Contemporary Literature

So this week I ended up reading Eightball by Daniel Clowes.  Eightball is a series of contemporary literature comics wrapped up into one book. 

It's hard to start about what I thought about this comic.  It seems like Eightball was written awhile back, maybe in the 80's or 90's because of the content.  It almost feels like an underground comic due to the nature of the content (Sex, nudity, drugs, cussing, etc...), but with a contemporary spin.  A lot of the panels didn't make a whole lot of sense, for example, in one of the comics the main character Clay is inside an adult theater watching porno, and he briefly describes the line in the men's room being awful and that he'd never go in there.  A specific porno shows up and he's drawn to one of the characters, so a guy in the lobby tells him to go to the men's room to seek answers.  When Clay arrives to the men's room, he's greeted by what looks like a guru of some sort.  There are many scenes like this in all of the comics that don't entirely make sense, although I'm not sure if they're suppose to. 

The stories are very character driven, but also has a strong story as well.  All of the comics usually show or talk about an issue in the current world (80's-90's in this case).  For example, in one of the comics, a man gets arrested and as they're driving down to the precinct, they see a prostitute on the side of the road working, so they arrest her.  Shortly after, the two cops are arguing about which one's "turn" it is to have sex with her, and one of them actually has sex with the prostitute.