I remember one day thinking, ‘I really don’t need to finish this just for the Dallas Fantasy Fair.’ The important thing for him and for Fantagraphics was to get “Eightball” out three or four times a year.īut, Clowes says, “At a certain point I realized I was cutting corners and doing things that I wasn’t exactly happy with, just to meet a deadline or to be ready for a comics convention. “Maybe it’s that the rest of the culture was so stultifyingly uniform.”Ĭlowes had no model in mind when he started “Eightball,” beyond wanting the comic “to look like an old issue of ‘Zap’… to have that throwaway feel.” In the early years he’d fill pages with whatever was floating through his head, whether it was the surreal, serialized detective story that would become his graphic novel “Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron,” short rants about modern life or raunchy parodies of old “Richie Rich” comics. “I just think there was a moment there, where people outside the comics world opened up to reading comics,” Clowes says. The rise of “Eightball” overlapped with the success of other alternative comics like Peter Bagge’s “Hate” and Chris Ware’s “Acme Novelty Library” as well as the dawn of Nirvana, Quentin Tarantino movies and “The Simpsons.” Today, Clowes is one of the most respected of the “literary comics” creators, known for his graphic novels such as “Ghost World” (which was adapted into an acclaimed 2001 indie film).īut he built his following via the eight years of stories and gags that have been collected in the new two-volume, slipcased hardcover book “The Complete Eightball 1-18” (Fantagraphics: 454 pp., $119.99).

By 1997, when the 18th issue of “Eightball” came out, Clowes estimates his circulation was around 25,000. At the time, the larger popular culture was barely paying serious attention to any comics, let alone to work like his, pitched partway between high art, punk rock and MAD magazine. He was part of a small wave of upstart young cartoonists pumping out strange little humor pieces for a handful of adults-only anthologies. When the first issue of Daniel Clowes’ comic book “Eightball” was published in October 1989, Fantagraphics Books printed 3,000 copies, and Clowes was sure it would take about five years to sell them all.

Eightball comic