How fatherhood and grief have shaped the work of graphic novelist Daniel Clowes

The acclaimed creator of Ghost World has spent five years on his most ambitious project yet: a psychedelic tale of murder and time travel

No cartoonist alive devotes as much effort as Daniel Clowes to mapping the differences between the way people see themselves and the way they really are. “Whenever you meet somebody you know just as an online presence, the only response I’ve ever had is overwhelming empathy and sadness,” Clowes says over iced tea and soup in Manhattan. “Because you see at once. Often people come off very combative and sort of aggressive, and then you see them and think: ‘You are just so not a vital presence in the physical world.’ I don’t think I’ve ever met somebody for the first time that way and thought, ‘They’re exactly what I pictured!’”

Clowes’s work is characterised by such a devotion to technical perfection and a well-calibrated acidity about the depressing consistency of human nature that it seems as if the man himself ought to be just like one of his own perpetually angry, thwarted oddballs.

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