Customer Reviews

Caricature

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Dan Clowes is a wonderful artist and storyteller. He's work is also very melancholy, and this collection is no exception. As long as you come into these stories knowing they are melancholy, it's very enjoyable.

The characters featured in these stories have a wide range: from a traveling caricature artist to a young hipster girl living off of inheritance money. One of my favorites is about a fourteen year-old tick-or-treating for the last time, and all the different, bizarre, houses he goes to.

More then one story leaves you wondering if the character telling it is crazy. I like this use of an unreliable storyteller. It leaves you with something to talk about.

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.

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.

Is that what the editorial reviewer said? Nabokov? Don't get me wrong, I like "Eightball" comics but let's not go overboard here. And this collection of short strips is nowhere near as good as "David Boring" or "Ghost World" (or Nabokov).

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.

To all the other reviewers: You can't expect all of Dan Clowes' work to be exactly like "Ghost World", I mean if you start out reading "Ghost World", and then expect all his comics to be exactly the same way, then it's not, and to say that something isn't as good because you keep comparing it to "Ghost World", then that's just stupid.

Like all of Dan Clowes' work, this comics is what it is, it's cynical and has stories that absorb you, such as the first one, and most of the female characters have something weird and strange about them, it's just an awesome book collection of his comics, and if you're a real fan of his, you'll get, but if you're just some person who keeps comparing everything to "Ghost world", you should still get it, but stop comparing!! geez

Clowes has always been an excellent storyteller, but the brilliance of his work is not in his stories (which are often mundane and uneventful) but the rich and poignant display of emotions that play underneath the narrative. This was certainly the case in "Ghost World" and "David Boring" in that the exploration of loneliness, adolescent angst and self-loathing took place in the nuances of facial expression and the subtext of spoken word, and not in the unfolding of the plot. "Caricature" is no different, but with the added advantage of Clowes working without the burden of having to tell a story. Being less constrained by the demands of a longer, more cohesive narrative format, Clowes in this collection of nine vignettes is able to explore his themes with greater freedom and whimsy. Thus, many of the stories here take on a dream-like quality and even the more grounded ones have a strong sense of unreality. And indeed, it is in the weird plane of reverie where the emotions he means to convey are best communicated. This is stream-of-consciousness in the form of the graphic novel and more than in any of his other work he communicates at the level of the subconscious. Needless to say there are moments in this book that are transcendental.