Comics were just not a thing yet.” Daniel Clowes (who would know) is talking about the period that led to the creation of Eightball, the stunningly smart and innovative comic that did what almost no other comic seemed able to do at the time: enter the culture of people who didn’t like comics. Eightball became one of the essential comedic touchstones of 1990s culture, a way to help the self-selecting weirdos of the pre-internet—or at least pre-good-internet—era identify kindred spirits and speak in shorthand. (For a time, if you heard someone say the words “Needle Dick, the Bug Fucker,” there was a reasonably good chance that person would become your friend.) As a result, it joins the now-long line of things still unaccountably filed in your consciousness as bold new works that are, in fact, older than you were when you first discovered them. No matter how timeless it always seemed, Eightball being 25 is a stiff drink…
