Unique Obsessions of the Authors of The Death-Ray, More Than Money, and Kafka

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22 November 2018
Obsessions
Graphic narratives have been popular since before the conquest of Americans and especially today more abundantly than ever with low-cost, low tech shaping devices. The number of practitioners engaged in this type of narratives and its diversity is growing. This paper explored the different obsessions on the authors of The Death-Ray, More Than Money and Kafka.
The Death-Ray is a graphic comic by Dan Clowes (2011). It is about Andy, a withdrawn, orphaned high-school student who lives with his grandfather. Andy is full of vengeance after his grandfather is killed. Apart from his superpowers, Andy has a ray-gun capable of erasing anything in the world. The Death-Ray takes on Clowes’s obsessions, in which he explores the consequences of being able to act on every violent inclination. Clowes’s obsessions can be traced to the influence of his role model Steve Ditko, the author of Spider-Man comics. They were both obsessed with revenge and violence, frailty and ugliness, heroic and un-heroic action. Clowes’s choice of characters reflects his views and experiences in life, just as Andy is. The comic was released in the early 2000s a period dominated by the war on terror. Clowes reflects the theme of war in Andy’s deep origins associated with 1960’s superhero stories of war that involved experiments and atomic power. He once said in an interview that all the characters in the story related to his childhood friends and classmates. For someone who draws comics for a living, it seems that Clowes used The Death-Ray to express his views of the seemingly dangerously chaotic and random world we live in.
More Than Money is a graphic memoir by Claudia Dominguez (2018) that recounts the true story of how the author’s family recovered their father after he was kidn...