Daniel Clowes writes either the funniest sad comics or the saddest funny comics in the world. He’s won a PEN award for his body of graphic work and an Oscar nomination for the screenplay to Ghost World, but none of that would exist without Eightball, Clowes’s ongoing series that graced less reputable newsstands from the late 1980s onward.

Eightball is where the Ghost World stories first ran, where Art School Confidential (the source material for his second feature film) first appeared, and where his graphic novels Ice Haven, David Boring and The Death Ray were serialised. Now, the lion’s share of that old material, from the religious tract parody to Clowes’ jokey ad for “hand-painted girlie ties” (which he actually honoured, if you sent him a hundred bucks) is getting the oversized, slipcased treatment from Fantagraphics. The Complete Eightball is out 4 July.

Hi, are you free to talk? I’m not surprising you or anything?

Yes! I’m free. I think the worst moment of my life was once I was on a book tour and dead asleep and the phone rings. And I picked it up and it was a radio DJ who said: “Are you ready to go on the air in 30 seconds?” It was an AM American radio show and he was like “So! you do comics!” I was completely still in a dream world.

What’s it like looking through all this material from 25 years ago?

Luckily it’s been long enough that I don’t look at it and go: “Oh my god, I wish I’d fixed that face or rewritten that line of dialogue.” There was actually a typo that after all these years that no one had noticed. Multiple reprintings and it’s just always been there.

One thing I always stop on going through Eightball back issues is Devil Doll, the stapled-in parody of Jack Chick’s famous Christian mini-comic tracts.

When I was growing up you would see those lying around. You don’t really think of those as being part of the official canon of effective comics. And one day I sort of changed my mind. I thought: “These are really compelling and I’d rather read these than pretty much anything else published in 1985.” So I made a long trek out to a Christian bookstore in Queens and I bought every single one, which totaled I think $3 – they were each 10 cents. And I went home and read them all in one sitting, and it was maybe the most devastating comics-reading experience I’ve ever had. I really felt like he’d almost won me over by the end. I knew every single one of them almost by heart by the time I did that story. I was so obsessed.

It’s such an effective evocation of them that I’ve occasionally wanted to just buy an old issue of Eightball and just slip it into the rack in the Times Square subway station where the guy hands them out.

A couple of people had the gumption to actually redo that story as a Chick tract and I only wish I had a thousand of them, because that would be really fun to leave in the laundromat.

Are there any characters in these stories that you miss? Dan Pussey, the guy who tragically makes it big in superhero comics, or the misanthropic Lloyd Llewelyn?

I feel like Dan Pussey could have just gone on and on as the world changed. He would be running one of the movie studios right now. I think about Lloyd Llewelyn all the time. He was like the big actor that peaked too soon and became a has-been and is doing infomercials or something, and there’s something much more interesting about that than the successful character that takes off. I’ve thought about doing the Ghost World girls as adults. I think one day I may just revisit all the characters. I may do something where they get together in some way, just to see what would happen.

It’s funny how short the Art School Confidential story is. Four pages long, and it’s been made into a feature film.

The only reason I allowed it to be [marketed] as though it’s based on that story was because I would get money from being the author of the original material. But really we wanted to do an art school story. I always thought we should have changed the name, but nobody else agreed with me, so it stayed with it.

Do you want to keep on making movies?

It looks like there’s going to be a Wilson movie coming up this summer, I wrote the screenplay for that, but I have to say ... I don’t know. It was a fun thing to do for 10 years or so, to write the screenplays. But now, really, all I want to do is sit at the drawing board. I’m newly inspired to get back to comics full-time and not do anything else. I’m cranking out the comics.

How do you preserve an observation that inspired you after you’ve reworked it a hundred times?

I’ve devised various ways to keep it loose while still plotting it out so that I don’t get trapped. A lot of it has to do with not writing any of the captions or dialogue until I’m really feeling the pressure. I’ve actually found over the years that when I’m using the pen and doing the comic book lettering, at that moment my brain is really freed to know what’s going to sound right. I’ll wind up making drastic changes while I’m lettering that have a sort of clarity to them I can’t have at any other time. It’s a very interesting process.

I’ve never understood how jokes in particular survive any of this.

By the time you’re actually drawing the thing, no matter how spontaneous you keep it, the joke is already worked out. Once Peter Bagge’s wife told me she could hear him through the heating grate in the floor where he had a studio in the basement, cackling at his own comics. And I thought: “I’ve never laughed at one of my own comics.” Going back and rereading the Eightballs, I laughed at a couple of my own jokes. It was cool.

What else makes you laugh?

There’s so much good comedy in the world you almost take it for granted. That Mike Judge show Silicon Valley always makes me laugh because we’re [living] right in that area [northern California], and he’s so great at cataloguing different types of assholes. Every week there’s a new type of asshole! And you’re like: “Yes. That is one of them.”

Given how respectable comics have gotten in the past 20 years, where is there still to go? What would you like to see more of?

I’d like to see more people who can draw really well also figuring out how to tell stories. Because I feel like there are a lot of really beautiful-looking comics that aren’t that interesting to read. And there are certainly a lot of people who could potentially write good comics, but writing for comics is a very, very difficult thing. I think it’s only really done perfectly when it’s the same person doing both, or at least having a great control over the visuals. I’d just like to have more things to actually read. I have a lot of things I can look at. Even the most average, bland Hollywood movie has to be worked out to such a degree that there’s a certain pleasure to watching it, knowing that it’s going to play out in a way that has some structure to it. Just to get to that point would be a big step.

The cover and logo of Eightball get redesigned practically every issue – were you just bored and mixing it up, or were you trying to find something that worked?

No, I think that’s a very clear sign I was trying to find something. You can see in the first two issues I use the same logo. In the third issue that logo didn’t quite work, and then I’m just restlessly moving from one thing to another, and by the end it was these big, full-colour paintings that I was spending weeks on. It’s something I never quite got, and at the time I felt once I have the perfect format, I’ll just stick with that. But I now look back and see that it’s a good thing I never felt comfortable with that. And I still never do! I’m still looking for ways to work that will be, you know, The Way.