The graphic novel from Daniel Clowes is a genre-bending thriller, a series of interconnected narratives that collectively tell the life story—actually, stories—of its title character.
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.
