Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron

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Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron is a graphic novel in English, written and drawn by Daniel Clowes. It follows a rather fantastic and paranoid story line, very different from the stark realism of Clowes' more widely known Ghost World. It contains nightmarish imagery, including dismemberment, deformed people and animals, and sexual fetishism. Like the rest of Clowes' extended works, it originally appeared in serial form in his magazine Eightball.

[edit] Plot

Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron is the story of a man named Clay Loudermilk and his attempts to locate his estranged wife. For reasons unknown, Clay is in the audience at a porno theatre when he sees a bizarre BDSM feature, the star dominatrix of which is revealed to be his wife. Clay sets out to locate her and becomes embroiled in a series of misadventures involving an incredibly bizarre and varied cast of supporting characters. Clay is victimized by two crazed policemen, meets a religious cult led by a mass-murderer who intend to overthrow the American government, conspiracy theorists who believe that the reins of the world's political power somehow revolve around a series of dimestore novelty figures, an inhumanly malformed, fish-like young woman and her nymphomaniacal mother, and various other freaks and weirdos.

[edit] Trivia

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The opening panels of later chapters of this story were presented in color when originally published in Eightball.

Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron is one of very few graphic novels to have inspired an official soundtrack album. The 10 track CD by Victor Banana was released on the Jenkins-Peabody label.

In an issue of Eightball published after the conclusion of Velvet Glove, Clowes did a story about a hypothetical movie based on Velvet Glove. As presented by Clowes, the film is a highly commercialized, poorly-made flop, with little in common with Clowes' original story beyond the title and a few superficial elements.

The title of the book is a quote from the Russ Meyer film Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! The full line, as delivered by Lori Williams, is "You're cute, like a velvet glove cast in iron. And like a gas chamber, Varla, a real fun gal."

Clowes uses the phrase What's the Frequency, Kenneth? in this story, referencing the bizarre Dan Rather incident, years before the R.E.M song did the same.