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Wilson is a remarkably acrid, unpleasant work that follows a certain inexorable logic and rhythm that ultimately become as predictable as a Cathy Guisewite Sunday strip. In each self-contained one-page episode, the titular Wilson indulges in a grandiose or absurd monologue (or a failed, one-sided dialogue with someone else) that soars ever higher into self-deluding fatuity, then pops like a pin-stuck balloon into some comic comeuppance or anticlimax, or else a cruel rejoinder that would be shocking were the rhythms of the book not so predictable. The pacing is as reliable as a finely tuned motor, but the compulsive repetition of the method renders the humor arid and tedious. That may be part of the point: Wilson is deliberately structured to emphasize existential torpor, boredom, and flattening of affect, punctuated with sudden bursts of incivility or outrage, and the flatness of the contemporary Sunday strip may be the perfect vehicle for that feeling. But the results are off-putting.

The smartass side of Clowes and the humanly insightful side are ever at war with each other, and so it is with Wilson, a work that, like Clowes' great Ghost World and "Caricature," seeks to sound out the limitations of a world-weary, cynical POV even as it enacts that cynicism. In Wilson the tug o'war is made especially bitter by the compression enforced by the one-page strip format. The consolation here is Clowes' visual craft, which tackles each page in a different style, from naturalism to bigfoot cartooning, the shifts in style presumably matching changes in Wilson's mood or self-conception. This is all exceptionally well-done, smart as hell really, but the emotional outflow of the work is so constricted, the results such a study in willed flatness, that I don't imagine rereading it anytime soon. Again, an acrid work, stunted in feeling.