It’s been nearly 20 years since Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World first hit the shelves. In that time, the angsty graphic classic has exploded; gaining a huge cult following, and spawning an equally adored, Oscar-nominated movie spin-off. Starring Enid Coleslaw and Rebecca Doppelmeyer – the pseudo-intellectual teen leads – the book shattered comic cliches, and offered salvation to the cynics, misfits, and outsiders of the world.

Now, for the first time in five years, Clowes has returned with new graphic novel, Patience – an “indescribable psychedelic science-fiction love story”. Marketed as his biggest and “most ambitious” project yet, the plot follows a couple who are about to have a baby, until the wife is mysteriously found dead on the floor of their house. The husband, driven by depression, then steals a neighbour’s time machine – leading him through a number of far-out plot twists that have him reassessing his own mortality.

“In many ways I was trying to write my own religion,” Clowes told Seattle News. “If I had to imagine what the fabric of the universe was like, what you would see behind the curtains of reality, this was it.”

Patience is available now