It’s difficult not to connect the dots from Robert Crumb to Daniel Clowes. Crumb’s raw, realistic figures, oozing desperate human emotion (unrequited lust, mostly) spawned numer-ous other writer/illustrators like Clowes, Chris Ware, Johnny Ryan, Dave Cooper and Charles Burns that have have expanded comics beyond the green tights and trusty sidekicks that came before. Caricature features nine stories, many from Clowes’ Eightball periodical as well as the melodrama “Eyeliner,” the first comic work to appear in Esquire’s fiction issue. Clowes’s stories are rich with buck-toothed, horn-rimmed, hat-haired eccentrics, each living their lives in quiet and not-so-quiet desperation: a gynecologist/karaoke singer, a 14-year-old trick-or-treater, a traveling carnival caricaturist, all traveling down a road they seem unable or unwilling to change. It’s the journey, not the destination, and these nine by the writer of Ghost World are definitely worth the ride.
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