Rave4ColumnsPensive, philosophical ... Monica reveals his Gen-X cynicism as the zeitgeist-y side of a deeper disquiet ... Clowes being Clowes, we’re nagged by the suspicion that we’re meant to read the story at an ironic remove, as creepy yet campy—a suspicion reinforced by his visual rhetoric. Densely referential, polyvalent ... He walks the line between homage and parody, appropriating—and interrogating—the comic books and Sunday funnies he grew up with.
Jeff Sharlet
Positive4ColumnsThe Undertow feels at once urgently important and inconclusive. Perhaps we’ve realized, at long last, that sermons and parables, from Edwards to Trump, won’t save us. In fact, they just might be the death of us ... Harrowing, heartbreaking, scary, but also bleakly funny in a theater-of-the-absurd way, The Undertow is a Wisconsin Death Trip for the Trumpocene, a graveside elegy on the edge of the burn pit that used to be—if only aspirationally—a democracy.
