Literary paper: Ice Haven

I'm not going to lie. The higher up I go in school, the harder it is. The bumps on this academic road are bigger and - indulge me a bit more as I delve further into this metaphor - sometimes I may fall into ditches or pits. Now the problem is getting out of those seemingly merciless traps, which could have been avoided through schoolwork-filled weekends and the eschewing from procrastination. It's too bad I'm not perfect, yet who wants to live a life of perfection? You should give Keane's, "Perfect Symmetry" a listen and you'll see what I mean, this whole business of mankind's imperfection as a definition of living. Yet a perfect GPA is every college student's dream come true. And what happens if that dream really did come true? Where do you go when you've reached the top? Stay there and look at the kingdom you've mastered? Or do you stumble and fall, hoping, desperately to climb back up again? What if you turn into a turtle and cannot get back on the right side, on your legs? You will need either external help or an extra push exerted by your own will and muscle. A slump in GPA is hard to pick up and much of the picking up is contingent on many factors, like the courses you take that are available to you, the professors, the subjectivity of the assignments. School is a jungle. A migraine-causing rumble that enlightens until you tumble.

And let me tell ya. I've been tumbling down those pits like a shameful turtle knocked and turned on its shell.

But I, for a brief moment however it may be, saw my potential. I got an "A-" on a paper. It was the first "A" I've gotten in a long time. Yes, I needed that.

So I proudly present to you that paper. This place will serve as my refrigerator.

"Ice Haven’s Men, Women and Children – Many Dark Lights"

What makes Daniel Clowes’s graphic novel, or comic as he would prefer it be called , Ice Haven, immensely creative and thought-provoking is its many characters and the breaking of the fourth wall by Harry Naybors, a comic critic (one of the main characters who in particular representative of Clowes himself) at the beginning and end of the story. Naybors harbors views similar to those of Clowes. One example is where they share what they think comics really are. Naybors directly says to the reader:

While prose tends toward pure ‘interiority,’ coming to life in the reader’s mind, and cinema gravitates toward the ‘exteriority’ of experiential spectacle, perhaps ‘comics,’ in its embrace of both the interiority of the written word and the physicality of image, more closely replicates the true nature of human consciousness and the struggle between private self-definition and corporeal ‘reality’. (Clowes 4)

This comic reveals, explicitly and intriguingly, Clowes and Naybors’s high value on human consciousness and their belief that the conventions of comics provide the perfect way to delineate the inner workings of the mind – our thoughts, internal imprints left only in ourselves, unless we leave some kind of legacy in the world in any form including our impact on relationships and society. In other words, how can we touch the lives of others in our world, if we keep ourselves to ourselves? Unfortunately, for the citizens of Ice Haven, the world they live in is not happy and perfect. As the narrator, Random Wilder puts it, “Our [the people of Ice Haven] lovely name, intended to conjure a wondrous winterland, [brings] to mind only gloom and frostbite,” (Clowes 6). Through many characters (over twenty – nine of whom are protagonists) and their relationships with others, this comic powerfully shows us why Ice Haven is a place of “gloom and frostbite.”

The comic revolves around the kidnapping of David Goldberg, a highly reserved boy who separates himself from society, rarely saying anything until the end. The nine idiosyncratic, central characters provide various perspectives on the crime, some directly relating to it and some briefly only mentioning it. Random Wilder is a frustrated writer whose rival is Ida Wentz, Poet laureate of Ice Haven and grandmother of Vida, a visitor to Ice Haven, who dreams to be a writer, but without immediate success. Charles is a boy who is outwardly quiet to all but his younger neighbor, George, to whom he confides his deepest, intellectual and secret thoughts. He is also friends with Carmichael, a creepy boy whose actions and thoughts perturb Charles. Charles’s older sister, Violet is the typical seventeen year old girl who hates her step-father and mother and wants to escape her home troubles to run off with her boyfriend. Lastly, we have Mr. and Mrs. Ames, detectives who have problems in their own relationship as they investigate the kidnapping of David Goldberg. All these characters are in one way or another connected to the kidnapping of David, whether they are directly investigating the case, like the Ames or if they have a friend who is friends with the owner of a stationary shop, from which the paper of David’s ransom note was bought. All of these characters, not coincidentally, also have relationship problems.

Although Ice Haven can be approached in a myriad of ways, new critical and gender/feminist provide the best basis for analysis. From a new critical perspective, one of the main themes is nature versus human consciousness. Nature can be stipulated as embodying the concept of sexual desire, instincts and fate (how events ended up), while human consciousness can be connected to the thoughts, feelings and intellectual capacities of humans, as well as how humans can project those to their environment, that is, their society, by means of their legacies. Throughout the comic, human consciousness is favored or seen as superior over nature. However, as the comic unfolds, nature ultimately triumphs. Subconsciously, characters think they could beat nature with their legacies; but, nature punishes them in the form of empty and troubled relationships that they cannot avoid (it is fate). This is seen most prominently with Random Wilder, Charles, and Rocky, who appeared only once (though effectively) in the comic.


Believing that he is better than Ida and should therefore be the Poet laureate of Ice Haven, Random Wilder epitomizes the idea of humans’ being capable of producing refined artistic visions, coming from the mind. Being a writer, Random Wilder has his mind wrapped around his poetry – words brought to life by his thoughts and creative writing. However, his constant need to be superior to Ida causes endless frustration. Nature has produced for him a place in which he self-destructs because he is extremely focused on his legacy – his poetry – and he realizes that he cannot beat her. Because of his obsession of wanting to leave a legacy, nature punishes him by making him go through the motions of hating himself for (upon realization and resignation) being a worse or unpopular poet, compared to Ida.

Unlike Wilder, Charles is punished by nature by his uneven relationship with his older step-sister: he is in love with her, but she does not realize this and does not return the love. He tells George how he absolutely refuses to let sexual desire (nature) control him, and yet he is so deeply in love with Violet, so much so that he desperately hopes their parents would break up so that it would not seem so outrageous if he were to be in a romantic relationship with Violet when he grows older. He is trapped in his self-denial. What is ironic is the fact that he explicitly realizes this. He says, “Nature laughs at our suffering,” (Clowes 38). Charles overtly tries to fight off sexual desire, but ultimately he cannot. He must endure what cruelties nature has in store for him: unrequited love that is also frowned upon in society as it is taboo to romantically love your sibling.

Perhaps the most explicit form of the defeat of human consciousness and legacy at the hands of nature can be seen in the scene with Rocky, a Fred Flintstone look-alike, whose clip is set in prehistoric times. This one panel is obviously a deliberate inclusion made by Clowes, as its setting differs substantially from the rest. Rocky is a caveman who has grown tired of nature, when he says, “I’ve had it,” (Clowes 49) and decides to die in a symbolic fashion: he digs a hole for himself to lie in. This action signifies his perpetuating himself in human society so that his body will remain, as if it were a legacy, on earth. Upon lying down in the ground, he says, “This hole will be my monument. It will erode one day into a bottomless pit or an ocean,” (Clowes 49). Even when he dies, he will remain in society.

Ice Haven’s bleak society, filled with failed relationships, can provide rich insights when approached with feminist/gender critical lens. The comic’s ending makes it seem as though women ultimately were superior to men. After all, the only two characters who were able to escape Ice Haven were women and the only person who was truly happy was also a woman. One of Vida’s magazines was recognized by a producer who then wanted her to help in the making of a film about it. Violet was able to move to Hawaii, after giving up on her dissolving relationship with her boyfriend, Penrod, without missing anybody but her younger brother, Charles. Finally, throughout the comic, Ida was the only character who remained happy: she got to see her grand daughter and remained the most liked Poet laureate of Ice Haven.

One reason why women seem to dominate over men, ultimately in this comic, could be because the original crime, off which the crime involving the kidnapping and possible murdering of David Goldberg was inspired (by Clowes), was done by two intellectual men, Leopold and Loeb. They are mentioned in the comic through the book Carmichael gives to Charles. There is also a panel containing solely their story (of their crime), although they are not present in the comic plotline itself; their crime is set in the 1920’s. They had kidnapped fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks and murdered him with a chisel, after luring him into their car . Not only that, the men of Ice Haven have ignored woman (as when Penrod stopped speaking to Violet), and were seen as turning women into sex objects (when Carmichael arbitrarily makes love to Paula and when Harry and the police officer implicitly has affairs with Mrs. Ames). Perhaps society is now against men because of that crime, which seems like an original sin, and is now favoring woman, as punishment. Men’s punishment can be seen in the men of all the relationships: Charles and Violet, Random Wilder and Ida, Random Wilder and Vida, Mr. and Mrs. Ames. Charles can never be Violet’s boyfriend; Wilder’s works can never match the popularity of Ida’s; Wilder self-destructs when he sees that even Ida’s grand daughter, Vida, writes better than he; Mrs. Ames cheats on her husband, through affairs with Harry Naybors and the police officer.

However, seeing women portrayed as the ones who were successful in one of Clowes’s works seems unfitting because he often wrote about Generation X , the generation born after the baby boomers of the 1950’s, particularly from 1965 to 1976 (Ortner 416). One characteristic of Generation X’s women is that they were the generation who never really fought hard for women’s rights. In other words, they were not the strongest feminists time has seen. “Many Boomers saw the critical issues of their youth (. . . feminist, sexual freedom) as moot,” (Tulgan 45). What does the inclusion of this outlook of women – their ascendency over men – say about the author, Clowes himself? Is he a feminist? Or is he mocking Generation X for not continuing, fervently, the breakthroughs women were making before that generation? Perhaps he is reacting to the harshness and ingenuity of Leopold and Loeb, whom he had heard of since they went to the same University as he did, although at different times . Clowes would then be writing this comic as a stand (defending women and society) against men like Leopold and Loeb.

One class activity that I would engage the students in if I were teaching this graphic novel involves the teaching of the gender/feminist lens. I would first explain to the students the concept of using a gender/feminist critical lens, emphasizing that the point of using that lens is to see different perspectives of the graphic novel from both male and female views (as opposed to just female). I would ask them, in particular, as a model, “How would the story be like if it were told by David Goldberg? Would David see the world full of people who were exactly the same? Or would he lean toward certain people and describe certain others in negative or positive ways, based on their gender?” In other words, I would get the students thinking in terms of gender/feminist lenses. We would brainstorm possible answers as to how the story would have been different and write it on the board. After looking, physically, at all the possible solutions that the students come up with, I would explain to them how looking through different lenses can produce many different perspectives. With this in mind, the students would be ready to work on the following activity. I would break the class into groups. Half of the groups would choose a different female character and re-tell the story solely from that character’s point of view. The other half of the groups would choose a different male counterpart of the female characters and re-tell the story solely through that point of view. We would then go from group to group, discussing what they had come up with, writing short summaries of their responses on the board. This activity highlights the benefits of using different perspectives, in this case, in the gender/feminist lens. When students use a different lens, other than the traditional new critical lens, they begin to approach the graphic novel in a way that makes them think deeply and find connections to society and its expectations. They begin to open their minds wider as they see the story differently.

If this comic were to be taught in a high school class, there is no doubt that the students would find the text both entertaining and enlightening. However, they would have to know additional intellectual skills that are required to read graphic novels. One main intellectual skill that I have learned while reading graphic novels or comics myself, is the ability to make inferences between what is being said and what is going on in the picture. Students should not only look for actions being described but how the actions are displayed. They would have to understand what is going on when the characters discuss something in one box and then just stand, looking at each other in the next, for example.

Given this valuable skill – making inferences – some parents, teachers and principals might still make some objections about using graphic novels in the classroom. As McCloud, author of Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form, puts it, “The revolution in public perception has been a SLOW and difficult one, but at least some recent trends have been encouraging compared to what came before,” (82). He means that comics have been traditionally viewed as non-serious fictitious pictures of violence and sex. However, more graphic novels are deviating from this stereotyped view. Still, some have these aspects – violence and sexual content – but in a more rich and insightful way that renders a worthwhile read in the classroom. For example, Ice Haven in particular has some sexual content that parents might not want their children to read or be exposed to. However, it is up to the teacher to justify still using the graphic novel. Effective arguments she might make to counter those objections, specific to Ice Haven or any other graphic novel, include arguing that the content alone without a particular critical lens (in the case discussed in this paper – new critical and gender/feminist) may be obscene, but with the lens, it will be fulfilling and worth the reading and teaching of it.















Works Cited
Clowes, Daniel. Ice Haven. New York: Pantheon Books, 2001, 2005 by Daniel G. Clowes.

McCloud, Scott. Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form. Canada: REINVENTING COMIC BOOKS, 2000.

Ortner, Sherry B. “Generation X: Anthropology in a Media Saturated World.” Cultural Anthropology 13.3 (Aug., 1998): 414-440.

Parille, Ken. “A Cartoon Wolrd: Ice Haven by Daniel Clowes.” Boston Review. January/February 2006 < http://bostonreview.net/BR31.1/parille.php>.

“Daniel Clowes.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedi. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 1 October 2010. Web. 20 September 2010.

“The Loeb-Leopold Murder of Franks in Chicago, May 21, 1924.” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 15.3 (Nov., 1924): 347-348.

Tulgan, Bruce. Managing Gernertaion X: How to bring out the best in young talent, revised and updated. New York: Norton paperback 2000, 1996 by Bruce Tulgan.