Daniel Clowes and I both have terrible head colds. I ask him a question over the phone and he breaks out into a cough.
“Three coughs means, ‘yes,'” he manages to get out.
I’d been a tiny bit apprehensive about talking to the creator of borderline misanthropic characters like Ghost World‘s Enid Coleslaw and countless sardonic others that populate his illustrious 40-year career. But Clowes is charming, amenable, and quick to laugh as we talk about his new graphic novel, the cosmic time-travel love story Patience, his first since 2010. It’s his longest work, 180 pages, hardbound and packaged like a Technicolor dream.
Well, this is his first new material in five years. Last year saw the release of the two-hardcover-book Eightball collection [“Behind the Eightball,” Books, April 15, 2015], Clowes’ seminal comic anthology that ran from 1989 to 2004. Compiling it, he did a bit of time-traveling of his own.