Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron

A particularly vivid nightmare, like Daniel Clowes's brain spilled ink-black directly onto the page. Surreal and sad, you'll waste your time trying too hard to grasp at plot points and resolutions--this books doesn't want to answer your questions. "Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron"--but what does it mean???[return][return]Exactly.

This is the first Daniel Clowes graphic novel I have read and it was recommended by my friend Zachary and a friend of his from college last time we were at Quimby's book store in Chicago together. This has a very fantastical nature to it and is dark and grim. It begins with a gritty film in an adult movie house, a toilet guru, and a dark adventure based around a historical symbol that appears innocent from the outset-like a pudgy face with a cute miniature hat on it...drunkards, commune feminists, policeman who want to fight, a dog without orifices, and a girl who literally looks like a potato and fancies him something terrible all follow the main character as real life seems to intersect oddly with the characters from the film. I can't show more forget about the little girl who smokes cigars and draws nothing but ponies all day yet dreams up murderous plots for scripts.

There is an overarching sadness to all the oddities and a weirdness that makes you feel empty here. It reminded me a bit of Charles Burns's novel Black Hole but it also has a keen Lynch quality that makes you question if anything is real yet believe, deep down in the pit of your stomach, that reality really can be that dreadful even when you don't want to believe in it the most. show less

A particularly vivid nightmare, like Daniel Clowes's brain spilled ink-black directly onto the page. Surreal and sad, you'll waste your time trying too hard to grasp at plot points and resolutions--this books doesn't want to answer your questions. "Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron"--but what does it mean???

Exactly.

A very Lynch-ian start to Clowes's work. Great ideas, great art, but they are a bit unrefined and not fully realized. Still, love the ambition.

On one level, I can see how this constituted the early, mainstream-unfriendly foundations of Clowes' later successes (Ghost World, etc). But on another level, the madness and twistedness of the plot completely boggled me. I loved the character of the half-human-half-sea-creature, Tina, with her simple human needs and pains. I also liked the idea of the dog-without-orifices for its devil may care bizarreness, although too much of such bordered on the indulgent. But I was pretty much half-lost throughout, and some of the sub(?)-plots were totally opaque to me.

Clowes is great at fetishishing women, though, and depicting emotion with a spare, flat drawing style. Could there be something else in Clowes' idea of the woman in the movie, which show more Velvet Glove didn't manage to put across because it was focusing on so many other weird things? show less

This was a little too free-form for my liking. I expected something more like Eightball or Caricature and this didn't follow the same structure. Interesting for serious Clowes fans, but the dreamlike narrative leaves something to be desired.

Clowes does Lynch and everything feels yucky. Whether that's positive or negative all depends on how you feel about such things.