The Four Color Media Monitor

Cartoonist Daniel Clowes, who penned GNs like Ghost World, was interviewed by El Pais, and indicated he may move to Spain, because he's mad at what things are like in the USA now, but as could surely be expected, it's from a left-wing viewpoint:

Gritty, populated by downtrodden losers, pathetic and surreal, yet also full of humor and color. No one has drawn the American experience quite like Daniel Clowes, 63, who captured teen rebelliousness in Ghost World and is also the author of the traumatic biography Monica. One of the most relevant cartoonists in the United States, he seems exhausted and frustrated by the current state of his country: “We are looking at the possibility of moving to Europe, just in case. You never know. You just think of Jews in Berlin in 1932. You have to think ahead,” he said in Madrid in early November, before giving a talk at the Reina Sofía Museum that was not coincidentally called Make America Weird Again: “Nobody wants Americans for good reasons. But my wife always tells me: ‘In Europe they value artists, so maybe some country will adopt you.’”

Now that he is presenting Bola Ocho Integral, the Spanish edition of his first comic book Eight Ball, where he published Ghost World, Clowes almost looks back with nostalgia at 1989, when he began publishing comics. That lonely outcast in his twenties saw then that the underground comic scene was the thing that could get him out of his confinement: “The late 80s were really one of the calmest, least crazy eras in American history. It was very boring. I remember at most of the elections back then, the complaint was that both parties were just the same. There was no real choice between voting. And the scandals were nothing compared to today. But you could sense underneath it that there was a madness in America, and that it had always been there. And I was very interested in that madness. I wanted to explore it. Then the madness came up to the top and now it’s released. It has been like a Pandora’s box,” he explains to EL PAÍS.

So we have here yet another left-wing artist who only thinks conservatives like Donald Trump are a problem, not any liberal ideologues, not Islamic jihadism, not illegal immigration, not domestic extremists, and Clowes likely has no courage to question whether his own fellow leftists are turning against him. And the 80s the least insane era? What about Betty Mahmoody and daughter's terrifying ordeal in Iran? What about the time when Salman Rushdie was threatened by ayatollah Khomeini? I guess most foreign issues don't interest Clowes, selectively or otherwise.

Clowes has always tried to understand his characters, no matter how complicated and insufferable, and even despite the bad decisions they make. “I tried to depict characters that were sort of oppressive to me, or ones that I related to. My wife and friends, whenever we’re walking around somewhere, they’ll look at somebody and say, ‘That’s one of your characters!’ They’re really out there in the world. The goal is always to inhabit them in a way that you try to see the world through their perspective and try to understand why they make whatever decisions they make. Sometimes I think: what are characters I could never fully write? I couldn’t write like a Nazi prison guard, like someone who’s so evil in a way that’s almost without thought. I can’t get in the head of somebody like that. But a lot of other very antisocial types, I can imagine how they would feel.”

Clowes adds that it would be very difficult to find empathy in an Elon Musk or Silicon Valley. “I couldn’t do it without utter contempt. It would be very hard to find empathy for that. But if it were a developed story, I’m sure I could find some way into it. I mean, they have to have some kind of frailty. Although it seems useless, and maybe they don’t deserve it, I try to understand them,” he reflects.

Well here's another clue for now just how pathetic Clowes is being in his world view. Does that mean that, if Clowes is willing to buy electric cars, he won't buy from Tesla but will buy from Volkswagen? If that turns out to be the case, it'll be a classic mind-boggler. And why does he cite Nazis as an example, but not Islamic jihadists? Clowes appears to be the kind of ideologue who sticks with obvious citations, and won't step off the leftist plantation of thought. And what's this about "understanding" his characters? This is supremely silly, because he created them, ditto the personalities he applied. Maybe it should all be understanding the people he might've drawn inspiration from? I'm tired of hearing these press sources, along with the artist himself, make it sound like the comics characters are real life people, which they most definitely are not. Based on how they put it, it's galling they would even bring up the issue of surrealism when they don't even bother to distinguish between fiction and reality.

Over time, Clowes left behind the cynicism of youth to embrace a tenderness that he still feels (“you come to realize that there are people and things and principles that are absolutely worthy of all your affection and attention and all the things that you get angry about are just worthy of being ignored”), he finds it difficult to express it at this moment: “I’m a bit too [...] angry and appalled to answer right now,” he replied by email days after his visit to Europe, with Trump now elected president, in response to questions about the election outcome.

“The people in Spain are so much more supportive of the arts and artists than in the U.S., and the culture, as in most of Europe, is far less stressful,” he noted. During his visit he had already spoken about his fascination with the Spanish capital, since he sees in its gritty reality something that reminds him of the dark Chicago of his adolescence where he built his fictional world, although he has been living in progressive Oakland (California) for more than 30 years.

Wow, this guy sure doesn't pay any attention to the crisis of Islamofascism that's eating away at Europe today. One can only wonder if he'll continue to travel around with blinders no matter how things turn out in Europe in the forseeable future. If he's not willing to fight for Europe's better interests any more than the USA's, he shouldn't be surprised if there'll come a day when even in Spain, they won't appreciate his art any more than north American liberals of recent. And then, a most eyebrow raising revelation comes up:

He recalls that the lonely 12-year-old boy wished that he could share his love for Thor comics with a friend at school, but these were not popular at the time. “And now you see a 50-year-old guy wearing a Thor T-shirt on the street. It’s disturbing. In Europe at least you see adults dressed like adults,” he says, and admits that he stopped collecting and reading Marvel comics when he was 14: “I never looked at them again.”

It sounds like Clowes is the kind of person who, despite working in comicdom as he did for 35 years, never appreciated mainstream superhero fare when it mattered. This does offer a clue there are certain would-be creators out there who didn't appreciate the hard work of Stan Lee any more than any other creators of the times, and it's obviously a shame. Because as a result, we can't expect them to even take an objective view of the dire situation Marvel/DC are in now. And then, a certain problem alluded to before comes up:

Clowes is particularly critical of society’s emotional drift, and the “frustrating” Gen Z message of only wanting to see characters they can identify with: “It’s just devastating to fiction and to developing critical thinking. The only way to develop perspective and understand characters is to read fiction and the classics, and young people don’t do that anymore. There are people who now read Ghost World and think the characters are mean and horrible. Nobody said that in the first 30 years after it was published; you related to them, they were human. But now people say that ‘the ideals the characters represent don’t relate to my values so how dare you produce them.’ Now you have to censor yourself, so I admire young artists who don’t do that. They’re the ones who in 20 years people will still care about. But all of this self-censored stuff will be completely ignored and it will be looked back on like a huge mistake.”

So much like, say, Robert Crumb, Clowes is also discovering the age bracket he once wrote and drew for is turning against him, and I think it's actually because, depending on how his comic's characters are structured, they despise seeing a mirror held up to see themselves in. Is that it? Could be. The problem here, of course, is that Clowes predictably won't utter an iota of complaint over how modern leftists may be the ones shunning his work now. So what was that about developing critical thinking? I'm afraid Clowes has fallen way short of proving the point, nor does he show courage to take issue with modern leftist thinking. Isn't courage also an important trait? Well he lacks it. And at the end:

Although he is now presenting his work in a museum, Clowes still believes that “comics are not made for museums. They should be read in solitude, in a comfortable chair and in silence. That’s how you get the emotional connection.” That and the film he watches every night constitute his refuge from a world that today terrifies him a little more than yesterday. “And it’s going to get worse, with artificial intelligence, all public spaces are going to be polluted. We will end up not knowing if we are talking to our friends anymore. Whoever claims that an AI will produce better art than a human makes it clear that they have no idea what good art is, but it’s like arguing with a Trump supporter. It’s useless,” he concedes.

Yup, that's Clowes' way of thinking, regrettably. There's only so many things his own political side could do, and he won't utter a whisper of complaint about what they do. Leftists like him only seem capable of railing against right-wingers no matter where they are in the world, and it's cheap. And now, he may be among a certain segment of leftists in the USA who've said they'll bolt for abroad if Trump wins the election, as he did earlier this month. But even Europe shouldn't be too hasty to welcome such ideologues if they aren't realists. Unfortunately, that appears to be just what Spain for one is doing, and despite what Clowes claims, it's possible that in time, he'll discover even Europe doesn't live up to the standards he assumes they do, mainly because he won't push for better values no matter where he resides. And of course that's a shame.

Is he right about comics not being made for museums though? It'd make more sense if he said they're not made for the speculator market, and complain about all the artists who're feeding this farce back in the USA, and make a point that artwork for comics, if anything, should be for people at large to actually see, and not sold all over the place at auctions, and then padlocked in a trunk for centuries where it may never be seen by anybody at all. The artists who're going along with variant covers for the speculator market have to address this issue too, and whether they're comfortable with it.

Labels: censorship issues, Europe and Asia, history, indie publishers, islam and jihad, marvel comics, moonbat artists, msm propaganda, museums, politics, technology, Thor