June 9-15, 2005

artpicks

Sketch Artist

books

A bewitching multiple narrative about a small Midwestern town shaken up by a modern-day variant of the Leopold and Loeb case, Daniel Clowes' Ice Haven (Pantheon) is self-aware enough to mock its own self-awareness. Among the failed poets, sociopathic preteens and emotionally stunted detectives who populate Ice Haven's brief chapters, each drawn in a distinctive comic-strip style, is one Harry Nabors, a teenage comic book critic who breaks down some of the story's more obscure reference points (as well as its autobiographical subtext), while simultaneously disdaining the reader -- or, perhaps more to the point, the artist -- for taking this comic book stuff so seriously. Mixing the snarky bite of Clowes' earliest Eightballs with the cut-and-paste formalism of Chris Ware and Art Spiegelman, Ice Haven feels at once like a step forward and a step back, an oblique rebus that at once revels in the unique possibilities of the form while reaching across the border between panels.

Daniel Clowes reads Tue., June 14, 7 p.m., free, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341.

—Sam Adams