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Wilson is that kind of person. The person who has no problem while you're sitting and reading to come up and start his own conversation with you. The not very lovable stranger who asks quasi-personal questions and then editorializes about your life. The sad asshole type who just can't help but engage strangers and obliviously feel like these strangers really give a fuck about what he thinks.

Part of the character of Wilson is self-incrimination of what I imagine the average Clowes reader is, and to what I picture Clowes himself to be like. Wilson says the rude things about people and modern life that I know I find myself sometimes thinking, and I'm sure I'm not so unique or alone in thinking these things. Wilson is saying the same kinds of things that Clowes was saying against all different types of people in his earlier short work in Eightball, and in the serialized story Ghost World. There is just something uncharming now about the stance Wilson has. Enid making snarky little observations about the poverty of modern life had a funny and cute feeling to it--Wilson saying similar things has the uncomfortableness to it. Yeah, maybe it was kind of counter-culture and good, or maybe it was necessary as a tween (shoot me in the face for using this term) to see through the bullshit and set yourself apart from it (as in the first half or so of Ghost World), but there has to be more to it. As the girls in Ghost World showed, the seeing through the bullshit is only half of the battle, and it's depressing as fuck if you can see through the bullshit and end up just getting caught in it anyway, or not be able to do anything more than see through the shit.

Wilson is sort of a less cute version of Enid now all grown up, middle-aged and bitter (and well male). Who see's how empty and worthless so much of modern culture is, can speak out against it, but has no answers for even living his own life in any meaningful kind of way. Maybe I'm just reading into what I thin Clowes and his other readers are like, but it seems like this is the ugly personal side of him (and them, and well me), the asshole who thinks he (or she) is better than all of the poor schmucks living the lie, but is really just a miserable sack of shit. Good times.