The opening panel of the first story is a close-up of a stunning, raven-haired woman, with earrings that (on the third or thirteenth read) turn out to be Thalia and Melpomene, the classical masks of comedy and tragedy. Faces tend to be grotesque, and the dialogue is often stylishly rancid (“Yeah, stop fucking around, Douche…I don’t want our sales to be affected by this unreadable shit!”), but the comics’ sheer beauty and mystery can also knock you out. Varying in tone and ambition, each of the comics in Eightball’s first issue fixates on verbal zing and graphic textures. “Pages are waiting to be pencilled, written and inked!” “Get a move on, boys! Breakfast is ready!” cries the taskmaster to his underpaid team, bunked in the Infinity Comics compound. The closing feature is “Young Dan Pussey,” a warts-and-all take on a superhero comics mill-a meta-maneuver suggesting firsthand experience. Next comes a sleazy fable of adultery and novelty gags (“The Laffin’ Spittin’ Man”), dressed to kill in angular midcentury fashions and punctuated with the airborne sweat droplets known in the comics trade as plewds. (After getting a pentagram tattooed on her brow, she cackles, “I think it looks radical!”) Then there is “Devil Doll?,” a takeoff on those tracts drawn by the evangelical cartoonist Jack Chick that proselytizers still leave on subway seats-a campy-cruel three-pager in which heavy metal, PCP, and D&D lure a woman to a life of sin. In the surreal opener, “Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron,” our hero gets blindsided by a creepy bondage movie, soul-kissed by a filthy drunk, and arrested by sadistic cops he periodically flashes back to the troubled face of some lost love or phantom. In 1989 a two-dollar comic book called Eightball debuted with the aggressive subtitle “An Orgy of Spite, Vengeance, Hopelessness, Despair and Sexual Perversion.” True to the letter, the five vices suffuse its thirty-two black-and-white pages. A page from Daniel Clowes’s ‘Ghost World,’ which appeared in Eightball #17, August 1996
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