Today, we are happy to welcome Todd Hignite to the site, who has conducted a new, fascinating interview with Daniel Clowes.
TH: With Jack as a character, there’s this almost dream of omniscience running throughout, he’s the author of the story, ultimately directing events, but on another level, is he something of a stand-in for you, revisiting your earlier work? I got a real shock at a certain point and undoubtedly started reading too much into this, imagining clues and references in specific panels, backgrounds, locations, perhaps aged versions of previous characters, and dialogue…
DC: (laughter) I don’t know that that’s necessarily the case, but I can say that I was definitely very influenced in the story by my own work because I had spent so much time putting together the Modern Cartoonist art show and monograph, and then that was followed immediately by compiling The Complete Eightball, so I was very much in the world of my own comics in a way that I’ve never been. Normally, I try to not look at my own comics at all, and I try to be influenced by things outside of not only my own work, but outside of comics—I try to find unfamiliar things to be influenced by in each book, and in this case I was really kind of immersing myself in my own work, using myself as a reference in the way that in an earlier book I might have used Charles Schulz or Johnny Craig, or somebody like that (laughter). It was kind of an odd experience and I did find myself creating little glimmers of recognition with old characters and giving little nods to previous ways of working, maybe.
We also have Day Three of Jen Lee and her Cartoonist's Diary.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Eleanor Davis shares the unsurprisingly well-stocked comics shelves she grew up with at her parents' home.
—Eve Kahn at the New York Times writes about an exhibit on display at NYC's Museum of Jewish Heritage, featuring sketches from a WWII prison camp drawn by MAD magazine contributor Max Brandel.
—And this has been going around the internet, so likely many of you have already seen it, but R. Crumb took on Donald Trump in 1989. Further unforeseen developments make this not quite as harsh as you might like, but it's still pretty mean.
