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Boom: A Journal of California, Vol. 2, Number 2, pps 13–21. ISSN 2153-8018, electronic ISSN 2153-764X.
© 2012 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for
permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and
Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/boom.2012.2.2.13.
P r O D u C I N G C u L T u r e
An interview with Daniel Clowes
spring warren
From Ghost World to Your World
Oakland artist and graphic novelist Daniel Clowes was born in Chicago. He launched his
career with the comic series Lloyd Llewellyn, about the adventures of a private detective,
then went on to create the comic series Eightball, which included such seminal works as
Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, Ghost World, and Death Ray. Ghost World, the 2001
movie based on Clowes’ screenplay, was nominated for an Academy Award. His work has
been featured in The New Yorker, Time, and Newsweek, and in 2011 he was awarded a
PEN Literary Award for Graphic Literature. His most recent book is Wilson (Drawn and
Quarterly), the story of a lonely, middle-aged malcontent. In April the Oakland Museum
of California opened the exhibition Daniel Clowes: A First Survey, on view through
12 August of this year.
Spring Warren: You were born in Chicago, but you’ve been in California now for
going on twenty years. What brought you here?
Daniel Clowes: I came to Berkeley for a reading on a particularly nice day in February.
It was 80 degrees and I wound up meeting my future wife at a signing.
Warren: Wow. Love and weather.
Clowes: Yeah. We had a long-distance relationship and then she said why don’t you
come out to Berkeley and I couldn’t think of any reason not to, you know? The first
time I went back to Chicago, there was freezing rain and I had to walk to a bookstore
to do a signing where I knew nobody would be because it was the worst weather in
the world. I just wondered how people ever settled there.
Warren: Now you’re living in paradise.
Clowes: That’s right.
Warren: You once said that when you close your eyes, you see Chicago. Not California?
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14 b O O m C a L I f O r N I a . C O m
Clowes: I saw Chicago for a very long time. I’m not usually
dealing directly from experience in my work, but dealing
with my own inner life. My stories tend to be based in
emotions that have been with me for a long time. But
now I feel like California is seeping in or some version of
California is multiplying with images of Chicago, so there
are palm trees mixed in with the urban blight and my vision
of the landscape is now much more Oakland than Chicago.
It took a very long time to tap into the California thing, a self-
satisfaction that we have in California—and I’m as guilty
of it as anyone—that comes from living in a place like this
where the weather is nice and there’s a certain beauty to the
landscape that you don’t have anywhere else. I found that sort
of off-putting at first and then came to see California, like the
East Coast, as one of the two places that you go in America to
be as far away from where you come from as possible.
Warren: Which might contribute to a certain colorful
eccentricity of characters that show up in your work?
Clowes: I feel like that’s certainly true in this area. I spent
many years living right in Berkeley and they’re almost
intolerant of non-eccentrics. . . . Like you wouldn’t be
welcome if you wanted to sell insurance. But even though I
live in a real pocket here where the values are really liberal
and you know, everything is very sort of progressive and
artsy, all you have to do is drive through the Caldecott
Tunnel into the suburbs and then immediately you’ll start
seeing Romney stickers and stuff like that.
Warren: Do you sketch in Oakland public spaces—for
instance, are the coffee houses in Wilson actual places?
Clowes: All of the locations in Wilson and Mr. Wonderful are
based on actual places in and around Oakland, but rather
than draw them accurately, taking photos, or doing location
sketches, I’m more interested in drawing my memories or
impressions of those places, expressing how it feels for me
to be in those spaces rather than to transcribe their exact
particulars.
Warren: Is there anything about Wilson, the character,
that is particular to California? That is, if Wilson the book
was set in New York, would he still be the same guy or
was there something about Oakland or California that
spawned him?
Clowes: He strikes me as uniquely Californian in some
way. In New York, for instance, his personality would be
easily explained by the anxiety of living in such a dense
high-pressure environment, but in the context of Oakland,
his peculiarities seem much more self-generated.
Warren: Does the current, rather dismal state of the State of
California show up in your narrative line? Like the Bush era
being reflected in Death Ray?
Clowes: I am certainly very interested in what’s going
in California but I’m not consciously trying to deal with
that in my work, though I think anything you immerse
yourself in will come out in your fiction; I am sure you
know.
Warren: It would seem so with the art world here—your
work seems in keeping with the experimentation in
narrative form that California is known for.
Clowes: Maybe in a general, zeitgeisty kind of sense,
because I really have no connection at all to that world here.
I feel kind of purposely out of touch with that stuff.
Warren: Certainly the zeitgeist of comics changed in the
nineties—they became more about social commentary
than ever before, and graphic novels shifted to being okay
for grownups to read. What was going on in the Bay Area
then, and were there particular artists in California you
were influenced by?
Clowes: Certainly Robert Crumb and some of the other
Underground Cartoonists of the sixties were based in the
Bay Area, and they had a great impact on what we were
and are doing. Among California artists, my favorites
are the architects Bernard Maybeck and Julia Morgan, the
photographer Eadweard Muybridge, and above all, Alfred
Hitchcock, whose Vertigo, The Birds, and Shadow of a Doubt
are three of the greatest Northern California films, along
with Coppola’s The Conversation.
Warren: I heard from one of the curators that there was
great excitement over your upcoming show at the Oakland
Some version of
California is multiplying
with images of Chicago.
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Museum of California. That artists like Alicia McCarthy
and Barry McGee and Ruby Neri are all great admirers of
your work. Do you interact with these artists?
Clowes: I don’t know them personally. I actually know who
those three artists are, but that’s because they’re like the
biggest of the big.
Warren: Maybe at this moment they’re having a conversation
along the lines of “I’ve never met Daniel Clowes but I know
who he is, ’cause he’s one of the greats.”
Clowes: No, I doubt it. I doubt it extremely.
Warren: You lived in Berkeley for a while. Were you relieved
to move to Oakland because of a certain second-tierism
you’ve mentioned?
Clowes: Yeah. Oakland feels like the weak sister to San
Francisco, and you know, I grew up on the south side of
Chicago, which is really the neglected half of the city
compared to the north side. When I lived in New York, I
lived in Brooklyn, which at that time, was not cool. And it
was certainly the lesser part of the city when compared to
Manhattan, so I’ve always found myself in those sorts of
neighborhoods and I often wonder if I actually feel more
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16 b O O m C a L I f O r N I a . C O m
comfortable there and that’s why I wind up there, or if it’s
just sheer coincidence.
Warren: You also worked for Cracked magazine.
Clowes: Yeah. The sad little brother of Mad.
Warren: I saw a photograph of you, perhaps around that
time, posing with some fans in a comic shop, and you wrote
about how uncomfortable it was, that you didn’t really know
these people and they had your comics in a box in the adult
section.
Clowes: Always. Even as a teenager I was interested in
comics and wound up being sort of pen pals with some
other guys who did comics in that area. You know, you see
somebody’s address who’d written a letter to a comic and
you’d write them a letter. That’s how you’d meet people
back before the Internet days. And you wind up going
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over to their house for some party or something. We’d all
like comics, but I had nothing else at all in common, you
know. Even the stuff they liked about comics was the stuff
that I actively disliked about it, and it made me even more
alienated. You can talk to somebody for a few minutes,
however, and the way they respond to the work, you can
surmise a lot about them. You see the parts of the work that
they respond to and you do feel connected to them in a way
that’s much more profound that you’d imagine.
Warren: In all the interviews and public appearances that
I’ve read and seen, you’re just fantastically popular, scads
of people in the audience, very erudite, self-possessed.
I imagine you being put up in the poshest digs with
chocolates on the pillow. That hasn’t always been the case?
Clowes: Back before there were graphic novels, when they
were just comic books, I would be invited to a comic store
in another city and I’d drive fifteen hours to get there and
wind up staying on the guy’s floor. Then you’d go to the
signing, and you’d realize it’s just the comic shop owner
and his five friends. When you’d go out to dinner afterward,
you’re like held hostage until three in the morning. I
remember one time staying at somebody’s house, sleeping
on their couch, and to get to the bathroom, they said you
have to go through this door and our roommate’s asleep in
there. So I enter this room where this guy was asleep and
he woke up yelling, “Who the hell are you?!”
Warren: That’s all changed?
Clowes: Even recently I agreed to do a little slide show for
one of my books, and at every single venue they didn’t have
the right adapter for my computer and the audience had
to just look at my back while we’re trying to figure out the
computer. I figured they hated me by the time I could do
anything. It rarely goes well.
Warren: You said at readings that people are sometimes
disappointed that you are not Enid from Ghost World?
Clowes: Yeah. I mean, I’ve certainly had that feeling of
meeting an artist of some kind and you feel like you’re going
to connect with some character that you really respond to and
you realize it’s just a guy who made that up and spent hours
and hours revising it to get it to feel the way it did and it didn’t
just spring straight from their id onto the page. It’s something
that takes a lot of effort and solitude to come up with.
Warren: Speaking of solitude—when you were thirteen,
you idolized Wally Wood [one of Mad magazine’s founding
artists] and said at that age you wanted to be a cartoonist
even more than you wanted to draw cartoons. That you
loved the idea of obsessively drawing all night when no one
else was awake, with a cigarette dangling from your lip and
a jar of pencils at hand.
Clowes: Yeah.
Warren: Do you now like being a cartoonist more than you
like to draw?
Clowes: Back when I was sort of looking to be like Wally
Wood, the actual act of sitting down and drawing was often a
struggle. I was really trying to learn how to do this stuff and
had a vision of how I wanted it to look, a very clear idea of
what I wanted to do. Then to achieve that was much more
difficult than I ever imagined it, so I was just constantly
frustrated and I was always throwing my pencils on the
ground and storming off. I never would finish the day feeling
like I did a great job. I would always think Goddammit, I’ve
gotta fix this tomorrow. It really was very unsatisfying. It’s
only been in the last ten or fifteen years that I’ve been able
to do what I wanted to do or what I set out to do, or at least
I don’t put the pressure on myself to do something that I
know is impossible. I kind of know what I’m capable of and
so it’s much more fun. Your brain gets acclimated to doing
this thing and now I feel utterly at ease when I sit down to
draw. It’s tremendously challenging still and there’s still
frustrations, but it’s something I can’t not do at this point.
Warren: You’ve talked about how a lot of your projects took
off when you thought that your career was over. For instance,
Eightball happened because you couldn’t bear to do any more
Lloyd Llewellyn, and Wilson came at a time when you were
I would always think Goddammit, I’ve gotta
fix this tomorrow.
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18 b O O m C a L I f O r N I a . C O m
struggling with this weighty tome of a book and really didn’t
want to keep waking up in the morning to work on it.
Clowes: Yeah.
Warren: So now that you are a celebrity, maybe even a
commodity in some way, does this create expectations that
could interfere with your work—like you’re being asked to
create the millionth Deborah Butterfield horse?
Clowes: (laughs) You know, I certainly don’t, there’s nothing
of that in my daily life. Nobody ever calls me and nobody
ever recognizes me on the street, so that there’s no sense
of that at all. I mean, really, I feel more anonymous than I
ever did. Back when people actually wrote letters and stuff,
I used to get thirty–forty letters a week from people and
anonymous phone calls in the middle of the night. Now
there’s no response at all. So while I’m very self-conscious
in many ways, I’m not at all in terms of the work I do. I don’t
really think about how anybody’s going to receive it until it’s
basically done and it’s too late, and then I start to agonize
over it. When I’m working, it’s a very personal thing, not for
anybody else, and I’m only thinking about myself. I mean,
the one exception to that would have been Mr. Wonderful, that
I was doing for the New York Times Magazine. I was actually
thinking about an audience, but that very quickly changed.
Warren: You’ve been very free in terms of shifting styles.
Wilson, in particular, is noteworthy, as within the comic itself
the work goes from more naturalistic illustrations to highly
stylized ones in the turn of a page. It seems a sort of lens
in which one views the exact same things happening to the
same characters in a totally different way. And even when
you sort of go more, maybe, classically cartoony, it reads even
more tragically, you know, in a really intriguing way.
Clowes: Yeah.
Warren: How did you arrive at this collection of styles?
Clowes: When I first started, I did all these little strips while I
was with my dad in the hospital, stick figures. The work was
all just about the writing and the rhythm of the comic strips
© DANIEL CLOWES
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that had nothing to do with the drawing. When I got home
and it finally dawned on me that I was gonna have to do this
as a book, I set out to come up with a style that would work
for all of these strips. And I found that a certain style would
work well for some of them and not for others, and vice versa.
I was getting very frustrated by that and I just couldn’t figure
out if I was just gonna do some sort of middle-ground style
that worked fairly well for everything. . . . Finally, I started
looking at all my drawings and trying to figure out what style
I was gonna pick, and I realized that all of them together
were what I needed to do and that my brain had kind of
solved the problem already and I just hadn’t noticed it.
You know, the result was really what the book was about
and what I was trying to get across. [It] was something you
can really only do in comics, where you can shift a style
like that and all of a sudden it shifts the perceptions of the
reader, but not to the degree that they get lost. They still
follow the story, and after a few of these shifts, they’re used
to that and it’s not jarring at all. The shifts become a way
that colors the events that are going on. I found you could
play with emotion to such subtle degrees by shifting the
style; it was endlessly enthralling to work on that every day.
Warren: Wilson, the character, didn’t occur to you first as
an image, is that right?
Clowes: With Wilson, the character just emerged without me
even knowing what he looked like. He just existed as this stick
figure that had a fully formed personality from the very first
couple of little thumb-nail drawings I did of him, and it was
just a matter of note-taking, just like writing down everything
he said. He became one of those very rare characters that can
lead you rather than you leading them, and so I just let him
go. I would give him a situation and think, what would he do
with this? And then, next thing I knew, I’d have a six-panel
strip. That was a very different experience from most projects,
which are much more of a struggle to get it all to work and for
the character to come alive.
Warren: Is starting out with stick figures a pretty typical
way for you to work?
Clowes: No. No. I work differently every time.
Warren: When people have asked is Wilson really you, you
said something along the lines of being more the person
that would be victimized by Wilson.
Clowes: Yeah. I don’t think it was conscious, certainly, but
if you look at the guys that Wilson victimizes throughout
the course of the story, they’re all basically versions of me.
Warren: All tall, lanky guys.
Clowes: Yeah.
Warren: Wilson follows a man through his middle years.
Ghost World is about teenagers. I love the way that your work
bounces back and forth between these two age categories
and it seems there are a lot of similarities between them—
facing big changes in your life that might be exciting and
might be terrifying—and you’ve got all these big questions
about why am I here and what should I be doing, and also
some huge feelings of hating the rules of the world, just
rejecting them. Is this just my imagination that you’re
working back and forth between these two places?
Clowes: I think they’re both really interesting times. When
you’re a late teenager it’s kind of your one opportunity to
define yourself and so the pressure is on. And I think that’s
a really interesting dilemma to have to face. Then in middle
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20 b O O m C a L I f O r N I a . C O m
age, I feel like it’s very different than what I imagined it was
gonna be. You think of yourself as not being so plagued
with self-doubt when you hit a certain age.
Warren: That’s for sure.
Clowes: And if anything, if anything, it’s certainly, possibly,
worse.
Warren: I have noticed that at two in the morning.
Clowes: Yeah.
Warren: Wondering if that story line is going to work or not . . .
Do you agonize over narrative? I mean, when people think of
comics, they think about the visuals carrying the story.
Clowes: In comics, really, the writing is the drawing in a
lot of ways.
Warren: But it’s not like the words don’t matter, that if you
can draw a picture you can necessarily make a strip.
Clowes: Yet, when I’m writing I would never think in
terms of blocks of text or, you know, in terms of dialogue
or anything like that. I think in terms of how the images
are going to go together and tell the story. And I would
hope that in any of my books, if you couldn’t read English,
you could still figure out what’s going on in the story. The
visual component would let you know the basics of what’s
happening. And that’s what’s really interesting to me.
Warren: You do all of your work from top to bottom, your
own inking and coloring and lettering?
Clowes: Yeah, absolutely.
Warren: That’s unusual. Do you ever think, gosh, I just hate
lettering. I’m sending it out to have it done.
Clowes: I love the lettering, but I hate, I hate doing the
computer coloring. That’s the one thing that I think at
some point, I could at least hire somebody else to do all
the computer files and I could pick the colors, but I haven’t
quite gotten to that point yet. I have, like, separation anxiety.
It’s hard to let go.
Warren: There’s something about seeing the forms and
colors in place to know if it’s really right.
Clowes: Yeah. That’s true and you know, there’s something
about getting a book back from a printer and knowing I
did every mark on the page. There’s nothing at all that’s
not mine except for the UPC code on the back—which if I
could do it by hand, I would.
Warren: It must be interesting, then, to relinquish your
work to a museum to present it to the public. How did the
exhibit for the Oakland Museum come about and what’s it
like to go from comic book to museum wall?
Clowes: A curator named Susan Miller first approached me
around five years ago with the idea of putting together a
museum show, and through her tireless efforts and some
luck it wound up going to my favorite local museum. I’m
very curious how it will feel to see people experiencing the
work in such a different way. My hope, of course, is that
they will see the original pages as artifacts of the process of
making comics and will seek out the books, which are the
actual final works.b
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