Product Description: The creator of Ghost World eviscerates American culture.
Before the Ghost World graphic novel and film propelled Daniel Clowes to international superstardom as the preeminent cartoonist of his generation, his ongoing comic book Eightball was already the most talked-about series of the 1990s. Renowned for its gleefully incisive social satire and riotous absurdity, Entertainment Weekly proclaimed it "the year's best regularly published comic book" upon its debut in 1989. The Village Voice proclaimed it "brilliant," and Art Spiegelman called it "curdlingly good." Simpsons creator Matt Groening has repeatedly called it his favorite comic book.
20th Century Eightball collects the very best humor strips from Eightball, written and drawn between 1988 and 1996. Included within are such seminal strips/rants as "I Hate You Deeply," "Sexual Frustration," "Ugly Girls," "Why I Hate Christians," "Message to the People of the Future," "Paranoid," "My Suicide," "Chicago," and over three dozen more. Other favorites include "Art School Confidential," one of Clowes' most popular strips of all-time: it was recently optioned as a major motion picture by Drew Barrymore, with a screenplay by Ghost World's Clowes and Terry Zwigoff. Also included is Clowes' hilariously Freudian deconstruction of professional athletes, "On Sports," which caused a stir in San Antonio last year when reprinted in the city's most popular weekly paper, prompting an advertising boycott and demands for the paper to be destroyed by local sports fans. Noted comics historian Roger Sabin, author of Phaidon's Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels, calls 20th Century Eightball a "corrosively satirical vision of an America cracking apart, and confirms Clowes as a worthy successor to the underground greats of the 1960s." 40 pages in color, fully illustrated.
Almost the opposite of Clowes' strengths Clowes' strengths are his sublime pacing, wonderful atmosphere, and realistic characters - none of which he displays in his short stories. He is just, as Spiegelman says, a "wiseass." Some people like the early Eightballs because they're more comic than his later works, but Clowes cannot compete with the classic humor comics like Howard the Duck and Cerebus: High Society. His longer works, on the other hand, are top rate stuff.
These stories aren't bad, but they're not good either. Certainly not worth buying.
pretty good pretty funny - I think it's better than Ice Haven manic, quick, collection works together well
A great laugh I think I laughed more out loud while I read this than I have with my previous Clowes. While the Clowes I've read in the past is dark and haunting themes (Ghost World and Like a Velvet Glove), this is a filling dose of dark humor and venting of frustrations. I might have given it five stars, but I'm not such a scraps-o-stories kinda gal. Lots of the stories had good starts, and either no endings or abrupt drop-offs. And also, if I was fiendish about the way that my TPB's look, as in for resale value and such, I might have had a heart attack the way Amazon sent it. It looked like it might have been lying on a garage floor for a couple of years before they tossed it in the carton. The other comic I ordered arrived in mint condition and plastic-wrapped, so I dunno what the deal is. I love Clowes more every time I read a new one, and this is no exception!
Pretentious curmudgeonry best left under wraps Clowes admits in his introduction that Art Spiegelman called Clowes' early work his "total wiseass period." He should've taken the hint.
As a fan of Daniel Clowes' "David Boring" and "Ghost World," as well as his screenplay based on the latter, I was disappointed to discover how much of a jerk he'd been early on. The rants remind me of my adolescence, but as Clowes was college-age and up when he first published these comics, immaturity is not an excuse. While this book will interest hardcore Clowes fans, I do not recommend it to the casual Clowes enjoyer.
The Product of a Sick and Warped Mind But, so was Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum." Only time will tell if his work will be included amongst such august company, but for the time being, Daniel Clowes stands at the top of the heap of today's comic book artists.
Twentieth Century Eightball is an omnibus, "best of" collection of his comic panels from his Fantagraphic comic book series "Eightball" which was issued semiannually from the late 1980s through the 1990s.
Clowes' rapist (pun intended) wit is in overdrive here, as he expounds on his endless lists of things he hates, often in the guise of such stand-ins as the now-classic Lloyd Llewellyn. "I Hate You Deeply" and "I Love You Tenderly" will have you howling like a banshee, as you follow Lloyd through one of his ranting diatribes against sports figures, corporate greed, hippy sellouts and lowest-common-denominators.
And that's basically the whole book: Thinly-veiled attacks on all the things that bother the idosyncratic Daniel Clowes. But, so what: They deserve bashing! My favourite targets of his ire were post-modernist talentless art school poseurs, violently agressive hippy burnout peaceniks, "hip" people, Chicagoan "Jim Belushi" types, dumb jocks and pretentious Americans such as I who use the British spelling of words (e.g., "colour" instead of "color"; "kerb" rather than "curb").
Some of the material is just too bizarre to describe here -- I don't want to give away the weirdness, so find out for yourself about "On Sports," "Pogeybait," "The Happy Fisherman" and other such sundry freakishness.
But this book also reveals a soft-spot in Clowes' heart, particularly in the short "Ugly Girls," in which he questions society's norms of "beauty." Though he doesn't use the name "Enid," the reader can tell that Clowes has long been entranced and obsessed with the raven-haired, bookish, bespectacled wallflower type. I agree: She *is* much more stunning than those trophy blondes.
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