As the book follows Monica, from grief-stricken teen mourning the grandparents who raised her, to successful 90s entrepreneur and on to ageing postpandemic Gen Xer, it’s clear this isn’t just a tale about reconciliation, but a sadder elegy for the baby-boomer generation and the optimism of the 1960s as it drifted into the economic and social decline of America during the twenty-first century.
Monica, Clowes’s first book since Patience (2016), is a more subtly woven exploration of history, personal regret and redemption, focused on its titular character’s search for the mother who abandoned her sometime during the 1970s, a casualty of the flower-power generation who disappeared into a cult.
Author of the acclaimed 1997 Ghost World – the zeitgeist-capturing story of American suburban ennui – Clowes has long mined the possibilities of colliding sci-fi tropes with indie-comics culture’s preoccupations with emotional complexity and the frustrations of dead-end contemporary life. In Daniel Clowes’s comics the mundane life of ordinary people tends to twine and fuse with the weird, freakish and fantastical.
