Drawn

Daniel Clowes’s new graphic novel Wilson comes out next week. I’ve read it, and loved it.

The antihero Wilson is a not unfamiliar Clowes character. He’s a cynical loner type reflecting on a life of failed relationships, both familial and romantic.

But where it gets interesting for me is in the cartooning itself.

The story is made up of individual standalone one-page gags, each reminiscent of a large Sunday comic strip, but telling a larger story when stitched together. This sense of reading the Sunday funnies is compounded by Clowes’s decision to draw these pages in a wide range of cartoon styles, each different from the next. So the reading experience is both entirely familiar, and unlike anything else I’ve read.

The variety of form makes it a book that highlights how comics are used to tell stories, as much as it tells one itself. And perhaps, too, it reflects how moments in our lives take on different forms in our memories. Then again, as someone who often finds it difficult to sustain or commit to a style for too long, I probably would have found the process of switching it up to be quite freeing. But as Tom Spurgeon says in his review, it’s “the hook for comics book club meetings, Internet chats and convention dinners for months if not years to come.” It’s an effect that gives Wilson a unique way with which to engage the reader. Each page is an encapsulated micro story, one which you can stop to study further, or quickly move past to get to the next.

I’m looking forward to seeing Clowes at TCAF in a few weeks. He kicks off the Toronto event with a presentation of the book.