Literary Up: Clowes Call

The Death-Ray
By Daniel Clowes 2 (Drawn & Quarterly, 2011)
Aka Eightball #23, Spring 2004.

You could question the value of reprinting a single issue of a comic book in hardcover form and charging $20 for the privilege. But when it’s a work by Dan Clowes, you shouldn’t. Like the earlier Drawn & Quarterly release Ice Haven, Death-Ray isn’t a collection of stories with the same characters of several installments scattered through several issues of Clowes’ irregularly published Eightball comic. It’s an entire multi-part, multi-styled issue of Eightball (#23, from Spring 2004), every part of which pertains to the same central narrative. That theme is one that Clowes has been successfully exploring since his early Lloyd Llewellyn comics in the 1990s—how average young people would behave if granted superpowers overnight, and how the responsibility might simply make them wish to return to normalcy. The power here is not just a death-ray but super-strength, gifts bestowed on an awkward, withdrawn, horny teenager. The depiction of sullen youth is not clichéd, while the fantasy of using mysterious superpowers to right wrongs and revenge yourself on bullies is. It makes for a great balance, and a smart use of the comic book form. Which more than justifies this elegant oversized reprint. The hardcover version made me reappreciate a comic I loved the first time around but haven’t thought to revisit. Now I’m digging all my older Eightballs out before Drawn & Quarterly has to do it for me.