Living myth of the American countercultural comic, Daniel Clowes (Chicago, 1961) passed through Madrid this past November as a star of the graphic novel to chat at the Reina Sofía Museum in the shelter of the complete publication in Spain, finally, of ‘eight ball‘ (Fulgencio Pimentel), the badass fanzine that he started in 1989 and that elevated him to the altars of corrosive comedy. His work of yesteryear? This is how he defined it in a cartoon: “An ‘underground’ cartoonist is the person who creates pictographic stories, often fictitious, for the entertainment of a small group of marginalized people and drug addicts.” He was on the verge of giving it up but, poetic injustice, he has ended up elevated in the modern art museums whose good people he mocked so much. They even revere him.
-At sixty years old, as a recognized author, how do you see the stories of ‘Eight Ball’? With tenderness? With pride?
-To me, they almost seem like the works of a child, from so long ago. They are almost 40 years old. But I’m very proud that, even at that age, I made a lot of good decisions, like trying to make very ambitious comics in a way that’s unusual for someone young. And not get carried away by working for companies that would have wanted to change my style, not listen to anyone who said: “This is too extreme and will not sell to the general public.” I knew I shouldn’t hear that. So I’m very happy about it. I see the errors, of course. What always surprises me is how tense he was to make comics look good and to be considered a real comics artist, even though he was very young. I shouldn’t have felt this way. But you can see that I was holding the brush tensely in my hand, really struggling, using rulers for each line, trying to make everything look right, in a way that I can now do without thinking about it. I see that struggle and I think that struggle enhances the art of the first issues. It makes you feel the tension.
-The ‘hate’ chapters are hilarious. I hated the mullet hairstyle.
-It’s strange… I was the first. There really wasn’t a word for it. When I mentioned it, a lot of people were like, “Oh, I hate it too. “I hate it.” And then in pop culture, it became a phenomenon like a year or two later. And I felt like they didn’t want to give me credit.
-In Spain it is fashionable.
-It’s coming back. And, in fact, I kind of like it now. With ironic distance, it’s fun.
-I also hated the Rolling Stones. Have you added new hatreds?
-Now I love the Rolling Stones. It’s not funny anymore… That’s the problem: hate is real. There are things that are really scary. I used to hate things that weren’t scary, things that were just culturally irritating. I mostly hated the Rolling Stones and stuff like that. He didn’t hate them, he hated the kind of people who adored them. Because they were very oppressive, they were everywhere and I wanted to insult them. But now, of course, they are 80 years old, like me. They are old. And I think, “Of course I love them.” So in this sense, everything is very different. But yes, people tell me: “You don’t hate as much as you did when you were young.” Now it’s much deeper. Actually, I think that hatred of mine before was the hatred of an optimist. It was like, “Everything is fine. We are going in a good direction. So I’m going to look at the little imperfections.” Now I feel like we’re doomed, I feel less optimistic and I no longer have the energy to get angry over small things like TikTok. I don’t know if that kind of hatred exists in the world anymore. I used to have a lot of friends who got really angry over the smallest and most unimportant things. You know, because of the music in the restaurant. Outraged. How can people hear this? I love that type of person. He’s my favorite type of person, in fact. So I made some story about that guy who always has an opinion and gets angry about everything. Nowadays, people can’t be like that, at least in America, because there is a real hatred that is very destructive.
-The seed for writing the first chapter of ‘Like a silk glove forged in iron’, the surreal graphic novel inside ‘Eight Ball’, was a visit to a seedy cinema. Do you force yourself to go to strange places to get inspired?
-Well, back then, that was just my life. He was very interested in all the seedier places in New York. That was a theater near where I lived called the Variety Theater. You can see it in ‘Taxi Driver’. You walked in and there was no advertisement for the movies they were showing. They simply showed two to four movies a day. You’d go in, I think it was like a dollar or something, and my friends and I would go in and sometimes you’d see some amazing Czech arthouse movie or something, and you’d be like, “What is this?” Or it could be the worst quality porn film that anyone made today. Grainy black and white movies, with fat women fighting. The audience was full of degenerates: guys in trench coats, or prostitutes without a leg or an eye, wandering the halls looking for clients. I remember standing in line to get into the bathroom and thinking, “I’m never going to use that bathroom.”
-Returning to the Rolling Stones, another comic strip is ‘Comic Artists VS Rock Stars’. Congratulations, you have won! Well, they say rock is dead…
-I remember my colleague Peter Bagge said something about the battle between cartoonists and rock stars: a battle that rock stars haven’t even heard about… Of course, in those days there were bands, at the beginning of the It was grunge, they loved us. And they were like, “Oh my God, I’m meeting Peter Bagge and Robert Crumb!” And then they left with their five ‘groupies’. And we were left thinking: “I thought we were the cool ones.” We always found it funny. I collect all the magazines that interviewed me in those days. And I have magazines from 1991 or 1992. And on the cover appears some rocker that you haven’t remembered again, like Camper Van Beethoven. They’re on the cover, and I’m on page 63. You look at the whole magazine, and there are actors, movies, models… None of those groups were relevant again.
Daniel Clowes at the Reina Sofía Museum
-In your case, with your ‘Ghost World’ comic, did you reach a larger female audience?
-With ‘Ghost World’ more female readers arrived. I often had the experience of going to small comic festivals, and hanging out with, I don’t know, a Marvel inker or something. Suddenly they would announce, “Line up,” and they would have like 50 fat guys with beards, while I would usually get the only woman there, who was usually the girlfriend of one of those fat bearded guys. I always thought, “Well, mine is better than yours.” But yeah, when ‘Ghost World’ came out it was something completely different. It was the first time, along with ‘Love and Rockets’, that women felt there was something they could read.
-He studied Fine Arts, and far from criticizing the career, he values it as something positive because “never again will you be surrounded by such a large group of people whose pretentiousness will be encouraged.”
-That is still etched in my mind. I think about how there were so many people who were such serious artists and really worked on their art. Every ten years or so, I do a Google search. Almost none of them even had any kind of career in the arts. They immediately said something like, “To hell with this!” Now I feel bad about my perspective back then, that of making fun of their excesses.
-In art it is better to know how to sell yourself than to have talent?
-Someone who is very persuasive can achieve a lot, but you can’t do a mediocre job and expect to receive respect or benefits in the long term. Although in the comic, there is a different immediate reaction to music or literature. You can be the shyest person in the world, but if you have a page that an editor sees and says, “What is this?”, the reaction is quick. There are many comic artists who can barely speak. When I first met Chester Brown, I could barely say a word. When I met Jaime Hernández, we went to a restaurant, and Jaime would whisper his order to Gilbert (his brother) so that Gilbert would order for him. I was too shy to talk to the waiter.
-In fact, it has a fable in which a climber explains his ‘lessons of wisdom’ to the pure of heart… and poor. Do harmless people have a worse time surviving?
-Clear. As an artist, all my friends are artists in different fields, and you can see from day one who is allergic to success or money, especially money. I have friends who, when faced with any opportunity that could bring them recognition or profit, say: “I’m going to do just the opposite.” And then you see those who are attracted to it, which is a natural state. Some always find a way to achieve everything, and others simply never will. In comics there is this kind of shy and withdrawn character… because, in the end, comics are made in a lonely room. It is a monastic process. It is, in many ways, a meditation practice. As you get older, that’s the part that has become addictive for me. Being in that room is almost like praying: the act of cutting the paper, tracing the lines, you feel like you are making a manuscript in a 12th century monastery.
-Are you worried about AI?
-I’m worried it’s the Terminator, but it’s unlikely. The rest is not, “Oh, I’m terrified of this happening!” but rather, “I know it’s going to happen.” And it will make everything even worse than it already is. Everything will be horribly ugly. Whoever would have previously hired a real designer or artist will use AI. Everything will look the same, it will be confusing and horrible. Another thing that will make the world uglier. The answer lies in the question: if there is a way to make things easier but worse, people will use it.
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