"Wilsoooon!!"

Wilson (C+) One fairly recent comic character trope that I've noticed is what could be called the Emotionally Autistic Lout. His (it's always a he.) standard comic bit is to behave in an insensitive and socially inappropriate way around others, and in this way comedic juice is squeezed. His earliest appearance is in John Cleese's Basil Fawlty character, but he's come a cropper in the past decade. Off the top of my head, you've seen him in Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge, Sacha Baron Cohen's characters, and most notably in Ricky Gervais' leads in Gervais' T.V. series. He's a mostly British character, since their sense of social propriety is more rigid. Over on this end of the pond, you'll see him in embryonic form in Seinfeld, advancing to Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, and the cast of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

I'm bringing him up in discussing Dan Clowes' Wilson, since Clowes' title character is an E.A.L in human form. By which I mean, he engages in the type of boorish behavior that Larry David does in Curb Your Enthusiasm, but Clowes plays it for drama, not for chuckles. The problem is, we as readers wind up writing Wilson off after about four or five pages in. So we're following the story only to see how bad Wilson's self-deception will lead him. (Turns out, it's pretty bad. He kidnaps his estranged wife and the here-to-unknown daughter she gave up for adoption after they separated. He goes to prison for six years as a result.)

Because Clowes plays the character for drama, the more well-adjusted characters in his life write him off as quickly as we do. (Meeting his daughter, post-prison, she points out that 'she doesn't want any more drama in her life'.) The only human contact he has is by childishly bullying random strangers he meets and becoming intimate with the woman who pet-sat his beloved dog. (She moves in with him as an alternative to being homeless.) If Clowes had played the character darker, he would've been moving into Ivan Brunetti territory, and Brunetti's stratagem is to distance the reader from actual suffering.

In reading interviews with Clowes, I got the impression that he was trying to use classic comic book idioms from strips like 'Peanuts' and 'Barnaby' to tell adult stories. I don't think it succeeded, entirely, partly for the reasons above, and partly for the stylistic technique he uses.
(The book consists of 77 one page black-out strips, drawn in different styles.) The whole book feels like an epilogue to a bigger story, like the epigram to a John Cheever or John Updike novel.