The "Humbert" of the story is Mal Rosen, the eponymous traveling caricaturist and lonely, middle-aged man who encounters young girl of indeterminate age, Theda (probably an anagram for Death, considering Clowes' penchant for wordplay), whose estranged parents are famous art world celebrities of the Jeff Koons/Damien Hirst variety. This pretentious environment marred Theda with a rebellious, post-ironic malaise that coverts lowbrow, outsider culture for its real world contact to the underclass and its humble devotion to craft. Mal seems painfully aware of a subtle degradation implicit in Theda's critical appropriation of his art, as seen in what is probably the quintessential moment in their relationship: Mal shows Theda a goofy, banal portrait of himself a fellow cartoonist had rendered of him, only to incur Theda's disdain. "He's not as good as you. He seems almost 'too' aware of what he's doing," she says, while Mal eyes her with suspicion and dismay.
It's hard to tell who's more pathetic. Mal is older and presumably more mature, yet he is deliberately at the mercy of an irresponsible, possibly insane young woman betrayed by her own overt intelligence and zeal. Dissing her mother's claim that only women can make art because of a primal 'birthing' connection, Theda argues that, "making art is more like shitting," a statement that resonates with significance when, after she disappears, Mal is left alone in his motel room staring at her day-old shit in the stopped-up toilet.
Both a powerful statement on the current role of Art (both High and Low) in society, and a haunting story of the futility of love for these two fully developed characters, Caricature realises all the themes of Clowes' comics: visceral, complex narratives that are simultaneously naturalistic and self-aware; the preoccupation with anagrams and Freudian subtext; the fetishsed pop aesthetic versus the ironic kitsch of Post-Modernism; and the sophisticated ego artfully degraded by existential dread. Caricature if the first great apotheosis of Eightball, and establishes Clowes as the American successor to, not Crumb, but Nabokov.
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