In the late 90s, in an issue of Eightball, Clowes included this insert phamphlet containing a diatribe about how the talent in comics was being wasted, because few people in comics seemed to want to be making GOOD COMICS. They were all about creating something that could get sold as a film option, or made into a toy or a cartoon or a video game, or whatever. And he argued that COMICS were a unique art-form/method of storytelling and that you should take pride in working in comics and make the most of the medium. He called out, as a challenge, to do that.

I think the issue of Eightball I picked did just that. It told one long tragic story of a creepy pedophile, but over the course of the issue, it was broken up into a number of single page "strips" or multi-page stories, each one reflecting a differnt style of comic art or comic storytelling. It was genius. Reading that comic was like a punch to the soul; to see such genius in one piece of art. I can think of only a few other times in my life that I was so struck by the pure power of genius like that; seeing West Side Story, reading Ulysses, seeing the painting Christina's World... it was on that level. I was living in Seattle at the time, and I read the comic in some dimly lit bar in the U-Dist, and I can still remember the smells in the air and the taste in my mouth. A powerful memory.