It's easy to imagine that for some of its victims, the death-ray - with its cheerful 'Pop!' sound - offers a clean, sharp ending to a life of perpetual emotional desolation. And the arrival of a deceptively silly-looking yellow gun only makes things more complicated.Ĭlowes' unsettling figures sneer and snarl at each other, their eyes dead. So when super strength comes - not as a result of a radioactive spider bite or a bolt of lightning but from smoking cigarettes - he uses it for neither good nor evil but in a brutal playground showdown. He's desperately in love with a girl he met in California who won't return his letters he's filled with shame at the constant taunts of his classmates he's lonely and depressed, his parents having died several years before. First published in 2004 as an issue of Clowes' occasional serial Eightball, The Death-Ray now gets a deluxe new hardcover treatment befitting its status as one of the signature comics stories of our time.Īndy, a miserable high-schooler in 1970s Chicago, has only one friend, an angry fellow outcast named Louie. That's the intriguing question explored by the cartoonist Daniel Clowes in The Death-Ray, the defining work of a 25-year career that has seen him mixing deadpan realism ( Ghost World, Wilson) with surreal, often grotesque fantasy ( David Boring, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron).

Given the opportunity to make that locker-room tormentor or Mean Girl disappear, with no consequences, would you have done it?

After all, the extremity of emotions experienced by your average 17-year-old rivals the most passionate telenovela character. In fact, the only time in most of our lives that we have enemies to whom we wish to do actual harm - or who wish to harm us - is high school. Sure, that one guy might be a real jerk on Twitter. Sure, your next-door neighbor might refuse to trim dangling limbs from his oak tree. Who are your enemies? Do you even have any? Unlike superheroes, everyday people living everyday lives don't usually have nemeses. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

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