Most of the book is done in a mockumentary style format (a format that’s grown tiresome from it’ over-usage in film comedy), dealing with a legendary collecting scandal and the collectors’ flailing attempts to connect Wimbledon Green to one “Don Green.” Saddlestitch, “Cuts” Coupon, Pulpy Wise, and so on. The rich subculture Seth invents feels both real and charmingly alien at the same time, with his comic book aficionados all having collecting pseudonyms that recall the handles of old gangsters-Ashcan Kemp, R. Seth invents plenty of rival eccentrics for him to race to issues of fictional books like The Green Ghost #1 and Corns Bunion. The title character is a sort of Scrooge McDuck-type of wealthy eccentric, traveling the world on quests to find the oldest, rarest and most valuable comic books. It’s a beautiful looking book, most of the well-designed pages are simply jam-packed with 20-panel grids and colored in different shades.

The technique is not used as successfully here as it was in Ice Haven, yet if this doesn’t exactly feel like an extremely important work, that may be because it wasn’t supposed to be: The cover proclaims it “A Story From The Sketchbook of the Cartoonist ‘Seth’,” and in his foreword, said cartoonist Seth explains “it’s just a send up of comic book collectors.”Īnd while it lacks the power and depth of Clowes’ best work-and the acid zing of Clowes’ sense of humor-if Wimbledon Green is Seth’s idea of a dashed-off lark, it’s certainly not apparent from the quality of the art. Well?: Thank Daniel Clowes for coining a term we can use to discuss this work-like Clowes’ Ice Haven, Wimbledon Green is a “comic strip novel,” comprised of individual comic strips of varying length and style which each contain a small part of a an overall, novel-length story. Why Now?: With a title like that, what comic book enthusiast could pass it up once they were made aware of its existence? I honestly had no idea this book even existed until I saw it sitting on a cart at the library I work part-time at, waiting to be put back on the shelf. Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World (Drawn and Quarterly), by Seth

Wimbledon Green by Seth