Relational Genres, Gapped Narratives, and Metafictional Devices in Daniel Clowes’s David Boring

Abstract

Daniel Clowes's comic books have always have characterized by their juxtaposition of different artistic expressions. Since his begiinnings as a cartoonist in the mid 1980s, Clowes's works have continually revealed echoes from films, painting or literature, blended with different forms of popular culture. Not interested in creating a realistic arproach, his comic books highlight flctionality, a process that has strong implications in the development of highly experimental storylines. This article analyses Clowes's graphic novel David Boring (1999) and its narrative appropriations of the superhero genre, embodied in the inset superhceo comic book 'The Yellow Streak'. This meta-comic book is a recurrent motif which challenges our expectations as readers. Focusing on intertextual processes of re-working already existing materials, the aim of his study is to research the different ways in which 'The Yellow Streak' could function within the frame of Davin Boring. firstly, as a superhero comic book per se, since it both follows and subverts traditional aspects of the genre; secondly, as a family biography which mirrors the events in the main story; and finally, as a metafictional comment on how a gapped narrative can be the subject of endless interpretations, requiring a sort of 'detective work' on the readers' part in order to achieve meaning.