Twentieth Century Eightball

About this book

Before the Ghost Worldgraphic novel and film propelled Daniel Clowes to international superstardom as the preeminent cartoonist of his generation, his ongoing comic book Eightballwas already the most talked-about series of the 1990s. Renowned for its gleefully incisive social satire and riotous absurdity, Entertainment Weeklyproclaimed it "the year's best regularly published comic book" upon its debut in 1989. The Village Voiceproclaimed it "brilliant," and Art Spiegelman called it "curdlingly good." Simpsons creator Matt Groening has repeatedly called it his favorite comic book. 20th Century Eightballcollects the very best humor strips from Eightball, written and drawn between 1988 and 1996. Included within are such seminal strips/rants as "I Hate You Deeply," "Sexual Frustration," "Ugly Girls," "Why I Hate Christians," "Message to the People of the Future," "Paranoid," "My Suicide," "Chicago," and over three dozen more. Other favorites include "Art School Confidential," one of Clowes' most popular strips of all-time: made into a motion picture with a screenplay by Ghost World's Clowes and Terry Zwigoff. Also included is Clowes' hilariously Freudian deconstruction of professional athletes, "On Sports," which caused a stir in San Antonio last year when reprinted in the city's most popular weekly paper, prompting an advertising boycott and demands for the paper to be destroyed by local sports fans. Noted comics historian Roger Sabin, author of Phaidon's Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels, calls 20th Century Eightballa "corrosively satirical vision of an America cracking apart, and confirms Clowes as a worthy successor to the underground greats of the 1960s."