I was sort of fishing around to see what people could get out of the work. Also, at the time, I hadn’t decided what kind of an artist I wanted to be, or even if comics were what I’d be good at, so I was trying out different styles, different styles of humor. And now, when I look back at it, it all seems much more cohesive than I ever imagined or intended. I thought, People are going to think it was done by a team of different artists. Yeah, the interesting thing is that, at the time, it really felt like it was all over the map. Looking back, do you feel it was borne out in “Eightball”? At least that was the theory I was going by._ _ But I also had the theory that if it was all by the same artist, and the artist was trying to be truthful or willing to let his unconscious or his intuition decide what was going to happen on the pages, then it would all kind of come together in a cohesive way. The thought was that if you did stories in all these different styles-if you combined the serious stuff with humorous stuff-that the result would be kind of discordant. I remember my initial impetus: I wanted to do an anthology publication like Mad magazine, but I just wanted it to be all my own work-with no other collaborators.

Was it your intention to try out different approaches each time?

The stories you were doing in “Eightball” cross many genres, use different drawing styles, and are of varying length. We asked Clowes to reflect on his work from the past twenty-five years. From 1989 to 1997, Daniel Clowes produced eighteen issues of a comic-book series called_ _“Eightball.” As Sean Nelson wrote recently in The Stranger, “ Eightball became one of the essential comedic touchstones of 1990s culture, a way to help the self-selecting weirdos of the pre-internet-or at least pre- good-internet-era identify kindred spirits and speak in shorthand.” The series is now about to be rereleased as a “slipcased set of two hardcover volumes, reproducing each issue in facsimile form exactly as they were originally published.” The irony of a hundred-and-twenty-dollar volume that collects comic books which sold for two dollars and fifty cents an issue cannot be lost on Daniel Clowes, the cartoonist, graphic novelist, and filmmaker (with Terry Zwigoff for “Ghost World” and “Art School Confidential”) who’s widely considered a one-man embodiment of nineties cool.

Eightball daniel clowes