Monica

by Daniel Clowes

Monica is a series of interconnected narratives that collectively tell the life story—actually, stories—of its title character. Clowes calls upon a lifetime of inspiration to create the most complex and personal graphic novel of his distinguished career. Rich with visual detail, an impeccable ear for language and dialogue, and thrilling twists, Monica is a multilayered masterpiece in comics form that alludes to many of the genres that have defined the medium—war, romance, horror, crime, the supernatural, etc.—but in a mysterious, uncategorizable, and quintessentially Clowesian way that rewards multiple readings.

Five years in the making, Monica marks the apex of creativity from one of the defining voices of the graphic novel boom over the past quarter-century. A new book from Clowes is always a huge event in comics and literary circles; Monica will be the biggest literary event of 2023.

Genres: Graphic Novels, Comics, Fiction, Horror, Graphic Novels Comics, Bande Dessinée, Short Stories

106 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2023

About the author

Daniel Clowes is an American cartoonist, graphic novelist, illustrator, and screenwriter whose work helped define the landscape of alternative comics and bring the medium into mainstream literary conversation. Rising to prominence through his long-running anthology Eightball, he used its pages to blend acidic humor, social observation, surrealism, and character-driven storytelling, producing serials that later became acclaimed graphic novels including Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, Ghost World, David Boring, Ice Haven, and Patience. His illustrations have appeared in major publications such as The New Yorker, Vogue, and The Village Voice, while his collaborations with filmmaker Terry Zwigoff resulted in the films Ghost World and Art School Confidential, the former earning widespread praise and an Academy Award nomination for its screenplay. Clowes began honing his voice in the 1980s with contributions to Cracked and with his Lloyd Llewellyn stories for Fantagraphics, but it was Eightball, launched in 1989, that showcased the full range of his interests, from deadpan satire to psychological drama. Known for blending kitsch, grotesquerie, and a deep love of mid-century American pop culture, he helped shape the sensibilities of a generation of cartoonists and became a central figure in the shift toward graphic novels being treated as serious literature. His post-Eightball books continued this evolution, with works like Wilson, Mister Wonderful, The Death-Ray, and the recent Monica exploring aging, identity, longing, and the complexities of relationships, often through inventive visual structures that echo the history of newspaper comics. Clowes has also been active in music and design, creating artwork for Sub Pop bands, the Ramones, and other artists, and contributing to film posters, New Yorker covers, and Criterion Collection releases. His work has earned dozens of honors, including multiple Harvey and Eisner Awards, a Pen Award for Outstanding Body of Work in Graphic Literature, an Inkpot Award, and the prestigious Fauve d’Or at Angoulême. Exhibitions of his original art have appeared across the United States and internationally, with a major retrospective, Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes, touring museums beginning in 2012. His screenplay work extended beyond Ghost World to projects like Art School Confidential and Wilson, and he has long been a touchstone for discussions about Generation X culture, alternative comics, and the shifting boundaries between the literary and graphic arts.

Reviews

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Monica is the 2023 graphic novel event by comics great Daniel Clowes, a fictional biography of a woman that is told from multiple perspectives and in multiple genres, spanning much of the time in which Clowes has lived, and looking back on much about comics that he has loved: horror, pulpy sixties and seventies alt-comix. And the dark side of crazy sixties and seventies culture. It’s a sad and dark tale, where a girl, Monica, is abandoned by her mother, Penny, but manages to survive and even thrive for a time, as owner of a candle shop, though she also later joins a cult (this is one of the barely surviving parts), which is vintage wacky Clowes, and perfect for the time period he depicts, but is also about her search for her parents, her roots. Spoilers.

Foxhole is about two G.I. buddies in Nam, one guy, Johnny, with a girlfriend back home. Johnny shares a dream he has that everything eventually turns to crap. It’s an apocalyptic story, alluding to the dystopian end-of-the-world story at the very conclusion of the book, on the end paper, the zombie apocalypse. So this first one looks like fifties/sixties war comics, a staple of comics history, and the set-up for the birth of Monica, though she never sees her father until late in life, as he is just gone.

“Pretty Penny” introduces us to Monica’s mom, Penny, and her “biological father” (Krug, an artist) in bed. He’s back from Nam, ptsd-crazy; drugs may be part of it. Penny doesn’t want a baby, but has it anyway, moving in free love sixties fashion from man to disastrous man, an acid trip through hippie lala land. She dumps Monica on her own mom and dad’s doorstep. Never to be seen again. Well, like daddy dearest, one more time, near the end of this story. Childhood abandonment, painted in the glorious fifties comic strip colors Clowes most loves. Real life horror.

“The Glow Infernal” is a fantastical nightmare story of a man trying to find his parents (as with Monica doing this). Sixties cult story. A man, in the nineteenth-century, like a Lovecraft mythos trip. I was most puzzled by this one, initially, but I believe it is tied to the dystopian theme, the broader view of history as “turning to crap” that Monica’s crazy daddy has in Nam, and the ending of the book.

“Demonica” is the story of Monica getting in touch with her grandfather through an old transistor radio (like an episode of Twilight Zone!). She reads old books to him that she grew up reading. The search for some solid ground, some goodness in the past. Twilight Zone nostalgia. You look at the crazy fun art and you think: What is this stuff? But dig a little beneath the surface and the whole story is really grounded in a search for family, for stability, home.

“The Incident” is another strange story of madness, surrealism, Clowes’s cuppa.

“Success” is maybe like Clowes’s own success story, money made in Hollywood through the film version of Ghost Story, that he seemed to work against for the rest of his career. Monica makes money through a candle shop, then throws it all away to join a cult, another sixties crazy tale, but this is also a time of crazy conspiracy theories and cults just as we have today, real madness and danger. Clowes is writing about how the more things change, the more they stay the same. But this is a place where Penny had been in the cult, and Monica thought the leader might have been her father. It’s more of the search for Monica’s roots but also the roots of today’s chaos.

In “Doomsday,” Monica’s finds her actual biological father, who confesses that mental illness and acid did a lot of strange things to him and a lot of people, oops, sorry, girl. The legacy is. . . doomsday, though Monica would seem to have found love later in life. . . and she also finally finds her mom, but not with a particularly happy resolution. She goes back to dig up her Grandpa’s transistor radio; she gets instructions there from some other voice to dig in a nearby field, unleashing. . . the apocalypse we recall from the first story soldier's dream. Perfect Clowes horror story, his warmest in some ways (because you feel for the abandoned child Monica, having lived this rudderless mad life), but also ultimately his darkest.

I think a lot of people may hate this story, or series of related stories, but this is Daniel Clowes, it’s horror on the edge of madness, same as it ever was, but better comics art than ever from him, even better than Patience, with all of these genres. I call it a masterpiece of comics storytelling, his crowning achievement, eyes wide open to the legacy of the recent past from Nam on through the acid-soaked sixties and the money-making late seventies through the eighties. Coming of age, then life story of lovely lost Monica. Strange, and unique comics artist, one of the icons.

[Jack Tripper · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my eyes this is one of Clowes’ best works to date (at least that I’ve read), up there with the Lynchian nightmare Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. Then again my tastes lean toward weirdness and horror and this delivered, even if only in small doses. These moments hit harder though due to the fact that they’re unexpected, as the majority of this is made up of slice-of-life-type tales following our protagonist, Monica, born during the turbulent Summer of Love-era 60s.

It basically traces her life story, trying to find her birth mother and her own place in the world while in the midst of a crazed hippie cult, but with strange supernatural-tinged interludes that almost seem unrelated at first, and in fact, some of them still do in a way. It’s actually pretty powerful, moving stuff, but what put it over the top into 5 star territory for me was the ultra-bold ending. Clowes really went for it, and while not everyone will care for it, I have to give him credit for the sheer audacity. Don’t forget to check out the splash/spread on the inside back cover and endpaper for the true ending.

Much of the heartfelt drama-meets-capital W Weird here felt more like something Charles Burns of Black Hole: A Graphic Novel fame would write, which, considering Black Hole is my all-time favorite graphic novel, is probably why I dug this one so much. Clowes is somehow able to ping-pong between charming, depressing, crass, touching, creepy, cringe, hilarious, batshit insane, and uplifting in the span of a handful of pages.

Highly recommended for indie comic fans as well as those interested in a masterfully written tale that combines coming of age stories, mystery, and even Lovecraftian horror, by one of the best in the business. All with artwork that may surpass anything Clowes has done before.

[Drew Canole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hyped for this.

Finally got my hands on a copy. I may want to re-read this one again before I give it a review. I really enjoyed the story - basically Monica is trying to discover what happened to her mom after she gave her up as a child and who her dad was. It leads her on some pretty crazy trails including joining a hardcore religious cult. Told as a series of stories that feel like they could have been found in various EC comics, only the first couple don't connect immediately to the others.

I've found 2023 pretty light for great new comics but this is probably the best one of the year I've read thus far!

[Bert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sat down and read it in 2.5 hours. just an absolute banger of a comic book. I love the way it captures different time periods and also mixes in the supernatural and cultish genres. I love the way the captions and panels only show so much—sometimes dialogue is pushed off to the side only giving the reader only glimpses of character or scene but enough to understand.

One of the coolest devices in graphic novels is how they can skip around through time with such ease and Monica is no exception. This book is dense but short and i look forward to rereading it sometime

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

His best, richest work. Say no more!

[Lucas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this marks the point where I give up in liking Clowes. It wasn't necessarily bad. The art and writing are both technically good. I just don't get the point of it. It's meandering, but without doing anything particularly interesting meanders. I don't want to spoil too much but it's something that sounded really appealing to me on paper. A series of loosely connected shorts that span across decades and characters, with a heavy focus on the 60s/70s and the drug fueled cults that come with it. And despite it's wide range of colorful characters, I didn't really end up caring for any of them. I'm looking forward to reading people's reviews though, see if I missed something obvious. I think the bottom line is just that I don't vibe with Clowes..

[Rod Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

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


FOR REFERENCE:

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

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

This book made both lists.)

[Donovan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A kaleidoscope of Clowes chaos, it’s a juggling jigsaw of perpetual perspective, stories in psychedelic skyscraper, tangled and twisted over time, demanding rereads for retention.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's best to go into this cold. Monica is a collection of connected tales and Monica is the connective tissue. Clowes' art is as it always is, part Ditko, part EC, all unsettling to some degree. The stories are on the periphery of Monica's life or feature Monica herself. That's about all I have to say. It's quirky, a little offputting, pure Clowes. Four out of five stars.

[Rebecca · Rating 1 out of 5]

Daniel Clowes is a respected American graphic novelist best known for Ghost World, which was adapted into a 2001 film starring Scarlett Johansson. I’m not sure what I was expecting of Monica. Perhaps something closer to a quiet life story like Alison by Lizzy Stewart? In any case, not this jumble of 1970s nostalgia and supernatural horror. The book is in nine loosely connected stories that make the head spin with their genre and tonal shifts; one thing that stays constant is Clowes’s drawing style, which combines vibrant, campy colour with exaggerated faces and blunt haircuts.

At first it seems there will be a straightforward linear narrative: the prologue, “Foxhole,” has two soldiers dreaming of what life will be like Vietnam, with the one looking forward to a simple life with his fiancée Penny. “Pretty Penny” shatters those illusions as we see that Penny has fully embraced sexual liberation while he’s been away. She rejects her mother and, in a countercultural decision, keeps the baby when she gets pregnant. Young Monica has a sequence of stepfather figures before Penny dumps her with her parents and goes AWOL.

To an extent, the rest of the book is about Monica’s search for her parents. We see her as a young college student communicating with her dead grandfather via a radio, as a successful entrepreneur selling candles, and as an older woman caretaking for a California Airbnb. But in between there are bizarre sci-fi/folk horror interludes – “The Glow Infernal” and “The Incident” – about unconnected characters, and Monica’s involvement with a cult inevitably turns strange. I couldn’t get past the distasteful story lines or grotesque style. Mostly, I wasn’t convinced that Clowes liked or cared about any of his own characters, so why should I? (This might be Tom Cox’s dream book, but not mine.) I suppose I might try a classic work by Clowes one day, but only if I can be assured that it has more plot and heart.

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎]

I didn't like it.

[Sarah Baenen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m probably going to be in the minority on this, but I’m tired of books that prioritize a clever and groundbreaking message over readers actually understanding the message. I did like that the book challenged me to think through how all the chapters were related. Up until the last chapter, I thought I was making progress, chipping away at those connections. But then the end blew up all of those hypothesis, leaving me feeling frustrated and dumb.

ARC from NetGalley

[Anika · Rating 3 out of 5]

TF did I just read?

[Peacegal · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's been a minute since I've been this blown away by a graphic novel. Firmly rooted in the perspective of the first kids of Gen X, this is the story of a girl who tries to track down the parents who fell down the rabbit hole of the darker side of the late 1960s--ultimately leading her to the door of a bizarre cult.

Each page positively radiates its era in loving (and sometimes ugly) detail. As someone who adores the aesthetics and music of Sixties culture, I loved how completely immersed I felt in each page--and didn't feel patronized by explanations on the author's part. The "retro" felt natural (snatches of lyrics by Jefferson Airplane et. al.) in a way that's not typically seen in modern media.

And all of this doesn't touch how absolutely freaking weird it all is, hilariously so. Just take a look at the endpapers--illustrations of notable moments in Earth's evolution and human history (think dinosaurs, the atomic bomb, Sputnik, and the like), and it ends with a panel depicting the cast of the "Beverly Hillbillies." If the thought of that makes you laugh uproariously, I think you'll love MONICA as well.

[Guillermo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Daniel Clowes lo ha vuelto a hacer.

[Przemysław Skoczyński · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wielopoziomowość „Moniki” może wywołać konsternację. Pierwsza lektura jest zaledwie zapowiedzią kolejnych. Intertekstualność dzieła Clowesa objawia się w zaczepkach w kierunku horrorów spod znaku „EC Comics”, opowiadań wojennych czy powieści gotyckich. Z kolei trop interpretacyjny każący szukać nawiązań do biografii autora, podąża w kierunku jego relacji z rodzicami. Całość można postrzegać jako próbę podsumowania pokolenia lat 60, które po zachłyśnięciu się wolnością, próbowało odnaleźć się w kompletnych chaosie, w jakim ostatecznie wylądowało. To paniczne szukanie oparcia w kolejnych związkach czy społecznościach o charakterze sekty, jest wynikiem szukania czegoś stałego w czasach ciągłej i nieograniczonej zmiany.

Bardzo podoba mi się kompozycja tego komiksu. Elementy, które tylko pozornie nie mają nic wspólnego z fabułą, z czasem trzeba poskładać w większą całość. Przyznam, że przy pierwszym podejściu byłem pewny, że mam do czynienia ze zbiorem opowiadań, dopiero po chwili zorientowałem się, że poruszam się ciągle w ramach tej samej historii. Tu nie ma przypadku -„Monica” wydaje się dziełem dopracowanym w każdym aspekcie (łącznie z kolorystyką papieru poszczególnych rozdziałów). Mam wrażenie, że dostaliśmy właśnie jeden z najważniejszych komiksów ostatnich lat

[Paul Secor · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is one of my few DNF books. I got halfway through and gave up. It consists of inane garbage - a young girl ignored and raised by hippies; conversing with the dead through an old radio; a town taken over by a cult (or something similar to a cult. Just complete crap. I had better things to do with my precious time than spending it on finishing this piece of junk. If I could have given it a negative rating I would have done so.

[Gurldoggie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The journey of one unlucky woman from her unwanted birth to her lonely old age, told through the multiple perspectives of creeps, cultists, soldiers, therapists and charlatans who make up her world. A fever dream of a graphic novel, cryptic and unsettling, filled with odd details and obscure references, haunted by the spectre of apocalypse. I need to either bury it where I will never find it, or re-read it.

[~:The N:~ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Whoa, this graphic novel is super strange, I'm not sure what to make of it. It's like a jumbled mix of a woman's life story, cults, weird creatures, and other random stuff. Despite its weirdness, there's something about it that had me hooked. I'd give it like 2.5 stars, I guess.

[Liam O'Leary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Daniel Clowes writes funny, weird comics. His work is always borderline surreal and offensive so it has a certain crowd of readers, but among us we seem to disagree on his best work.

Many fans like the characters of Ghost World, but I found them fairly dull and cliche? Some fans dislike the surreal horror of Like A Velvet Glove... or Eightball but I think it was his most original and fascinating stuff. Many fans hated Patience for being too focused with an unlikeable characters but I found it one of the best comics I ever read period.
So what of Monica?

I think Monica could've been SO MUCH better but it's still a new development in Clowes's style and an incredible comic. If anyone has read Building Stories by Chris Ware you will know how I feel with reference to the bee stories in those dragging down an otherwise incredible graphic novel feat, and a similar situation has happened here.

Monica feels like Patience, but moving more toward Clowes's older surreal horror works. Unfortunately to me it feels like a step backwards in the end result too. There is cynicism and disjointedness that I've not seen in his more recent work. The styles conflict in that I can't care about a character who is bored and cynical. Monica is more likeable but less interesting, and the story is more layered but wayward. I've never seen a story give up on its characters achieving something so often. I've read a lot of Daniel Clowes and this is one of the first times I've not been really invested or entertained by the plot.

Another problem with Monica is the 9 interconnected stories vary too much in quality and style that it doesn't feel like a collection or a single story. 'Pretty Penny', the second story, is undoubtedly a 5* sequence that suddenly transitions into a bizarre nightmare story that has very little connection to it. Monica isn't the star of this collection, Penny is, and it's odd to me that Clowes chose to focus on Monica's not knowing about her family life as the motif rather than Penny's inability to live a stable adult life. It feels like we were given the story of a secondary character searching for the main character, and so it's no wonder that the overall conclusion is not as strong as Patience or his other single narratives.

Despite this, the opening of this was so so amazing I can forgive how it progressed. I laughed and loved Monica's childhood scenes so much in Pretty Penny, it was an amazing sequence to read!!

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hadn't read a Clowes book for about 15 years, and it was both funny and enjoyable to find his thing both so hilariously familiar (depressive alienated female narrator! small mid-western town! mid-century pop culture! a shadowy cult! the apocalypse! - it's Ghost World plus Ice Haven plus Velvet Glove plus David Boring!) and so convincingly, overpoweringly sinister.

[Kim Lockhart · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the kind of imaginative immersive storytelling that drew me to graphic novels in the first place. The art is simple in style, but the story is the star.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rec. by: Previous work; MCL
Rec. for: Children of the flower children

Monica is messed up, man. Mostly, though, that's not her fault; she was merely misbegotten—born into a bad scene, a child of a child of The Sixties™. Her mother, Penny, was one of the many women who were unpleasantly surprised to discover that hippie freedoms and the joys of communal living applied mostly to... men.

Monica—whose real name is something much less common—actually came out of that situation fairly well, eventually parlaying her mom's scented candle business into a multimillion-dollar franchise.

It's been almost a decade since I read Daniel Clowes' The Death-Ray, a graphic novel which—as I said in 2015—"distills the entire arc of a second-rate superhero's life into a single short graphic novel." But to me—and to anyone who's familiar with Clowes' other work, like Ghost World or Wilson—his clean style and quirky plotting are immediately recognizable in 2023's Monica, which is a remarkable mosaic—nine interconnected graphic vignettes, merged into one beautifully-reproduced hardcover edition from Fantagraphics in Seattle.

We start in a "Foxhole", in Vietnam. Monica isn't even in the picture(s) yet, and Penny's just a pretty name.

In "Pretty Penny," we get to see what Penny's been up to while Johnny's been in the 'Nam.

"The Glow Infernal" switches focus yet again, raising the spectre of a "devilish mystery" in a derelict small town that—at first, anyway—seems to have nothing to do with Monica.

In "Demonica", Monica herself begins being feeling the effects of occult influences that heretofore had only touched her indirectly.

"The Incident" veers away from Monica again, to recount another disturbing... incident... in a town where "there was just something off, a feeling of madness in the air" (p.51).

Monica's "Success" was a giddy time for her, a flashy and addictive high from which she finally found the strength to withdraw...

And the next thing I knew, I was deep in the bowels of a dangerous cult, alone and terrified for my life.
—p.64

"The Opening The Way" is where Monica really got sucked into that cult. All she wanted was to find her long-lost mother... and to figure out who her father (or fathers—spiritual as well as physical) might have been.

Cranky old man "Krugg" is an artist and a recluse, who retreated from the world long ago. What he knows is not what Monica is searching for.

The final segment of Monica is called "Doomsday", but it begins quietly enough, with Monica—now in her 70s—"living sexless and invisible in the blissfully-irrelevant vacation town of Pine River, CA" (p.93). Until she receives one last clue to her parental mystery, a clue which leads her back to the setting of "Demonica" and to an act of resurrection which is only rash in retrospect...

And while I did not expect, nor even especially like, the way Clowes ended Monica, those final pages could not retroactively spoil my enjoyment of what had gone before.

[Dakota Morgan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm sure that for the indie comic afficionado, Monica is pure catnip. But I couldn't make heads or tales of it.

The story follows the life of Monica, from pre-birth into old age. Interspersed are several random, cosmic short stories, seemingly unrelated. It's all presented in the classic comic book stylings of Daniel Clowes, which you either like or you don't. I guess I don't?

I found Monica engaging at first, but it completely lost me towards the end. Was there any purpose to any of this? I kept looking for the twist or reveal, and it didn't seem like there was one.

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not going to pretend to be any sort of authority on graphic novels, but I nevertheless feel comfortable with labeling this one a master class for the whole medium. Seamlessly intertwining stories, styles, and time periods alike, Monica is a short but dense look at the life of the titular character. At once cosmic and personal, tragic and deeply, even depressingly pedestrian, this is a stunning reminder that funny books can be real art too.

[tricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

actual rating: 5000000000000000/5

will be immediately rereading and thinking about this one forever

[Fany · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It's quite a blow to discover 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."

[Mary K · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird! But good. Made me want to befriend some older women.

Ending was really fun. Would be 5 stars if it was written by a woman.

[Ignacio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clowes escribe la historia de la vida de un personaje entre finales de los 60 y la actualidad en una búsqueda de sus figuras materna y paterna a través de varios relatos en los que varía el tono y el género. Este viaje resulta cautivador por su manera de afrontar la elaboración del relato de nuestro origen personal. Además tiene toques maestros cuando el surrealismo marca de la casa se hace fuerte, caso del momento en que el abuelo de la protagonista se manifiesta a través de un aparato de radio o el capítulo entero alrededor de una secta cocinada entre las novelas mainstream de Philip K. Dick y las de cf post-exégesis.

[Gabe Steller · Rating 4 out of 5]

rlly hard to sum up into words. both kinda epic and bizarre but also very straightforward and i guess emotionally realistic?? I love how free clowes is with the structure, I love how cynical and semi grouchy monica is, I LOVED the art. Techincolor! Nightmarish! Goofy!

The i also liked spendin time in those hangover of the sixties themes, rotten utopianism, conspiracies, aimless hedonism.

anway. kinda slow to get going but rlly rlly dug by the end. (4.5)