Broken Frontier

"Bang, there it is." The thought raced through me as I reread Dan Clowes’ Ice Haven. There are many secrets held in the small Chicago suburb that the book is named after. The glorious narraglyphic picto-assemblage is a watermark of Clowes’ career. Pantheon’s hardcover edition of Ice Haven is the letterbox director’s cut edition of Eightball #22, and it’s driving me crazy.

The story of Ice Haven spirals around the disappearance of a young boy, while the locals around town amble about their daily routines. Clowes makes numerous references to the Leopold and Loeb killing of Bobby Franks during the Jazz Age, and without glorifying the act of murder, creates a work that transcends its roots. At times the book seems hopelessly mundane, yet from another point of view otherwordly.

How Clowes achieves these ends speaks to his decades of underground cartooning.

There are a multitude of secrets hidden in the book, but first and foremost the thing that hits the reader is the design. In the Pantheon edition, the story is formatted in a way that highlights Clowes’ influences, his newspaper comic strip forebears. Some of the characters are reminiscent of Peanuts and Family Circus, others harken back to Mary Worth. All the while, the inhabitants of Ice Haven retain Clowes’ trademark style. The characters use toilets in a way that reminds me of Vonnegut discussing pornography, in the most casual and lived-in way. At the same time, the book is a reflection on heartbreak. The characters’ pains are familiar, because they are the ones we deal with in our own lives: jealousy, abandonment, paranoia, unrequited love.

And then there are secrets.

I’m not going to spoil any of them here. Any of them. What you should know is that the new elements that I initially found extraneous took on a new life after re-reading. Clowes shows that what we don’t see, what we don’t know, that is what enthralls us most. He makes of his readers detectives. We have to put the clues together in a way that can only come to us in hindsight, and reflection.

Dan Clowes forces readers to read the book using things that can’t be read.

He uses the distinct styles of each chapter to disconnect each of the shorter stories from each other. The characters speak in a kind of poetry. Each has their own personal drama that comes alive as the story progresses.

The original Ice Haven story is intact in the new edition, with some minor adjustments made specifically for the new release as well as many pages of new material. A short prelude and coda help to tighten the focus of the already dazzling presentation.

Ice Haven is not merely a comic book, a graphic novel or a narraglyphic picto-assemblage. It’s Clowes’ ascendancy to Master status. The book will be taught in university classrooms and studied more passionately by students (academics and students of the heart) than private investigators. Ice Haven is one of the seminal works of graphic storytelling.

-Neil Figuracion