Radiant Comics

I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got eight new comics:

X-O Manowar – 2

Stormwatch – 10

Harbinger – 1

Creator-Owned Heroes – 1

Thief of Thieves – 5

Epic Kill – 2

Mud Man – 4

Night Force – 4

And now for a review of something I’ve read recently.

”David Boring” by Daniel Clowes

This story was first serialized in three issues of “Eightball” back in the late 1990’s. It was always one of my favorite Clowes pieces but I haven’t read it in a while. I just read it again because I finally decided to buy it in a collected edition. Since I have all the original issues I never bothered with a collected edition before but since I found a hardcover of it on Amazon for about ten bucks I decided to get it and give it a read. I like it as much as I did back then.

”David Boring” is the story of a twenty year old man named David Boring. It starts out as a normal introspective Clowes story about the life of a young man as he tries to come to grips with the world and figure out who he is and what he wants. David Boring lives with an old high school friend named Judy who is a lesbian. He’s become a bit of a ladies man since moving to the big city but than finds his dream girl in a twenty two year old named Wanda.

At the beginning of the second issue David Boring narrates that it feels to him like his story started out as a romantic comedy and then turned into a gothic horror story. That pretty well describes the turn in the plot as David, now injured, is taken by his mother and Judy to a house on a little island in the middle of a big lake. David it there to recover and we are introduced to a whole new bunch of characters. More Clowes fun and weirdness ensues.

In the third part of the story it takes a turn towards the detective novel. David Boring is back in the big city and has a new girlfriend but he is trying to track down his old girlfriend, Wanda, to find out what happened to her. The cops are after him a bit too due to other plot elements. It really is hard to describe what goes on in this book.

If I were ever to make a list of my top ten comics (or whatever number) ”David Boring” could very well make the list. I like this book a lot. Clowes artwork is great in it and the story is very involving. I find I can relate to the characters and at the same time find them very odd. There is a strange apocalyptic undertone to the whole story as it is occasionally mentioned that someone, terrorists or a foreign country, are going to blow up the city and it will be the end of the world. It seems to be a fear that almost everyone lives with.

I could go on and on with all the things I like about this book. Little bits of dialogue and narration, the drawing, plot, characters, and lots of other stuff. But you should check it out yourself. It’s good.