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Post by jporcellino on Oct 24, 2023 23:54:02 GMT
WHEN IT RAINS IT POURS DEPT.:
After a week, Amazon told me they weren't sure if/when my copy would ship, so I tracked a copy down at my semi-local shop and bought it there yesterday. Went to go cancel my AMZ order and they had shipped it at about the exact time I was checking out at the LCS. Today the book shows up at IST for 30% off cover.
C'est la guerre.
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Post by timbecile on Oct 25, 2023 14:30:55 GMT
Never seen a book get better press: "Daniel Clowes Shows You How to Fight Loneliness" "Daniel Clowes Will Not Explain Monica" "Daniel Clowes is Ready to Face the Truth" "Daniel Clowes Sees the Horror in Mundanity" "Daniel Clowes Forgets his House Key and has to hop the fence and reach through the pet door" I liked the two longer stories the best. Got tired of all the narration and classic Clowes faces staring dead-on. The added bits about Monica being the author of the other stories I could take or leave. The opening spread is so self-aggrandizing it makes me laugh.
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Post by dominocorp on Oct 25, 2023 15:49:18 GMT
Got tired of all the narration... I still need to read it, but I was looking over Ghost World recently and it's amazing how that has ZERO narration, it's his most pure cartooning, characters simply acting on the page...now that I have some distance from it, I wonder if that's a Jaime influence thing. It seems like around Ice Haven (which I still hold as the best one, though reading a few pages from GW re-alerted me to how absolutely amazing it is) he gets really into narration, Johnny Craig type comics.
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luke
New Member
Posts: 46
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Monica
Oct 25, 2023 17:30:27 GMT
Post by luke on Oct 25, 2023 17:30:27 GMT
Got tired of all the narration... I still need to read it, but I was looking over Ghost World recently and it's amazing how that has ZERO narration, it's his most pure cartooning, characters simply acting on the page...now that I have some distance from it, I wonder if that's a Jaime influence thing. It seems like around Ice Haven (which I still hold as the best one, though reading a few pages from GW re-alerted me to how absolutely amazing it is) he gets really into narration, Johnny Craig type comics. What do you think of Wilson? That one is also narration-free. For my money, it's Clowes' best late work by far.
I have a toe in "literary" (prose) writing/publishing where nowadays critical reception is precisely commensurate with amount of promotional push. It seems like there's something similar going on with Monica. Clowes and Fanta seem to really be pounding the pavement with this book, much more than usual, with seeds planted starting well before it was published--I'm thinking of how the Complete Eightball softcover got way more press than the original hardcover release, what with Clowes even bestowing his presence on the Kayfabe boys for the occasion! Not that it doesn't deserve the attention or that a new Clowes book isn't a big deal (it is to me, certainly; he's probably my number-one favorite cartoonist ever). But the unequivocal praise for Monica from mainline outlets is surprising given how the book feels (to me at least) fairly insular in its appeal to Clowes-heads and hardcore comics people compared to Wilson or Ghost World or even something like The Death Ray.
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Monica
Oct 25, 2023 18:57:53 GMT
Post by dominocorp on Oct 25, 2023 18:57:53 GMT
I still need to read it, but I was looking over Ghost World recently and it's amazing how that has ZERO narration, it's his most pure cartooning, characters simply acting on the page...now that I have some distance from it, I wonder if that's a Jaime influence thing. It seems like around Ice Haven (which I still hold as the best one, though reading a few pages from GW re-alerted me to how absolutely amazing it is) he gets really into narration, Johnny Craig type comics. What do you think of Wilson? That one is also narration-free. For my money, it's Clowes' best late work by far.
I liked it ok, but I liked Mr Wonderful a lot better. Parts of Wilson (and this won't make sense probably) felt too late period Brunetti working from that (to me, way too limited) cartoon system, but that might just be my faulty memory. It'd be a classic from anyone else. I did reread Patience in the last few months and---it's leagues away from everyone else in terms of pulling somehting like that off, but I really didn't like how screenwriting it got twoards the end. 'No, it's THIS guy who is the killer all along! And he's in the house rn!' It felt like Clowes main theme---'i'm a violent reactionary but after all I'm basically an ok guy, right?'---served up a little too neatly. I sat down and looked at Deitch's Reincarnation Stories after re-reading and thought about how Deitch's project, later in life, allows him a lot more freedom in how to tell a story and the work just feels more alive. But they're different artists of course...
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luke
New Member
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Post by luke on Oct 25, 2023 21:30:38 GMT
Interesting, that makes me want to reread Mr. Wonderful, which I've always regarded as minor for probably unfair reasons. I remember Clowes talking candidly about how calculated he was in crafting it as something that couple appeal to his imagined typical New York Times Magazine reader. Not in a cynical work-for-hire way, more as a formal exercise or artistic challenge.
I love Deitch and think he's insanely overlooked for someone of his stature. I treasure my signed and sketched-in Boulevard of Broken Dreams I got from him as a teenager in 2002 at a co-signing with Clowes. Truth be told, at the time I knew nothing about his work and only got the book because I felt sorry for him. Clowes's line was out the door and his was totally empty! Too bad he signed the book to "Lou" instead of "Luke," though.
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Post by whitecomics on Oct 26, 2023 15:09:25 GMT
luke do you think this is significantly worse in literary prose world than in comics world? I'd find that mildly encouraging for comics if so... Just finished my first Monica read, still ruminating. Ice World and to a lesser extent Wilson are my favorite Clowes, which surely has something to do with the fact that I like newspaper strips more than other notable Clowes influences (I can appreciate but don't much enjoy reading EC or Wayne Boring). But also I think the strip vernacular lends itself well to Clowes' piecemeal storytelling approach -- "It's just another shithole, filled with worthless pigs" in Ice Haven is a fairly perfect single-panel distillation of that notable Clowes theme. Here, on the other hand, it can be hard to tell to what extent the narration is an EC pastiche but whatever the motivations I do find it overwritten at times. Someone mentioned Beto's B-movie work which is a useful comparison, it strikes me that Building Stories is another one -- a constellation of stories that are sometimes suggested to be written or imagined by a female protagonist, in a way that it's not immediately clear which stories are fiction. Though funnily, a big clue in Building Stories about which strips are in-story fiction is overwritten narrative prose...
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Monica
Oct 26, 2023 16:50:50 GMT
Post by jporcellino on Oct 26, 2023 16:50:50 GMT
Just finished my first read. Mind still reconstituting.
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luke
New Member
Posts: 46
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Post by luke on Oct 30, 2023 15:10:22 GMT
luke do you think this is significantly worse in literary prose world than in comics world? I'd find that mildly encouraging for comics if so... Well, yes, but the comics world has its own problems, namely that there just aren't many outlets with reach that bother to cover comics on either a promotional or critical level, and comics publishers have few resources with which to reach those outlets. When a comic like Monica penetrates the mainstream press, it's because it's already been determined important/good enough to be worthy of that coverage. Ed Park has a very occasional (and not great) column of comics capsule reviews in the New York Times that sometimes pans books, but that's about it.
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Monica
Oct 30, 2023 21:13:27 GMT
Post by mikesheawright on Oct 30, 2023 21:13:27 GMT
pretty shameless jerk off sesh with clowes in TCJ today.
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Post by pentimento on Oct 31, 2023 1:43:04 GMT
Yeah, same questions and answers in the other 12 interviews I've read/listened to with him the last week, pathetic. He's like an AI PR machine, it's embarrassing. Maybe his intern is actually giving the interviews.
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Post by Sean Knickerbocker on Oct 31, 2023 21:58:50 GMT
I'm starting my 2nd reading of Monica tonight. It hasn't been my favorite Clowes comic, though I like it quite a bit. Taking off on what JM said in his TCJ review, I think the color of the pages hint as to when Monica is writing these stories. I'll be thinking about this on my 2nd reading.
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Post by disneyweirdness on Nov 18, 2023 18:25:42 GMT
My library finally got copies. I tore through it this afternoon, I gotta think about it a bit before I have an opinion. First impression, I liked it a lot (especially the cult stuff) but not as much as i liked Patience.
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Ian M
Junior Member
Posts: 68
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Post by Ian M on Nov 25, 2023 1:35:11 GMT
I finished it yesterday, and I loved it. I liked Patience a lot, but there was some emotional barrier for me, I couldn't completely connect to it. With this, I was pretty much on board from the inside cover.
I hadn't thought about the importance of writing. I got that the interspersed vignette's weren't Monica's life, but I hadn't considered it her writing.
The opening pages and the credit page is a rush of history speeding up to Foxhole (it reminds me of the cacophony in the seconds leading up to Breathe on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon). Because it's Monica's life story, and the story proper begins with her conception (I assume!) in Pretty Penny, I imagined the battle in Foxhole was happening simultaneously to Monica's conception. It's a weird story to put before the story titles otherwise.
The stuff with the grandfather is hard to make sense of, but that'll be for the second read.
The ending, I figured it was metaphorical, in that the universe ends when Monica ends. All of history led up to her existence, and history ends when she's gone.
His works are opaque enough that there's a Rorschach Test quality to figuring them out.
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