If I had travelled this long in a straight line across Hed, I would have been walking on the ocean bottom a week ago.” He added a branch to the fire, watched the flames eat across the dry leaves. He said wonderingly, “I’ve never seen such lonely land.”ĭeth, unpacking their store of bread, cheese, wine and the apples and nuts one villager had given them, smiled. The rough, undulating land flowed toward old, worn hills that seemed in their bald, smooth lines like old men sleeping. Morgon, coaxing a young fire, paused a moment and looked around him. The late sun in the clear, dark-blue sky glanced off the red faces of rocks pushing up in the soil, and turned the hill grass gold. They stopped beside a narrow stream under a stand of three oaks.
In the rocky fields and low border hills of Marcher, where villages and farms were rare on the rough land, they found themselves camping for the first time in the open. Morgon, his eyes on the ageless face bent slightly above the polished oak harp, felt the familiar nudge of a question in the back of his mind. They were given without hesitation any song, ballad, dance they asked for and occasionally someone would bring out his own harp, a harp that had been passed down for generations, and recite a curious history of it, or play a variation of a song that Deth could invariably repeat after listening once. Morgon, nursing a cold in miserable silence, sipping hot broth the women made for him, watched weary farmers and unruly children settle quietly to the sound of Deth’s beautiful, intricate harping, his fine, skilled voice. Deth paid for their shelter with his harping. Features new covers by Clowes, and "Behind the Eightball": the author's annotations for each issue, heavily illustrated with art and photos from his archives.They journeyed slowly through Ymris, as Morgon fought the last stages of his illness, avoiding the great houses of the Ymris lords, taking shelter after an easy day’s riding in small villages that blossomed at the crux of a patchwork of field, or in the curve of a river. It includes more than 500 pages of vintage Clowes: seminal serialized graphic novels, strips, and rants, such as "Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron," "Ghost World," "Pussey," "I Hate You Deeply," "Sexual Frustration," "Ugly Girls," "Why I Hate Christians," "Message to the People of the Future," "Paranoid," "My Suicide," "Chicago," "Art School Confidential," "On Sports," "Zubrick and Pogeybait," "Hippypants and Peace-Bear," "Grip Glutz," "The Sensual Santa," "Feldman," and many more. Now, Fantagraphics is collecting every single page of these long out-of-print issues in a paperback edition. From 1989 to 1997, he produced 18 issues of what is still widely considered one of the greatest and most influential comic book titles of all time.
The beloved comic book series Eightball made Daniel Clowes' name even before he gained fame as a bestselling graphic novelist (Ghost World, Patience, David Boring, Ice Haven) and filmmaker. Collecting issues 1-18 of the iconic Daniel Clowes comics anthology, Eightball it contains the original installments of Ghost World, the short that the film Art School Confidential was based on, and much more, newly designed for paperback by the author.