Caricature

by Daniel Clowes

Book Overview

The dramatic short stories included in Caricature have drawn comparisons to Nabokov for their complex naturalism and sense of humor. Anchored by the title story, considered the first apotheosis of Clowes' seminal Eightball underground comic book series, Caricature also includes eight other stories, including "Green Eyeliner," a six-page full-color short story originally published in Esquire as the first work of comics to be featured in the magazine's...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1560974583
• ISBN13: 9781560974581
• Release Date: April 2002
• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
• Length: 100 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.8" x 10.2"

Customer Reviews

Best collection of Clowes shorts

To sum it up, this is my favorite collection of Clowes in short form. However, if you've never read Clowes before, i wouldn't recommend this. Go start with Ghostworld, which was turned into an Oscar-nominee movie. Clowes is cynical, humorous and sad. His drawing are fairly ugly but his human faces are very expressive.

Some of his best stuff; a great intro to Clowes for a newbie

Like the above title says...if you are already into Clowes, you should definitely get this. If you don't know who he is, this book is a great place to start finding out.

Grim and brilliant

This collection is the opposite extreme of 20th Century Eightball. While 20th C is hilariously funny, this book is dark & cynical. I would recommend 20th C for a 'beginning' Clowes fan, and this for someone who likes his grimmer stuff.

My Hero

Despite what his sickly, balding, hunched figure at comic book signings might suggest, Dan Clowes is one of the most vital artists alive today. He blows the dust off of everything, and like Joyce or Grosz before him, does not merely use his words and pictures as a means to an end, but plays with them as raw materials. Those who marginalize him as a misanthrope are missing the essential empathy and belief in the human condition inherhent in his art. (...)

Compelling 'Caricature' is haunting and unpretentious

I’m confused that some can call Clowes’s style too "retro" and in a narrow vein that "only individuals sharing his neurosis could love", but then turn around and fault his work as "post-modern [sic]" (a term too frequently mis-used to have any meaning) and "commercial". These two statements contradict one another and cannot be taken seriously.In surveying "comix nouveau" it is quite understandable why some naysayers might consider its writers -- and those "nerds" who scour every panel examining its meta-meta-theoretical undertones -- at the very least pretentious. I agree with many of these criticisms (as does Clowes - his "Lout Rampage" bundles the ignorant with the so-called intelligentcia).Yet much of the backlash against the latest group of popular American writer-artists (such as Chris Ware, and some would argue [not Clowes!] Art Spiegelman) is actually a reaction to the pompus critical methodologies used to interpret these works, rather than against the works themselves, which are brilliant but in the most brilliantly unassuming way. Highly murky interpretations of graphic fiction too often become a substitute for the works themselves."Caricature", Clowes's follow-up to his breakthrough "Ghost World", does not attempt to be anything more than it is -- a fine collection of intriguing stories in the graphic fiction format....Clowes's characters (or caricatures) are "true". They capture that "stranger-than-fiction" truth which is often too "neurotic" or "disturbing" to be taken seriously. Each story of "Caricature" had me thinking, "this seems so autobiographical!" - and yet he could not have lived all the characters' lives. That is the main point: even if you, the reader, does not relate personally to caricaturists, pseudo-hip punksters, freaks, and adolescent bundles of confusion, you still realize they are in the world, walking or driving beside you.Dan Clowes himself is a caricaturist, not only of faces and gestures and movements but of the general visual and verbal ridiculousness of the world. There’s nothing "hidden" or "pretentious" about his clear lines and conversational dialogues. Many of his characters' inner lives are coneyed in so little space, and without "so many words". That's the magic of comic (versus strict prose) fiction - you think you're being fed something simple; that perhaps the legions of comic fanboys are fooling themselves into believing the legitimacy of their "art form"... and then you remember the girl with her head in her chin, or the eerie, crossed-out messages in the sand, or the half-scowl of the creepy roommate on page X. Pictures haunt like words cannot (and vice-versa). The captions, which seemed so helpful at the time, have fallen away and only the lines and colors remain. It doesn't take a literary theorist to recognize how illustrations (the proverbial "1000 words") can creep under your skin in the most elementary way.The stories in *this* collection are both disturbing and fascinating. I h