Patience is a psychedelic science-fiction love story, veering with uncanny precision from violent destruction to deeply personal tenderness in a way that is both quintessentially Clowesian and utterly unique in the author's body of work. This 180-page, full-color original graphic novel affords Clowes the opportunity to draw some of the most exuberant and breathtaking pages of his life, and to tell his most suspenseful, surprising and affecting story yet.
After his pregnant wife, Patience, is killed, Jack lives in misery for decades until he discovers a way to travel through time in hopes of stopping the murder. When Jack visits the past, he learns things about his wife and her years as a young adult that she has kept from him, including several physically violent and emotionally damaging encounters with previous men. While some teens will empathize with the despondent Patience, who feels like she is trapped by her circumstances, others will get caught up in the time chase. Clowes uses time travel as a vehicle to create vivid, mind-blowing images with a bright and colorful palette. With a classic like Ghost World under his belt, Daniel Clowes already has a legion of graphic novel fans, and although the subject matter differs here, his signature drawing style is recognizable. VERDICT This time-travel love story will pick up fans of slow-burning thrillers and graphic novels, especially those already familiar with Clowes's work.—Carrie Shaurette, Dwight-Englewood School, Englewood, NJ
"Deeply felt and winding story of love and the limits of time nestled within an operatic science-fiction structure that is bursting with wild colors and page design."
― Artinfo
"Patience is incredibly captivating – a stunning marriage of text, image, and design, and a demonstration of Clowes' sheer mastery of the art of sequential storytelling. A must-have for any graphic novel section."
― Booklist
"Disturbing, convoluted, darkly comic and just plain dark, the book itself is a thing of beauty. The book's self-awareness and sympathy make it more than just an exercise in the mixing of genres, but it's in this unabashed mixing that Clowes creates a story that is as transcendent as it is upsetting ― and affirming."
― Chicago Tribune
"DAN CLOWES. American. A master. Perfect fusion of story and art. Clowes is an auteur. Period. A superb narrator. Patience is the rare time travel tale that fully delivers."
― Guillermo Del Toro
"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."
― Hyperallergic
"A world where time travel is as real as love. The humanity of this futuristic thriller is alarmingly palpable. It's final pages left me close to tears but filled with hope."
― Lenny Letter
"A huge gorgeous slab of a book with drawings so sumptuous and vibrant I wanted to plaster them all over my walls."
― Longreads
"A genuine, selfless love story that stretches out across space and time, and it isn't spoiling things to say you may well have your mind pleasantly expanded by the ending."
― Mashable
"Some of the freakiest art Clowes has ever drawn."
― New York Magazine
"Daniel Clowes's new graphic novel is a time-travel thriller filtered through his own furiously warped sensibility. ... Nobody draws reality curdling around its edges like Clowes... and Jack's all-devouring quest for vengeance mutates his story from a sci-fi whodunit to psychedelic psychological horror."
― Douglas Wolk, Playboy
"A bizarre masterwork."
― Publishers Weekly
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Clowes plumbs the depths of science fiction in this intriguingly bizarre love story. One of the best releases of 2016.
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― Publishers Weekly
"The creator of Ghost World writes a psychedelic science fiction love story, veering with uncanny precision from violent destruction to deeply personal tenderness in a way that is both quintessentially Clowesian and unique in the author’s body of work."
― Heidi MacDonald, Publishers Weekly
"Clowes’ latest work finds the graphic novelist at the height of his powers, employing all the mind-bending talent he can muster."
― San Francisco Chronicle
"Each panel reminds us that every moment matters."
― Slate
"Tender and heartfelt, exciting and bizarre, Patience is interested above all in the stories we tell ourselves about love. Loyalty can be toxic, for all that we prize it. Patience isn’t always a virtue; sometimes, it’s just a time bomb in disguise."
― The Guardian
"You cannot help but feel carried along by a true master of the form, a cartoonist working at the very height of his powers. Anew high watermark for the author, but also for the medium as a whole. It is not just his longest work, but his most affecting, and the powerful emotional punch of the closing pages is one that will stay with the reader for a long time."
― The Independent
"The vibrant colouring leaps off the page – averitable rainbow of vice and iniquity. And the flamboyance with which he illustrates the various drug trips and nightmare visions that punctuate is a joy to behold."
― The Independent
"A shadowy, lysergic trip down nostalgia lane. Full of Clowesian magic ― visceral portraits, melting reality, and clean, beautiful artwork. Like riding a Robert Williams painted pony into the sunset, it's a trippy experience, and disconcertingly tender amid its bursts of violence."
― The Portland Mercury
"Gripping to the very last panel. This is an essential purchase."
― The Quietus
"I can’t think of another example in comics to compare to Clowes at this point in his career: never to my knowledge has an artist with so many phenomenal books to his name made such a shift in his style so dramatically and so successfully."
― The Seattle Review of Books
"You turn a page and boom, an enormous spread punches you in the face."
― The Seattle Weekly
"A time-traveling love story by a beautiful, twisted genius."
― Vice
"His most complex narrative yet."
― WIRED
