Influential graphic novelist Dan Clowes tells Hillary Chute why illustration lives on but comic books are dead

The title character of Daniel Clowes’s latest graphic novel Wilson (Drawn & Quarterly) is a middle-aged man, who, like Clowes, was born in Chicago and now lives in Oakland, California. Clowes is the creator of the long-running, influential comic series Eightball, which he started in 1989, as well as the author of Pussey! (Fantagraphics, 1995), Ghost World (Fantagraphics, 1997), Caricature (Fantagraphics, 1998), David Boring (Pantheon, 2000), and Ice Haven (Pantheon, 2005), among many others. His screenplays include Ghost World and Art School Confidential – both movies based on his comics – and his serialised strip Mister Wonderful ran in the New York Times magazine starting in 2007. Clowes is also a frequent contributor of covers to The New Yorker. We sat down with the influential illustrator to discuss Wilson and what the future holds for the world of comics.

So what was your first published comics work?
It was a feature in Cracked magazine called “Aren’t You Nervous When…?”

How did you hook up with Cracked?
I had a roommate at Pratt [Pratt Institute in New York, where Clowes studied] who was kind of an amazing guy who could talk his way into anything. And one day he noticed there was an opening for, like, an assistant gopher at Cracked. And he said, Hey, I’m going to get this job! And within three weeks, he was like the editor in chief. [Laughs] It was pretty great.

What do you think about the fact that you’re always being accused of having misanthropic characters, especially, say, in Ghost World?
I would hope that if you really read the work carefully, that wouldn’t be all you took away from it. Because certainly that’s not my intention. And I often don’t see the parts that people find especially grim and depressing. I usually find whatever I’m doing to be funny. And often I’m surprised when people say, “I was so depressed for two weeks after reading that comic.” Not me. When I work, my wife hears me upstairs laughing at my own stupid jokes. [Laughs]

You’re famous – to me at least – for drawing really believable girl characters.
Well, that’s nice.

And then your last two works, Mister Wonderful [which ran in the New York Times magazine in 20 instalments] and Wilson both feature middle-aged man characters.
They’re two very different versions of the same guy in a way. With Mister Wonderful, the woman at The New York Times called me up and asked me if I wanted to do a comic strip, and we were just sort of talking about different ideas. At some point I said, “I should do a romance story.” And of course I was imagining a ’50s-style, teen romance kind of a thing. And then I thought, well, what would that be like for my imagined reader of the New York Times magazine? I tried to create the guy I thought was the optimal reader for the New York Times magazine, and it was this guy Marshall. And then I thought, what would his love story be? And that’s how that began.

Where did the many different styles throughout Wilson come from?
Originally I was going to do it all in the same style, and I couldn’t decide what style to pick [Laughs], so I kept trying out different styles, and then it became part of the DNA of the book. It was unimaginable then that I would pick a certain style that felt like it accurately reflected this person.

How did you decide that you wanted to make it a “graphic novel” object?
I felt like the whole comic book thing is over. Like we can’t go back to that anymore. Now that you have to charge six dollars or whatever for a comic book it’s not the same thing as it was. It just seems like an affectation at this point in time.

Wilson is more than twice the size of your last book, Ice Haven. How did you decide to make it so big?
I liked the idea of Ice Haven as this little travel book or something. I wanted it to look like a postcard. Wilson—I just wanted everything about it to be sort of easy to read. I wanted it to just have the feel of a kid’s book, almost—sort of heavy, weighty. I wanted it to feel like it could take a bullet—like you could hold it in front of your chest, and it’s like, the bullet didn’t make it all the way through! It’s really the thickest board I’ve ever seen on a book. I told Chris Oliveros at Drawn & Quarterly, “I want the thickest board you can get me.” I thought, there’s something so great and strong about it. I felt like in a world where everybody is downloading books, it was saying, “I’m a book, damn it – deal with me.”

Wilson is published by Drawn & Quarterly.