Monica

It's not as formally inventive as some of his other collage novels like Ice Haven, and it doesn't run on fantasy genre energy like Patience (not counting the ghost-radio bit, and a jarring swerve into horror at the very end); it feels to me more like an attempt to revisit some of the "America is a collection of cults and failures" vibe of his very early stuff but with more grounded ideas about the characters. I think it works really well as that; the title character and her mom may be kind of opaque in terms of why they're doing what they're doing at any given moment, but they feel lived-in, I like the details of the worlds they move through, and I think it has some of Clowes's best dialogue. I think following one person over this many show more years is also new for him. The continuities and differences between young Monica and middle-aged Monica are things I don't think he could have written convincingly in earlier years—with strong support from the art, which has settled into an interesting groove where even though there's still a lot of the deliberately stiff retro stuff he's always been into, the handling of faces is really graceful. show less

A woman named, yes, Monica, is the central character in this story, which follows her from birth to old age. Monica’s mother decides to stop waiting for her boyfriend to return from Vietnam and jumps deep into the counterculture of that time. Monica is soon born and spends a tumultuous few years before she is dumped with her grandparents while her mother disappears for decades.

Her life is told through a series of interconnected stories involving a cult, a coma, a successful interlude as a businesswoman; but mainly a life a seeking, trying to nail down her origins. She finally tracks down most of the people she’s looking for, with varying degrees of satisfaction, and seemingly settles down into something approaching almost show more contentment, waiting for social security. But one last quest leads to an ambiguous Pandora’s Box of an ending that leaves you, me at least, confused and wondering what it all means. show less

Pretty wild collection of vignettes in the life of a woman searching for her family. Cults, the 60s, transistor radios in cabins communicating with the dead(?), all kindsa weird stuff. Clowes usually gives me a stomachache and this is no exception, but there's also no denying that this is a solid achievement.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/monica-by-daniel-clowes/

As usual, a disturbing comic book from Clowes, this time looking at the life of a woman called Monica, trying to discover the truth about her origins after her mother abandoned her as a child. The images are vivid and the stories deliberately a bit obscure, so that you have to concentrate on getting the links. I thought it was great, if anything a bit more accessible than some of Clowes’ other work. Recommended.

I like that the Clampetts from The Beverly Hillbillies made it into the summary of the history of the Earth included on the title page. That was the first and last thing I enjoyed in this book. The rest of it is just a bunch of absurd nonsense of the sort that critics seem to love (see below) but that just leaves me cold.

FOR REFERENCE:

Contents: Foxhole -- Pretty Penny -- The Glow Infernal -- Demonica -- The Incident -- Success -- The Opening the Way -- Krugg -- Doomsday

(Best of 2023 Project: I'm reading all the graphic novels that made it onto one or more of these lists:
• Washington Post 10 Best Graphic Novels of 2023
• Publishers Weekly 2023 Graphic Novel Critics Poll

This book made both lists.)

Eerie and devastating, the most lovely book production of any graphic novel I have encountered

Raro y entretenido. Los caminos de la vida…