Although Daniel Clowes's Eightball has been the source of three narratives collected as graphic novels, Clowes has yet to write a "long story, one that [he] ... plan[ned] out in advance."

Instead, as he reveals in a recent Comics Journal interview (#233, May 2001, p. 52-77), his composition process relies on continual reading of previous episodes or installments (usually only from notes), then projection of the characters and plot into a single new chapter.

Ghost World, for example, began as an independent six-page story that only later became the first chapter of an extended story; the "plot" of Ghost World really only begins to emerge in its penultimate seventh chapter. Clowes has, in effect, replicated the comics *reader's* experience in this serial approach to plotting: like a subscribing fan waiting for the next issue, he reads an unchangeable narrative past, looking for clues to the future and the story's possible conclusions.

Seriality of this sort is not often considered in discussions of the graphic novel -- the "novel" being presented between two covers as a complete story -- but it is an inescapable fact of Eightball's publication, and of the monthly comics that provide much of the graphic novel's vocabulary. The essay will consider the structure of Clowes's recent David Boring, where Clowes seems most keenly aware of his serial composition process.

The first chapter in particular is deliberately littered with loose threads for Clowes to pick up (or ignore) when plotting the next two chapters.

David Boring himself engages in a sort of comics "reading" more than once, studying the "rebus" left in Wanda's apartment (p. 34, p. 82) or interpreting the scraps of his father's comic (p. 73-74, p. 95) in a process resembling Scott McCloud's game "Five-Card Nancy."

This process of "reading" randomly juxtaposed panels seems directly connected to Clowes's process of interpreting the loose threads he leaves for himself as he plots his stories one issue at a time. The process also relies directly from one of the unique virtues of the comics medium: since a reader can return to a page or a panel several times, or pore over it for an indefinite time, comics seem particularly well-suited for certain sorts of interpretation or clue-searching -- be that a semi- or pseudo-Freudian analysis of imagery (as in the Comics Journal interview, p. 65), or simply noticing that the same strangely bearded man appears three times in David Boring's first chapter (5.2, 19.1, and 35-36).

The essay concludes, then, by considering David Boring and the new, self-contained Eightball #22 as detective fictions of a peculiar sort, in that they require detective work from the reader and from the writer-in-process.