, Vol. 2, Number 2, pps 13–21. ISSN 2153-8018, electronic ISSN 2153-764X. © 2012 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/boom.2012.2.2.13.

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Boom0202_03.indd 13 07/06/12 2:22 PM Some version of Warren: Is there anything about Wilson, the character, that is particular to California? That is, if Wilson the book California is multiplying was set in New York, would he still be the same guy or was there something about Oakland or California that with images of Chicago. spawned him?

Clowes: He strikes me as uniquely Californian in some Clowes: I saw Chicago for a very long time. I’m not usually way. In New York, for instance, his personality would be dealing directly from experience in my work, but dealing easily explained by the anxiety of living in such a dense with my own inner life. My stories tend to be based in high-pressure environment, but in the context of Oakland, emotions that have been with me for a long time. But his peculiarities seem much more self-generated. now I feel like California is seeping in or some version of Warren: Does the current, rather dismal state of the State of California is multiplying with images of Chicago, so there California show up in your narrative line? Like the Bush era Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/2/2/13/381266/boom_2012_2_2_13.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 are palm trees mixed in with the urban blight and my vision being reflected in Death Ray? of the landscape is now much more Oakland than Chicago. Clowes: I am certainly very interested in what’s going It took a very long time to tap into the California thing, a self- in California but I’m not consciously trying to deal with satisfaction that we have in California—and I’m as guilty that in my work, though I think anything you immerse of it as anyone—that comes from living in a place like this yourself in will come out in your fiction; I am sure you where the weather is nice and there’s a certain beauty to the know. landscape that you don’t have anywhere else. I found that sort of off-putting at first and then came to see California, like the Warren: It would seem so with the art world here—your East Coast, as one of the two places that you go in America to work seems in keeping with the experimentation in be as far away from where you come from as possible. narrative form that California is known for.

Warren: Which might contribute to a certain colorful Clowes: Maybe in a general, zeitgeisty kind of sense, eccentricity of characters that show up in your work? because I really have no connection at all to that world here. I feel kind of purposely out of touch with that stuff. Clowes: I feel like that’s certainly true in this area. I spent many years living right in Berkeley and they’re almost Warren: Certainly the zeitgeist of comics changed in the intolerant of non-eccentrics. . . . Like you wouldn’t be nineties—they became more about social commentary welcome if you wanted to sell insurance. But even though I than ever before, and graphic novels shifted to being okay live in a real pocket here where the values are really liberal for grownups to read. What was going on in the Bay Area and you know, everything is very sort of progressive and then, and were there particular artists in California you artsy, all you have to do is drive through the Caldecott were influenced by? Tunnel into the suburbs and then immediately you’ll start Clowes: Certainly Robert Crumb and some of the other seeing Romney stickers and stuff like that. Underground Cartoonists of the sixties were based in the Warren: Do you sketch in Oakland public spaces—for Bay Area, and they had a great impact on what we were instance, are the coffee houses in Wilson actual places? and are doing. Among California artists, my favorites are the architects Bernard Maybeck and Julia Morgan, the Clowes: All of the locations in Wilson and Mr. Wonderful are photographer Eadweard Muybridge, and above all, Alfred based on actual places in and around Oakland, but rather Hitchcock, whose Vertigo, The Birds, and Shadow of a Doubt than draw them accurately, taking photos, or doing location are three of the greatest Northern California films, along sketches, I’m more interested in drawing my memories or with Coppola’s The Conversation. impressions of those places, expressing how it feels for me to be in those spaces rather than to transcribe their exact Warren: I heard from one of the curators that there was particulars. great excitement over your upcoming show at the Oakland

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Museum of California. That artists like Alicia McCarthy Warren: You lived in Berkeley for a while. Were you relieved and Barry McGee and Ruby Neri are all great admirers of to move to Oakland because of a certain second-tierism your work. Do you interact with these artists? you’ve mentioned?

Clowes: I don’t know them personally. I actually know who Clowes: Yeah. Oakland feels like the weak sister to San those three artists are, but that’s because they’re like the Francisco, and you know, I grew up on the south side of biggest of the big. Chicago, which is really the neglected half of the city compared to the north side. When I lived in New York, I Warren: Maybe at this moment they’re having a conversation lived in Brooklyn, which at that time, was not cool. And it along the lines of “I’ve never met Daniel Clowes but I know was certainly the lesser part of the city when compared to who he is, ’cause he’s one of the greats.” Manhattan, so I’ve always found myself in those sorts of Clowes: No, I doubt it. I doubt it extremely. neighborhoods and I often wonder if I actually feel more

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comfortable there and that’s why I wind up there, or if it’s these people and they had your comics in a box in the adult just sheer coincidence. section.

Warren: You also worked for Cracked magazine. Clowes: Always. Even as a teenager I was interested in comics and wound up being sort of pen pals with some Clowes: Yeah. The sad little brother of Mad. other guys who did comics in that area. You know, you see Warren: I saw a photograph of you, perhaps around that somebody’s address who’d written a letter to a comic and time, posing with some fans in a comic shop, and you wrote you’d write them a letter. That’s how you’d meet people about how uncomfortable it was, that you didn’t really know back before the Internet days. And you wind up going

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Boom0202_03.indd 16 07/06/12 2:22 PM I would always think Goddammit, I’ve gotta fix this tomorrow.

over to their house for some party or something. We’d all to connect with some character that you really respond to and like comics, but I had nothing else at all in common, you you realize it’s just a guy who made that up and spent hours know. Even the stuff they liked about comics was the stuff and hours revising it to get it to feel the way it did and it didn’t that I actively disliked about it, and it made me even more just spring straight from their id onto the page. It’s something alienated. You can talk to somebody for a few minutes, that takes a lot of effort and solitude to come up with. however, and the way they respond to the work, you can Warren: Speaking of solitude—when you were thirteen, surmise a lot about them. You see the parts of the work that you idolized Wally Wood [one of Mad magazine’s founding Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/2/2/13/381266/boom_2012_2_2_13.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 they respond to and you do feel connected to them in a way artists] and said at that age you wanted to be a cartoonist that’s much more profound that you’d imagine. even more than you wanted to draw cartoons. That you Warren: In all the interviews and public appearances that loved the idea of obsessively drawing all night when no one I’ve read and seen, you’re just fantastically popular, scads else was awake, with a cigarette dangling from your lip and of people in the audience, very erudite, self-possessed. a jar of pencils at hand. I imagine you being put up in the poshest digs with Clowes: Yeah. chocolates on the pillow. That hasn’t always been the case?

Clowes: Back before there were graphic novels, when they Warren: Do you now like being a cartoonist more than you were just comic books, I would be invited to a comic store like to draw? in another city and I’d drive fifteen hours to get there and Clowes: Back when I was sort of looking to be like Wally wind up staying on the guy’s floor. Then you’d go to the Wood, the actual act of sitting down and drawing was often a signing, and you’d realize it’s just the comic shop owner struggle. I was really trying to learn how to do this stuff and and his five friends. When you’d go out to dinner afterward, had a vision of how I wanted it to look, a very clear idea of you’re like held hostage until three in the morning. I what I wanted to do. Then to achieve that was much more remember one time staying at somebody’s house, sleeping difficult than I ever imagined it, so I was just constantly on their couch, and to get to the bathroom, they said you frustrated and I was always throwing my pencils on the have to go through this door and our roommate’s asleep in ground and storming off. I never would finish the day feeling there. So I enter this room where this guy was asleep and like I did a great job. I would always think Goddammit, I’ve he woke up yelling, “Who the hell are you?!” gotta fix this tomorrow. It really was very unsatisfying. It’s Warren: That’s all changed? only been in the last ten or fifteen years that I’ve been able to do what I wanted to do or what I set out to do, or at least Clowes: Even recently I agreed to do a little slide show for I don’t put the pressure on myself to do something that I one of my books, and at every single venue they didn’t have know is impossible. I kind of know what I’m capable of and the right adapter for my computer and the audience had so it’s much more fun. Your brain gets acclimated to doing to just look at my back while we’re trying to figure out the this thing and now I feel utterly at ease when I sit down to computer. I figured they hated me by the time I could do draw. It’s tremendously challenging still and there’s still anything. It rarely goes well. frustrations, but it’s something I can’t not do at this point. Warren: You said at readings that people are sometimes Warren: You’ve talked about how a lot of your projects took disappointed that you are not Enid from Ghost World? off when you thought that your career was over. For instance, Clowes: Yeah. I mean, I’ve certainly had that feeling of Eightball happened because you couldn’t bear to do any more meeting an artist of some kind and you feel like you’re going Lloyd Llewellyn, and Wilson came at a time when you were

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struggling with this weighty tome of a book and really didn’t over it. When I’m working, it’s a very personal thing, not for want to keep waking up in the morning to work on it. anybody else, and I’m only thinking about myself. I mean, the one exception to that would have been Mr. Wonderful, that Clowes: Yeah. I was doing for the New York Times Magazine. I was actually thinking about an audience, but that very quickly changed. Warren: So now that you are a celebrity, maybe even a commodity in some way, does this create expectations that Warren: You’ve been very free in terms of shifting styles. could interfere with your work—like you’re being asked to Wilson, in particular, is noteworthy, as within the comic itself create the millionth Deborah Butterfield horse? the work goes from more naturalistic illustrations to highly stylized ones in the turn of a page. It seems a sort of lens Clowes: (laughs) You know, I certainly don’t, there’s nothing in which one views the exact same things happening to the of that in my daily life. Nobody ever calls me and nobody same characters in a totally different way. And even when ever recognizes me on the street, so that there’s no sense you sort of go more, maybe, classically cartoony, it reads even of that at all. I mean, really, I feel more anonymous than I more tragically, you know, in a really intriguing way. ever did. Back when people actually wrote letters and stuff, I used to get thirty–forty letters a week from people and Clowes: Yeah. anonymous phone calls in the middle of the night. Now Warren: How did you arrive at this collection of styles? there’s no response at all. So while I’m very self-conscious in many ways, I’m not at all in terms of the work I do. I don’t Clowes: When I first started, I did all these little strips while I really think about how anybody’s going to receive it until it’s was with my dad in the hospital, stick figures. The work was basically done and it’s too late, and then I start to agonize all just about the writing and the rhythm of the comic strips

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Boom0202_03.indd 18 07/06/12 2:22 PM that had nothing to do with the drawing. When I got home and it finally dawned on me that I was gonna have to do this as a book, I set out to come up with a style that would work for all of these strips. And I found that a certain style would work well for some of them and not for others, and vice versa. I was getting very frustrated by that and I just couldn’t figure out if I was just gonna do some sort of middle-ground style that worked fairly well for everything. . . . Finally, I started looking at all my drawings and trying to figure out what style I was gonna pick, and I realized that all of them together were what I needed to do and that my brain had kind of solved the problem already and I just hadn’t noticed it. Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/2/2/13/381266/boom_2012_2_2_13.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 You know, the result was really what the book was about and what I was trying to get across. [It] was something you can really only do in comics, where you can shift a style like that and all of a sudden it shifts the perceptions of the reader, but not to the degree that they get lost. They still follow the story, and after a few of these shifts, they’re used to that and it’s not jarring at all. The shifts become a way that colors the events that are going on. I found you could play with emotion to such subtle degrees by shifting the style; it was endlessly enthralling to work on that every day. © Daniel Clowes Warren: Wilson, the character, didn’t occur to you first as an image, is that right? Clowes: Yeah. I don’t think it was conscious, certainly, but if you look at the guys that Wilson victimizes throughout Clowes: With Wilson, the character just emerged without me the course of the story, they’re all basically versions of me. even knowing what he looked like. He just existed as this stick figure that had a fully formed personality from the very first Warren: All tall, lanky guys. couple of little thumb-nail drawings I did of him, and it was Clowes: Yeah. just a matter of note-taking, just like writing down everything he said. He became one of those very rare characters that can Warren: Wilson follows a man through his middle years. lead you rather than you leading them, and so I just let him Ghost World is about teenagers. I love the way that your work go. I would give him a situation and think, what would he do bounces back and forth between these two age categories with this? And then, next thing I knew, I’d have a six-panel and it seems there are a lot of similarities between them— strip. That was a very different experience from most projects, facing big changes in your life that might be exciting and which are much more of a struggle to get it all to work and for might be terrifying—and you’ve got all these big questions the character to come alive. about why am I here and what should I be doing, and also some huge feelings of hating the rules of the world, just Warren: Is starting out with stick figures a pretty typical rejecting them. Is this just my imagination that you’re way for you to work? working back and forth between these two places? Clowes: No. No. I work differently every time. Clowes: I think they’re both really interesting times. When Warren: When people have asked is Wilson really you, you you’re a late teenager it’s kind of your one opportunity to said something along the lines of being more the person define yourself and so the pressure is on. And I think that’s that would be victimized by Wilson. a really interesting dilemma to have to face. Then in middle

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Boom0202_03.indd 19 07/06/12 2:22 PM age, I feel like it’s very different than what I imagined it was Warren: That’s unusual. Do you ever think, gosh, I just hate gonna be. You think of yourself as not being so plagued lettering. I’m sending it out to have it done. with self-doubt when you hit a certain age. Clowes: I love the lettering, but I hate, I hate doing the Warren: That’s for sure. computer coloring. That’s the one thing that I think at some point, I could at least hire somebody else to do all Clowes: And if anything, if anything, it’s certainly, possibly, the computer files and I could pick the colors, but I haven’t worse. quite gotten to that point yet. I have, like, separation anxiety. Warren: I have noticed that at two in the morning. It’s hard to let go.

Clowes: Yeah. Warren: There’s something about seeing the forms and colors in place to know if it’s really right. Warren: Wondering if that story line is going to work or not . . . Do you agonize over narrative? I mean, when people think of Clowes: Yeah. That’s true and you know, there’s something Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/2/2/13/381266/boom_2012_2_2_13.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 comics, they think about the visuals carrying the story. about getting a book back from a printer and knowing I did every mark on the page. There’s nothing at all that’s Clowes: In comics, really, the writing is the drawing in a not mine except for the UPC code on the back—which if I lot of ways. could do it by hand, I would. Warren: But it’s not like the words don’t matter, that if you Warren: It must be interesting, then, to relinquish your can draw a picture you can necessarily make a strip. work to a museum to present it to the public. How did the Clowes: Yet, when I’m writing I would never think in exhibit for the Oakland Museum come about and what’s it terms of blocks of text or, you know, in terms of dialogue like to go from comic book to museum wall? or anything like that. I think in terms of how the images Clowes: A curator named Susan Miller first approached me are going to go together and tell the story. And I would around five years ago with the idea of putting together a hope that in any of my books, if you couldn’t read English, museum show, and through her tireless efforts and some you could still figure out what’s going on in the story. The luck it wound up going to my favorite local museum. I’m visual component would let you know the basics of what’s very curious how it will feel to see people experiencing the happening. And that’s what’s really interesting to me. work in such a different way. My hope, of course, is that Warren: You do all of your work from top to bottom, your they will see the original pages as artifacts of the process of own inking and coloring and lettering? making comics and will seek out the books, which are the actual final works. B Clowes: Yeah, absolutely.

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