Dan Clowes: He-Man Comic Artist

Art School Confidential


m: So how'd you like art school?

d: Well, you can read about that in Eightball seven. There's that "Art School Confidential" in there.

m: Right, but that was pretty much exactly it?

d: Yeah, I mean it was a lot of fun, and it was a completely worthless experience in terms of education.

m: Did a girl really tell you that she wanted to be your dog?

d: Oh yeah, and I actually said "you and what army?"

m: Bet you were pretty proud of yourself after that.

d: Yeah, it was the first thing that popped into my head.

m: Ah, improvisation! So you liked it a lot cause it was crazy?

d: Well, yeah. It's a good way to score with crazy girls and to fool around for four years basically. You know, when I was paying off my college loans it didn't seem so fun. It's a good place to meet people. That's kind of the idea of art school, that you can meet people who you can later work for [laughs]. I got my first job at Cracked magazine -- that was like the first paying work I ever did -- and that was through a guy I went to art school with. You know, had I not gone I would have never known that guy. All my best friends were people I met through those years.

m: So things I take it were completely different there [art school] than at home. I mean you had this new liberty. . .

d: Yeah, I had the chance to reinvent myself in the image I had created in my sort of fantasy world in Chicago but didn't have the courage to implement. So all the sudden I could become this chain-smoking hipster I wanted to be. This bohemian. . .

m: So what years are we talking about?

d: This was like, I guess, '79 was the first year I moved there.

m: So you were in kind of the punk era there?

d: Yeah, sort of the last vestiges of that. But it was all brand new to me, so I was mister Johnny-come-lately. I got really tired of that by 1981 or so.

m: So did you pretty much know at this point that you were going to put out magazines or not at all?

d: No, this is still in the era when there was nothing going on comic- wise and we were self-publishing in college and doing things for our own amusement. But I had no idea that these would ever, you know, that I would ever be able to actually do something like that for a living. It wasn't until I started reading things like Love and Rockets in the mid eighties, like around 1983, that it ever occurred to me that it was possible. m: Were a lot of people telling you that you had a lot of talent and encouraging you?

d: No, not at all [laughs]

m: Really? Was it really competitive?

d: I sort of remember when I started art school I was very much in the middle of everybody. There were a lot of people worse than me and a lot of people better than me. I never had any training whatsoever, so I had a lot of stuff to unlearn about art before I could learn anything. So I felt kind of at a disadvantage, at least in retrospect.

m: Was it that you had to unlearn stuff that your parents had drilled into you?

d: . . . at the time I was trying to learn comics, I had been mostly studying bad Marvel comics in the mid-70s cause that was what was available. And that was just the worst thing that anybody could do because those artists were artists who were copying artists who were copying other artists, and it was as removed from real art as anything could be. I was copying fifth generation imitators of Jack Kirby basically, and that's really a bad thing to learn to do. I would pick up little background techniques and things like that instead of actually thinking about what I was trying to draw. It wasn't until I was about twenty years old that I gave up on all these old techniques and actually started thinking that if, you know, if I'm going to draw people then I'm really going to look at people and not just draw a bunch of bad comic book cliches.