When fellow cartoonist Ware moved to Chicago in 1991, he was invited by Clowes and a group of other local cartoonists -- Gary Leib, Archer Prewitt and Terry Laban -- to join them in drawing improvisatory comics (which they called "minis").

"It was a welcome diversion, since I didn't really know anyone in town," says Ware. "Plus, I also got to see how they all worked, particularly Dan. It seemed as if he could draw anything, and whatever he did was always perfect -- not overdone, forced or uncertain. It all made me initially simply want to give up cartooning; but eventually I realized that I had to work much, much harder at it."

"'Eightball' is the greatest comic book of the last two decades," Ware adds, "and every issue is a huge step forward from the last -- which always seems to be an impossibility. I don't think that a statement like that can easily be applied to many other cartoonists' work. It's inspiring and comforting to know that he's always forcing himself to improve. His stuff makes the rest of us reconsider our own, and moves all sorts of subject matter that had seemed impossible before into approachable range."

Clowes is "painfully aware of the disregard and lack of respect that the rest of the world has for our chosen profession," Ware says, "but he also takes what he does very seriously. He once made me buy a huge book that lists hundreds of mostly obscure cartoonists, illustrated by self-portraits and hopeful autobiographies, which, he confessed, actually had made him get misty-eyed one day because of its undeniable grimness. I knew he wasn't kidding, as his eyes sort of went off in two different directions with the memory of it. He said I should have a copy so that he could call me up anytime and say, 'Look at Page 334,' and I'd know exactly what he was talking about."

Clowes' tortured but hilarious forays into self-exploration are well-documented in the pages of "Eightball," perhaps most brilliantly in the story "Just Another Day," in which young Clowes brushes his teeth, flosses, shaves and sniffs a dirty sock. The "real Clowes," who is directing this pathetic scene from a soundstage, interrupts the action to mock the reader and call his agent from his convertible. Then the "real real Clowes," who is drawing all this, is suddenly gripped by self-doubt -- he is really just a self-hating, sensitive "artiste" whose opinion of himself shifts with the breeze. This confession prompts the Operation Desert Shield T-shirt-wearing "actual really real Clowes" to come out and take charge. Or maybe that's not quite right. The story spirals into a hilarious slide show of possible identities. Who is Clowes? Is he a revolutionary? A scholar? A boring Midwestern cartoonist? A cross-dressing necrophiliac?

"It's hard to have any self-image when you do something like this, because I get no feedback for what I do until it's long finished. And then I don't really care. I'll work on something for six months just in this room, and I don't even let my wife read it. She has to read it when I'm not around and not talk about it or I get really angry," he says, laughing. "So I don't have any feeling of my place in the world; it's just like I'm living with this blank slate. Of course, I grew up thinking of myself as an outsider because I wasn't in the in crowd in high school like everybody else, but now I don't know what I'm in."

I get the feeling, though, that it doesn't really matter. In or out, the sense of discomfiture that permeates "Eightball" is all his own -- which is lucky for us, because if success hasn't spoiled Dan Clowes, total peace of mind just might.

So I'm somewhat relieved when he says, "You know, I'll get a call from the New Yorker or something, and I'll think I'm a big success! And then two minutes later I read a bad review and I think I'm the biggest loser! My wife goes crazy because I change so drastically. I'm like, 'Honey, we're rich! We can get whatever we want.' And then the next day, it's like, 'We have to really tighten our belts; my career is going down the toilet.'"

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