Ice Haven

Clowes made the rare transition from favorite doodler of nerdy underdogs everywhere to Hollywood inspiration, when the movie adapted from his Ghost World graphic novel become a cult hit. The Oscar nomination he won for its screenplay hasn’t convinced him to mainstream his talents, however. In Ice Haven he continues to chronicle the idiocies and idiosyncracies of local characters who are quite ordinary, altogether bizarre, and often both. Clowes’s characters always seem to resemble our co-workers or neighbors–only he seems to know them better than we do. His expressive and largely unflattering drawings have an unrelenting flatness that is belied by his ability to reveal the hidden depths of personality. In Ice Haven he spies on a small Midwestern town experiencing a series of events loosely based on the Leopold and Loeb story.