Writer/Artist: Daniel Clowes
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Many characters in Daniel Clowes’ Ice Haven appear to be Peanuts characters all grown up at different points in their lives. Others are similar to Peanuts children, familiar Peanuts children. But none of them are actually Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts children. These are the ones who were always out there that never made the strip, or who made it beyond the age of eight physically, but not mentally or emotionally. Clowes has made them his own. They’ve found their home, some only briefly, in the small city of Ice Haven.
Ice Haven is a wonderful “comic-strip novel.” Less than 100 pages, it follows a large and varied cast of characters over a period of time, during which a young child, Daniel Goldberg, mysteriously disappears and is believed kidnapped. Two private detectives, Mr. and Mrs. Ames, are hired by the boy’s parents to locate their son.
Scenes and images from the book have settled into my memory and subconscious. Some linger, others haunt, a couple I ponder over. Ice Haven is the kind of book I want to praise from the hilltops with my strongest voice to reach the greatest audience. And in thinking on it, it pulls me back to it, and into my own personal memories.
Ice Haven makes me think about the kind of neighborhood, the kind of city, I live in. And the neighborhood I lived in once, and the people there, both children and adults. It makes me think of longing and loneliness, of acceptance and isolation, of jaded criticism and harsh banality. Of what makes up a daily life, and the kinds of happiness and sadness that fill it. It makes me think about the people in front of us who we don’t really see, and the people behind us we’re not paying enough attention to.
There is so much pain in this book (the last we see of the young boy Charles is genuinely heartbreaking), on par with many aspects of Schulz’s Peanuts (which was never always funny). Ice Haven may be disturbing to some, but it isn’t wholly tragic. It’s achingly real, at times bizarre, sprinkled with subtle humor, and thoroughly engrossing.
I want so much to explain the book more -- Clowes’ narrative techniques, the simple yet rich detail in the artwork, the use of different shades of paper so that at times it appears as if you’re reading an old comics strip, the jarring inclusion of a talking blue bunny -- but then I start drifting back again to its story, and I no longer find myself trying to write about it. I’m in it. Ice Haven is that good.
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