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.
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 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.
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.”
