Lucy Ellmann

Teenage girls all over the world have suddenly developed electro-magnetic powers that can be unleashed on anybody who bugs them. The effect of these electrical jolts ranges from a tingly sensation to scarring, shock, pain, permanent disability, dismemberment and sometimes death. So girls have all the ‘power’ now. Older women soon start zapping too, and thereby move into high office and make millions. It is the end of patriarchy as we know it: almost overnight, women’s tolerance of bullying and sexual harassment sinks to zero, and men start dropping like flies. They now become the world’s cowering victims, servants, slaves and playthings. Men have to adapt swiftly to their new lowly status, and to kinky, often catastrophic, types of sex.

If you could travel back in time, would you kill Hitler’s mother, seek out your old house and play ball with your former self, or locate your (eventual) wife during her unhappy adolescence and punch her violent boyfriends? These are the dilemmas facing Jack, the hero of Daniel Clowes’s latest graphic novel. The murderous attitude towards Hitler’s mother (rather than towards Hitler himself) fits right in with an underlying misogyny throughout. Indebted to Hollywood for most of its ideas and its deficiencies, Patience only squeaks by in the Bechdel test. It begins wittily enough with the tip of a penis, a semi-circle of cervix, and a big white splodge in between. Across this romantic conception scene the year 2012 is emblazoned.