Monica
Daniel Clowes
Fantagraphics, 2023
Monica is the protagonist of this graphic novel, but the narrative ranges far wider than her life story, extending into social commentary about the mid-Twentieth Century . The focus is on her mother Penny at first. Penny is a bit of a lost soul: we first meet her as she is cheating on her fiancee, who is serving in Vietnam. She eventually sends him a Dear John letter, and proceeds to jump from one man to another. When she gets pregnant she surprises everyone by keeping the baby, which brings Monica into the picture.
She hooks up with a man named Davis and establishes a successful business called "Monica's Candles." Then there was a succesion of men before her old beau Johnny came back into her life. Just when it looks like they might have a normal family life, Penny runs off with her. She leaves Monica with her parents (who raised her), and Monica never saw her mother again.
Flash-forward to Monica at college, suffering the loss of her beloved grandmother (her grandfather had passed earlier). This hits her hard, because she now had no remaining family. She goes to her granparents' lake cottage to clear it out for sale. There she has a surreal experience: her dead grandfather communicates with her via a transistor radio. She finally sends her boyfriend away, buries the radio, and drives away, crashing her car and going into a coma.
Next thing we know it is 22 years later. Monica has resurrected the Monica's Candles business, which became so successful that she was able to sell it to a retail chain. But she still desperately wants to reconect with her mother, so much so that she leaves all of her possesions behind to track her into the cult she joined when she abandoned Monica as a child. After many bizarre adventures Monica manages to find her mother and her father, though neither were very satisfying. In the end she drives back to the cottage, digs up the radio, and follows its instructions, ending the story with chaos and the release of demons. It is a bizarre non-sequiter that somehow feels like an appropriate conclusion.
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