While the super-hero angle is not really something I expected from Clowes, the characters of Andy and Louie fit right into the Clowes pantheon. The story, which originally appeared in the Eightball series in 2004, is approached creatively with different length strips coming at the character of Andy and his actions from varying perspectives. The large format book serves the art well, giving room for the short and long sections to combine into a powerful narrative. This is one worth checking out, both for Clowes fans and for those who don't know they are Clowes fans just yet.

[full review here: http://spacebeer.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-death-ray-by-daniel-clowes-2011.html ] ( )

reading a new Clowes book is like getting a punch in the teeth. ( )

Purely an emotional rating. It would have been another start if I had been on some kind of drug while I read it. I only have to quote one thing to sum up this book:

"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."

Fun read. ( )

This story is about a young lad who, with the aid of nicotine, gains special powers and is able to control the death ray. He uses this to deal out his own brand of justice upon society. Daniel Clowes is a great graphic novelist. ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

It was just a month or two ago that I was reviewing Daniel Clowes' Mister Wonderful, lamenting that little wisp of a story and declaring how much I was looking forward instead to his next major masterpiece; and now it's here, in the form of a giant oversized hardback called The Death-Ray, although with "new" perhaps not being the best term, in that this is actually a reprint of a 2004 issue of his idiosyncratic comic book Eightball. Nonetheless, this sees Clowes in the same brilliantly dark, surrealist form as such past classics as David Boring and Like A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, telling the story of a nerdy, antisocial teen and double orphan in the mid-1970s who discovers that his dead father committed bizarre genetic experiments on him as a child, granting him superhuman abilities every time he smokes a cigarette but also an uncontrolled rage to go along with it; the story itself, then, is partly about what a sociopathic loner like him might actually do with such powers, partly about his "Ghost World"esque loser best friend as he transitions from heavy metal and dysfunction to punk rock and relative normalcy in those same years, and partly what can only be called the most deconstructionist take Clowes has done yet on the entire subject of visual storytelling in the first place (and this from a guy who spends a lot of time thinking about the conventions of the comic-book format), the story itself hopping back and forth between different styles and color palettes in order to set different emotional tones for different scenes, and Clowes brilliantly adding context to dialogue by sometimes literally cutting voice bubbles halfway off with the edges of his story frames. A fantastic treat for existing fans, and a great starting point for those unfamiliar with his work, like a lot of artists throughout history a conservative President in power seems to do wonders for Clowes' artistic output, with him churning out classic after classic during the Bush years but now in a seemingly constant flounder since Obama got elected in 2008. An absolute must-read for all of CCLaP's readers, and a book that will very likely be making my best-of lists at the end of the year.

Out of 10: 9.6 ( )