Writer/Artist: Daniel Clowes
Collecting material from EIGHTBALL #1-10
Price: $19.95
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
ISBN: 1560971169

One of my favorite filmmakers, AUGUST ON THE WATER's Sogo Ishii, aside from being a talented director, has an astoundingly elegant understanding of the pleasures of film. In the outside world, he says, people go about their business chaotically; there is a constant urge to find release, and so they stop, gather in a dark room with strangers for two hours, and collectively daydream.

With this scenario begins Daniel Clowes' LIKE A VELVET GLOVE CAST IN IRON. Instead of calming entertainment, though, the daydream of choice is a few reels of surrealist pornography. No nudity, no sex: only undeniable, disturbing perversion. For those who know Clowes only through GHOST WORLD, LIKE A VELVET GLOVE CAST IN IRON will be quite a shock.

Collected from its original run in EIGHTBALL, this graphic novel presents some of the most tautly woven and labyrinthine surrealism in the comics medium (which is to say, it's mighty strange). Clearly influenced by David Lynch's BLUE VELVET, Clowes presents a strange world that becomes suffocatingly unsettling as Clay, the main character, finds himself sinking into his search for a woman from his past.

Of course, none of it makes any sense - at least not concretely. Even identifying the underlying plot threads laced throughout the seemingly random sequence of events might require a rereading or two. Halfway through the book, one can't help but wonder what the Cousin It dog with no orifices has to do with the man with two bacteria-eating shrimp for eyes. The answer, sometimes frustratingly, is nothing.

The entire book operates like a kind of literary Magic Eye image. When you blur your focus, however, instead of a fuzzy three-dimensional Tyrannosaurus Rex, a sweat-soaked Möbius strip pops into view. Beneath the nonsensical literal surface is a discussion of the subtle connections between paranoia, conspiracy, and the human need for a higher power. The book is littered with pseudo-gods, created by and operating through the collective unconscious permeating Clay's world. Most of the book's story deals with the networks that naturally develop around these powerful entities.

Like Lynch's films, there is no single solution to the story's many puzzles, and much of the book's pleasure comes from the vast array of interpretations one is capable of deriving from the plot's machinations. At times, it reads like nothing more than a skillfully connected dream journal, but examined from afar one can see the same currents appearing at various intervals throughout. The result is a riddle that both demands and defies solving - and the many plot threads both confuse and provide important clues for any reading.

The clever trick is, just as we are presented with the sleaziness of the conspiracy theorists who begin to control Clay, we are forced to mimic them. To make any sense of what is going on, we have to tie the loose ends together ourselves - in ways that are just as irrational as the madmen on the page. Just as the paranoia envelops them, we feel the pressure of the inwardly marching tale, laced together snugly.

Compounding this sense of neurosis is an ever-present use of silence and awkward conversation, most of which is predicated by strange and seedy looking men. Most character introductions, of which there are many, require a moment for both the reader and the hero to digest, speechless and confused. After a sudden cut to a hairy, naked, and sweaty man coldly dismounting his passionless lover to inject himself with testosterone, it's difficult to reorient within the narrative. Everyone and everything is peculiar in just the right way, and to just the right degree, to provide a challenge while reading the ten chapters.

The interweaving of the bewildering and claustrophobic only serves to amplify the sickening quality of the objects and characters Clowes presents, rendered in his well-known lighthearted 50s artistic style. The clear innocence of much of his linework contrasts shockingly with the subject material - pathetic and sagging naked women, brutal and bucktoothed men, leather clad dominatrices, tiny monsters running rampant on a dry and chipping scalp. The results are gleefully unpleasant.

Like many of Clowes' works, LIKE A VELVET GLOVE CAST IN IRON discusses the darker elements of sexuality. With the same honesty as Robert Crumb, only treated with a stone-faced and unrelenting psychological seriousness, Clowes presents the guilt and self-loathing involved with one's inexplicable desires. Strange women continually attempt to seduce Clay, or simply force themselves upon him. He continually must run from them to continue with his own murky obsessions. The effects are far more successful than Clowes' frustratingly aimless DAVID BORING, which has a similar focus.

Inexplicably disturbing, the book as a whole acts as an example of the surreal pornography that provides its impetus. As Clay searches through the dark alleys and motels of the city of Gooseneck Hollow, the reader must search through the dense folds in the plot. The structure of the book, in its layering of play-within-a-play style order, shares something with Grant Morrison's THE FILTH, and the character design revels in intricate oddities on a level used in Farel Dalrymple's POP GUN WAR.

The intangible qualities of Clowes' novel, despite all of its attempts to baffle, invite the reader to enter with the despicable cast of characters into a common obsession. After being barraged with the incomprehensible, a certain solace can be taken in the final chapters' ramblings by the book's foremost madman.

A few more times through the book, and I may unwittingly find myself approaching strangers to ask, "What's the frequency, Kenneth?"

Jake Mix is a student of cognitive science at the University of California at Berkeley, where he teaches a student-run seminar on comics as literature and is a contributor to the Daily Californian.

This article is Ideological Freeware. The author grants permission for its reproduction and redistribution by private individuals on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice.