Daniel Clowes

So his first short film, HowardCantour.com, premiered at the May 2012 Cannes Film Festival.

It wasn't until it was posted online on December 16th of 2013 that viewers began to notice that the film was almost an exact adaptation of a graphic novel by Daniel Clowes, best known for Ghost World.

And Cl- Clowes told BuzzFeed, which brought much of the story to light, he said, "The first I ever heard of the film was the morning when someone sent me a link.

I've never spoken or met Mr. LaBeouf.

Then do...

Or start with Calvin and Hobbes, then Carl Barks, then Bone, then Jesse Lonergan's Drome, finishing with Daniel Clowes' Monica.

[laughs]

This is quite a journey.

It is.

It's based on Daniel Clowes' comic serial Ghost World, which ran in his legendary, highly influential alternative comic anthology series, Eightball, throughout the 1990s.

And in the comic, Enid Coleslaw, which by the way, is a brilliant anagram of Daniel Clowes' own name, and Rebecca wander through this decaying strip mall, suburban wasteland.

They just wander around.

Yeah, they spend their days mocking pathetic adults sitting in sad diners and haunting local record stores.

Zwigoff matched Clowes' deadpan, flat panel compositions.

He kept the acid-laced, hyper-sarcastic dialogue almost word for word in some scenes.

He was heavily aided by the fact that he co-wrote the screenplay with Daniel Clowes himself, though, right?

Well, I'd had exposure to comics when I was a kid.

when I was a teenager, that turned into Dan Clowes and the like.

Oh, yes.

Even though I was a painter, I did see comic work and graphic work and paint work as kind of belonging to different worlds, really, when that wasn't the case.

That is on HBO Max right now, by the way, if you wanna watch that.

And then his follow-up to Bad Santa was Art School Confidential, which is based on another comic by Daniel Clowes, who's the cartoonist who wrote and drew Ghost World.

And in the film version of Art School Confidential, an aspiring young artist played by Max Minghella goes to college to study art, and he becomes disillusioned with what he finds there.

The way the art school world, and the art world more broadly, is just filled with hacks and leeches and, and untalented people, and it punishes the, the true artists, and it kind of rewards the sycophants and the hangers-on and the barnacles and...

Yes.

I suppose it's sort of like, it's a bit like when, you know, you read something like Daniel Clowes comics, and it's this kind of idea of a sort of 1950s or whatever kind of Americana that's like curdling and, and becoming something much more malevolent and weird, but still looks and feels a bit like, you know, something that you might recognize, but actually it's just making you feel really bad.

That's the thing.

You, you could argue that, that, that someone like a Trump, an American equivalent of someone like Savile, is a product of that kind of curdled 1950s.

It, it was like when we hung out with Coheed and Cambria, and they were all about comics, and so was I, but I was like, "Not superhero comics.

I like Daniel Clowes.

I like-"

Oh, yeah, I guess we were too snobby in Worcester.