Alternative Visions
Alternative Visions |
|
Page 16 of 29  Snake Eyes Dan Clowes completed the triumvirate of alternative comic comedians, and produced a brace of titles that were worthy of note. Lloyd Llewellyn (Fantagraphics, 1986) featured the adventures of a perpetually bemused sleuth, who navigates through a hyper-real version of the early 1960s (a sort of Dragnet on acid), and was a minor hit. Eightball (Fantagraphics, 1990) had more widespread success, and was an anthology in which 'Lloyd Llewellyn' appeared as one strip. Other, much funnier, additions included 'Young Dan Pussey', a bitter, hilarious satire of the comics industry; 'Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron', a bizarre mystery serial, crackling with sexual terror; and 'Duplex Planet', a semi-documentary strip based on the utterances of senile occupants of an old folks home. All these were rendered in a meticulously 'clean' fashion; the artwork was detached, but never cold, and the cumulative effect was something analogous to the early movies of David Lynch. Clowes was clearly another creator for whom anger was an energy: in one of his best Eightball strips, T Hate You Deeply', he simply lists everyone and everything that annoys him. However, unlike Bagge, he was prepared to explore more abstract territory. He has summed up his approach by saying: 'On the one hand, I'm trying to step into my own subconscious and trying to see what images and ideas excite me and scare me and affect me emotionally ... And I'm also trying to write an honest narrative, a narrative that works by its own rules ... I'm just trying to let the characters be themselves and do whatever they would do, and not really control them. Just let them act according to their own humanity - or lack thereof. And then, on some level, it's kind of a social satire, a comment on the way I see the world in my bleakest moments.'  Neat Stuff (1985). Bagge's first hit solo comic.  Neat Stuff |