In the field of comics, the arrival of a new book by Daniel Clowes is an event. Clowes is the author of Ghost World, Ice Heaven and Patience, his latest album, published eight years ago. Coming from the underground and independent scene, Clowes is today, undoubtedly, one of the most interesting artists in North American comics and, by extension, in world comics. In addition, he is also one of the most restless, capable of thinking about each of his works down to the smallest detail, even if that requires the reader to read carefully.
Monica is published simultaneously in Spanish (Fulgencio Pimentel, with translation by Alberto García Marcos and César Sánchez Rodríguez) and in Catalan (Finestres, with translation by Montse Meneses).
The album includes nine stories that mix science fiction, horror, romance and war stories. The first story begins, precisely, in the middle of the Vietnam War, and there Clowes clearly evokes the comics by Jack Davis and Harvey Kurtzman set in the war. Other chapters tell us the case of an old radio that transmits the voice of the dead or delves into the practices of conspiracy sects that announce the end of the world.
However, this variety is only apparent. In reality, Clowes has done something truly exceptional: construct a unique and unitary story through this mixture of stories, styles and themes, because as we progress in reading we realize that all these comics – some truly extravagant – They end up coming together in a single story. This is how we discovered that the album actually tells the story of the Monica that gives the book its title, a strong and feisty woman who has had an easy life and who is now looking for answers trying to fit together the pieces of her past.
Leafing through the book gives us the feeling that we are looking at a compilation of varied comics with an aesthetic that pays homage to North American comics from the 50s and 60s, especially those from the EC Comics publishing house. Clowes deliberately plays with this diversity, erasing clues from what is actually a unitary graphic novel. And this game is part of the storytelling charm of it. The chapters of pure fiction that are interspersed with the main story contribute to accentuate this sensation – although we will later see that they have connections with it – and that we distinguish from the rest because they are printed on salmon-colored paper instead of white. Clowes uses genre comics to make author comics.
Clowes is a master at composing vignettes that convey strangeness, strangeness, and coldness. He likes to portray his characters frontally or in profile, accentuating that hieraticism, and there are many times in which he draws them from the back, conveying the feeling that they are inaccessible beings. Clowes presents a world full of strange, rootless and lunatic creatures. A world where reality, dream and nightmare have very blurred borders. Like in a David Lynch movie, in a Charles Burns comic or that Acting Class that Nick Drnaso published last year.
And everything in this comic is meticulously thought out and to such an extent that the endpapers that open the book and the credits pages contain a narrative that continues in the closing endpapers of the book. Nothing more nor less than the history of our planet is told there. You might think that this is an anecdote or an eccentricity. Absolutely. Clowes puts the history of the Earth in relation to the story of Monica, of which we will even learn how it came about. Clowes is telling us that Monica’s story is part of the history of the world, that our individual lives are part of a much larger vital project.