Daniel Clowes ranks among the top three of four greatest living cartoonists. I've been following his work since 1986, when I came across his Fantagraphics comic book Lloyd Llewellyn, about a retrofuturistic detective with a misanthropic streak.
Clowes is not only an amazing artist, he's also a fine observer of human behavior, which make reading interviews with him as much fun as reading his comic books. This month Fantagraphics published The Daniel Clowes Reader: A Critical Edition of Ghost World and Other Stories, with Essays, Interviews, and Annotations.
I'm relishing all 358 art-laden pages. They include the entire Ghost World story (made into a movie directed by Terry Zwigoff) with annotations, plus a number of rarely seen stories. Several of the twelve essays about Clowes' work were new to me, and I enjoyed re-reading Joshua Glenn's sharp interview from a 1990 Hermenaut interview. This is an essential book for all serious readers of Clowes' work.
