Daniel Clowes’ ‘Monica’: Grief, Nefarious Hippies and a Personal Apocalypse

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.”

Clowes is famously reticent to unpack the symbolism in his work, and for the most part, you might as well throw in the towel when it comes to inferring creator intent in Monica. The artist’s personal Rosetta Stone of references and obscure cultural touchstones remains, as always, locked away in his head. But for Clowes, a reader’s visceral, unsullied interpretation is always the correct one.

“I’m in that phase now where everybody who’s reading [Monica] is in the same boat and approaching it with fresh eyes,” he says. “I know when it comes out, some blowhard is going to have theories about it…”

I’m in my forties now, a long way from that teenage comic shop counter jockey, but I still want Dan Clowes to think I’m cool. I take a silent oath not to be the blowhard.

“It should be a Rorschach test,” he explains. “Everybody’s got a different analysis. One of my friends was like, ‘It’s such a hopeful book for you’. And then others are like, ‘It’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever read. It feels like I’m actually witnessing the end of the world,’ and any range in between. I love that. I’m trying very hard not to interfere with any response.”

Telling his truth

Though others have characterized Monica as a book about loneliness, Clowes clarifies it as “aloneness,” which is how I experienced it. It’s the kind of existential turbulence that is both universal and deeply personal — like the death of a parent.

Indeed, while he refuses to deliver a cheat sheet to any of the symbolism, Clowes is forthcoming that this book is about confronting his own past and relationship with his mother. His mom was less cookies and milk, he says, and more hippie/auto mechanic/gun nut/karate expert. When he was a young child, she left his dad for a race car driver who was later killed in an accident. Like Monica’s mom Penny, Dan’s mom dumped her parental duties onto his grandparents soon afterwards.

Though Clowes pshaws my suggestion that this book is about grief, he did lose several central figures in his life, including his mother, during the seven years it took to finish Monica. When a person passes away, decorum usually dictates that obituaries are nothing but rave reviews; the unflattering and flawed pieces that also make up a life get swept under the rug. Here, Clowes tells his unvarnished truth.

“I realized my parents are dead, my grandparents, my only siblings. I have zero living relatives that even knew me as a kid or know anything about my family. It’s just me. [So] now I get to say what really happened, and it’s so liberating,” he says.

“In a way, it’s the opposite of lonely,” he adds. Previously, when he would discuss the past, “my mother would be like, ‘What? You’re out of your mind. That’s insane.’ But I’m right. I know how it was. It’s very freeing.”

While I disagree that Monica is a hopeful book, it’s true that Clowes himself seems to have shed some of his old-school cynicism. Dare I say, he comes across as exuberant, especially as we chop it up about his love of movies and the Bay Area: “I feel very gung-ho about California, the way you would about a sports team you’ve loved your whole life for no good reason,” he says. “You’re just, ‘I’m with them.’”

He lights up as he talks about bringing a friend on a Hitchcock tour early in the pandemic, when you could just drive right up to any beautiful landmark in San Francisco with no traffic whatsoever. Unsurprisingly, he’s also a big fan of the Noir City film festival, now programmed annually at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theater. As most of our old Bay Area theater gems have shuttered in the past couple of years, seeing all of the packed screenings for classic noir movies is especially heartwarming.

“It fills me with civic pride to see all of the young people dressed up,” Clowes gushes. “I just want to hug everybody.”

It’s a delightful bout of positivity coming from an artist whose new book’s end pages depict a twisted and fiery apocalypse full of melting faces and mutants strangling one another. I wonder, does this positivity extend to his feelings about his book, now that it’s finally making its way into the world?

“It is one of the few times I’m sort of just happy with it. Normally I’m like, ‘Oh, there’s something about this I wish I could change,’ or ‘I should have gone on a different course.’”

But with Monica, he says, “I feel like I did my best. It’s the one time I feel like, ‘OK, I did it.’”

‘Monica’ is out Oct. 3 on Fantagraphics. More info here.