Daniel Clowes’ “Monica” is rich and confounding, an artful comic exploring what it’s like to seek but never fully find.  

It’s told in vignettes centering on the title character, a girl whose mother gets caught up in the counterculture and ends up abandoning her. Monica spends much of her life trying to figure out that act. Even in what should be a successful adulthood, she remains trapped in the past, snared by the need to understand what happened to her mother, and by extension, to her.

This quest is anything but straightforward. There are hippie cults, Lovecraftian figures, ghost radios and vague intimations of some apocalyptic event. But there’s also the normal stuff of life: ex-boyfriends, aimless youth, the possibilities of late-life romance. To complicate things further, Monica is prone to writing stories, and some of these fictional accounts enter the narrative, weird little sections in the vein of old Creepy Comics or the “Tales of the Black Freighter” interludes in Watchmen.

Clowes is assured at capturing it all, from cult derangement to edge-of-apocalypse noir to the day-to-day vibes of just never quite fitting in. I found the least fantastical scenes the most engaging. My heart sank with each dippy new lover Monica’s mom takes on; when Monica meets a man she can share her stories with, I was eager for her “October” romance to work out.

The art is excellent throughout, detailed, expressive, carefully blocked and plotted. Clowes’ lines are precise and fine, like something John Severin might offer. But the story itself resists easy explanation. I typically resist ambiguity in this vein, but Clowes is so assured and intentional with what he offers here that I ended up being captivated instead.