Orgy Bound [Paperback]

ORGY BOUND (1996)
by Daniel Clowes

This material collects various tales from Dan Clowes 'Eightball' comic book. The material was originally published in the early 1990s. A lot of this stuff is also included in the Twentieth Century Eightball collection.

When I was in middle school I read normal DC and Marvel type comic books. One day a friend and fellow comic book reader brought a couple of things to school for me to check out. One of these was the first issue of EIGHTBALL. That issue had everything that I came to love about independent comics - non-linear, weird for the sake of weird, not sure if it's supposed to be serious moments - and I still have it with me today. The other item was a Fantagraphics books catalog with cover art by Charles Burns (who I sort of knew about from DOG BOY on MTV's Liquid Television). I had been given the keys to a strange and expensive new world.

A typical issue of Eightball featured a lengthy excerpt from the main story (in this case, 'Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron' and 'Dan Pussey') along with several less ambitious comics that were usually funnier and more self-contained. This latter group makes up this ORGY BOUND collection. These comics are a lot more blunt than the more sublime stories that Clowes is famous for. For example in one comic he recounts the thoughts going through his head as he encounters various morons at a party. In another comic he shows an unwelcome large blonde man trying to teach the reader how to be a "sensual santa". But the most hilarious parts are where he uses the comic as a way to criticize a specific subject. In "Chicago", Clowes dissects his hometown in the style that he does best - noticing the unusual world around him and amplifying the weirdest elements to the point where they are overpowering. Or in a different comic, he makes a sort of Freudian interpretation of various sports that sounds like it would be stupid but is hard not to laugh at. As a Christian I obviously disagree with his arguments in "Why I Hate Christians", but there is quite a lot to enjoy in this book.

There have been a few references to various things in this book. For example in the Ghost World movie, the guy who goes into the coffee shop and answers the trivia questions (Feldman) has his own comic here. Of course the original Art School Confidential comic is included here as well, and in my opinion is better than the movie. An interesting last note is that there is a comic here depicting a movie version of 'Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron', made several years before Clowes' foray into Hollywood!

› Go to Amazon U.S. to see the review  4.0 out of 5 stars