‘Monica’ by Daniel Clowes, a graphic novel (2023) – 106 pages

What a wild and wicked ride ‘Monica’ is.

We start out even before Monica is born. Johnny is fighting over in Vietnam. His girlfriend, back in the US, gets caught up in the spirit of the times, the hippy spirit of free love and sexual liberation. She sleeps around, gets pregnant, and has the baby Monica. For a few years, Penny stays with her child, but then she takes Monica to her parents’, the grandparents’, home.

“From that moment on,” Monica says, “I lived a normal life, happy and safe from harm, but I never saw my mother again.”

From then on, we get chaotic episodes from Monica’s life, from early childhood to old age. After a relatively uneventful childhood, Monica’s college years wind up with a car crash which leaves her in a temporary coma. After she recovers Monica finds financial success by opening a candle business which eventually burns down.

Meanwhile Monica avoids any involving relationships, but she has an ever persisting quest to reunite with her mother and to find her father, whoever he may be. She hears that one of Penny’s old boyfriends, Krug, is the leader of a demonic cult called The Way, Monica decides to infiltrate the cult and perhaps find her mother and figure out who her real father is.

The last episode takes us into current times.

“Like many others, ours is a divided town, with us hippy artists on one side and gross redneck idiots on the other. We used to all get along but, as you know, those days are over.”

She does finally find her father, now a businessman living in a suburb with his wife and three children.

“It’s quite a blow to discover after a lifetime of fairy-tale fantasies that you are not really special, just the unwanted fetus of two random fuck-ups caught in a confusing historical moment.”

My rather straightforward account of ‘Monica’ leaves out the phantasmagoric effects of the cartoon drawings, the black comedy of this woman’s life, and several of the more devastating otherworldly plot twists. Those looking for down-to-earth realism need not apply, yet Daniel Clowes has many mordant ironic insights into life as it is lived today. ‘Monica’ definitely pushes the boundaries of what a graphic novel can be.

Grade:    A