Dan Clowes: He-Man Comic Artist
Flaws
m: If you took issue thirteen versus issue one, what in the quality
of work are you seeing that's a lot better?
d: Just on the surface, the artwork on number one to me looks
hopelessly crude. I mean, it looks to me like I inked the whole
thing with a toothbrush or something. With number one, I spent
forever on this issue. It was the absolute best I could do. It
took me like six months because I wasn't on a deadline since it
was my first issue. But just in terms of the drawing and story-
telling there's a certain clunkiness where I hadn't worked out a
lot of the mechanics of comics yet.
When I look at number thirteen, I see there's sort of an
invisible sophistication to it that the average reader might not
see, but I'm now aware of, where the characters seem more
placed in their environment and there are subtle details that I'm
executing that I wasn't even aware of with number one. On a
general quality level, the later Eightball,s are a lot more what I
was going for in the first place, and the first one was sort of an
attempt at that.
m: That's interesting to me. I'd love to know if you could cite just
one or two examples of the kind of subtle detail that you're
getting more deft at.
d: It's sort of hard to talk about the old ones in terms of the lack of
that, but I can talk about the new issues. This is very technical,
but people who draw every day will understand this. In the
Ghost World stories I'm dealing with perspectives that are really
naturalistic. So if you look at things in the background there are
generally two angles of perspective, which is a really
complicated thing to figure out. But I think it gives it a more
naturalistic look. It's like looking through a camera lens or
something. And it's very complicated to figure out, especially
when there's a bunch of figures talking in the panel; but it
doesn't seem complicated, it seems as if this is a very simple
way of drawing.
In the first Eightball every background is sort of an
approximation of a background; it's sort of ruled out in square
angles in a very simple way; it's very flat, it's almost like you're
looking at a diarama in the background or a backdrop or
something. Whereas in the newer issues, there's depth to it, and
it's as if there's a real world that continues on. And, you know,
there's something to be said for a sort of flat backdrop sort of
backgroun
d: It gives it this sort of forced claustrophobic fake
look, but that wasn't really my intention; it was just that that
was all I could draw comfortably at this point.
m: Does it also reinforce the sort of archtypal sort of imagery in
Velvet Glove.
d: Yeah, I think it kind of worked to its advantage in the first
couple of issues. I just feel a lot more confidence now. You could
make up any scenario that would seem horrible to draw and I could
grasp it and deal with it in some way. Whereas in the first issue, if I
thought of something that was not going to be easy to draw, I
probably would have written it out of the story [laughs]. So I just
feel a lot more confidence and a lot more breadth of ideas. And I
feel that my ideas are a lot more coherent at this point. I was sort of
going on instinct in the first couple of issues, and now I think I'm
more aware of the issues I'm trying to deal with, the larger goings-on
behind the stories.
