‘Monica’ by Daniel Clowes | PAUL GRAVETT (original) (raw)

A Graphic Novel Review

Here’s the full text of my review of Monica by Daniel Clowes (Fantagraphics / Jonathan Cape), published in The Times Literary Supplement dated February 9th 2024 and necessarily shortened for their ‘In Brief’ spread. At the 51st Angoulême International Comics Festival last month, the French edition of Monica won the ‘Fauve d’Or’ award for best book of the year.

Like ‘Dickensian’ or ‘Lovecraftian’, there is now ‘Clowesian’, so distinct are Daniel Clowes’s volatile American comics. One character in his first graphic novel in seven years voices much of their mood: ‘…everything seemed perfectly normal, but there was just something off, a feeling of madness in the air.’ What drives Monica, the book’s main narrator and nexus, is the ache of not knowing which of the assorted lovers of her hippy mother Penny fathered her, nor what became of her mother after abandoning her during the era of Vietnam, free love, the pill, drugs and cults. Thankfully Monica is raised by her loving maternal grandparents, but after her grandmother dies, she is a teenager quadruply abandoned. Her twisted ‘parental-mystery’ will take her life to resolve.

In ‘Demonica’ Clowes unpacks her mourning spent staying alone in her grandparents’ holiday cottage. This delivers alarming results when an old radio enables her to converse with her departed grandfather. Eventually, as his signal fades, his last answer takes the form of a hummingbird, symbolising the soul. The unease coursing through Monica relates to its creation during the pandemic and to the deaths of Clowes’s mother and three others while making the book. He sketches another hummingbird hovering on the ‘In Memoriam’ page and unleashes a swarm for the finale.

Much as Monica wishes she was a ‘Princess in disguise’, Clowes does not grant her an Oliver Twist ending. He presents later Monicas on her quest for provenance, as a listless business success, an initiate infiltrating the cult her mother joined, and a ‘flinty’ spinster who connects with a bereaved lodger (the later perhaps almost a Clowes cameo).

In between, four tangential chapters, printed on browning newsprint, subvert generic comic books - war, crime and horror - into something stranger and stronger. In ‘Foxhole’, an opening existential battlefield conversation in Vietnam, Penny’s fiancé Johnny shares his dream: ‘All I’m looking for is a simple life’. We already sense that’s unlikely to happen.

In ‘The Glow Infernal’, a prodigal son returns to find his hometown and father in thrall to a sacrificial sect, while ‘Krugg’ headlines the rants of a self-important painter and potential father. For several in this atomised cast, America’s Land of Opportunity offers anonymity and despair and the chance to disappear, reinvent or lose themselves entirely.

Solo graphic novels are Gesamtkunstwerks. All the details here count, from the opening title credits spanning the dawn of life on Earth to ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’, to a closing apocalypse worthy of Basil Wolverton. Captioning the majority of his panels, Clowes has hand-written every capital letter of every word, not one in bold but all in the insistent first-person. There’s no escaping his recurrent frontal faces, like wanted posters or ‘killer-image’ fashion shots. They speak directly to us and stare out at us, unnervingly eye-to-eye.

Posted: February 7, 2024

An edited version of this review was published in The Times Literary Supplement, February 9th 2024.