David Boring

"David Boring" contains a surprisingly large number of panels of naked girls with large bottoms, and so is a tad embarrasing to read while commuting to work on the train. There's also a lot of violence, including the hero with a bullet hole in the middle of his head (but he recovers (twice)).The writing is clever, and moves in directions that I didn't expect after reading "Ghost World". Act two reminded me of Agatha Christie's "Twelve Little Indians".

A little confused about all the women`s names but guessI`ll just have to read again. : ) Artwork was great.

I just got done reading this about an hour ago, so everything is still pretty fresh in my mind. The art work is fantastic, and the writing is MOSTLY pretty good. But there are these occasional spots throughout the story that just kind of come out of nowhere, it becomes very difficult to follow after a while, so I'm not sure how good I should say the writing really is. The dialogue is generally enjoyable at least, even if you're not always sure whats going on. I would still recommend this to anyone looking for a good, non-superhero graphic novel, but you should still be aware that there quite a few instances of panels not really transitioning very well into one another, giving way to confusion in the story.

I return to this book again and again. I see the world fhrough Daniel Clowes's eyes whenever I go out and mingle with the public. This story will haunt you.

If you like Robbe-Grillet or David Lynch, you'll like David Boring. Surrealism isn't my cup of tea, and so I found myself alternately put off and bored by the book. But I can appreciate the thought that went into planning its seeming disjointedness.There's no plot to speak of, and what storyline there is is one that seems a parody of hardboiled detective stories. Panels abruptly break into different narrative threads. Interpolations that make no sense whatsoever interject themselves. The "Yellow Streak" comic/missing father subtheme is baffling. There are tons of nonsequitors: Wanda's disappearance in a sexual/religious cult; Manfred's running off with David's mother; Mrs. Capin's seduction of David; the affair with Naomi; the abrupt termination of Dot's lesbian affair; and the never-developed hints at apocalyptic disaster. Temporal sequence seems unimportant, chance encounters carry mysterious weight, characters appear and vanish with magical realism fluidity. Sometimes it's intriguing, sometimes perplexing, sometimes quite tiresome. And the woodenness of the drawing--again deliberate, one suspects--only adds to the surreality of the story. Facial expressions seem frozen, bodies pre-pubescent. Even in the love-making scenes, the characters look like store front mannikins. (And what's up with all the socks? Can Clowes not draw feet?)Is there a point here? The absurdity of existence? The deep and futile human longing for love? creative expression (David is a failed screenwriter)? deep meaning? Is David a kind of Camusean l'etranger, unable to connect with anyone on a deep emotional level? Or in fact is there no message at all to "David Boring"? Is the negative reviewer who said that the book seemed to have been dreamt up panel by panel as Daniel Clowes proceeded on the money? I don't want to think this is how the book was actually written, but ultimately it's so artificially mysterious that it might as well have been._______________* Clowes' own description of his novel.

Welcome to the Clowes mind: you'll be pleased and appalled to see how closely it resembles yours.

I loved this. Sad that it was over, but looking to read other installments of Eightball........

This was bad. Really bad. I thoroughly enjoyed 'Ghost World' by Daniel Clowes so decided to give David Boring a try, but was hugely disappointed. The book is a rambling and incoherent juxtaposition of multiple vignettes that are lazily thrown together by the author in a world in which anything can happen without any plausibility or rational explanations (that's one way to come up with a story, I suppose, it sure makes things easy for the author!). There's no overarching theme, sense of atmosphere, mood, or emotion etc. I feel like the author was making this up as he went along without any effort put into the experience of the reader. I think to call this Lynchian or surrealist is going out on an awfully big limb. If Clowes was actually trying to tell a story you could be harsh by calling this a terrible execution, but I don't think he was even putting in that much effort to begin with.