Space-Time, Romance and Grit: A Review of Daniel Clowes’s Patience / Matthew Quann

Space-Time, Romance and Grit:

A Review of Daniel Clowes’s Patience

Matthew Quann

Patience (Fantagraphics, 2016), Daniel Clowes’s five-years-in-the-making graphic novel, is a fairly standard time-travel romance story with enough snappy dialogue and wacky art to warrant the price of admission.

The first thing that hit me when I took Patience out of the box is its striking hardcover design. The front is a bust of the eponymous character at the centre of a wheel from which psychedelic spokes shoot out. The silver reflective title demands the reader’s (or casual shopper’s) attention while Patience herself looks directly at her audience. On the verso: our hero, Jack Barlow, surrounded by pie-slices of his adventure through time. Book binding may seem a nitpicky thing to also bring up, but so many comics these days lose a lot of their content in the gutters. Not so with Patience, whose binding is perfectly suited to its large splash pages and multitude of “talking head” panels.

Clowes’s artwork speaks to a master in his prime deciding to flex some different muscles. While Clowes’s character work has always been good, I was happy to see that he dove into some truly trippy page layouts and scenes. The Death-Ray, Clowes’s previous effort, was a good test run of his particular brand of science-fiction hipster storytelling, but he just goes absolutely mad in Patience. While there’s nothing particularly special about the time-travel plot line, the depiction of time travel and its physical/psychological side effects are dizzying in their adoption of ’80s sci-fi kitsch.

I’ve read and heard criticism of Clowes’s depiction of faces, but I find it to be one of the most appealing aspects of his work. What worked for me in this graphic novel was the relationship between Patience and Jack, which is only complimented by Clowes’s ability to nail the depiction of emotion. While I thought that a lot of the dialogue, narration, and scenes were genuinely funny, there’s not a whole lot to dig into from the time-travel narrative perspective. The story isn’t groundbreaking, and isn’t all that concerned with the theoretical underpinnings of time travel. What Clowes wants the audience to know is that Jack has the opportunity to prevent Patience’s death; the rest is just semantics as far as Patience is concerned.

So, there’s nothing really wrong with this graphic novel, and it would make a fine addition to anyone’s shelf, especially fans of Clowes. The weaknesses are minor, and Clowes more than makes up for them by putting his own particular spin on a story that you’ve read before. While the concept was intriguing, it was the art and character work that really sold me on this project. If you’re a bit worn out on the time-travel/romance genre (if it isn’t a section at your bookstore, find a new one), then maybe leave this for another time. Overall, Patience is an undeniably pretty graphic novel, despite it being wanting in the plot department.

All comics images taken from Patience by Daniel Clowes. Copyright 2016 Fantagraphics Books.