Daniel Clowes Is Ready to Face the Truth

Across five decades, the cartoonist Daniel Clowes has written about a wide array of outcasts: the high-school best friends wrestling with their transition into adulthood; the middle-aged grouch searching for the daughter he never knew; the sex-obsessed malcontent fixated on his ex-girlfriend; the many other dropouts, weirdos, and natural-born screwups who feel drawn from real life. Clowes, who began making comic books in the 1980s as part of an artistic underground fermented during the enforced patriotism of the Reagan era, swiftly became associated with the emergent citizens of Generation X—those authenticity-obsessed, society-rejecting cynics who seemingly wanted nothing more in life than to hang out while avoiding responsibility and other human beings. His characters couldn’t hold down jobs. They didn’t have healthy relationships with their parents. They were like every slacker from your high school whom you suspected had the ability to get it together—but, like, whatever, man.

But what if those outcasts grew up, shedding their cynical armor and, is a woman defined not by defensive misanthropy but by a flinty resilience that propels her to find real meaning in her life. After surviving a chaotic Bay Area childhood in which she’s abandoned by her parents, Monica manages to find some stability as a young woman, and then embarks on a long and often unsatisfying quest to reconnect with her mother and father. Her journey takes many surreal twists: Ghosts are involved, as is a bizarre California cult and—because this is a Clowes story, where doom is never far off—the literal apocalypse. For a book that’s barely 100 pages, things get a little hectic.