Daniel Clowes’s graphic novels are getting darker. If some readers found his last full-length comic, Patience, a little on the bleak side – a tale of obsessive love, poverty and domestic violence, it was about a man who went back in time in order to discover the identity of his wife’s killer – they’re unlikely to find much relief in its successor. Seven years on, the cartoonist has produced a book that speaks to all our present anxieties. Yes, outwardly, Monica has the colourful, retro feel of an old EC Comic (an American publisher of genre strips – horror, sci-fi, war – from the 1940s until the mid-50s). But its heart is far from nostalgic. With its conspiracy theories, crank cults and hints of an impending apocalypse, it seems to belong to the era of global warming and Donald Trump as much as it does to the past.
Playing around with form a little, Clowes gives us nine short stories of varying styles, which are linked by its eponymous heroine. But this isn’t straightforward. Sometimes, the connection is hazy; as Françoise Mouly, art editor of the New Yorker, has already written, even after multiple readings, everyone will have their own idea of what exactly is going on. However, there’s something reassuring about the figure of Monica, a small child when we first meet her and a grey-haired, middle-aged woman by the time the book ends. An eternal outsider, prickly and damaged and sharp-tongued, she’s instantly recognisable: here, at least, is another of Clowes’s female misfits, a type we’ve loved ever since Ghost World was published, more than a quarter of a century ago.
