Cover of ‘Patience’ by Daniel Clowes, published by Fantagraphics Books (2016) (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)
Imagine confronting past versions of yourself — would you recognize
your present self in them or feel completely alienated? Cartoonist
Daniel Clowes found himself in this position when he was preparing for his first museum
retrospective
at the Oakland Museum in 2012. In order to select material for the
show, he had to examine his earlier material, facing the style and
vision of his younger self. “I started digging through all my old crap
in my flat files and kind of facing that person that I was,” Clowes
explained to Nicole Rudick of
The Paris Review at the Strand
a few weeks ago. “I felt like I couldn’t even relate to that person who
I was. It felt like such a strange dialogue with this earlier version
of myself.” Around the same time, five years ago, Clowes began working
on his recently released book,
Patience,
in which the narrator, Jack, is similarly forced to face his earlier
selves. But in this case, it’s not a metaphorical facing of the past,
but a literal one involving romance, murder, and time travel across
several decades.
The narrative present is 2029, but the story begins in 2012, when
Jack Barlow comes home one day to find his wife, Patience, has been
murdered. The story jumps ahead to 2029, where Jack is recalling this
moment in a futuristic-looking bar, colored in pastel blues, pinks, and
creams. In an effort to save his wife and remedy his own life, Jack
finds a way to go back in time to try and prevent the murder.
Characteristic of Clowes’s stories, the task proves to be more
challenging and tragic than expected.
Spread from ‘Patience’ by Daniel Clowes
Talking with Rudick, Clowes explained the seeds for the story, planted in 1995 when he was working on the serial comic
Eightball.
“Anything that popped into my head that had a sort of visceral feel to
it, I would try to turn into something,” he remembered. “The only thing
that I had was a guy from the future who was sort of a bull in a china
shop, sort of marching through the modern world destroying everything in
his path.” This certainly describes Jack of 2029, barreling through
various levels of his past unable to control his time travel accurately.
While the focus of the story is on whether or not he will
successfully save Patience, the more interesting moments are when, as a
consequence of Jack’s lack of control, different timelines collide,
bringing characters face to face with themselves and their memories of
the past. At one point, Jack goes back too far in time, to 1985, when he
was just a child. In a comical scene he attempts to pay with a 5 dollar
bill from the future, raising alarm and accusations from the store
clerk. Alone and discouraged, Jack thinks, “I should be overwhelmed,
returning to the world of my childhood, who the hell gets to do that?”
But underlying his words is another question: Who would want to do that?
Spread from ‘Patience’ by Daniel Clowes
Later, still in the years of his youth, he stumbles upon his
childhood home. “It’s crazy how it all comes back, all the little
bullshit things you forget about. The shapes made by the electrical
wires and the way the air smells,” 2029 Jack thinks as he walks down his
street. The vantage point hovers just above his head. At first he’s
pictured looking in the distance, but what he looks at is out of frame.
Then we see the “stains in the snow,” as he recalls details of his
hometown. Finally, Jack stands across the street facing his childhood
home. He speaks with his mother: asking where his father is, reminding
her to take her diabetes medicine, a disease she has yet to be diagnosed
with in 1985. He briefly tosses a football with his kid self. Later, he
thinks, “When I was standing on that porch, part of me wanted to stop
everything and move back in, be a father to myself, a husband to my
mom.” Clowes touches on the dissonance between memories and reality; our
desire to change the past and ease our growing pains, while knowing
that would never be possible, even if we could travel back in time.
Spread from ‘Patience’ by Daniel Clowes
At the Strand, Rudick asked Clowes about his working process, how he
builds his stories and knows what to keep and what to let go. “You have
to trust you know the world,” Clowes explained. “Once you’ve done a few
pages, it’s done. It becomes sort of inevitable. I always want to go
back and redraw. And sometimes I do. But then I always regret it. I
think the first one was always the right one.” It would be too simple to
draw a parallel between Clowes’s own feelings about revising past work
and Jack’s struggle to edit the ending of his own life, but there is an
interesting connection. Looking back over his past work, and his past
self, Clowes explained, “I started to think of all the events in my life
that lead from me being that guy to being who I am now. It was all just
very random happenstance moments.” He shared the story of how he met
his wife at a comic signing — she happened to have seen an ad in a
magazine that was likewise only placed as a consequence of another
chance event.
Jack also finds his circumstances immensely altered due to small
chance occurrences. As he haplessly plummets forward and backward
through time, he continuously berates himself for failing to follow his
plan, aware that even the slightest changes in the past could alter his
future in 2029, to which he worries he will never be able to return.
Towards the end of
Patience, Jack makes yet another unplanned
jump in time and suddenly realizes, “I hadn’t fucked anything up;
everything, even the stupidest shit, had happened for a reason.” All of
his actions in the past created the situation in the future that allowed
him to go back in time. With that switch in time, the narrator also
switches to Patience, narrating from 2012, the year in which the book
starts.
Spread from ‘Patience’ by Daniel Clowes
Patience remains the narrator for the conclusion of the book, as Jack
struggles to prevent her death, the date and time of which rapidly
approach. The tension becomes less and less about whether or not
Patience will survive, but instead what Jack’s motives are. No longer
able to return to 2029, does Jack hope to rekindle his happiness with
Patience or save her for his 2012 self to grow old with?
Like the impulse to change past work, facing past selves is not just
about grappling with our past, but also recognizing how past choices
create present and future selves. As Rudnick noted in the conversation,
Clowes’s characters seem to constantly struggle with free will. Despite
Jack’s ability to travel in time, he has very little control over
outcomes. Yet every choice he makes pushes him closer to his inevitable
future. The book concludes with 2029 Jack’s final revelation, “the more I
saw […] the more it all seemed to matter; every moment, every choice.”
The greatest action in Clowes’s time-travel murder mystery isn’t the
violence, surprise twists, or trippy visuals, it is whether Jack will
choose to give into the lure of his past or accept the future he has
created.
Patience by Daniel Clowes, out from Fantagraphics Books, is available on Amazon and other online booksellers.
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