A Clowesian schlub spins wheel of fate
You’ve heard the thought experiment before: if you could travel back in time, would you kill baby Hitler?
Could you radically disrupt history and spin that wheel of fate with disregard for your own well-being, the existence of everyone you know, and make unlikely the possibility of a future you so as to prevent a very bad thing?
Jack Barlow, the protagonist in Daniel Clowes’ new neo-noir sci-fi comic Patience, is the sort who’d say, “You bet!” Barlow isn’t concerned with the sophistries the question inspires or the heinousness of the act involved; rather his story is about just how far you’d go to prevent a terrible thing from happening, especially to someone you love.
In one panel, Barlow stands in a supermarket in 1985 with his futuristic blaster weapon drawn on a golden-haired toddler sitting in the flip-down child seat of a shopping cart — that child who would become the man he suspects would murder his wife and unborn child 27 years later. It is, ultimately, a love story. Barlow is a perfectly Clowesian schlub — self-loathing, down-on-his-luck, slightly anti-social and guided by some tightly held principles. When he and his wife Patience learn that she’s pregnant, Barlow decides its time to become a better provider. First, he must confess to Patience that he lied about getting that office job; he’s been handing out “porno flyers” on the street for minimum wage.
A better life lies on the horizon, he thinks, and it starts by coming clean. But when he arrives home, he finds Patience murdered in their apartment.
The cops’ investigation turns up nada. And his own 17-year hunt is unsuccessful. The ghosts of Patience and the child haunt him daily. They’ve made him into a wraith himself. Finding her murderer has become his only mission. Through a fateful connection, he hears about a man who’s developed a time machine. He will travel back in time, he resolves, to stop his beloved’s murder and, with any luck, return to the present, the year 2029, to find a happy life with his family.
At the behest of the device’s inventor, Barlow tries to intervene as little as possible, preserving the space-time continuum as best he can, but following Patience covertly from encounters with abusive exboyfriends to date rapists, he’s compelled to step in.
Like The Death-Ray and its titular ray gun, Patience employs its time machine as the ultimate “if only” device, a leveller for anyone who’s ever felt powerless.