Some time ago now I bought a comic book/graphic novel/trade paperback/whatever called David Boring by Daniel Clowes. I bought it because I'd read Ghost World and one of the Eightball comics and liked them, and was grasping around for something good to read, but even so I remember feeling almost resentful about buying something with the word "Boring" in the title. It seemed like a rather inauspicious introduction to any story, and I anticipated disappointment.

You'll be happy to learn that the story is not, in fact, boring. On the contrary, it's full of sex, nudity, violence, mystery, murder and mayhem. That's what I gleaned from it on first reading; there's something pleasurable in the fact that comic books allow themselves to be read very rapidly and superficially, so that one derives from them just a sense of colour and movement, without having to work out all the intricacies that push them along.

However, reading quickly like that I did tend to get the impression that the author had laced the book with unresolved mysteries as a way of giving the illusion of depth. On more recently rereading it I have revised this opinion; the depth is real, and the mysteries are, I think, meant to be evocative of the mysteriousness of life, rather than presenting the reader with puzzles to solve.

Anyway, I should be giving some sort of introduction to the story, shouldn't I? So, David Boring, our protagonist and narrator, is a teenage boy, just barely out of high school, who has moved to "the city" (we aren't told which city) mainly in order to escape from his domineering mother. When we first encounter him he is having sex with, as he says, "what the consensus of the day would have held as a perfectly beautiful woman", but the expression on his face and the tone of his narration indicate a lack of real enthusiasm and a distant, half-embarrassed attitude to the situation. This seems to be a perfect introduction to David; throughout the story he appears to be obsessed with sexual conquest, and yet, whether through nostalgia or insincerity or fear, he seems largely incapable of enjoying it, or indeed, much of anything else. He has a cold, distant, affectless manner which provides us with one of the first mysteries of the story; how does this skinny, very ordinary looking boy, with such a muted way of being in the world, happen into bed with a "perfectly beautiful woman"? The answer is, I think, in his overwhelming obsessiveness, and through it we are given a sad and convincing portrait of the deadening effects of such obsession when it is unleavened by love, or at least laughter.

I think I like David because he represents so well what is going on "behind the scenes" in the lives of so many people who appear muffled, paralysed, and otherwise disconnected from life. He is struggling to be in the world, to wake up, to return to some state of connectedness which he dimly remembers from his past. He does stupid, dangerous, and unpleasant things, and sometimes he just seems to be an out-and-out jerk, but I always felt sympathetic to his plight.

The other aspect of this story which I liked was its commentary on symbolism. Another of the mysteries in this book is the meaning of an old comic book which is the only memento David has of his father. The glimpses we see of this book are strange and suggestive of possible hidden meaning, and yet we never have enough information or context to be able to piece this meaning together. We get to share in David's struggle to make sense of it. This comic-within-a-comic ("The Yellow Streak") appears in many ways to be like a bad, cheap pulp book from the sixties or seventies, but because it's David's only clue to what his father was like, and what his parents' relationship was like, it takes on an importance which contrasts vividly with its throwaway appearance. As a literary device I like it because it creates the sort of frustration combined with teasing hints of the possibility of resolution which is characteristic of efforts to understand one's parents better.

Since this is a review and not an analysis, I won't go into any more detail except to say that this a seriously interesting book, a work of art, and good fun, too, and that I'm glad I overcame my resistace to paying for something with the word "boring" in the title.