Love Quote by Daniel Clowes

Clowes draws a clean line between the art form and the machine that sells it, and the hurt in that separation is the point. By calling comics a "medium", he stakes a claim for seriousness: not a genre, not a niche, but a full expressive toolkit. Then he narrows to "individual comics", a phrase that feels almost protective, as if the real proof of comics' worth lives in singular, hard-won works rather than in the industry’s self-mythology.

The knife twist is "the business". Clowes doesn’t accuse it of being tacky or frustrating; he says it’s nothing he’d be "proud of". Pride is moral vocabulary, not aesthetic critique. The subtext is that the comic-book economy has often run on exploitative labor, shaky ownership, and a churn of hype that rewards IP over idiosyncrasy. Even when alternative and literary comics gained cultural legitimacy, they were still routed through precarious publishing models, tiny advances, and marketing expectations that can flatten the weirdness that made the work matter.

Clowes’ career sits right at that crossroads: a generation that helped elevate comics into bookstore culture while watching the industry double down on franchising and nostalgia. The sentence is structured like a love letter with a restraining order. He’s loyal to the form, devoted to particular artists and books, but refuses to romanticize the marketplace around them. That refusal reads less like bitterness than like an ethic: you can be in love with the thing and still demand better conditions for the people making it.