‘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

‘Patience’ by Daniel Clowes, a graphic novel   (2016) –   180 pages

The graphic novel ‘Patience’ by Daniel Clowes is a strange blend of realism and time travel.

In 2012, Patience and Jack Barlow are a young couple, and Patience is expecting a baby.  She doesn’t want to discuss her past which she says was “like a horrible reality show”.  Jack doesn’t want to hear about it either.  However one day Jack returns home to find Patience lying dead on the floor, murdered.  At first, the police try to pin the murder on Jack, but after ten months, Jack finds out that the police no longer suspect him and let him go.  By then, the trail to the real murderer is cold.

Time passes, and the year is 2029.  Jack is still hung up on Patience.  He finds out about a substance that allows one to travel back in time.  He decides to travel back to 2006 in order to find out about Patience’s past, determine who her murderer was, and perhaps stop the murder from ever happening.  He becomes involved with some of the people who were involved in Patience’s life at that time including drug dealers and men who abuse her.  He is zeroing in on who the murderer might be when he accidentally travels back even further in time to 1985 to the time of his childhood.  He has a difficult time to find a means of time travel in 1985, but finally he arrives back in 2012 again, the year of the murder.

As far as graphic novels go, I found ‘Patience’ to lean more toward the fantastical comic book side than the literary side with its time travel and its surreal artwork.  I must admit that the concept of time travel holds little or no interest for me.  Here the time travel was a contrivance which only complicated and convoluted the story.  Thus the idea of having Jack Barlow in the same scenes as both a fifty year old and a twenty five year old was confusing and not enlightening in any way.

Other reviewers were much impressed with ‘Patience’, calling it psychologically astute and darkly comic. I saw no humor or potential wisdom in it whatsoever.  I preferred Clowes’ more realistic earlier work, ‘Mr. Wonderful’.

It would be way too unfair and facile to use a graphic novel’s own words against it, but these words from ‘Patience’ sum up my own reactions quite well:  “I’m so god-damned sick of all the science fiction mindfuck bullshit, all the guessing games and all the impossible, unsolvable riddles. I just want it all to fucking end.”

Grade:   C