Ice Haven [Hardcover]

Daniel Clowes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 7, 2005

At long last: Daniel Clowes is back at Pantheon, with a brilliant new graphic novel already hailed by Time as “another of his hilariously slightly off-center worlds that have a vague sense of dread about them. Kind of like where you live.”

Welcome to Ice Haven! “It’s not as cold here as it sounds,” declares Random Wilder, our reluctant guide to this sleepy Midwestern town. He’s also its would-be poet laureate. Would-be, that is, were it not for the "Florid banalities” of his archrival, Ida Wentz, published ad nauseam in the Ice Haven Daily Progress. Among Wilder’s other fellow Ice Havians are the lovelorn Violet Van der Plazt and Vida Wentz; the detective team of Mr. and Mrs. Ames; the adorable interracial moppets Carmichael and Paula; disaffected stationery salesgirl Julie Patheticstein; the Blue Bunny, newly sprung from prison and the bitterest rabbit in town; and poor little David Goldberg, missing for more than a week now…

While Dan Clowes has gotten a nod from the mainstream — an Oscar nomination for the screen adaptation of Ghost World - his work remains wonderfully idiosyncratic and imaginative. The lives of the men and women of Ice Haven are woven into a multi-layered tale that, while it owes a debt to Our Town, is ultimately based on and inspired by… Leopold and Loeb. No kidding.

Only Daniel Clowes could do it and, luckily for us, he has.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Clowes (Ghost World) casts a harsh spotlight on the misfit dreamers who inhabit the small town of Ice Havenin this riveting graphic novel. Originally published in a somewhat different form as part of Clowes's occasional comic book Eightball, this piecefinds Clowes moving beyond the withering satire of his earlier works to a more nuanced style. Readers will wince even as they feel sympathy for the self-deluded characters who reside in Ice Haven. Take narrator Random Wilder, writer of doggerel poetry. One would think it'd be easy to be the best poet in a place like Ice Haven, but Wilder has a rival: Ida Wentz, an old woman who likes to bake cookies. Wilder spends his spare time plotting against her. Ida's visiting granddaughter, Vida, also has literary yearnings, despite having sold zero copies of her fanzine. These and other oddballs play out their stories against the mysterious disappearance of a little boy named David Goldberg, whose possible murder recalls the Leopold and Loeb case. Clowes unfolds the multifaceted story as a series of brief comics, some drawn in a wildly cartoony style, others in his well-known mid–20th-century look. Masterfully blending fact and fiction, this is a funny, sad, chilling and absurd work. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal

Grade 10 Up–Previously published in the independent comic-book series Eight Ball, this is a darkly comic romp through the small Midwestern town of Ice Haven. The basic story is pretty straightforward: a sad, quiet little boy named David Goldberg vanishes. But instead of delivering a pulp-inspired detective story, Clowes uses the child's tale mostly as a backdrop. His real interest is in the lives of the bizarre, yet all-too-real townsfolk. They include a lovesick teen, an irritable private detective, a poet, and a schoolyard bully. Although the characters are types, the author/illustrator embellishes them enough to make them unique and memorable. Through vignettes that jump perspective every few pages, readers witness their lives and individual reactions to David's disappearance. As the point of view shifts, so does the artwork. In showing how the event affects the boy's classmates, the panels take on a style inspired by Charles Schultz's Peanuts, but Clowes moves into satire with a bleakly funny schoolyard of kids talking quite openly about sex, drugs, and violence. Other vignettes pull from the motifs of detective strips, teen romances, and The Flintstones. While well-read comics fans will get most of the jokes, some references may frustrate or confuse readers. Overall, though, there is plenty here to enjoy.–Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 88 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; First Edition edition (June 7, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 037542332X
• ISBN-13: 978-0375423321
• Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 0.6 x 8.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #120,237 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Daniel Clowes was born in Chicago in 1961. He is the creator of the comic book Eight-Ball, twenty-one issues of which have been published to date. His work has appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, Vogue, Time, and Newsweek, among others. A feature film based on his 1998 book, Ghost World, starring Thora Birch, was released in 2001 by MGM. He lives a childless, petless life in California with his beloved wife.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is Eightball issue 22!, June 18, 2005

By 

R. Wade "darumah" (Norfolk, VA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ice Haven (Hardcover)

Eightball 22 is my favorite of Daniel Clowes' works and when I read reviews of Ice Haven I was really excited because I thought the story would fall along the same lines, but I had no idea that it was going to be the same book disguised as a new book. If I new that I was buying the same book with 3 extra strips, I would not have bought it. I am giving the book 5 stars because I still love the storyline and if you don't have Eightball 22 than it is well worth the money, but I am very upset with Daniel Clowes' cheap attempt to release an old book as new.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Kindle Version -- Lousy Graphic Resolution, July 15, 2010

By 

Mariano E. Paniello - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Ice Haven (Kindle Edition)

My review isn't for Clowes at all, whose work I completely adore. It's rather with the abysmal resolution of the graphics in the kindle version. All sorts of pixilation and haloing. Is this really the level of quality one should expect of graphic novels in Kindle format?

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I don't see how many of these bad ratings are plausible., May 18, 2009

By 

Sean Choate - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ice Haven (Hardcover)

The point of my review is to put an actual insight to some of the reviews.
I don't know why people are complaining that this was in Eightball. I really don't. Well, you might as well complain about "Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron", or "Pussey!", or even "Ghost World." And not to mention "Ice Haven" was written and designed to be made into graphic novel, not a comic. If you read the comic, note how it doesn't flow as well as the novel. And as far as the complaints that they'd already read the story and got this thinking it was something different, why would you buy a shirt without looking at the size? And as far as the "double dipping" comment goes... SO WHAT! The comic is out of print! What do you want them to do?