“I wanted to take the sensibility of the underground,” he says, “and apply it to longer narratives.”Ĭlowes’ early comics, collected in “20th Century Eightball,” show just how grim and socially uncomfortable Clowes could be. He grew up middle-class outside Chicago and attended Pratt Institute, the Brooklyn art school that he later skewered in the strip “Art School Confidential.” While writing and drawing pieces for Cracked magazine in the mid-1980s, he began to work on his first continuing character, the lounge-culture-loving detective Lloyd Llewellyn, and by 1989, Fantagraphics was publishing Clowes’ occasional comic “Eightball.”Ĭlowes was inspired by Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts,” as well as the advances made by Crumb and Spiegelman. “And his sense of humor - finding humor in the razor’s edge between tragedy and comedy - there’s a lot of resonance between me and him.”īy the time he was 4 or 5, Clowes was drawing little comics on the cardboard that the dry cleaner wrapped around his father’s shirts. “I think we have a similar worldview,” the author allows. In person, Clowes - who has created an oeuvre marked by hard-edged social criticism, over-the-top satire and obnoxious, confrontational characters - is almost disappointingly well-adjusted: He’s intellectual without being weirdly intense, skeptical without being bitter, observant without being harshly judgmental.īut in some ways, Wilson shares Clowes’ DNA. “It came from within: I thought I’d make something both personally meaningful and something an audience would find interesting.” “I didn’t intend to go in and try to push the envelope on how unpleasant I could make him,” a slim, bald and darkly handsome Clowes, 49, says over coffee at a Los Feliz cafe. Which is impressive, because this bearded, self-righteous, middle-aged slob may also be the author’s least likable protagonist in a decade or more. As unlikable as Wilson is, the book helped pack Skylight Books a few weeks ago and has already become Clowes’ bestselling work. But so far he’s been good for this cartoonist who broke into the mainstream with “Ghost World” and has defined a whole subgenre of post-Crumb, post-Spiegelman “alternative comics” since. He’s Wilson - the main character in Daniel Clowes’ new graphic novel “Wilson” (Drawn and Quarterly: 78 pp., $21.95) and, it’s worth remembering, not Clowes himself.

He has no job and no family, and he’s both totally oblivious and smart enough to know how insufferable he is. He’s full of odes to the sweep of life and won’t stop sharing them with the strangers he accosts in coffee shops. He’s the kind of guy who waxes rhapsodic about his love for the human race but curses people who don’t smile at his dog.

Wilson by daniel clowes