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Arts & Entertainment

Daniel Clowes, Cartoonist

John Del Signore

Published May 5, 2010

Modified May 5, 2010

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John Del Signore

Published May 5, 2010

Modified May 5, 2010

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Even if you're unfamiliar with graphic novels or comics, you probably know Daniel Clowes's work, if only because his series Ghost World was expertly adapted into a 2000 film of the same name, starring Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson, and Steve Buscemi. Over the past few decades, Clowes has been instrumental in the journey of comic books into a more widely appreciated mainstream art form.

His latest book, Wilson, draws on a wide spectrum of cartoon styles to tell the story of an isolated, semi-bitter intellectual renegade on the outer limits of mainstream America. Tonight Clowes will be appearing at The Strand, signing books and talking with David Hajdu, author of Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America .

Where did the idea for this book come from? Can you pinpoint where it started? Yeah, my dad was in the hospital, very much like Wilson's dad. And so I had a week of sitting there, during that time when you're just sort of sitting doing nothing, and I was starting to have anxiety attacks, so I thought, "I should get out my sketchbook and try to draw something." So I got out my sketchbook and tried to work on stuff I was already working on, and I just couldn't concentrate, so I thought, "I'm just gonna draw a funny little comic strip and see how that goes," just to amuse myself and distract myself.

The first strip I drew was basically the one where he's waiting in the airplane gate, talking to the businessman, and that sort of popped out of my head. I guess I had just been on a plane, so I was thinking about that. And so all of a sudden, the next thing I knew, five days later I had drawn hundreds of these strips with this character who sort of emerged full-blown onto the page right there. Once I got home, I realized when you have a character like that, you've got to make use of it; it's what all cartoonists dream of, a character who can make something out of every situation and sort of surprise you with what he does.

There are some autobiographical similarities between you and Wilson. Where does that begin and end? That's probably for my therapist to say. [Laughs] I feel like Wilson is the kind of person I know, the kind of person who tends to be in my little social class. I know a lot of people who are smart and educated, but also poor and not successful, and that's sort of an interesting class of people that doesn't get discussed, and that tends to be the crowd I find myself in, so he certainly reflects the opinions and resentments of that group.

Do you see this in any way as a cautionary tale for people in this little tribe? Yeah, it's one of those things, I'm not sure what you do. If you make the choice at 22 to become a journalist, or an artist, or a novelist or something, as opposed to going to law school or studying dentistry, you're sort of setting yourself up for that. But I would also say that all of my friends, all of the people I like, all if the people who sort of make life worth living are within this group to some degree. So I wouldn't want to discourage anybody from it, but I find it an interesting thing. It's a group that not identified, I guess.

And the cities that Wilson's set in are both very familiar to you? Yeah, he lives in my neighborhood, for sure. People who live in Oakland will recognize the exact area that he haunts. It's kind of a beaten-down, less-glamorous part of the bay area. He grew up in the same neighborhood I grew up in in Chicago, on the south side. That's really specific too. I'm not sure what that means other than that it obviously resonates with me, and has an emotional impact for me when I kind of deal with revisiting those areas, the lost world of my childhood.

Why did you decide to draw in different illustrative styles for the different pages? Well, when I actually sat down to draw this thing, I thought I better come up with a style for this. And I'd drawn different books in different styles, and I thought I'd come upon the perfect style that encompassed all of what needed to be said about this guy, and I just couldn't decide on one. I kept veering really drastically from the most cartoon-simple style, to the most detailed, over-rendered, drawing-every-eyelash kind of style. Ultimately I decided the only way it would work is if I had all of these, and if each strip had its own reality and its own personality that was related to the others, but kind of different in the way it sort of modulates the humor, and deals with the emotions of the story. In some cases I wanted it to just read as a joke, and others I wanted it to seem like a joke but actually it's the furthest thing possible from a joke.

Yeah, I liked how parts of it are very funny, and parts of it are very sad and intense. It's a difficult line to walk. It's interesting, It involved a lot of changing things around and a lot of editing to it to flow correctly. I wanted it to set up a pattern at first, wherein the you think it's just going to be goofy, unrelated jokes—and sort of halfway through you'd realize there was a reason behind the sequence all along.

Where did the name Wilson come from? I wanted a very bland name, the type of comic strip name you'd see in a '50s or '60s comic strip that has no distinguishing characteristic at all. Of course, there's Mr. Wilson, who lives next door to Dennis the Menace. There are lots of people with the last name Wilson, it's probably like the eighth most common name in America, something like that. It's not as obvious as Smith, but I wanted it to seem generic, I wanted him to seem in some way like he's a comic character. You don't even know if it's his first or last name because I changed my mind about that so much that I decided it's just a single name, like Cher.

Or Greenberg. Right. Certainly I didn't know about Greenberg when Wilson came along, I'm glad I didn't give him a Jewish name, because I thought about that for awhile.

I can see some tonal similarities with the two characters. Yeah, I liked Greenberg.

You went to Pratt, do you miss New York at all? It's so different. I feel like I lived in New York during what I call the "Sidney Lumet Years," when everything looked like Dog Day Afternoon, and everybody was ugly and greasy and wore horrible looking clothes. There was rampant crime, but there was something really fun and exciting about that. When I go back, I cannot believe there's a Whole Foods on Houston Street, I can't accept all the changes. It seems like this unapproachable island of the rich at this point, it doesn't seem at all like what I left. Brooklyn, the thought of Brooklyn ever being a cool place to live back when I was there was just inconceivable.

When were you there? '79 through '85.

Have you been back to Pratt or that neighborhood since? Yeah, every time I go for more than a couple days in New York I always wind up going up to Pratt just to check it out. I just wind up walking through the halls, there's no security or anything. Walk in and check out the classrooms. It really hasn't changed all that much. At least they got some money, it's a little nicer than it used to be, but that's about it.

Someone was telling me you have a favorite diner in Fort Greene? Yeah, there was a place, still there, right across from the campus, it was called "Mike's Luncheon," I'm not sure if it's the same name. It's just diagonal from the campus. We used to go there everyday. And I had a tab there, which was inconceivable that somebody would give me a tab. I'd just go, "Put it on my tab!"

Can you please tell us about tonight's event at The Strand? Yeah, just sorta put together a bunch of slides of stuff I've done over the years, kind of like an overview of my little career leading up to Wilson, and it obviously will focus on that. The idea is that David Hajdu, a very smart journalist who has written about comics in the '50s and Bob Dylan, will do a Q & A. So it's gonna be a free-form thing; he's going to ask questions, show the slides, talk about the books and other stuff, and I'll sign books.

Is it intentional that you do stuff like this at an independent book store when you have the opportunity, or is that just how it worked out? Certainly I like to support the independent bookstores, but I'm not opposed to Barnes and Noble or whatever. But that's my world, the independent guys. Can't do better than Strand in New York. Can't think of where else would be better than that.

I really love your New Yorker covers, I'm thinking particularly of the most recent one for the anniversary issue, with the butterfly... Thank you. It was really weird. Originally it was going to be much more of a stand-alone thing, where it was the day of that butterfly running into Eustace Tilly, and then some of the other artists got involved, and it became this crazy narrative that makes no sense. Once you see the other covers, it's a little odd. I have another one coming up June 1st for the graduation issue.

OK, great. I think yours stands alone... I'm glad. I thought it was a little odd. But it was fun to do. I never really noticed how weird that butterfly was. It doesn't resemble any living butterfly. I did all this research trying to find out what butterfly [Rea Irvin] was looking at, and it was nothing, he just made up this crazy thing.

Ghost World was such a good film. Do you have anything else coming up that you would like to see made into a movie, or are planning to do? I have a bunch of stuff in various stages of completion. But I learned with Ghost World that it's really a mistake to start talking about all your movie projects, because I sort of started talking about Ghost World right when we first got the offer to write the script. I assumed that you get that offer, the movie's gonna be made in a year, and there's no problems involved. And that was 1996 when I first got the offer and started telling everybody, "Yeah, yeah we're gonna do this movie!" And then it didn't get made until late 2000, so it was like four years of, "Are you still making the movie?" Of course there were a million failed deals that all fell through before it finally happened. I truly regretted it. A friend of mine said, "Don't tell anybody about your movie project until it's going to be in theaters that weekend, then you can be fairly sure that it's going to come out."

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John Del Signore

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Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.

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