Caricature
By Dan Clowes
Published by Fantagraphics Books
I know Dan Clowes isn't a carnival caricaturist who had an affair with a teenage girl who claimed to be in her early 20s. I know he isn't an isolated, disaffected young boy whose halloween mask serves as an ironic indicator of the horror he refuses to let himself feel. And I am reasonably certain that he isn't a fat girl who grew up to be a beautiful young woman who terrorized a theater full of people with a fake handgun.
The greatest thing about this collection of nine falsely autobiographical tales is that, while reading them, you forget that Clowes is a 40-ish cartoonist and filmmaker who has probably never sketched cartoons at carnivals, never written messages in the sand to a girl he's too shy to approach, and almost certainly never been an over-the-hill superhero being shown up by a young stud with a flashier costume. These tales are all twisted in Clowes's unique fashion, but they're all utterly convincing portraits of humanity in all its shame. Clowes gets under the skin of his characters like an invasive parasite, making a tiny tear in their flesh and then crawling through the layers of their being, revealing their character, their dreams, and most of all their empty, lost humanity.
These tales are all told in the first person, giving them a surprising unity that I wasn't expecting from such a broad variety of subjects and characters. Clowes, god-like, brings in these people who never existed and breathes life into the clay and makes them walk and talk and shows us just enough to humiliate them and mock them.
There's no one here who evokes sympathy in the manner of Enid in Ghost World, but this is a very different collection with a very different intent; it does include some serious works that evoke the quality and mood of Clowes's lengthier, celebrated novels David Boring and Ghost World, such as "Gynecology," "Like a Weed, Joe," and the story that gives the collection its name, "Caricature."
"Caricature" is a nuanced and subtle character study of a carnival caricaturist who meets a troubled and enigmatic girl that works her way into his life, until he begins to open up to the idea of settling down with her for a life on the road. Then, of course, the cruel hammer of Clowes's true-to-life cynicism comes down hard, leaving us with a somewhat unresolved and yet satisfying ending. There is a convincing level of detail about what such a life might be like, and a depressingly genuine sense of loneliness and bitterness; it's a weighty piece worthy of giving its name to this collection of stories.
The best story here may be "Like a Weed," which manages to capture perfectly the awkwardness and lonliness of growing up. It is, perhaps, the most substantive and human of these stories. It finds the protagonist leaving messages in the sand that are returned by an untouchable girl a universe apart from him, but her messages are garbled, lost in the wake of the relentless surf that carries their truth out to sea. It reminds me of the ghostly messages haunting the walls of Ghost World, and strongly hints at a fascination Clowes seems to have with the human tragedy of missed communications; we try to reach out, but something always seems to get in the way. Usually, it's ourselves.
Probably the most delightful tale here is the one that closes the book, "Black Nylon." It stands serious superhero comics up and splatters their brains against the wall gangland-style in a way Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns were afraid to: Moore and Miller retained a love of the genre that prevented them from saying in hundreds and hundreds of pages what Clowes gets across in just six and a half.
Clowes is a master of the comics artform, one of the best cartoonists alive. While I think Ghost World is his best work to date, you owe it to yourself to investigate these other works as well. It's a satisfying collection of bizarre falsehoods that speaks truth about the world and its inhabitants on every page.