Eightball #23, "The Death-Ray," begins in a mode all too common to the work of Daniel Clowes, with the lamentations of insufferably jaded losers. Meet our protagonist, Andy:
I guess I don't have a lot in common with most other kids. I don't really like rock music or TV shows.... It's my opinion that most people don't really care about music anyway, that they just want to be part of the "cool crowd," which is okay, I guess. My trouble is I can never really find a group I want to join.
One might object by saying that this cliched anomie belongs Andy, not Clowes, that Clowes presents these tired sentiments for scrutiny, not emulation. And he does, but that misses the point: any critique of Andy's detached, adolescent viewpoint is just as redundant, just as tiresome as Andy's critiques of the cool crowd. Had "The Death-Ray" stayed on this tedious register, dutifully charting the psychology of a Salinger stereotype, there would be little to recommend it.
The story's power lies in its connection of Andy's dangerous self-absorption to America's current relationship with the rest of the world. Andy's isolation as a teenager melds seamlessly into his fantasies of becoming a superhero, which in turn feed into the fantasies of victimization and vengeance necessary to justify his violent acts, which themselves settle into a petulant, distinctly middle-aged isolation that feels more Dirty Harry than Spider-Man ("Who am I? Your worst nightmare"). One leads inexorably to the next, so that by the time Clowes is openly addressing current events - titling one section "The United States of Andy" leaves us little wiggle room - he's created the impression that a posture of wounded, isolationist militarism is just as adolescent as young Andy and Louie's dreams of blowing up the world.
It's no accident that the Death-Ray's costume so closely resembles that of Spider-Man, who became (in the wildly successful movie) America's first post-September 11th superhero, or that Andy would begin his costumed career with an Uncle Ben-style fantasy in which he imagines his grandfather has been shot, a tragedy that would grant him license to exact brutal revenge.
Andy and his partner Louie prefer to think they commit their actions on behalf of others: Janet Mastroserio, Theresa and Sonny, Dinah and her daughter, "the weak, the innocent, the unloved, and the friendless." (The last two items in Andy's list seem more evocative of Andy himself, perhaps a sign of who he's really serving.) By the present day, when Andy has isolated himself completely and has no more friends to watch over, he claims to be looking out for us, "Mr. and Mrs. Decent Citizen," when just one page earlier he tells us, "You think anybody cares about you? [...] You should have been an abortion or sold into slavery." But so long as Andy can believe he acts on behalf of defenseless innocents, or to avenge a tragic death, he can justify any atrocity.
Doing so, however, only isolates him further. In the last panel of the issue's introductory present-day framing sequence - a panel that will color our reading of all that follows - Andy complains, "You try to make the world a better place and what does it get you? I mean, Christ, how the hell does one man stand a chance against four billion assholes?" Presumably Clowes meant six billion, but the point is made; he's inviting us to read Andy as a figure for a Bush-helmed America which, while claiming to act in everybody's best interests, only turns the rest of the world into its enemies.
Which is not to say this point is always made with subtlety or skill. Clowes deftly connects Andy's superhero fantasies to a post-9/11 victim/revenge mentality through action and implication, but when he has Louie spout, "We're doing it for America!" the theme bears down too heavily. The political critique, sometimes effectively understated, is also sometimes horribly overdetermined.
Clowes's execution falls short of his thematic reach in other areas as well. Despite the chapters' many apparent shifts between different subjects and points of view and levels of fantasy or objectivity, they're all rendered in the same flat, sketchy style and washed-out colors. While these elements are clearly deliberate choices, their uniformity seems especially unequal to the task of differentiating between reality and various types of subjective narration or fantasy. The double-page splash of The Death-Ray striking a criminal needs to be rendered far more dynamically than the panels of slouching high-schoolers - and while the splash is printed in full color, those colors are individually just as dull as the rest of the issue. A more effective satire should be able to match or beat its targets at their own game.
Clowes does deploy a few formal devices more successfully, like the word balloons that are constantly blanked out, cut off by the panel borders, or obscured by Andy's narration - a telling graphic demonstration of Andy's inability to recognize anybody else's problems. The issue's documentary interludes are also effective; although much of the issue appears to be narrated by Andy, the intercuts, especially those of the dead, imply some even more remote and chilling viewpoint.
Other devices, however, like the episodic structure, the chapter headings, and the variations in layout, read like superficial tricks that don't quite disguise the story's fundamental simplicity. This is a straightforward, more or less linear narrative that wants to look like it has a complex structure. (In that sense, the flat style and uniform colors are at least more accurate.)
This is an interesting comic, in many ways a good comic, but not a particularly great comic. (That compliment isn't backhanded - interesting comics, comics that support the variety of readings seen in the discussions of Eightball #23, are almost as rare as great ones.) Reading it after the online discussion had more or less peaked, though, I had to wonder what some of the fanfare was about. Is this issue - bold in its themes, fairly tepid in its execution - really the Second Coming of comics?
Much of the early praise for this issue (Sean Collins being a notable exception) seized on "The Death-Ray" as an indictment of the superhero genre. That's not inaccurate, but it misses the larger and vastly more important political indictment that springs out of Clowes's critique of the superhero mentality - in fact, he seems to criticize that mentality largely as it plays out in geopolitics, not within the comics. Of course, you probably don't care about that if you primarily value this comic to the extent that it licenses your own feelings about the superhero genre.
I would rather not reduce Eightball #23 to a genre critique, not only because its genre-specific critiques are scarcely more original than its teenage outsider characters, but because that would make it just another "alternative" comic that doesn't dare let go of the mainstream against which it defines itself. Nor do I believe any work of art should be judged solely on the merits of how much it tells us what we already think (whether about war and politics or the vastly more serious business of whether superheroes suck or rock!). I happen to think Clowes offers some timely and important arguments - not simply the argument that has dominated the discourse thus far - but his execution doesn't always do them justice.
Tim O'Neil, jumping on the Eightball commentary bandwagon even later than I did, offers a thoughtful review over at The Hurting. Tim's reaction to Eightball #23 is even more negative than my own, placing me in the heretofore unprecedented position of arguing in favor of a Dan Clowes comic.
Tim suggests, and not without good reason, that "The Death-Ray" suffers from its unremitting focus on "misanthropic alienation." Tim feels the issue's thematic and emotional limitations even creep into the one traditionally unimpeachable aspect of Clowes's work, his craft and formal control:
I can't disagree with any of this, but I think Tim overlooks the other themes that, while they don't ameliorate the book's cynicism, do make it more than just a portrait of misanthropy. As I argued above, the political subtext (or sometimes not-so-sub-text) adds an exigence and an engagement with the world to what would otherwise be a mere character sketch, redundant even within Clowes's own body of work.
Tim suggests that Clowes's earlier works recognize "the limitations of alienation as a rigid lifestyle creed." Yet "The Death-Ray" does as well; Andy is not being offered as a role model, or even as a reliable voice of social commentary like the smirking, unbearable narrator of "Art-School Confidential" (can't wait for that to get expanded into a two-hour movie). The story criticizes Andy, silently but with unmistakable clarity, for his solipsistic, self-aggrandizing world-view.
But that, as I said in my review, would be just as redundant, just as cliched as a story that fashioned Andy into another one of Clowes's whiner-heroes. We don't really need to be told that misanthropy is bad, especially when the misanthrope is also a serial killer. It's the political context, the connection of Andy's sociopathic detachment to America's post-Iraq relationship with the rest of the world, that redeems "The Death-Ray" from being just another unflaggingly alienated Dan Clowes story. The alienation is still unflagging, but the critique is no longer limited solely at the usual Clowes targets of art or character or social interaction.
Finally, and quite separate from all this, Tim also stumbles across one of my main objections to the fawning acclaim that's usually heaped upon Clowes:
This passage, though offered in praise of Clowes, unwittingly identifies the crux of my problem with his reputation: it's founded on the tautology of self-fulfilling fan acclaim at least as much as it is on the work itself. Clowes is respected because he's Important, and important because he's Respected. That his work isn't popular with X-Men readers is irrelevant - in fact, it's a selling point. His "critical consensus" still stems from popularity, which is to say that it also carries a dangerous element of inertia. (I found it telling that, of all the people to object here and elsewhere when I left Clowes off my list of great comics, almost none of them elected to tell me why Clowes should be considered a great. The partisans of Frank Miller, Walt Kelly, and even Neil fricking Gaiman were far more game.)
Kudos to Tim, though, for looking beyond the bandwagon and writing a well-considered analysis of an ambitious but deeply flawed book.
Posted by: Marc | August 17, 2004 at 11:54 AM
Just curious, but did you feel the same way about Ice Haven (i.e. #22)? I'm more fond of the Death Ray than you and certainly of Tim O'Neill(though admittedly more in the style of the story, than perhaps its content)(though i thought the lack of dynamics to the supposedly dynamic parts, and the lifelessness was actually all quite intentional).
But that said, I think its very much the inferior of Ice Haven, which really ... while the individual characters might have had a sort of negative "It's all bad bad bad" quality that i can be bored by with Clowes and that seems to be a turn off for you... i thought in unison with the other characters, it ended up being much more than the sum of its parts; things that sometimes come across as cruel, by putting it in context of the various failures of the other people in the community, it ended up feeling sympathetic. (Doesn't that comic climax with the characters running into the streets and holding hands and singing? I know its not played straight, but I don't recall feeling it was a cynical moment either... more a fantasy moment, which...)
that was the first Clowes book i liked without any hesitation, and i felt like all my usual complaints about him just evaporated on that one. if the usual accusation against him is that his work suffers from a very dull kind of misanthropy (which i guess was my complaint, so correct me if i'm wrong), i can't say it applied to that comic which ...
by being about community, and by attacking all the different comic styles it did, i found it far more, i don't know... affirming? that's not the right word. far more... well, genuinely positive (even while individual elements might have been highly cynical) and in love with comics than any number of, you know, more sugary affairs.
if your criticism is based on the stuff in 20th Century Eightball, i would happily agree. there's bits i like (i liked Art School Confidential much more than Schlong Baseball or whatever that one was called). but i should think a defense of clowes would best start at ice haven, and a critique of clowes would have to consider it.
Posted by: Abhay | August 17, 2004 at 09:52 PM
Haven't found a copy of "Ice Haven" yet, although having seen the comic behind the fawning praise for "The Death-Ray" I'm now preparing myself for disappointment on that front as well.
Posted by: Marc | August 19, 2004 at 10:19 PM