Daniel Clowes
Daniel Clowes
Daniel Gillespie Clowesis an American cartoonist, illustrator, and screenwriter. Most of Clowes's work first appeared in Eightball, a solo anthology comic book series. An Eightball issue typically contained several short pieces and a chapter of a longer narrative that was later collected and published as a graphic novel, such as Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, Ghost World, and David Boring. Clowes’s illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker, Newsweek, Vogue, The Village Voice, and elsewhere. With filmmaker Terry...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth14 April 1961
CountryUnited States of America
I was 30 before I made a living that was not embarrassing.
I had no television when I was little, just a stack of old, beat-up comics from the 1950s and 1960s.
I don't read much of anything online.
I try personally not to be nostalgic.
But I enjoy the opportunity to use swear symbols.
I knew how to draw all of the different smokestacks on the old trains and all that stuff, and then I realized that if I can draw trains, which is the thing I was probably the least interested in in the world at the time, I can do anything and find a way into it that will be interesting.
I have cultivated a little crew of people whose opinions I understand. It's like the way you'd follow certain film critics because you know what their criteria are, and you may not agree with them, but you can glean from their opinion how you will feel about a film.
You need to be, like, turning down high-paying illustration work because you want to work on your comic. That's when you know you're doing something good.
I was thinking the other day that there will never be another form of music that everybody has to respond to - like disco.
Avatar is a total nerd thing, and yet our popular culture has somehow made all that stuff acceptable.
I think I have a very clear vision of what I want things to look like.
I think that gulf is what makes the work interesting, but as a creator it's endlessly frustrating because I'm starting out with this goal, this thing I'm trying to create, and then the thing I actually do create is very, very different. It's always painful, in some ways, especially when it's just finished.
I think if you had different artists approaching the material in different styles, that's very different. I think it's an interesting thing to discover, what's present in the work even when you're shifting the styles. I've just found it a much stronger way to work.
I actually start drawing things. Usually they're abandoned before I commit too much time and effort.