Résumé: Twentieth Century Eightball collects the very best humor strips from Eightball, written and drawn between 1988 and 1996. Included within are such seminal strips/rants as "I Hate You Deeply," "Sexual Frustration," "Ugly Girls," "Why I Hate Christians," "Message to the People of the Future," "Paranoid," "My Suicide," "Chicago," and over three dozen more. Other favorites include "Art School Confidential," one of Clowes' most popular strips of all time, which was adapted into a major motion picture that re-teamed Clowes with Ghost World director Terry Zwigoff. Also included is Clowes' hilariously Freudian deconstruction of professional athletes, "On Sports," which caused a stir in San Antonio when reprinted in the city's most popular weekly paper, prompting an advertising boycott and demands for the paper to be destroyed by local sports fans. Also on display is Clowes' absurdist sense of humor, from strips like "Zubrick and Pogeybait" and "Hippypants and Peace-Bear" to "Grip Glutz," "The Sensual Santa," and "Feldman."
Noted comics historian Roger Sabin, author of Phaidon's Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels, calls Eightball a "corrosively satirical vision of an America cracking apart, and confirms Clowes as a worthy successor to the underground greats of the 1960s." While Clowes' legion of admirers continues to grow along with the author's maturity as an artist, many longtime fans frequently cite Clowes' bitterly humorous work to be amongst his very best. With over 40 pages in color and many of these strips having been out-of-print for years, Twentieth Century Eightball has proven to be one of Clowes' most popular books of the twenty-first century.
2003 Harvey Award Winner, Best Graphic Album of Previously Published Work