Once Upon a Time at the End of the World Vol. 1: Love in the Wasteland
Jason Aaron, writer; Alexandre Tefenkgi, illustrator; Lee Loughridge, colorist; with Nick Dragotta, illustrator and Rico Renzi, colorist
BOOM! Studios, 2023

There are dystopian stories, and then there’s the End of the World. The story opens with our heroine Mezzy sailing through glaciers of melted plastic, fields of green glowing ice, and above wild infernos raging in the deep (complete with a sea scabbed with ash and pockmarked with geysers of gushing black fire). Nothing living, which was good news apart from the food problem. But when her boat springs a leak she is forced to seek refuge in a skyscraper. Our hero Maceo almost uses his defenses against her but decides to save her from attacking mutant creatures instead. He tells her he is alone in the tower, and gives her a tour.

She turns down his invitation to stay and exits via the back door. But before long he comes afer her, loaded down with a huge backpack full of supplies and an endless supply of chatter. At first he needs a lot of looking after–it is his first time out in the world, after all–but soon he begins to demostrate useful skills. He really is an inventor, capable of incredible feats using scrap parts. Gradually the two come to care for each other, and their love story is the core of the story.

But there are other parts to the narrative that hint at a larger narrative. The first are the “Years later” flash-forward sequences, which shows a future with an aged, battle-hardened Mace, who has apparently become estranged from Mezzy. The second is the Wasteland Rangers, the survivalist cult than Mezzy escaped from. They have been after Mezzy, and when they catch up with the pair at the climax of this collection everything changes.

What a great beginning to the series! Alexandre Tefenkgi and Lee Loughridge’s art fits the narrative perfectly, from surreal creatures and environments to character designs. The flash-forwards feature a contrasting expressionistic style from Nick Dragotta and Rico Renzi. It will be fascinating to see where the story goes next. The collection concludes with several Script to Page examples and character designs.

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Monica
Daniel Clowes
Fantagraphics, 2023

Monica is the protagonist of this graphic novel, but the narrative ranges far wider than her life story, extending into social commentary about the mid-Twentieth Century, as well as including plenty of surreal experiences. The focus is on her mother Penny at first. Penny is a bit of a lost soul: we first meet her as she is cheating on her fiancee, who is serving in Vietnam. She eventually sends him a Dear John letter, and proceeds to jump from one man to another. When she gets pregnant she surprises everyone by keeping the baby, which brings Monica into the picture.

She hooks up with a man named Davis and establishes a successful business called “Monica’s Candles.” Then there was a succesion of men before her old beau Johnny came back into her life. Just when it looks like they might have a normal family life, Penny runs off with her. She leaves Monica with her parents (who raised her), and Monica never saw her mother again.

Flash-forward to Monica at college, suffering the loss of her beloved grandmother (her grandfather had passed earlier). This hits her hard, because she now had no remaining family. She goes to her granparents’ lake cottage to clear it out for sale. There she has a paranormal experience: her dead grandfather communicates with her via a transistor radio. She finally sends her boyfriend away, buries the radio, and drives away, crashing her car and going into a coma.

Next thing we know it is 22 years later. Monica has resurrected the Monica’s Candles business, which became so successful that she was able to sell it to a retail chain. But she still desperately wants to reconect with her mother, so much so that she leaves all of her possesions behind to track her into the cult she joined when she abandoned Monica as a child. After many bizarre adventures Monica manages to find her mother and her father, though neither encounters were very satisfying. In the end she drives back to the cottage, digs up the radio, and follows its instructions, ending the story with chaos and the release of demons. It is a bizarre non-sequiter that somehow feels like an appropriate conclusion. On one level this is a biography, but as usual with Clowes, strange things lie just below the surface.