By: Daniel Clowes Publisher: Pantheon Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: Pantheon Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 88 Publication Date: June 07, 2005 Release Date: June 07, 2005
Product Description: At long last: Daniel Clowes is back at Pantheon, with a brilliant new graphic novel already hailed by Time as “another of his hilariously slightly off-center worlds that have a vague sense of dread about them. Kind of like where you live.”
Welcome to Ice Haven! “It’s not as cold here as it sounds,” declares Random Wilder, our reluctant guide to this sleepy Midwestern town. He’s also its would-be poet laureate. Would-be, that is, were it not for the "Florid banalities” of his archrival, Ida Wentz, published ad nauseam in the Ice Haven Daily Progress. Among Wilder’s other fellow Ice Havians are the lovelorn Violet Van der Plazt and Vida Wentz; the detective team of Mr. and Mrs. Ames; the adorable interracial moppets Carmichael and Paula; disaffected stationery salesgirl Julie Patheticstein; the Blue Bunny, newly sprung from prison and the bitterest rabbit in town; and poor little David Goldberg, missing for more than a week now…
While Dan Clowes has gotten a nod from the mainstream — an Oscar nomination for the screen adaptation of Ghost World - his work remains wonderfully idiosyncratic and imaginative. The lives of the men and women of Ice Haven are woven into a multi-layered tale that, while it owes a debt to Our Town, is ultimately based on and inspired by… Leopold and Loeb. No kidding.
Only Daniel Clowes could do it and, luckily for us, he has.
I don't see how many of these bad ratings are plausible. The point of my review is to put an actual insight to some of the reviews. I don't know why people are complaining that this was in Eightball. I really don't. Well, you might as well complain about "Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron", or "Pussey!", or even "Ghost World." And not to mention "Ice Haven" was written and designed to be made into graphic novel, not a comic. If you read the comic, note how it doesn't flow as well as the novel. And as far as the complaints that they'd already read the story and got this thinking it was something different, why would you buy a shirt without looking at the size? And as far as the "double dipping" comment goes... SO WHAT! The comic is out of print! What do you want them to do?
It left me cold Disjointed, minimalistic, overly pessimistic, one can only think that Leopold and Loeb should have been comic critics, and limited themselves at killing "comics" like this.
Where have you gone Daniel Clowes? It's very good, but just buy Eightball #22. I realize that many of the other reviews have said basically the same thing, but let's make a clear distiction between the sham of charging almost twenty dollars for a book that's barely distinguishable from the $6 comic (still available from the same publisher!) and the amazing piece of art that they both are. I can see that it's a matter of taste, and the non-linear story will not appeal to everyone, but Eightball #22 is still the comic I give non-fans to read in hopes of showing them what the medium is capable of. Let's all boycott Clowes's movies so he goes back to doing comics! I'm half kidding of course, but it's interesting and sad that "making it" in independent comics often means being able to leave comics for film, television, and the like. **Sigh**
Is there a story here? I read a lot of graphic novels and enjoy the majority of them, but some just don't make a lot of sense. This, for me, is one of the latter. I know, I know -- Clowes is one of the stars of the genre, and I actually very much enjoyed the award-winning _Ghost World,_ but this one isn't in that league at all. In structure, it's a series of very brief, semi-connected vignettes centered on a variety of residents of the town of Ice Haven, most of them teenage or younger. (I gather this is also just a slightly rewritten remake of the original comic book.) The interrelationships are unclear, the motivations are puzzling, and the dialogues and monologues are mostly overwritten. I guess even award-winners have bad days.
has its moments cannot say this is his best work - I think Ghost World is hard to match
Anything Goes Trivia
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