Exploring Ghost Worlds: A Review of The Daniel Clowes Reader

Abstract

Daniel Clowes is undoubtedly one of the most influential and prolific cartoonists working today, with a career spanning many decades. The Daniel Clowes Reader (Parille 2013) comes at the perfect time – when interest in Clowes from scholars and critics is at a high, but in which he is still perhaps given less critical attention than his peers Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman, and Marjane Satrapi, all of whom are cited twice as often as Clowes despite his large canon of significant works in comics. With recent books being published on Chris Ware by The University Press of Mississippi and the forthcoming Art Spiegelman collection from Drawn and Quarterly, more significant focused, monographic books are emerging in comics and comics criticism, and The Daniel Clowes Reader is a more than welcome addition to this emergence.