Caricature [Illustrated] [Hardcover]

Daniel Clowes (Author), Dan Clowes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1998

The bestselling author of Ghost World collects his acclaimed short stories from Eightball and Esquire.

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 fiction issue (and commissioned by then-editor Dave Eggers). Also included are: a rare fully-painted short, "MCMLXVI," the full-color "Gold Mommy," "Glue Destiny," "Gynecology," "Immortal, Invisible," "Blue Italian Shit," "Like a Weed, Joe," "Black Satin," an all-new cover, and more. Color and black-and-white comics throughout

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Dan Clowes follows his amazing graphic novel, Ghost World, with an equally stunning collection of nine short comics stories. His characters drift through the world in detached desperation, and they seem all the more real for it. Take the caricature artist, Mal Rosen, of the first story. His encounter with a young girl at an art festival plays out like a series of small self-discoveries, leaving him hollow and empty like a fresh exhalation. In this same sad, insightful way, all of these tales are coming-of-age stories--there's the boy who is too old for trick-or-treating ("Immortal, Invisible"), the 18-year-old virgin trying to create a new tough-guy persona ("Blue Italian Shit"), and the image-obsessed Mona Beadle from "Green Eyeliner," which originally appeared in Esquire. --Jim Pascoe

From Publishers Weekly

These nine stories show Clowes (Ghost World) as a writer compelled to produce infinite variations on the inner monologues of articulate, geeky loners. His characters exude a stylish, contemporary misanthropy; they're self-isolated, bland and ordinary, straight from some small town or emotionally dead family; and admittedly and intensely self-involved. They invariably substitute a trendy obsession with media kitsch, porn, fashion, old folk music or with just looking bored for empathetic communication or even small talk with others. These personages seem depressed and are usually fed up with most people. Though saturated in this tone of mannered disdain, Clowes's pieces are rescued from cliche and repetition by his expressive, meticulously glum drawings (in b&w and color) and a constant undertone of oddball, mocking hilarity. In the title story, he provides a portrait of an itinerant, county fair caricaturist and the unstable hipster brat-chick who insinuates herself into his life. In "Blue Italian Shit," he relates the story of Rodger Young, secret virgin and pathetic poseur, and his journey through a succession of bad late-1970s New York City styles ("there were fifteen minutes on this earth when I had a John Travolta haircut") and peculiar roommates ("Nat... listened to Kansas, and walked around naked"). In the supremely weird "Gynecology," Clowes deftly generates his characteristic emotional anemia in a story featuring a singing gynecologist and racist iconography. Clowes is a strange master at creating entertaining scenarios about contemporary social vacuity.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 104 pages
• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books; illustrated edition edition (December 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560973293
• ISBN-13: 978-1560973294
• Product Dimensions: 10.5 x 7.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,946,602 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Nobody captures the feeling of alienation better then Clowes, April 30, 2004

By 

Sibelius (Palo Alto, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Caricature (Paperback)

The brilliance of Clowes comic strips can be found in his unique ability to capture that lonely, empty feeling of alienation that his characters so often convey drifting in and out of vapid 'Ghost Worlds.' Make no mistake about it, this book is brilliant and should be rated 5 stars if it weren't for the last 1/5 of it where we're offered 2 stories that suffer from a lack of narrative cohesion. The first 4/5's though, demonstrate Clowes at his finest by way of his beautiful artwork and razor-sharp writing filled with pathos, humour and cutting observation.

Not to be missed by fans of Clowes not to mention newcomers interested in getting a taste of his work.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling 'Caricature' is haunting and unpretentious, May 10, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Caricature (Hardcover)

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 have known these people! Or at least their cousins. While Clowes's written introductions ("Hi, my name is John Smith and I'm a busboy...") aren't always original, and some of the endings seem anti-climactic, by the end of every story you are engaged in a merging of the visual and the written... making sense of what you’ve just read.

This is not a "new" narrative art. It's one of the oldest, and yet it’s still polarizing today, as the "funny page" criticisms. Weird, yes, disturbing, yes – but like any good collection of short fiction it comes highly recommended.

5.0 out of 5 stars so good its against the law not to like it, January 22, 2011

By 

meeah (somewhere between my ears (i presume)) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Caricature (Paperback)

Its true! The police come and take you away if you dont like this book!

Yup, its a really great book--as a series of graphic short stories it's great, but its also just as great when compared to any "conventional" literary story.

Detectives, artists, lonely children, down-and-out superheroes--outcasts all-- are among some of the characters--or caricatures--that find themselves starring in these tales.

Clowes is as good or better than any writer out there today in any medium. He's intelligent, versatile, and challenging. His stories are all elliptical and post-modern. They leave a lot of loose ends dangling, which will annoy some people.

But i like loose ends. They tickle me. haha

If graphic fiction has an argument as the form general fiction will eventually take when we all become incapable of reading blocks of uninterrupted text, Clowes is one of those writers who best support the argument that graphic/text is the way to go.