![]() If Clowes weren't so deft at capturing Marshall's anxiety, the whole thing might seem slight. ![]() Mister Wonderful, which was originally serialized in The New York Times Magazine, is the story of where this one blind date takes these two lonely characters. The tension Clowes creates is the intimate, familiar tension of budding romance, fraught with peril at every turn those stakes are high indeed. It must be kind of awful."Ĭlowes characterizes his hero's nervous self-involvement by deliberately placing that bit of inner monologue, and many others, over Natalie's word balloons, so that Marshall's paranoid fears and fantasies literally block us from hearing her. "Most beautiful women turn so bitter when the realities of aging set in," he thinks. ![]() Marshall, for his part, decided the second she walked into the coffee shop that Natalie is much too attractive a woman to tolerate his odious presence, so the fact that she is still sitting there, laughing at his jokes, means there must be something wrong with her. As their evening together wears on, the ruthlessly self-deprecating Marshall will provide Natalie with plenty of opportunities to change her mind on that score. She certainly doesn't appear to, although it should be noted that the poor woman has only just sat down. "Dear God," thinks Marshall, the hero of Daniel Clowes' new graphic novel, as he gazes across the table at his blind date Natalie, "could it be? Does she actually not loathe me?" ![]()
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