I think about Lloyd Llewelyn all the time. He would be running one of the movie studios right now. I feel like Dan Pussey could have just gone on and on as the world changed. It’s such an effective evocation of them that I’ve occasionally wanted to just buy an old issue of Eightball and just slip it into the rack in the Times Square subway station where the guy hands them out.Ī couple of people had the gumption to actually redo that story as a Chick tract and I only wish I had a thousand of them, because that would be really fun to leave in the laundromat.Īre there any characters in these stories that you miss? Dan Pussey, the guy who tragically makes it big in superhero comics, or the misanthropic Lloyd Llewelyn? I knew every single one of them almost by heart by the time I did that story. I really felt like he’d almost won me over by the end. And I went home and read them all in one sitting, and it was maybe the most devastating comics-reading experience I’ve ever had. I thought: “These are really compelling and I’d rather read these than pretty much anything else published in 1985.” So I made a long trek out to a Christian bookstore in Queens and I bought every single one, which totaled I think $3 – they were each 10 cents. You don’t really think of those as being part of the official canon of effective comics. When I was growing up you would see those lying around. One thing I always stop on going through Eightball back issues is Devil Doll, the stapled-in parody of Jack Chick’s famous Christian mini-comic tracts.

Ghost World by Daniel Clowes