Daniel Clowes is synonymous with American independent comics. Starting in 1989, Clowes’s Eightball series introduced the world to serialized storylines “Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron” and “David Boring.” A few of Clowes’s creations have been turned into films (Ghost World and Art School Confidential, both directed by Terry Zwigoff; Wilson, directed by Craig Johnson), including one case in which he served as unknowing inspiration.
This Q&A was adapted from the Alta newsletter, delivered every Thursday.
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A Chicago native, Clowes relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid-’90s, where he and his wife raised their son.
Monica, his newest book, was seven years in the making and represents the most ambitious scope of Clowes’s career. It also refines many of his favorite tropes. The fantastical and supernatural inject themselves into the nine chapters featuring negligent parents, hippie cults, and other monstrosities. Interviewing Clowes about his intentions or story mechanics won’t get you very far. Monica is a work that demands you meet it at its level: paranoid, violent, vulnerable, and chaotic.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What is the genesis of Monica?
It was very organic. I had all these ideas that I was excited by over the past 30 years, some of them just kind of gelling together. I had this very vague idea of this kind of nine-story book that wasn’t necessarily as related as it wound up being, but that they would all be tangentially related. I was imagining them all in different genres. And that was sort of the very beginning. But as it became more and more gelled—I don’t even know the word. Sifted? Keeping the good stuff and enhancing that while getting rid of the stuff that’s just sort of connective tissue. That took place sort of in the midst of Trump and COVID and all that stuff.
I never want to do something that’s consciously about the world as it is in that moment, but the way the books are written is about my daily thought patterns, making sense of the world. And so that filters into the way I write and think.
I associate you a lot with the Gen X ’90s, but Monica starts with Vietnam and goes into the hippie movement. Your parents were probably around for that hippie era.
My mom, especially, was, like, older than all the hippies, but she embraced it. That was her happiest time of her life, and she really sort of stayed a hippie her whole life, in a certain way. She was a very singular person, you know. There’s no way to describe her.
How much did your mom inspire the book?
There’s not a single event in that story that’s exactly something that happened to me or her, but it’s all a very similar feel. The rhythm of the plot feels like my childhood. A lot of, you wake up one day like, “Who’s this guy?” “Now, now we’re moving here?” You know, just total chaos.
How did your mom end up running an auto repair shop?
My dad was involved in auto racing. He was an engineering major at the University of Chicago, and he was just really involved in building his own cars. That was back when people did stuff like that and it didn’t cost a fortune. He and my mom accidentally got pregnant with my brother and got married and sort of knew they should not necessarily be together.
And so my mom decided, “I’m going to really get into this auto racing. That seems really fun.” She and my dad worked together for a few years. And then my mom wound up leaving my dad right after I was born for the driver that they’d hired. And so she and the new husband opened the first foreign-car repair on the South Side of Chicago. Nobody else would repair non-American cars at the time.
I read that you lived with your grandparents at some point?
Yeah. So the stepdad I was telling you about, he died in a race when I was five, and my mom kind of shut down and sent me to my grandparents at that point. It wasn’t that I never saw her again, like in the story, but I was never close to her again. She was around; we would have dinner once a week. It was just sort of like, “I don’t really wanna be a mom now.”
Did you grow up going to the woods?
Yeah, my grandmother who I lived with, she and my grandpa had a little summer cottage in Michigan. So I spent my summers there just with them. I was the only person under 70 around. There’s only other old people who had little cottages, just in the middle of nowhere, and so it was a super lonely, isolating thing but also really safe and calm. That’s where I think I became an artist. Just having summers to fill, so I would just have, “I’m gonna do my own comic book and learn all this stuff,” and it’s like being in prison in a way but where they give you books and drawing paper and stuff. I would have given anything for just another kid to talk to.
Is that a commonality with cartoonists? That they all have that indoor-kid time?
You have to be very comfortable with being by yourself. Sometimes I’ll meet a young cartoonist who’s very social and you think, “You’re going to go into animation! You’re going to go crazy if you have to be all by yourself!”
There are sort of, like, ellipses to everything in Monica. I still want to crack the code of what’s going on.
It’s all in the text. There’s nothing that only I know but nobody could ever figure out. I feel like in, like, two years I would happily talk to everybody about my intentions for it. It’s so in my nature to just go, “No, here’s what I was thinking.” And then I realized, “Oh, that’s so detrimental to anybody’s enjoyment of it.” Right now, there’s going to be such a short time while people can read the book and not have any idea what it’s going to be. It’s going to get so spoilered and reduced down to the very basics. I hate that about the world now, you know—that you can’t just walk into it. I feel like every panel from the book has been on some Instagram page by now.
Right. When I think about the cult element, obviously there’s QAnon and then there’s just sort of, like, the slavish following the leader.
It feels like everybody’s in their own cult. When I was younger, you felt like the world was made up of a bunch of individual cranks and weirdos, and you’d meet people who were into some conspiracy or a cult, but they could also be totally normal on many other issues. And now it feels like there’s almost this magnetic pull to bring you into each faction. So you have this set of beliefs that everybody in your little clique also believes. And you can’t really deviate from that. It’s like, “Wait, are you, are you in that other clique?” Everybody feels like they’re just sort of part of a little collective in a way that feels very culty.
I’m still just trying to triangulate where in California Monica is set. Nevada City, I was thinking?
Amazing! Oh, weird. I have a good friend who lives in Nevada City. I was thinking that type of city. Mendocino also, something like that, but absolutely informed by Nevada City.
I remember reading Wilson and looking around like, A lot of this looks like Oakland to me.
Yeah, it’s all within a few blocks of my house. It was just all based on where I walked every day. I used to live in Elmwood when I first moved, a few blocks up from Ashby. When I met Adrian [Tomine] through his mini-comic, we were writing letters to each other, and then I was like, “Well, where do you live in Berkeley?” And he lived one block away, just miraculously.
My wife was going to Berkeley. I wanted to move to California really bad, always as a kid. I had an uncle who lived in Livermore; he was a nuclear physicist. So I’d come out here to visit. Compared to Chicago—that just seemed like such a grim, depressing, cold, dying midwestern city—California just seemed like, Why wouldn’t everybody want to live here?•
Daniel Clowes will be appearing at Skylight Books in Los Angeles on October 20.
