Not For the Faint of Mind: Daniel Clowes’ Like A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron
But to chart out the plot of LVCIG is to really miss out on the fact that Clowes’ intention is not so much as to tell us a tale as to really enable the reader to simply soak in the bizarreness, primarily through its stark, eccentric, black-and-white art. There is a dream-like unreal quality to the visuals, which, when juxtaposed against the everyday mundane-ness of the world the characters inhabit, makes it more in the vein of magic realism.
In the same anthology, Clowes has provided relatively straightforward narratives in the more well-known Ghost World and Wilson. LVGCI, on the other hand, does away with any such courtesy to the reader- there is not even a pretension of logic. Clay’s misadventures which may or may not be simply his nightmarish imagination ask us to suspend disbelief as we navigate a world where answers to his questions are just around the corner, but never quite within reach.
This is a world where love is not so much about your loving another human being as it is about self-preservation, and sex is too visceral an act to ever be passionate. Here, empathy for a fellow human being is a commodity too expensive to part with, but sense-less animals (literally so), are treasured beyond words. And while that may seem like a dystopic, depressing explanation, this is not a story that makes you loathe the characters, simply because of the endearment that Clowes displays towards his characters. There is plenty of dark humour too which offsets the rather muted horror.
If anything then, this is a work which makes the attempt to map out the workings of the subconscious mind in all its irrational, misshapen and disjointed fragments. A story here is formed only by the weakest of links. Deformed people, conspiracy theories, sexual fetishism, and hellish imagery are only the surface of this graphic novel- the complexity and the odd beauty of this work derive from its refusal to provide any sense of plot and instead, thrive in chaos. The grotesque facade provides a sense of continuity in a narrative which is not easy to follow, but for patient readers with a penchant for the strange and the fantastic, it provides rich rewards in a second or a third read.