Many years ago, I was having dinner with a well-known writer and his then-12-year-old daughter when the subject turned to the poet Philip Larkin. Without warning, the writer and his daughter began to recite Larkin’s funniest poem, “This Be the Verse,” a famously vulgar, sing-songily serious joke about the harm that parents inevitably do to their children. Like a family vaudeville act, they let Larkin’s perfect final lines lilt: “Man hands on misery to man./ It deepens like a coastal shelf./ Get out as early as you can,/ And don’t have any kids yourself.”
Fine advice, maybe, but — and I took this to be the point of the parlor trick — it is always already too late to do anything about the parents we have, or about those we had, or even about the wide abyssal plain of not having them. We are, each of us, products of the past that bore us, a past that lingers at the edge of perception the way a comics panel we just read does, peripherally shaping our sense of the one we are now reading. The trouble with origin stories is that they are maps, which is why we keep reworking them, hoping that we might finally find our way to someplace new, or at least someplace where we can start again.
“In a way, Penny had given me the best possible life,” says the eponymous narrator of “Monica,” Daniel Clowes’s first graphic novel in more than seven years. “She’d allowed me to invent my own provenance.”
Monica is speaking of the mother who abandoned her when she was a young child, never having told her who her father was. In the years before, the pair subsists in hippie dissipation, operating a candle shop that burns down, sometimes inhabiting squalid group houses, sometimes the cluttered apartments of men Penny dates. Then, on the verge of something like stability, Penny vanishes, leaving Monica to be raised by her grandparents. “From that moment on, I lived a normal life, happy and safe from harm, but I never saw my mother again,” Monica says over a panel that finds her held by her grandmother on the porch of her new home, her few belongings crammed into a paper shopping bag.
In an earlier book, Clowes — who is best known for his graphic novel “Ghost World” and other stories that he serialized in his comic book “Eightball” — might have immediately undercut that “safe from harm.” Here, by contrast, it only gradually becomes clear that Monica will never be fully safe because the harm has already been done. Following her through her life, we see how totally her parents shape her even in their absence, from the candle business that makes her rich — an echo of the store her mother ran — to her growing fascination with a paranoid cult that could yet give her back, perhaps literally, the family she lost. She may not have really know her parents, but, as Larkin might still warn her, “They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.”
Between the longer chapters of Monica’s life, Clowes intersperses a series of shorter, self-contained narratives that play with other genres. In one, two soldiers speak grimly about life in the Vietnam War; another finds a prodigal evading the eerie blue monster people who have taken over his hometown; and so on. These vignettes are, presumably, meant to be read as stories written by Monica herself, tentative attempts to make sense of her patchouli-scented childhood and subsequent abandonment, and their sometimes-glancing connections to her own life lend them a slippery proximity to fact.
Even the sections set in the real world — or at least Monica’s version of it — swing languidly from genre to genre, ambling seamlessly into the haunted house of the ghost story, the locked rooms of the cult-recovery memoir, and, ultimately, the small towns of adult romance. In Clowes’s earlier works, such as “Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron,” surrealist swerves served as declarations of artistic independence, but they work differently here. Sometimes shocking yet never jarring, the narrative shifts in “Monica” evince its protagonist’s gradual maturation, the stages she passes through as she shapes herself in the absence of the parents who might have guided her.
Throughout, but especially in the interstitial segments, Clowes nods visually to the aesthetics and iconographies of EC Comics, a legendary publisher from the ’40s and ’50s that was best known for its often shocking horror and crime titles. And though he also draws on mid-century war and romance comics, his allusions to more sordid elements of the medium’s past carry a special weight. In these episodes, he seems to be negotiating his own lineage, acknowledging his long-standing debt to a generation of talented artists whose work was largely neglected by the mainstream comics business for decades — thanks in large part to industry-sponsored censorship that helped drive EC out of business. Here we have an alternate genealogy of comic-book history, one that doesn’t subvert the perverse paternalism of Marvel’s and DC’s superheroes so much as it, like Monica herself, seeks a wholly different way of relating to the lost familial past.
Clowes’s visual style is as crisp as ever, all controlled lines and spare colors even when his story explodes into prismatic anarchy, like a businessman in a gray flannel suit sporting a punky mohawk. Sometimes, dense cross-hatching amplifies his restrained inkwork, lending his characters an intermittent fleshy vitality for a panel or two, as if they were suddenly and uncomfortably aware of their own bodies. Other panels are strangely tight, their word bubbles truncated by the edges of the frame, the contents only partially legible — as though someone had zoomed in on an iPhone photograph only to have the device freeze up on them. The technique leaves one with the disquieting sense that someone else has already perused these half-remembered images in search of clues, and that we are studying not the event but the traces of their investigation. Such effects are amplified by the book’s slightly oversize pages, which allow Clowes to produce dense but never busy layouts that, like the sprawling sentences of László Krasznahorkai, almost demand rereading, forcing us to constantly loop back and revisit what was or might have been in Monica’s past.
Though it remains as playfully weird as his early work, “Monica” is largely without the puckish bite that made Clowes a counterculture icon. Instead, it is of a piece with his previous graphic novel, “Patience,” a terrific if sometimes plangent time-travel romance about the challenges of really knowing those we love. The themes in “Monica” — abandonment, grief and self-loss, especially — are familiar from a library’s worth of books, but there is nothing maudlin, or even comforting, about the way Clowes explores them. Instead, he comes at them with a steely confidence, consistently guiding his story onto unsettling new paths, following them through the dream thicket to the book’s magnificent final pages, which will infuriate some and puzzle many more, but which are still entirely in keeping with everything that precedes them. “Monica” is a work of tremendous artistic maturity, one that finds Clowes progressing steadily forward even as he bends back, as one must, to his many origins.
By Daniel Clowes
Fantagraphics. 106 pp. $30