With MONICA (Fantagraphics), legendary cartoonist Daniel Clowes has pushed the limits of his storytelling and art to make one of the great graphic novels of the decade. We sat down during CXC weekend to talk about this amazing, haunting, hilarious book and how it grew out of his attempts at trying to figure out his childhood, the ways in which MONICA is haunted by the deaths of cartoonists Richard Sala and Gary Leib (oh, and those of Daniel's brother and mom), what art, community and mortality have come to mean to him, and how certain panels took him 5 years to draw. We get into what he's learned from using multiple genres within a single book, the artists who influenced him and the ones he had to escape, the 7-year gap from his previous book, PATIENCE, and what's changed, and his late-stage depression at finishing MONICA. We also discuss how he was always awaiting the shift from pamphlet-comics to hardcover original books, how thankful he was to not be good enough to get work at Marvel or DC in his youth, what it's like writing and drawing his books without any editorial input, his only takeaway from writing for movies, the Americanness of his comics, why he prefers drawing over writing even though A) he's a really good writer and B) would never draw from someone else's script, the only advice he would ever give young artists, and a lot more. Follow Daniel (sorta) on Twitter and Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal and via our Substack