EIGHTBALL 23
Reviewed by Adam Ford

by Dan Clowes
Fantagraphic Books
$7.00

When I heard that Dan Clowes's latest issue of EIGHTBALL would feature a story about a superhero called The Death Ray I was reminded of that weird rumour going around a couple years ago that claimed that Marvel Comics was thinking of asking Clowes to work on one of their Spider-Man titles. If anyone actually needed empirical proof that Marvel and Clowes were fundamentally artistically incompatible, EIGHTBALL #23 would be it. Having said that, it's an oversimplification to think of "The Death Ray" as merely a superhero story. Sure, there are elements in "The Death Ray" that are characteristic of superhero stories - the acquisition of superpowers during adolescence, garish costumes and weird weapons - but these elements are part of a larger story, a character piece focusing on a disappointingly ordinary man called Andy and the life choices he has made.

Andy is a late-forty-something nobody who offers us his home-spun, self-justifying life philosophies as we follow him on his daily routine. We go back to Andy's teenage years and witness his transformation into The Death Ray, a costumed hero whose strength comes from smoking cigarettes and who carries a ray gun that can make things disappear. Andy and his best friend Louie try their hardest to use Andy's powers to become heroes, but their own pettiness, their lack of imagination and the sheer mundanity of the world stand in their way.

"The Death Ray" is an eye-catching delight, a symphony of experimental techniques in terms of colour, dialogue, pacing and even panel composition. Clowes is well aware that changing the nature of any of these elements can change the way that a comic is read, and he plays fast and loose with all of the rules.

Throughout the comic there are speech bubbles that are only partially revealed, the words they contain hidden behind objects - and other speech balloons cut off completely by panel borders. Sound effects, too, run out of the frame, and there are many actions that take place "off-camera." This creates a sense that the actions and events depicted are happening too fast to take them in properly, too fast to be made sense of, disorienting the protagonists and the reader alike. This disorientation is compounded by the use of title panels and headings all the way through the story - at the beginning of pages, halfway through pages, between panels right in the middle of sequences - which on the one hand determine the pacing of the story and break it into easily digestible episodic chunks, but on the other hand disrupt the flow of the narrative.

Every element that Clowes uses to jar the reader is drawn from the lexicon of comic book iconography. The interrupter-headings use various kinds of garish pulp-style lettering, from the saccharine cursive loops of romance comics to the over-rendered 3D look of science fiction anthologies. The panel shapes are familiar despite their unusual combinations - standard rectangular frames are at times counterpointed by jagged electric-edged and soft, thought-bubble, cloud-shaped frames. Colour, too, is used in disparate ways from page to page. A full-coloured double-page action-packed "pinup" spread is followed by a minimal duotone grid-style sequence, which itself is followed by a colour page that begins with a large half-page "teaser-style" panel above a standard three-by-three grid. The end result of all of this chopping and changing of colour palette and panel composition, combined with the use of false titles, is that a cursory glance might make the reader think that this was an anthology of shorter stories rather than one single story.

"The Death Ray" is a bleak and unforgiving story, an unravelling of the superhero mythos that seems to take a perverse delight in the shortcomings of its self-aggrandising, self-deceiving protagonist. It's tempting to think of Andy as a sort of everyman, but that would be unfair to humanity as a whole. Andy's story is a deliberately caustic examination of human failings turned up to eleven, a cruel caricature of futility and wasted potential. The story is more sophisticated than those that merely point out the sadomasochistic arrogance that is often associated with superhero power fantasies, though its bleakness and cynicism are things that it has in common with many satires of the genre. One thing that makes "The Death Ray" stand apart from other satires is that it doesn't just play with the inherent absurdity of superheroes. It also examines the flaws and uglinesses that can be found in all people and drags those things screaming into the light.

"The Death Ray" is a bleak and misanthropic story of one man's failure to live up to his own potential, but despite its hopelessness it is a brilliantly told story that highlights Dan Clowes's love for comics as well as his mastery of its potential.

EXTREMELY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Trapped in a world he never asked for, Adam Ford is a Melbourne-based author. His latest novel is called MAN BITES DOG. It's a story about small press, unfair accusations and bad television. He knows it's been a long time since GODLINGS episodes, but life got in the way and he hopes to have something new for GODLINGS fans (all three of them) next year. Adam's web site can be found here.


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