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Reading lists

16 mesmerising graphic novels

Patience

Dan Clowes’ most important graphic novel since Ghost World and David Boring

Patience is a new high watermark for the author, but also for the medium as a whole... Clowes is a singular voice, not just in comics but in American literature.

No cartoonist alive devotes as much effort as Daniel Clowes to mapping the differences between the way people see themselves and the way they really are… Clowes’s work is characterized by such technical perfection and well-calibrated acidity… Clowes’s new book, Patience, is an enormous undertaking, not just in length but visually and in narrative scope.

Clowes does realism impeccably…but he is also fond of letting the irruption of the hyperreal or fantastical not so much shift gears as change the entire vehicle… This is a deeply affecting book…its sustained undertow of tenderness and melancholy giving it a surprising delicacy.

Clowes’ drawings are as uncompromisingly honest and deadpan as ever, and the twists towards the end are expertly plotted, making Patience a brilliant addition to his great body of work.

A naturalistic feel and the confidence that many contemporary fiction writers try to achieve… It’s a time-travelling love story by a beautiful, twisted genius.

Clowes mixes retro-styled visuals with eye-poppingly colourful surrealism and although it has the pace of a thriller, it’s also soaked in a feeling of helplessness as its characters struggle to control the world in which they live.

Patience by Daniel Clowes is the NEXT great book you are going to read… But this book is so good it should cross over into the arena of those who don’t normally partake of books in which images and words intersect… read this, fall in love with its majesty… Don’t miss out.

Tender and heartfelt, exciting and bizarre, Patience is interested above all in the stories we tell ourselves about love.

As the time travel escalates the book heads towards entropy, gripping us to the very last panel and reminding us just why Clowes is held in such high regard. This is an essential purchase.

Creating weird worlds, subverting genres and confounding expectations is what Clowes does best.

Daniel Clowes is back and better than ever.

Acerbic, melancholic humour that drips off each and every page… I hope Patience might be the project that finds him the larger audience he deserves.

Patience turns the author’s standard mis en scène of suburban isolation on its head within 13 pages. A portrait of a struggling couple flips into a sprawling, ambitious, time-travel murder-mystery.

Compelling and richly written graphic novel… A comic in genre but a thriller of a nightmarish narrative in execution, the hardback is a colorful, 180-page paean to passion from the lauded US scribbler and screenwriter.

It’s a strangely touching book – a scabrous love story, simultaneously cynical and tender… Unflinchingly observes the trials of a young woman negotiating the difficult transition to adulthood.

Drily funny hardboiled Science Fiction Crime story… This may be Clowes’ most accomplished book to date… there’s the assured, almost relaxed touch of a storyteller and artist at the top of his game… This is a masterful melding of character motivation, action and plot that every writer needs to know.

A welcome return - just as thoughtful, intellectual and valuable as Wilson or Mister Wonderful, but with an added sci-fi angle that's a perfect blend of weird science and paradoxical time travel.

Clowes is a master of immediacy. Even without his elegant illustrations, his dialogue…is so sharp, he establishes characters in just a few bubbles… I read it in one sitting and wanted, like Jack, to start over again.

A beautiful graphic novel that pays equal tribute to 50s comics and the contemporary confessional memoir.

A time-travelling masterpiece full of anger, with the fabulous art for which Clowes is renowned

A brilliant time-travelling rumination on love, bereavement and obsession.

A time-travel epic propelled by slabs of bright, confectionery color and the unhinged grief of a widower… In a year when so much art felt undone in light of current events, Patience is right on time.

Patience is an indescribable psychedelic science-fiction love story, veering with uncanny precision from violent destruction to deeply personal tenderness in a way that is both quintessentially ‘Clowesian’, and utterly unique in the author’s body of work. This 180-page, full-colour story affords Clowes the opportunity to draw some of the most exuberant and breathtaking pages of his life, and to tell his most suspenseful, surprising and affecting story yet. 
 
The story opens in 2012, when Jack Barlow returns home to find Patience, his pregnant girlfriend, murdered. We meet him next in 2029, still haunted by the murder. He hears of a guy who thinks he’s invented a device that enables time travel. On the next page Jack is in 2006, watching Patience on her dates with boys. Is one of them the killer?

The Death Ray

A major new work by comics legend Dan Clowes.

A super knowing romp around the superhero shtick, which knocks all recent competition into a cocked hat.

It's like Holden Caulfield with his phaser set on kill. Phonies beware.

The Death Ray revisits Clowes's trademark mix of eloquent pacing and poignant alienation, while upending the superhero genre to thoughtful and gloriously perverse effect.

It is a terrifying idea, and Clowes does well exploring the consequences of being able to act on every violent inclination.

A neat deconstruction of superhero comics and another fascinating, wryly amusing character study by Clowes.

The Death Ray is the story of teen outcast Andy, an orphaned nobody with only one friend, the obnoxious-but-loyal Louie. They roam school halls and city streets, invisible to everyone but bullies and tormentors, until the glorious day when Andy takes his first puff on a cigarette. That night he wakes, heart pounding, soaked in sweat, and finds himself suddenly overcome with the peculiar notion that he can do anything. Indeed, he can and as he learns the extent of his new powers, he discovers a terrible and seductive gadget - a hideous compliment to his seething rage - that forever changes everything. 
 
The Death-Ray utilizes the classic staples of the superhero genre - origin, costume, ray-gun, sidekick, fight scene - reconfiguring them in a story that is anything but morally simplistic. With subtle comedy, deft mastery and an obvious affection for the bold Pop Art exuberance of comic book design, Daniel Clowes delivers a contemporary meditation on the darkness of the human psyche.

David Boring

A startling follow-up graphic novel by the author of Ghost World.

Imagine a tilted comic-book homage to Hitchcock's Vertigo, but with religious cults, fetishistic scrapbooks and scenes of underwater coupling

For those interested in comic art's potential, Clowes' work offers exciting literary possibilities. Boring is anything but

Daniel Clowes' underground comics are now a hipster must-have. Why? Because his work is beautifully drawn with subtle, convincing storylines centred on everyday emotional weirdness

Discover the adventures of David Boring in this electrifying new graphic novel from the author of Ghost World 
 
David Boring is a nineteen-year-old security guard with a tortured inner life and an obsessive nature. When he meets the girl of his dreams, things begin to go awry: what seems too good to be true apparently is, and what seems truest in Boring's life is that, given the right set of circumstances (in this case a sensational cascade of vengeance, humiliation and murder), the primal nature of mankind will come inexorably to the fore. 
 
'Imagine a tilted comic-book homage to Hitchcock's Vertigo, but with religious cults, fetishistic scrapbooks and scenes of underwater coupling' - Guardian

Ghost World

The astonishing graphic novel that became a cult classic and a major movie.

For once in a comic story, people are portrayed as they really talk and act. Clowes' pitch is uncannily accurate

Clowes' remarkable Ghost World might some day become a primer for the next generation of comics writers and artists... Masterfull

Clowes spells out the realities of teenage angst as powerfully and authentically as Salinger did in Catcher in the Rye for an earlier generation

If ever there was a comic book story meant to be examined by non-comics fans, it's this, a classic in any medium

Not only an amazing comic, but an amazing piece of literature

Clowes is the master of the modern comic book

Daniel Clowes was born in 1961. He is the creator of the comic books Eightball, Ghost World, which was made into a film by the director Terry Zwigoff, David Boring, and Ice Haven. His adaptation of his own Ghost World graphic novel for the screen earned him an Oscar nomination. A regular contributor to the New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and The Best American Comics, he lives in California with his wife.

Ghost World is the story of Enid and Rebecca, teenage friends facing the unwelcome prospect of adulthood, and the uncertain future of their complicated relationship. Clowes conjures a balanced semblance, both tender and objective, of their fragile existence, capturing the mundane thrills and hourly tragedies of a waning adolescence, as he follows a tenuous narrative thread through the fragmented lives of these two fully realised young women.

Daniel Clowes

A master. Perfect fusion of story and art. Clowes is an auteur. Period. A superb narrator

Guillermo del Toro, creator of THE SHAPE OF WATER

A new book by Clowes is always eagerly anticipated... Monica didn&rsquo;t disappoint&hellip; He gives us our own times magnificently disguised as a gorgeous-looking period piece

Clowes just gets better and better&hellip; Monica is really inspiring

This strange and gripping book is often frightening and sometimes deeply sad. But it&rsquo;s also wickedly funny at times&hellip; A series of pitch-perfect portraits&hellip; I could not put it down

The year&rsquo;s most eagerly awaited work... A book that&rsquo;s philosophical as well as playful, and one of his best

Guardian, *Best Graphic Novels of the Year*

Clowes has long been considered one of the finest cartoonists of his generation.... But in Monica, he reaches a new artistic peak... Each section has a beautifully rendered drawing - whether it be a soldier lighting a cigarette or Monica wiping the steam from a bathroom mirror - that can be held up among the best of his career

It is precisely Clowes&rsquo;s lower-frequency sensitivities toward the suffering of his characters that power what many consider his greatest works - Ghost World, for one - and elevate his latest graphic novel, Monica, to the status of a masterpiece

Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Novel

A thrilling kaleidoscopic journey&hellip; Fans will need little excuse to fling themselves into this genre-hopping work. But casual readers shouldn&rsquo;t fret. Monica&rsquo;s story, despite being told in themed fragments, with gaps that sometimes stretch for decades, is full of drama... A rich, clever work

The rare cartoonist whose graphic novels become cultural events

One of the most notable comic artists of our era, a pillar of the '80s-'90s scene who's continued to do great work up to the present day

Clowes' stories demand real attachment, and the more time I spent with Monica, the more I felt moved by the emotional ambition of its decades-long narrative

No cartoonist alive devotes as much effort as Daniel Clowes to mapping the differences between the way people see themselves and the way they really are

A new Daniel Clowes release is always a cause for celebration - and with Monica, it&rsquo;s another career highlight

Clowes delights in confounding expectations

I can think of few other artists in the medium who marry their style so perfectly to their subject matter... Clowes is going from strength to strength

In classic fashion, Clowes offers another devastating, surreal examination of human nature... A hauntingly precise and compellingly strange study of the human struggle to reconcile a decentered past with a path forward

This is Monica, one ordinary woman&rsquo;s extraordinary journey through the history of comics &ndash; from the creator of Ghost World 
 
***AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023*** 
 
'Pitch-perfect... Could not put it down' OBSERVER 
 
'In Monica, Clowes reaches a new artistic peak' VANITY FAIR 
 
A dazzling, spectacular tapestry of interconnected narratives that together tell a life story, Monica is the new graphic novel from one of the most iconic storytellers of all time. This eponymous protagonist is a rag-to-riches character who, after being abandoned by her freewheelin' parents in childhood, succeeds in clawing her way to the top - only to lose it all in a stroke of bad luck. She lives out the rest of her days in search of her parents, encountering a cast of eccentric characters who help to piece together her story. 
 
This graphic novel extravaganza is an unforgettable ode to the many genres that have defined the comics form - from war, romance and horror to crime and the supernatural. Mysterious, uncategorisable and quintessentially Clowesian, here is a multi-layered masterpiece born of a lifetime of inspiration. Monica marks the creative apex of Daniel Clowes' distinguished career, one of the defining voices of the graphic novel boom over the past quarter-century.

Daniel Clowes

Books by Daniel Clowes

Articles featuring Daniel Clowes

16 mesmerising graphic novels

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