Daniel Clowes
Caricature
Fantagraphic Books, Inc
VLS (Village Voice Literary Supplement, early 2000s)
by Simon Reynolds
Cartoonist Daniel Clowes's stories are set in some all-American twilight zone of Hopper-esque diners, lugubrious motel rooms and desolate streetscapes. Time and place are deliberately left non-specific--it's the Big City, any-postwar-year-- allowing Clowes to indulge his fondness for the kind of quaint furnishings and appliances (e.g. barber's chairs) that now sell as overpriced antiques in "architectural salvage" stores. Some of the stories in Clowes' new collection Caricature veer into the full-on noir surrealism of Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron (his famous Twin Peaks-like serial driven by non-sequiturs and a mystery narrative that never resolves itself). But most develop further the seedy realism of his superb 1997 graphic novel Ghost World, conjuring a world that's all the more uncanny because the blatantly supernatural rarely occurs. Caricature's most poignant stories seem autobiographical: brink-of-puberty vignettes "Immortal, Invisible" and "Like A Weed, Joe", and "Blue Italian Shit", a memoir of life as johnny-come-lately punk at the tail end of the Seventies. From the title story's fairground caricaturist to the decrepit cartoon superhero in "Black Nylon" and the pugnacious epigone in "MCMLXVI" (who believes American culture peaked circa 1966) Clowes's forte is stalled lives and blocked dreams. Nobody can rival him when it comes to the physiognomy of anomie--he's a virtuoso at jaded eyes, non-commital mouths, and the myriad facial nuances of affectlessness.
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