LAST MINUTE PLANS: Daniel Clowes At Quimby's Tonight

By Kim Bellware in Arts & Entertainment on May 17, 2012 7:40PM

Someone up there is doing Chicago a solid because amid museum closings and NATO hoopla, cartoon genius and former Chicagoan Daniel Clowes touches down in his hometown tonight for a several events running through the weekend.

Clowes, the mind behind incomperable graphic novels like Ghost World and Wilson and the comic book Eightball is in Chicago for this weekend's "Comics: Philosophy and Practice" conference at University of Chicago. Put together by the U of C's Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, the conference is kind of like NATO for the comic book world (minus the teargas and nifty swag bags.)

The Hyde Park native will be part of the three-day conference that includes other shit-your-pants awesome comics like Lynda Barry, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, and fellow Chicagoan Chris Ware. We'll take bets now on whether Asif Ali Zardari will duck out of talks on Afghanistan to hear Phoebe Gloeckner instead.

Clowes makes his first stop tonight at Quimby's Bookstore on the heels of the new book, The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist, which covers the cartoonist's career from the '60s to present-day, touching aspects of his comic book, commercial and underground work.

Meanwhile, the conference (tag line: "Addressing the Art of the Empathetic Doodle") runs from Friday to Sunday at U of C. Registration for the conference is closed, but you can tune in for a live webcast.

Here's the sweet conference poster designed by Chris Ware:

And listen to WBEZ's Alison Cuddy recently interview Clowes

Daniel Clowes signs books tonight at Quimby's Bookstore, 1854 W North Ave 7 p.m., FREE