Ice Haven

I haven't given anything five stars for a while... but I'm happy to save them for books like this.

For me, Ice Haven was a perfect book. With intricate art, it tells short interlocking stories of suburbia. The comic strip format, different for each story, is experimental, but it's still an accessible read.

Clowes' books are black comedies, cynical and alienating, but on some fundamental level you still sympathize with his characters, and it keeps his books readable and human.

A good, if slight, book from Clowes. Very funny in parts. Highly postmodern, although in an ingenuous and understated - not overly knowing - way. I was interested by the 'Vida goes to Hollywood' section - is its misogyny just self-referential self-mocking? Is it supposed to be that, yet still misogynistic in its own right? Is it more misanthropy than misogyny? I give Clowes the benefit of the doubt, and believe it is carefully constructed - both highlighting the misogyny of which Clowes has been accused in the past, and also bringing the paranoia of failed writer, Random Wilder, to life. It feels like Ice Haven manages to pull together many of the themes that Clowes has explored through Eightball. While not weighty, it feels like a show more great introduction to and overview of his work. show less

The hamlet of Ice Haven is home to the typical small town dramas–lovelorn teenagers, neighborhood rivalries, children taking their boredom out on one another, etc–when a young boy goes missing.

You’d think this sort of thing would stop the city cold, but, as in real life, most people remain chiefly concerned with their own artistic, emotional or sexual frustrations whilst the Goldberg case played out on the periphery of their lives.

For such a short work, Clowes has given us a vibrant cast of believable characters. There’s the pseudo-narrator, Random Wilder, who fancies himself to be a poet and to be in a feud with Ice Haven’s poet laureate Ida Wentz. Ida’s granddaughter, Vida, is a budding writer visiting from out-of-town and show more becomes interested in Mr Wilder’s poetry. She publishes a journal no one reads.

There’s Charles, Carmichael, and Paula, who go to school with the kidnapped boy, Mr Life of the Party up there. Charles is a hopeless romantic in love with his step-sister and he only talks to his younger friend George. Carmichael is an unpleasant little boy with a mean streak who gives Charles a book about Leopold and Loeb (there’s an excellent strip about that murder in the book). This leads Charles to think perhaps Carmichael has killed David.

Violet is Charles’ step-sister, they’ve just moved to Ice Haven and she’s miserable. She’s in love with an older boy named Penrod who lives elsewhere.

And Mr and Mrs Ames, the detective’s sent to work the case of the missing boy. Their marriage is not in the best state.

Then there’s Harry Naybors, a comic book critic who is a little meta for my taste, but we live in meta times, my friends.

The entire book is 88 pages of stylistically different comic strips, which combine to make a somewhat linear novel (with a couple detours through the mind of an anthropomorphic stuffed toy and the first human in Ice Haven in 100,000 b.c.)

It’s full of honest moments with very human characters, but the truest section was ‘Seersucker’, which perfectly capture the thoughts of many writers (and probably most humans), with such classic quotes as:

‘Today I must begin a schedule of focused and lucid daily writing. I must clear my mind of all distractions… I’ll never be able to concentrate fully until I finish cleaning the birdbath….After this, I’ll eat a quick dinner, and then straight to work!’

‘My life is fading away. The days speed by in a blur. How can I have wasted so much time? How much could I have accomplished if I had put my time to better use?…I have to fill every remaining second with intensive study and work… Today I will begin with Wells’s Outline of History and Sarton’s Six-Volume History of Science . From there I’ll branch out into various subcategories, like botany and ancient China… As soon as I finish this [household chore] I’ll go straight to the library…’

The ending was both surprising but fitting and gave everyone their moment. Ice Haven is definitely going on the re-readable shelf, I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys off-beat stories that make you think. show less

Ice Haven is a truly wonderful book, offering a melancholy ride through a thoroughly American landscape full of despair, failure, and redemption. Even more interestingly, Ice Haven deviates from Clowes' other works in its ability to present story lines dealing both with coming of age and coming to terms with oneself, all presented without the mawkish awkwardness that is the stock-in-trade of so many "indy comics", and not a few of Clowes' other titles. The alternating subplots, each with their own primary characters, flow together wonderfully, and the wrapping and interweaving narrative of a kidnapped boy gives the many parts a convincing cohesion. This is Daniel Clowes at his best.

If you're a fan of Daniel Clowes's comics, this one will probably please you as much as any of them, or nearly so. I liked the comic-strip-style chapters and the interrelated storylines and characters. Ice Haven features Clowes's distinctive and charming art, a collection of characters coping with fears and obsessions and their strained relationships, and a drab backdrop that manages to look like every place and no place at the same time. I would have liked the book even more if there had been more of it, but it's pleasantly compact and succeeds on its own terms. Perhaps it works just as it was meant to, and it's no slight to say that it left me wanting more of it.

Dan Clowes is one of the most prominent names in graphic novels today. His book Ghost World was made into a successful and highly regarded film. Clowes’s characters tend to maneuver through his stories in a strange kind of desperate somnambulance that imbues his work with a distinctive feel. Ice Haven shares much of that tone with Clowes's previous work. This book features a collection of characters living in the shadow of a small-town tragedy. Each character struggles to define his or her direction in life, with the abduction of a local child serving as a unifying backdrop.

Co-worker saw me reading this over lunch and commented "oh, some high-level reading, huh?" because it's got, y'know, pictures. Never mind that it's actually written for adults, making it maybe a higher level book than 80% of what I've been reading anyway. Grumble.

Because Dan Clowes is not an easy, breezy read. Ice Haven has a pretty large cast, all of whom have their own individual dramas going on, and every drama is given the same weight--from the parents whose son has been missing for a week to the boy in love with his new stepsister. It's not as linear a story as Ghost World, but it's all interconnected, making this one long comic-strip narrative rather than a bunch of separate stories.

I wouldn't be me if I didn't have one complaint, show more and that's that Clowes' lettering is so tiny and his comics so wordy that it can sometimes be difficult to decipher. There was one panel I stared at for a long time, trying to figure out why a woman responded to bad news by clutching her husband and crying "oh, my god, tacos!", before realizing that the all-capped "TACOS" was actually "JACOB." show less