It Is Only A Matter Of Time Before We Find Out Where Dan Clowes Hid The Bodies

I like Daniel Clowes a lot, but I think the most prevalent theme in his comics has been entirely overlooked.  It stares me in the face every time I see his stuff.

I’ve been reading his comics since I was maybe 14. Critical appraisals of his work all seem to mush into one- he was the voice of ‘post-adolescent aimlessness’, Mr. Ghost World; and he’s the OK Soda guy, his work encapsulating a distinct sense of 20th century ennui and alienation. Comparisons with J.D. Salinger are common.

No-one talks about the most evident them of all in his work- that Dan Clowes wants to kill a lot of people, and has possibly already killed.  Allow me to explain!

Right from his earliest issues of Eightball, Clowes stakes out a firm position as the only right-thinking character on earth. This is a common stance for a comedian or cultural commentator, and one that’s echoed by Clowes’ contemporaries from the same era- the comedian Bill Hicks springs to mind. Like Hicks, Clowes often describes the rest of humanity as maggots, ants, or vermin.

The earth is sick with humanity. There’s too many people. They’re equal to lice.

The cure?

 

The cure is a machine gun!

Above, Clowes outlines some of his violent impulses. In his self-insertion narratives, these are always internalized and never acted upon.

Of course, Ghost World’s Josh and ‘Dan Pussey’, both alternate-universe versions of Clowes, are the kind of people who ‘snap’ and become serial killers.

In this panel from his short ‘My Suicide’, Clowes rationalizes his violent fantasies by suggesting that the rest of humanity all think about far worse things. The idea that he is the one abnormal one seems to be impossible for him to comprehend.

Here’s an early Eightball strip which has never been collected as far as I know. It’s reminiscent of another strip, ‘The Party’, where main character Dan Clowes goes to a party populated by the typically dumb stereotypes that fill his pages. This one is about a ‘famous writer’ attending a similar party. The ending, though, is a little different:

From this point on, murder becomes a prevalent theme in Clowes’ work. Nearly everything Clowes has written after Ghost World involves a murder or otherwise criminal subplot of some description, usually perpetrated by an educated man with a dim view of civilisation. But even his beleaguered hero David Boring seems to harbour the same opinions that characterise Clowes’s killers:

When we’re introduced to the love interest in David Boring, Clowes endears her to us in a typically Clowesian fashion- she’s a ‘practically genocidal’, ‘fascistic’ woman who David can talk with about how horrible everything is.

The sentiment in the excerpt above is echoed by the narrator of Clowes’ strip ‘MCMLXVI’. Both characters lament the same thing- why must ordinary, unworthy people turn up and spoil the hero’s perfectly curated vision of the world?

Around the time of Ghost World, Clowes was talking about writing a book which would be a recreation of his school days, only this time he would have a ‘Death Ray’. This story finally surfaced in 2004. The main character, Andy, grows up into an uptight conservative who loves his dog and hates people who transgress his very specific moral boundaries. From the psychological profile we’ve built, we can infer that Andy’s words could be Clowes’ own:

Around the same time, Clowes was working on perhaps his most misanthropic work of all, the 2006 movie ‘Art School Confidential’. The film is based on a funny Eightball strip about Clowes’s days at Art School- this expanded revision, uh, adds a disgruntled professor who kills people and paints pictures of their remains.

In the paintings, we can see echoes of the lummoxes that populate Clowes’ earlier work. Compare this woman’s dumb-looking toothy mouth with Stoob in Death Ray, or the ‘jocks’ who bullied Dan Pussey, above.

Revealing his crimes to the audience, the professor says of one victim: “he was too stupid to live”. To which the young Clowesian hero replies:

“All of humanity is too stupid to live… fuck them all!”

The young man ends the film in prison, but as a successful and critically lauded artist- one gets the sense that Clowes himself is unsure what reward this path should reap. In fact, in The Death Ray Clowes allowed us to decide how the story would end. Perhaps this shows an awareness of the limitations of this way of thinking- that it can only lead to loneliness or destruction, and maybe it shows the crossroads that Clowes himself must find himself at.

It’s fitting that Clowes should draw so much comparison to J.D. Salinger. Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye was often cited by convicted killers as an inspiration for their crimes- Charles Manson and Mark Chapman among them- but this was a misreading of the book’s intent. Holden Caulfield’s worldview was not J.D. Salinger’s, and The Catcher in The Rye contains characters who provide to the readers a sense of wisdom and  perspective that Caulfield lacks. In Clowes’ work, however, the idea that humanity is sick and deserves only death bleeds onto the page without any sense of authorial distance.

Clowes is now married with a seven-year old son and is presumably living a happy and fulfilled life. Are characters like old Andy and the murderous art professor a fanciful projection of how Clowes could have ended up, if he’d carried his ‘angry young man’ schtick into middle age? Or- after his child is tucked up in bed, does he sneak into the park and strangle a huge foreheaded, ginger mulleted jock and leave him buried in a shallow grave? We demand answers, Clowes! Your secrets cannot remain hidden any longer!