NATIONAL POST ARTS

The graphic model: Daniel Clowes returns with The Death Ray

“It’s a really difficult thing to do.” Daniel Clowes is trying to describe the hard-to-name form — we’ll call it the graphic novel for the sake of convenience — of which he is one of the undisputed masters.

“You have to be able to do so many different things well, and yet the actual storytelling of cartoons is something that you can’t get from being good at any of the other fields, like drawing and writing and graphic design. It’s got to be a specific cartooning gene that you have.”