David Boring Graphic Novel, Hardcover Edition, February 2000
The back cover of the original hardcover edition of Daniel Clowes’s terrific graphic novel David Boring is basically a faux Silver Age splash page — and it’s a great one.
It stars the Yellow Streak, the comic-within-the-comic hero, racing across a stylized city while a reporter waves a microphone like something huge just happened. Around them are jagged starburst caption boxes… cleverly containing review quotes from TIME and Newsweek.
It’s a fun little meta gag — using the language of old superhero hype to sell a contemporary story about alienation and existential dread.
I’d had my eye on the original art for this piece for quite a while, because I love Clowes’s whole modern-retro thing. He’s clearly channeling mid-century comics — clean design, bold shapes, quirky characters — but filtering it through his own lens.
The original shows how carefully that look is built: crisp, confident brushwork and big open areas designed for flat color and classic screen-tone textures, just like the mechanical screens used in mid-century comic production.
It’s a great riff on those oddball ’60s comics from fly-by-night publishers that appeared — and often disappeared — without much of a trace.
Clowes really nails that vibe, doesn’t he?
