By: Daniel Clowes Publisher: Pantheon Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Pantheon Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 136 Publication Date: September 24, 2002 Release Date: September 24, 2002
Product Description: Meet David Boring: a nineteen-year-old security guard with a tortured innner life and an obsessive nature. When he meets the girl of his dreams, things begin to go awry: what seems too good to be true apparently is. And what seems truest in Boring's life is that, given the right set of circumstances (in this case, an orgiastic cascade of vengeance, humiliation and murder) the primal nature of humandkind will come inexorably to the fore.
"Boring finds love with a mysterious woman named Wanda, loses her and sort of finds her again. He also gets shot in the head (twice) and stranded on an island with his brutish family. Meanwhile, the world may or may not be ending soon. And did I mention that much of this is hilariously funny?" -- Time
From the Hardcover edition.
Amazon.com Review: It's impossible to write about Daniel Clowes's work without using the word "ennui." But his is a joyous ennui, if such a thing is possible, one that relishes the boredom of everyday life with a Zen enthusiasm. The title David Boring reflects his self-aware humor and captures the essence of an ordinary man living through a larger-than-life story. The main character lives with his best friend, Dot, in a large city, each looking for love and meaning. David in particular is trying to understand his father, whom he knows only through an obscure comic book called "The Yellow Streak." Murder, obsession, sex, and war are all just distractions as he tries to construct a sensible portrait from the odd bits and pieces he finds in his travels. Clowes finds little miracles everywhere he looks--so many, in fact, that they seem hardly to interest him. This detachment perversely makes David Boring deeply compelling and worthy of serious attention from fans and newcomers alike. --Rob Lightner
A small masterpiece of everyday life I find the lukewarm reviews here to be baffling. It might help if, when people post reviews of graphic tales as extraordinary as this one, they would also post a list of the ones that they do consider first rate. (And to to be called a hypocrite, some of my favs include THE SANDMAN, TRANSMETROPOLITAN, the ongoing FABLES as well as JACK OF FABLES, most of Alan Moore's work, Jeff Smith's BONE, the relighting of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER Season Eight as a comic, several of Brian K. Vaughan's series -- especially THE RUNAWAYS, the reissues of the Krazy & Ignatz comics, and Jason Lutes's BERLIN books. I rather enjoy the more recent versions of the Marvel Universe, am not a big fan of what they did in the sixties and seventies (hey, it was comics for little kids, no more and no less) and have never really warmed up to the DC superhero universe (though I own a staggering number of Vertigo series). There, that is my context in reviewing this. I'm a fan, but I'm not a fanatic. Reading graphic novels occupies only a tiny portion of my reading time.
I can't understand the reviews that don't grasp how brilliant this book is. Are they reading too quickly? Are they not grasping the subtlties? Given the huge critical acclaim the book has gotten among very knowledgeable fans of the genre, I would have expected that naysayers would at least pause before lambasting it. Why are the people at the top of the industry huge fans, but some are not understanding the book's appeal? Is the fault the top writers and critics? Or have these commmon fans (whose reading habits we don't really know) got it right?
My own believe is that DAVID BORING is not merely one of Daniel Clowes's best books, but one of the best comic works of the past decade. It is subtle. And it is shorn of superheroes and men in tights (apart from the comic that David studies for clues about his own father). The action primarily is in the emotional lives of the main characters, not jut David but his friend Dot, his mother, and the various women he encounters. Because I love characters and character development, I read this with rapt attention. Most comics are largely if not entirely on the surface. The best are like icebergs, with most of its heart not to be found on the page. THE SANDMAN books are like that. WATCHMEN is spectacularly like that. And DAVID BORING is like that. If you don't take the time and effort to wonder and marvel about the parts of the book that appear between and outside of the frames, you simply won't enjoy the book. You can't read it like you would SPIDER-MAN. It is simply more sophisticated (not that Spider-Man, in the hands of some writers, is never sophisticated).
What is unusual also about DAVID BORING is how much violence there is. Now, there are some pretty amazingly violent comics. There are many that have guns discharged on nearly ever page. LOVELESS or 100 BULLETS ought to come with a scratch and sniff section to generate the smell of gunpowder. But those comic worlds are worlds in which violence is considered the norm. The world of David Boring is pretty much our world. Yet, in it are several murders and/or suicides. The kinds of murders and/or suicides that occur in our world, not the world of superheroes.
I strongly recommend this book, but only for those whose taste in graphic arts extends considerably beyond men and women in tights. If you love and enjoy books like Terry Moore's STRANGERS IN PARADISE, Chris Ware's JIMMY CORRIGAN, and Craig Thompson's BLANKETS, you almost certainly will love DAVID BORING.
Big on pretension and ambition; not much else People are right when describing "David Boring" as ambitious. Ambition, however, does not always add up to quality. (Macbeth can tell you that.) Clowes brings up many themes within this piece, but never expands upon them much. All that remains is a depressingly uninteresting and pretentious narrative that is filled with characters that are hard to care about. It's just an endless barrage of verbs happening to nouns. The structure of this work is, also, of fault. By combining the structure of the three-act play and comic book, Clowes denies the strengths of both mediums. One of the points of graphic novels is to use illustrations to supplant the need for description. With Clowes' over-worded script, the reader is taken away from what the art itself is saying. It seems that the author could have saved space on some panels to leave more room for character development. The characters within this story fail to appeal. Part of this is because most of what the information on each of them is given by the "depression is cool"/Freudian mindset of a narrator that fails to engage and thinks that he is somehow better and cooler than you because he doesn't smile as much. Also, the plot devices are used to little effect. The most obvious case of this is the apocalyptical occurrences that may or may not be happening in the story. (If they do or do not happen, it doesn't really matter to the plot.) Each moment that is built up within the story ends up with a resounding bang of anti-climax. I really tried to like this, but was crushed when trying to find a meaningful justification for my purchase. I was left with a sense of wasted time and a need to write a review for this pretentious book that is, at most, a very depressing soap opera. (Questionable parentage of babies, framing of individuals for crimes, overbearing mother: check.) If you feel you have to read this to make friends, do so. To anyone else, stay away. Read something interesting like, say, the drug information of things, the nutrition information of your favorite morning cereal, etc. David Boring isn't good.
"It's like Fassbinder meets half-baked Nabokov on Gilligan's Island." * If you like Robbe-Grillet or David Lynch, you'll like David Boring. Surrealism isn't my cup of tea, and so I found myself alternately put off and bored by the book. But I can appreciate the thought that went into planning its seeming disjointedness.
There's no plot to speak of, and what storyline there is is one that seems a parody of hardboiled detective stories. Panels abruptly break into different narrative threads. Interpolations that make no sense whatsoever interject themselves. The "Yellow Streak" comic/missing father subtheme is baffling. There are tons of nonsequitors: Wanda's disappearance in a sexual/religious cult; Manfred's running off with David's mother; Mrs. Capin's seduction of David; the affair with Naomi; the abrupt termination of Dot's lesbian affair; and the never-developed hints at apocalyptic disaster. Temporal sequence seems unimportant, chance encounters carry mysterious weight, characters appear and vanish with magical realism fluidity. Sometimes it's intriguing, sometimes perplexing, sometimes quite tiresome. And the woodenness of the drawing--again deliberate, one suspects--only adds to the surreality of the story. Facial expressions seem frozen, bodies pre-pubescent. Even in the love-making scenes, the characters look like store front mannikins. (And what's up with all the socks? Can Clowes not draw feet?)
Is there a point here? The absurdity of existence? The deep and futile human longing for love? creative expression (David is a failed screenwriter)? deep meaning? Is David a kind of Camusean l'etranger, unable to connect with anyone on a deep emotional level? Or in fact is there no message at all to "David Boring"? Is the negative reviewer who said that the book seemed to have been dreamt up panel by panel as Daniel Clowes proceeded on the money? I don't want to think this is how the book was actually written, but ultimately it's so artificially mysterious that it might as well have been. _______________ * Clowes' own description of his novel.
Very erratic I just got done reading this about an hour ago, so everything is still pretty fresh in my mind. The art work is fantastic, and the writing is MOSTLY pretty good. But there are these occasional spots throughout the story that just kind of come out of nowhere, it becomes very difficult to follow after a while, so I'm not sure how good I should say the writing really is. The dialogue is generally enjoyable at least, even if you're not always sure whats going on. I would still recommend this to anyone looking for a good, non-superhero graphic novel, but you should still be aware that there quite a few instances of panels not really transitioning very well into one another, giving way to confusion in the story.
His worst Just because it's in the title doesn't mean i CAN'T say that this was just boring. It really seemed for the first time that Clowes was TRYING to be hip. The characters were nothing to be liked, there was nothing about the main character that made me care what happened next. The ending wasn't really an ending, so much as the story just stopping.
Read Pussey!, Ghost World, Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (masterpiece), Caricature, or even Lloyd Llewellyn (for quick laughs). This one... buy it if you think the late 90's were cool.
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