CLOWES'S GHOST WORLD is one of the great graphic novels, I would say, and this new one is impressive. Monica is born to and for a few years raised by Penny, a young woman caught up in the dodgier, more sordid turbulences of the 1960s. It's not certain who her father is. Monica is only four or five when Penny, on the threshold of marrying her high-school sweetheart, a returned Vietnam vet and not Monica's father, takes off and joins a cult. Monica is left to be raised by Penny's parents.
Much of the book is about Monica's adult life and the long shadows of Penny's disappearance. Monica decides to give up everything else in her life to find her mother, which leads to an extended stay in what is left of the cult as well as tracking down any paternity clues she can.
It's an often grim and dispiriting tale, but Monica does seem to have achieved some understanding and equilibrium once she hits her sixties. And then...
...I wasn't sure what to make of the ending, which abruptly flips a switch to turn on some supernatural, otherworldly horror. I didn't feel quite prepared for it, although an early chapter that seemed a digression from the main plot may have been a clue to dark secret powers percolating through the story.
Ghost World also had a subtle hint of the supernatural and otherworldly at the end...that was fine, I thought. This time, I'm not so sure.
Clowes does seem to be true to the weltanschauung of the old EC Tales from the Crypt-style horror comics, though. The visual style of the book is very EC--heavy black outlines, lurid colors, chiaroscuro effects--so maybe the oozing Lovecraftian terrors under the bland everyday surfaces make narrative sense. It bothered me, though, that Monica's hard-won serenity was so catastrophically overturned in the final page.
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