Rating:  Summary: Surreal Review: Like a Velvet Glove cast in Iron is an extremely good book. One of the reasons is how much it makes you think. This is the kind of book that you have to go back and reread to understand certain parts...not thats its incomprehnsable entirely. Rather, everytime you go back you discover something new, surprising, and maybe even disturbing. I highly reccomend this along with all other Danial Clowes books.
Rating:  Summary: Beautiful. Review: mysterious and thrilling. The art,layout and storytelling is amazing. really really beautiful..
Rating:  Summary: to the sound of bloody theremins and yellowed newspapers... Review: Sometimes you find yourself living an unexpected life -- no longer sufficiently rooted (in people and places and things) to be able to exercise that faculty of constantly creating, 2 or 3 steps ahead of yourself, the road you're on and the days you inhabit, by virtue of pre-expectation. The world es exactly what you have always known it would be, and each step you have taken has only served to reinforce this... and then one day its all gone. And where do you live then, you? You live in the world, the unrooted, fleeting, ever-ambiguous world outside your head, and it is truly more strange and vivid than anything you ever imagined. And it has teeth...This book will disturb your sleep for months. Tina, Foot-Foot, Clay, Laura the Dog, et al inhabit a neighboring counter-earth to the planet David Lynch hails from. Ther serial/chapter format, the mad accumulation of details and plot tangents, the little girl with the pipe... Creepy as hell. Harum Scarum indeed... Wish everyone could have been there back when you had to wait 3-4 months between serial installments of this in Eightball. It was truly disturbing then.
Rating:  Summary: Clowes > Lynch Review: the comparison is obvious. just watch 'the straight story' and 'mullholland drive'. as amazing as this book. :)
Rating:  Summary: Weird but cool Review: This is the most bizarre comic book I've ever read. It has fishwomen and swamis who live in a bathroom. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but don't let that stop you from reading it. Very creative and orginal.
Rating:  Summary: delightfully strange Review: This story takes you to very strange places, but not so odd that you can't follow it. Forget the comparison to David Lynch. I didn't treat it as some kind of puzzle, I just had fun reading it. I want to read it again now.
Rating:  Summary: My brain hurts Review: WAY too surreal for me. UG!! My brain hurts. The quote from World Art on the back says "incoherent but engrossing" and that's sort of how I felt. I HATE stuff that's surrealist because I really WANT to understand, but can't quite. pooh!! Oh well. Still, very interesting, and the illustrations were amazing. (The potato-looking radiated-fish-baby is one of the most interesting characters I've ever encountered)
Rating:  Summary: Beautifully woven tale AND meaningless shock horror in one! Review: Worth it alone for the reactions I have gotten from people at school that I have shown this book to. But seriously, let's talk about the story... Velvet Glove starts off normally enough-Clay Loudermilk, with nothing better to do, goes into a B-movie theatre, where he steps in icky stuff on the floor, tries to look unapproachable for the other patrons, and wonders why there is a line forming in the men's room. So he's watching this movie and feeling all disgusted with himself, and then the second feature comes on, a movie he's never seen before, a movie of the same title as the story. In this movie, which features no nudity or sex but is somehow just as sickening, a masked woman in a bondage outfit appears to behead two other people in the movie, one of whom kinda looks like Hitler and dresses in baby clothes. Then the woman in the bondage outfit removes her mask and turns out to be--Clay's ex-lover. Clay's quest to find out what in the hell his old girlfriend was doing in that movie takes him on a surreal, psychotic voyage. On his way, he encounters a cult of nymphos bent on triggering the ultimate war of the sexes and an eccentric middle-age man who thinks a corporate logo holds the key to the origin of the universe. Love Clowes' character images. Very snazzy faces. He can draw some disturbing and ugly images, too. Had to note the art somewhere. Try to find this book or the issues of Eightball it is serialized in. It is worth the effort. If you do get the individual issues, be sure to get all of the first ten of Eightball so you get the complete story, because you need to down it all in one gulp. For the longest time you will plod through this book thinking something does not make sense or you'll wonder what that was doing in the story altogether. Don't go back trying to understand what you don't get right away. Just keep reading to the end where everything is neatly wrapped up more than you expected it to be, and be prepared for a kick in the head. But even at the end "makes sense" is a term used in the loosest way possible. If you want a realistic story, it's not here. This book ends nowhere near as normally as it began.
Rating:  Summary: Know something about it before you dig. Review: You have to be appreciative of either Eightball or Dan Clowes (if it's possible to separate the two) to like this.
It was serialized in Eightball and was a hefty portion of many issues. If you read them in order and liked it, maybe buy this. I'll admit - I was familiar with Twentieth Century Eightball only, and I wanted to read this from the beginning. Since then, I have been buying up back issues.
It's not as shocking as many people say. It is, however, as confusing as many people say. You have to use your imagination, inductive logic, and movie-watching experiences to really glue it all together.
And by the way, the people who compare this to Twin Peaks are insane. Twin Peaks cannot be messed with. And I love this book.
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