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What Lies Beneath?
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Daniel Clowes
David Boring, Pantheon Books, 2000. 116pp. $24.95. |
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Daniel
Clowes stands without a doubt as one of the most significant
American cartoonists to emerge from the alternative comics ghetto in the past
two decades. Graduating from early science-fiction and genre material like Lloyd Llewellyn to the more all-encompassing world of his pictorial
potpourri Eightball (all published by the Seattle-based comics publisher
Fantagraphics Books,
Clowes has demonstrated a knack for narrative sophistication
and character development - not to mention a keen and often devastating wit.
These traits have garnered his work critical acclaim and some amount of commercial
success, including the recent feature
motion-picture version of his graphic novel Ghost World. David Boring, Clowes's most recent long-form comics project,
was initially serialized in three issues of his comics series Eightball, but its hardcover publication by Pantheon Books has broadened its potential
audience from comics-shop devotees to casual bookstore browsers. The book's
slick design work (and its puff quotes from mainstream media mavens Time
and Newsweek) may help entice non-comics-readers into picking up
a copy. And this action, as comics aficionados and cartoonists agree, would
be A Good Thing; the more that general readers are exposed to comics, the
more that the dreaded "Comics Aren't Just for Kids" review headline would
be banished to the trash heap of Obvious Observations. Upon reading the book, though, one cannot help but think that
David Boring, for all of Clowes's undeniable skills, is not entirely suited
to this role of Comics Ambassador to the General Reading Public. It is a
work of careful craft and sophisticated storytelling, true, but it does
not engage on any emotional level. While it does not pander to unrefined
juvenile tastes, neither does it reward readers looking for anything more
than cleverly structured escapism. Such might be enough to ask of less experienced
storytellers. But the context in which David Boring comes to us -
given Clowes's own growth as a visual storyteller, as well as the book's presence
in the mainstream bookstore marketplace, long jaded in its reaction to comics
narratives - is an important factor in gauging its accomplishments. Overall
it suffers from an air of inconsequence; the plot and characters play themselves
out according to a carefully established pattern, but that pattern in turn
reveals little beyond the inherent shallowness of the main character. While
not entirely boring, Boring also does not excite. Loosely put, the plot concerns the romantic trials of our
self-styled "eponymous narrator" (2), particularly the soulless, clinically
passionless quest of his feminine ideal. Along the way, there are mysterious
deaths, mistaken identities, coincidentally overlapping quests, and the possibility
of war just over the horizon. Such ingredients can be the stuff of excitement
(if not High Art), but Clowes consciously works to frustrate dramatic impulses
at every turn. Boring's own narration marks time for us, describing the events
of his own life like a movie even he does not enjoy; his emotional distance
from himself at first invites our pity, but eventually it simply distances our own
emotions. The references to film are pervasive. Clowes conceived and executed
David Boring while his Ghost World movie was in the
early stages of development; and this fact surely has some connection to
the book's preponderance of cinematic references and stylistic quirks. The
book itself is divided into not three chapters but three "acts"; faux
lobby cards depicting possible upcoming scenes from the narrative are presented
between chapters two and three; and the characters are listed in an "end
credit sequence" after the book's final panel (upon which is superimposed
"The End"). And Boring's own narration draws countless cinematic parallels
between events and his interpretation of them: "I love that I'm talking
about 'blondes' and 'alibis'" he notes with reference to film noir
conventions when, early on, he obsessively follows the latest personification
of his feminine ideal, Wanda Krankl (16). Thankfully, David Boring ultimately is not an attempt
to reproduce a cinematic experience in comics form. Such an exercise would
inevitably prove futile, just as those comic-book films that wear their
source material formally on their sleeves never adequately reproduce a so-called
"comic book feel"; the differences of media and the problems of adaptation
mitigate against such easy overlapping of narrative forms. And Clowes is
too canny, too accomplished a cartoonist to make such a mistake. But the
cinematic references call attention to themselves in obvious ways, and they
contribute not only to the suspicion that Clowes sees film narratives as
fussily involved with superficiality, but also to the fact that the story
we're reading falls into a similar trap, one whose dangers are spelled out
for us. But film is not the only medium which is invoked; Clowes foregrounds
as well the comics form - and its cultural avatar, the adolescent's comic
book. Boring's father, we learn, had been a cartoonist, and a tattered
copy of one of his father's works, The Yellow Streak, is his only
link to his memory. The back of the dust jacket is made of a montage of
Yellow Streak images, its low-culture origins tagged via the
use of "big dot color separations" by John Kuramoto, a technique also replicated
throughout the narrative whenever comics panels are replicated. Foregrounding
the means of color reproduction like this draws immediate distinctions between
comics as part of the mise en page and the comics narrative we as
readers are following; at times Clowes blurs the effect by including a decontextualized
Yellow Streak panel as part of the page breakdown of the main
narrative, blending David's life with his father's created narrative. This
technique effectively draws thematic parallels, but those parallels are themselves
usually of an obvious nature. The technique is clever, but its use is pedestrian. There are other, more intriguing comics storytelling techniques
on display, though. Clowes "freezes time" in his panels in a way that few
other cartoonists can manage. Part of the potential elegance of comics narratives
lies in the selection of just which moment in time to depict for each action
presented, and from which perspective. Clowes chooses unconventional (although
not incomprehensible) moments to illustrate. A head-on shot of a bullet
in flight suddenly draws the audience into the story at one of its more
dramatic moments (the end of Act One). And the awkwardly posed fight sequences
(yes, there are a few punches thrown) reveal not an unskilled artist but
rather unskilled pugilists and the way in which physical confrontations generally
do not stand as exemplars of balletic beauty and grace. These and similar
small moments reveal that Clowes does in fact have remarkable storytelling
skills. Unfortunately, these narrative practices serve an underwhelming
story. Clowes's Ghost World, for all its episodic, decentered narrative
nature, nevertheless presented characters we could care about. The slow,
circling rhythm of its narrative (initially serialized in several short vignettes)
reflected life as it is experienced - not a highly structured plot, but quotidian
events whose significance is revealed through reflection. This is not to say
that a rewarding narrative cannot have a tight plot, but in Ghost World's
case, the looseness of the plot reflected the loose, live-for-the-moment
joie de vivre that initially characterized the lives of Enid and Rebecca.
At the same time, narrated events served to create depth and resonance in
the characters. Ghost World's signal virtue is its celebration of
character, its realization that quirks and flaws tempered with change and
growth are precious qualities to be cherished. In David Boring, by contrast, plot is paramount. Boring
himself is, well, not very exciting. Which in and of itself is no flaw;
dynamism is not on call here. However, emotional appeal is, and there is
precious little about David Boring that appeals. Boring's father-quest
as a character-defining trait is trite, even for comic books (this realm
has been mined to death by even mainstream comics authors like J.M. DeMatteis).
Boring's other defining trait is his sexual desire, a numbing fascination
with body types which ultimately reveals its source in a clandestine childhood
encounter with his cousin Pamela. The fact that David and Pamela's
relationship resumes near the end of the story merely reinforces that his
obsessions have served him well - Boring's string of soulless encounters has
not been merely an empty, joyless exercise, we are led to believe; rather,
he was indeed seeking to regain a lost love, a quest which is revealed to
be not a futile childish longing at all. This joyful reunion in the face
of disasters large and small seems more tritely structured than the tidy
cinematic plots to which David has compared every facet of his life. As the book ends, Boring has found at least a semblance of happiness,
though he acknowledges that his bliss may be short-lived (as all of his
emotions generally have been). The phantom war which has skirted the story
seems as if it may in fact become a reality after all; Boring refers to
it, in characteristically cinematic fashion, as a falling curtain (116).
That its ambiguous nature remains unresolved, however, frustrates more than
it suggests. The same might be said for David Boring as a whole. The
story is made manifest through suggestion, not assertion. This strategy
could be - and has been, in Clowes's hands - a sophisticated strategy for
the development of character and theme. In David Boring, however,
Clowes seems more interested in form for its own sake, suggesting little
beyond its own self-awareness. Clowes's techniques remain careful and clever;
we can hope that his future works will again explore both the surface and
the depths of experience.
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