Mister Wonderful

Daniel Clowes’ latest exercise in dysfunctional love affairs smitten by misanthropy concerns the titular, Mister Wonderful, Marshall, a neurotic divorcee who goes on a first date, with the obvious ‘complications’ ensuing.

The woman he meets is perfect: she’s funny, acerbic, laughs at his jokes and throws back her own, but Marshall can’t quite settle into the date and relax, and his neuroses get the better of him, sending them both home earlier than expected. Marshall then accidentally stops the guy who has just purse-snatched his date’s handbag, and on returning it to her, gets a second chance, but this is only the beginning of the night. I’ll leave the plot spoiling there as what ensues is a joy, typically Clowes in its balance of neurotic male leads and the child-like hipsters they chase after, neither party quite ‘getting’ the other.

Clowes’ panels are simple to follow and rely more on the unsaid, the un-thought, than the putdowns and spiky dialogue and this is what marks him out as head and shoulders above any other graphic novelist. He is the master of the understated bittersweetness that life’s disappointments deliver; if he wrote prose, he’d be compared to Raymond Carver or Richard Yates – so let’s do him this service now by declaring Daniel Clowes a Carver/Yates-esque compiler of human misery and the poignancy and humour that it offers.