Dan Clowes: He-Man Comic Artist

The Velvet Glove

m: This is probably a good jumping off point into The Velvet Glove in general. How did that all start?

d: Well, it all started when I started the first issue of Eightball, and I wanted to do a story that went on longer than the stuff I was used to. And so I thought, how am I going to do this, because if I write a really long story I'm going to be totally bored with it by like the third episode and I'm not going to finish it, and I'm going to be stuck in the middle. So I thought, I'm going to have to come up with something totally free-form that I can just make up as I go along, and it won't really make much of a difference because it'll be fitting with the way the story was begun, which will be very surreal and sort of you know, you're not knowing what to expect next. So I just wrote the first episode based on two dreams that I had had and sort of combining it with some other stuff that I had come up with. I had no idea where it was going after that. I just wrote, "to be continued." And then I did the second episode much the same way, and then the third, and by then I was sort of lost in this world that I had no way to get out of. So I had to, at that point, start figuring out how all this stuff comes together, and I had to start analyzing the stuff I had written and see how it all correlates and figure my way out of it.

m: Was it difficult for you to come up with an ending for the Velvet Glove?

d: Yes [laughs]. Yeah, I mean I was making it up as I went along, and after about six episodes I was getting ideas for how it could finish. But, they didn't really come together, so I just sort of kept writing. It was like I was sort of walking on a tight rope and sort of trying to balance and keep all these ideas afloat; it was sort of like trying to keep all these balls in the air while juggling or something. I didn't want to drop anything because I might need it at the end. So then I just decided, OK there'll be ten episodes and I'll just confine myself to that. And so, I still had all this stuff floating in the air by issue ten, and I had to sit down for like three weeks, chart everything out, and figure out every little character and what happened to them, and explain them in some way that I felt satisfied with them. It was the most work I'd ever done writing; I mean, it was exhausting. In retrospect, I'm pretty happy with the way I did it, but at the time I thought I really blew it.

m: So the idea behind it was that every character got a resolution?

d: Well, I didn't want a real resolution because the whole story was about how there really aren't any real resolutions. But I wanted at least the main characters to have, not quite a resolution, but something that implied a sort of break in their story so there was an apt place to end this particular story, and the reader could imagine future episodes of this story or the fate of this world I had drawn and how it carried on.

m: There's a real kind of what's-around-the-corner-next feeling to the whole thing, it's really episodic is I guess the word I'm looking for. Does that come from just walking around Chicago where spontaneous things tend to happen?

d: Yeah, it has to do with this sort of urban fear I grew up with. You're constantly aware that anything can happen. Stuff I would see when I moved to New York. . . I would get so used to seeing just scenes of horror and degradation that I got completely hardened to. . . . I remember walking home from the subway one night, and I remember seeing this guy laying face down on the cement in a pool of blood, and I just kind of walked past and sort of said, who cares. I remember thinking, oh it's just some drunk, you know, who cares. Surely some guy had just gotten blown away by like the mob or something. You know, I just went home and sort of mentioned it to people and they were like "pha, who cares." If that were out in the country or something and you saw that, it would change your entire life, it'd be the most important thing you'd ever seen. And I just remember seeing stuff like that all the time.

m: The comic side of Velvet Glove, -- it seems to me at least --is in its meanness. It kind of laughs at meanness and deformity and depravity and things like that. Does that come from learning to laugh at these things you were experiencing?

d: Yeah, well I think deep down I'm a very empathic person, and I have deep sympathy for people. I tend to have to try to stifle that because I'll just be depressed all the time if I let that part of my personality come forward. Because there's just so much to feel bad about [laughs], that the only way you can really deal with the world is just to see it as some sort of twisted joke that's basically funny on some level.