On its face, Monica is a mother-daughter tale of the typically shattering kind ... Monica’s quest for origins — for a stable self — takes her on strange and twisting paths ... Achieves something like a conclusion; she gets some of the answers she seeks, just not the ones she would have liked ... Weird, wild.
Pensive, 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.
Kaleidoscopic ... The chapters don’t simply carry the story forward. Instead, they chart the protagonist’s life in a wide range of styles – a free-wheeling drama, a ghost story, a rags-to-riches tale, an occult thriller and a retiree romance – broken up by tales of wartime friendship, hitmen, blue-skinned interlopers and cynical artists in which Monica appears only obliquely, if at all. There’s no back-cover blurb or introduction to tell us what to make of it all. The reader, like Monica herself, must play detective ... Clowes is a skilled evoker of time and place, and his enthusiasm for the styles he adopts helps the episodes – which move broadly from the 1960s to the present – to flow.
Between the longer chapters of Monica’s life, Clowes intersperses a series of shorter, self-contained narratives that play with other genres ... 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 ... 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 ... Clowes’s visual style is as crisp as ever, all controlled lines and spare colors even when his story explodes into prismatic anarchy ... Though it remains as playfully weird as his early work, Monica is largely without the puckish bite that made Clowes a counterculture icon ... 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.
Another devastating, surreal examination of human nature ... Altogether, along with Clowes’ lurid palette and crisp, expressive linework, it’s a portrait of the self-destructive nature of obsession over questions about the past that, in reality, will never have a satisfactory answer. Even when readers find a measure of hope that Monica is finally settled enough in her life to move on, she’s still inexorably consumed by an urge to dig even further. A hauntingly precise and compellingly strange study of the human struggle to reconcile a decentered past with a path forward.
Eloquent ... Episodic and fantastical ... Lucky new initiates to Clowes will want to dive into his backlist after this unnerving introduction to his oeuvre; for fans, it’s a must-have.
Clowes strikes an irresistible balance of cultural criticism, philosophy, and pulp. The pacing and interconnection of the stories tease the reader along as narration and dialogue pop with insight and humor. Clowes’ art retains a classic comics aesthetic while delivering a thoroughly modern vibe. A timeless nugget of polished pulp.
