Pussey!

Pussey! by Daniel Clowes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fresh out of high school, Dan Pussey goes to work for Infinity Comics Group. Will Dan earn the fame and fortune he so sorely wants?

As far as I know, other than Ghost World, the only other Daniel Clowes stuff I've read was in issues of Cracked in the late 1980s. Since I'm trying to branch out into more and more non-super hero comics, I picked this up.

This was serialized in Eightball initially and I have to think the beginning is at least partially an autobiographical account of Daniel Clowes breaking into comics. Pussey, pronounced Poo-Say, gets a job at Infinity Comics Group and works for slave wages and no credit, with the Stan Lee-esque Doctor Infinity hogging the lion's share of the glory. Pussey branches out and achieves some fame in comics and eventually dies alone.

The story is part biography, part fantasy, part utter disdain at the comic industry at the early to mid 1990s. There are shots taken at Stan Lee, the image guys, and maybe a jealous barb in the direction of the Hernandez brothers when Affection and Torpedos is mentioned a couple times.

The art is more grotesque, less refined, more raw than in Ghost World, which was done years later. This is closer to his Cracked work. I'd like to see a list of who Clowes mentions as his influences. I see a lot of Basil Wolverton and Harvey Kurtzman in this.

Pussey is a fun yet sat portrait of all the shitty things that go on behind the scenes in comics. Four out of five stars.

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