Daniel Clowes - Life and Career

Life and Career

Clowes was born in Chicago, Illinois, to an auto mechanic mother and a furniture craftsman father. His father was Jewish and his mother was from a "reserved WASPish Pennsylvania" family. In 1979, Clowes finished high school at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. After earning his BFA, he unsuccessfully attempted to find work in New York as an illustrator. From 1985 to 1989 he contributed both art and stories to Cracked magazine, working extensively on a feature called "The Uggly Family."

In 1985, Clowes wrote his first Lloyd Llewellyn story, which he sent to Fantagraphics' Gary Groth, and his work soon appeared in issue 13 of the Hernandez brothers' Love and Rockets. Lloyd Llewellyn became a comic book series; the six regular issues, published in 1986 and 1987, were followed by a special, The All-New Lloyd Llewellyn in Black and White, in 1988.

In 1989, Fantagraphics published the first issue of his periodic comic collection Eightball. Many of Clowes's serials in Eightball have been collected and released as graphic novels, garnering significant critical acclaim and mainstream sales. The first dozen or so issues of Eightball typically contained a number of short comedic stories featuring absurd characters such as Shamrock Squid and Grip Glutz, along with topical satires such as Art School Confidential. The first extended piece serialized in Eightball is Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. Appearing in issues 1-10, this story features a complex, surrealistic storyline. Later issues have tended to focus on longer narratives, however. Ghost World was released as a collection in 1997 after being serialized in Eightball (issues 11-18). It was adapted by Clowes and Zwigoff into a full-length feature film in 2001; both were nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay. Issues 19-21 serialized David Boring, which was released as a graphic novel by Pantheon Books.

The last two issues of Eightball, (nos. 22 and 23, "Ice Haven" and "The Death-Ray" ), were each conceived as an artistically ambitious and self-contained work in an oversized, all-color format. Ice Haven was released in June 2005 by Pantheon in a revised and reformatted hardcover edition.

On September 16, 2007, The New York Times Magazine published the first installment of Mister Wonderful, a serialized graphic novel by Clowes. Clowes described the novel as a "romance"; it ran for 20 installments, until mid-January 2008. Clowes's most recent graphic novel, Wilson, which did not appear in Eightball, was published by Drawn & Quarterly in May 2010.

Clowes lives in Oakland, California, with his wife Erika and son Charlie. In 2006, after a prolonged health crisis, Clowes underwent open-heart surgery. His latest graphic novel is a collection of his Mister Wonderful strip featuring added content specific to the standalone release of the story.