Interview with Daniel Clowes in Mother Jones

Following up on Mark's post about Daniel Clowes's first graphic novel Wilson, I'd like to call your attention to this great interview with Dan over at Mother Jones. I think Dan is the smartest, funniest, and most pioneering comic artist of the last twenty years. In this interview, he talks about the state of "underground" comics, open-heart heart surgery, and, er, a big dick joke he and his cartoonist pals hid on the cover of The New Yorker. From Mother Jones:

MJ: What is it about comics that breeds obsessiveness?

DC: It's a world that you can exert control over. I started drawing at a very young age. Writing a story wasn't satisfying, but to actually draw our own world–it's like controlling your own dreams.
MJ: That was the message of Pussey, which is about an impotent guy who dreams about superheroes all the time. As well as being a satire of fanboys and the comics industry.

DC: That was so specific to 1989. Nobody had done anything like that before, making fun of comics fans. Now, that's such a commonplace thing; everyone's so familiar with that world. There's Comic-Con every year, which gets 100,000 people. Back then, it was like 1,500 people and that was it; that was all the comic geeks in the world. It seemed like this sad little world–which it still does, but it's a sad big world. When I was in high school, if you said you liked superheroes or Lord of the Rings, you were just like a hopeless reject, and now those are the biggest things in the world. Even Avatar is a total nerd thing, and yet our popular culture has somehow made all that stuff acceptable.

MJ: So what are the outsider nerds into now?

DC: I don't think there are any outsiders anymore. It's good for the outsiders; I don't know if it's good for our culture. I think it was good to have this mass culture that we all reacted to in some way. I was thinking the other day that there will never be another form of music that everybody has to respond to–like disco.