His first piece debuted in Love and Rockets # 13 (September 1985), an introductory prelude to his retro-chic detective magazine Lloyd Llewellyn which launched soon after, running in various incarnations for three years. However, once heâ€™s in your brain thereâ€™s certainly no shaking the things he can do with pen and ink, motive, character and the special kind of targeted situational magic that inhabits the world of pictures and words in static harmony.īorn in Chicago in 1961, Clowes began his career as a cartoonist with humour magazine Cracked before creating uniquely skewed short comic tales for Fantagraphics. So whenever a master creator regularly, consciously and deliberately subverts that implicit convention the result might be occasionally obscure or confusing, but always utterly engrossing.Īt the forefront of comics storytelling for nearly three decades, Daniel Clowes is, for many, an acquired taste.

With pictures wedded to text, what you see is so clearly what you get. One of the greatest assets of the comics medium is the ostensibly straightforward nature of its storytelling.

By Daniel Clowes, with Ken Parille & various (Fantagraphics Books)

Ghost world comic strips