Dan Clowes: He-Man Comic Artist

Fleeing the Home Life
d: Oh yeah. Yeah I had this really kind of fucked up family that I was tired of dealing with. It's like, my parents got divorced when I was young, so I had to sort of split time with my mom and my dad and my grandparents. I actually didn't have one house. I'd have to move every two days to a different house.

m: Oh, man.

d: [laughs] It was this really agonizing way to grow up. I was kind of looking forward to getting the hell out of there and not having to deal diplomatically with all my parents.

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: Do you think being part of that scene influenced you a lot as far as your art?

d: Oh yeah, sure, because one of the things about the scene was that it gave people the freedom to be whatever they wanted to be. You didn't have to feel guilty for liking stuff like comic books. I mean, when I was growing up, I went through this kind of hoity- toity private school where if you even brought up something like comic strips, it was just laughed out of the room, and then all the sudden I had this attitude like "ey, fuck you, I can do comic strips if I want, comic strips are awesome!" It's kind of like, you know, I was into all this total junk culture at the time, just bad rock and roll from the sixties and all this crap, and then all the sudden I was allowed to like this stuff, and it was really cool, so yeah it was great. It was a very freeing experience for me because [before] I felt like there was nobody else who shared my aesthetics and that they were really stupid. And all the sudden I was meeting all these interesting people who were into the same kind of stuff.

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.

m: So what kind of influences were you having at that particular time as far as other media, I mean were you into movies, or was there some kind of music that kind of influenced the way you were seeing things?

d: Certainly I was starting to expand my horizons and all that stuff. At that time, New York was a great place for someone who was trying to learn about movies because there were about ten theaters showing old black and white films at the time. There was one summer were I'd go and see two movies every single day. And that was when I was really learning stuff. You know, I'd go see weird experimental art films from the sixties and all the film noir stuff and Hollywood stuff that I'd never seen. I wound up seeing like all the old classics and then just buying records. That was back when you could buy records for like three dollars. You know, I'd just buy tons of bad, old, used records and, you know, just going to book stores and trying to absorb all this culture that I was not familiar with until then.

m: Does a lot of that stuff play itself out still in Eightball?

d: Oh yeah, I mean it's all kind of the foundation for my thinking. That's when I was starting to figure out sort of critically what I really liked and what I thought was really stupid. You know, when I was in high school, I was sort of going along with what other people would tell me was cool and I would try to get into it, and if I didn't like it I would think that it's just cause I'm stupid and I don't understand it, but that if I keep trying to get into it one day I will understand why Lord of the Rings is such a great story. And then when I was like eighteen or so, I sort of realized that it's not me, this really does suck [laughs], and there's a lot of cool stuff out there that I actually do like. And I sort of started figuring out what it was that I really liked and tried to be honest with myself and tried to like stuff on its own merits and not just because people said it was good. So that was good for me.

m: So it was also good to be away from the home situation.

d: Yeah, yeah, just away from. . . like I went to this high school where it was like the same hundred kids from kindergarten, not even a hundred, it was like seventy-five kids, and by the end I hated every single one of them. I would have gladly mowed down the entire class with an UZI [laughs], so it was great to meet some decent human beings.

m: Those people that you'd like to have mowed down, do you think they make any cameo appearances in your work now?

d: Oh yeah, all the time, I use their real names often.

m: [laughs] Do you really?

d: Yeah, I used the name of one of my old English teachers, and some guy who I didn't know at the time -- he now works at my old high school and is a comic fan -- he just works in the library, and I guess he showed it to the teacher. The guy [the teacher] didn't remember me at all. He was pissed off that I made him into this buffoonish character [laughs].

m: So, you got any lawsuits coming or anything like that?

d: No, if you read the fine print it says, you know, any similarity is merely a coincidence. Actually, in the new issue I did this thing about sports, and it's all about the Freudian significance of sports. It's narrated by my old gym teacher, who was just the most horrible neo-Nazi asshole who tortured me for fifteen years of my life. So I draw him sort of expounding on how, you know, sports are like sublimated homosexuality, and I'd draw pictures of him from my old yearbooks and stuff.

m: [laughs] So is that going to be in issue fourteen?

d: Yeah, that'll be in fourteen.

m: When is that coming out?

d: I'm hoping for like the first week in October or late September.