does infamous second son paper trail not eligible

Future issues ran bylines from Dan’l Clowes, D. (Unlike misfit penciller Dan Pussey, he never served time at a superhero outfit.) For the inaugural issue, he signed his pieces Daniel Clowes, D. G. C., and Dan Clowes. He was twenty-eight and living in his native Chicago, after a stint in New York, where he studied at the Pratt Institute-later lampooned in “Art School Confidential”-and drew comics for Cracked. Everything in Eightball was done by the artist Daniel Clowes.

The joke is that he has no one to blame but himself. In one story, the hard-boiled narrator breaks the fourth wall to grumble about space limits as he contemplates his dire straits: “A good question that deserves an answer-unfortunately I only have 6 pages in this issue so you’re gonna have to take my word for it.” At two bucks, the comic was a bargain, dense and delirious. The shading effects were done cleanly in Zip-A-Tone (a soon-to-be-discontinued adhesive sheet), and the peculiar lettering could look plucked from an earlier era, its fussiness forcing readers to come closer, slow down. It felt like the future, arrived at through the past. Her face is so hypnotic, you miss what’s hiding in plain sight.Įightball was published not long after Art Spiegelman’s groundbreaking memoir Maus (1986) and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s caped-crusader deconstruction Watchmen (1987), when the mainstream American press briefly lauded the literary potential of comics, but its word-drunk selection has little in common with such monumental works. The opening panel of the first story is a close-up of a stunning, raven-haired woman, with earrings that (on the third or thirteenth read) turn out to be Thalia and Melpomene, the classical masks of comedy and tragedy. Faces tend to be grotesque, and the dialogue is often stylishly rancid (“Yeah, stop fucking around, Douche…I don’t want our sales to be affected by this unreadable shit!”), but the comics’ sheer beauty and mystery can also knock you out. Varying in tone and ambition, each of the comics in Eightball’s first issue fixates on verbal zing and graphic textures. “Pages are waiting to be pencilled, written and inked!” “Get a move on, boys! Breakfast is ready!” cries the taskmaster to his underpaid team, bunked in the Infinity Comics compound. The closing feature is “Young Dan Pussey,” a warts-and-all take on a superhero comics mill-a meta-maneuver suggesting firsthand experience. Next comes a sleazy fable of adultery and novelty gags (“The Laffin’ Spittin’ Man”), dressed to kill in angular midcentury fashions and punctuated with the airborne sweat droplets known in the comics trade as plewds. (After getting a pentagram tattooed on her brow, she cackles, “I think it looks radical!”) Then there is “Devil Doll?,” a takeoff on those tracts drawn by the evangelical cartoonist Jack Chick that proselytizers still leave on subway seats-a campy-cruel three-pager in which heavy metal, PCP, and D&D lure a woman to a life of sin. In the surreal opener, “Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron,” our hero gets blindsided by a creepy bondage movie, soul-kissed by a filthy drunk, and arrested by sadistic cops he periodically flashes back to the troubled face of some lost love or phantom. In 1989 a two-dollar comic book called Eightball debuted with the aggressive subtitle “An Orgy of Spite, Vengeance, Hopelessness, Despair and Sexual Perversion.” True to the letter, the five vices suffuse its thirty-two black-and-white pages. A page from Daniel Clowes’s ‘Ghost World,’ which appeared in Eightball #17, August 1996

Does infamous second son paper trail not eligible