20 cool psychedelic comics to read after seeing Thor: Ragnarok

Patience (Cover image via Fantagraphics)

10. Patience

At first glance, Daniel Clowes’ Patience looks like it’s going to be one great, big fridge-fest. I’m referring to the unfortunately established comics practice of “fridging” a hero’s loved one (nearly always a woman) in order to give them purpose. Never mind that many other non-murder motivations exist out there.

It got so bad that writer Gail Simone helped establish the Women in Refrigerators website to help people understand how dangerous it could be to be a female character in comics. Even today, sexism in comics remains a pervasive issue.

However, Patience is far more complicated than a horrible throwaway plot line like fridging. Yes, the title character is the wife of the protagonists. Yes, she dies and that does indeed set the plot in motion. Yet, thanks to time travel and Clowes’ questions about love, life, and how someone’s experience creates them, Patience is much deeper.

Jack is the aforementioned protagonist of the story. He’s coming to terms with his wife’s pregnancy, learning to anticipate their coming child with joy. Patience herself is a cipher. When she alludes to her “horrible reality show” life before meeting Jack, he closes his eyes and asks not to hear about it.

Their happiness abruptly ends when he finds Patience dead on the floor of their apartment. And though seventeen years pass, Jack remains devoted to the image of his dead wife.

Things change dramatically when Jack manages to steal a time machine from its inventor. He heads back to pre-Jack Patience, hoping to learn who might have wanted to kill her. However, he soon learns that Patience — or this version of Patience, anyway — might be better off without him. Those extra-strange dissociative episodes don’t help clear things up, either.