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I can look at my early work and see what a pained struggle it was to draw what I was drawing. I was trying so hard to get this specific look that was in my head, and always falling short.

Daniel Clowes

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Daniel Clowes
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: April 14
Cartoonist
Comics Artist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Dan Clowes
Always
Struggle
Pained
Head
Specific
Fall
Falling
Look
Draw
Looks
Drawing
Hard
Draws
Trying
Early
Work
Short

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The secret to being alone is to organize your time to develop habits and routines and gradually elevate their importance to where they seem almost like normal, healthy activities.
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I feel like a lot of my aesthetic was in response to feeling the awfulness and cheapness of that [ the 70'th].
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I'm always looking for things I imagine must exist, but don't - this is usually the impetus to create that thing myself.
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I'm more interested in characters who are a little difficult.
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At a certain point, I realized that I could draw anything, and there was nothing I should avoid - I could make it work. That's opened me up to being able to be much more comfortable telling any kind of story.
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I have cultivated a little crew of people whose opinions I understand. It's like the way you'd follow certain film critics because you know what their criteria are, and you may not agree with them, but you can glean from their opinion how you will feel about a film.
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Even if I only had 10 readers, I'd rather do the book for them than for a million readers online.
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You can give some kind of spark of life to a comic that a photograph doesn't really have. A photograph, even if it's connecting with you, it seems very dead on the page sometimes.
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But I enjoy the opportunity to use swear symbols.
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You try to make the world a better place and what does it get you? I mean, Christ, how the hell does one man stand a chance against four billion assholes?
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I love the medium and I love individual comics, but the business is nothing I would be proud of.
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I knew how to draw all of the different smokestacks on the old trains and all that stuff, and then I realized that if I can draw trains, which is the thing I was probably the least interested in in the world at the time, I can do anything and find a way into it that will be interesting.
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I actually start drawing things. Usually they're abandoned before I commit too much time and effort.
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Before I could read, I remember trying to piece together the stories from the images. It was a very primal experience.
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It keeps me moving when I see people doing stuff that I see as my direction. I think, Oh, it's been tainted. Now I've got to do something new. There's nothing worse than working on your own stuff and thinking that someone else is following you along.
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If you think about it enough to have a really articulate answer, you're not doing it right. That's how I feel about art. If your thought process could take you to knowing exactly what you're doing and why, there would be no point in making the art. It would become like propaganda. It's more nebulous than that.
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I lose faith in everything else, but rarely in my work. If I start to get bored, I change it to make it more interesting. I try not to take it too seriously, but I also try to never cheat or hurry things along.
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I was a very fearful little kid, and I would always see the worst in everything. The glass was half-empty. I would see people kissing, and I would think one was trying to bite the other.
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If I could have somehow been the kind of artist who could crank out two or three issues a year, that's different. That's sort of what it's all about, to get this thing out so that there's some kind of continuity. But to do a comic book every year or two was just so anti-climactic.
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That's been my main interest for the last 15 years, is to really make sure the story and the characters take precedence over everything else, and that I give them everything I can to make them exist as actual people.
Daniel Clowes