Given 5 stars for the sheer pleasure of reading this comic collection at a slow pace and putting myself back in time. Fresh out of high school, I earnestly wanted to be a graphic novelist and I owe that to Clowes. I think for Clowes’s humor to hit just right, you either need to be firmly Gen X or maybe you grew up a precocious xennial. Either way, the tone of his satire is very of its time, biting, sometimes mean, often self-deprecating. He is best known for Ghost World, adapted into a Terry Zwigoff film in 2001 (just recently found out he was writing the final GW installations while working on the screenplay simultaneously). I came across a lot of short-form comics I’d never seen before (for better or for worse) and most of all, I found a ton of joy in reading the totally bizarre Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron in its entirety. This man’s brain is… something else. Remember that this is social satire and these comics were written from 1989-1997. Some of the problems he rails against are very topical. Some of his gripes are pretentious. No such thing as a perfect idol!