Daniel Clowes – Enid Coleslaw

If you were to ask me what was the highlight, the happiest moment I experienced during the 13 years I attended the annual United Kingdom Comic Art Convention that ran between 1985 and 1998 (I missed the first year) then I would have no hesitation in saying it was watching, with a full audience of complete strangers, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure which was part of the free-of-charge all-night film show sponsored by Neptune Comic Distributors in 1988. You will have to picture the scene. Tim Burton had recently been announced as the director of the much-anticipated, long-delayed, finally-greenlit Batman movie and we were all eager to find out what a virtual unknown had done to land this prestigious gig. TB probably got the job due to the runaway commercial success of Beetlejuice, but that had only just opened in the UK and the cost of seeing that in the West End in London was the equivalent of the cost of buying around 20 comics, and as I am guessing a fair proportion of the ram-packed audience that night were people who were using the all-nighter as a substitute for checking into paid overnight accommodation then you can guess where our priorities lay. The film that immediately preceded PWBA was Michael Radford’s 1984 version of 1984 and that film – spoiler alert – has a truly feelbad ending; Winston and Julia do not live happily ever after. So by that time in the night we were all feeling a bit down and in need of cheering up. I think only a few of us had seen PWBA before (I hadn’t) or even knew who Pee-wee was (his show had never been broadcast in the UK) so most of us did not know what to expect. The showing started in an unintentionally comic way because the projectionist accidentally ran the last reel of the film first (Pee-wee escapes from the, I think, film studio but is distracted by an emergency in a pet shop) but a few minutes from the end of the film, someone must have realised what was happening, stopped the movie and restarted from the beginning. As soon as the titles started accompanied by the joyously jaunty Danny Elfman score we all gave ourselves up to the film completely. I have never before or since experienced such a terrific atmosphere in a cinema, as we were all beside ourselves in hysterical laughter. Every joke and comic situation hit the target, and it is a cliché to say this but I think my sides were literally aching for laughing for so long and so hard. It was a wonderful communal experience and a very happy memory I think back on with great fondness. You had to be there. Because a few months later I was able to lay my hands on a videocassette of the movie and took it around to the house of someone to whom I had raved about the film. Apart from Pee-wee’s answer to the waitress’ question, “Have you ever had a dream?” which raised a slight titter from me, I watched the film again with a faint smile on my face, but in complete silence. I have not seen the film again and don’t plan to. It would be impossible to replicate the very special circumstances in which I saw it for the first time and to watch it again without them would lead to only disappointment. Some things are best left as memories.

My second favourite experience attending UKCAC was when I met Daniel Clowes at the 1997 event. I had been a fan of his since his creation Lloyd Llewelyn had a short preview in issue 13 of Love and Rockets. LL was a mildly amusing retro-style strip that reminded me of US sitcoms. However, it was the first issue of Eightball in 1989 that really took his work to another level. The first issue is the best first issue of any comic I can remember ever reading. It was a comic I bought multiple copies of at the time so I could press them into the hands of people I knew who had a passing interest in comics so as to show them what the medium was capable of. There is only one other serious contender for the title of best comic of the 1990s and I have read only a few story arcs of that title (although I did enjoy them) but even so that decade is not renowned for its classic comics so I will go out on a limb and say that Eightball is for me the greatest comic series of the twentieth century, and I have probably read more comics than Flaming Carrot (although not in one sitting; there’s a different reason for my acting the way I do).

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