It was hard to tell if it was a lot of those guys or if it was all these kind of tastemakers in the counterculture who were responding to it like they'd never read a comic before. It was a comic that people talked about, but it was still during that time when a guy who was collecting Alpha Flight or whatever would hear about a comic like Eightball or Love and Rockets and add it to his weekly pull list at the comics store.

I knew it had caught on to some degree, but it was so hard to tell how many people were actually reading it.

When did you become aware that Eightball was becoming important in that world? Was that strategic, or were your references just that much more obscure?Īt the time, there was a strong subculture dedicated to appreciating pop culture that wasn't popular. Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron often felt like it was made of very specific visual references that disappeared the more you tried to identify them, like trying to remember a dream. As Clowes writes in the intro to the gorgeous new The Complete Eightball collection that attends the 25th anniversary of his masterpiece, 'Overwhelmed by failure, I decided to put everything into one last hopeless non-commercial effort, hoping to finish one or two issues before being expelled from comics forever.' In the immortal words of Devil Doll, 'HAW HAW.' Like any great breakthrough (and many stiff drinks), it was born of desperation.

No matter how timeless it always seemed, Eightball being 25 is a stiff drink. (For a time, if you heard someone say the words 'Needle Dick, the Bug Fucker,' there was a reasonably good chance that person would become your friend.) As a result, it joins the now-long line of things still unaccountably filed in your consciousness as bold new works that are, in fact, older than you were when you first discovered them.

Eightball became one of the essential comedic touchstones of 1990s culture, a way to help the self-selecting weirdos of the pre-internet-or at least pre- good-internet-era identify kindred spirits and speak in shorthand. 'Comics were just not a thing yet.' Daniel Clowes (who would know) is talking about the period that led to the creation of Eightball, the stunningly smart and innovative comic that did what almost no other comic seemed able to do at the time: enter the culture of people who didn't like comics.

Daniel clowes like a velvet glove