Radiant Comics

I’m back from the comic shop and I only got one new comic this week:

And now for a review of something I’ve read recently.

“Wilson” is an original graphic novel by Clowes. That means it hasn’t been serialized in his comic “Eightball” as have his other stories so this is all new to me.

“Wilson” is structured like a bunch of Sunday comic strips. Each page is a little world of it’s own with a beginning, middle, and end. At first it played like a gag-a-day comics before moving into an overall larger story. Clowes also changes his drawing style from page to page. Some pages are drawn in a cartoony stlye, some in a more “realistic” illustrative style, and some fall in between. It all works well together though. It doesn’t seem abrupt or out of place.

Wilson is the name of the lead character who does almost all the talking throughout the book. He’s a middle aged man who doesn’t have much going on in life but his own misery. Wilson is a navel gazer about his own unhappiness and wants to change and find some happiness but inevitably sabotages himself all the time. He’s mean to people and though he may be truthful he is also hurtful.

“Wilson” starts out with Wilson going about his every day life of walking his dog and not doing much. There was no plot for a while except gags about life. Then the twists and turns started. Wilson was pretty much the same angry, introspective, ant-social guy all along but things got really weird for him. I won’t go into the details of the plot because that would ruin the fun but it was interesting.

I liked Wilson. The book and the character. Well, maybe I wouldn’t actually hang out with the character if he were real because he was miserable and could be mean but I liked that he thought about things. He had ideas about the world unlike most people who go out of their way not to think. Sure a lot of his ideas were unpleasant but the world isn’t always a great place.