As Dan Clowes has matured as a cartoonist, his storytelling has undergone a fascinating inversion. In his earlier serialized works such as Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron and Ghost World, the reader could take the events presented for exactly what they were. As baroque or surreal as Clowes might present the events in the lives of his characters, the reader could be reasonably certain, within the parameters of any given story, we were being played fair with and seeing things play out in a fairly direct manner.

Beginning with David Boring, Clowes began moving in a very different direction. Having abandoned the sort of comics essays that were liberally sprinkled through most of Eightball’s run (perhaps the most notorious being “On Sports”), the cartoonist began telling stories not by the events that are depicted, so much, as by what is left out. Clowes scholar Ken Parille’s examination of David Boring (in Comic Art #7, 2005) shows most clearly just how much is going on in that particular story, events and developments that are hidden from the reader’s direct view and only revealed by looking sideways at the story as presented. This technique is a common element in the films of David Lynch, and at times (Like a Velvet Glove and David Boring) Clowes’s work resembles Lynch’s more than it does any cartoonist one could name.

Clowes further developed and refined this mode of storytelling (one he shares to one degree or another with at least two of his peers, Chris Ware and Gilbert Hernandez) in his two longform works immediately prior to Wilson, Ice Haven (originally published in Eightball #22 and then expanded for the graphic novel release) and The Death Ray (Eightball #23). Ice Haven was perhaps the most joyous and thrilling of the two works, Clowes for the first time using multiple cartoon stylings (as he does in Wilson) to depict different points of view within the greater cohesive narrative. The Death Ray also held back more than it told, to wildly successful effect, and if anything, Wilson feels like a summation of everything Clowes learned while creating Ice Haven and The Death Ray.

Like The Death Ray, Wilson focuses on a single misanthropic character, the titular Wilson. He’s the turd in the punchbowl of daily life for anyone unlucky enough to encounter him on the street, at the coffee shop or waiting at the bus station. He reaches out to virtually everyone he meets, making conversation and trying to bridge the conversational gap, but he is such a mass of neuroses and outright hatred for humanity that no encounter with him will ever be remembered as anything other than a low-level waking nightmare.

 Each page of Wilson is a single story with its own title, and the first dozen or two are spent on such face-to-face encounters, often with a humourous and/or mortifying “punchline.” As we immerse deeper into Wilson’s world, though, Clowes gets to the heart of the matter, an agonizing adventure of domestic disaster as Wilson tries to transform the mistakes of his past into a family, or at least a big payday (as with many elements of the story, Wilson’s motives and end goals are not entirely clear, leaving the reader to interpret the many clues dropped along the way). Along the way we are treated to a number of character studies, including Wilson’s ex-wife, his child, and of course Wilson himself.

I don’t see the oblique approach to the material as anything other than a strength. Clowes is such a powerful storyteller that there’s no doubt he knows exactly what the events are that transpire between the panels, between the pages here. I prefer this technique over that in earlier Clowes stories, where little of importance is left to the imagination. By the end of Wilson, we have learned an enormous amount of information about Wilson the man, and yet are left to wonder volumes about Wilson the life.

I’ve often said the very best comics resonate with the feeling of having experienced something of the inner life of another person, and certainly Wilson is among that number. I don’t think it’s very likely you’ll like Wilson much by the end of the story, but as with so many real people in our everyday lives, we learn thousands of facts but are left adrift at sea when it comes to whether we really know what he was like as a person, whether he was as bad as his worst moments suggest, or if he had the potential to be so much more, as suggested in the final moments we spend with him.

In Wilson, Clowes has created yet another mankind-hating misanthrope for us to laugh at and feel superior to, but unlike many previous models created from the same template, we are allowed to wonder what we miss by not seeing every moment of his life. We are allowed to see him as a human being, weak and despicable, loathsome and arrogant, but with aspirations to be better, to be more. The older Clowes gets, the more humanity seems to infuse his characters; the more real they become, and the more valuable, and the more memorable. No one in Wilson’s world is likely to remember him, but we will.