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TLS. Times Literary Supplement no. 6306 Feb. 9, 2024, Paul Gravett, “MONICA.”. p. 25.
World Literature Today vol. 98 no. 2 Mar.-Apr., 2024. Jacobs, Rita D. , “DANIEL CLOWES: Monica.”.
The New York Times Book Review Oct. 8, 2023, Díaz, Junot. , “The Searcher.”. p. 9.
Publishers Weekly vol. 270 no. 36 Sept. 4, 2023, , “Monica.”. p. 63.
Kirkus Reviews Aug. 1, 2023, , “Clowes, Daniel: MONICA.”. p. NA.
The Brooklyn Rail Sept., 2022. Garrett, Yvonne C. , “Daniel Clowes’s The Complete Eighth all 1-18.”.
School Library Journal vol. 62 no. 9 Sept., 2016. Shaurette, Carrie. , “Clowes, Daniel. Patience.”. p. 169.
Booklist vol. 112 no. 16 Apr. 15, 2016, Hunter, Sarah. , “Patience.”. p. 41.
Publishers Weekly vol. 263 no. 8 Feb. 22, 2016, , “Patience.”. p. 75.
Booklist vol. 108 no. 14 Mar. 15, 2012, Flagg, Gordon. , “The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist.”. p. 32.
Daniel Clowes is an acclaimed American cartoonist, illustrator, and screenwriter. He gained fame with his comic book series Eightball, which was notable for its dark humor and commentary on modern culture. Clowes' work often explores themes of social isolation, personal identity, and the complexities of human relationships. His graphic novel Ghost World received particular acclaim, becoming a cult classic and later adapted into a feature film. More recently, his books Patience and Monica have been critically acclaimed, showcasing his continued innovation and depth in graphic storytelling. Clowes' style is recognized for its meticulous detail, emotional depth, and engagement with the absurdities of the everyday, cementing his status as one of the most influential figures in the comics medium. He lives in Oakland, California with his wife, kid, and their dog.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Daniel Clowes
Clowes looking at an angle across the camera
Clowes in 2019
Born Daniel Gillespie Clowes
April 14, 1961 (age 62)
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Occupations
Cartoonist
Illustrator
Screenwriter
Known for
Eightball (1989–2004)
Ghost World (1997)
Spouse Erika Clowes
Children 1
Daniel Gillespie Clowes (/klaʊz/; born April 14, 1961) is an American cartoonist, graphic novelist, illustrator, and screenwriter. Most of Clowes's work first appeared in Eightball, a solo anthology comic book series. An Eightball issue typically contained several short pieces and a chapter of a longer narrative that was later collected and published as a graphic novel, such as Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (1993), Ghost World (1997), David Boring (2000) and Patience (2016). Clowes's illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker, Newsweek, Vogue, The Village Voice, and elsewhere. With filmmaker Terry Zwigoff, Clowes adapted Ghost World into a 2001 film and another Eightball story into the 2006 film, Art School Confidential. Clowes's comics, graphic novels, and films have received numerous awards, including a Pen Award for Outstanding Work in Graphic Literature, over a dozen Harvey and Eisner Awards, and an Academy Award nomination.
Early life and career, 1961–1988
Clowes was born in Chicago, Illinois, to an auto mechanic mother and a furniture craftsman father.[1] His mother was Jewish, whereas his father was from a "reserved WASPish Pennsylvania" family; Clowes's upbringing was not religious.[2][3] In 1979, he finished high school at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, where he earned a BFA in 1984. It was at Pratt that he met and befriended fellow cartoonist Rick Altergott, with whom he started the small-press comics publisher Look Mom Comics.[4]
According to Clowes scholar Ken Parille, the cartoonist had an early response to a "graphic" comic when, at age four, he burst into tears and began hitting his head against a wall after seeing a cover of a Strange Adventures comic book that depicted a family dying of heat.[5] Later, he received "piles of 1950s and 1960s classic titles like Archie and The Fantastic Four" from his older brother, who also introduced him to the work of legendary cartoonist R. Crumb.[6]
Daniel Clowes's Wilson (2010)
Clowes's first professional work appeared in 1985 in Cracked, and he contributed to the magazine until 1989,[7] working under a variety of pseudonyms, most prominently "Stosh Gillespie", and, toward the end of his tenure, under his own name.[citation needed] Clowes and writer Mort Todd co-created a recurring Cracked feature titled The Uggly Family. In 1985, Clowes drew the first comic to feature his character Lloyd Llewellyn. He sent the story to Fantagraphics' Gary Groth,[citation needed] and his work soon appeared in the Hernandez brothers' Love and Rockets #13. Fantagraphics published six magazine-sized, black and white issues of Lloyd Llewellyn in 1986 and 1987, another story was published as a Back-up story in the reprint book Doomsday Squad (1986) and The All-New Lloyd Llewellyn, the final Llewellyn comic book, appeared in 1988.
Eightball, 1989–2004
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In 1989, Fantagraphics published the first issue of Clowes's comic book Eightball.[8] On issue #1's masthead, Clowes described the anthology as "An Orgy of Spite, Vengeance, Hopelessness, Despair, and Sexual Perversiona". Eightball lasted twenty three issues, ending in 2004. One of the most widely acclaimed American alternative comics, it won over two dozen awards, and all of Clowes's Eightball serials have been collected and released as graphic novels.
From #1 to #18, an Eightball issue typically contained short pieces that ranged in genre from comical rant and Freudian analysis to fairy tale and cultural criticism. These issues also featured a chapter of a serial that Clowes later collected as a graphic novel: Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (1993), Pussey! (1995), and Ghost World (1997). With #19, Clowes abandoned the anthology format. The oversized black and white issues #19–21 each contained a single act of Clowes's three-act David Boring, which was released as a graphic novel in 2000. Clowes again changed format with #22. The first full-color Eightball, #22 included a single graphic novel-length story Ice Haven. The final issue, #23 was a full-color, single-story comic The Death-Ray released in 2004.
During the early 1990s, Clowes was associated with Seattle label Sub Pop, creating artwork for recordings by Thee Headcoats, The Supersuckers, The John Peel Sessions, and The Sub Pop Video Program collection. He designed the label's mascot, Punky, who appeared on T-shirts, paddle-balls, watches, and other merchandise. In 1994, Clowes created art for the Ramones video "I Don't Want to Grow Up".
Post-Eightball, 2005–2023
Clowes at the 2006 San Diego Comic-Con
After Eightball ended in 2004, Clowes began to release full-color graphic novels, beginning in 2005 with Ice Haven, a revised version of the comic that appeared in Eightball #22. In 2010 Drawn and Quarterly published Wilson, Clowes's first graphic novel that had not been serialized in Eightball. The next year, Pantheon released Mister Wonderful, a revised and reformatted version of a narrative serialized weekly in 2007 and 2008 in The Sunday New York Times Magazine, a story Clowes described as a "romance."[9] 2011 also saw the Drawn and Quarterly hardcover release of The Death-Ray, which first appeared in Eightball #23.
During this period, Clowes drew the first of several New Yorker covers and contributed comics to Zadie Smith's The Book of Other People (2008) and the influential art comics anthology Kramers Ergot (#7, 2008). In 2006, after a health crisis,[10] Clowes underwent open-heart surgery. His longest graphic novel Patience was released in the US in March 2016. His latest graphic novel Monica was released on October 3, 2023, by Fantagraphics.[11] Clowes lives in Oakland, California, with his wife Erika and his child.[12][13][14]
Cultural contexts
Clowes's work emerged from the late-1980s and early-'90s American alternative comics scene and played an important role in comics achieving a new level of respect from reviewers, academics, and readers. Ghost World was among the earliest American "literary" comics to be marketed and sold through conventional book stores as a graphic novel.[15] (Clowes has been critical of the terms "literary comics" and "graphic novel.")[16] It was presented in serial form within Eightball #11‐#18 (1993‐1997).[17]
Some of his most popular stories, such as Ghost World and "The Party", are associated with Generation X ("The Party" was reprinted in Douglas Rushkoff's 1994 GenX Reader). This movement's investment in post-adolescent aimlessness was one of Clowes's main themes during the 1990s. The cartoonist led the way for comic artists like Adrian Tomine and Craig Thompson, who also focused on the angst of post-adolescent characters.
Like filmmaker David Lynch, Clowes is known for mixing elements of kitsch and the grotesque.[18] Reflecting the cartoonist's interest in 1950s and 1960s TV, film, mainstream and underground comics, and Mad magazine, these elements surface in Clowes's 1990s work, especially his graphic novel Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. During the 1990s, the juxtaposition of kitsch and horror became something of a zeitgeist in visual art, independent film, and post-underground comics.
Clowes's post-2000 graphic novels marked a shift in subject matter and form. Ice Haven, The Death-Ray, Wilson, and Mister Wonderful featured older protagonists and explored issues of masculinity and aging. Like the work of his fellow cartoonists Chris Ware and Art Spiegelman, these comics displayed an interest in American comic-strip history, using layouts, coloring, and drawing styles reminiscent of newspaper cartoons, especially the large early- and mid-twentieth-century Sunday comic strips.[19]
Awards
Clowes has received dozens of awards and nominations for his comics and film work. In 2002 he was nominated for several awards for the Ghost World film, including an Academy Award for Best Screenplay Based on Material Previously Published, an AFI Award for Screenwriter of the Year, a Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Best Screenplay, and others.[20]
For his comics, Clowes has won many Harvey Awards, including Best Writer in 1997 and 2005; Best Series in 1990, 1991, 1992, and 1997; Best Letter in 1991 and 1997; Best Single Issue or Story in 1990, 1991, 1998 and 2005; and Best Cartoonist in 2002. He has won numerous Eisner Awards, including Best Writer/Artist: Drama in 2000 and 2002; Best Single Issue/Single Story in 2002 and 2005; Best Short Story in 2008; Best New Graphic Album in 2011. In 2011, he won a Pen Award for Outstanding Body of Work in Graphic Literature.[21]
Clowes was awarded the Inkpot Award in 2006.[22]
Clowes received the prestigious Fauve d'Or for his album Monica at the 51e Édition of the "Angoulême Festival du BD" in January 2024.[23]
Exhibitions
Clowes's original art has appeared in American group shows as well as exhibitions in Belgium, France, Germany, Japan, and elsewhere. His first solo show was held at Los Angeles's Richard Heller Gallery in 2003. In 2012, Susan Miller curated his first museum retrospective, Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes at the Oakland Museum of California. It featured 100 works, including pencil and ink drawings, color pencil illustrations, and gouache art, with covers for The New Yorker, Eightball issues, and Clowes's graphic novels. The show traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 2013, and is at the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, in mid-2014. It may continue on to Europe and Asia.[24]
Screenwriting
In the late 1990s, Clowes began a career as a screenwriter. His first film was 2001's Ghost World. Based on Clowes's comic of the same name and written with director Terry Zwigoff, the film is set in a nondescript American town and follows the misadventures of two best friends, Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson), who detest most of their high school classmates. After graduation they plan on moving in together and avoiding college, but they grow apart as adult pressures take their toll. The girls play a prank on a nerdy record collector named Seymour (Steve Buscemi), who quickly becomes Enid's unlikely friend and confidante, as her relationship with Rebecca deteriorates. Nominated for a host of awards, most notably a 2002 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, the movie appeared on many 2001 "Best of" lists.[25] In 2001, Fantagraphics published Ghost Word: A Screenplay.
Clowes's second film Art School Confidential was based on the cartoonist's experiences at Pratt Institute in the early 1980s. (Clowes's four-page comic "Art School Confidential" covered some of the same experiences.) Directed by Zwigoff with a script by Clowes, the film follows Jerome (Max Minghella), an art student who dreams of becoming the world's greatest artist. The film was not as well received as Ghost World.[26] In 2006, Fantagraphics published Art School Confidential: A Screenplay. A third adaptation of a Clowes graphic novel, Wilson, directed by Craig Johnson, starring Woody Harrelson, and with Clowes writing the screenplay, was released in 2017.[27]
At least four other film projects have been discussed or partially developed, with one being abandoned and two remaining in limbo for over seven years. Clowes and director Michel Gondry discussed making a film based on Rudy Rucker's novel Master of Space and Time, with Clowes writing and Gondry directing, but the project never advanced beyond this stage; of the film Clowes said, "I actually announced that that wasn't going to be made at the 2006 San Diego [Comic] Con."[28] In 2006, Clowes began writing a script based on his comic The Death-Ray for a movie to be produced by Jack Black's Black and White Productions.[29] Clowes also wrote a screenplay based on the true story of three boys who, over the course of seven years, filmed a shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark.[30] As of 2018, neither The Death-Ray nor the Raiders project has been greenlit. In 2016, it was announced Clowes will adapt his graphic novel Patience for Focus Features.[31] As of 2018 the project remains in development.
Plagiarism by Shia LaBeouf
In December 2013, Shia LaBeouf's short film Howard Cantour.com became available online. Soon thereafter, those familiar with indie comics noticed its remarkable resemblance to "Justin M. Damiano," a comic Clowes contributed to the 2008 charity anthology The Book of Other People.[32] The short film was then removed by LaBeouf, who claimed that he was not "copying" Clowes, but rather was "inspired" by him and "got lost in the creative process." LaBeouf later issued several apologies on Twitter, writing, "In my excitement and naiveté as an amateur filmmaker, I got lost in the creative process and neglected to follow proper accreditation", and "I deeply regret the manner in which these events have unfolded and want @danielclowes to know that I have a great respect for his work." Clowes responded by saying "The first I ever heard of the film was this morning when someone sent me a link. I've never spoken to or met Mr. LaBeouf ... I actually can't imagine what was going through his mind."[33]
Legal representatives of Clowes also sent a cease-and-desist letter to LaBeouf[34][35] concerning another tweet stating he intended to make a second film plagiarizing Clowes.[36]
OK Soda
In 1993 and 1994, Clowes created artwork for Coca-Cola's Generation X-inspired beverage OK Soda, which was test-marketed in select American cities in 1994 and 1995 and then discontinued. His art appeared on cans, bottles, twelve-pack cases, posters, vending machines, and other merchandise, along with point-of sale display items. Clowes's art appears on two cans/bottles (the face of a young man looking forward; the face of a young woman looking forward), though he is often incorrectly credited for other OK can art.[37]
Illustrations
Clowes has illustrated over 25 LP, EP, and CD covers, including Everything Looks Better in the Dark (1987)[38] by Frank French and Kevn Kinney, Thee Headcoats' Heavens to Murgatroyd, Even! It's Thee Headcoats! (Already), and the Supersuckers album The Smoke of Hell (1992).
His art appeared on a skateboard deck for Santa Cruz Skateboards (1991 – it was reissued in black and white in 2006).[39]
His artwork can be seen in the Ramones video for their Tom Waits cover "I Don't Want to Grow Up" (1994).
An OK Soda vending machine with Clowes art appears in several shots in Christopher Guest's mockumentary Waiting for Guffman (1997).
He created the movie poster for Todd Solondz's film Happiness (1998).
He drew the cover for Encounter Briefs, a fictional comic book featured in Greg Mottola's film Paul (2011).[40]
He drew covers and booklet art for the Criterion Collection's releases of Samuel Fuller's films Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss (2011).
He drew the key art for Season 4 of the HBO series Silicon Valley (2017).[41]
Selected works
Comic books
Lloyd Llewellyn #1–6 (1986–1987) and a special (1988).
Eightball #1–23 (1989–2004).
Graphic novels
Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (Fantagraphics, 1993). Clowes's first graphic novel, this volume collects ten chapters serialized in Eightball #1–10. A surreal narrative partially based on Clowes's dreams, it tells the story of Clay Loudermilk, an alienated young man who searches for his ex-wife after seeing her in a fetish film.
Pussey!: The Complete Saga of Young Dan Pussey (Fantagraphics, 1995). This collection features Dan Pussey stories that first appeared in Eightball. A satire of the superhero comics industry, it chronicles the life of the title character from his boyhood dreams of being a famous comic-book artist, to success drawing superhero stories, and finally to a rapid fall into obscurity.
Ghost World (Fantagraphics, 1997). This graphic novel collects the Ghost World chapters from Eightball #11–18. On the first paperback edition's back cover, Clowes includes a brief synopsis: "Ghost World is the story of Enid and Rebecca, teenage friends facing the unwelcome prospect of adulthood and the uncertain future of their complicated relationship." The cartoonist's breakthrough and best-selling work, it has been translated into seventeen languages.
David Boring (Pantheon Books, 2000). This volume collects David Boring Acts 1–3 from Eightball #19–21. The comic's elaborately plotted narrative explores the title character's search for the perfect woman and his effort to learn about his missing father.
Ice Haven (Pantheon, 2005). First appearing in Eightball #22, Ice Haven was revised and reformatted for the 2005 collection, with new chapters and redrawn art. Featuring a fictional Midwestern town and a large cast of main characters, the story centers on David Goldberg's kidnapping and the strained interactions of the town's inhabitants.
Wilson (Drawn and Quarterly, 2010). Wilson is Clowes's first non-serialized graphic novel. Set in Oakland, California, it tells the story of Wilson, a confrontational misanthrope who desires a deep connection with other people, but whose aggressive interpersonal style thwarts such relationships.
Mister Wonderful (Pantheon Books, 2011). Called "a midlife romance" by Clowes, this volume is an expanded and reformatted collection of a story first serialized in The New York Times Magazine in 2007 and 2008. It won a 2008 Eisner Award for Best Short Story for the serialized version.[42]
The Death-Ray (Drawn and Quarterly, 2011). Clowes's long-form superhero story, The Death-Ray first appeared in Eightball #23. A formally complex narrative, it recounts the story of Andy, who acquires super-powers and a death ray that he uses, according to the back cover, "in defense of the righteous".
Patience (Fantagraphics, 2016). Clowes's longest graphic novel, the book is described by the publisher as "a psychedelic science-fiction love story, veering with uncanny precision from violent destruction to deeply personal tenderness in a way that is both quintessentially 'Clowesian' and utterly unique in the author's body of work."
Monica (Fantagraphics, 2023), a multi-genre exploration of a woman's life and cults, conspiracy theories, and the mid-20th century
Anthologies
#$@&!: The Official Lloyd Llewellyn Collection (Fantagraphics, 1989). Clowes's first anthology, this paperback volume collects thirteen stories from the seven Lloyd Llewellyn comics.
Lout Rampage! (Fantagraphics, 1991). This paperback includes stories from Eightball #1–6, along with strips Clowes created for alternative comics anthologies Blab!, Young Lust, and Weirdo.
The Manly World of Lloyd Llewellyn: A Golden Treasury of His Complete Works (Fantagraphics, 1994). Clowes's only hardcover anthology, this volume collects all of the Llewellyn stories from the seven Lloyd Llewellyn comics, early Eightball issues, Love & Rockets #13, and elsewhere.
Orgy Bound (Fantagraphics, 1996). This anthology collects stories from Eightball #7–16, along with one-page strips from Details magazine and National Lampoon.
Caricature (Fantagraphics, 1998). Subtitled "Nine Stories", Caricature collects comics from Eightball #13–18, along with "Green Eyeliner", the first comic to appear in Esquire's annual fiction issue, commissioned by editor Dave Eggers.
Twentieth Century Eightball (Fantagraphics, 2002). Focusing on short humor comics, this collection reprints some of the cartoonist's most well-known work, such as "Art School Confidential" and "Ugly Girls". It won a Harvey Award for Best Graphic Album of Previously Published Work in 2003.[43]
Ghost World: Special Edition (Fantagraphics, 2008). This hardcover collects the Ghost World graphic novel and screenplay, along with other related material.
The Complete Eightball, #1–#18 (Fantagraphics, 2015). This two-volume hardcover set reprints the first eighteen issues of Clowes's comic-book series.
Other appearances
"Justin M. Damiano" in The Book of Other People (2008)
Movies
Ghost World (2001)
Art School Confidential (2006)
Wilson (2017)
Miscellaneous
Cracked – recurring strip "The Uggly Family" (1986–1989)
Thee Headcoats – Heavens To Murgatroyd, Even! It's Thee Headcoats! (Already) cover (1990)
Santa Cruz Skateboards – Corey O'Brien full-color deck (1991 – reissued in 2006 in black and white)
National Lampoon – series of one-page strips (1991)
Urge Overkill – The Supersonic Storybook cover (1991)
The Supersuckers – The Smoke of Hell cover (1992)
Eightball postcard set (1993)
"Boredom" – a mock board game (1994)
The John Peel Sub Pop Sessions cover (1994)
Ghost World: A Screenplay (2001)
Little Enid Doll (2001–2002) – five versions
Enid & Rebecca Cloth Dolls (2002)
Yo La Tengo – Merry Christmas from Yo La Tengo cover (2002)
Enid Hi-Fashion Glamour Doll (2004)
Pogeybait Doll (2006)
Art School Confidential: A Screenplay (2006)
The New Yorker cover[44] (May 24, 2010)
Dan DeBono's Indy – created original cover and interviewed
Commercial work
OK Soda – Clowes was one of the main illustrators for OK Soda cans and print materials, along with fellow Fantagraphics artist Charles Burns.[45]
QUOTED: "I had wanted to do something about my childhood, to try to make sense of a very complicated, chaotic childhood that no one would ever talk to me about. My mother was still alive when I was working on it. As I was doing it, I was trying to make sense of my own emotions about my childhood, but also thinking in the back of my mind that maybe this would lead to her finally explaining what happened. And she wound up dying while I was working on the book."
"I found myself, like Monica, with this confounding mystery of trying to figure out just the basic events of my childhood. My brother died right before my mom and so I had nobody left who even knew the facts. So it was all a mystery."
Daniel Clowes Sees the Horror in Mundanity
PERSON TO PERSONRICHARD KLIN October 20, 2023 | 4 books mentioned 5 min read
RELATED BOOKS:
Daniel Clowes’s newest graphic novel, Monica, is a colossal achievement, a high point in a decades-long career in comics. In Monica, the titular character embarks on a turbulent journey to reconstruct a tangled family history. It’s a journey that covers a wide swath of American life—past and present—and catalogs various historical horrors and apocalyptic visions. The book is—to reference Gerard Manley Hopkins—“original, spare, strange.”
I talked with Clowes about loneliness, the mysteries of family, and The Beverly Hillbillies.
cover Daniel Clowes
cover Daniel Clowes
Richard Klin: There’s an element of loneliness in all of your work—from Ghost World to Mister Wonderful—that reaches fruition in Monica. It’s a big, awful lonely country.
Daniel Clowes: I’m never thinking, “I’m going to write a book about X.” I have no information to impart. Once I got far along enough in the book that I knew what it was, it became clear to me that it was about all these different types of—I hesitate to use the word loneliness, because I’m not sure Monica’s actually lonely, but aloneness. Each story in Monica is an examination of a different type of how you can be alone. I think it’s something you can see in that first story, “Pretty Penny,” where’s she left by her mother. That was very similar to my childhood and you can see where that turns you into a perennial loner, where you’re always searching for that family that never quite emerges.
RK: Even when the family turns out to be a cult.
DC: I think we all find our way into our own little cults these days.
RK: It definitely paints a very bleak picture. Your work has always dealt with some unhappy topics, but they’ve always been leavened with an element of humor that I find less in Monica. There’s something very somber to it, as opposed to some of your other work.
DC: I find everything I do to be funny, but in a very bleak way. I can find humor in anger and uncomfortableness. My wife is always telling me that I’m the only person laughing at certain movies—I’m the one cackling like a maniac. The whole audience is, “Who’s laughing at that?” I find Monica still quite funny in many ways—on a level that I don’t expect to be transmitted to the general reader.
RK: One phrase in Monica that really stuck out to me was the “grime of madness.” I don’t know if you meant that as a societal comment, but there is something about this country that feels like it’s drenched with the grime of madness.
DC: Like a greasy coating that can’t easily be washed off. It’s not just the dust of madness. You could use all kinds of soap and disinfectant and it’s still there!
RK: Grime implies you’re trying to clean it off.
DC: It feels more permanent and more frustrating.
coverRK: There’s something so apropos about the endpapers—scenes of the apocalypse and The Beverly Hillbillies. I was thinking about the title of that James Ellroy book, this feeling that this country is the big nowhere. It’s a jumble of the apocalypse and The Beverly Hillbillies.
DC: I was thinking of that—not only the history of the world, but the history of life on earth as it turns into today. The first story in Monica begins in the early sixties. I was a small kid in 1964, 1965. What would have been the most important thing to all of us? Television. We all watched it every night. What was the most popular television show for those five years? The Beverly Hillbillies. It was something every single person would have known. Of course, there were other, similar shows, but it had the feel of the emblematic television show of that era. And it really was as important as Sputnik or anything like that in terms of the culture.
RK: There was also plenty of societal comment with The Beverly Hillbillies.
DC: [laughs] I’m a great fan. And Green Acres, I believe, is an actual surreal masterpiece.
RK: Absolutely!
DC: Absolutely hilarious. There are so many characters on that show who are the perfect emblem of a certain American archetype. Mr. Kimball, the useless government bureaucrat, who can’t remember what he’s asking… it’s just brilliant.
RK: I’ve noticed in your work and in a lot of comics, there’s more of a sense of the quotidian and the day-to-day—and I’m generalizing—than in most current literature. There’s an ear to the ground about your work. Comics are where you can read about that favorite local coffeehouse, the three bands for ten dollars. There’s an immediacy.
Clowes: The thought of writing that kind of thing in just prose seems daunting to make it interesting. Somehow bringing it into the visual and finding the dynamic visual of the mundane—it’s a very appealing idea to me, to find the grotesque and the uncanny in the middle of something that seems so commonplace. In a comic, you can depict the world not just through the characters’ eyes, so it’s a much different experience.
RK: There’s an element of The Twilight Zone in Monica as well.
DC: I saw those Twilight Zone episodes when they first aired. I was a little kid, three or four years old. My brother was a sci-fi obsessive and it was his favorite show. To this day, they feel unlike anything else. The best episodes feel like dreams that we all shared.
RK: Monica walks the fine line where it’s uncertain if some of the events are imaginary or real.
DC: To me, the interest in comics lies in that idea: Is the image reality and the words are filtered through the person’s perspective, or perhaps the image is a lie and what the person is saying is the truth? I like playing with that, and sort of being on the edge of where both of those are true at the same time.
RK: Was there a guiding impetus to writing Monica?
DC: I had wanted to do something about my childhood, to try to make sense of a very complicated, chaotic childhood that no one would ever talk to me about. My mother was still alive when I was working on it. As I was doing it, I was trying to make sense of my own emotions about my childhood, but also thinking in the back of my mind that maybe this would lead to her finally explaining what happened. And she wound up dying while I was working on the book. I found myself, like Monica, with this confounding mystery of trying to figure out just the basic events of my childhood. My brother died right before my mom and so I had nobody left who even knew the facts. So it was all a mystery. But I was able, just through digging through my mom’s papers and things, to kind of piece things together a little bit. It was like a private-detective investigation. It felt very much like an episode of Mannix or something, where you’re collecting clues. I came up with sort of a semblance of the questions I had—answering those questions. Art mirrored reality very much as I was working on it.
RK: Was there ever a resolution? Monica leaves lots of loose ends.
DC: I think Monica tied up her loose ends better than I did!
RK: What’s next for you?
DC: I have some ideas. I don’t know if I’m going to do another book that takes seven years. My goal is always to have something in the next two or three years. I have a bunch of ideas, but right now, doing the promotion for this book, I find I’m still drawn back into this book, still thinking and living in that world. And I really have to put that all away after this is over and move to the new place before I can really do anything useful.
QUOTED: "I read a lot of books where I literally never rest my hand. With Monica, I wanted you to be stuck in each panel, [to feel like] ‘I’ve got to read this whole text or I’m not going to follow it. I have to look at every little thing. ... I wanted it to really slow down."
Daniel Clowes’ ‘Monica’: Grief, Nefarious Hippies and a Personal Apocalypse
Janelle Hessig
Oct 2, 2023
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a diptych features a white man with glasses and a white beard next to a graphic novel with a woman's face in profile, titled 'Monica'
Oakland author and artist Daniel Clowes says his latest graphic novel, 'Monica,' was partially inspired by his own childhood memories and relationship with his mother. (Brian Molyneaux/Fantagraphics)
Fool that I am, I thought it would be cute to read the first few chapters of Dan Clowes’ new magnum opus Monica while vacationing in a cabin in the woods. Instead of the cozy and peaceful scene I had envisioned while climbing into bed with the book tucked under my arm one night, I found myself wide awake at 3 a.m., disturbed and bleary-eyed, looking more like a roadside accident victim than the Sleepytime Tea bear.
Of course, Clowes devotees may not find this terribly surprising. In Monica (out Oct. 3 on Fantagraphics), we follow the titular character from cradle to grave as she attempts to decipher and reconcile her past, most notably around her negligent, free-spirit mom, Penny. The book is divided into nine chapters, and mixes a heady dose of childhood trauma with themes and characters — creeps, cultists, nefarious hippies — that will be familiar to fans of the artist’s earlier work.
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In the chapter entitled “Demonica,” for example, a haunted teenage Monica resembles a distant cousin of Ghost World’s Enid Coleslaw, with her ephemeral green bob and angst. And if you vibed with the potato-headed fish lady, Tina, in Clowes’ surreal 1993 graphic novel A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron, you’re going to love the putrid blob of tortured townsfolk in the chapter called “A Glow Infernal.” Throughout, the storytelling flits between nightmarish surrealism and linear narrative. It’s unmooring, and certainly added to the sense of unease I felt while reading it (in the goddamn woods): Anything could happen next.
It’s not a breezy page-turner, Clowes says, by design.
“I feel like a lot of modern comics are under that Scott McCloud paradigm where you have to project yourself into every character and keep them very minimal,” Clowes tells me over Zoom, referring to the comics theorist’s argument that readers are more likely to identify with simply-drawn figures than complex ones.
“I read a lot of books where I literally never rest my hand. With Monica, I wanted you to be stuck in each panel, [to feel like] ‘I’ve got to read this whole text or I’m not going to follow it. I have to look at every little thing,'” he says. “I wanted it to really slow down.”
A cartoon drawing of a young white teenage girl with green hair is crying against a black background. Title reads "Demonica"
A young woman is haunted in ‘Demonica,’ a chapter from Dan Clowes’ latest graphic novel, ‘Monica.’ (Fantagraphics)
A punk bible
In the early 1990s, I was a youth working at Comic Relief, a comic book shop in downtown Berkeley. Every now and then, while perched on a stool behind the register, I would catch a fangirl high when Dan Clowes, who lives in Oakland, walked in the door. At a time when the term “graphic novel” hadn’t yet become common parlance and comics still solely belonged to the kooks and the obsessives, Clowes’ comic book Eightball was every punk’s sweaty little Bible.
During its run from 1989 to 2004, each issue was filled with barbed humor about the buffoonery of the human race; popular targets included hipsters, comic nerds and art school students. Biting satirical shorts like The Sensual Santa and Chicago will always be genius and hilarious to me.
Over time, Clowes’ work also delivered tenderness, empathy and forgiveness, though such sentiment was usually reserved for the central characters in his longer-form work. Ghost World — which first appeared in 1993 as a serialized Eightball story, before its release as a stand-alone graphic novel and eventually a film — follows a friendship between two teenage girls who are growing apart. I think of it as the first time we encounter real vulnerability in Clowes’ storytelling.
a comic book cover that reads 'The complete Eightball issues 1-18' by Daniel Clowes
An anthology of ‘Eightball’ comics by Daniel Clowes. (Fantagraphics)
Reading Monica, I found myself wondering if there was something about writing in women’s voices that made it easier to channel that care. But Clowes says the decision to make Monica‘s protagonist a woman hardly felt like a choice.
“It’s who the characters are, I can’t turn them into what they’re not,” says Clowes. “[Monica] was a girl from the beginning.” At some point, he says, he did consider how it might impact the story to change the protagonist’s gender. “[But] I just couldn’t do it. It wouldn’t be right somehow. I think it’s mostly because the only person I ever talk to is my wife. Just her all day. So she’s my model of a human being that I see.”
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Clowes is famously reticent to unpack the symbolism in his work, and for the most part, you might as well throw in the towel when it comes to inferring creator intent in Monica. The artist’s personal Rosetta Stone of references and obscure cultural touchstones remains, as always, locked away in his head. But for Clowes, a reader’s visceral, unsullied interpretation is always the correct one.
“I’m in that phase now where everybody who’s reading [Monica] is in the same boat and approaching it with fresh eyes,” he says. “I know when it comes out, some blowhard is going to have theories about it…”
I’m in my forties now, a long way from that teenage comic shop counter jockey, but I still want Dan Clowes to think I’m cool. I take a silent oath not to be the blowhard.
“It should be a Rorschach test,” he explains. “Everybody’s got a different analysis. One of my friends was like, ‘It’s such a hopeful book for you’. And then others are like, ‘It’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever read. It feels like I’m actually witnessing the end of the world,’ and any range in between. I love that. I’m trying very hard not to interfere with any response.”
a colorful page of a comic book
A page from Daniel Clowes’ ‘Monica.’ (Fantagraphics)
Telling his truth
Though others have characterized Monica as a book about loneliness, Clowes clarifies it as “aloneness,” which is how I experienced it. It’s the kind of existential turbulence that is both universal and deeply personal — like the death of a parent.
Indeed, while he refuses to deliver a cheat sheet to any of the symbolism, Clowes is forthcoming that this book is about confronting his own past and relationship with his mother. His mom was less cookies and milk, he says, and more hippie/auto mechanic/gun nut/karate expert. When he was a young child, she left his dad for a race car driver who was later killed in an accident. Like Monica’s mom Penny, Dan’s mom dumped her parental duties onto his grandparents soon afterwards.
Though Clowes pshaws my suggestion that this book is about grief, he did lose several central figures in his life, including his mother, during the seven years it took to finish Monica. When a person passes away, decorum usually dictates that obituaries are nothing but rave reviews; the unflattering and flawed pieces that also make up a life get swept under the rug. Here, Clowes tells his unvarnished truth.
“I realized my parents are dead, my grandparents, my only siblings. I have zero living relatives that even knew me as a kid or know anything about my family. It’s just me. [So] now I get to say what really happened, and it’s so liberating,” he says.
“In a way, it’s the opposite of lonely,” he adds. Previously, when he would discuss the past, “my mother would be like, ‘What? You’re out of your mind. That’s insane.’ But I’m right. I know how it was. It’s very freeing.”
a comic book panel that reads 'Foxhole'
A page from ‘Monica’ by Daniel Clowes. (Fantagraphics)
While I disagree that Monica is a hopeful book, it’s true that Clowes himself seems to have shed some of his old-school cynicism. Dare I say, he comes across as exuberant, especially as we chop it up about his love of movies and the Bay Area: “I feel very gung-ho about California, the way you would about a sports team you’ve loved your whole life for no good reason,” he says. “You’re just, ‘I’m with them.’”
He lights up as he talks about bringing a friend on a Hitchcock tour early in the pandemic, when you could just drive right up to any beautiful landmark in San Francisco with no traffic whatsoever. Unsurprisingly, he’s also a big fan of the Noir City film festival, now programmed annually at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theater. As most of our old Bay Area theater gems have shuttered in the past couple of years, seeing all of the packed screenings for classic noir movies is especially heartwarming.
“It fills me with civic pride to see all of the young people dressed up,” Clowes gushes. “I just want to hug everybody.”
It’s a delightful bout of positivity coming from an artist whose new book’s end pages depict a twisted and fiery apocalypse full of melting faces and mutants strangling one another. I wonder, does this positivity extend to his feelings about his book, now that it’s finally making its way into the world?
“It is one of the few times I’m sort of just happy with it. Normally I’m like, ‘Oh, there’s something about this I wish I could change,’ or ‘I should have gone on a different course.’”
But with Monica, he says, “I feel like I did my best. It’s the one time I feel like, ‘OK, I did it.’”
‘Monica’ is out Oct. 3 on Fantagraphics. More info here.
How comics legend Daniel Clowes composed his ‘magnum opus’
"Monica" by Daniel Clowes
“Monica” by Daniel Clowes(Fantagraphics)
By Noel Murray
Oct. 11, 2023 3 AM PT
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ON THE SHELF
Monica
By Daniel Clowes
Fantagraphics: 106 pages, $30
If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.
Daniel Clowes has been writing and drawing comics professionally for almost 40 years, turning out some of the most acclaimed and influential graphic novels the medium has produced — including “Ghost World” and “Wilson,” both of which he helped adapt into movies.
Yet even now, the way the 62-year-old works is “mysterious, even to myself.”
“I sort of imagine what a book would look like and then I start moving toward that,” he said in a Zoom interview. “It’s almost like a sculpture more than a comic.”
Clowes’ latest book is “Monica,” a collection of nine interconnected stories — and also so much more. Initially, each story recalls a different classic comics genre: a little war, a little romance, a little horror and so on. Gradually the genres bleed into one another until, as Clowes described it, “It’s like when you mix all the colors together and it just turns gray.”
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The result is a work that Clowes’ friend Ari Aster, the writer-director of the films “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” described via email as “Dan’s magnum opus.”
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“It feels like an unselfconscious snarling together of all the phases and styles and preoccupations of his career,” Aster said, “while also being among the most personal things he’s ever written.”
"Monica," by Daniel Clowes
(Fantagraphics)
The personal parts are what longtime fans may find the most moving. Clowes’ comics have occasionally veered into first-person essays, and his stories are often laced with his own memories and observations. “Art School Confidential,” which has also been made into a movie, is a fiercely honest and hilarious memoir. But “Monica” cuts deeper.
Clowes began the project by envisioning the kind of cheap old square-bound comics anthology that gathers dust in thrift shops — like a 1970s DC Comics “100-Page Super Spectacular,” but without superheroes. “It was almost like a dream image,” he recalled. “It seemed like something that should exist.”
Originally the book’s nine stories were going to stand alone, but during the writing process Clowes shifted toward telling the story of one person’s life against a backdrop of paranormal suspense: a roman à clef crossed with EC Comics’ “The Haunt of Fear.”
Self-portrait of Daniel Clowes, author of the book "Eightball"
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So while there are tangents throughout “Monica” — an aging artist’s rant in one piece, a sort of detective story in another — Clowes returns repeatedly to the title character. His Monica is a lost soul, who is abandoned by her free-spirited hippie mother as a child and then spends much of her adulthood trying to piece together what exactly happened.
Monica’s story is, in part, Clowes’ story. His early years were also a whirlwind, with multiple moves and different father figures.
A man with a beard and a shaved head in thick black glasses.
Monica, the title character of Daniel Clowes’ new work, is a lost soul with an unstable family history that resonates with the author’s own life. (Brian Molyneaux)
“I had a very chaotic childhood and I never understood it,” he said. “I always imagined that after my mom died I would talk to my brother and he’d finally explain the logistics of it all. And then my brother died before my mom, who died about a month later. I have no other relatives. That’s it. There’s nobody left who knows the story.”
Through letters his mother left behind and fragments of his own memories, Clowes has puzzled out a few details. His mother and father were involved in auto racing in Clowes’ hometown of Chicago; they hired a driver for the race car they built together. As Clowes tells it, his mother left his father for the driver — “who I vaguely remember.” But then the driver died.
“Then I was taken to my grandma and that was kind of it,” Clowes said. “It was just this very complicated thing.”
In “Monica,” the character’s quest to understand herself by learning more about her mother takes some more dramatic turns. She discovers a radio that broadcasts her dead grandfather’s voice. She becomes the rich and famous owner of a candle store. And by following her mother’s trail, she ends up living with a dangerous, distrustful cult.
Opening panel of a sequnce in "The Legendary Lynx," thed fictional comic within the novel of Alex Segura's "Secret Identity."
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To illustrate the sinister, supernatural forces creeping underneath Monica’s life, Clowes drew on images from the comics equivalent of B-movies: long-forgotten imitation EC, DC and Marvel comics cranked out by writers and artists who ended up pouring their own fears and anxieties onto the page while scrambling to make deadline.
“Those stories are mostly unreadable,” Clowes said, “But the individual panels to me had the weight of a great enigmatic painting or movie. Something that had a lasting power.”
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Clowes' "Monica" is at once deeply personal and a compendium of comics genres including horror and detective stories.
Clowes’ “Monica” is at once deeply personal and a compendium of comics genres including horror and detective stories. (Fantagraphics)
The motif of mysticism that runs through “Monica” also recalls the work of Clowes’ cartoonist friend Richard Sala, who died while the book was still being created — and whose fascination with H.P. Lovecraft and pulp mysteries became an inspiration to Clowes.
“I started to imagine Richard as like a ghost haunting the entire book,” Clowes said. “Standing there in the panel, observing.”
The two men lived near each other in Oakland, where Clowes still lives with his wife, Erika. Clowes and Sala used to get together with other local artists to talk about comics, movies, life … everything.
It’s a tradition Clowes has maintained, offering companionship and advice to younger cartoonists including “Shortcomings” author Adrian Tomine and “The Man in the McIntosh Suit” author Rina Ayuyang. “He is still keeping up with what current comic artists are working on and I appreciate that,” Ayuyang said via email. “He’s so down-to-earth and unassuming. Maybe it’s the Midwesterner in him.”
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Tomine and Ayuyang have both read “Monica,” and they have their own takes.
Tomine, via email, wrote, “It’s got a certain tenderness, especially in relation to childhood, but it’s also infused with a raw sense of grief and mortality that, believe it or not, makes all his earlier work seem sugarcoated.”
Ayuyang’s read is more existential. “At its core, the book is about isolation and a need for belonging,” she said, “but there’s also a desperate search and attempt to connect with the pieces of one’s past, in order to define the meaning of one’s present, to understand how we came to be, on a personal level and on a cosmic level.”
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Clowes himself is cagier about how to interpret “Monica” — and in particular its startling ending, which Aster described as a “gut punch.”
Filmmaker Ari Aster calls his friend Daniel Clowes' "Monica" the comic artist's "magnum opus."
Filmmaker Ari Aster calls his friend Daniel Clowes’ “Monica” the comic artist’s “magnum opus.” (Fantagraphics)
“I know after the fact what it all means,” Clowes said, describing an approach to storytelling that has been compared to the noir-ish nightmares of filmmaker David Lynch. “When I’m doing it, it’s like being in a dream. You get in a certain state and follow that path of logic. It has a certain vibration to it, where you’re like, ‘OK, this panel’s right, this panel’s right…’ It’s like a tightrope walk.”
Clowes said making “Monica” was the most purely enjoyable experience he’s had in his career — which may be why it took him more than five years to finish. And it reaffirmed that he’d rather be working on comics than movies. “I’ve got a few little ideas [for films],” he said. “But I’m mostly just all comics. That’s all I want to do. Movies aren’t as much fun.”
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Aster understands. “I love the films that he and [director Terry] Zwigoff made together,” he said. “But if Dan is only functioning as a screenwriter, he is being held out of a process for which he has a real and rare genius, and that’s in image-making.”
As his younger colleagues attest, Clowes is still studying and refining his craft. “I feel like it took me almost 40 years to get to the point where I can actually understand some of what I was always trying to do,” Clowes said. “I’m at the age where you should be stuck in your thing and riding it until you’re done. Instead, I feel like, ‘Oh man, if I had another 30 years I could really do something great.’”
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Murray is a freelance pop culture critic and reporter from Central Arkansas.
Clowes will be signing copies of “Monica” at Skylight Books on Oct. 20.
MONICA
DANIEL CLOWES
112pp. Cape. 20 [pounds sterling].
One character in Monica, Daniel Clowes's first graphic novel in seven years, aptly summarizes the distinct mood of the author's comics: "everything seemed perfectly normal, but there was just something off, a feeling of madness in the air". What drives Monica's titular narrator is the pain of not knowing which of her hippie mother's assorted lovers fathered her, or what became of her mother after she left her with her grandparents during the era of free love, drugs and cults. The book follows her over a lifetime as she attempts to solve this twisted "parental mystery".
We first catch a teenage Monica as she mourns her grandparents, alone in their holiday cottage. In a surreal twist she discovers that she can converse with her departed grandfather through an old radio. Eventually, as his signal fades, his final words take the form of a hummingbird. Monica was written during the pandemic, following the death of Clowes's mother, and a sense of loss looms large. There is an "In Memoriam" page on which another hummingbird features, and more birds are unleashed at the book's finale.
As the story progresses we see Monica as a listless entrepreneur; a member of a cult; and a "flinty" singleton connecting with her bereaved lodger (the latter perhaps a Clowes cameo). Much as she wishes she were a "princess in disguise", Clowes denies her a happy ending. Scattered in between are four tangential chapters, printed on browning newsprint, that offer short vignettes subverting the classic comic book genres--war, crime and horror. In "The Glow Infernal", a prodigal son returns to find his home town in thrall to a sacrificial sect, while "Krugg" concerns a self-important painter and potential father. For many of these characters America offers the chance to disappear, to reinvent or lose themselves entirely.
The small details here count Clowes has handwritten every letter of every word. Frontal faces recur like mugshots or wanted posters. They speak to us directly, staring unnervingly back.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 NI Syndication Limited
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Gravett, Paul. "MONICA." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6306, 9 Feb. 2024, p. 25. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A782233131/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0c466dbe. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.
QUOTED: "Monica is beautifully drawn, provocative and enlightening, often disturbing, and ultimately brilliant."
DANIEL CLOWES
Monica
Seattle. Fa ntag raphics Books. 2023.
106 pages.
IF THERE'S AN OVERRIDING message in this remarkable graphic novel, it may be "Beware what you seek." Monica is on a quest to define herself through discovering her origins. Though she knew her mother, Penny, before Penny disappeared and Monica was sent to live with her grandparents, she was never sure of her father's identity.
But Daniel Clowes isn't a spinner of simple tales, and this is in no way a straightforward narrative. Instead, it is a compilation of nine interrelated stories that experiment with drawing styles, cultural allusions, supernatural tropes, and literary quirks, always rendered with vibrant and often spectacular illustration. Even the end-page drawings--the opening ones with the threat of natural catastrophe and the closing ones with the undead coming off the page--are strong works of art.
Penny is a creature of the 1960s, and the volume opens with her fiancé, Johnny, depicted in the jungles of Vietnam while Penny is in bed with a hipster. This is only the first of Penny's various liaisons with many men who move in and out of Penny and Monicas lives. And just when she gets back with Johnny and there is a semblance of normal life on the horizon, Penny cancels the wedding and joins a cult. In effect, Clowes is writing not only Monica and Penny's story but the story of America in the mid-twentieth century. The allure of a counterculture is strong and often depicted via gothic horror imagery--creepy but undeniable.
When Monica's beloved grandparents die, she is unmoored. In the chapter titled "Demonica," she sequesters herself in her late grandparents' cabin and converses with her dead grandfather though his old radio. But we are not mired in sadness because Clowes's story is energized by leaps. He then flashes forward twenty-two years when Monica has recovered from a terrible accident, made a pile of money, and is vastly successful yet still the lost and abandoned daughter seeking the truth of Penny and the idenofher father.
In a crucial, near-final episode, Monica pretends to join a cult to find out what happened to Penny. At this point, Clowes illustrates a nightmarish sequence satirizing cult leadership and the Stockholm syndrome behavior of cult followers. It is here that we finally realize Monica will never discover the truth of her past. And, as the novel winds down, a gray-haired Monica enters what appears to be a contented retirement period where Clowes tantalizes us with the possibility of a late-in-life romance. But Monica simply can't resist digging up the past, literally, and all the demons are again released.
Clowes appears to be railing against rates' dictum that the unexamined is not worth living. Monica struggles mightily but never uncovers the explanations she hopes will give her life meaning. As she says, "It's quite a blow to discover that after a lifetime of fairy-tale fantasies that you're not really special, just the unwanted fetus of two random fuck-ups caught in a confusing historical moment."
Monica is beautifully drawn, provocative and enlightening, often disturbing, and ultimately brilliant.
Rita D. Jacobs
New York City
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
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Jacobs, Rita D. "DANIEL CLOWES: Monica." World Literature Today, vol. 98, no. 2, Mar.-Apr. 2024, pp. 63+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A783796209/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=dbd36a6d. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.
QUOTED: "Clowes's strange, luminous work demonstrates how thick daughterlove can be -- and, equally, how apocalyptic."
MONICA, by Daniel Clowes
In 1989, Daniel Clowes kicked off his comic series ''Eightball'' with an issue subtitled ''An Orgy of Spite, Vengeance, Hopelessness, Despair and Sexual Perversion,'' and dude was only half kidding. ''Eightball'' was like no other comic on the stands, a demented cornucopia that brought into sharp relief Clowes's remarkable sweep of gifts: his spare, uncanny compositions; his parodic brilliance; his pitch-perfect captures of his alienated characters' inner lives; his surrealistic flights and pulpish progressions; his inability to remain in any generic lane whatsoever; and his true superpower, a scabrously radiant honesty that had no equal in comics or ''literature.''
To those of us reading ''Eightball'' at the time, it seemed impossible that such a protean one-of-a-kind talent could hold together for long, but hold together Clowes did. Over a 15-year run he unleashed banger after banger, from gags and genre sendups to teenage wasteland coming-of-age stories. He one-upped Alan Moore by describing what would actually happen if an unhappy orphaned teenager acquired a superhero's enormous power (not enormous responsibility, I assure you) and pulled off the single most heartbreakingest panel in comic history (''You've grown into a very beautiful young woman''), all the while clowning everyone from Mick Jagger to your least favorite art-school poseur.
It was a creative irruption that established Clowes as one of the greatest talents in the independent comics game and also (in spite of his acerbic reputation) one of the most feeling. Chilly and remote his sympathies might be, they are nevertheless deep and affecting. It is precisely Clowes's lower-frequency sensitivities toward the suffering of his characters that power what many consider his greatest works -- ''Ghost World,'' for one -- and elevate his latest graphic novel, ''Monica,'' to the status of a masterpiece.
On its face, ''Monica'' is a mother-daughter tale of the typically shattering kind. We first meet Penny, the elusive mother-to-be, at the moment of her unleashing: She is in bed with the cynical, ''sort of beatnik'' artist Krug while her straight-arrow fiancé, Johnny, is fighting in Vietnam. Penny is ''an art major -- pottery and textiles -- just passing time until her fiancé got back from the war.'' But it's the 1960s and the Age of Aquarius is in full swing and some smothered unhappiness in Penny -- or, as one of her former lovers describes it, ''a darkness'' -- is exposed by Krug and the revolutionary zeitgeist he introduces.
In a fiery act of reinvention, Penny destroys all ties to her former life (bye-bye, Johnny) and throws herself headfirst into the counterculture. Before long, she has a daughter, Monica, with a mystery man she stubbornly refuses to identify. Monica, the narrator of this tale, spends her first years watching her mother bound from relationship to relationship, ''an endless cascade of hirsute suitors and freaky flatmates.''
Penny starts a candle business, loses a candle business to a possible arson, struggles to make ends meet, tears into anyone who questions her parenting. Little Monica responds to the precarity by tidying the house and offering her mother her spare change, while praying to God for divine salvation. It ultimately arrives in the form of Penny's old fiancé, Johnny, but in the end Penny can't seem to stop herself from burning it all down; she leaves Johnny at the altar and abandons Monica on her parents' stoop.
''From that moment on,'' Monica says, ''I lived a normal life, happy and safe from harm, but I never saw my mother again.''
No part of this declaration ends up being true. Monica's life -- which the graphic novel follows to its gray-haired end -- is punctuated by calamities. Her beloved grandparents die when she's in college; shortly after, a brutal, coma-inducing car crash makes all of Monica's early memories suspect (including the weeks just before the crash, when she finds a radio that allows her to communicate with her dead grandfather). Post-recovery, Monica starts a wildly successful candle business but ends up burning it down (figuratively).
If, as the poet Nayyirah Waheed writes, our mothers are our first country, then for Monica it's a country whose calamities she has never gotten over. Unwilling (or unable) to form real attachments, bereft of all past and without much of a future, a 40-something Monica finally resolves to locate her mother and uncover the truth of her abandonment -- and, in the process, discover who her father was.
Because this is a Clowes story, Monica's quest for origins -- for a stable self -- takes her on strange and twisting paths. She traces her mother through the decayed revenants of the counterculture, ending up at a bizarre cult whose leader might or might not be her father. There are oneiric interludes: In one, Johnny is a hard-boiled private detective in a city that's being engulfed by a mysterious disaster; in another, a young man saves his hometown from a supernatural invasion only to be rewarded in the worst way possible. The Gothic, noir, war comics, even a glimpse of William Hogarth -- all appear, and all are made very weird indeed.
A pervasive air of apocalypse hangs over all these diverse proceedings, and it speaks to Clowes's talents that he never lets the eschatological side of things overwhelm the story, or Monica. Our narrator might have no idea who she really is, but Clowes doesn't lose track of her or her dogged human longing for a mother bond to call her own.
Monica's quest, for all of its outré swerves, achieves something like a conclusion; she gets some of the answers she seeks, just not the ones she would have liked. ''It's quite a blow to discover after a lifetime of fairy-tale fantasies that you're not really special,'' she says. ''Just the unwanted fetus ... caught in a confusing historical moment.''
The novel's final chapter finds an aging Monica ''in a state of near-contentment, living sexless and invisible ... waiting for social security to kick in.'' But near-contentment is not the same as contentment, and answers are not the same as healing. A newcomer offers up the possibility of the kind of romantic bond that has eluded Monica her entire life, but despite all the years and all the miles, Monica is still her mother's daughter. She cannot break free of ''the black emptiness that might (or might not) overtake me if/when I stopped moving.'' Nor can she break free, it seems, from her mother's appetite for destruction.
What happens next is the weirdest, wildest thing in this book -- and that's saying something.
In Toni Morrison's ''Beloved,'' Paul D warns Sethe, who slew her eldest daughter to save her from slavery, that her motherlove ''is too thick.'' Clowes's strange, luminous work demonstrates how thick daughterlove can be -- and, equally, how apocalyptic.
Junot Díaz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a professor at M.I.T. He can be found online at junot.substack.com .
MONICA | By Daniel Clowes | 106 pp. | Fantagraphics Books | $30
Junot Díaz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a professor at M.I.T. He can be found online at junot.substack.com.
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Díaz, Junot. "The Searcher." The New York Times Book Review, 8 Oct. 2023, p. 9. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A768081796/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a26c2ff3. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.
QUOTED: "Lucky new initiates to Clowes will want to dive into his backlist after this unnerving introduction to his oeuvre; for fans, it's a must-have."
Monica
Daniel Clowes. Fantagraphics, $30 (106p) ISBN 978-1-68396-882-5
This eloquent end-times tale about a woman's search for herself takes its time winding up to terror. The first full-length graphic novel from Clowes since 20l6's Patience offers an episodic and fantastical stitching together of nine stories stretching from the 1960s to the present day. Though ranging in subject matter from the Vietnam War ("Foxhole") to the emptiness of girlboss triumph ("Success") and the pomposity of Lovecraftian horror ("The Glow Infernal"), each is threaded to the title chatacter, whose mother abandoned her as a young girl and who has since been chased by anxieties and hauntings. Clowes's awkward, grief-stricken characters, starkly shadowed art, and EC Comics-esque coloring casts everything as a pulp nightmare--even the most sylvan scene carries the potential for unholy creatures to tise out of the earth. The horror is often suggested rather than visualized, most of it generated by Monica's origin story--mother Penny falls in with hippies and leaves her semi-feral daughter to watch "an endless cascade of hirsute suitors and freaky flatmates"--which reads like a Joan Didion cautionary tale about the price of freedom. Clowes's vision of an unmoored America is replete with lost souls facing seemingly mundane ennui ("I really do wish I could be more like the person I'm pretending to be," Monica says) that insidiously pivots to horror (murder, a cult, a dead grandfather talking through a transistor radio, a possible apocalypse). Lucky new initiates to Clowes will want to dive into his backlist after this unnerving introduction to his oeuvre; for fans, it's a must-have. (Oct.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 PWxyz, LLC
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"Monica." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 36, 4 Sept. 2023, p. 63. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A765992676/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=15c28a02. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.
QUOTED: "The pacing and interconnection of the stories tease the reader along as narration and dialogue pop with insight and humor."
Clowes, Daniel MONICA Fantagraphics Books (Fiction None) $27.00 10, 3 ISBN: 9781683968825
Clowes' latest graphic novel weaves nine interrelated stories into a tale of curiosity, corruption, and humanity's addiction to significance.
The book opens with a two-page spread of the roiling waters, cratered land, and fiery skies of our primordial planet, then runs through snapshots of history: single-cell organisms, ancient Egyptians, the plague, Shakespeare, Hitler, The Beverly Hillbillies. It's an ambitious opening that the book lives up to through its intersecting narratives of Vietnam soldiers, counterculture, horror, ambition, control, and mommy issues--all spinning around the orbit of a woman named Monica and her quest for her origins. Initially we meet Monica's mother, Penny, as an art student in the 1960s, seduced away from her sedate life plans by the ideas of her new bohemian lover and his friends. As Penny delves deeper into free love and artistic pursuits, she soon finds herself a mother to young Monica and the subject of Monica's observations as Penny cycles through men, eventually abandoning Monica to follow her own path--perhaps into the clutches of a desert-dwelling cult. After a macabre interlude about a young man's return to his boyhood home only to find the town under a sinister influence, we catch up with Monica as an adult, dealing with her own loss and encounter with the uncanny. In pursuit of her long-gone mother, Monica peels back opulent and fantastical layers of her own life until she finds the haunting core. Clowes strikes an irresistible balance of cultural criticism, philosophy, and pulp. The pacing and interconnection of the stories tease the reader along as narration and dialogue pop with insight and humor. Clowes' art retains a classic comics aesthetic while delivering a thoroughly modern vibe.
A timeless nugget of polished pulp.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Clowes, Daniel: MONICA." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A758849071/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=74cdc7fb. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.
QUOTED: "It's the combination of both image and story that gives Eightball its lasting power."
The Complete Eightball 1-18
Daniel Clowes
Fantagraphics, 2022
Daniel Clowes (pronounced like wows) is one of the most important comic artists around. In the 1990s, his wildly creative, darkly funny Eightball comics were a must read. Although some might know Clowes primarily from the comic-adapted films Ghost World (2001) and Art School Confidential (2006), in the 1990s those of us in the know read Clowes. Fantagraphics Books, who Clowes recently called "the greatest publisher of comics of all time" (New York Times, May 5, 2015), has been a source of excellent comics and graphic novels for decades, and I've long relied on them for great reads the way I used to rely on indie labels like Sub Pop, SST, Touch and Go (and so on), for great music. This September's release of The Complete Eightball is a more affordable paperback but no less gorgeous version of the now out of print hardcover dual volume slip-cased edition (2015). A flurry of press coverage around the release of the hardcover edition waxed ecstatic about the care taken to produce a historical artifact that is rife with vibrant art, extras from Clowes, and a higher price point than many of us could have paid in the 1990s.
In a recent interview (Publishers Weekly, Feb 01, 2016), Clowes describes revisiting Eightball so many years later as "confronting this alien being--this artist who is me but doesn't feel like me anymore ... you can become a completely different person in twenty years." Rereading Eightball so many years later I experienced a repeated revelation that I am indeed a very different person, and reader, than I was in the 1990s. I don't have much nostalgia for my life back then, although I do miss the excitement of heading down those steep stairs on East 7th Street into See Hear to discover which new zines, comics, and music was on offer. I don't miss the weirdness of the male gatekeepers at the NYC comics stores I went to--particularly the sneers I got when I ignored their suggestions and headed for the titles I wanted. Eightball was on my list, as was Peter Bagge's Hate and, perhaps more predictably, the Hernandez brothers's Love and Rockets and Neil Gaiman's The Sandman. I remember one clueless male clerk ringing up my purchases and suggesting I was probably buying Eightball for a boyfriend. As if. And this to a woman whose cat was named after a character in Pepe Moreno's Rebel and who'd once regularly foregone food to buy the latest 2000AD.
One of the aspects of Eightball that kept me coming back for more was the compelling strangeness of the serialized and very dark mystery "Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron" that appeared in Eightballs first ten issues. It's roughly the story of a man, Clay Loudermilk, who sees an intriguing woman in a film, tries to find her, and eventually comes to a bad end. The stark black-and-white panels resonated with me, connecting at the time with my own personal soundscape and visual world of indie music, film, books, and art. I've never been as deeply knowledgeable about art as some of my friends, but to quote that overused line, I know what I like when I see it. I liked "Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron" enough that I still own two signed pieces by Clowes, and I'm not generally a person who owns art. When Clowes mentioned in a recent interview (Nerdist) the influence on his work of "crazy, surrealist cinema from [Luis] Bunuel" and Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss, something finally clicked, and the power of those black-and-white panels suddenly made sense. I love when something I knew subliminally is brought to the fore like that! I was lucky enough to have film school friends who dragged me to screenings of anything and everything, and while films by Fuller and Bunuel blurred into those by Richard Kern and Nick Zedd, the prevalence of creepy black-and-white imagery was foundational to my visual experience of Clowes's work. Unlike the superhero and anti-hero comics and Manga that were also on offer at the time, Clowes presented variety, humor, and a weirdness I understood.
Clowes has also mentioned that Mad Magazine was an influence on his work, and that he wanted to produce comics that were anthologies--not just a single story. But he also wanted to do all of the work himself. This is another reason why Eightball worked/works so well: it's a bit like a buffet of weirdness all done by one person. Some people love the social commentary in shorts like "On Sports" (baseball bats as penises and so on) and "Ugly Girls," or the bitterly caustic voice of Lloyd Llewellyn in "I Hate You Deeply" (with brilliant dialogue that at the time often read too much like people I knew), and of course the serialized tale of young comics genius Dan Pussey's rise and fall. Some of the shorts are laugh out loud funny, others are quickly-turn-the-page disturbing ("My Suicide"), and some short pieces lead to other creative endeavors for Clowes ("Art School Confidential"). As each issue shifts through different story lines the art also changes: black and white is primary, but there's color too, and stark realistic lines shift into colorful cartoons (see the brutal send up of "Richie Rich" in "Playful Obsession"), and the Jack Chick tract-influenced imagery in "Devil Doll?".
Of course, some fans of Clowes discovered his work through "Ghost World"--a serialized story that appeared starting in Issue 11 of Eightball after "Like A Velvet Glove..." wrapped up. If you haven't seen the film based on the comic, "Ghost World" focuses on two cool young women during the summer after they graduate from high school. Clowes uses his sharp dialogue and characterization skills to present their conversations, thoughts, desires, and caustic and often hilarious judgements of others as they go about their lives. Published in 1997 as a graphic novel, Ghost World is Clowes best attempt at presenting female characters as more than objects of desire or derision. And it's brilliant. The 2001 film (directed by Terry Zwigoff) deservedly won Clowes an Academy Award nomination and if you haven't seen it, you really should. Thora Birch is charming as Enid Coleslaw and Steve Buscemi is always a joy to watch.
Among the glorious aspects of The Complete Eightball, aside from the deep dive this reissue allows the reader to take, are the notes Clowes adds in sections he calls "Behind the Eightball." These sections provide insight into his process, influences, and other tidbits on each issue--including details of printing nightmares and disasters. I'm not a comics artist but I found these snippets incredibly interesting--partly because I like to learn things and partly because Clowes uses a welcoming and conversational tone that serves to draw any reader in, as if we were listening to him talk about his art in the least pretentious way possible. And that's part of the appeal--this isn't some precious private club that you can't join if you don't know the in-jokes and secret passwords. Eightball was important then as it's important now: because Clowes is telling stories--not superhero, juvenile male fantasy escapist stories, but real stories with real characters living real lives, and maybe they're weirder than the average reader but they're people all the same. Clowes is, of course, a consummate artist and anyone wanting to see good comics art should read this book. But he's also a story teller, and while his images last, seeping into that collage of all the powerful art, that's out there if you look for it, for me it's the combination of both image and story that gives Eightball its lasting power. In a recent piece in The New Yorker, Clowes mentions making Eightball "to see if it somehow transmitted something to another per son." It did and still does.
Yvonne C. Garrett holds an MLIS, an MFAFiction, two MAs (NYU), and a Ph.D. with a dissertation focused on women in Punk.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 The Brooklyn Rail, Inc.
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Garrett, Yvonne C. "Daniel Clowes's The Complete Eighth all 1-18." The Brooklyn Rail, Sept. 2022, pp. 103+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A718450847/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fe86e692. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.
QUOTED: "This time-travel love story will pick up fans of slow-burning thrillers and graphic novels."
CLOWES, Daniel. Patience, illus. by Daniel Clowes. 177p. Fantagraphics. Mar. 2016. Tr $29.99. ISBN 9781606999059.
After his pregnant wife, Patience, is killed, Jack lives in misery for decades until he discovers a way to travel through time in hopes of stopping the murder. When Jack visits the past, he learns things about his wife and her years as a young adult that she has kept from him, including several physically violent and emotionally damaging encounters with previous men. While some teens will empathize with the despondent Patience, who feels like she is trapped by her circumstances, others will get caught up in the time chase. Clowes uses time travel as a vehicle to create vivid, mind-blowing images with a bright and colorful palette. With a classic like Ghost World under his belt, Daniel Clowes already has a legion of graphic novel fans, and although the subject matter differs here, his signature drawing style is recognizable. VERDICT This time-travel love story will pick up fans of slow-burning thrillers and graphic novels, especially those already familiar with Clowes's work.--Carrie Shaurette, Dwight-Englewood School, Englewood, NJ
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
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Shaurette, Carrie. "Clowes, Daniel. Patience." School Library Journal, vol. 62, no. 9, Sept. 2016, p. 169. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A462899838/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d4211d9a. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.
QUOTED: "incredibly captivating--a stunning marriage of text, image, and design, and a demonstration of Clowes' sheer mastery of the art of sequential storytelling."
Patience. By Daniel Clowes. Illus. by the author. 2016. 180p. Fantagraphics, $29.99 (9781606999059). 741.5.
Jake and his girlfriend, Patience, discover she's pregnant, and though they're sure parenting will be difficult, because of everything from money to emotional stability, they're too in love with their future baby to care. But not long after the discovery, Jake comes home to find Patience murdered. Decades later, in a psychedelic-hued future, Jake, now wrinkled and gray, is bitterly, furiously fixated on what he could have done to prevent Patience's death. An offhand "If I could just go back . . leads him to someone who can make that happen, and, from there, Jake tumbles down a trippy rabbit hole into Patience's past, trying to track down the old boyfriend he's convinced is her killer. This is no mere sci-fi romp, however; time travel becomes a poignant metaphor for wraithlike Jake's obsessive mourning, and, before long, his schemes become as destructive as his grief. Punctuated by meltingly grotesque evocations of Jake's time-shattering flashes of awareness, Clowes' brilliant artwork homes in on expressions of aching feeling, particularly in Patience, who, through Jake's observations, gradually becomes vividly, marvelously multifaceted. Though the going is bleak and heart-wrenching, Clowes still leaves readers with a golden glimmer of hope. This is incredibly captivating--a stunning marriage of text, image, and design, and a demonstration of Clowes' sheer mastery of the art of sequential storytelling. A must-have for any graphic-novel section.--Sarah Hunter
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Hunter, Sarah. "Patience." Booklist, vol. 112, no. 16, 15 Apr. 2016, p. 41. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A451632247/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c968c0cb. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.
QUOTED: "another strong entry in an already stunning body of work."
Patience
Daniel Clowes. Fantagraphics, $29.99 (180p)
ISBN 978-1-60699-905-9
Clowes (Ghost World) plumbs the depths of science fiction in this intriguingly bizarre love story. Jack, torn apart by the mysterious murder of his wife, Patience, flings himself back and forth through time to discover and punish the real culprit. Not everything is at it seems, however--not even his beloved wife. This is a fascinating collage, repurposing elements from action thrillers, psychological horror, and romantic drama. Clowes skillfully anchors each psychedelic turn in human emotion. The SF elements here, as in his earlier The Death-Ray, are just vehicles for the dead-eyed cast to continue roaming through time for a happiness their own obsessions ensure they will never reach, and the future is no refuge from the cycles of abuse that Jack and Patience try to break out of. Patience herself is a wonderfully complicated character and the unraveling of her psyche is key to the story, as is the web of time travel that ensnares her husband. Another strong entry in an already stunning body of work, and one that will surely be hailed as one of the best releases of 2016. (Mar.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"Patience." Publishers Weekly, vol. 263, no. 8, 22 Feb. 2016, p. 75. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A444400977/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d5334fe0. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.
QUOTED: "handsome volume."
The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist.
By Alvin Buenaventura. Illus. by Daniel Clowes.
Apr. 2012. 224p. Abrams ComicArts, $40 (9781419702082). 741.5.
Clowes is the ultimate alt-comics artist, combining drawing chops equal to those of Jaime Hernandez, the derisively skeptical attitude of a Peter Bagge, and a formal mastery of the medium that rivals Chris War&. This handsome volume, released in connection with a traveling exhibition of Clowes' artwork, offers an overview of his 25 years in comics, from his late-'80s magazine Eightball through his acclaimed graphic novels, including Ghost Worm (1997), David Boring (2000), and Wilson (2010). The volume opens with a recent, career-spanning interview and a generous selection of his groundbreaking Eightball-era work, followed by an appreciation by close friend Ware, who reminisces about their days as struggling cartoonists in Chicago in the early '90s (their informal collaborations are among the rarest of the many rarities reprinted in the book). Other essays offer insight into Clowes' later work, but it's the profusion of his artwork collected here--comics pages, unpublished sketches, New Yorker covers, and other commercial illustrations--that makes the most compelling case for Clowes as one of the most accomplished and important figures on the contemporary comics scene.--Gordon Flagg
Flagg, Gordon
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 American Library Association
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Flagg, Gordon. "The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist." Booklist, vol. 108, no. 14, 15 Mar. 2012, p. 32. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A284551775/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=65fc69bd. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.