The University of Chicago has acquired the papers of cartoonist Daniel Clowes, an artist so closely intertwined with Hyde Park that it only makes sense his raw materials would live there in perpetuity. Clowes, who is best known for the alternative comic book “Eightball” and earned a 2002 Oscar nomination for the adapted screenplay of his popular “Ghost World” comics, grew up in Hyde Park and attended UC Laboratory Schools.
But more importantly, as he has said often: His doughy, pimpled, vaguely grotesque faces were modeled on the everyday Chicago of his youth.
The bulk of the UC holding, 16 boxes worth, is drawn from Clowes’ work of the past 15 years. It includes sketches and outlines from his books “Mr. Wonderful,” “Death Ray,” and “Ice Haven.” The papers, which will kept at the school’s Special Collections Research Center, also contain personal notes and materials related to “Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes,” a traveling exhibit that was a major success at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2013. It is the first comic-book related acquisition for the Special Collections library, said director Daniel Meyer, whose center is better known for holding the papers of Saul Bellow and decades of editorial materials from the Chicago-based Poetry magazine.
Clowes, who lives in Northern California, was in Chicago this week, for a few reasons: He’s signing copies of his new collection, “The Complete Eightball,” at Quimby’s bookstore on Thursday. His mother — who is 83 — is getting married. And then, there’s this sizable acquisition. He said he was first approached by the university to donate his papers around the time of the MCA show, “and they were looking to broaden their archives and get more into comics. And I’m this guy from Hyde Park, so it’s remarkable that all this stuff will now live two blocks from where I grew up.”
As for the rest of his papers, including his early work for “Cracked” magazine, his New Yorker magazine covers, his “Eightball” sketches?
“I have it at home, and I’m hoping this (acquisition) will be the start of something more.”
cborrelli@tribune.com
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