[In the following review, Ivan-Zadeh offers a positive assessment of Daniel Clowes's “compelling” characterizations in David Boring, asserting that “this is Clowes at his mature best.”]

Daniel Clowes's breakthrough book, Ghost World, was the tale of Enid and Rebecca, two cooler-than-thou teens caught in limbo between high school and the rest of their lives, and was hip in a way that only truly anti-hip stuff can be. With his crisp graphics, ironic tone and uncanny insight into teenage hell, 40-year-old Clowes has been creating two-dimensional characters with three-dimensional problems for years; but it was Ghost World's evocation of the particular pain of outgrowing childhood that really touched a chord. Serialised in Clowes's own comic, Eightball, and published here in book form during 2000, it gave a face and voice to all those American girls who don't wannabe Britney, way before Kelly Osbourne hit our screens. When the subsequent movie tie-in—a low-budget gem starring Thora Birch and Steve Buscemi—came out last year, it tripled book sales overnight. Ghost World has shifted more than 100,000 copies to date, creating a whole new readership for comics that grown-ups aren't ashamed to be seen with.

David Boring, Clowes's latest work, is an enigmatic murder mystery shivering with pre-millennial paranoia. Our “eponymous narrator” is a skinny 20-year-old security guard with an overactive sense of biography. Having escaped to the city to get away from his domineering mother (whose double-beehived hairdo gives her the air of Minnie Mouse after a hard night), David moves in with Dot, his lesbian best friend from high school. When another childhood friend, Whitey, is murdered, David goes all Raymond Chandler on us and tries to solve the case. “I love that I'm talking about ‘blondes’ and ‘alibis’,” he remarks. He gets entangled with an enigmatic dame called Wanda before taking a bullet in the brain. From then on the story ricochets off into Weirdsville as David retreats to the remote island playground of a dead millionaire, to wait out an unconfirmed world apocalypse.

David himself is not a particularly likable chap. Like the male characters of the seminal cartoonist Robert Crumb, many of Clowes's anti-heroes have a sweaty, guilty look, as if caught masturbating over pictures of the next-door neighbour's daughter. In our first peep at David, he is “naked, about to have sexual intercourse with what the consensus of the day would have held as a perfectly beautiful woman”. While thrusting away he begins to describe her, then trails off, bored. “Her trim, athletic figure was blah blah etc etc.” In fact, David is so pathologically detached from the world around him that it's difficult to care very much about him or, indeed, any of the other characters who, seen through David's eyes, are a far from endearing group of inadequate flakes, sinister control freaks and lust objects.

So what makes David Boring so compelling? Even its title is perversely uninviting. Shouted in declamatory Marvel style across the cover, it is partly a comic-buff reference to Superman artist Wayne Boring. Like many progressive writers of graphic novels (Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Chris Ware), Clowes grapples head on with his superhero heritage in a way that moves the medium forward. Despite his obscure link to the man in tights, and the bombastic middle name “Jupiter”, David is devoid of secret superhero skills—apart from the surprising ability to tell the shape of a girl's bum by her face. David's long-absent father was a cartoonist in the 1950s and his garish Technicolor strip, “The Yellow Streak”, is interspliced with Clowes's otherwise dramatically noirish panels. David struggles to formulate his identity through the past fragments of his father's comics, the shifting narrative of his own life (“what I had once thought was a romantic comedy is actually a horror story, complete with gothic effects”) and his filmic aspirations (“I'm better than my father. Movies are better than comics. Tomorrow I will write”). In doing so he emerges as more than just an obsessive, introverted misfit: he's a cipher for the graphic novel itself.

Deeply cool in both senses and beautifully controlled, this is Clowes at his mature best. David Boring might lack the bubble-gum charm and emotional charge of Ghost World, yet it is a subtle and intriguing book, whose compelling perplexity makes it well worth unlocking. And happily, the easy rhythm of the grid structure means you can read the whole thing inside an hour. So, read and re-read it, until it blows you away with a muted “Kapow!”